A Poem, likely the beginning of something

Poetry came to visit again, too bad she seems to be in a bad mood. But, she's got the feel of something new astir in here. We shall see where this goes.

*******************************************************

folded in this trunk, somewhere, is the me

this moment is not about sex

the debt of that girl’s death also folded in the trunk

this moment is not about to happen

somewhere, in the me, the dance that girl performed is written

this moment is happening

and is not about sex

nothing lyrical or pretty is folded in here

the debt of lyrical to that girl

Little Poem from SF

Beggars here near inaudible,
just a sidewalk look, coinshakey little cup,
jingling their shamehope.

I am a grenade.

Very Long Poem

Sometimes I write this prosey, humor-y poems that are not like the others. Here's one from the frustration file in the overwritten style of the break-up letter:

May 2007
The Kitchen Table

Dear America,

We have been married for thirty-eight years, and while you have always been something of a fuck-up, America, you used to be a dashing, well-meaning, even groovy fuck-up who tried to do some good in the world. It wasn’t always good, but you and I could at least feel that your motives were right and just, that we had both good and bad in our marriage, as we should expect. And we were so in love for a while, and the sex was delicious at first. I know, I know, I pledged myself to you. I was so happy just be with you that I said that pledge everyday for years. But you made a pledge to me too. These last twenty years, the last six mostly, have become too much for me to bear. I barely recognize you now. I just can’t keep apologizing for you in public all the time. Especially since I remember my pride at being with you, extolling your virtues at all those dinner parties. But that public embarrassment is nothing compared to our private life.

I am leaving you. The sadness I feel at those words nearly stops my hand, but I feel I owe you some explanation.

All of our marriage together, while you helped to support me and make my teaching our children and others’ possible, I have suffered, America, the buffeting of your abuse. I can’t win what has become only battle with you no matter much my love for you leads me to wish to fulfill your desires.

Over the years, more and more often, what you have promised and what you have done diverge. Either you are lying maliciously, or are simply too callous to care about the effects of your behavior. You said you would focus our family’s well being, but neglected us in the most disappointing way. You refused to let our children really learn, or even to feed some of them, and you made many of them sleep outside for no reason at all. When I raised objections, you said I was crazy, that they had to learn to fend for themselves, and huffed out of the house to disappear for hours. Then you went and tore up Kyle and Dwayne’s landscaping, probably to warn we what would happen should I let the kids back in, but that’s another matter. You said that you would consult me in the important decisions, that we would discuss them and choose the best courses together. Instead, you have made decisions unilaterally, saying that discussion was a sign of my doubt, even a lack of love for you. When you allowed discussion, you misrepresented the facts and choices, leading me to agree to courses of action I would never assent to with full knowledge. The cognitive dissonance is just too much bear. No matter how much I remember loving you, I just don’t know who you or we are anymore.

And the physical abuse? Need we rehash that? You know what you did. What you allowed to happen. Remember how you used to want me to call you Uncle when we were in bed together. “Say Uncle, Say Uncle,” you would whisper in the desperate moments. Well, then it changed, it changed to, “Who’s your daddy?” I started to worry that the incest metaphors were getting too creepy, so I asked that we not play that game anymore. You know what you did. And you taped it, and you put it on YouTube, and now men on the street won’t stop leering and rubbing against me. I just can’t deal with this. I know I could go to the police, but getting the fuck out of here is just easier than dealing with your legal system. There are so many husbands with whom I would be safer that staying with you is simply irrational.

And the neighbors? What really terrifies me is that you’re becoming more and more paranoid. Yeh, I know one of their spoiled kids blew up our tool shed, but you know, the Karsoszy’s kids were in there too. Why did you have to go all Rambo like that? We were not the only ones bereft that day. I know that some of them just are not on the same reality map we are, but you and I are not on the same reality map anymore either. I fear that you have felt my withdrawal from you, my support flagging. Your constant fear even of people we use to have cookouts with and worked with on some of the homeowners association projects, I fear you might escalate your more and more random and aggressive behavior toward them. They’re so scared of you that they haven’t even noticed the crack house is open for business again. I know, right on the corner where we worked so hard to get them out, but they’re back because everyone used to look up to you and now they don’t know where to look. I have no idea why you had to blow up down the Jaffif’s Rose of Sharon, but you did. And they had nothing to do with the shed, and you knew it. Now I can’t even look Noor in the eye. She and I used to have coffee. Now we have nothing. That was all you, America. You’re breaking everything. Isolating me more and more from my friends. Where did you get that C-4 anyway? What is in that room in the basement you put the electronic lock on?

Anyway, I’ve asked you for years and years to help me get the radon thing under control and a water filter that catches arsenic, but you just won’t do it. You’ve gone so overboard with your precious goddamn “lawn care” that my vegetable garden and my roses are poisoned at the root. I couldn’t grow us edible vegetables if I were Martha Goddamn Stewart. And all that smoking in the house, do you know what that’s doing to my health? Do you care? No, all you do is bitch about our insurance premiums, how we can’t afford that new Escalade.

There’s just too much to write. I mean thirty-eight years of unstable and now dangerous marriage, America? How could I explain it all?

I have to go catch my plane. Now don’t go looking for me, don’t ask what flight I was on. The most mortal moments in a woman’s life are the days just after her abusive husband discovers she is leaving, so I assure you, America, by the time you read this, I will be long gone. I have had myself declared legally dead so my paper trail will end. I stole the identity of a long dead French sheep farmer who used to make Roquefort. To do this, I have betrayed you for a long time by saving part of my meager teacher’s salary in a tax exempt account in the Cayman Islands that I might pay for identity theft and expatriation to a place where you will never find me. I know the double insult of my betrayal and absence will leave no place for you to aim your anger. Your frustration and possible consequent behavior sadden me for both you and those you will no doubt injure or annoy as you burn it off.

But I can’t help anyone if I am not whole, and I am not whole, America. Not anymore. Please, take care of yourself, and there’s a casserole in the freezer. I know how you hate getting back from a junket and there’s no food ready in the house. I have arranged for transfer of the kid’s custody to people who love them, and made that custody a condition of your inheritance of my assets and possessions in my will. I suggest you get some therapy and put yourself back together, but you will have to do it without me. I don’t care what you do with the house or my grandmother’s silver or any of it. A legal death certificate and the new notarized will are on the desk next to your iPod. So, that’s all up to you, which is how you like it. I just need to rest. I’m going someplace where I’ll have to live by my hands. You know, most of the world. Working with my hands, concentrating on simple survival will help settle my soul and rebuild my sense of connection to life. It’s all I can manage now.

I loved you.

Your legally dead wife,
Kathy

Irigaray Circle and The Last Couple Weeks

Rest, as Jason Bourne's mantra goes in the novels (which, are super good stories in their own right and rather like not at all the excellent films), is a weapon. And my cache got low. Two weeks at nearly a dead run, and much too much socializing. Good socializing, but too much for this sometime introvert.

The introversion is necessary because while I'm in NY at the conference, or on a plane, or in a classroom, or catching up on grading , or crash-prepping courses due to travel (all of which count as extrovert activities for me), friends are going into labor, breaking their wrists, worrying over dissertations and motivations, quitting a crap tenure track job, and me in a widening fondness for an interesting man, and my brother is moving to a new shot at some Nice Green Cash in Arizona.... so, I had a few other things to process and offer energy to whether directly or vibrationally. So, once again, my debt to Hotel Hill-Ries in the Bowery. Y'all are too good.

Plus, in the world o' books, McFarland's Editor Cat is being a little funky, and not in the groovy way. We're still talking, which is good. But, we're sort of moving through discussions one little step at a time that could felled in one graceful swoop with a full proposal. Sewwww, I've dived into All That. Nearly there. Just a few more notes on audience and competition, and the selection of a couple essays as samples, and Editor Cat will simply have to, by force of conscience, commit to this anthology. Meanwhile, I'm nervous. What's with the string-along, and especially when between 12 and 15 people have a stake in this book, and lots of them are Amazing Young Scholars, and what's the matter here? So, a bit busy with that, too.

And stressing in a background kind of way about that and the other book, and wondering: Did I get ahead of myself ? Seriously. Like maybe, way ahead and in much too much of a hurry by which I will be crushed like an old cricket by a spry cat? We shall see.

Et, aussi, des bonnes nouvelles! Five of the ten Motif Series poems will be published in Arabesques (see the roll, it's on there somewhere), which is hip, and peace making, and international 'n shit. V. Excited there. -- perhaps also a hint about which of the sorts of poetry i write the world wants to eat.

But, all That aside: this year's Irigaray Circle was simply amazingly tasty. My compliments to the organizers for the depth of the panels and for keeping up that relaxed-and-smart atmosphere the meeting had last year. It's good to be part of a good community. And a moving circle now: the conference will go to Hofstra next year, and then either to Wash U or Webster U, or more hopefully to Paris on the suggestion of Claire Potter. It's dicey, in some ways on the French side there, but she's willing to try to make arrangements, make sure Irigaray hears these engagements and celebrations of her work before she, well, dies. She is of that age, healthy though she is now. Plus, you know, I like these people, and several more are about to become correspondents, and yay.

As always, everything was smart, every paper was rich. But, we had a minor revolution that nearly made me jump up and cheer. Elizabeth Grozs's paper! (of which, must have copy) What a RELIEF. I did whooop a little when it was over, but tried to keep my voice down.

Here's the gist: title "The Ontology of Sexual Difference." Yep, that's what she said. A new account of the real, one that makes it quite clear, thank you, that sexual difference is the reason that there is complex life, that if in the real it is two that makes our life (and with it the symbolic &c.) even possible, then a merely accurate symbolic and metaphysics would be of two, by two. This point is made, gently but pointedly, into a defense of Irigaray's work against recent (or constant) and mistaken (!) critiques of it as homophobic, eurocentric, or colonialist. Why? Because except in a few rather discrete moments, Irigaray is not doing social politics. She's doing ontology, which has implications for social or cultural politics, but is not that, not addressing those valences of our experience. On the political and symbolic valence: Sexual Difference inflects those differences but is not the same category: it's not like race, or religion, or ethnicity, or sexuality, or ideology. Sexual Difference is, eventhough it is also constructed.

"Sexual difference," saith Grosz, "is the generator of the new ... is the failure of identity and sameness ... is overcoming in a Nietzschean sense." It is "the failure of death." (squirming with happiness)

There are connections to three D's going on this thought: to Derrida, to Deleuze, and to Darwin.

Sexual difference is a kind of ontological rhizome (my prhase, I'm summarizing a bit messily), and thus our connection to Deleuze (or one of them). Sexual Difference is everywhere a kind of moving substrata of other differences and runs across or through cultural expression and social organization.

It is sexual difference that "opens life to chance, to contingency, to possiblity." This is for Grosz both a Derridian and Darwinian point. In Derridian differance, opposities (and remember, a binary is just one and it's opposite, a unity, G so perfectly says) have to be placed into play and slippage, into connotation, to discover their sameness and at the same time open up to real difference, two genuinely not-like terms, and once that happens, meaning MULTIPLIES and becomes undecidable -- that is, life becomes possible. Where the unity of the One and its abject is not at all life (and here see Derrida or my paper for Dublin) -- it's that insidiously smart attempt at closure that the whole PoMo geist points out just ain't so and my haven't we been mistaken.

Now, in an analogy I admire for its adventure, Grosz moves to Darwin to point out that in science (one method for encountering the real, or trying to), or in evolution chez Darwin, there are several aspects of difference at work, or play. One: there's just plain old biological or sexuate difference. Boys and Girls. And the fact of that difference allows for RNA and DNA to do their thing and create infinite variation. That is, "Sexual difference, the genuine interaction of two in difference, multiplies difference infinitely." And there goes your critique that we can't get from two to the many. Wham. Two means many. It's in a world without, or rather that fails to acknowledge difference (twoness), and its operations that we can't get to the many. REmember, binary is just one. (gah)

Bonus, in Darwin we have the little discussed theory of sexual selection (not nearly as closely examined as, say, natural selection, fittest, etc.). Herein, Darwin points out that our physical characteristics are not ONLY about getting food, defending from predators, or surviving sudden environmental ruptures: they are ALSO about getting other members of our species to want to have sex with us. That is, on a real level, to want to engage in that difference. Yep. She's not kidding. (and my notes get sketchy in the places where i was utterly tuned in, so take her word for these things, not mine)

Sexual selection, argues G, drives genetic creativity. The simplified example: giraffes have long necks because they help to reach leaves, thus to survive in the dry seasons, BUT also because GIRAFFES FIND LONG NECKS SEXY. See?

Now, me here, that feedback loop in nature might be mild, but in culture it's very strong, We have the symbolic and imaginary to deal with and deal in and make and manipulate. We encode what we find sexy (or nice, or moral, or true, or right) into the symbolic and then enforce it, which then shapes what we find sexy, and affects how we interact in our difference. This, of course, is why IRigaray's critics are concerned. But, G points out, Irigaray interventions in the symbolic are only openings, cracks, possibilities WE will have to exploit and explore and negotiate because all (ALL!) she's done is point out the hidden fact that the real, or it's philosophical correlate ontology, is sexed. From there, the imaginative work (yes, she uses the word) is up to us, as Irigaray has said, each starting from where we are: in our moments, contexts, bodies, sexualities, and so on and on. We will have to do the inventing of forms of life more suited to us, and once we get clear on SD and the way it inflects or cuts across (and morphs in relation to) other differences (like, the butch-femme spectrum in many lesbian communities: a scale of relative masculinity and femininity, partly symbolic, partly a nod at the real, partly just real, and also evidence of differences infinite creative capacity), the more effectively we can create life and lives that allow us our becomming, our own evolution. Since, an ontology of sexual difference is an ontology of becoming, where ontologies of identity are of stasis -- which the real (and the imaginary or the symbolic) do not do, after all.

Or something along those lines and far more coherent than this remembered summary. This paper has to get into print soon, and I'll be just sooooooo waiting for it.

Oh, and people liked my paper too, and some didn't, and you know how that goes. The paper was the Irigarian reading of Graham's poetics, and the responding question, picking up on the ethical/spiritual thingy, asked: Well, that's all very nice, but isn't this harder done than said? Which, well, yes, quite. Not a compelling reason not to try, and fail, and try, and fail, and keep on with it in becoming, which is, you know, contingent, and open-ended, and non-linear, and imperfect, and the only honorable choice, and whatnot.

All of Which was better than the turkey sandwich I bought at the "deli" in the Newark airport, and the unfamiliar whinging noise the plane made for a few seconds during take-off, and the fact that I'm at odds with an economy in which everything costs more while being crappier.

But, there's a bunch of 20th C Lit gigs up this year, so maybe next year I'll be able to afford more crappier stuff and talk about poetry and theory three days a week. Applications Ahoy!

Texas Unbound with WordSpace Happening NOW

Get your boogie butt to downtown Dallas, NOW, and hang with WordSpace for their (formerly our) summer arts festival. The schedule is here. Go, go tonight, and every night, and get all round, hip, cool, smart. Otherwise, you are doomed to being a square, knee, loser, twit for the next whole month.

El Bob is watching, dears. Make him happy.

Greak Grock

Ears open lately. Lioness and I identified the feeling we have, and she acutely of late: we are aliens. Full of enough knowledge and experience and visitations to other ways of the life that we don't fit. Upside: a strong sense that life can be artful and rich, that one is writing one's own story. Downside: the distinct impression that one is a dangerous freak. Alienation, in short. To this, Ken Wilber, that ubiquitous guru has a short speech. To sum up: there is a vast imaginative, decentralized conspiracy to make the world kind to humans and their fellow creatures. You are a dangerous freak, but not alone, not without agency, and blessed in your prodigality.

Consciousness, as we know, is constantly evolving through deeper and deeper waves of care and complexity, bringing our hearts and minds ever closer to the limitless depths of our souls’ potential. And as consciousness continues to evolve, there are always individuals who are riding the crest of that wave—which is actually not quite as glamorous as it may sound, as these people typically find themselves feeling alone and alienated in a world which simply cannot speak their language. Therefore, when these people are finally able to find each other, something truly amazing happens—like an intersubjective supernova, the Miracle of We is born anew as a new truly cutting edge culture begins to emerge, forging a path which may very well play a central role in the future of the human species.

Of course, Ken-Man sees II as the epicenter of that delicious earthquake. But, there are many such centers.

Like Mark Morford's column, which recently said this:

Here's what I find fascinating and somewhat sad about the crazily tumescent phenom of women (and increasingly, men) spending larger and larger piles of money -- a great deal more than four grand a month, btw, if you're truly wealthy -- on expensive high-tech spa treatments just to look like someone could walk up and eat raw sushi off your perfectly spotless expressionless wrinkle-free inhumanly porcelain face: It isn't about sex.

Which is to say, you'd think it would be about sex, at least a little, that most people who spend more than their mortgage payment on grooming and put that much effort into zipping from spa appointment to cuticle scraping to hyperbaric chamber are trying to look, consciously or unconsciously, at least somewhat hot, are trying to really enjoy their bodies and maybe attract a mate, or just get laid, with the added bonus of making others of their sex totally jealous of their overall, you know, staggering hotness.

Yes, you might think that. But of course, you'd be wrong.

Arabesques new issue is on-line and is chock full of international women writers. A big picture of life and thought amongst the gals there. I think you can read the whole thing if you sign up for the newsletter. Which you just ought to. Here's a couple of random tastes from mine: One and Two.

On Speaking of Faith (an APR joint) recently: Pastors of various stripes discuss marriage, and what it really means/is, which is just so Not what Focus on the Family has in mind. Heartening. And, to my happiness, very Irigarayan.

On Fresh Air recently: Terri interviewed fusion poet Sekou Sundiata, who died last Wed. This man was a walking, talking testament to loving the hard cold world. Listen up.

And Orion mag argues that the Hubble Deep Field photo needs to be every classroom for Copernican reasons. As well as that there's a not entirely unreasonable secession movement. I'm Hell Yes on the first, and too exhausted for the second. On that, I'm just certain that we have enough to work on, and that if we turn that energy to working on it will not be required, even of Vermont.

Here: I cleaned out the salt-lick for the horses and was rewarded with much large mammals standing with their heads over my shoulder and snuffing of my head. I feel much better.

Not the Life Formerly Known as Mine

Mallarme's prosey jokes.
A drive in July sun in Sally.
Breakfast at Sunrise with friend and omlette.
Seeing a new friend at Sunrise,
listening deep in conversation.
Not saying hello just then.
Beads and overhearing talk of sculpture.
Driving Sally in July sun.
Home to dogs, compact and floppy.
Dough for pie crust.
Fingers sticky with flour, butter, ginger.
Rhubarb soaking in sink.
Dogs, compact and floppy, snoring.
Growl of a bushhog clearing pasture.
Pie crust cooling.
Ginger scent on fingers.
Stephane's elegant outrage.
Good work to do, good work to get.

It's a Good Day

Well, skippy-kay-yay! Co-Editor and I got an email tangle un-ed, and now there's more Murdoch Anthology articles on promise. This newest from Japan. I'm hoping, hoping it will fit. The whole point of the book is bring some focused attention back to the sheerly magnificent applicability of M's work to our present conundra. So, we have England, Scotland, the US, Italy, Turkey, Japan; Philosophy, Literature, Political Theory, Influences and Implications. You name it. I'm sooooooo giggly happy.

Also, am nearly off narcotics and tranquilizers. V. Happy about that. Can now apply downward pressure with left arm, so can cut own food again. Small progressions, good progressions. Will be months before I can independently put on my own bra or do my hair, but Fleur is game. Hmmm, and button-fly jeans are just more trouble than they're worth right now. Which, you know, kinda limits my denim.

Irigaray Criclet is meeting at my house Sunday, as driving in the city is not a great idea in my condition. ALLLLL we need is me in a car wreck. Yeh. So the girls are game for a trip to the country.

Wrote and revised a completely hysterical Dear John letter to America that Speed says I should email to John Stewart. Parts of it made Hemingway cry with humor. Good there. Plus evidence of real mental activity. Back to work for me soon.

And I decided that when this arm is fixed, I'm tattooing it. Yep, you heard me. Little Miss No Thanks on the body art is getting some ink. And here it will be:

In black and blue, and dig on all that symbolism.

And yes, I WILL still inherit the dragon tapestries. Dad will just have to eat that one.

Cheers All.

Revison

I swear, I Swear, that coffee stain, the mother of all cliched images of writing,

was just me putting down the coffee on the desk.
I swear.
But --- it is pretty rich.

Also, students in writing classes,
look at the crossing out
and notes for new ideas.
See,
that's how writers
actually
do
it.

Updates Here and There

Poetry: WordSpace's documentary on the life and poetry of Robert Trammell is underway, with the special involvement of Heather Wood, PhD Candidate at UTD and humorist at The Wood Report, and Rod Russell-Ides, Dallas area artist and musician (just google him), and Ben Fountain, WordSpace President and seriously up-and-coming novelist. Three of my favorite people dedicated to the memory and legacy of one of my favorite people. Still hear you, El Bob. Links for all at right under People to Know and Dallas Toys.

Rock on, WordSpace, how I do miss playing with all of you.

Also, in Dutch Literature News, my pal Lucas got his wish for his novel, the Big Novel That's Too Hard To Read!!! So very pleased.

Walking Shoulder: Today is Catch Up On Email Day and so forth, as next Monday is Surgery Day. The funniest thing about that so far is that the Doc said the pain killers would be most handy during the physical therapy. (???) Also that while left arm may be secured to body for up to four weeks, some-magic-how Doc thinks I will be able to go to Limerick for a job interview -- should the gods be so kind. Paradoxes, oh how I love them. Soo, the next few weeks with the left arm tied to the rib cage means not much writing. --- Also trying to get at least one essay finished this week so as not to be all stressy over forced lack or ponderous slowness of writing progress. -- On this point my fortune cookie said, "Keep up the good work. Good news is coming next month."

Walden: Had a lovely drive up the River Road to Grafton in Sally with Smart Man of Good Soul who's leaving for Korea to teach Calculus for a year. I figured a kind and friendly person doing such a thing deserved a present. Turns out, he's just the sort of person who deserves many presents. There was talk of preventing development in Goshen, the area north of town where I live, what I call The Shire, and then there was the watching of a rather low-grade meteor shower, talk of everything. All should wish SMGS great adventure.

Reading: All over the place. Some Levinas of Totality and Infinity, DeKoven's Feminist Locations, Hollywood's Sensible Ecstasy, Murdoch's novel The Sacred and Profane Love Machine (with local Smart Pretty Girls for fun), and the usual researchy bits. Good for the brain. Bad for the writing. --- And I think my library books are overdue!!! Drat, drat.

Humanities and Humans, How To Teach After PoMo and After VT

What I love best about the Humanities, about the study of literature, is that what I was promised came true. I was told as a youngin' that if I read literature and philosophy, I would learn about Life and about Me and about Other Kinds of People and would feel more at home in the complicated world. And it's true. I did. I must say, however, that I'm talking about a reading career of some, ahem, 20 years now. It takes as much reading as living to learn that everything really is more complicated than you think it is, and that that ambiguity is navigable -- not perfectly, but navigable.

The tragedy and horror that Cho chose to impose on the world are getting responses all over. One is on The Valve, a community blog sponsored by The Association of Literary Scholars. One of my favorite regulars there, Scott, posted this about VT, and then got back to the discussion of the book event (which is related):

Like everyone else this week, I’ve lost more than a little sleep thinking about what happened at Virginia Tech. I fret over the university context one minute, the comparative one the next—two hundred people died senselesly in Iraq yesterday—but more than anything else, it is the professional context that dogs my mind. Cho Seung-hui was an English major, after all, and thus an example of the abject failure of the liberal arts to humanize the troubled souls who study them. His plays are compelling evidence that Plato was onto something in Book X of The Republic: literature originates in the base, irrational place to which it appeals; and the production and consumption of it succours the worst in us. Put mildly, Cho’s work was not cathartic. He fell prey to the vicious cycle of unreason Socrates described.

As a senior English major at Virginia Tech, he could have taken courses that appeal to the most hardened culture warrior—Chaucer, Shakespeare, Augustan Literature, Romantic Literature, Renaissance Literature, &c.—or those the cultural studies side considers morally edifying—Ethnic Children’s Literature, Introduction to Women’s Literature, Introduction to African-American Literature, Literature and Ecology, Postcolonial Cultural Studies, Contemporary Horror, Women in Sport, &c. My intention is not to declare a pox on both houses, but to point to how thin this justification of our work is. One course in postcolonial literature does not a progressive make, nor will reading Shakespeare transform a troubled soul into a humanist. On one level, we know this—witness the photograph of the SS officer, feet on desk, reading Goethe—but on another, our professional identity intertwines with the notion that good books make good people, so long as someone teaches them how to read.

I want to work out a response to Scott here. I'll take it to Valve later, when the book event won't be our central focus. We do want to believe that studying the Arts and Lits will make "better people", by which I think we generally mean "increase the capacity for curiosity about and sympathy with other people" as well as "a historically contextual understanding of the world." Or something. I know that my profs, both the New Critical and the Post-________ sorts, believed this to the soles of their feet. I also know that they believed in teaching part-to-whole reading, a keen sense of aesthetics, and a plethora of methods of critique, questioning, contextualizing. What they assumed was that the "being a better person" part would kind of infuse me, rub off, transfer by osmosis. And in many ways it did.

But, I'm not a hot coil of selfish, resentful, seething anger.

There probably is Nothing the Humanities can do for one so coiled, so close to striking. Professors of the Humanities are not trained psychologists, and our powers of healing the soul are limited to those of other lay persons with good intentions. Salon has a nice piece about this and the difficulties of telling the difference between a student who writes violence because our media culture is glorifying that kind of imagination right now, the student who writes it because they're off the grid. The personality type that goes into being a writer/teacher, or a Hum's Prof, is one oriented toward generosity and kindness and pushing youngin's to be more of their best and smartest selves. But, we are not Magic Healing Fairies from Utopia. The failures of Uni Admins to act on the reports of Hums Profs, especially women profs, who are threatened by disgruntled students with alarming regularity (I know four such women personally), is clearly at issue, and will get its day here soon.

Scott reads Cho as sign of the failure of the Hums to make good people, and he acknowledges in the comments that Cho was off the grid, but has a larger point in mind. I want to take up that larger point:

How to make the Hums really make better people, especially we Lit Types.

First, remember the limits of our discipline. The study of literature can enhance and amplify the caring, curiosity, and intellectual acumen, political savvy, and creative capacity, and sparkling cocktail conversation of our students. It Can NOT instill such qualities ex nihilo.

Second, (and I'm working on a paper to this effect), Whether we are Old School or New School, Pre- or Post-Modern, traditional or interdisciplinary, or whatever our period specialty and critical approach: We need to start highlighting how reading lets us discover others. We need to stop assuming that the goodness is going to rub off and start letting the conversations about what we are discovering, learning, beginning to question about Life In General right into the middle of our pedagogy. Not just in the content of our texts, but their form, and our modes of engagement with them.

Why don't we? Because Literature must justify itself as a discipline supported by universities, state taxes, so forth. And what The People want is measurable outcomes like increasing critical thinking skills. Which discussion of the near infinite complexity of literary aesthetics Does help to meet. Intangibles, like amplifying the richness of the human soul and enabling students to deal with the complex ambiguities of real life, these are not the objectives and outcomes tax payers want to see, not being all that objectively measurable. A few really stellar teachers can do both. So, because we want our jobs, and because the lenses of gender, race, class, the subaltern, and post-structuralism are Very Interesting and involve Lots of Critical Thinking, we teach that.

Now, Cho was a good critical thinker. He executed a complex, premeditated, plan that involved a distraction event, a media package (because he knew the media), a historical context (his admiration of the broken killers at Columbine), the purchase and familiarization with the required firearms, and cetera. He was good at complex problem solving and higher order thinking. But like the SS officer reading Goethe, the ends to which his coiled soul put those abilities were evil, selfish, wounded. Critical thinking is a morally neutral undertaking.

Nietzsche warned to watch out for the resentful.

But a moral imagination is not neutral. (Moral, not religious.)

What happens is that in those wounds and self-interest, one forgets that other people are also alive. While the Humanities cannot save the mad and the utterly shattered, it can teach complexity, ambiguity, care. We can look at difficult texts, extremely complex situations in history, and not only teach how they bear out the traces and intricacies of our pet theories, or of aesthetics itself, but how learning to pay such close attention to such complex material is a mode of practice for the ethical attention we owe each other. That was owed to Cho and denied him in his youth, and that Cho owed to his peers at VT, old wounds or no. We need to remember that while the community at VT tried to care for and about Cho, the community he lived in before that had not. And, there were more of them, and they need to learn compassion and care and Being Good Humans, too.

Teaching the part to the whole, and the text to the context, and the context to its larger context, and reading those Hard Books, and Hard Poems, and Hard Novels that don't just ease their way into our minds but which actually make us read with out whole intellectual and intuitional apparatus in fifth gear, and talking about that too with our students, that, Scott whom I admire, if we highlight it instead of just assume it's happening by virtue of opening books, then we might get somewhere with the humanizing effects of the humanities.

Because the world we inhabit, and the other people in it, are all as rich and complex, more so, than these texts and these ideas. We owe this to our students. And it will be hard for us to do. And that's another reason we should do it.

Some quick references in this direction, just off top of head: Joan Retallack's Poethics, Jorie Graham's interviews with Thomas Gardner, Lyn Hejinan's The Language of Inquiry, and Carole Maso's Break Every Rule, as well as good dose of remembering that the purpose of Post-Struct and PoMo theory was to describe the conditions that dehumanize us, and to imagine responses to glopping historical ick. Not just to dither about non-closure in the novel, but what that gesture means, asks of us, teaches us about being here together. That would be Why The Author Would Work with Strategies of Non-Closure --- because they're meant to Do Something To Us.

In Which Miss Stein Finally Gets the Better of Our Heroine

Tired of Confusing People, The Poet Buys Femmy Shoes

Shoes are for walking, and being brown and black. Shoes stabilize. Shoes adventurize. Shoes needn’t be blue or pink, or green, or tall, or puce. Shoes help, and then get polish. Shoes are not me. Shoes are not in my wallet. Clothes are not simple like shoes. Black and brown shoes know the world, have felt its pavements and stones, airports and cafes, its cool airs and clever hands. Shirts hug and leave a curve just so. Skirts are not afraid to raise or ruffle or fall. But shoes adventurize, and seem to destabilize some who see them. So, some shoes have sequins, and walking green and orange is not walking black and brown. There is one orange shirt, and it is tangerine.

Addendum, Slam

On the "death" of Slam, Jasmine said it on the phone last night, "Marketing, it just eats everything now." She's right. Marketing, once one part of the State's apparatus, or the Ideological State Apparatus (as defined by Althusser), has now (now being practically from the moment he wrote the essay) replaced most of the other apparati. Marketing, with its endless need to feed off the creativity of fringe cultural actors, marketing in collusion with a consumer society, taming and bringing under the auspices of overdetermination all the impulses and rebellions that might do us some real good. Cheezy example: There's a new Wendy's (?) commercial to which the soundtrack is a Violent Femmes tune. And all the people in the commercial are a bit young to "remember" the Femmes tune. Not that the Femmes are radical and adventurous new music, not these days. But, they never did go mainstream, and where these brightly polished youngins in the ad would have heard the song is mostly their Gen X parents' music collection. And, now, we have been graced with a Tourist's Guide to Slam. (Fair play: the book can serve other purposes, but it is also, very much, a tourists guide to an underground scene.) The ISA is doing the incorporating and transcending when that's what we should be doing.

And We're Done, RIP Slam Poetry

Claim: Well, Slam is now officially mainstream. Which means it is, in deed, dead -- at least in spirit.

Factual Proof: I saw at the Border's today a book: The Idiot's Guide to Slam Poetry. So, if you were feeling rebellious and smart, and like you wanted to speak truth to power, or just wanted to read poetry written in really short lines about the hair on your testicles really loudly while in drag, For-Get-It. It's over.

Half-Clever Metaphor: As in de-coded and souled out.

Emotional Proof: I have seen in my day some completely A-Maz-Ing Slam and Performance and Spoken Word and Fusion poetry (whatever it wants to call itself), I mean breathtaking, lightning bolt, soul cracking poetry. The performances with the Artists Night Out hosted by Wil Richey in Dallas are a case in point. I have seen really smartly dressed up political rants. I have seen people who don't really have problems bitch and yell on stage about their "problems" while leaning on the mic and smoking in a James Dean Redux. I have heard some miserable crap whored up in hip-hop beats about menses and dating and suicidal tendencies (about all of which it is possible to write good poetry). I have seen the Geek Slam in Austin and slurped it up through my very own flexi-straw while watching a simultaneous Scrabble-Off. I have sighed and fawned over Henry Rollins doing his thing, especially when he set up a rhyme and breaks it. I've cheered the teams from Texas when the national slam comes around. I wanted to get a road trip together from Texas when the Nationals were in St. Louis (free place to crash).

Restatement of Claim: But, now that the whole culture and purpose is laid out like a set of fucking party tricks, it's time to go home before you get grounded.

Sorry, it's just done.

Conclusion: The poetry will live, and evolve. But had there ever been an Idiot's Guide to Punk, I would have personally beaten the author with a pipe (back in those days, I would have, but not now). So, instead of that old response, I'll just say this: Sorry, my dear serious and my dear deluded rebels alike. You have been codified.

Implication: Now, Go. Do . Something. They. Don't . Expect.

Some Good from the Google Ads on My Gmail

I've been sleeplessly surfing this site for Barrelhouse mag, and while I may yet again be on the back slope of the wave, these people have a great sense of humor. These days, I'll take that. And a not bad sense of literature. Both of which are Good Things. Like, the mag needs a power ballad, and while it's not the edgiest, riskiest, funkiest mag out there, they are more than certainly doing no harm. Go look. I'm going to keep looking and will be back tomorrow after a good looking over. For now, It's Melatonin Time!

A Sentimental Little Poem

which is not very good, even, but after that long spate of really abstract, experimental stuff I was working on, my brain seems to have Wanted Very Badly to write a little epiphany-structured I-poem. Go figure.

I have fallen in love
broken hearts
and
destroyed property
sometimes all in the same night

I have been broken
had property stolen
and
wised up a little
but that took longer

All my favorite love songs are by Tom Waits
which tells you something

Confession is good they say
and
I agree
but not while you’re listening

The morning dove isn’t mourning
I wish it were
or that we were
that we might hold up
rest
wait
consider
and mourn
reach out toward what’s racing at us in the winds
with its grit
and
its bits of ocean and smoke
turn it

I would love to miss your face
that I might return to it

I want to fall in love, break hearts, and destroy
property,
all in one night,

but not your property,
and not your heart.

From Jamileh

A friend sent these of Denise Levertov, so I'm sharing. Click &c.

In Mind

There's in my mind a woman
of innocence, unadorned but
fair-featured and smelling of
apples or grass. She wears

a utopian smock or shift, her hair
is light brown and smooth, and she

is kind and very clean without
ostentation-

but she has
no imagination

And there's a
turbulent moon-ridden girl

or old woman, or both,
dressed in opals and rags, feathers

and torn taffeta,
who knows strange songs

but she is not kind.

The Métier of Blossoming

Fully occupied with growing--that's
the amaryllis. Growing especially
at night: it would take
only a bit more patience than I've got
to sit keeping watch with it till daylight;
the naked eye could register every hour's
increase in height. Like a child against a barn door,
proudly topping each year's achievement,
steadily up
goes each green stem, smooth, matte,
traces of reddish purple at the base, and almost
imperceptible vertical ridges
running the length of them:
Two robust stems from each bulb,
sometimes with sturdy leaves for company,
elegant sweeps of blade with rounded points.
Aloft, the gravid buds, shiny with fullness.

One morning--and so soon!--the first flower
has opened when you wake. Or you catch it poised
in a single, brief
moment of hesitation.
Next day, another,
shy at first like a foal,
even a third, a fourth,
carried triumphantly at the summit
of those strong columns, and each
a Juno, calm in brilliance,
a maiden giantess in modest splendor.
If humans could be
that intensely whole, undistracted, unhurried,
swift from sheer
unswerving impetus! If we could blossom
out of ourselves, giving
nothing imperfect, withholding nothing!

What Were They Like?

Did the people of Viet Nam
use lanterns of stone?
Did they hold ceremonies
to reverence the opening of buds?
Were they inclined to quiet laughter?
Did they use bone and ivory,
jade and silver, for ornament?
Had they an epic poem?
Did they distinguish between speech and singing?

Sir, their light hearts turned to stone.
It is not remembered whether in gardens
stone gardens illumined pleasant ways.
Perhaps they gathered once to delight in blossom,
but after their children were killed
there were no more buds.
Sir, laughter is bitter to the burned mouth.
A dream ago, perhaps. Ornament is for joy.
All the bones were charred.
it is not remembered. Remember,
most were peasants; their life
was in rice and bamboo.
When peaceful clouds were reflected in the paddies
and the water buffalo stepped surely along terraces,
maybe fathers told their sons old tales.
When bombs smashed those mirrors
there was time only to scream.
There is an echo yet
of their speech which was like a song.
It was reported their singing resembled
the flight of moths in moonlight.
Who can say? It is silent now.