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.

SMILE, YOU’VE JUST BEEN NICK DEMSKED

(or, my hair is shiny but it doesn’t feel clean)

i.

Nick Demske’s Nick Demske—a kind of potent (and endless) doubling immediately—demands to be spoken through and over and again like the glitchy, media monster that it is. Even titling this post is difficult: which sound bite (doubling as byte) to choose? Joyelle introduces Nick Demske/this contaminate/this contagion to us in her Judge’s Citation. “Language,” she writes, “de-synchs and hooks up in detrimental sequences” (xi). Indeed, Nick Demske has assaulted my brain with Nick Demske force like a Nick Demske (cracked with Nick Demske, spilling Nick Demske)—off my tongue rolls Nick Demske (or maybe in his tongue I—or we—roll/chew, as he commands, “Put Your Face In My Tongue”). I considered, at one point in the reading process, declaring that “I’ve been Nick Demsked” on Facebook. But this just sounded dirty, wrong. Plus, he’s out there somewhere in our virtual reality. Plus—a hole in my logic—, who/what is Nick Demske anyway? A collective? A criminal? A terrorist? A mimic? A strip tease(r)? A jazz musician? A piece of shit? (Joyelle poses the question, “Is it shit or is it speech?”) (xi). In a recent Montevidayo post, Johannes notes, “Transfer is media. Media reproduces. Art is the transfer, the ‘mediumizing.’” In Nick Demske, Nick Demske is as slippery and globby as a media membrane/Art goo, perhaps? “I just want to secrete some hatchling/ So unrepulsive even my grandmother could be// Indifferent,” says the speaker in “View from a Balcony” (57). The “figure of speech,” the loop itself—perpetual syndication: Nick Demske (like): we’ve (always) “never seen him before” (17).

II. Eponymous?

In an interview with Tarpaulin Sky’s Julie Strand earlier this year (available here: http://tskynews.blogspot.com/2010/11/libraries-small-press-and-cross.html), Demske discusses the self-titling of his book as relying on a tradition practiced in music (but less so in literature). Here Demske suggests that, rather than the title being (solely) “eponymous,” he is interested in contributing to an investigation (as launched by poets) into power structures perpetuated by or inherent in the act of naming. He says,

"We assign words--little names--to all these things to separate them from each other, but those distinctions so often--maybe always, I don't know--are artificial and that's a majorly flawed system…Making the book self-titled in an attempt to kind of force collaboration on others is one of my ways of trying to circumvent--or at least bring attention to--one of those power-imbalance flaws of language."

Last week I suggested that we might be able to think about Demske’s text as it relates to Homi Bhabha’s mimicry—as the book often deals in “double articulation” and serves as perhaps “a threat to disciplinary powers” by “cross[ing] the boundaries of the cultural enunciation through a strategic confusion of the metaphoric and metonymic axes of the cultural production of meaning” (122, 130). I think Demske’s stated objective in regard to the self-titling of his book jives with Bhaba’s notion of mimicry’s threat; its partial display is dangerous because there is “no essence, no thing itself” (131). Nick Demske’s Nick Demske is always a dangerous doubling or repetition rather than a representation; in “Rhetorical “Prayer,” he writes, “I ripped out my stuffing./ Removed guts, veins, organs. And then: Nothing” (25). There is “no presence or identity behind its mask” (129) (Lara Glenum describes the work of the Gurlesque poets as operating this way in her introduction to the anthology, and CJ and others have already discussed Chelsey Minnis as “colonized by poetry”; how might Nick Demske’s work compare to the work of some of the Gurlesque poets we’ve read?) In “Put Your Face In My Tongue,” the poem begins with a series of familiar expressions ripped from their context: “Nobody move. Read them and weep. Lifeguard on duty” (17). In these phrases—and Demske’s rickety, swerving, doubled (or frankensteined) clichés (for instance, “I promised myself I wouldn’t cry. I stuck a needle/ In my eye and all I got was this lousy needle/ In my eye”—or the continually thwarted move toward distillation or reduction which instead result in accretion: “I’m not a poet, I/ Just write poetry. I’m not a cop killer , I just/ Kill cops. I’m not a cop killer, I just”)—the text lurches—a kind of paintmixer rattling, without falling or moving away (29, 38, 3). Planes, plates shift across the textual surface; the face contorting in its strict form (Nick Demske: botulism?)—as Joyelle writes, “The sonnet sequence is one brief sequence played backward and forward until its fake, twitchy face says everything” (xi).

C. Criminal? (Crime Scene?)

We’re stuck in the looping, twitching, chewing, media face of/in Nick Demske (the text—and/or we—can’t extricate (ourselves) from the reel, the scene: “The EKG tweets ‘sell’ in Morse code./ Through gold fronts. And it’s going: once. twice. sold” (50)). Is Demske’s text then, like a criminal returning endlessly to the scene of a crime (the “known world” mapped as such—given the “media apriori,” the media shaping/constructing this “true crime” reality as Mark Seltzer suggests) (4)? Nick Demske lurks over (/observes) corporatism, terrorism, atrocity in the book—and he glitches (or is in a glitch in) the system at the level of transmission—or transfer (“My muse gushes deafening orchestra that shreds into fleshy/ Confetti” (36)—“I’m faking it. For real. I actually have/ No idea what the weather will be/ Like” (37)). The language, the rhetoric is unstable (though stable enough to hinge)—dangerous, thieving (a little from this line, a little from previous—speeding things up or drawing things out long enough to make us uncomfortable: “It is raining men. Ha/ Lleujah. A young person is smearing their privates” (an exuberant and unholy observation? (36)). If Demske’s text is offensive (in his TPS interview, Demske considers the word as meaning “not defensive”) in its violence, do we participate in this crime as it is constructed/occurs in the language—the media (we feel these vibrations where, as Seltzer notes, experience is always “referred” because of the “technical combinations of communication and corporeality” (5)? (Nick Demske/Nick Demske: Crime Scene/Scene of the Crime?) Nick Demske sounds his emergencies (“I need an adult,” he writes in “Good Touch”); the emergencies are (sound like) Nick Demske (and the noise of everyday experience).

4. Scat? (“Fuck me, shit me./ Remind me what it’s like to be offended, Nick Demske./ Ah. Already with thee” (7).

Though I know very little about scatting, it occurs to me that scat (in both the scatological and musical senses of the word) might serve as an interesting lens through which to consider the text. In terms of singing, scat (according to Wikipedia) involves a vocal improvisation in which the singing attempts to turn the voice into a kind of instrument (creating “the equivalent of an instrumental solo”). Just as scat involves improvisation and the use of specific musical structures (“stock patterns, riffs,” etc.), the magic of Demske’s text seems to occur in the activation of strange correspondences—opening up strange lines of flight (though sound in music—in scat— would be a reterritorialization, according to D&G) along the sequence(s)—which we might read as hosting Demske. In “Sonnet,” the speaker disappears from the scene: “Because I am the substitute teacher, better than any/ [insert six lines here]” (31).

…
(Some more questions/closing/opening remarks)

How is the book form figured here—especially as Demske’s obsessions register across/throughout the text? How does this text compare to others we’ve read this semester or last? (For instance, Demske’s text seems to exhaust itself less than The Cow, I think, while remaining nervous/nervy. Do Demske and Reines (register) shock(s) (to) the system in similar or different ways?)

Does curation seem like an apt way to describe Demske’s text? If so, how does this curation compare to Hawkey’s Ventrakl or Aaron Kunin’s The Sore Throat?

Who/what is Nick Demske, anyway? Is he endlessly aborted in this text? Scooped?

Other thoughts?

***

“There is no I in team” (27).

mish mash sandwhich

This is as disjointed as my mind currently....what follows are some scattered thoughts on issues that arise in Bhaba/ Deleuze & Guattarri, and how they might relate to texts we’ve read thus far in this class, and last semester in Johannes’ workshop. I must also confess that I have been in various states of travel for days without access to these texts and so my observations are based on the impressions they have left.

-“mimicry is also the sign of the inappropriate....which coheres the dominant strategic function of colonial power, intensifies surveillance, and poses an immanent threat to both ‘normalized’ knowledges and disciplinary powers.” This brings to mind Reines’ Cow, particularly the sections after the white space, the “other side of the animal,” wherein the poems are made up of stolen language defining processes of meat processing and definitions of terms relating to such, all language & knowledge unknown to the majority outside of the industry. On the level of tone these poems challenge disciplinary powers as they are made up of technical language but their placement in the book brings them into a discourse against an Empire of the Body emblematic of the meat industry.

-And what if Chelsey Minnis has been colonized by poetry....thinking of the Prefaces (I think 1& 13 are in Gurlesque antho), their beauty lies in their lack of depth. The poems are poems talking about poems with utter disdain (“I have a wonderful quality that is like swan shit on marble”) and they do not attempt to make grand/ luxurious metaphors, but revel in simplistic language and syntax. “mimicry conceals no presence or identity behind its mask.” The preface poems have no identity beyond the poet’s obvious disdain for herself as poet/ poetry. The irony requisite to Bhaba’s mimicry is abundant. Poems luxuriate in their status as poems while simultaneously rebelling against paradigms essential to poetry. This is the double vision of the colonial subject.

-And does Collobert Orbital function for us as English readers as within a major or minor literature? French→Swedish→English. French they say is a minor literature within a major, under the right circumstances. Do the private utterances of Collobert fulfill this? Thinking back to the English translations of her journal, thoughts were disjointed in such a way that power structures inherent in language could be said to be disrupted...i seem to recall a form of unpunctuated sentence fragment, components of which combine to create their own unique machine. And so does Jonson’s creation, where Collobert’s reconstituted, re-retranslated words emerge from each other fluidly and precisely.

-Ronaldo Wilson certainly presents a case of “language robbed of its mythic power.” Derogatory words for different groups of people are bandied about as I remember (fag, nigger, etc) such dehumanization occurs. These two identity categories that Wilson occupies (black & queer) serve as “a continuum of reversible intensities.” The importance of each identity category is constantly in flux such that “there is no longer a subject of the enunciation, nor a subject of the statement.” Identity becomes like D& G’s circuits that make up a collective assemblage. The language is not figurative but “a distribution of states that is part of the range of the word.”

- How does one “oppose the oppressed quality of (a) language to its oppressive quality...linguistic Third World zones by which a language can escape.”? In their conclusion to chapter 3 D&G are advocating utilization of the polylingualism of ones own language. In thinking about this practically with English, issues of authenticity are swinging through my mind, like how it would be taken if I were to adopt a black Southern vernacular in poetry, along with some Spanglish, Boston accent, Minnesota accent, etc etc etc. Would the use of these Englishes be a colonization on my part, having no authentic racial/ regional etc connection to them? Would the inauthentic use of the language of the minor literature undermine its power?

I'm Wearing A Paper Mask of My Own Face As I Type This Up For All of You

Ventrakl is both a haunting book and a book that is itself haunted. Georg Trakl obviously looms over every bit of the work here, but Trakl’s own ghosts—his family and life, his hallucinations—also complicate the spook landscape here.

The most moving aspect of the entire work was the honesty I perceived to be on display from the constructor of this text, Christian Hawkey. I say ‘constructor’ because I’m not sure what role one might say Hawkey had in this book, moving through modes of being a translator both in actual translating and in engaging with the struggles of translation itself, but also an investigator, a curator of impressions about Trakl. Hawkey ponders photographs and biographical moments from Trakl’s life in what to my mind was at all times a deeply personal, occasionally chilling pursuit, seemingly looking for a particular something (a hole to fill) or an overarching takeaway from these searches and ruminations that doesn’t ever quite come.

It’d be easy to rattle on about how this book ‘raises so many questions’ about the nature of translation and appropriation, and it certainly does, but really I don’t think Hawkey was overly concerned with such questions; his preface to the book nods to all these questions and does seem interested in them to a point, but my deeper feeling was that this a book more at work with a more abstract obsession, an obsession along the lines of the ‘conversation’ that takes place between poet and reader in any book of poetry, translated or not. Hawkey clearly and repeatedly emphasizes this kind of connection—we know that it is something powerful in this connection that has subsequently produced this very book.

Hawkey wasn’t merely interested in the above-mentioned questions or in some strictly intellectual play as this book began and grew; churning at the core of this book like a reactor is something I took to be more emotional to Hawkey as the curation and production continued. This is why I find the numerous modes of translation and erasure spelled out by Hawkey to be intriguing and even amusing at times, but really their nature, at least occasionally arbitrary, is the means and not the end here.

What I was left with was a feeling that I had caught at least a touch of Hawkey’s haunted pursuit, felt the bits of quiet anxiety and melancholy that permeate the entire text. I didn’t ever think I quite knew what was being looked for or what was needing to be resolved, but I felt myself hoping it would come, and it’s there I think the resolution is in the swelling of that sad tension outside of oneself, returning to the same feeling at least of connection that also seems vital to the work here. If the book isn’t concerned at its deepest levels with translation and appropriation I think it’s because those seem moot pressures—fidelity isn’t important here, and there’s no appropriation if everything is felt to be shared.

The biggest weakness I felt in the text was the explicit nature of that sharing, of the ‘conversations’ between Hawkey and Trakl becoming a semi-literal reality in several italicized snippets of talking, ‘interviewing’ as the two sat in a room together. These exchanges were occasionally amusing or unsettling, but more often than not they just seemed a bit too easy, made the rich nuances of the entire project too simplistic and direct; they never did anything the rest of the book wasn’t already doing in a more powerful way. I also thought they occasionally seemed to rob Hawkey of his stature in the book, seemingly putting him in the role of the dense student who is always baffled by the genius of the teacher; while I don’t question that this is perhaps a genuine sentiment at times, it just struck me as an unsatisfying role for Hawkey who I always thought was on much more equal, insightful footing than he was perhaps comfortable giving himself credit for.

In conversations about this book I’ve read elsewhere, it has been suggested that these sections are unsatisfying because the silent presence of Trakl that throughout the book suddenly becomes literal—here sits the figure of Trakl, and the secondary figure of Hawkey is unable to really push him into voice in a way that seems to do any work for the text as a whole. This Trakl seems flat and contrived compared to whatever Trakl we perceive in the rest of the poems and photographs, his lingering gaze and tensions dissipating—if this was a novel we might say this faux-puppet Trakl is made of cardboard. Are these exchanges born out of some unimaginative sense of obligatory homage? If we think of the Zizek, is Hawkey acting through some sense of politeness, but failing in tact?

Joyelle has provided a rhizome in the question of holes, so I suppose a little water on it is due. Bearing this simple notion in mind we see holes everywhere—Hawkey’s violent erasure technique of taking a shotgun to Trakl’s poetry. On page 35, ‘But the more I look at that space between his lips the more it seems to widen, spread—shadowed and dark, ink-dark, warped.” Hawkey has saddled an obsession with this hole in particular in his attempts to invoke Trakl’s voice through his own via the contrivance of this book. In the section ‘Traces’ as well as basically everywhere in the book we get holes in everyone’s bodies, the invention of the machinegun and its absolute brilliance in achieving this. Trakl’s sister’s party-adjoined suicide, a hole to the head (an extra one, anyway). Wikipedia will tell you that after nursing hordes of hole-filled soldiers Trakl was traumatized and tried to add this precise kind of hole to his own head, though he failed the first time around. Eventually he opens a much smaller one, big enough for cocaine and is successful. The result of the eye-holes and all they take in. The hole-as-aperture, all the ominous photographs the book stops to obsess over. The hole of Hawkey’s Trakl obsession; the hole that every obsession is attempting to fill. “…a history of holes and what we put inside them, lose inside them” (19).

Can a book put a hole in itself? In a sort of concrete way I would say no, at least it only can when it has failed; intentional holes aren’t really at all, they’re the trick of an illusionist (we hope a skilled one), a few mirrors and angles when a hole is wanted as an opening, as something to fall into or as a portal to bring something out of.

And so many questions out of a book like this—questions might be holes too, awaiting an answer (a filler / filling). What label, if forced, to we give to Hawkey? Author? Translator? Blasphemer? Are these poems his or Trakl’s? If we imagine we might debate the ownership of each one (there would be grounds for this, I think) what of the whole book; to whom does it belong? If we agree on a notion of collaboration, in what ratio? What do we feel about the final poem of the book, the only one that appears as we might expect a translated poem to be arranged?

Are we troubled by the lacking confidence that seems to plague certain elements of the book or do we think they’re honest? Even if they’re honest are they compelling? Do we owe it to ourselves to take put a shotgun blast to each book once we’ve read it? Is Hawkey obligated to contextualize his ‘translations’ with five pages of prefacing? Would we feel better if Hawkey took that paper face off in his author photo and just stood up in the text for himself? If I find the text on page 143 to be so pat and lazy that it actively works to undercut a little of the book’s velocity, might I just tear it out and forget it was ever there on subsequent readings?

If the book can’t put holes in itself should I help it along?

"There is a vast network, an ocean of possibilities... Do you have a couple of bucks I could borrow? "

The trouble with rhizomes’ points of entry is that there are so many of them. And the trouble with metaphor is the impossibility of its identical reproduction in another medium. Meta- reproduces and refers to itself ad infinitum, reducing into an abstraction that, in its extensiveness, cannot be thoroughly mapped through a single panoramic gaze. If everything were trees, three-dimensional, maybe then we could grasp a concept and contain it, turn it over, and make tracings that aren’t anemic for their being closed. But it isn’t. Everything is flat, units of meaning are not discrete, everything is contingent, and nothing is proscribed. Better representative of the uncontainable force of desire, in nature, is not the arboreal--not a traceable, terminal branching--but the entangled root-mass of the RHIZOME. It is according to this structure, or anti-structure (a structure that is not pre-determinable, one not constrained by locate-able cause and effect, one able to incorporate unnamable multiplicities and the limitless accretion of all their attendant laws) that Deleuze and Guattari argue we ought to think about in considering the Book, in its relation to the World, as well as about linguistics, politics--in short, everything that experiences/directs planar movements between desires/drives within territories (spatial, and of bodies). There are no binaries, no easy dichotomies that entrench ideology by covering and re-covering the same classical ground. There is only the Rhizome. (Except that D&G have effectively set up a new dialectic in that very move to disestablish them all.)

The ambitiousness of this metaphor lies in the troublesome tension between vehicle and tenor.

I want desperately to be able to discern, to trace, the template of the Rhizome from botany to G&D’s philosophy. But in appropriating the Rhizome, the apparatus itself discurses in rhizomatic fashion; replication isn’t possible. The metaphor adds a porousness, a means of entry, not a crystallizing reduction.

Laura Dern’s character(s) in Inland Empire—Nikki and Sue—slips into rabbit holes of other dimensions, traverses the simultaneity of all potentialities. She is Artaud’s Actress, a body without organs, registering multiple elevations of the psycho- and the somatic, on the perpetual threshold of immanence—but never arriving at transcendence—which, according to G&D, would effectively kill the Rhizome, by marking an end, closing the system. The stratification of texts/stories in IE (Axxon N, the longest-running radio-play in history, the polish-gypsy folk tale as the basis for the original screenplay, never finished, reconstituted as the remake) reconstitute themselves like the orchid and the bee: “interlink[ing] and form[ing] relays in a circulation of intensities pushing the deterritorialization ever further” (10).

This endless (be)coming. These lines of flight. Do they imply a conscious agency?

What does asexual reproduction have to do with all this?

another pertinent song