If my halfassed ethical critique was not enough for you, and you need more Greif-hating in your life, I highly recommend this post by Zunguzungu, passed along to me by my friend Max. Zunguzungu takes Greif to task for, among other things, historical inaccuracy, ethnocentrism, ignorance of evolutionary biology, insensitivity to the gay marriage movement, and failure to make a sound argument.

If you are pressed for time and just want some bite-sized snark, check this out: “The Shadow Editors: Reading Mark Greif’s N+1 Piece in Real Time.” Here is possibly the best moment:

Tom Scocca: God [wrings hands], I sometimes wish I were gay, so pure pleasure and love wouldn’t be bound up in all this…this hegemonic, patriarchal structure of authority that man-woman relations are always suffocated by. [Clasps hands, stares at place wall meets ceiling.] You know? To just love a person for love’s sake. Gay people, they’ve been cast out by society, but that’s, that’s like being cast out of PRISON, in some ways, really, isn’t it?

Enjoy!

I write to you today in response to an article that some of my friends have been pointing to urgently but not really talking about: On Repressive Sentimentalism, by Mark Greif. The piece is worth reading in its entirety if you have the time, but here’s the Cliff’s Notes version: Greif proposes that progressive politics has allowed itself to be straightjacketed by the rhetoric of the religious right, defending gay rights in terms only of marriage and feminism in terms only of abortion. The particular problem he sees is that progressives seem to unquestioningly accept the ways that the right characterizes these as sentimental issues: marriage is a happily-ever-after union with your destined partner, and abortions are tragic. How else might we view these issues? Greif proposes that the promise of the gay rights movement is not simply equal marriage rights for all, but the possibility that the institution of marriage itself could be radically questioned. The nuclear family once served a number of socioeconomic functions that it no longer does, which has has left marriage with only an emotional function, and one that it does not even fulfill very well. This part of the argument is worth quoting at some length:

[The nuclear family] is no longer necessary as the site of the pre-capitalist workshop. It is no longer the only structure for child-rearing, as children now come out of so many differently constituted families. The family no longer houses the old folks of several generations. It’s no longer even the privileged secular space for intimate confession and support, as this modern necessity is increasingly outsourced, well down the class ladder, to therapists, gurus, and members of all the helping professions. When marriage has as its main purpose a total and unique defense against loneliness and isolation and anomie, then it’s been saddled with a function too grand and dishonest for it ever to meet; no wonder it will seem imperfect, disappointing, not yet the right, final marriage.

The appeal to anomie simply ignores, post-1960s, the emotional capacities we’ve gained. We now resist atomization and anomie with the wide range of unusually warm, non-exclusive and simultaneous friendships, often verging on erotism but not compelled to it, both across and within the sexes, and among straights and gays—this extraordinary birthright the ’60s gave to all those of us born, say, after 1969. The range is better than any narrowing. The multiplicity of friendships trumps the marriage structure. Yet these relations really survive, and thrive, only until marriage begins to clear its throat, and they are jeopardized by the cowardly constraints of couplehood. Marriage is lye poured upon the petri dish of the new relations of erotic sociality.

For better and worse (and for richer and for poorer), marriage is also almost inevitably intolerable to any post-’60s individual who counts the accumulation of strong experience and passionate feeling as the sine qua non of meaningful existence.

I will have some things to say about this in a minute, but for now I will continue with the paraphrase. Marriage, sentimentalized as a forever-bond, prevents people from recognizing the other interesting ways that they could be connecting with people. The abortion debate is similarly restricted by sentimentalization; Greif argues that progressives should stop calling abortion “sad but necessary” and start calling it “right and good” — the issue, he says, should be freedom rather than choice: free and legal abortion is required for women to have the most basic equality with men in terms of planning their lives. The connection between the two issues — marriage and abortion — is, of course, sex. Both debates come down to a squeamishness on the part of the religious right about the idea of sex without consequences, which Greif defends as not just fun and fulfilling, but deeply important to developing a more inclusive and tolerant morality:

You have to defend sex because we still have no better model than the actual, concrete sexual relation for a deep intuitive process opposed to domination. We have no better model for a bodily process that, fundamentally, is free and universal. It does not produce (there is no experiential remainder but pleasure) nor consume. It is cooperative (within the relation of the lovers) and, in that relation, seems to forbid competition. It makes you love people, and accept the look and difference of their bodies. [...] Sexual cooperation is the other side of our basic human nature, and matches and disarms economic competition. Conservatives look to the chimpanzees, utopians to bonobos. One viewpoint prefers that side of our evolutionary ancestry that punches and rapes; the other that side, of equal propinquity, that rubs genitals and makes out.

I think these are all valuable and interesting ideas, which is why I’m bringing them to your attention, but something about this article didn’t sit quite right with me, and after some thought I realized it was this: Fundamental to Greif’s argument is a valuing of freedom with regard to our interpersonal relationships — marriage is bad because it restricts that freedom, limiting our ability to get to know and love our neighbors, and outlawing abortion is bad because it prevents women from being able to determine the course of their lives. But what happens when you do decide to bring a child into your life, whether by giving birth or by adoption? You commit to loving a person, sight unseen, who may not turn out to even like you very much. You commit enormous amounts of financial and emotional resources to a person who may walk out the door on her eighteenth birthday and never speak to you again. Even if your relationship with your child doesn’t fail quite that dramatically, it’s almost certain that the relationship will not turn out exactly as you imagined — and yet you are still ethically obligated to that relationship at least until your child reaches adulthood. My point here is that it is actually impossible to conduct all of our relationships as though we had no long-term obligations to them. Greif mentions “unorthodox childrearing and communal parenthood” in his list of reforms that utopians have historically fought for, but I think that solution misses the point in two ways. First, it is extremely difficult to manage both legally and socially in today’s world, though it might be viable as a longterm progressive goal. Second, if you were going to make something like communal parenthood work, and have it be more like a family than like an institution, it would have to involve serious commitments to the parenting enterprise on the part of at least one if not several members of the commune — which gets us right back to my point that the freedom to terminate your affective ties at will runs up against a limit case when you are talking about a parent’s affective ties to a child.

The fact that we have a profound — I hesitate to use the world “absolute” — obligation to our children is, I think, an argument for the importance of other kinds of interpersonal commitments, too. I agree wholeheartedly with Greif that the world would be a better place if the family unit were not so tyrannically policed, if family configurations other than man-woman-child were recognized and accepted, but I also think that without commitment there can be no family. (This does not, however, have to mean exclusive romantic commitment.) It’s nice to imagine a commitment-free world where you might be able to wake up each morning and freely choose whether to continue living with and loving your family members, but I think Greif is overstating the amount of choice we could theoretically have in the matter. In “Whom to Give to (Knowing Not to Know),” Jacques Derrida points out that choices like this are extremely difficult if we take them seriously: “As soon as I enter into a relation with the other, with the gaze, look, request, love, command, or call of the other I know I can respond only by sacrificing ethics, that is, by sacrificing whatever obliges me also to respond, in the same way, in the same instant, to all the others.” He gives the somewhat trivial but still troubling example of his cat: why should I feed my cat and ignore all the stray cats in the world? In terms of the family, one might ask: why should I feed this child and not all the children starving in Africa? Why should I devote my time and energy to this partner when there are so many other worthy partners in the world?

A family is, frankly, convenient to most people precisely because it provides us with a fairly easy answer to the terrifying ethical question posed by our limited time and resources and shouted at us by George Thorogood: “Who do you love?”. And I don’t think that’s necessarily a bad thing. Even if we bracketed the question of child-rearing, I don’t think a world without any concept of family is particularly desirable.

That said, I think there are some worthwhile lessons to be learned from Greif’s vision of a sexually-liberated utopia even if you refuse to throw the baby of commitment out with the bathwater of traditional marriage. For one thing, I think he’s right that most people do themselves a disservice if they allow a single romantic relationship to stifle all their other connections to people. I also think he’s right that it would be a mistake to let any romantic relationship go unevaluated — but commitment to a romantic relationship “for better or for worse” doesn’t have to mean not trying to make it better, or not leaving when it’s unfixably worse. The trick is to not allow yourself to slide into complacency, and Greif is not wrong to characterize marriage as an institution that seems almost designed to encourage it — but that doesn’t mean complacency is inevitable.

I turn, as I often do, to Simone Weil. One fragment in her notebooks goes like this: “Possible loves — are for fools — the wise have — impossible loves.” Weil has a gift for making counterintuitive statements that are strangely compelling, forcing you to change your habits of thinking, and this line is no exception. Two kinds of impossible loves come to mind first: those that are prevented by circumstances, and those that are unrequited. Weil is perhaps trying to tell us that these unrealizable loves are valuable because they ask us to make a change, to either break free from those repressive circumstances or to try to improve ourselves to be worthy of our beloved. Possible loves require no such change, and therefore do not help us grow. (This, I think, is similar to Greif’s position.) But there is a third kind of “impossible love” that Weil might be referring to: not the love that is denied us, but the love that we — impossibly — receive. If you can remember that everyone who loves you is a miracle, and if you work every day towards deserving that love, then I don’t think it matters whether you love fifty people or just one person over the course of your lifetime. Love can always change you for the better if you let it.

First of all — if you missed it the first time or just want to remind yourself what a charming writer I am, I urge you to check out my essay on how and why I became a vegetarian: It Ain’t Easy Being Green: Memoirs of a Veggie Cowgirl. I originally wrote it for a food blog that my friend Matthew was starting up, but that site has since gone defunct, and my friend Ari was looking for contributors to her new blog, Vegan Ithaca — I was happy to send it to her so the piece could have a new home. Here (again) is the first paragraph to whet your appetite (again):

I became a vegetarian reluctantly. My two best friends in high school were vegetarians, so for years I had no choice but to champion the life of the carnivore. While Kate and Jessica wrinkled their pretty noses, I was the girl going out with the boys for all-you-can-eat ribs at Big Ed’s Barbecue. I believed in the food chain, meat was delicious, but also -– and not unimportantly –- eating meat marked me as a different kind of girl, one who made dirty jokes and drank hard liquor and just might be talked into a ride on the mechanical bull in the back of Big Ed’s.

As I said when I was promoting this piece before: it’s about ethics, it’s about gender, it’s about food snobbery, and I think it’s a pretty good time. The Vegan Ithaca blog is an idea whose time has come, and it makes me pine for a town that I already miss terribly.

But enough old news — the new news is that I’m working on another real live blog post and it should go live in the next day or so. So assuming you’re here for the off-the-cuff ethics and not for the dubious poetry that’s been populating these pages of late, you will be pleased!

As you have no doubt noticed, I’m having a hard time figuring out what to say to this blog lately, since my academic thoughts are all getting funneled into my dissertation. But two out of my three most recent posts have been collage-poems, so I figure I may as well share with you another poem in order to keep this place from going completely dark. Lately in places other than this blog I have been experimenting with another poetic technique of constraint, wherein I take every Nth letter of an existing, usually rather famous poem, and write a new poem connecting those words in the order that I found them. The best results of this I have been hoarding with the ambition of getting them published someplace, but tonight’s poem hits that place between “potentially publishable” and “do not show to anyone ever” that blogs so happily occupy — and besides, I think it’s kind of fun. Instead of a poem, I used “The Promised Land,” one of my favorite Bruce Springsteen songs, as my source text, because it’s my last night in Jersey until December. Enjoy.

–

Thirty miles into Utah and the
radio stops working. Barefoot driving
turns me part machine; soon the cops won’t know
who to tell to step out of what. They all said to live
in the moment, like a moment was a place where you could
wipe your feet and hang your hat. I don’t know anymore
what I’ve done, just that I’ve got a long way to go.
Your eyes can’t tell when somebody’s gone cold-hearted, so just
remember this: when you get cut and somebody else bleeds,
the dogs understand. Cut yourself into ribbons,
boy; believe in the dark spaces between them.
I’m heading straight for the twister,
so either you’ve gotta blow apart
your tomorrows or you’ve gotta leave the keys
in the ignition. They all said to live in the moment
like a moment was a goddamn split-level condo.
I believe in starting fires and running
for the horizon.

Readers of this blog (with relatively long memories) may be interested to learn that I have just finished teaching a class on sacrifice, something I started to think seriously about two and a half years ago. I proposed the class over a year ago, and have been offered two chances to teach it since then, both of which I had to turn down because of other, more attractive teaching offers. This summer my number came up again and I was thrilled to finally get a chance to do it. The class went wonderfully, and my students were shockingly good, but teaching what’s supposed to be a ten-week course in a five-week summer session ate up all of my dissertating time. I taught the last class two days ago, finished grading their second-to-last papers yesterday, and found myself this morning facing a one-day-long chunk of potential dissertating time — because the drafts of their final papers start coming in tomorrow.

And I rebelled. “One day,” I said to myself, “is barely enough time to reacquaint myself with my notes and get back into the headspace of even thinking about this chapter. And then tomorrow I’ll have to start reading drafts again. I can’t possibly do real work today.” So instead I wrote a poem, using the same collage method I used on the one I posted in March. (In fact, it’s made from leftover words from the previous and certainly better poem, which is part of why there are so few concrete images here — I used up all the good ones on my first effort.) I’m starting to come to terms with the fact that collage really might be where my poetic voice lies. It’s just so damn hard to say anything in this post-ironic day and age. This blog is painfully sincere a lot of the time, and I’m always sort of amazed that nobody makes fun of me for it — my theory is that my entries are so long & academic that only people who genuinely care about me and/or what I have to say even make it to the end of most of them. (Hint: the end is always where it gets sappy.) But even though I’m (almost) capable of maintaining a blog that is very sincere about literature, I quail before the idea of writing a poem that says something about myself in anything like a straightforward manner. It’s not that I have burning feelings that I am afraid of putting into words, either — I’m not sure that I’ve experienced that particular kind of angst since I was about twenty years old. Rather, what excites me about poetry these days is the idea of letting the words tell their own stories — of hunting those stories out, sifting among fragments and letting them cohere and settle until they find a shape that I can call a poem.

All of that is basically to say that I utterly disown any gothy melodrama that the poem below may exude. The words, it was their idea.

I recently saw the film All About Eve, and today I posted on Facebook that I’d noticed significant structural similarities between its plot and that of Henry James’ novel The Golden Bowl, but that I was resisting the urge to write a blog post about it because I was pretty sure that nobody cared. Some friends assured me that they did, in fact, care, so I am now writing that blog post. Note that this post will be full of spoilers, especially of the film, but both works have plenty to recommend them even if you know the broad contours of their plots already.

Basically, the similarity I see is this: both plots are divided into two distinct halves, and what happens at the turn in the middle is that we are given a new perspective on the situation which causes different characters to become sympathetic. This summary will be pretty rough-hewn, as it’s been years since I read The Golden Bowl, but it goes something like this: the first half of the book is from the perspective of the prince, who is in love with Charlotte, a plucky young American, but has to marry the princess because she has money and he, though of noble blood, is destitute. Charlotte (who is the princess’s best friend) marries the princess’s father so that she can continue to be near the prince, and she and the prince unsurprisingly begin to have an affair — but the princess and her father seem not to notice; they are homebodies and enjoy each other’s company immensely, and don’t mind that Charlotte and the prince are always going out to balls together. Throughout the first half of the book, we are basically rooting for Charlotte and the prince, since they have love on their side and it doesn’t hurt that they’re the only characters doing anything interesting. The princess strikes us as a pretty flat and pretty naive character who has failed to outgrow her attachment to her father, and thus her claim on the prince’s affections seems to be not nearly as urgent or genuine as Charlotte’s. But in the second half of the novel, we see things from the princess’s perspective, and we realize that she does know what is going on, and is genuinely wounded, and moreover has every right to be wounded. Is it so wrong for a woman to enjoy her father’s company? Is it so wrong for her to be a homebody? Does that really give her husband the right to have a semi-public affair with her best friend? We are left somewhat chagrined by having written her off so early, and we cheer her on as she finally gains some agency and deals with the situation.

In the first half of All About Eve, Eve is given to us as a slavish admirer of Margot Channing, a celebrated but aging star of the theater played by Bette Davis. Eve works tirelessly as Margot’s assistant — and though we know that she has acting aspirations of her own, Eve seems so genuinely selfless that when Margot turns on her, all we can see is crazy old Bette Davis getting drunk and having a persecution complex. But in the second half of the movie, something strange happens: Margot apologizes. Not to Eve, granted — she doesn’t get the chance — but to their mutual friends, she says something along the lines of “yeah, I’m sorry I acted so crazy the other day; I guess I’m just past my prime and starting to realize it, and it makes me flip out sometimes.” Sunset Boulevard came out just two months before All About Eve (in August and October of 1950, respectively), but I think I’m not wrong when I say that in 1950, the idea that a character who seemed so firmly in a downward, crazy, destructive spiral — especially one who was a woman and no longer young — could just turn around and apologize and start acting like a human being again must have been kind of surprising. Tennessee Williams’ A Streetcar Named Desire hit the stage in 1947, though it wouldn’t be adapted to film until 1951, and I admit that a lot of the examples of the “crazy aging woman” plot that I was going to cite here turn out to be later — Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is 1955, and Whatever Happened to Baby Jane of course features an even older and even crazier Bette Davis. Regardless, I’m reasonably certain that a 1950s audience would not have expected Margot to be able to do anything but get older and drunker and crazier.

But that’s not what happens at all — not only does Margot stop acting crazy, but it turns out she was right about Eve all along: Eve was trying to undermine her, to take over her dramatic roles and her romantic relationships, and it’s Eve who turns out to be the crazy one. What I’m proposing here is that the shift that happens in the middle of the film is similar to the one that happens in the middle of The Golden Bowl — our understanding of Margot for the first half of the film is shaped (quite deliberately, I think) by our preconceived notions of what a “crazy aging woman” plot looks like, much like our understanding of the princess is shaped by our preconceived notions about this sort of “love triangle” plot should look like. The suitor who offers wealth and stability is inevitably the “false” suitor; we assume that this person cannot also be offering true love, because if he or she were, then it would be a lot more difficult for our hero to feel noble about rejecting wealth and privilege in order to run off with his/her “true” lover. The Golden Bowl reminds us that our hero is never just rejecting wealth and privilege; he or she is also rejecting a human being. For the first half of the book, the princess is, if not a villain, at least a hapless victim who basically deserves her bad fortune — similarly, in the first half of All About Eve, we figure that even if Margot is right and Eve is scheming to further her own career, Eve deserves to further her own career and Margot ought to graciously step aside and let the next generation of actresses have their turn in the spotlight.

What both plots show us, then, is the power of plots themselves. At the turning point, they reveal the constructedness and contrivance of the first half, and the characters initially portrayed as unsympathetic get to have their say. There’s a lesson here about literature (and film), but there’s also a lesson about life, as there tends to be in this blog: pay close attention to the “plots” you impose on the things that happen to you — you may be the protagonist of your story, but everybody is their own protagonist, and if somebody looks like a flat character from where you’re sitting, that’s only because you are a poor writer.

Here’s a meme I picked up from Ron Silliman’s blog: list the 20 books that caused you to fall in love with poetry. It is, as Ron notes, quite a different proposition from asking you to list the 20 books of poetry most influential on your current thinking. My list is pretty weird, shaped largely by what I happened to come in contact with during high school, and by a particular class I took in college which cemented my certainty that experimental poetry was What I Was Going To Do With My Life. Here’s the list in alphabetical order, with some explanatory notes.

Will Alexander, Asia and Haiti — I decided to write a paper about this in that class because it was the most difficult book we’d read so far. Making that decision made me feel pretty cool.

John Ashbery, Your Name Here — A peculiar choice from Ashbery’s oeuvre, to be sure, but it was the first book of his I ever came across. “The Fortune Cookie Crumbles” remains one of my favorite poems ever.

Karin Boye, Complete Poems, tr. David McDuff — This was sent to me by my cousins in Sweden, and it was exactly what a melodramatic teenager needed. Her poems are a strange marriage of strong viking spirit and burning romance. Here are some lines that stick with me to this day: “Fair, fair is joy, fair also is sorrow. / But fairest is to stand on pain’s battlefield / with stilled mind and see that the sun is shining.”

Reggie Cabico and Todd Swift, eds., Poetry Nation: The North American Anthology of Fusion Poetry – I bought this book at Barnes & Noble when I was about fifteen because I wanted to find out “what people were writing today,” and I was so charmed that I read at least four or five of the poems in here at an event at my high school. I think the major revelation that the book gave me was that poetry could be really fucking funny without being trivial, a fact that would be reinforced by all the experimental stuff I would begin reading once I got to college. A few years ago, Cabico was brought out as a special guest at a poetry reading I’d participated in, and it seemed like I made his year by recognizing him and explaining at great length what his anthology had meant to me.

e.e. cummings, 100 Selected Poems — A friend of mine once said that e.e. cummings is for deep sixteen-year-olds, and I think he’s right, but I think a lot of us are secretly deep sixteen-year-olds at heart. When I was a deep sixteen-year-old in the flesh, I would stay up late and sit on the floor in front of the full-length mirror in my closet and read e.e. cummings out loud to myself. The revelation that cummings was not actually very difficult once you read him out loud was a pretty important one for me.

Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems — A boy gave this to me for my sixteenth birthday, with a bunch of artifacts inside keyed to specific poems — pictures, magazine clippings, a necklace. Most of them are still in there. Years later, I would write a paper about death and the void in Dickinson, and decide that this gifted edition presented a pretty heavily edited view of her work.

Allen Ginsberg, Howl — Sooner or later, every poetry-loving teenager gets ahold of Howl. I was fortunate enough to have access to my mother’s legitimately-70s copy. Later, I would name one of my notebooks “The Sunflower Sutras.”

Joy Harjo, A Map to the Next World — I read this book in college under my favorite tree on one of the first warm days of spring, and cried like I was waking up from a terrible dream. Just a few days ago I was reminded of that experience and I picked the book up again, and I had trouble figuring out what had moved me so deeply. Harjo has some interesting things to say, for sure, and I’ve always been interested in myth, but I think it must have been a confluence of circumstance that made me love this book so much back then.

H.D., Trilogy — I have now written four separate papers on this book for graduate school. Every time I re-read it there’s something new to pay attention to.

Lyn Hejinian, My Life — This is one of the books I wrote my senior honors thesis on, and I read it six million billion times. I circled all the repetitions and keyed them together by page number, I underlined any time she seemed to be saying anything about the composition process, and I came to love parataxis above all other literary devices.

Yusef Komunyakaa, Neon Vernacular — I read “Woman, I Got the Blues” to basically everyone who will let me. You have to yell the “sweet mercy” line pretty loudly and sincerely to get it right.

Mina Loy, The Lost Lunar Bedecker — I was on a date with a guy ten years older and a million times cooler than I was, and I took him to one of my favorite little bookstores in NYC, and he pulled this book off the shelf and said “if you buy this, I guarantee that you’ll be ahead of the game in your next poetry class.” And he was right; Loy was assigned to me just a few weeks later, in a modernist poetry class I took my senior year. I had already read it and fallen in love with “Songs to Joannes,” which remains one of my favorite ambiguous-love poems of all time.

Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary — This was it; this was the book that I was reading when I decided “this, right here, is what I am going to do with my life.”

Pablo Neruda, Selected Poems, A Bilingual Edition, ed. Nathanial Tarn — Really, what I loved the most in this volume was the Viente Poemas de Amor. I read my mother’s copy so many times that the binding fell apart, so she didn’t mind too much when I stole it and brought it to college with me.

Sylvia Plath, Ariel — I am allergic to bees, and hence pretty afraid of them. My most vivid memory of this book is of being so unable to put it down that I took it to the dorm kitchen with me to read while making dinner.

Adrienne Rich, The Fact of a Doorframe — I first encountered Rich through one of her more recent books assigned in class, but it was this “selected poems” volume that really had an effect on me; watching the arc of her career as it developed was incredibly interesting.

Leslie Scalapino, The Public World / Syntactically Impermanence — My most vivid memory of reading this is of lounging around on the quad in the sunshine while a tour group walked by, and thinking to myself, “The scene of me reading here only looks idyllic. If they could see inside my head or even just onto this page, boy howdy would they get a different idea.”

Juliana Spahr, Fuck You – Aloha – I Love You — I read this book at the beginning of a five-hour bus ride, and then I read it again, and then I read it again. It was like watching the same tower be built, unbuilt, and rearranged over and over again.

Gertrude Stein, Tender Buttons — The professor of that landmark poetry class I took in college gave us the first few pages of this on the first day of class, and I thought he was out of his mind. Over the next few weeks, though, I realized that he was right, and this stuff was incredibly interesting. Furthermore, when I read the whole book, I was surprised to find that it was downright hilarious. Now that I’m a teacher myself, I too start my poetry classes with Tender Buttons. (And Shakespeare, and Christian Bök’s aural ravings, and I ask my students whether each of these three objects count as poetry and why.)

Rosmarie Waldrop, Reluctant Gravities
Rosmarie Waldrop, The Reproduction of Profiles – Waldrop instantly became my favorite living poet when I read these two books, and she remains so today (her other books are great, too). I think she is the only person in the history of the human race who has successfully solved the mind-body problem.

Last night, in a fit of boredom with my dissertation reading, I decided I needed to make something. I have a bunch of back issues of Poetry, the incredibly dreary magazine of the Poetry Foundation, an organization whose website invites you to “discover poetry” via the six essential categories of “love,” “weddings,” “autumn,” “sadness,” “death,” and “funerals.” (I once got so livid about this fact that I wrote a sestina with those six categories as the end words, but it wasn’t very good so you don’t get to see it.) Anyway, I came into these back issues of Poetry in college, when one of my professors was getting rid of them and I thought that reading them would be a good way to figure out “what was going on in the poetry world.” But I figured out quickly that Poetry is about as on the cutting edge as the Grammys, which recently gave “best rock song of 2008″ to Bruce Springsteen’s “Girls in Their Summer Clothes.” I grew up in New Jersey and I love The Boss, but that song utterly fails to rock — and there are plenty of yowling young bands with questionable haircuts that could teach him a thing or two these days.

So anyway, I cut apart the first one of those back issues last night, which required me to read it pretty closely. This was at times physically painful, but one unexpected result of scanning these poems for interesting words or phrases was that I noticed that of the fifteen or so poems in the magazine, at least five contained the word “mirror,” another five contained the word “river,” and another five were on the subject of aging. Furthermore, these groups overlapped somewhat and were arranged sequentially in the magazine — it began with “river” poems, then moved into poems where “rivers” were compared to “mirrors,” then “mirror” poems, then poems where people looked into mirrors & saw themselves aging, & finally moved into “old age” poems. These observations represent a general trend & don’t cover absolutely every poem in there, I don’t think, but I was somewhat surprised to see the organizing hand of an editor so clearly visible. However, ultimately, nearly all these poems were nothing but triteness and treacle. Do we really need more poems comparing rivers to mirrors? Come the fuck on.

These were my rules: I could use nothing other than material in this one issue (June 2003), and I was limited to what my scissors could actually remove. So if I cut out something on one page, and in doing so I mangled something on the reverse, that thing on the reverse page was lost to me. Furthermore, if I messed up in cutting something out and cut the word apart, it was lost to me. Rather than agonize over whether the poem on the front or the reverse of the page had “better” material for my purposes, I just went straight through the magazine page by page — which means, I suppose, that poems on odd-numbered pages are probably represented more heavily than poems on even-numbered pages. Fun fact: one of the poems that I harvested from was by Kay Ryan, our current poet laureate. It was called “The Niagra River,” and while not actively offensive to my sensibilities, it was pretty boring.

I apologize for the quality of this picture; for some reason it was really difficult to get the text to photograph legibly. Also, you might be interested to know that the picture at the bottom is from a Visa ad, and the whole thing is pasted on the side of a shoebox with an interesting texture that I found in my closet. Without further ado:

I have been busy with my dissertation, and hence pretty absent from this space. I reiterate that you should subscribe to this blog with an RSS reader if you haven’t already, because you never know when the skies might open up and I’ll decide to write another post. One thing I will be doing occasionally is writing at the new blog of my friend Matt: Songs About Radios. It’s an idea whose time has come, an intelligent and articulate music blog that thinks and feels about music rather than simply concerning itself with staying ahead of the indie rock curve. Here’s a quote from his inaugural post:

And so, I hope this little space where my hand is on the dial will be a chance for some of us to share our love of music. In the posts that follow, I’ll do my best to share some of my favorite artists, new and old, familiar and obscure. Rather than trying to keep up with the latest currents in music (there are already enough blogs reposting practically every track on Pitchfork.com), I’ll stick to music that is meaningful to me, and I’ll make an effort to tell you why in language that’s more heartfelt and less impenetrable than the academic blog which I’m leaving behind.

Along those lines, I’ve written a brief comparative piece about “Thunder Road” by Bruce Springsteen and “Crucify” by Tori Amos for his “Parallel Lines” series, which will concern itself with articulating specific points of comparison and contrast between particular songs.

You will also perhaps be interested in the efforts of my mysterious colleague Milo Cantos, who has just started a blog called Zombie Public Speaking in which he will post from his prolific musical recordings, some of which feature myself on flute, vocals, or melodica. He promises to keep it brief, and I highly recommend him if you like your music to feature any of the following: Ph.D.-level lyrical cleverness, garage-electronic production, irony, earnestness, distortion, orchestral instruments, and/or people laughing in the background.

Enjoy.

As you probably already know if you are a literary type, David Foster Wallace has died. In the following thoughts about Infinite Jest, I will not divulge any plot details — but I will discuss the general shape of the plot arc in a way that, frankly, would have spoiled the reading experience for me in a pretty significant way if I had known it beforehand. However, if you’ve read even a single review of IJ, you’re probably already aware of the thing that I’m wary about disclosing; my reading experience was somewhat abnormally sheltered. Let’s put it this way: if this blog post were about The Usual Suspects, it would not tell you about the identity or even the existence of Keyser Söze, but it would tell you that the movie has a twist ending. (We all knew that, right? Sorry. I shed a lot fewer tears for watchers of a two-hour movie than for readers of a thousand-page book.) Anyway, this post will give you information about plot structure, but not about plot. The undeterred can continue reading below.

Welcome, intrepid readers. The not-so-secret secret of Infinite Jest that I want to talk about today is the fact that it basically doesn’t have an ending. Wallace orchestrates an enormous and bizarre cast of characters in a network of plotlines that range from outlandish to sordid, and when you realize that you only have about a hundred pages left (a fact that may sneak up on you, because of all the footnotes), a sense of dread begins to fill your heart. There isn’t enough time, you begin to mutter; this is not going End Properly. And it does not. In Dan Cryer’s otherwise-glowing February 1996 Newsday review, he writes, “The author lets us down only in the book’s disappointingly inconclusive ending: It sputters to a halt with a sigh of fatigue. Maybe this is by design — the fictional equivalent of coming down from a drug high. Maybe it’s just the writer’s weakness.” This is a pretty poor attempt at understanding. Drugs are certainly a major theme of Infinite Jest, but so are artistic achievement and the tyranny of genius, and I think it’s much more productive to look at the abrupt ending of the book through these latter lenses.

Jacob Levich at the TV Guide perhaps gets closer to the mark when he writes, “At 1,079 pages, Infinite Jest isn’t nearly long enough. Given, say, an additional 500 pages, David Foster Wallace might have been able to conclude his fantastically complicated tale in a reasonably satisfying way.” I would go further: the first thing I did upon finishing Infinite Jest was to call up one of the friends who had recommended it to me and say, “I think what I just read was the first thousand pages of the best three-thousand-page novel ever written.” Unconvinced by what I thought a brilliant feat, Levich goes on to say that “the year’s Big Novel isn’t a novel at all; it’s a tantalizing literary fragment that Wallace and his publishers have passed off — with alarming success — as a finished book.” While his review devolves into abuse, speculating that Wallace “lost control of an overly ambitious story, blew his deadline, and finally capitulated to the demands of his publisher,” I think that for a minute there, Levich got it right: Infinite Jest is perhaps better thought of as a fragment than as a novel.

One of my favorite discussions of the notion of fragment occurs in Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy are careful to distinguish the fragment from on the one hand the fraction, and on the other hand the ruin. The fraction, unlike the fragment, does not particularly emphasize the fracture that produces it — think of an excerpt from a book, for example. We generally don’t dwell on why a particular excerpt is being displayed and not another one; we just assume the fraction to be a representative part of the whole. We also don’t mourn what is lost, which is the essential characteristic of the ruin. Sappho’s fragments (which I briefly discussed last summer) would be more properly called “ruins” in this taxonomy, designating that they once were complete but have been fragmented by the action of time. In a ruin, according to Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy, “what is thereby both remembered as lost and presented in a sort of sketch (or blueprint) is always the living unity of a great individuality, author, or work” (42). The fragment shares with the ruin a sense of being a memorial, but unlike both the fraction and the ruin, it does not participate in the fantasy of wholeness or completion. Rather, it “designates a presentation that does not pretend to be exhaustive and that corresponds to the no doubt properly modern idea that the incomplete can, and even must, be published (or to the idea that what is published is never complete)” (42). (I expressed a similar sentiment in my recent post on heretical eloquence.)

Now, Infinite Jest is not a fragment in the same way that, say, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” is a fragment. For Romantics like Coleridge, a poem could never be complete because it could never really be faithful to the author’s vision. This is the “properly modern” version of the fragment that Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy discuss and is, I suspect, the idea that motivates critics like Levich to declare works like Infinite Jest to be “overly ambitious,” doomed to failure by the very grandeur of their vision. But if there’s one word that’s connected to Infinite Jest in every single review that’s ever been written, it’s “postmodern,” and postmodern works of art, more or less by definition, cannot fail in this way. We no longer have grand visions: we have process, not product; we have parody, not plot; etc.

So what I want is to figure out what a postmodern fragment does, if it doesn’t refer to a complete vision (like a fraction) or memorialize a lost complete vision (like a ruin), or deny the possibility of realizing a complete vision in this world (like a “modern” or Romantic fragment). Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy (being postmodern critics themselves) are quick to point out the internal contradictions in the notion of fragment that the German Romantics were working with. In particular, they puzzle over Fragment 206 from Atheneum, the literary journal edited by Schlegel and his brother from 1798 to 1800 that served as a mouthpiece for the movement. This fragment, in its entirety, reads: “A fragment, like a small work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog.” This is truly bizarre, and not just because of the hedgehog. For one thing, it seems to directly contradict Schlegel’s claim that “aphorisms are complete fragments,” which directly implies that fragments are incomplete.

Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy believe these contradictions to be inevitable, because if your mode of writing is the fragment, then your pieces cannot cohere — otherwise they would make up a whole. Rather than dwell on this and what it meant for the German Romantics, I’m going to pick up the hedgehog and run. In Jacques Derrida’s essay “Che cos’e la poesia?” (“What sort of thing is poetry?,” written in response to that question for an Italian journal), he says that a poem is kind of like a hedgehog thrown out into the middle of a road: “Rolled up in a ball, prickly with spines, vulnerable and dangerous, calculating and ill-adapted (because it makes itself into a ball, sensing the danger on the autoroute, it exposes itself to an accident).” This entire essay is basically a riddle wrapped in an enigma, but my hunch is that Derrida is describing a poem’s difficulty when he talks about a hedgehog’s spines — the spines are a hedgehog’s defense system, but the animal is utterly helpless when it is in ball-mode; it gives up the ability to run away or fight back. Similarly, poems are esoteric and forbidding, flashing their spines at you when you encounter them, but doing this also makes them vulnerable to your “attack,” or inquiry.

So if poems and German Romantic fragments are little hedgehogs, then Infinite Jest is perhaps the biggest hedgehog of all time. Its 1079 pages and 388 footnotes are its spines, raised in an enormous array to threaten those who would learn its secrets. Not long after Schlegel & co. penned Atheneum, Schopenhauer introduced the world to what would become known as the Hedgehog’s Dilemma. In this fable, a group of hedgehogs decide to huddle together to share warmth during a spell of cold weather, but they find they can’t avoid hurting each other with their sharp quills and ultimately have to sacrifice warmth for comfort. Schopenhauer informs us that the moral of this story is that people cannot become emotionally close to one another without causing significant psychological harm, and that therefore one should cultivate internal warmth so that one can stay at a safe remove from the dangers of close personal relationships.

Derrida sure doesn’t spell it out, but I assume that Schopenhauer’s hedgehogs are what he had in mind. After declaring the hedgehog “both vulnerable and dangerous,” he goes on to deliver one of the greatest descriptions of poetry I have ever come across: “No poem without accident, no poem that does not open itself like a wound, but no poem that is not also just as wounding. You will call a poem a silent incantation, the aphonic wound that, of you, from you, I want to learn by heart.” Here, wounds are transformed into opportunities; they are the price of intimacy, and as such are something to be celebrated, not avoided.

I would never call Infinite Jest a poem, but what Wallace fan doesn’t have its last lines by heart? Abrupt as the ending is, that last sentence is beautiful. Let us think of this great unfinished finished work as a wound, and as something that has wounded us in turn. For with our capacity to wound — and not without it — comes our capacity to care.