shotbucking shot

from one man I was reading it said “scorched earth is worse”

from one tv show it showed “deep groove is worse”

in

reality they are equal

U will never re- again

U believe in snake oil

U could apply it to my stomach and placebo me so I’d believe

in it you can’t cultivate

http://media01.couriermail.com.au/multimedia/2007/01/070125_sounds/tasdevil.mp3

that kinda care to

not choose to have so much to choose so that I could make choice to do a thing so unnatural made natural by rationale

the ambient meat analogy game

thought a tile that was an actual tile was the cover of a book & I liked that better.

today cj said that bad bad was like the best scarf in the world & the cow was like, a real body.

I would rather have the best scarf in the world : I'd rather look good than feel good : I'd rather "..."

elegance requires a lIne outside of the body : : a flight. becoming a nothing a new generation, lives inbetween, is via transition. the becoming-body is a copy : : it is born of a body, it sees bodies it consumes them it can't help it it is coded. then the body is not a body it is a product shaped like a body. the difference has something to do with the scope of the word "organic."

((to eat a body, to be made & aware of bodies feels disgusting. becoming-digusted & knowing,

we call that capitalism))

in 27 trucks of cotton corpulence = less. a kind of becoming a suspension in flesh. if a body is such a constant tense, is that which does not work, a joint : form + infinity ++ the now opens up.

"all time is a piece of shit, nothing but a warning" : a body is opened, totally. then pain raises an alarm redwhiteblue no one can see then the body is just

++++nutrition, you have to, otherwise inorganic. thus not alive, totally empty : : a costume is worn [by] the body ! a beautiful scarf worn by a beautiful body that is form : :

there are two kinds of irises -- a wild iris it is lovely because it has to; a hothouse iris it puts on a show; a wrecked body beautiful because blinded, bound; the love of a fascist, the first boot-licker, the drain of a drama by which a body encounters the same

[&] the oppo(site) an organ exposed, a wild iris all of its functions on show. also, when you're so hungry you have to eat a baby. your copy. the front porch. a nonsense song your own lung so :

: an emptying an inbetween that's love, requires a body : beauty : : this is how this works : if you have to suck a gun still alive = lovely.

to suck down death, court a bullethole emptiness : blast : : oversaturated : : because the voice is too large for the body it must accessorize boldly ! a becoming accessory, a girl-ing :

elegance because a skeleton : : (form) : : opened a busted body : if god wanted wholeness he wouldn't have asked, a hole knight thru the apocryphal mass; even then & then all the bloody virgins clairvoyant : because a mode which is "violence" - (decline:) - "deprivation" : a motivational speaker dressed in hearts speaks to analysis, writing a worm-bin recycled only known substance --

the names of the raw : no hunger : immaterial : : girl : fly out (of [line]) away : an invisible cartography mapped in the making "..."

also : if it is processed then someone must like it. like, no one would go through the trouble of milking if it were vile : : a body of meat is pure by which I mean bloody unprocessed probably diseased but this is how this works : meat begets meat begets meat begets : a dairy the maids smile cultivated it's a disease : : so the theater is a cheese not a meat : consider --

[ fill in blanks/holes/texts/omissions/ as you see fit ]

parks stein weiner

Parks

- I did not send around the essay I was supposed to because of being busy at first then it became a matter in my opinion of over- prescribing a reading of the text revolving around race and while that paradigm is of importance, taking this as a text and not a performance, it could swoosh by the reader that The Foundling Father is black. It is not explicit. Or perhaps I missed a word or allusion despite reading so many times. But I know from undergrad and the back of the book (w/ a black Abe Lincoln). And maybe I did miss an allusion but this fact is not obnoxiously clear from the text. And yet changing the race of Lincoln is supposed to perform something, to complete something, to build a bridge with history. “Note the death wound: thuh great black hole- thuh great black hole in thus great head. – And how this great head is bleedin.” (199)

- The Foundling Fathers reenactments of the shooting of Lincoln take place “out west” likely somewhere beyond the bounds of the United States at the time of the Civil War and so geographically digs a hole in the history he portrays.

- What about those blonde beards? Foundling Father says it’s sometimes fun to switch things up even when accuracy falls by the wayside (more on this later) but people get mad. But sometimes “inaccuracies are good for business.” People get mad that he is wearing a blonde beard but they don’t care that he’s black. Surely this disjunction signifies something, the issues of time and race racing around each other. This thought is likely something more obvious/ simplistic than Parks’ intentions, but perhaps the tourists ambling through his attraction have no problem with the inaccuracy of skin color because of racist legacies, because the imitation of a white man by a black man can be acceptable if murder is to simulated against that body with unclear racial definitions.

- What of “The sun on his fair hair looked like the sun itself.” (168). Where is Parks positing the divide between History (with a capital H because of purported accuracy) and the history of invention, hearsay? The above quote as the accompanying footnote informs us is from ‘”The Sun,’ a composition by The Foundling Father, unpublished.” Through footnotes here given the same importance as quotes attributed to various Civil War figures as well as lines from Our American Cousin. As a character then the Foundling Father digs a hole in the history he is portraying, and the text digs a hole as well which illustrates the type of historicity this play posits, one of various levels of artifice. A composition composed by the imposter Lincoln is given the same credence as “historical accuracies.”

- Levels of history/ accuracy/ realness are posited by the play, ie: “C Woman (theatrically): ‘They’ve killed the president.’” Which begs the question why a woman in a representation of a historical event in a theatrical production would need instruction to act theatrically if not for the necessity of calling attention to the artificiality of the history in which she is a participant.

- And how about the ability of the text to be cleaved for production? Some scenes seen as perfunctory/ disposable? Like the history of real life where the act of remembrance is prescribed. Social reality created by the hole, though not everyone is a digger.
- Lucy and Brazil hold a relationship to history separate from Foundling Father as it is something they are attempting to recover, rather than create/ reenact. The hole of history is what he left them upon his (offstage?) death. Facsimiles of Lincoln serve as stand-ins for the Foundling Father signifying the reception of history in the real life, the way representations come to be reality, and their recovery never quite careens towards the actuality of occurrence.

Stein

-“every generation has something different at which they are all looking.” And so temporality not only creates a sense of the real but the time in which consciousness (of the world) comes to one creates a baseline so that all understanding henceforth as in the works of the masters and etc etc can only emerge only from the base understanding from the time at which they were conscious and all future developments only pile on top of those developments but are unable to function without the below-ground basement of their genesis.

-“Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead because by that time the modern composition having become past is classified and the description of it is classical.” And so easily establishments of taste making might be implicated and said to cull from the past as the present is perhaps not of the same baseline and so some buildings begin in the basement and some have the fifth floor as the ground floor and of course the building materials are different in all cases so that nothing can be called static. And yet it is only when static is achieved that something can be called beautiful and the dead can have hands shook but not while living because while living the coughing out of an understanding and the phlegm in the coughing is seen as infectious and the infection is only acceptable with an antibody produced in death when the body of the cell can exist as a shell but without its internal war mechanisms to bring destruction to the various buildings with various floors as their first floors (and of course it is not the naming but the naming that does make a floor into the floor it is supposed to be called or so called if it’s a floor as in the level of a building when we take the building to be worldview as built upon a shelf of linear time and so it is though we probably don’t want it to be).

- “It is understood by this time that everything is the same except composition and time, composition and the time of the composition and the time in the composition.” And from this understanding one can attempt to create the continuous present the foundation upon which the acceptance of beauty could be perhaps not posthumous and but continuously present and so the date would have no bearing on the buildings but every first floor might be located at the first floor the foundations upon which they were built desired their inclusion on a floor on which nothing was built. And so no buildings would exist. And time would crumble like the glob of boogers coughed up let dry played with between the fingers.

Weiner

-Hannah Weiner is most obviously in touch with the various spirits that inhabit the rooms where humans inhabit themselves this is why people who have a defective screen between the real world of reality and the spirit world are often deemed schizophrenic and bipolar. The extreme mood swings inherent in people with what the constantly erroneous psychological establishment deem bipolar disorder veer between extreme moods as they become aligned with malignant spirits of widely varying temperaments in short periods of time. So to do schizophrenics lack the veil when they see things that not others see it is certain that what they see is to be seen by many and could be seen by all but persistent belief in the wall that holds up reality as persistently known disallows an understanding of all that surrounds one in a physical body and so leaves humans stuck with an appreciation only for physicality and materiality

I intended to finish this sentence but then I became a

There is something extremely fitting about Tales of Horror being almost impossible to find (buried). The publisher will have it for you two months down the road. Amazon doesn’t have it at all. Prices for used copies soar into the ridiculous (“cash changed hands”). The Notre Dame library lists it as existing—but only in the dark, dark void between checked-out and in-circulation, that ominous, unhelpful: “Not on shelf” (“And then Nothing”). Already a number of us in class are approaching this book as an oddly elusive text, simultaneously bold and impossible to pin down.

And that feels about right. There is too much in Laura Mullen’s Tales of Horror to even brush (“cut by a knife”) in a single blog post, too many mysteries to have a final unveiling or an exorcism, too many opportunities to slip through the solid floor—so I present you instead with a salvo of my most distinct impressions.

Dangerously Genre Savvy: Horror and Sexuality/Suspense and Titillation

True story: a majority of our most enduring classic works of horror claim to be, at their hearts, love stories. Jonathan and Mina Harker’s relationship drove the plot of Dracula. Leroux’s phantom acted out of maniacal lust. Lon Chaney’s Quasimodo was such a shocking character because he was as heartbreaking as he was repulsive. Horror and love are irrevocably linked with each other in the cultural and artistic canon, no matter how you look at it. Or it might be this: horror is not linked with love so much as it is to the gestures of love—to intimacy, to sex, to sexuality “…and so, he smiled, ‘seductive,’ or ‘frightening’” (80).

Horror is all about the body, about how it may be turned into object, broken apart, put back together and most importantly, invaded. Norman Bates stabbing Marion Crane in the shower was intimate invasion; vampires have long been regarded as sex symbol as well as monster; lycanthropy is a disease, perpetrated by a penetration of the body and growing—reproducing—under the skin. Frankenstein’s monster was so abhorrent because it not only stemmed from grave robbing (invasion of the most solemn sort) but because it was a birth outside the normal reproductive cycle, an existence minus the requisite human intimacy. The term “body horror” is virtually repetitive, as there can be no true horror without a physical, human form (“corpses piling up”).

And Mullen knows this. Mullen appropriates this, plays with this, turns this on its head so that it acts out its own cliché and then surprises us anyway. Explicitly, we are told by the Doctor that the story of the house is a “love story first of all” (15), a line which will be repeated and repeated throughout the book—both in questioning (what could possibly a love story about this?) and in reaffirmation, so that we as readers become hyper aware of all possible “love” connotations, attuned to terms of intimate contact both explicit and subtle to the point where the blade through the fog, the “mouths opening all over her body” or “his open palm began its slow crawling towards me” (66) become indicators of sexuality as overtly as “those large, soft, full, white breasts” (80), until every act or image of horror takes on a tone of Victorian romance gone wrong, lust at the forefront and revenge in the wings except that, like any good mystery, we can’t be certain who has done what or who desires whom.

And this lack of knowledge—inability to move forward, to complete—is as vital to the horror genre as it is to the erotic. The monster is most frightening before we see it, the characters are most interesting when we do not know who will live, and every blind corner is another racket on the EKG. See also: love stories are only good before the characters get together, romance novels know that foreplay and titillation are more engaging that what comes after, 97.8 or something like that percent of harlequin plots boil down to “will they or won’t they.” Except Laura Mullen’s will they/won’t they is have they or haven’t they? Are they or were they? And will the floor just open up and swallow them all for before they do?

We’ll never know. Mullen does not allow us to know. The suspense goes on indefinitely, the issue (the main course, the brains, the proof, what everyone wants to say) is skirted, the sentence never ends. These ominous rumors of.

Working within the knowledge of these clichés and elements—that is, dangerously aware of the genres in which she is working—Mullen constructs a Frankenstein’s monster out of every novel moment which made us hold our breaths, the men arming themselves to mount their final assault, the footsteps in the fog before the shape is revealed, the low top of the dress which allows glimpses but fails to satisfy, the hand creeping forward to. It’s marvelous.

TL;DR: Discuss, if you’d like:

- Horror as domination, both sexual and otherwise. In what ways does power over others function in Tales of Horror?

- Other relations between horror and sexuality: i.e., why does the sexy girl always die in slasher films? In what ways does horror as a genre reinforce morality and gender roles, and in what way does Mullen interrupt or disturb these traditions?

- In what ways is Tales of Horror a stereotypical work in the gothic style? In what ways does it manipulate and deviate from this style?

- What is the ultimate effect (for you as a reader) of the lines which cannot complete themselves, the events which cannot be expressed, the story that refuses to be told? If the suspense is truly indefinite, how can it be suspense at all?

- For fun: We all have things that scare us; what was the most unsettling element/event for you in this book?

Someone in the Back: Audience, Drama, Identity

In just a few seconds I’ll get around to copious amounts of meta language which work their way into the book, but for now, here’s a slightly different element, connected rather intimately itself to both horror and a meta-awareness of textuality. I was fascinated by the figures which appeared, disappeared, and reappeared (much like ghosts themselves) in the form of the audience/the crowd throughout the book. These figures were not an audience in the direct, broken-fourth-wall sense, as if Mullen (or her characters) were pointing at us, the readers. Instead, they existed as body, a chorus, the spectators to the experiments of a mad doctor, forcing themselves bodily into the text at impossible, private moments: “He stood in the street/ watching the lighted windows go out, one by one./ There is something, he whispered to the fog, that I think you should know./ ‘A love story!’ Someone in the back row gasped in disbelief” (18) and “With one hand I waved the crowd of closely pressed onlookers back” (89) and in the seemingly crucial moment of the “she” waking: “‘It could have happened,’ a voice chimed in (too eagerly?), ‘to anyone’” (97). At any given moment the “we” is capable of bursting into a multiplicity of people—perhaps is constantly that multitude?—distorting the proportions of the room and the fragmenting the sensations of the events until they become spectacle, intensely.

Which works itself quite nicely (read as: eerily) into two other noticeable aspects of the text: the overt use of staging and dramatic terminology, and the collapse of identity and speaker. As Kim’s notes on the first pages point out, the book is brimming with clauses, lines, and silences which seem to indicate attention to the arrangement and movement of characters across a scene/space—even going so far as to state things like “Dr. Silence came on stage again” (16), the back row, the collective referred to somewhere I can’t find now as “characters” (and flimsy ones at that). The horror story, then, takes places inside another dimension, shifting from a retelling or a written account to a living body, violence enacted (re-acted) against the “real” figures, capable then of being enacted against any audience member, barely contained. This is probably why the horror play was a staple of theatre in the past, making the audience into accomplices of victims of invasion. (And yet dramatic productions are also necessarily distancing; we perceive them as production, duplication, falsehood. They are easy to distrust in a way which writing is not—that is, even the truest play is filled with actors, fakers. So, does the existence of dramatic staging and language in the text make us complicit and increase its terrifying nature—or does Mullen use this language to highlight the sensation of spectacle, of artifice, of inability to communicate directly without the need for costuming, on-stage/back stage/off-stage?)

Although this is already getting way, way too long, I don’t feel like any blog post on Tales of Horror would be complete without some mentioning of the destabilization of speaker and character identity, which stems in part of this seeming chorus, from this crowd of voices jammed into the text at any given moment. Are the italics thoughts, or a new voice? Who has the British accent? What role does the gardener really play? Are the doctor and the professor the same people? Is the speaker female, male, both? Different from section to section? Who is the girl who will not wake up in relation to those who describe her? At one point the husband is a late husband, at another he seems alive at the table. At one point it seems as if the female speaker breaks the window, but only a few pages later, it’s the male character’s hand which is bloody. And there is also (blank) to contend with. Nothing felt certain or constant to me.

This, of course, plays directly into horror conventions as well, the destabilization of the self produced as a byproduct of invasion and producing an opening for invasion, the spaces between the surety of self filled by the cacophony from the back row, the echoing ghosts. This again seems to illustrate Mullen’s command of and ability to distort the conventions of the horror/gothic form into something that suits her purpose, erecting a stage and then refusing to clarify who will play each role.

TL;DR: Discuss, if you’d like:

- What is the role of the “back row”? How the crowd which appears and disappears function in your reading of this book?

- Does the use of staging, the attention to scene, character, interlude distance you from the text? Serve as the necessary dimension to bring the violence to bear? How does this book operate as a text which attempts to be drama—not screenplay, but actors already on the stage?

- What did you make of the shifting speakers? (Or am I the only one who thought they were shifting?) What effect does the indefinite use of pronouns have on your reading? What does changing gender of speaker (actor) say about binaries in genre?

- How does the set-up of the book, featuring Overture and Interlude, operate in terms of preparing us to read this a dramatic piece?

(A Word of Explanation): Meta language

This is the very last (full) impression, I promise. And it will be short. The use of meta-language and the existence of that level of self-reflexivity are redolent in this text. I hardly have to point them out: the prologue is labeled “belated,” we get snippets like “’Connected,’ but how?” and “But there didn’t seem to be a beginning” (19), and “I sit here and spin these stories about you (and then undo them of course)” (67), so that work begins to resonate not only as a construction/narrative/poembook about an imagined event but as a work devoted to understanding the very construction of that narrative/work. The book operates out of the gothic tradition and into the gothic tradition, dissecting like an experiment on a table the methods by which clichés have been produced, how characters become stock… even going so far as to dump what seem like slush pile queries onto the page and use book reviews to alert us about the “surprise ending” (which, at least in my eyes, never came, but which should have come if this were a tale of horror).

The meta aspects of the text demand our attention almost as effectively as the horror elements themselves do, insisting that we suspend our suspension of disbelief in order to attention to things we might otherwise have let go—the characters, she insists, are shallow, and yet I did not have that thought until she provided me with it. She intentionally undermines the setting and body built and peopled for this work in order to present us (implicate us, becoming the disembodied hand reaching out to us) readers with a tongue-in-cheek break from the horror, which, in an utterly bizarre and quite stunning way actually pushed me right back into the text by highlighting the “storyteller” dimension, by teasing out the implied and understood meanings of words to materialize (and dematerialize) them, foreignize and make them ominous, calling attention to all the standard failings of language to convey everything we swear it can convey. Lovely.

Discuss, if you’d like:

- What do you make of the inability of characters to express events in writing (particularly the Pastoral Interlude)? What role does the unread yellowing paper play in the book, and why does it ultimately have to be burned?

- How did you read the meta aspects of the book?

And, last, last, last, I promise, just to make sure I’ve covered some extra bases too, more discussion questions:

- In what ways do the “proof” and “cure” language of this book work into last week’s concept of writing as the Pharmakon? How does “proof” (either dead-orphan writing or living logos speech) operate in this text? What is the “cure” here?

- Joyelle suggested that she reads this as a novella, but I read it more like a book of poetry. How do you understand this text? Is it a novella, poetry, occupying the space in-between? Something else entirely? Can this text be read as a narrative, or does it fragment itself, branch off along the web, so many times that it insists on a different reading? If it is not narrative as a whole, what is the significance of the narrative elements?

-How does repetition function in this text? I'm thinking especially of page 54 here. Lines, phrases, images and scenes are repeated over again over throughout the work. Why? In what way do these scenes act like "sites of crises"? What does the repetition say about the ability to reach a conclusion?

- What do you make of the book’s subtitle “A flip-book”? What does that suggest about how we should be reading this? For fun: This book is listed a “Choose your own adventure” in our library. What does that suggest about how we should read it?

- What do you make of the French? Did anyone try to translate any of it? If you didn’t, how do you see it working in the text? As code? As ghost-voice?

Now I’m shutting up. For real.

Deirrid-a-do-don't, de--construct the deconstructing

Deirrid-a-do-don't, de--construct the deconstructing

I've been thinking about the pen and the space between the page before the ink even forms an image or with the keyboard of a computer, the space is there also. There is a traveling distance between the of touching a letter and seeing it on the screen. Then you as the writer must press more and more keys to accumulate meaning that extends in a time much delayed from the original thought. While meaning formed on not simply letter arrangement but meaning is determined by past accumulation of logic, and this meaning must be carried into another's perceptions. Once this page hits the blog you all have to make sense of it. You will take it, and it will somehow transcend into something beyond the context of my thought, beyond the original. It has been extended endlessly from Derrida, all his readers, scholars and translators. Also, the way I've structured his thought also leaves out thought but that thought still lives just as the thought outside Derrida's theory, which will ultimately be used to collapse his/my reasoning.

*

a scribe shines

in the sun of science,

of writing depicting,

of objects appropriate

to savage signs & words

can't be satisfied w/ writing

science runs the

risk of never able to define

unity of object & project

*

destroy itself to exceed

the metaphysical orb is

an attempt to get out

of the orbit to the limit

of coherence of being produced

as truth @ the moment

truth is shattered

of substitution, of desire,

of language, the logic

of all opposites, the abyss

is not a happy or unhappy

accident what is excluded

from our concepts

determines it & the excluded

comes the opposition of deconstruction

(From of Grammatology, his words, my collage of lines & pages)

For me Derrida, chases the space within two seemingly opposing or opposite entities. He reminds me of the eastern philosophical concept of yin yang. Western minds often write this as yin & yang to illustrate a difference, or when drawing the symbol using a line to delineate the space each concept occupies. But in reality there is no boundary between flux, and these artificially opposing forces are just simply fluid moving as a unified current it is this space....the supplement...the liminal place that resides between the two oppositions while holding them both.

The Supplement:

there has never been

an intermediary between

everything & nothing

supplements the mid-

point of total absence

& total presence

? what’s meant

isn't just in his

writing but our reading

the writer writes

always aims towards

the unperceived

reader commands

doubling commentary

to which language respecting

classical & traditional

only protects, never opens,

(From of Grammatology, his words, my collage of lines & pages)

Dissemination:

So what does this mean to Plato?

Plato's one is ripped apart. The world of ideals cannot be separated from the material world. Also, there is no such thing as this mystical one or true, because there are many realms and many ideals. As the world of ideals and it's unity is true, so too is the shadow mimicry and falseness of logic. The real and unreal are within each other and cannot be authentically separated just as Plato cannot be separated from Socrates. He is Socrates in a historical, conceptual and artistic doubling, and when you rip it apart there remain these multiples staged as opposites but is connected and is sophisticated mimes of each other. These mimes or concepts remind me of the ideas about mimicry and the rhizome, they are holes that smash, transgress and transcend one another.

*

a text is not a text unless

it hides

from the 1st corner,

the 1st glance,

text remains

imperceptible

never to be booked

in present, into anything

called perception

lost & who will ever know

woven textures

undoing web

behind the cutting

trace few fingers

caught adding new

thread hidden thread if

readingwriting are

one oneness

tissue of paradoxes

as khairein gives

myth a vacation

frees one-self

(From Dissemination, his words, my collage of lines & pages)

The Myth:

For me the most interesting idea of the myth is that all writing is in some way the essence of mythiness. It's like myth came back from the Bahamas in the name of writing. According to Derrida, when Plato gives myths over to khairein, he is simultaneously welcoming, rejoicing and bidding the farewell. And you could take away the "ing" and welcome the welcoming or rejoice in rejoicing and bid in the bidding. He contends that when Plato says he's letting myth chill on a beach, he sets myth as the center stage of his logos. Logic is myth and myth is logic. Derrida believes Plato brings myth in and uses myths not just in his retelling, but also as the storyline itself of a written copy of a speech. The speech's true form is altered and myth-like when written, as Plato's thoughts become myth when written. The written builds logic from the shifting forms of the words that are all "unreal" and myth. So there is the untruth in Plato's rational pursuit of truth.

*

writing what he

does not speak

in truth of non-truth

the written carries

out of themselves

die in the thrill of song

surprised by death

playing pharmakon

embrace the book

embrace the drug

(From Dissemination, his words, my collage of lines & pages)

The Pharmakon:

Choose your written word, choose your drug, choose your salvation, choose your poison, and choose your death. Reminds me of the 60's hipster dude (Timothy Leary?) who says you haven't lived and can't experience truth unless you've got a buzz on. But instead of "turn on" maybe write on or turn page, "tune in..drop out."

*

caught in a chain

malleable unity

masked & rendered

almost unreadable

someone else

see not see links

play in shadows

words turn

pivot strange &

invisible always

springing w/o

acting series

of opposites

remedy & disease

passing as truth

produce the opposite

effect outside

of self the drug is

hidden, the drug is hidden

in the middle hidden

under his cloak

Plato retires after

the pharmacy is closed

holding the pharmakon

thru the corridors bounce

contradicting rejoining

Full of meaning (a hole?),

a whole story

(From Dissemination, his words, my collage of lines & pages)

De-dis-discussion points:?::

In Plato, the myth of Teuth says, "writing will have no value unless god-king" assigns it, and that "writing always needs a father to defend itself or attend to it's needs. I like that Derrida took on two philosophers that believed in authoritarian strong-hand rule and conformity to illustrate that their absolutes are as much myth and drug and subversion as anything else. Here are a few questions to guide or not guide the discussion. I'm interested in seeing your ideas "bouncing" along the blog pharmacy corridors. Happy Sunday. Got some pills to read. Peace.

Ø Is writing always subversion needing to be controlled?

Ø Is it the drug that will at once cure and undermine a society?

Ø Is your writing or poetry in general a drug of subversion? or

Ø Or is poetry a drug of another sort, like, the cicadas reporting back to the gods?

Ø What kind of junkies are Plato or Derrida?

Ø Can you imagine the supplement within your work?

Ø What are the opposing meanings you like most to play with?

Ø How does the poetry we have read this semester play with the paradoxes within opposing meaning?

The Morning News is Exciting; Brought to you by ______________

Excess & Access: That’s not how you do it over here in Ame-ri-ka. Got it?


((un)necessary) info: Don Mee Choi was born in South Korea and came to the U.S. via Hong Kong.

Reading The morning News is Exciting, I was reminded of Johaness’ “Teaching Translation” he wrote for AWP panel on translation: “These leaky bodies/trickle/trinkets are mysteriously context-less, merely “washing ashore’ (like a corpse?) without bringing the proper contexts to make sense of them. One of the problems with translation is that they come from other context; they generate excesses: too many meanings, too many versions, too many literary histories and contexts.”
Question I had here reading Johaness and Choi was then: What if the body brought ashore was alive?

Unnecessary info: The first “Westerner” Korean encountered on the territory of Korea was Hendrick Hamel, a Dutch tradesman whose ship was wrecked on its way to Japan, the original destination. He was brought ashore with his fellow tradesmen and caused great disturbance among Koreans who were struggling to keep the Westerners out of the territory, refusing any communication with the Western world.

Immigrants are insidious. You cannot stop them from trickling in.

Obviously, Don Mee Choi’s writing is not a translation piece but it shares characteristics of translation, Foreignertext, FOB -like existence that won’t shut up about his/her homecountry that nobody in the party cares about (and their obnoxious Engrish!).

In The Morning News is Exciting Choi unabashedly points to politics, foreign history , foreign folktalkes, foreign form of poetry, critical/theoretical texts and some Canonical text written in English. They are ostensibly stitched together, or maybe not even stitched, just put together like the parts of different bodies that don’t quite fit one another. The text does not assume pretense of coherency, smoothness or seamlessness; it flaunts the stitchedness with different fonts (italics) and “Notes on” pages that stretches the stitches and exposes what’s inside.
But it’s alive.

Knowingly, Choi’s “Notes on” page does not reveal everything(the context cannot really be seen through Work cited page) but pretends to be. The creature is mysteriously alive. (mystery and “exotic is the most suspicious of all qualities, not only insincere and fake but also potentially politically incorrect, possibly even imperialistic, as well as vulgar, seductive a ripoff.”(more from Johaness’ writing))


Foreigners can do things that would make the Native cringe unknowingly or knowingly (grin); Although this text is not a translation, this text acts like the foreigners who play their loud music in the backyard, making the neighbors cringe and embarrassed.

The Morning News is Exciting is unabashedly(delightfully) politically incorrect; Asian (American) lit/culture scholars would cringe at Choi weaving seemingly journalistic text about touchy issues like Korean women raped and murdered by GI with Western scholar’s writing like Deleuze & Guattari who DON’T KNOW ABOUT THIS PARTICULAR ISSUE. Politics has to be focusing on particular, using particular voice.

Some critics will cringe at her use of Emily Dickinson; what does canonized English writer(disregard that she would not have agreed to this popularity or exposure to the public even) has to do with doubling of foreign identity in “Twin flower”? Isn’t that forced-inscribing for both sides, West and East?

Maybe incorrect info: From what I remember, Final Harvest by Thomas H. Johnson, which Choi chose to use for “Twin flower” section, was criticized for its heavy-editing on Emily Dickinson’s unorthodox use of punctuation.

The Morning News is Exciting is unabashedly loud; Language poet, like Susan Howe, insisted upon subverting the distinction between original/source/authentic text and the text that cites from the “source text” by not citing the texts that were used, and as Language poets took established positions, such convention became, well, the convention. “Notes on” pages in The Morning News is exciting refuses to follow such
etiquettes and announces where this is coming from, but not really.

Obnoxiously political statement [*Not cited]: Asians are often perceived to be model minority. They are thought to be quiet, gentle, (a)sexual.

This obnoxious loudness characterizes this book; Opening with “Manegg” section that sounds like accented/incorrect English, it not only flaunts its obnoxious alienness, but with “Notes on” page it shows off its incorrectness even more—I mean, what else can be more incorrect, semantically, than homophonic translation? It’s a slap-on-the-face for the translators who seeks the technique of “precise translation”. At the same time, it’s a mimicry of what native speakers want to tell those foreigners or Hong Kong people who speaks in Hong-Kong-ized English, “Say no lame!” trans: please speak English in correct manner.

And The morning news is exciting seems to play with excessive/unearned rhyming: wee & we, elite &petite, common confusion of lie & lay. Isn’t rhyming supposed to form a delicate mental link of both meaning and sound?

Inappropriate reference: Reading A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis, my students called Lydia Davis to be pretentious for feeling entitled to talk about unearned political topics like Vietnam War.
A Mown Lawn by Lydia Davis
She hated a mown lawn. Maybe that was because mow was the reverse of wom, the beginning of the name of what she was—a woman. A mown lawn had a sad sound to it, like a long moan. From her, a mown lawn made a long moan. Lawn had some of the letters of man, though the reverse of man would be Nam, a bad war. A raw war. Lawn also contained the letters of law. In fact, lawn was a contraction of lawman. Certainly a lawman could and did mow a lawn. Law and order could be seen as starting from lawn order, valued by so many Americans. More lawn could be made using a lawn mower. A lawn mower did make more lawn. More lawn was a contraction of more lawmen. Did more lawn in America make more lawmen in America? Did more lawn make more Nam? More mown lawn made more long moan, from her. Or a lawn mourn. So often, she said, Americans wanted more mown lawn. All of America might be one long mown lawn. A lawn not mown grows long, she said: better a long lawn. Better a long lawn and a mole. Let the lawman have the mown lawn, she said. Or the moron, the lawn moron.

Unnecessary attachment:
Poetry space hasn’t been kind to women, especially Korean women. 허난설헌 (Huh nan sul hun) was a poet in late 1500 who was abused and abandoned by her husband for being a poet and being regarded as brilliant poet; the poetry was the space of men, and the uninvited was to be punished. Poetry betrayed her.

That's why poetry has to be loud and obnoxious!!!!!
Poetry have to crash party where people exchange pleasantries.
For public announcements are for boys and men, instructions are for girls. Poetry has to speak louder, be obnoxious, using the Master’s language, the Poetryspace in a “wrong” way. Girls should. Make them frown. The error/mimicry makes the Master’s voice blush. The traditional Korean poetryspace, its format is now used to avenge her.
What an error. She’s an errorist(28).

Unnecessary attachment: Korean aphorisms.zip
1. Women and dried fish get softer as they are beaten
2. Women are like Christmas cake; nobody wants it after 25th
3. Once married, you have to live three years deaf, three years blind, three years mute
to obey your husband and while doing so, have to bear a son(s) for the family
(Incorrect translation, probably)

From notes on Disability Studies lecture: “In theatre, a Character with Disability has to lay out his/her backstory that explains where the disability is coming from. Explained, laid out, narrated. The disability has to be utilized for defining the character, and for developing the plot. Gratuitous disability is not allowed on the stage.”

Oh but it is.
Gratuitousness & Loudness is encouraged:

they talk but their words don't register

This will probably be a bit scattered. I feel like Antwerp is an intensely layered book, and I’m having a hard time conceiving of discussion points for it that don’t leave out a lot of the other things that were so interesting. Anyway, I hope what follows has at least a grasping point for some further readings that I’m very interested in reading about.

Antwerp :

1. Filmic

2. Hallucination

3. How to approach? Is it like an excerpt from an unfinished novel?

In thinking about Antwerp and the way it composes itself, as these prose blocks/prose poems (what are these? do we care?) unfold, as a collection of hallucinatory films.

1. Film and film, filminess, filmicness

The book sways between two modes for me—one that is filmic, takes on a movie-like quality, takes on that language explicitly, and a second that operates through a film/screen, again, sometimes explicitly, but also often atmospherically.

Filmic:

Here, I’m interested in the idea of writer-as-cameraman, observer-as-moviemaker. It’s an intentional move, with phrases like “fade to black” and “synopsis” appearing several times throughout the book, but I’m curious about exactly what effect this gives. For me, at first, it made me feel as though the “speaker” of the text (are there one, or a few?) was moving toward a position as a kind of director, but this didn’t last long, as we are consistently bombarded with scenes that the observer is only a watcher to—not implicated directly, but somehow vaguely associated with the girls in the scenes. I’m thinking particularly about pieces involving a girl having sex with a cop, like page 37. The cop in this scene, as a cop, has “overcome all the risks of the gaze” which enables him to take full part in the scene, as he has the ability to turn out a light, tune out the photographs, and carry on. The position this places the speaker in, then, is one of a kind of ultimate-gaze. The speaker is forever lights-on, which makes me wonder if he’s some kind of victim of the scene.

Filmy:

While the speaker, for me, has an ultimate-gaze in that he is forever and irreversibly the gazer, he is also constantly gazing through a kind of screen. Sometimes its hair—blonde hair pops up constantly (the hair of the Mexican girl, who he is in love with? Who Bolano is in love with?) and overtakes the vision of the scene. Some scenes are “fuzzy,” (36) and on page 22:

“On the wall someone has written my one true love. She puts a cigarette…”

The barrier between the wall and the love seems to be the writing, which becomes a screen and a transition marker, and each time this woman appears, she appears through this lovescreen. On 25, similarly, we have a fuzzy beach scene whose details are guessed at, at best. The ultimate-gaze seems to stop at these points, seems to be disrupted, and for me, makes an otherwise pretty choppy, sharp book take on these murky, aqueous qualities, which makes me feel like I’m reading it through

water.

2. Hallucination/Dream/Memory/Perception

There’s some dreaming going on here. Specifically, dreams of mouthless women (15). And often, I get the impression that some places here are more spectral or more real than others. When there are campgrounds and battlefields, these seem somehow more real than named places. We know that technically it is in Barcelona, and sometimes travels to Portugal and thinks about Antwerp a lot, but the named places seem like little more than their name to me. This brings my reading back to the idea of hallucination. I almost feel as though these places are complete fabrications in the world of this book.

3. How do we piece this together?

I had a hard time finding a lot of reference material for this, and one of the more amusing things I came across was some dude’s blog review. (http://www.mikeettner.com/04/2010/antwerp-by-roberto-bolano/).

He finds that there isn’t much storyline to latch onto like other Bolano novels, though I doubt that this matters to any of us. If it does, please do tell.

He finds that only devoted Bolano fans will like it. Hmm. I disagree.

He also cites the preface, and Bolano’s scattershot approach. This added to my impression of being in a kind of hallucinatory bubble—there is, for me, this constant shift between pieces of the way that scenes are perceived, with only threads in common to connect them—a Mexican girl, a redheaded girl, the hunchback, etc.

Anyway, what the blogger is curious about is how exactly to piece the book together. My approach was akin to watching choppily put together early films like Battleship Potemkin where scenes are spliced, dramatic pans in and out are par for the course, and the drama is high, yes, but the scenes are still almost syrupy in their drama, slow and dreamlike.

This is getting too long, but other things I’m interested in hearing about:

1. The hunchback

2. Who is Bolano in the world of this book?

3. I found Antwerp to be really unique in regards to what we've been reading so far. That is, there wasn't an immediate comparison for me between it and others we've read stylistically. In regard to thematic links, I think we deduced, when comparing Reines and Zurita, that smart, creative people can basically make connections between anything--so I'm interested in hearing about some of those as well. It isn't particularly my natural reading-mode personally.