PLR vol.1, no.2 (July, 2003)

P L R

volume 1

issue 2

Lonesome Hearts and the Failed Community Aleš Debeljak

He did not answer. Her voice seemed to come to him from a great distance. He kept driving.

Snow rushed at the windshield. He was silent and watched the road. He was at the very end of a story.

—Raymond Carver, Put Yourself in My Shoes I still remember the moment when I first realised that although I understand and indeed speak the Latin of the contemporary world, that fact alone is not enough to provide an insight into the true secrets of the American soul. To understand the essence of American culture requires more than regular attendance at high school English lectures.

It requires something like a humid evening in New York.

My friend Igor and I were heading to a big party. Igor’s friend, a painter, threw it in her loft to celebrate the opening of her exhibition in Soho.

About forty, perhaps fifty people circled round the room, sizing the place up, drinking beer and testing their skills at small-talk. I was enjoying myself immensely when the group I had just joined suddenly discovered that one of those present was in New York City for the first time: a “hometown boy.” It was immediately clear to me that this was meant in a derogatory way, indicating someone who sticks to his hometown like a drunkard to a barstool. Yet, I must admit that it would take me much longer to fully understand the metaphysical depth of this perfunctory teasing initiated by the smug group only because the hapless guy had been foolish enough to reveal his condition. I didn’t yet grasp the context that had suddenly made of the involuntary laughing stock the personification of an exception or a white crow, as we call it in Slovenia.

Later, in the late 1980s, when I was a graduate student at an American university and had acquired the “insider’s” understanding of my fellow students’ cultural environment, I witnessed the recurrence of such an episode in which almost precisely identical roles applied. This time, however, the casualty was a student who turned out to have gone to school—from kindergarten to the master’s degree which he was about to receive—in the same state, even worse, in the same city. My fellow-students, who hailed from both East Coast and West as well as points in between, reacted just about the same way as the previous group. Their scornful response contained a pitiful subtext. In a country where a third of the population changes their place of residence about once a year, permanent rootedness is perceived as a negative which implies weakness, indecision, immaturity and, worse, is the antithesis of individualism. To be one’s own, to start from scratch, to burn all the bridges after having crossed them—that is considered to be the most attractive possibility that America in her supreme mythic dimension promises to those that respond to her allure.

Regardless of individual religious beliefs, Slovenian culture as a whole is steeped in ritual-infused Catholic tradition, with mothers who keep their beloved offspring at home for as long as possible, like hens protecting her chicks. The impulsive desire to leave home is still a rarity, while it drives so many American teenagers in predominantly Protestant shoes to pack up and bid farewell to a home and hearth. Let’s leave aside the fact that in Slovenia, the tiny independent republic on “the sunny side of the Alps,” there is almost no real possibility for a destiny-altering change of address and that an apartment is almost impossible to rent at a reasonable price.

Moreover, there is the sheer symbolic weight of family meals, formal Sunday lunches, extended family ties and, in particular, the omnipotent figure of the mother who has dominated the life and literature of the Slovenians and has been critically assessed by many writers. These elements shape the spiritual characteristics of the Slove-

PRAGUE LITERARY REVIEW

nians and no doubt prevent them from gaining a really comprehensive insight into the enormous stock of energy needed for and the predicaments embedded in the American doctrine of radical individualism.

America’s high regard for individualism and freedom is in large part hinged on its unique history. In many aspects, the United States remains the legacy, the reality and the dream of people who left everything behind and set off for new shores, people who turned their back on the past, cast off the chains of tradition and dared to test the boundaries of the unknown. Their tenacious

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(nature, the future, the individual), is still very much present in the American mentality.

Indeed, if one wanted to achieve what is nearly impossible by summarising the rich contrasts in the American character in a single metaphysical dilemma, one could do worse than to look somewhere within the uneasy tension which distinguishes the relationship between the individual self and the community.

Popular imagination has often proved to be excellent terrain for detecting traces of global changes. It is no coincidence that at least a partial solution to the riddle of the stubborn maintenance

Photograph by Errol Sawyer, 2002 commitment to the values of self reliance comes from pioneers and trail blazers who advanced ever onwards in search of new challenges, experiencing the dizzy freedom of those bound by nothing more than their own capabilities. The myth of the fearless frontiersman who trusts nobody, relies only on himself and lives in a contradictory state of “permanent temporariness,” in a poorly defined space where stability (culture, memory, community) goes hand in hand with uncertainty

of individualism can be found in the contextual layers of those “local” artistic genres which, in regard to their structure, do not essentially depend on European moral and social paradigms. Here I refer, in particular, to the Indian adventure stories, Western narratives and hard-boiled detective novels where the “American experience” is expressed in its purest, raw and least processed form.

The opening up of the wild West—by gold miners, lumberjacks, trappers and hunters, entre-

Frank Zappa’s Poetics of Orality: Exploring the Maximalist Body

traverses his oeuvre from the menacing overtones of “Hungry Freaks Daddy” on Freak Out to the blown-up rotten teeth on the cover of the posthumous Everything Is Healing Nicely (1999). Drawing upon an anecdote told by Lowell George, who was a member of the Mothers of Invention before he left to form Little Feat in 1970, Watson traces the roots of Zappa’s “dental continuity” to the reification of the body by the Nazi regime: Lowell George enters dental continuity because of his part in a semi-improvised pantomime.

The albums I’m featured on most prominently haven’t been released yet. There was a ten-album set in the works— one side had me as a German border-guard interviewing each of the band members, asking them about the condition of their gold fillings and things like that.

This points to the reduction of the human body to an object by the Nazis, the notorious piles of gold teeth removed from victims’ mouths before they were sent to the gas chambers. That this is not merely an historical outrage is shown by the fact that the banks that handled such loot are still in operation today. That human beings are not composed of pure spirit is of course emphasised by using Meat as a name. . . . The grubby fingers that pull away the lips of the old Jew in order to see if there is gold worth preserving before he is exterminated, extracting the element of exchange value before the subject is disposed of, finds an analogy in the X-ray machine, which also sees past lips and cheek to the teeth.

The industrialisation of death. The rationalisation of mass extermination into the banality of an economic transaction. The baring of the teeth that permits the extraction of the gold performed in a grotesque caricature of the technical gesture of the dentist. The threatening quality of the

Michel Delville The centrality of orality and, in particular, dental aesthetics to Zappa’s work reaches a climax in the cover of the double album Uncle Meat (1969), a Cal Schenkel collage comprising, among other things, two sets of teeth juxtaposed with one another. The first belongs to an old man wearing a salt and pepper moustache and whose lips are pulled up by the dentist’s forefinger during a check-up. The man appears to possess at least one gold tooth. The second one is a black and white photograph of a set of false teeth. The lower part of the front cover features another series of apparently broken or damaged teeth glued to some mixture of paint, bread crumbs (which may or may not be the “dried muffin remnants” of the artist’s breakfast) and other unidentifiable organic material. On the back cover there are polarised photographs of the members of the Mothers of Invention as well as three x-ray slides of teeth and a skull bearing the inscription “1348,” the year of the first outbreak of bubonic plague in Europe. The gatefold sleeve features a girl lying (and apparently posing) in an early 20th century dentist’s chair on which Schenkel has glued a photograph of a dentist’s x-ray machine.

In his illuminating sub-chapter on Uncle Meat, Ben Watson discusses the political significance of dental continuity in Zappa, a concern that

preneurs and speculators, pioneer homesteaders and ranchers, desperados and indeed anybody else who scrambled over the Rockies hoping to find a better life in the promised land of California— represents the immediate socio-historical basis for the origin of the mythology of the frontier. Yet this mythology doesn’t embody the drive for constant experimentation, transience and a daring shift to the outermost boundaries solely in the geographical sense; it also manifests itself in the spiritual realm. Indeed, it is because of the genuine desire for freedom that this mythology has remained so closely tied to the ups and downs of the mentality of those who live in a land which stretches between the Atlantic and the Pacific oceans. It defines and conditions the ways in which the American “self ” time and again differs from all others.

Digging in the rich treasure-trove of stories about the ambiguous ethics of determined individualists who are never bound by ties strong enough to anchor them to a community or to prevent them from riding slowly off into the sunset, one can encounter the whole mythology of the frontier. Mysteriously simple stories in which the personal failure or success of a hero invariably indicates a comprehensive social drama are picturesquely clear in, for example, J. F. Cooper’s novels about the brave frontiersman Daniel Boon, the sentimental tales of “the self-made man” by Horatio Alger, in the immortal Westerns starring John Wayne and his lonesome saddle, even in the stories about the private dicks Philip Marlow and Sam Spade. One could even spare a glance at beatnik prose, at the cult hippie movie Easy Rider, not to mention the Hollywood trilogy about that out-of-the-ordinary archaeologist named Indiana Jones or the cinematic marathon of sequels about the trigger-happy hero of moral rectitude, Rambo.

Scholars of American mass culture would be quick to stress the important differences among this panoply of heroes. Sure, I am aware of them.

Yet from the larger perspective of a fundamental mythological background, such detailed differences are but tokens in the game of academic hairsplitting. In my opinion, it seems impossible to deny the fact that all these popular icons of the mass imagination are—after all is said and done— merely mutations of the oldest American myth, namely the fable of how an individual’s value and ethical capital are based on unconditional love of freedom and a concomitant aversion to commitment, obligations and integration in a broader community.

The depth of the dilemma borne of radical individualism is clearly revealed in a close reading of these narratives. The more the heroes can—and, as a rule, do—live beyond the everyday pressures generated by middle-class lifestyle that includes career, family, public and political obligations, the more to their advantage. Socially celibate, they remain morally incorruptible, and are consequently able to unveil the clandestine sins of a society which is seldom grateful. The precondition for truth and its right to be upheld, or enforced, is (continued on page 14)

record cover is reinforced by the Gothic letters in which the title of the album is inscribed. The reference to 1348 re-emerges in the song “Dog Breath, In the Year of the Plague,” which suggests that the illustrations were, at least to some extent, the result of a collaboration between Zappa and Schenkel. In addition to evoking the commodification of bodies in Nazi Germany, the themes of death and dentistry that pervade the cover of Uncle Meat also alert us to the huge symbolic potential of teeth extraction in Western culture. The stealing of the golden teeth of the Jewish victims evokes other forms of physical exploitation of the human body, such as that of the lower classes who, like Fantine in Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables, were encouraged to sell their teeth to the rich in the 18th and 19th centuries, at a time when “live transplants” were in vogue.

The equation of dental with moral corruption in the popular and artistic imagination is also widely documented. In precontemporary iconography, the extraction of teeth often amounts to the extraction of evil and sin from the conscience of man. The consumption of sugar in 19th century Holland was repeatedly denounced by preachers and one of them, Abraham a Sancta Clara, went as far as retracing the root of rotten teeth to original sin: “We unfortunate humans! We all have toothache and suffer ever and always from the teeth with which Adam bit the forbidden apple.”

In a similar register, the quack dentist and his patient who feature in the central panel of Bosch’s Haywain triptych confers to the dental symbolism a religious dimension by associating bad teeth with a battery of deadly sins. As David Kunzle

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Contents 1 1 4 6 10 10 11 11 12 12 13

Lonesome Hearts and the Failed Community Aleš Debeljak Frank Zappa’s Poetics of Orality: Exploring the Maximalist Body Michel Delville The Intricate Evasion of As: Poetry as Philosophy Simon Critchley Out of the Melting Pot Triestine Poetry, edited by Gerald Parks Report from the Hawk-Eye Camera Tom McCarthy Necronautism Jane Vein Paris is Burning Ethan Gilsdorf Three Poems Pierre Daguin “Untitled”: A Review Benjamin Kline Years of Reprieve Vincent Farnsworth Poetry Karen Mac Cormack, D.J. Huppatz, Drew

16 16 17

18 19 19

Milne, Travis Jeppesen, Robert Dassanowsky, Larry Sawyer, Sandra Miller, David Seiter, Tom Jones Book Reviews Louis Armand Dispositions McKenzie Wark Search and Deploy Alan Sondheim Miami Miautre: Mapping the Virtual City Gregory L. Ulmer Art Reviews Louis Armand Theatre Reviews Clare Wallace, Jitka Pelachová Letter from Paris ...

Adrian Hornsby

...

PLR ..........

Photograph by Errol Sawyer, 2002

volume 1 issue 2

PRAGUE LITERARY REVIEW

july 2003

Publisher Roman Kratochvíla Editor Louis Armand Design lazarus

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suggests, the association of toothache and guilt has survived into our own century: “in the past, toothache was regarded as a punishment for sexual guilt; and today, medical science warns us that tooth decay is the result of our excessive indulgence in the sweet things of life.”

For some contemporary artists, the visual representation of teeth becomes the very subject of the painting. Pablo Picasso’s “Weeping Woman” (1937) lays the foundation of a radical poetics of the face, one which lays emphasis on the edges and lines of force of a being stretched between representation and abstraction. A couple of decades after the explosions of the battlefield, an exploded mosaic of forms acts out the centrifugal disappearance of the corporeal envelope dismembered by the painter’s analytical gaze. In Karl Hubbuch’s “Beim Arzt” (1930), the distortion of the mouth and the nose, the disruption of the natural rhythm of the eyebrows, lips and eyelids result in an involuntary grimace that defies the general principle of symmetrical organisation of the face. As in the more recent enlarged pulled lips and pinched cheeks of Bruce Nauman or, for that matter, the carnivorous cover art of Zappa’s Everything Is Healing Nicely—which presents a blown-up picture representing what appears to be Zappa’s irregular teeth, darkened with coffee and tobacco deposits that the most powerful kind of dental floss could never remove—the distorted body becomes an alien landscape, its protuberances and cavities the site of countless visual divagations and speculations. Hubbuch’s fascination with the structures of the face was shared by numerous other painters of the Neue Sachlichkeit, a movement which saw the light in the 1920s and was catalogued as “degenerate” art on the occasion of the first exhibition of Entartete Kunst organised in Karlsruhe (Hubbuch’s home town) by the local Nazi party in 1933. For Hubbuch, as for many other German artists and writers of the same period, the patient’s bad, uneven teeth are a metaphor for the more general feeling of psychological and moral decay that characterized the Weimar republic. Whereas Thomas Mann consistently treats carious teeth as a symbol of decadence and existential maladjustment, the main character of Günter Grass’s novel, Local Anaesthetic (1969), is a history teacher who is caught between two radically different attitudes to the “treatment” of the social and political decay brought about by capitalism. The first point of view is that of one of his radical Marxist students who advocates the use of violence as the only viable form of political action. The second is characterised by the dentist’s distrust of radical politics and his preference for moderate reform and prophylactic medicine, a tendency manifested by his unrelenting attempts to remove his patient’s tartar as so many layers of “petrified hate.”

Grass’s novel returns Zappologists to a central dilemma surrounding Zappa’s politics. In the late sixties, Zappa had acquired a strong reputation as a cultural agitator and naturally attracted the sympathy of the new left. A concert the Mothers played in Munich on September 9, 1968, was interrupted by a group of leftist students who wanted the band to make a statement against capitalism and urge their followers to burn down a nearby American Forces base. Zappa refused, and years after the incident—which inspired the song “Holiday in Berlin” included in Burnt Weeny Sandwich— continued to consider direct revolutionary action as useless and naive, thereby making himself unpopular with many post-1968 militants. According to Michael Gray’s biography, in 1967 Zappa was even dumped by his then girlfriend, Pamela Zarubica, at the end of the Mothers of Invention’s European tour because she felt that he could not really live up to the subversive potential of his music and satisfy all the people who looked to him for answers to the political problems of the age. When Zappa met President Vaclav Havel in Prague more than twenty years later, he had definitively opted for the prophylactic politics of Grass’s dentist and was talking of putting the dynamics of capitalism and free enterprise to the service of the post-Communist Republic of Czechoslovakia. At the end of The Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa goes as far as defining himself as a “practical conservative,” a rather dubious term describing a “libertarian” attitude advocating “smaller, less intrusive government, and lower taxes.” As long as people keep confusing avant-garde art with revolutionary politics, Zappa’s music will continue to be misunderstood by leftists and conservatives alike. As we have seen and will see, the specific contribution Zappa made to revolutionary aesthetics is not geared towards practical politics but, rather, towards the creation of imaginary objects and the depiction of abstract

forms of behaviour that seek to reveal and subsequently ridicule the hidden eccentricities, perversions and depravities of his contemporaries.

Such manifestations of the repellent and the abject create a space where degenerate art meets slapstick comedy, where the self-consciously entartet spirit allies itself with the confectionery terrorism of the Belgian entarteur.

It is not by chance that Zappa, Schenkel, Mann and the New Objectivists privilege similar themes and techniques in their denunciation of the atrocities and hypocrisies of their times. For all of them, ugliness becomes an ideological tool against both aesthetic and political kitsch, whether it manifests itself in the idealized Germany of Hans Thoma or in the Norman Rockwellian vision of white middle class America. Like Georg Grosz and others before him, Zappa is determined to tell it like it is and tries to convince the whole world that it is, to quote Grosz, “sick, ugly and deceitful.” The twisted and degenerate aesthetics of Grosz, Dix and Schlichter—with their sickly prostitutes, mutilated soldiers and cretinoid businessmen—stood as a rebuttal of the healthy, classical nudes of Arno Brecker and, more generally, the celebration of the athletic body in Nazi Germany. From the dirty, crazy Mothers of the Freak Out album to the Aunt

Jemima checkered napkin-wearing Mammy Nuns of Thing Fish, Zappa’s new version of degenerate art results in a Cabinet of Abnormalities peopled with fetichist maniacs, bubbleheaded groupies, sinister pimps, mechanical robots, corrupted politicians and sex-crazed televangelists.

The Air In order to locate the origin of Zappa’s interest in the aesthetics and politics of the body, we now turn to what Ben Watson describes as the composer’s “horror and fascination for the structures beneath the face,” an obsession which can be accounted for by his childhood experiences of dentistry and experimental sinus treatment: Along with my earaches and asthma, I had sinus trouble. There was some “new treatment” for this ailment being discussed in the neighbourhood. It involved stuffing radium into your sinus cavities. (Have you ever heard of this?) My parents took me to yet another Italian doctor, and, although I didn’t know what they were going to do to me, it didn’t sound like it was going to be too much fun.

The doctor had a long wire thing—maybe a foot or more, and on the end was a pellet of radium. He stuffed it up my nose and into my sinus cavities on both sides. (I should probably check if my handkerchief is glowing in the dark.)

In the same passage from The Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa also mentions the tanks of mustard gas that were located near his family home in Edgewood, Maryland, and comments that “mustard gas explodes the vessels in your lungs, causing you to drown in your own blood.” The fear of internal biological collapse caused by the irritating and poisonous properties of mustard gas return us to the atrocities of the First World War which fuelled the spirit of outrage, subversion and negation of Dada, including the aesthetics of Merzkunst and sound poetry that prefigures the “noisy primitivism” of Schenkel’s and Zappa’s visual and phonic collages. But Zappa’s anecdote, like Thomas Mann’s description of “pleurashock” in The Magic Mountain, also alerts us the possibility of witnessing the changes taking place within the body, in this case the gradual transformation of one’s insides into an amorphous swarming of putrefied organs and tissues. A modern equivalent of Marsyas contemplating the transformation of his body into a “large, continu’d wound.” Or Michelangelo’s Saint Bartholomew holding the grotesque remnants of his skin-suit.

The torture never stops.

In the domain of modern aesthetics, the exploration of the human body from the inside was greatly facilitated by radiography, an invention whose impact on the history of contemporary art is relatively undocumented. In a recent essay entitled “Impossible Anatomy,” Jean Clair, explaining how the discovery of x-rays affected the

history of painting, writes that the advent of xray technology divided contemporary artists into two categories according to their ways of representing the skull: … a clear-cut line was created between those who continued to portray the skull in the traditional way, as if xrays had never been discovered, and those whose work takes account of the radical semantic and iconographical revolution they implied. The dividing line sometimes cuts unexpectedly, with “moderns” falling on the side they are not usually placed on. Thus Ensor and Cézanne emerge as traditionalist and outmoded, since they continue to use the calvarium as an accessory of Wordly Vanities. Munch and Duchamp, on the other hand, are modern. Looking forward to us, they explore the interiority of the body and its properties. The skeletal arm of the former, the jawbone of the latter, have a harsh resonance. We are faced with a sort of clinical report, whereas Ensor and Cézanne remain hostages to the romantic vignette.

By drawing attention to the power of abstraction of the x-ray machine and the relationship between clinical and artistic practice, Clair’s analysis recalls Benjamin’s remark that the analytical vision of the body afforded by the movies which “promotes the mutual penetration of art and science” also applies to radiography, which also proceeds by abstraction and isolation and demonstrates “the identity of the artistic and scientific uses of photography” by allowing objects and bodies to be “analysed much more precisely and from more points of view than those presented on paintings or on the stage.” Clair’s reference to the calvarium returns us to the black and white skull on the cover of Uncle Meat which is less a remnant of the ancestral tradition of the memento mori than a proof of Zappa’s and Schenkel’s commitment to a method that puts the grotesque and the macabre to the service of an art that considers the body as the site of endless aesthetic and psychological negotiations.

Of course, the practice of dissection provided visual artists with other ways of gaining access to the inner structures of living organisms long before Röntgen’s discovery of x-rays in 1895. Michelangelo himself reputedly sneaked into hospital rooms to perform dissections of the human body, flaying dead bodies in order to study the complexity of human anatomy, defying the edicts of the Church in a gesture of frantic desecration.

His Saint Bartholomew is holding a stretched out human skin to symbolize his martyrdom; he is also holding the knife used by his torturers in flaying him alive. Michelangelo painted his own face into the dead skin, probably in order to exhibit his growing pessimism and fatigue to everyone, after several years (1508-1512) spent on his back seventy feet above the ground, painting over three hundred figures on the curved ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The art of dissection provided Michelangelo with numerous anatomical models, and it probably also influenced the philosophical and theological foundations of his work. In an article entitled, “An interpretation of Michelangelo’s

Frank Zappa with Václav Havel, 1989 Creation of Adam Based on Neuroanatomy,” Frank Meshberger directs our attention to the striking similarities between Michelangelo’s God and a mid-sagittal view of the human brain. Was Michelangelo trying to represent God as a huge brain bestowing intellect on man? Was he trying to reconcile science and religion, matter and spirit, by evoking the return of the human soul to its godly origin? Or did the artist simply mean to pay tribute to the as yet unsung beauty of nerve tissue, pineal glands and corpora calosa?

Contemporary examples of such intersections between art and dissection abound, from the anatomical mannequin standing among the semihuman figures of Rudolf Schlichter’s “Dada Dachatelier” (ca. 1920) to Frida Kahlo’s esoteric self-portraits, stripping away the layers of flesh to reveal the wounds inflicted by illness and disillusionment. Still, the specific influence of radiography on contemporary art lies not merely in its capacity to violate the opacity of man and reveal the inside workings of the body—rather, what is at stake here is the promise it holds of

capturing the invisible and giving birth to the “non-retinal” art dear to Duchamp and his followers, an art prefigured by Munch’s “Self-Portrait with Elbow”(1895) and which paved the way for many later works such as Robert Rauschenberg’s “Booster” (1967), which, like Schenkel’s Uncle Meat collage, comprises a complete body reconstructed from a series of x-rays surrounded with washed-out magazine photographs and reproductions of technical instruments. Finally, it is a similar impulse that led Mona Hatoum to explore the body through endoscopic means, using the joint media of art and science to gain access to what Paul Valéry once called the Third Body, that which “has unity only in our thought” since “to know it is to have reduced it to parts and pieces . . . elements of varying sizes, fashioned so as to fit exactly in place: sponges, vessels, tubes, fibres, articulated rods …”

Tight Butts and White Jazz Before returning to Zappa’s facial poetics, we now turn to his general treatment of the theme of ugliness as it expresses itself in his more “sociological” lyrics. In songs such as “Beauty Knows No Pain” and “I’m A Beautiful Guy” Zappa equates the cult of the body with the false pretenses of white upper-middle class culture and repeatedly opposes himself to the totalitarian claims of the fashion industry which, by diverting people’s attention away from politics to the realms of sports and entertainment, contributes to a system that values form over content, surface over depth, passive consumption over creative action. “I’m A Beautiful Guy” derides the efforts of joggers to lose weight and tighten their butts, a theme also developed by Zappa in his instrumental illustration of “youthening” trends on “Beat the Reaper” from the album Civilization Phaze III. The following lines are sung to a particularly banal and bloodless jazzy tune—probably the kind of watered-down jazz the white, waterdrinking yuppie joggers listen to when they go back to their flats after indulging in their favourite sport: They’re drinking lighter They’re full of water I hear them say: “Let’s jog …”

They’re playing tennis Their butts are tighter What could be whiter?

Hey? In a civilization where the dialectics of the sweet-sexy and the salt-sexy has been replaced by low-calorie sugar substitutes and salt without sodium, in a world where politics, fashion and advertising are increasingly difficult to distinguish from one another—and where jogging in public has become one of the most powerful self-advertising gimmicks developed by prominent politicians to radiate an image of healthiness and reassuring normality—Zappa’s lyrics acquire a special significance. Like Kundera, Zappa believes that beauty is first and foremost a political lie, and “Beauty Knows No Pain” logically leads into a sequence of songs dealing with what lies underneath that lie and analysing the most unsavoury aspects of life in modern America, including the adoption of lifestyles based on racial stereotypes (“You Are What You Is”), disco dancing as organized mass-entertainment (the Adornoite “Mudd Club,” not to mention the related songs “Dancing Fool” and “Disco Boy”), fast food diet habits (“Conehead”), televangelist crooks and religious fanatics (“The Meek Shall Inherit Nothing”; “Dumb All Over”; “Heavenly Bank Account”), and drug abuse (“Charlie’s Enormous Mouth”; “Any Downers”).

The near-moralistic “Cocaine Decisions,” from the album The Man from Utopia (1983), is emblematic of Zappa’s aesthetics of abjection in its ruthless analysis of his contemporaries’ strategies of mis- or over-consumption. It is probably Zappa’s most direct and bitter indictment of the drug culture, an aspect of his work which firmly separates him from the rest of the world of alternative music. Zappa’s strict anti-drugs rules when working with the Mothers of Invention must be understood both as a rejection of the superficial mores and deadening habits of the “plastic” hippies (“Hey Punk”) and the realisation that his most complex compositions could only be rehearsed and performed efficiently through the use of tightly disciplined working methods. By contrast, “Cocaine Decisions” presents the ingestion of cocaine as an activity that underlines the user’s place in a logic of consumption geared towards material success (the success that results from a higher efficiency at work) and thereby reveals his absolute conformism and conservatism in a world

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dominated by the pressures of mercantilism and corporate interests. In the Reaganite 1980s, the “plastic people” ridiculed in the early Mothers albums are indeed replaced by the “EXPENSIVE UGLINESS” of “high class” people who “fly to Acapulco / Where all their friends go” (“Cocaine Decisions”), “junior executives all in a row” (“Planet of the Barytone Women”), brainless yuppies and anorexic talk-show hostesses (“Any Kind of Pain”).

“Charlie’s Enormous Mouth,” another song about drug abuse, conveys the absurdities of a life rendered meaningless by the pursuit of sex, money and the cheap ecstasies of the heavy drug user or compulsive dancer. Zappa’s absurdist lyrics introduce us to various parts of Charlie’s cocaine-wasted body which are reduced to the impersonal tasks and uses they serve to fulfil. His description of Charlie’s body as a snorting, eating and sucking machine once more evoke Kundera and Burroughs and their recognition of the lack of wholeness of the human body and the mechanical “washing and wetting” that maintains the equilibrium of physiological functions. Like Joyce in Ulysses, Zappa writes of the ungodly condition of man in terms that evoke the peristaltic doom of a creature whose life is controlled by chemical and mechanical processes over which it has very little control: Charlie’s enormous mouth, well, it’s awright The girl got a very large mouth, but it’s awright She got lips all around the hole Where she puts her food in They call it THE MOUTH They call it THE MOUTH They call it THE MOUTH and we stuffing food in one hole and out behind: food, chyle, blood dung, earth, food: have to feed it like stoking an engine The song ends with the girl’s death after one last OD. As she enters her final hole, her body is gulped down into the earth, covered with the dirt that her friends have thrown into the grave. Charlie’s death is a rather untragic one, and it can only arouse mockery or disgust. The friends who encouraged her to take “an extra hit” the night before and “were terribly excised while they / Watched her doin’ it” complain that they need their “downers” and quickly leave the sphincteral ritual of the funeral to go back home and watch TV. In an earlier piece such as “The Air,” the anatomical inventiveness of Zappa’s lyrics invites us to consider the futility of considering the body as the locus of integrity and individual freedom.

Like the “airholes from which breath should come” described by Beefheart’s before the Old Fart’s wooden mask melts into an “intricate rainbow trout replica,” the first part of “The Air” stands as a cross between Tzara’s vision of the body in The Gas Heart (where body parts such as a Mouth, an Eye, a Nose and a Neck acquire an independent existence and become actors in their own right) and the compulsive talking mouth of Beckett’s Not I. Somehow, the sadness that emanates from Zappa’s lyrics is increased by the imbecilic doo-wop melody of the song. What remains is a wheezing organism feeding on air, ex-pressing words that only signify the emptiness that lies behind a mask of flesh and bones. The theme of the body as an empty shell, also adumbrated in Michelangelo’s Saint Bartholomew, gives way to a laughable (non-)self, an abstract body that is reduced to the impersonal, mechanical process that keeps it alive. Zappa’s insane and compulsive rhyming suggests a mind which, like the body, is regressing, to some pre-human phase of existence characterized by rampant pilosity and phonetic idiocy: The air Escaping from your mouth The hair Escaping from your nose My heart Escaping from the craping And the shaping Of the draping ...

The air Escaping from your pits The hair Escaping from my teeth Grown So Ugly We cannot close this section on buccal aesthetics without discussing the most powerful facial icon associated with Zappa throughout his career: the now legendary moustache and goatee. Unlike Dali, who saw his moustache as a protection against the outside world and a direct extension of his paranoid politics and aesthetics, Zappa apparently never sought to consciously ascribe a particu-

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lar function to his facial hair. The disfiguring of fundamentals of post-Dada anti-totalitarian art) Mona Lisa by Zappa’s moustache in a famous follows Kundera’s recognition that beauty and 1970 poster advertising a Mothers of Invention harmony are first and foremost a political lie. The show in Boston may nonetheless provide us with power of laughter and satire of his music and a clue as to the way Zappa’s pilosity has been re- lyrics creates a profusion of festive, farcical exceived by his audience. Such a facile remake of pressions that frees the body from its instrumenDuchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.” (1919) may seem triv- tal destiny. Like Rabelais’s work—which mixed ial at first, and yet, it is one of the first direct popular and learned idiom, classical and modern reference to the spirit of Dada in the context of languages, lewd jokes and erudite Humanist talk— Zappa’s career, a tradition Zappa inevitably finds Zappa’s music brings together not only different himself associated with despite his general indif- musical genres and subgenres, from the most reference to genres, schools and movements, avant- fined to the most trivial, but also antipodal modes gardist and otherwise. The satiric intent here of apprehension of the real. His imaginary mebecomes deployed along the line of repetition as diations between the subjective and the objective, Leonardo’s painting has been done and redone the abstract and the concrete, are important beby dozens of Dada-inspired artists from Dali’s cause they create a pivotal space where opposites “Self-Portrait as Mona Lisa” (1954) to Andy War- meet and where the interpenetration of low and hol’s serial prints. The Mona Lisa poster logically high art, film, orchestral music, blues-rock and places Zappa in a line of artists that runs from noise is part of a larger conceptual nexus where Duchamp to Cornell and Jorn and beyond, one ideas, feelings and gestures get exchanged and that celebrates the art of disfiguring the familiar where Zappa’s carnivalesque aesthetics contribin order to project the image of the artist’s de- utes to the creation of alternative art forms that sires and neuroses onto the world of objects. encourage an integrated approach to life and art While Duchamp’s “L.H.O.O.Q.” was intended to in general (his role as a “documenter” of life on ridicule less Leonardo’s the road is crucial in this painting in itself than the respect). bourgeois idolatry of ReAccording to Kunnaissance art, the disfigurdera’s famous definiing of classical art objects tion, kitsch is grounded also has the effect of in a “categorical agreemaking them indigestible ment with being.” Not or unusable, thereby emonly does the language bodying Benjamin’s interand iconog raphy of est in the “liberation of kitsch “exclude everythings from the curse of thing from its purview being useful.” As we have which is essentially unseen, one of the great acceptable in human exmerits of Zappa’s art is istence”; it is also based precisely to change the on the uncritical acceplevel of perception that altance and consumption lows for a single unified of feelings that “multivision of the wor ld tudes can share”: around us and to enable Kitsch may not, us to consider a given obtherefore, depend on an ject, detail or composition unusual situation; it in a way that does justice must derive from the to the endless perceptual basic imag es people shifts of maximalist praxhave engraved in their is. The creative misuse of memories. The ungratetraditional art forms in ful daughter, the nePhotograph by Errol Sawyer, 2002 Zappa’s music and lyrics is, glected father, children as we have seen, apparent running on the grass, the not only in his treatment of everyday objects but motherland betrayed, first love. also in numberless acts of parody, satire and quoKitsch causes two tears to flow in quick suctation, the sum of which tends to blur accepted cession. The first tear says: How nice to see chilboundaries between popular culture and the dren running on the grass! avant-garde.

The second tear says: How nice to be moved, But the symbolic function of Zappa’s mous- together with all mankind, by children running tache is not limited to its potential for maximalist on the grass! defamiliarisation. Responding to a journalist askIt is the second tear that makes kitsch kitsch. ing him when he decided to grow a moustache, The brotherhood of man on earth will be possible only Zappa evaded the question and declared: “I have on a basis of kitsch. to trim my moustache because if I don’t, about Zappa’s own crusade against musical and poevery three or four days it grows into my mouth litical kitsch displays an awareness of the danger and I wind up eating my moustache along with of such a “dictatorship of the heart”: emotional my food.” The threat of autophagy is real since kitsch inevitably degenerates into “totalitarian” Zappa the Cannibal not only absorbs and satiriz- kitsch, a political space where “a deviation of the es past and current musical styles but also de- collective is a spit in the eye of the smiling brothlights in a constant, self-parodic reworking and erhood” (252). In Identity (1996), Kundera seeks recycling of favourite themes from his own rep- to prove the falseness and worthlessness of kitsch ertoire. His Project/Object seems to continually through a (Frank) recognition of the lack of infeed off itself; recycling, reproducing itself in an tegrity of the human I/eye: endless series of re-releases and alternate versions The eye, the window to the soul; the centre of the face’s which are themselves, to a large extent, the result beauty; the point where a person’s identity is concentrated; of Zappa’s crusade against bootleggers and the but at the same time an optical instrument that requires anarchic consumption of his music. (The appear- constant washing, wetting, maintenance by a special liqance of posthumous releases of Zappa’s music uid dosed with salt. So the gaze, the greatest marvel man and the recent trademarking of the celebrated possesses, is regularly interrupted by a mechanical washing “moustache” by the Zappa Family Trust adds action. Like a windscreen washed by a wiper. another, retrospective twist to the artist’s life-long To the “tiny sick tears” of Kundera’s political struggle with the dialectics of consumption and kitsch Zappa opposes the aesthetic value of the rejection.) Zappa’s autophagous methods are un- “Sleep [Eye]Dirt” which provides the ground for consciously captured by David B. McMacken’s one of his most bulimic (and also most melancover illustration for the album Overnite-Sensation choly) solos. His refusal of the maudlin and the (1973) which features a baroque whirl of mutual- sentimental, of the “second tear that makes ly absorbing intestinal gargoyles creating a con- kitsch,” (“I think one of the causes of bad mentemporary equivalent of the visceral energy of tal health in the united States is that people have Bosch’s paintings of Hell or the promiscuous glut- been raised on ‘love lyrics’”[Real 89]), his rejectony of Piet Breughel’s “The Big Fish Eat the tion of (white) middle class as an art of anal reLittle Fish.” As always, the crucial factor in the pression, his denunciation of “cheese” as a way creation of such grotesque imagery is the confu- of life that enables a whole nation to “perpetuate sion of the comic and the repellent, the humor- the fiction that it is moral, sane and wholesome” ous and the terrifying—a method often (sleevenotes to You Are What You Is) and, finally, encountered in Zappa’s visual and musical imag- his friendship with Vaclav Havel and their comination, from the Sadean blues of “The Torture mon celebration of the end of “communist Never Stops” to the squeaking trombone sounds kitsch” in the Fall of 1991, testify to Zappa’s comand Synclavier-generated whining, gulping and mitment to an aesthetics that works as a response grunting samples of “When Yuppies Go to Hell,” to kitsch’s idealization of the quotidian and faon the live album Make A Jazz Noise Here (1991). miliar as well as its promotion of automated forms All these examples suggest that Zappa’s use of of experience and existence. the grotesque, the abject and the repellent (the

The Intricate Evasions of As: Poetry as Philosophy Simon Critchley 1. Poetry is the description of a particular thing— a tin plate, the loaf of bread on it, the wine that I drink, clear water in a brilliant bowl, a small rock in the palm of my hand, the leafless stubby tree that I see from my kitchen window, the moon in a clear winter’s sky.

2. The poet describes those things in the radiant atmosphere produced by the imagination.

Poetic acts are thus acts of the mind, which describe recognisable things, real things, really real things, but which vary the appearance of those things, changing the aspect under which they are seen. Poetry brings about felt variations in the appearance of things. What is most miraculous is that poetry does this simply by the sound of words, This city now doth, like a garment wear, The beauty of the morning, silent, bare…

3. Poetry imaginatively transfigures a common reality, a morning walk in London, for example.

But that common reality can press in on the self, the city becomes oppressive and the self depressive. The world becomes a deafening, violent place dominated by an ever-enlarging incoherence of information and the constant presence of war.

Such is arguably our present. This feels to me a leaden time, a time of dearth, a world that cannot move for the weight of its own heaviness.

4. What, then, are poets for? In a time of dearth, they resist the pressure of reality, they press back against this oppressiveness with the power of imagination, producing felt variations in the appearance of things. Poetry enables us to feel differently, to see differently. It leavens a leaden time.

This is poetry’s nobility, which is also a violence, an imaginative violence from within that protects us from the violence from without—violence against violence, then.

5. The poetic act, the act of the mind, illuminates the surface of things with imagination’s beam. This act is part of the thing and not about it. Through it, we detect what we might call the movement of the self in those things: plate, bread, wine, water, rock, tree, moon. In poetry, the makings of things are makings of the self. Poets are the artificers of the world in which they sing and, singing, make.

6. Words of the world are the life of the world.

Or so we say.

7. That which is, is for a self who declares it to be. Philosophically expressed, all poetry is idealistic, at least in ambition. But the materia poetica, the raw stuff out of which poetry makes its radiant atmospheres, is the real, real particulars, actual stuff. Poetry is the imagination touching reality.

8. To introduce my first “as,” and it’s quite an “as,” poetry allows us to see things as they are.

But, and this is its peculiarity, poetry lets us see things as they are anew, under a new aspect, transfigured, subject to a felt variation. The poet sings a song that is both beyond us yet ourselves. Things change when the poet sings them, but they are still our things: recognisable, common, near. We hear the poet sing and press back against the pressure of reality.

9. It is easily said that the poet makes the ordinary extraordinary. Yet, the extraordinary is only extraordinary if it refers back to the ordinary, otherwise it would be empty. This is another way of drawing the distinction between imagination and fancy: the poetic imagination imagines things as they are, but beyond us, turned about, whereas fancy simply fantasises about things that are not.

10. We find an order in things. When I look at the boats at anchor in the harbour there, as night descends, their lights tilting in the air, they seem to master the night and portion out the sea, arranging the harbour and fixing the surrounding village. When I place a jar on a hill, the slovenly wilderness that surrounded that hill rises up to that jar and is no longer wild. We find an order in things. Poetry reorders the order we find in things.

It gives us things as they are, but beyond us. Poetry, it might be said, gives us an idea of order.

11. Think of truth as troth (that’s another “as”), as an act of betrothal, of wedding, of pledging oneself to things. Dichtung und Wahrheit, poetry and truth, poetry is truthful as trothful. It speaks the truth of things, it speaks the truth out of things, a truth that is something we both recognise and something new, something beyond us yet ourselves.

12. Poetry describes life as (there’s another) it is, in all the intricate evasions of as. It gives us the

world as it is—common, near, recognisable—but imagined, turned about. It is a world both seen and unseen until seen with the poet’s eyes.

13. Poetry momentarily focuses the bewilderment to which we are attached and which passes for our inner life.

14. Poetry is an elevation, an enlargement of life. At its noblest, poetry helps people live their lives.

15. What is essential is that poetry should produce this elevation, this enlargement, in words free from mysticism, that is, free from any intellectual intuition of a transcendent reality. There is no such intuition. I have no reason to believe that there is any such transcendent reality. Poetry might ennoble, but it is acutely mundane.

16. The climate of our world is not that of gods, monsters and heroes, or the wingéd soul taking flight into the silent aether, but that of the near, the low, the common, the imperfect. The imperfect is and can be our only paradise. A poet might write poems appropriate to that climate, to the things we find scattered around: to cities, towns and villages; to buildings and houses; to birds, plants and trees; to transport systems, the subtleties of trade and the speed of commerce; to weather, heavy weather and slight, to the movement that clouds make over a wet landscape on an afternoon in late November; to a time of war and what passes for peace; to wine, water and the sensation of eating oysters; to air, light and the joy of having a body; to your mother and your lovers, who should not be confused; to the sea: cold, salt, dark, clear, utterly free; to quail, sweet berries and casual flocks of pigeons; to your pet cat Jeoffrey who can detect electricity; to the whole voluptuousness of looking.

17. The poet finds words for these things which are not the revelations of religious belief, but the more precious portents of our powers, of imagination’s beam reordering the order we find in the world.

18. If I bang my head on the door, I do not cry out “Oh God” or “Sweet warm blood of Jesus,” but “door,” “head” and, most probably, “ouch.”

Poetry can teach this.

19. God is dead, therefore I am. Such is poetry’s proposition. Yet, how is one? Such is poetry’s question.

Let me try and explain myself a little further.

I want to address the topic of poetry as philosophy by considering the work of Wallace Stevens, in my view the philosophically most interesting poet to have written in English in the 20th Century.

Some of the words I have just used are his, some are mine, and some are borrowed from others.

As a philosopher (another “as”), what it is about Stevens that interests me is the fact that he found a manner, that is wholly poetic, of developing full thoughts, theses, hypotheses, conjectures, ruminations and aphorisms that one should call philosophical. As his work developed, Stevens created a unique meditative form, most often in the late work, the blank verse triplet, often grouped into units of six or seven stanzas, as you will see.

A fine example of this meditative form can be seen in the important long, late poem, “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.” This shows Stevens poetically capable not just of stating a proposition, exploring a line of thought, or initiating a hypothesis—“If ” is a very common word in Stevens’s lexicon, “as if ” is even more common, and Stevens’s is a philosophy of the “as if,” of qualified assertions. He will also suddenly change tack, introducing new personae and topoi, or simply let the poetry slide into comic bathos or very often into the bathos of sheer sound, “the micmac of mocking birds” or “the mickey mockers and plated pairs.” Towards the end of the poem, Stevens writes, If it should be true that reality exists In the mind: the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it, The long-bladed knife, the little to drink and her Misericordia, it follows that Real and unreal are two in one: New Haven Before and after one arrives or, say, Bergamo in a postcard, Rome after dark, Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes Or Paris in conversation at a café.

This endlessly elaborating poem Displays the theory of poetry, As the life of poetry. A more severe, More harassing master would extemporize Subtler, more urgent proof that the theory Of poetry is the theory of life,

As it is, in the intricate evasions of as, In things seen and unseen, created from nothingness, The heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longed-for lands.

Stevens’s language moves from a hypothesis, “if it should be true …,” to concrete particulars, “the tin plate, the loaf of bread on it …,” to syllogistic conclusions, “it follows that …,” to propositions of the most general import, “the theory of poetry is the theory of life”—with a possible allusion to Coleridge’s Theory of Life. The proposition is then pursued in the most finely ambiguous manner, where it is a question of life “as it is, in the intricate evasions of as.” Poetry is ambiguous. This is what appals some philosophers and attracts others. Poetic language is a matter of what he calls, … the edgings and inchings of final form, The swarming activities of the formulae Of statement, directly and indirectly getting at …

Yet, Stevens’s qualified assertions, his “ifs” and “as ifs,” deploy ambiguity to get at the evasiveness of poetry’s matter, which is reality, …………………………We seek Nothing beyond reality. Within it, Everything, the spirit’s alchemicana Included …

But that is not all. Going back to the above passage, we move instantly from grand propositions about the real and unreal into the almost comic, touristic particularity of “Sweden described, Salzburg with shaded eyes …,” and from there into moments of visionary lyrical rapture, “the heavens, the hells, the worlds, the longedfor lands.” The curious and distinctive thing about Stevens, it seems to me, is that all these aspects occur concurrently within the meditative form of the poem: metaphysics, a little casuistry, lyricism, bathos and pathos. It is this combination of normally distinct properties that gives the verse its movement and edge. We feel illuminated, deepened, amused and perplexed, turn and turn about.

Furthermore, what is enacted in the poem, for Stevens, is the very nature of poetry itself. The poem is the enactment of poetry’s essence. What this means is that this very poem, “This endlessly elaborating poem/Displays the theory of poetry,/As the life of poetry.” In Steven’s verse, the frontier between poetry and poetics is constantly being criss-crossed in and as the work of the poem itself. As he writes in “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” Poetry is the subject of the poem, From this the poem issues and To this returns. Between the two, Between issue and return, there is An absence in reality, Things as they are. Or so we say.

The nature of poetry is elicited through the poetic act itself, through “the naked poem, the imagination manifesting itself in its domination of words.” The theory of poetry—poetics— which a more harassing Coleridgean master would view as the theory of life, is performed in the specific poem insofar as that poem concerns itself with some real particular, with some object, thing or fact. … Or so we say. A final qualification necessitated both by the evasiveness of what is being elicited by Stevens and its banality: things as they are only are in the act that says they are.

To forestall a possible misunderstanding, by philosophy I do not mean religious brooding.

Although there are important religious concerns in Stevens, as when he says in a late poem that “God and imagination are one,” he is not a religious poet in the same way as, say, the later T.S. Eliot. Stevens fondly describes Eliot as “an upright ascetic in an exceedingly floppy world.”

Stevens is a somewhat floppier, worldly poet writing in the wake and complex cross-currents of romanticism. The latter can arguably be reduced to the belief that art is the supreme medium for attaining the fundamental ground of life and that the problems of the modern world can be addressed and even reconciled in the production of a critically self-conscious artwork. This is what Friedrich Schlegel saw as the great novel of the modern world, a secular bible. Poetry written in the wake of romanticism—and I think that all poetry has to be in romanticism’s failure, but that’s another story—is animated by the belief that poetry should take on to itself the existential burden of religious belief without the guarantee of religious belief. As Stevens expresses it at the beginning of his longest and most ambitious poem, “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction,” “The death of one god is the death of all.”

Poetry has to be vitalised by the question of the ultimate meaning and value of life without claiming to know the metaphysical or theological answer to that question. Stevens makes this crystal clear in one of his Adagia, which were notebooks he kept in the 1930s and ‘40s, “After one has abandoned a belief in god, poetry is that essence which takes its place as life’s redemption.”

Poetry takes the place of religion as that medium which offers the possibility, or at least pursues the question, of life’s redemption. It does this by producing fictions that return us to the sense of the world; and it goes without saying that there is no sense in claiming, for Stevens, that there is anything that transcends the world.

In “The Man with the Blue Guitar,” he writes, ………………………… Poetry Exceeding music must take the place Of empty heaven and its hymns, Ourselves in poetry must take their place, Even in the chattering of your guitar.

Philosophy is atheism, but an anxious atheism, a restlessness with a religious memory and within a religious archive.

Stevens was self-consciously philosophical in his interests and much of his reading. He read widely in philosophy and his criticism abounds with references to classical texts, like Plato, and authors closer to his own time, like Bergson, William James, Russell, his teacher Santayana and his friend Jean Wahl. He was evidently a highly cultivated man. So what, you might exclaim.

Much more significantly, his entire work might be viewed as an extended elaboration of the guiding question of epistemology: the relation between thought and things, or words and world.

In the history of philosophy, this question has been posed in different ways in successive epochs. For the Pre-Socratic Parmenides, it is the question of the sameness between thought and Being, or between thinking and that which is. For Plato, it is the correspondence between the intellect and the forms, where knowledge of a thing is knowledge of the form of that thing. For Aquinas, it is the adaequatio between the intellect and things, where both persons and things are creatures created by a God himself uncreated.

For Descartes and modern philosophy, it becomes the basic question of the theory of knowledge: namely, what is the relation between a thinking self or subject and the objects that appear to the subject.

The basic advance of Kant’s epistemology is that it does not suppose, as is supposed by both Plato and Descartes in quite different ways, that in order for knowledge to be possible there must be a correspondence between thoughts or mental representations and things-in-themselves, whether the realm of forms, the metaphysical realities of the soul, God and material substance, or simply a belief in the radical independence of reality from the mind, what Wilfrid Sellars calls “the Myth of the Given.” After Kant, that which is true is that which is taken to be true, i.e. that which appears to a subject or self. Now, that which so appears might indeed refer to a thing in itself, but we can never be in a position to know this fact independently of how that fact appears to us. On Kant’s picture, the realm of sensibility is our access to a world that is indeed real for us, but that world is always already shot through with conceptual content, it is articulated as such through the categories of the understanding and is dependent upon the spontaneity of the subject. This is why, as Kant says, “the transcendental idealist is, therefore, an empirical realist.”

It is in this Kantian lineage that Stevens has to be placed. After all, what could be more Kantian than the thought that “If it should be true that reality exists/In the mind … it follows that real and unreal are two in one.” Stevens can be said to be offering a poetic transposition of the thesis of transcendental idealism, where the relation between thought and things and words and world is redescribed as the relation between imagination and reality, the two master concepts of Stevens’s poetics. Imagination is that activity or, better, power, of forming concepts beyond those derived from external objects. Understood in this way, the imagination is a power over external objects, or the transformation of the external into the internal through the work of subjective creation, a creation that is given sensuous form and is therefore rendered external in the work of art, the poem. I take it that this is what Hegel means when he speaks of art being born of the spirit and then reborn in being aesthetically regarded.

In one of his Athenaeum fragments, Friedrich Schlegel writes, “No poetry, no reality.” We should

keep this in mind when reading Stevens, particularly as he places himself within a romantic tradition with its vast premise that the world might be transformed in and through a great artwork. So, no poetry, no reality: that is, our experience of the real is dependent upon the work of the poetic imagination. Yet, if there is no reality without poetry, then the inversion of Schlegel’s remark would also seem to be true for Stevens, i.e. “No reality, no poetry.” For Stevens, the poet must not lead us away from the real, where the solitary work of the imagination would result in fantasy or fancy. In Stevens’s terminology, Coleridge’s famous distinction between imagination and fancy might be redrawn in the following way: the poetic imagination must adhere to reality, whereas fancy works without reference to reality. As Stevens puts it, “The real is only the base. But it is the base.” So, the real is the base, it is the basis from which poetry begins, what Stevens calls the materia poetica, the matter of poetry, but it is only the base. One might say that reality is the necessary but not the sufficient condition for poetry, but it is absolutely necessary.

I am not saying that Stevens is simply a Kantian, but rather that he begins from Kantian premises read through Romantic spectacles. That is, he begins from a perceived failure of Kantianism, from what might be called a dejected transcendental idealism. The shape of the thought I am after here can be found in Coleridge’s 1802 “Dejection: An Ode,” whose melancholy mood laments the abyssal distance between nature and the self, or between things-in-themselves and things-as-they-are-for-us. Coleridge famously writes, Though I should gaze for ever On that green light that lingers in the west: I may not hope from outward forms to win The passion and the life; whose fountains are within Therefore, the only meaning that we find in nature is that which we give to it, O Lady! we receive but what we give And in our life alone does Nature live.

Nature in itself is that which resists the “shaping spirit of imagination.” Thus, if transcendental idealism is true, it is only so faute de mieux and inspires dejection in us. I pursue this question of dejection in relation to the experience of nature elsewhere in relation to Stevens’s very last poems.

Stevens’s poetic deepening of the thought of transcendental idealism might be said to lead him towards a more phenomenological sense of the real.

Phenomenology is a description of things as they are that seeks to elicit or make explicit the sense of our practical involvement with the world.

Again, more paradoxically stated, phenomenology brings out the meaning of the fact that, in Merleau-Ponty’s words, “we are condemned to meaning.” Phenomenology gives us the meaning of meaning. Phenomenological descriptions, if felicitous, foreground things as they are experienced in the everyday world we inhabit, the real world in which we move and have our being, the world which fascinates and benumbs us. From this phenomenological perspective, the problem with Kant’s approach is that it presupposes two things: first, a conception of the subject as what Kant calls the “I think” that has, at the very least, a family resemblance to Descartes’s res cogitans, even if it is a cogito without an ergo sum. Second, that the subject’s relation to the objective world is mediated through representations, what Hegel calls “picture thinking,” Kant’s and Fichte’s Vorstellungen. If we place in question these two presuppositions, then it might lead us to abandon the entire epistemological construal of the relation of thought to things, words to world. The world does not first and foremost show itself as an “object” contemplatively and disinterestedly viewed by a “subject.” Rather, the world shows itself as a place in which we are completely immersed and from which we do not radically distinguish ourselves: “Real and unreal are two in one.”

Stevens’s working assumption, which he owes once again to romanticism, is that the “two in oneness” of the world is phenomenologically disclosed or reflectively transfigured not in philosophy but through a poetic act, that is to say, in an artwork. It is the task of poetry to elicit the sense of the world as it is, in the intricate evasions of as, directly and indirectly getting at the real in the edgings and inchings of final form.

So, in my view, Stevens is philosophically significant because his verse recasts the basic problem of epistemology in a way that perhaps allows this problem to be cast away. What we might call his (continued on page 15)

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Out of the Melting Pot Poetry from Trieste, edited by Gerald Parks The selection of poems presented here is a very personal one, which does not pretend to be “the best poetry by the best poets” currently living and writing in Trieste. It aims rather at giving an idea of the range and variety of themes and styles that are to be found in the work of some of the poets that Trieste has produced in recent years.

I have followed a few simple criteria. First, I have only included poems that I, personally, liked, and that I wanted to translate. Secondly, I have excluded some poets who were born in Trieste but have lived most of their lives elsewhere (e.g., Fabio Dopplicher, Ferry Fölkel), even though they have a certain importance in the literature of Trieste. On the contrary, I have included poets who were born elsewhere, but are now living and working in Trieste (e.g., Carmela Fratantonio, Pietro Zovatto and others). Thirdly, all the poets represented here are still living (with one exception: Giorgio Depangher, who died in the winter of 2001 and whose book Sbrindoli appeared posthumously). I have also tried to give a sampling of some of the younger poets (the youngest included here is Paola Colle, who is only 20).

Unless otherwise indicated, I have myself made all the translations, with the systematic exception of the poems translated from the Slovene. I do not know Slovene, but there is an important group of poets in Trieste who write in that language; as it did not seem correct to translate their poems from Italian translations of them, I have reprinted English translations of their poems already published in the anthology Primorska, Moja Dusa in Srce, edited by Aleksij Pregarc (Kurir, Ljubljana, 1995). The poems by Aleksij Pregarc come from his book Moj Veliki Mali Svet (My Big Little World) (Optima, Ljubljana, 1999).

The poem by Giovanni Tavcar, a bilingual poet, instead, was originally written in Italian. Other well-known Slovene poets resident in Trieste are Alenka Rebula Tuta (b. 1953), Zlatka Obid (b.

1951), Bruna Marija Pertot (b. 1937), Jakob Renko (b. 1946), and Filibert Benedetic (b. 1935).

The following passage, taken from the introduction to Pregarc’s anthology, illuminates the meaning of the Slovene poetic contribution to the culture of Trieste: “It is true that the Slovenes of Primorska and Italians spiritually still ‘pass by one another.’ But—surprisingly—our poetry has chosen a freer path than in our native land, Slovenia ...We certainly suffer from our attachment to the land which is slipping from our hands and from under our feet. The past romantic enthusiasm and memory—revitalised, of course— still linger in our poems, but on a level that testifies to originality, Mediterranean playfulness ..., a convincing self-irony and parody, the Sisyphean theme sometimes ...We happen to be reflected in the pocket-mirror of Europe, and our ‘products’ often achieve a position in the most eminent international anthologies and magazines.”

All in all, five different languages or dialects are used by the poets included here. Aside from Slovene, there are of course those who write in Italian (the majority), as well as some who write in dialect (Giorgio Depangher in that of Koper, Ezio Giust and Claudio Grisancich in that of Trieste). One poet, Juan Octavio Prenz, writes in Spanish. There is even one poet in Trieste, not included here, who writes in English (Renata L. Cargnelli). All this linguistic variety is, of course, lost in the process of translation into English.

The best-known living poet of Trieste is probably Claudio Grisancich, who has a national reputation and is considered the legitimate heir of the Triestine tradition in poetry. That tradition effectively started with Umberto Saba (1883-1957) and Virgilio Giotti (1885-1957) (though they were not the first to write poetry in Trieste); both are now considered major Italian poets of the 20th century. It is symptomatic that Saba wrote in Italian, Giotti in the dialect of Trieste. These two linguistic mediums have continued to be used to the present day. Later poets in dialect include Biagio Marin (who wrote in the dialect of Grado), Anita Pittoni, Guido Sambo, Manlio Malabotta, Carolus L. Cergoly and Ferry Fölkel, while the Italian tradition was carried on by Guido Camber Barni, Mariano Rugo, Marcello Fraulini, Ennio Emili, Lina Galli and Ketty Daneo, and, among living poets, Franco Facchini, Sergio Brossi, Matteo Moder and Maria Tevini. The dialect has also been used extensively for a flourishing local theatrical scene. It does seem, however, that the younger poets prefer to write in Italian.

Of the other poets included here, the three who seem to be best known internationally are Aleksij

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Pregarc, Gaetano Longo and Juan Octavio Prenz, whose poems have been translated into several foreign languages (Pregarc publishes most of his books in bilingual or multilingual editions; Longo’s poems have been translated into twelve different languages, and he is himself a prolific translator, especially from Spanish; Prenz has published books and won prizes in Spain, Cuba, Argentina and Croatia). Marko Kravos is well-known as a major Slovene poet; he is underrepresented here because of the unavailability of English translations.

With the exception of Antonio Spazal, none of the poets in this selection uses rhyme or traditional poetic forms. Spazal has been included because the very popularity of his work (both his books have sold well enough to run into second editions) is a recommendation in a country where, notoriously, books of poetry do not sell.

There is an active group of young poets in Trieste called “Gli ammutinati” (“The Mutineers”), which was established in 1999. In 2000 they published an anthology from which a few selections have been taken. In addition to the poets represented here, others contained in the anthology are Manuel Fanni Canelles, Luigi Nacci, Christian Sinicco, and Ambra Zorat; another poet sometimes grouped together with them, but not present in the anthology, is Velvet Afri.

In an essay originally published in 1978 and recently reprinted (Dietro le parole, Milan, Garzanti, 2002), Claudio Magris had this to say about the poets of Trieste: “In Trieste, almost all the minor literature, not only in dialect but also in Italian, is a rearguard movement faithful to the rules of society and literary society, not an expression of diversity.” I leave it to the reader to decide whether this is still the case. In the same essay, Magris compares Trieste and Prague: “Trieste is, like Prague, a living oxymoron. Its literature oscillates between a desire to flee and a desire to return, between the impossibility of bearing the city and the impossibility of doing without it; it is a compact chorus of those who have remained to rail against it and those who have deserted it and dream about it: both of them are forced to talk about it. A self-destructive Oedipal relationship leads them to injure the object of their desire, thus preventing them from becoming detached from it and causing them to experience rejection as love and love as rejection.” As usual, Magris is a very perceptive observer, and this analysis would seem to be still valid.

What follow are a series of very brief notes on each of the poets included in this selection.

Paola Colle was born in 1981 in Trieste and is currently attending the University of Trieste.

The poem given here comes from her first book of poems (Mezzepoesie, Trieste, Franco Puzzo editore, 2001). Mariuccia Coretti was born and lives in Trieste. She is a poet, teacher, essayist and translator. She has published some twelve books of poems, and, with Tino Sangiglio, edits the literary journal Il banco di lettura. The poems given here are taken from her book Marinaio dell’Animo (Gorizia, Istituto Giuliano di Storia, Cultura e Documentazione, 1993). Marij Cuk was born in 1952 in Trieste. She is a poet, journalist and theatre critic. She has published seven books of poems. Roberto Dedenaro has published several volumes of poems and edited the anthology Poeti triestini contemporanei. The poems given here are taken from his book Alluminio (Milan, en plein officina, 2001). Giorgio Depangher was born in Koper in 1941 and died in Trieste in 2001. He published four books of poems and two anthologies of poems translated from the Slovene. For some years he was the mayor of Duino, the coastal town made famous by Rilke.

The poems given here are taken from Sbrindoli (Lecce, Manni, 2001). Carmela Fratantonio was born in Sicily but has lived for many years in Trieste. She has published two books of poems and a novel. She has also published articles in Italian and foreign literary journals and newspapers. The poems given here come from the anthology Poeti triestini contemporanei (see below). Ezio Giust was born in Trieste in 1949. His poems have appeared in anthologies. The poems presented here come from Poeti triestini contemporanei.

Claudiuo Grisancich was born in Trieste in 1939. He has published nine books of poems.

He is also the author of several theatre texts and, with Roberto Damiani, he edited the anthology Poesia dialettale triestina (1975), later updated as La poesia in dialetto a Trieste (1989). The poems given here are taken from Bora zeleste (Trieste, MGS Press, 2000) and from the anthology Poeti triestini contemporanei. Miroslav Kosuta was born in 1936 at Santa Croce, in the province of Trieste.

He is a poet, dramatist and translator. He has

published ten books of poems. Marko Kravos was born in 1943 in Trieste. He is a poet, prose writer and translator. He has published eleven books of poems. He recently published a trilingual edition (in Slovene, Croatian and Italian) of his poem on the legend of Jason, Le tracce di Giasone (Milan, Hefti, 2000). Gaetano Longo was born in Trieste in 1964. He is a journalist and war reporter. He has published six books of poems, as well as a novel. He has translated many books of poetry and two novels, mainly from the Spanish. Most recently he has translated poems by Gaston Bacquero, Justo Jorge Padron, Alvaro Mutis and Mateja Matevski. The poems given here come from his book Graffiti (Trieste, Franco Puzzo editore, 2001). Claudio H. Martelli was born in Trieste in 1940. He published three books of poems between 1965 and 1974, after which he published no more poetry until his recent book Il nemico dei sogni e altre poesie (Trieste, Edizioni del Tornasole, 2002). The selection given here comes from this latest book. Martelli is a journalist, art critic, and dramatist. He also edits the monthly review TriesteArte&Cultura. Ace Mermolja was born in 1951 in Gorizia. He is a poet and journalist. He has published seven books of poems.

Marina Moretti was born in Trieste, where she teaches archeology. The poems given here come from her first book of poems, Creature d’un giorno (forthcoming from Ibiskos editrice, Empoli).

The Mutineers “The Mutineers” are a group of young poets who are active in organising poetry readings around town. All the selections given here come from their anthology Gli ammutinati (l’antologia poetica) (Trieste, Edizioni Italo Svevo, 2000). Boris Pangerc was born in 1952 in Trieste. He is a poet, prose writer and teacher. He has published five books of poems. Gerald Parks was born in the state of Washington (USA) in 1945, but has lived in Trieste since 1970. He has published poems in journals in the USA, England, Luxembourg, Slovenia, and Italy, and is the author of four books of poems. The poems given here come from a long unpublished poem, La valle, some fragments of which were published by Edizioni Airone, Udine, 1998 and 2000. Sergio Penco was born in Trieste in 1943. He has published two books of poems, in 1978 and 1998. The selections given here are taken from his second book, Ballate dal Mary Celeste (Gorizia-Trieste, Istituto Giuliano di Storia, Cultura e Documentazione, 1998). Ugo Pierri was born in 1937 in Trieste. He has published seven books. Besides writing poetry, he also writes stories and paints.

The poems given here come from Poeti triestini contemporanei. Aleksij Pregarc was born in 1936 at S. Giuseppe della Chiusa in the province of Trieste. He is a poet, dramatist, publicist and actor. He has published eight books of poems.

Juan Octavio Prenz was born at La Plata (in Argentina). He has been living in Trieste since 1979. He has published many books of poems, literary essays and two novels. He has received many prizes and his work has been translated into many languages. The poems given here were provided by the author. Antonio Spazzal was born in Trieste in 1931. He is both a photographer and a poet, and has published two books of poems (Ricordi, Trieste, Franco Puzzo editore, 1999, 2nd edition 2000, and Fregole de Memoria, Trieste, Franco Puzzo editore, 2001). The poem presented here comes from his second book. Giovanni Tavcar was born in Trieste in 1943. He has published eight books of poems (in Slovene and Italian), as well as biographies, a novel, a book of short stories and other writings. The poem given here comes from his book (in Italian) Quel poco che ancora avanza (Castel Maggiore, Book editore, 2001). Mary B. Tolusso was born in Pordenone in 1966. She lives in Trieste, where she works as a journalist. She has published three books of poems. The poems given here come from her book Cattive maniere (Udine, Campanotto, 2000).

Irena Zerjal was born in 1940 in Trieste. She is a poet and prose writer. She has published six books of poems. Pietro Zovatto was born in Portoguaro, but has lived most of his life in Trieste. He has published eight books of poems in Italian and one translated into English. The poems given here come from Trieste and a Poet, Selected Poems, edited by Gerald Parks (Trieste, Parnaso editore, 2002).

Paola Colle

Multiple Homicide I commited my first homicide at the age of twelve,

I stained myself with divine blood, very dense and dark.

From the darkness of my childish, lovely conscience a kind question rose up: “Do you really exist?”

I was sitting on the choir steps singing sacred songs, suddenly there was no one to turn to anymore.

God’s corpse was enormous and got in the way causing a lot of trouble, certainly more than when he was alive: in him I used to find justifications and pretexts.

That day I began my brilliant career as a murderer destroying with pertinacity every poor human conviction; they were obvious, they were blind, they didn’t hear me arrive even if they were afraid of the unknown, being too confidently obtuse.

Sometimes I meet the masters of crime, they come before me glorious in the sunlight with laurel wreaths and red velvet mantles that become a brighter red as time goes on.

Each of them bears a heavy burden but no one ever puts it down; they will never repent and never be punished.

Here in the cemetery all are happy, and celebrate, and laugh while turning the dead bodies back into earth, where they plant tender shoots among the gravestones.

I myself poisoned my apple of evil with the serpent’s jaws of my first bite, later on, however, I discovered that place of now leafy trees, heavy with lush and always ripe fruit; I often go back there to eat, before I commit my next crime.

Mariuccia Coretti

Soul Sailor Briny figure-head I would like to venture forth on the galopping waves caress every shore I touch be there or elsewhere without any precise moorings in the heart of the shadow breathe the stars leaving doubts behind hook onto the shrouds.

But is there any escape sailor of the soul from the scalding billows—the furious shaking?

I seek no milder pitching I shall fly with the rolling of the winds in my insane proceeding.

And every uplifting and harsh shiver will be sweet.

Marij Cuk

Late Autumn She lay in the leaves one late autumn and the drizzle was beating the chestnut trees.

A rough hand on a pale breast, a rough hand over the waist and a kiss and a sigh the rustling of autumn leaves, restless warmth and the smell of walnuts and brandy.

—translated by Katarina Minatti Claudio Grisancich

Lorry

The lorry was big Lovely as a train Lovely with diesel odours Big Like a mountain going eveywhere When my father wanted it to It went over the mountains the sea And the shore Beyond life I dreamed That it was coming to meet me Through The night’s dark dust With its headlights on high Just to save me

Roberto Dedenaro

What Will Winter Be What will winter be The lining up of defeats a curdling Of wandering painful cuts The shrinking of objects And you saying here are my questions And each one closes us inside the panes Or a journey in the lightly moving air The wip-wap of wipers Subdued screech of brakes The sky here isn’t yet perfect But later it will reduce the cracks The splits knitting up so to say The knowledge of the wounds And I will be amazed that in such an ample imperfection Another miracle of cold has come to live in your house.

—translated by Roberto Cirelli & Patrizia Forza Giorgio Depangher

To Go Out Suddenly To go out suddenly, the chin at last serene, to become stale bread, tomorrow mere crumbs.

On the seafront eyes that dance with the waves they don’t ask for much: just not to have to wake up ever again.

Carmela Fratantonio

untitled

The time between eight and nine in the evening is the reign of quietness, tidying up, the half-flame for supper: chaste interval between the daytime film and the winter night.

There are only two of us in this house, we don’t make any noise: a light on in the other room, warmth on our daily clothes, no newspapers, keys and accessories on the chest of drawers.

But the place—80 square metres—is populated with inhabitants physically displaced elsewhere.

We set the table and, in our intentions, more than lavish board.

with the salaries, the rewards, and the doctors, then all will be fine.

Just have to wait, whoever is in power and can do anything will also become old and ill one day and when they cut him off, I’ll be on the top, then all will be fine.

Just have to wait: once the constellation in the sky falls in with the day of birth and the cuckoo’s call stops, then what will be, will be.

—translated by Katarina Minatti Ezio Giust

Man and Wave Four streetlamps spit out a blade of light that freezes the cobblestones and the soul, hiding deep down the border between man and wave.

Gaetano Longo

The Builders It’s not easy to build a maze quickly years and years of studies calculations history tears & blood High walls and blind alleys All open to the sky just to add some problems with the weather Sirens and assassins along the road love and sweat (will we ever be able to judge impartially?)

Time and Space will do the rest —Where shall we build the exit?— No iniquity in our hands It will be a well-thought-out blueprint a puff that reminds one of waterfalls Whoever knows the game should not teach it a game of troubled eyes for gentlemen & ladies All will be History or more appropriately a Great Parlour Game Claudio H. Martelli

Miroslav Kosuta

You Are So You are so small, you are so gentle, the world without you is like a blossom without dew.

You are so tiny, you are so fragile that I don’t breathe at you, as if you would fall apart.

You are so alone, you belong entirely to death yet over the bird of prey you keep watch with sealing silence.

—translated by Pavla Gruden Marko Kravos

Cuckoo’s Call Just have to wait until mom comes from the store, until I grow up, and grow a beard, until the hill with the house on it grows trees, then all will be fine.

Just have to wait and finish my studies and get a job and furnish the apartment and get married and when the first quarter of the moon rises, mushrooms will grow, then all will be fine.

Just have to wait, everyone will take their turns

From The Enemy of Dreams Where are you going, slow of pace and weary, traveller with the long, worn-out coat smelling of far-away rainfalls dried out by implacable suns?

What are your eyes staring at so intensely over there, at the end of the road where the hill cuts off the horizon?

It’s evening now and long shadows create lattices and barriers for my thoughts and yours.

Come, let us light a fire at the edge of the wood sheltered by a wall and let us not say anything.

Just for this one night let us dream of the friends we once had faces and echoes of voices engraved in the soul beyond the secret door, at the end.

That way we shall hear, without anyone overhearing, the songs of years ago and the odours brought by the wind; from seas and far-off plains the ancient scents will speak to us of saffron, incense and rose.

Then the red paper lanterns

will light up inside our eyes like the reflection of a flame; the sparks of memory will rise tall and dance and friendly voices will come whispering stupendous, true, words.

What’s the matter? What’s wrong?

What noise broke the spell and made us open wide our eyes already about to fall asleep while our hands leapt out to our swords?

Was it that rumbling down there on the motorway, the music at full blast from a stereo, or did it come from within, that noise, a sudden pain that renews the sores of anguish?

I heard it too echoing in the shadows at the edge of the fire.

A shudder ran through the clearing.

I know, you know: the Enemy of Dreams has made a false move, his hoof has crushed the flowering twig of thorns that protects our shelter.

A black, violent, presence— ambiguous, impalpable, he gave a precise signal to the maddened heart.

Careful: beware!

Among the leafy branches small harmless voices, animals looking for food, and night birds flying.

The sudden silence has come back to life and calls us to a sleep, we hope, without dreams, one that refreshes.

Let us sleep.

The time of meeting is not for today.

The clash will come, we know that.

But we won’t try to avoid it, and it doesn’t matter if we lose because for some time now, always and forever, we have been expecting this.

Ace Mermolja

Word

When a poet’s spirit slips into a word, it becomes restless, and tends to run away; abracadabra, the word crawls from underneath your forehead and—invisible—takes off ...

Then you look for it in a poetry book, in a dictionary, and just in case, you peep into a chemistry book; but the word isn’t there, for it smartly hides itself.

Usually you find it in a basket for old things, or beside a jug of beer.

—translated by Joze Zohar Marina Moretti

untitled The morning sparkles from the womb of the walls.

Night withdraws its army into a corner.

God seems to wake up in the things of this world.

How clear the face of the city is, true in the morning air; how lovely and alive

the shivering people, who hurry off in this new day of baptised grace.

As if a whole life of guilt in that dark track of the body had stayed there, under the covers.

A desolate trace of lost battles for what I have not been.

“The Mutineers” Giuliano Antonione

Rebellion of a Madman If I have to thank I will not thank, Now, Anyone or anything, But only that self of mine Forgotten and Forcibly hidden In the halflight between enforced normality and spontaneous madness, Which re-emerged along with life And the sublime desire to dare, Concealed between the lines of a few pages In a fantastically true metaphor.

If I have to start to live, I want to do it now: When this lukewarm November sun, So sweetly maternal, illumines Ancient dreams of glory —Signs of an undying empire— And modern walls of a normally conventional society —Indifferently— If I have to be reborn, Quite sincerely I want to be reborn now After for hundreds of times I have sworn I would, Only to return to the starting point.

Now I want to dare ...

And behave like myself ...

Like the madman I am.

Matteo Danieli

Nursery Rhyme about Light I spoke to my mother as I would to a sunflower I spoke to my father as I would to an elephant all yellowish in a field where the sun laughs shiningly and the lightning is like the blue sky I spoke to my parents to the elephants to the sunflowers to the dolphins to the loves of this yellow field where the meadow is green and the ceiling is blue where the lightning is lovely like a dolphin’s song up there where the sky is more marine where the dolphins swim and when it rains it’s like a bath of merriment and smiles of light and colour for my father the elephant for my mother the sunflower Luciano Dobrilovic

Balkan Anomie Not as a historian but as a poet I’m speaking to you.

In that far-off red time we were comrades facing that nothingness.

They shot at you if you said anything.

But we were all brothers in

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fearing an indifferent enemy.

Now you can even curse—alone to the high wind.

Massimo Palme

Put Out the Lights A flower on my father’s grave Put out the lights I hug a friend so tight I tell him it won’t end, but it does Put out the lights I don’t know how long it can last, but I would like eternity Put out the lights I’m not afraid, but sometimes desire deceives Do you love me? Do I love you?

Put out the lights That’s enough now, for a while I want to turn off the spotlights aimed at my life And take what I want and can Or what I seek or what I already possess Without realising it Put out the lights Maybe I want to fall down Maybe I really want to go away Maybe there are too many people around me Maybe tomorrow you won’t be there anymore Maybe Maybe you will still be there After all, I hope so, But now turn off the light Put out the lights I can’t manage to express myself this way Put out the lights, put them out After all is said and done, it’s so lovely to sleep Maybe I’ll dream of you.

Finally, the lights are put out.

Boris Pangerc

The Sweetest you rich spring of mine brushwood of unrestrainable womanhood savannah of passion voice of the prairie that loves the offering of blood and sun stillness of sands in bays consumed by an endless night from trails of gold I pick fragrant contours of your all-pervading presence ready for a passionate harvest and I dream waterfalls of your embraces and I dream a wild-sweet destruction with you —translated by Katarina Minatti Mary B. Tolusso

Self-Portrait without Underpants and Blouse I am a skeleton at half-mast —may it disintegrate— drinking the warm dream of a licentious afternoon I am a jack of poor cards an old romantic slipper —light wings and heavy flesh a good daughter of shopkeepers I am a cheap prostitute an average hero in a green violet dream —you’re about to end and you’re something else the dizziness of time when the doors are not the same and escaping inside is dangerous Sergio Penco

Thirty Cannibals Thirty cannibals go down to the shore to wait, quiet and good, for your boat to catch on fire, or for a shark to capsize you, or for you to get bored of rowing even just for a little while.

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Thirty cannibals take the roll-call and not even one is missing: the parents dead and buried, the old priest, the good friends, strange relatives.

They’re all there, lean and unhappy, they’re right there—all of them.

Thirty cannibals around a drum give you the beat for your rowing and urge you on with stony faces.

And they get ready for the feast.

Thirty hairless, bald cannibals, fasters by vocation, three times good and seven times famished, bless you with alacrity as you row, farther and farther out.

And you can save yourself only if you come to a maelstrom.

Aleksij Pregarc from

Gornji Kljuc

I came from the house of butterflies dazed stupefied with pollen and the charming kaleidoscope but on the way out a brimstone butterfly fluttered after me and sat on my hand and its single-coloured beauty possessed me a brochure came into my hand I never found it in a library not even at Marzarine’s in Paris an original—unique—almost ruined from a news-stand in Cavana I had climbed to the top of the Eiffel Tower Sydney Tower Edificio Italiano exquisite food drink for gods but I stopped short before a small chapel in familiar Kljuc below Gornji Kljuc a bas-relief of the flight to Egypt is the whole world captured in homeliness on purpose maybe just for me and a few others? or is this just an obsession gazing at the play of time and space?

—translated by Katarina Minatti

daily bread and in perfect bliss superhuman silences Giovanni Tavcar

The Little That’s Still Left In the weariness that besets me with increasing insistency I cannot even discern the darkened outlines of my sunken face.

A dull weight oppresses my eyes and hollows my flagging cheeks.

And yet the time of flashing flights is not so long gone, the time of joyous somersaults of love, of ecstatic transports.

The little that’s still left I would like to fill it out wearing the refulgent colours of the rainbow, chanting a harmonious song imbued with roaring springs.

Like a ruby set in the regal diadem of the firmament I would like at last to sleep, while waiting to be suddenly awakened by a young face in love.

Juan Octavio Prenz

Self-Portrait Half a century ago an Istrian girl descended the soft hill that I am climbing up.

Half a century ago a boy avid for dawns and with two stars on his face wandered over another soft hill.

They make a nest in a country of broad lands where a glance has no end.

And naturally they give birth to a sparrow.

Antonio Spazal

The Tramp He was just sitting there on an old bench with his stuff beside him looking toward the sea.

All at once he turned around and looked daggers at me because I took his picture.

But then he cooled down.

Have you got a fag? he asked me then.

I handed him the packet and he looked at me the while as I lit it for him with my trembling hand.

And then I was ashamed I felt it was I who was poor when he stared at me and gave me back the packet.

Ugo Pierri

untitled there never was a golden age or a good king just some amnesties special laws and death penalties ... as he couldn’t annihilate his enemies he joined up with them in every kind of business ...

I have no other god but that of the Franciscan friars who give out liberally joys and sorrows

Juan Octavio Prenz

Intimate History My father was a man with big light-blue eyes who loved people good wine fishing black cigarettes and took joy in the good fortune of others Many a time I saw his big light-blue eyes lifted upwards because he said that when a star falls a man dies His only public act was to have a pebble pathway built and over it passed generations of workers walking towards the factory where he left behind his youth and his bones When he died his arms were sweating and aching from having held up the sky every day Irena Zerjal

Foreseeable Matter When I at last —and because of you— put on this old dress, full of the smell of bygone days, then you will take seriously my old phrase —the haughty get buried— When you at last step through that old door asking: Is anyone still home; I’ll calmly tell you: Alone as an old song, in this ancient house I’m at home.

All will seem to be wanton but the leaves fluttering through the storm.

You’ll remember the old steel we used to temper among tall chestnut-trees with profound words.

Gaetano Longo

Nothing recurs, half of the ocean is now in the gale.

The angel who at that time grew up with us among the chestnut-trees and silent looks, now peacefully dreams, tempering the circles of this day.

The Wonderland isn’t the hundredth land— it is far away as far away as we are.

—translated by Joze Zohar

She had had to leave her home and family, friends, relations and acquaintances.

The new continent and the big city were awaiting her with open arms.

In her letters home she told how she was working as a waitress in a nice fancy restaurant but every night she sold herself very dear.

She had a rebellious son to support and helped her husband who was only a poor carpenter without a future.

One day she would go back home and perhaps things would be better.

All her baggage consisted of one blue scarf and a crucifix hanging around her neck.

Her name was Mary but in her village everybody, ironically, called her “The Virgin.”

Pietro Zovatto

My Father In memory I always hold fond the Herculean image of my father, bending to beat his hammer on the anvil.

He tamed the uncivil iron with the power and sweat of his muscles and blood.

He too became red-hot like a fire in the sky on a clear September night.

He hammered it—he turned it over, to its tempo he composed a metallic music more melodious than the magic flute.

He warned me: the halo of sparks is on fire for you, like a sabre they will light up the night, to uncover your star when you are a prince in the realm of fire.

In my silence I watched a star on high, alone, all for myself, the pathway of my life, pointing through iron and fire.

Chronicles of the New Immigration

Claudio Grisancich

At the Train Station And there’ll be three of us to see you off At the train station Next to the yellow Suticases. Three of us In despair on the platform Gazing at you And at the red light.

Four railroad bastards —Sad-looking, blank— Are taking you away.

Three of us in despair On the platform Will still be waiting for you Facing those railroaders.

from

La Valle

1. O God, your love is a blade that cuts off every illusion and the mental wounds bleed like your rib fountain of shadows and love.

2. God is a child that plays the game of a thousand flowers.

3. Brother, be the darkness that turns into light.

To save your soul, be a leper.

I am a leper, Christ is a leper; lastly, in infinite pity, even God is a leper.

4. Look at the moon’s eyes, how they laugh irreverently: this earth, this opaque ball, is the prison of our sorrows.

5. Life after death is an invitation postponed.

Now I have decided, of my own free will, to drop by for a while to see the sun’s hovel.

Carmela Fratantonio

Who knows if my little girl of a summer evening will ever have heard the rain under a corrugated iron roof.

If she will have felt the cold in her naked nightgown, and a first pulse of her self in bloom.

When she’s been away I have no idea, when she’s with me ... we pass by each other, lost in thought. …

Thoughts muddle up in the middle of the neck’s nape.

What I would need is another’s slow comb his height level with my shoulders, the eclipse of his face in the sky of my mirror.

Marina Moretti

untitled A blue ripple drags with it the baggage of desires.

Seagulls, in the wake, nail down all nostalgia to the virgin walls of the ship.

The film of time is burning.

6. The blood grows weak, the earth summons me back.

Blackness explodes.

The voice trembles as it lights up the shadow line.

The present falls headlong like this, with its back to the wall.

Death is not a game and life is not a toy, either.

Light up the odours of the flowering stars. Night is a canvas, simple and splendid as a child’s dream.

from

Gornji Kljuc

but when the north wind hits the clouds of dreams the view of the sea becomes distasteful big and egglike tickled at dawn by the growing beard of the sun a blood-red ball with bloody bristles evenings shine here like the threshold of twinkling stars invisible from the city ground only dark backs of hills sticking up from the abyss stare at us and snaky lights and the garland of the hippodrome where the slower horses bring small profit meanwhile the little chapel with the relic in Kljuc stands guard and keeps quiet in its modesty, counting the days till the end of his sacred service: will the flight to Egypt once more bring salvation?

—translated by Katarina Minatti Mariuccia Coretti

Walk Suspended I saw no returning from my wandering walk The rain had muddled every track and the segments of the sun wounded the worn-out rivulets Mud hardened around my feet as with all wayfarers at all hours Centuries of sojourning separated me from my origin’s core My feet were always swollen But by a spell a vapour of jasmin broke my steps and I stayed in the mud—in the sun.

Roberto Dedenaro

untitled Gerald Parks

Aleksij Pregarc

And (on the seafront) all the gleaming of passionate thought is paid for.

The Snow of the Swallows I would like to see you coming and going And coming and going Like swallows still do In some stables, nestling Between rafters and ceiling and rafters You come in and you go out, you come in And stay—so, so Glasses off, talk —You to me—of everything.

Miroslav Kosuta

Tall Blades of Grass Tall, o so tall blades have overgrown me, they’re keeping the horizon from my view, o how blue the grass, its fount so wise, so blue, blue in and above the dried-out sea.

In the midst of the grass there lies anther sphere: insects are breeding here, their faces flashing, something hissing, creeping, teeming, hashing is keeping me chained up down here.

O good waters, o this unheard-of delight, as they lave me to rinse me out, they are like ploughs preparing me to sprout into a new shape of growth in Light.

—translated by Pavla Gruden Gaetano Longo

Lonely Hearts Black lights roll over the city where open shutters absorb the light The sweaty eye of the afternoon is a little Chaplin staggering to a fall who passes a handkerchief over the Moon By some strange quirk of fate it sometimes happens that a beggar may walk in faraway parks at the feet of love

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Report from the Hawk-Eye Camera Tom McCarthy Some months ago, it was suggested by the Corporation of London that the best way of dealing with the pigeons fouling the high-rise on the twelfth floor of which the International Necronautical Society has its HQ was to drape netting over the whole building, cap-a-pied. Having spent a year researching the history of cartography with a view to mapping death—researching this history in all its details, from the variations between Mercator, Petersen and Polar Gnomonic map projections to the question of graticule to instances of blank and one-to-one scale maps (Lewis Carrol’s oeuvre is awash with these)—INS staff were intrigued by the prospect of having a grid square superimposed over their splendid view of the world’s greatest city. They were, however, even more appalled by the thought of working in what would effectively become a cage, and lobbied the Corporation to opt for an alternative method of pigeon control.

The INS has agents everywhere, and always gets its way. Arms were twisted, favours were called in, and as a result the building now enjoys twiceweekly visits from two hawks. Arriving in a Van Vynck van and launched from the leather-gloved forearms of their keepers, these austere birds patrol the skies above Golden Lane Estate, strangely anachronistic among the modernist fibre-glass and concrete as they sweep and turn in arcs and semi-circles, Yeatsian gyres. Perhaps they’re copying the markings on the tennis courts, across whose surface netball game-space codes are also taped, the overlay producing endless tangents, radii and incomplete circumferences, as on the taxi-ways of airports.

The students on the four floors of the Italia Conti Dance school directly opposite HQ (an INS staff job has its perks) seem to be copying the hawks as they spin and pirouette. So, too, do the small aeroplanes that bank above Golden Lane to begin their descent into City Airport. Occasionally the hawks will break their pattern to plummet, thunderbolt-like, on a flock of pigeons, one of whom they’ll off pour encourager les autres. It is an awesome spectacle.

No sooner had the INS installed its hawks than parliament followed suit. Since January Van Vynck birds have been keeping the exterior of the debating chambers and Big Ben pigeon dirt-free.

During much of this period hawks have been outgunning doves inside the building also as the government prepared the approach-route to war against Iraq. Parliament is clearly visible from INS HQ, its left tower cut into tangents by the giant British Airways wheel known as The London Eye. The whole city is visible from INS HQ. During the huge anti-war demonstration in February it was suggested that the INS track and document the movement of police and news helicopters over London’s airspace, but this proved impracticable as our own machinations had deprived us of a window grid-square within which to do so. Nonetheless, matching helicopters visible to the naked eye’s horizontal plane with the overhead images that alternated with the worm’seye ones on the tv set installed below the racked INS files turned out to be interesting.

When the war proper started, the stunning visuals transmitted to the same set by cameras attached to bombs inspired us to start lobbying the Corporation once again. This time we were demanding hawk-cams on the birds, with images relayed via a server to the laptop screens of subscribers in Golden Lane Estate—or, for that

Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge Issue 6: Codework/Surveillance Guest edited by Louis Armand Work by Zoe Beloff, MTC Cronin, Ondrej Galuska, Philip Hammial, Tom McCarthy, Tom Mackey, Damian Judge Rollison, A.R. Roughley, David Seiter, Alan Sondheim,, Darren Tofts, McKenzie Wark

www.rhizomes.net

10

matter, worldwide. Nature documentaries provide this facility already: viewers can experience vicariously the pleasure of an Andean eagle’s swoop and snatching of a rabbit or an African lion’s rush and savaging of a gazelle. What neither nature documentaries nor CNN war footage yet provide is the reverse-angle shot, the victim’s point of view—but this is perfectly feasible. Nick a gazelle’s thigh muscle or slightly dope a rabbit so as to render it odds-on to fall prey to its pursuer, strap a small Sony to its flank and—hey-presto!— gazelle-cam. Give a spy coordinates for your next target and you could recoup expenditure on bombs by selling bunker or hosp-cam pics to the world’s media. We wanted pig-cam: hawk-cam, pig-cam, and the ability to switch between the two at will. Our moles within the Corporation tell us that the proposition is unlikely to succeed so we are currently approaching the Arts Council of Great Britain, who tend to go more for this kind of thing.

Parliament sits to the left side of INS HQ’s ungridded window. To the right is Lord’s Cricket Ground. I mention this fact not because during the five-day long Test Matches played there you can also match blimps and helicopters with the tv images they transmit (which you can), but rather because media coverage of cricket is one step ahead of everything else. While Formula One racing has embedded cameras in drivers’ helmets, cricket’s tech-boys have managed to worm these into the very stumps at which the bowler aims.

It’s hard to avoid flinching when, each time a batsman is clean-bowled, the tragedy is replayed through the stump-cam. Stump-cams have been in operation ever since Channel Four took over television coverage of cricket from the more sedate BBC. Along with these came the snickometer, a device which uses a visually-rendered sound-line to determine whether or not a passing ball has touched the bat before being caught by the wicket-keeper (if it has the batsman’s out).

Best of all cricket’s new visual plug-ins, though, is the system known as “hawk-eye.” Available both on tv and over the internet either in real-time or as an archive, hawk-eye allows you to sort deliveries by pitch, speed, movement off the ground and consequence, and to view results in a variety of display modes, from “normalised past stumps” to “wagon-wheel.” Hanging beside this data on the web-page, as beside parliament, is the station’s logo: a large eye made of spokes. Perhaps it’s no coincidence that Channel Four also hosts Big Brother.

Cartographers of event-space tend to be continental thinkers: Virilio, Lyotard, Blanchot, Badiou—essentially sub-Heideggerian phenomenologists. It never ceases to amaze me that these people (not being British Commonwealth subjects) have never been exposed to cricket. The game is the most precise mise-en-scène their thought could ever hope for. It’s about repetition, information, geometry, history, stylised violence.

How can Badiou understand Beckett without realising how indebted the latter’s plays and novels are to cricket, from the stones that Molloy circulates between his pockets (the trick umpires use to keep track of the number of balls bowled in an over) to Hamm’s insistence that he be placed in exactly the right position, shifting first a little right and then a little left (the scene is modelled on a batsman taking his mark) to Clov’s slow intuition that, even though not much action ever seems to happen, nonetheless “something is taking its course”?

On the top of Lords, ninety degrees round from the new media stand, is a weathercock depicting Father Time, a crook-backed old man with a scythe. It gently turns beneath the curved vapour trails that light up when the sun descends towards the horizontal axis as each day progresses, reminding the more astute spectators what the philosophers already know: that all space-based events (and what other type is there?) play themselves out beneath the sign of death.

Two summers ago I was sitting in HQ transcribing for the INS archive an interview with the post-Situationist artist Stewart Home about the nature of the spectacle while simultaneously watching the Test Match on tv and glancing out of my window to see if any rain clouds were nearing the stadium. From behind the London Eye, two massive brown Chinook helicopters rose and started heading north. George Bush was visiting the Queen that day. “It’s him,” I thought. I tracked them as they swept hawk-like above the city— then, when they passed the blimp above Lords, looked back at the tv. There they were on the screen, being tracked from the ground camera. “‘President’ George Bush,” the scrolling text an-

nounced. Moments later, a rain cloud loomed above the stadium and play stopped. To fill the air-time, Channel Four showed a previous match—one I myself had attended.

I’d started out in the cheap seats but had eventually managed to make phone contact with an INS associate who I knew was being entertained by the Lords Treasurer. The associate invited me to join him in the Treasurer’s box, where liveried waiters served cucumber sandwiches, cakes and champagne. Towards the end of play a Pakistani batsman hooked a rising ball that started heading straight for our box. It continued rising, hitting the apex of its curve as it passed high above the boundary rope—and as it did I realised that it was heading not only straight towards the box but, more precisely, directly for me. I stood up to catch it.

Now, back in HQ, as Home repeated electronically the phrase “the spectacle is the order of power,” I watched on the tv what I had already experienced from the reverse angle: myself flinching and closing my eyes and the ball kinking at the final instant, missing me and smashing into the neatly-ordered trays and glasses, cakes and sandwiches. Collateral damage, I suppose. While well-groomed ladies and gentlemen all dived for cover, cream came showering down onto their upturned legs, like so much pigeon crap. (www.necronauts.org)

Necronautism Mapping the Space of Death —review by Jane Vein Je suis morté, … Je répète … Je suis A new artistic movement that has started to blossom in London, has the name Necronautism. Is it just one of the thousands of -isms that try to dis- & re-place one -ology or another?

Both the central and peripheral objectives of the research of the INS are death. Ok, but how should one imagine, approach or even experience DEATH? Is it even possible to survive one’s death?

Death has been an issue since the time of Ancient Greece. So Plato offered us philosophy as a preparation for death. “To do philosophy, philosophise, means to learn how to die.” Death is for Plato a kind of freeing, because it enables the soul to get rid of the physical imprisonment and know its real fate. In some human societies, taking care of the corpse was a sign of not allowing the death to spread further.

Death, as an experience, cannot be experienced, enjoyed, well, U know, when there is death you are not here and vice versa. That’s why it’s such a tempting and almost seducing issue, which can never be fully experienced and known. Dead people don’t talk. And if they do, then we either don’t understand them or they talk with a deformed human voice and then it is not the real stuff.

What is the INS? Necronautism as a project was always about space. It started by announcing two strategies toward space: making visible and entering.

The first project of the necro-society was “the Office of Anti-Matter.” In 2001, at the Austrian Cultural Forum in London (as a part of the ACF Visual Arts, a program organised by Auerbach), the members of the INS had just one demand – to have one office with a typewriter and a secretary at the exhibition who would write down everything that happened in the office. The whole project lasted from 21 March till 4 April 2001.

On this platform a report was created that caught interviews and discussions with various artists (e.g.

Margarita Gluzberg, Rut Blees Luxemberg, Nandita Ghose, Isabel Rocanora, and Sophy Griffiths) and the philosopher and member of the INS, Shane Brighton. The whole spectrum of discussions was oriented not only towards the necroissues that interest INS, but also to the new interspatial intersections between literature, philosophy, performance, surfing, sailing…i.e. colonizing space in different undiscovered ways.

In 2002, Tom McCarthy, the founder and General Secretary of the INS, published a book that was built on the base of this project and is called, Navigation Was Always a Difficult Art. With this book, the project of INS was introduced, for the first time, to the large (dead) auDIEnce in printed form, and not just on websites.

The literary impulses that influenced, entered and colonised the ideas of necronautism reach

from Wilde, Melville, Caroll, Cocteau, and Beckett to Pynchon, Burroughs, and Proust, while the philosophical influences have come from Levinas, Heidegger, Hegel, Bataille, Baudrillard, and Derrida.

The ultimate aim of this movement is, as they declare in their manifesto, construction of a vehicle that will bring us to the space (of death) in such a way, that if we cannot live there, then we can at least survive in it. The second paragraph of the necro-manifesto formulates it clearly: “To die in new, imaginative ways.”

Orpheus and the Look Back The face of death cannot be seen. For the INS, the legendary poet Orpheus is the key person who enters into a space of death. According to the legend, Orpheus ventured into the underworld for the sake of his dead bride, Eurydice, whose return to Orpheus was vouchsafed on condition that Orpheus not “look back” during their ascent from Hades. The question remains, why did he look back? Because he wanted to glimpse en face the tunnel that swallows everything that is alive?

Because he felt the uncontainable, (im)mortal power of that look? Because only he, as the figure of poiesis par excellence, was able to stand, understand and experience the passionate darkness of the space of death vis-à-vis the gaze, the mortifying omnipresence of death’s evil eye?

Members of the INS see the elementary drive of human nature in Orpheus’s example; the one that every man has within himself; the timeless temptation to approach death, to experience it somehow, to taste it, to see it and live through it.

But when death is here, we are not.

“Death,” says Gluzberg, “has so much to do with the problematics of describing something,” which implies that even the necronautical project will always fail to describe. It’s doomed. Completely. It is dead before being sentenced to death.

Because one will always fail to “describe.” This is a problem we are faced with – not being able to describe the indescribable. This is also what the omnipresent “Orphic look” refers to – Orpheus overstepped the boundary of the visible, ergo describable. According to McCarthy (founder and First Secretary of the INS) this is precisely what opens up the very possibility of doing it. Doing anything. Mapping death. It’s like Beckett’s logic: I can’t go on, I must go on … id est—fail again, try again, fail again better. This also refers to Lyotard’s notion of an event as what is left after we have described the whole scene. Or, in other words: the event is a disaster (Blanchot), and space is pure violence (Bataille).

“Necronautism, as a creative venture, should remain what it has always been: the annunciation, performance and repetition of an art which is not art, craft which does not work. It should be entered into, as our manifesto has always stated, ‘rigorously, creatively, eyes and mouths wide open so that they may be filled from the deep wells of the Unknown.’”

McCarthy characterises his movement very precisely; gives it new shapes, but always stresses that he is not stating, is not creating an ersatz-affirmation; he is just suggesting and mapping. One of his suggestions is to undertake the task of bringing death into our world. To keep mapping all forms of death and media wherever they may be found – in the spaces of literature and art where death is most obvious.

From traffic accidents and crashes, to the butcher’s fridge; death is moving; is present in our flats, through TV screens everywhere, in our dreams. Our bodies, so the manifesto goes, are nothing but machines carrying us towards death.

The end of the third paragraph of the manifest ends thus: We are all necronauts, always, already.

Death has always been interconnected with rituals, intimate or public, but always secret.

Ritual dispels and at the same time postpones and approaches death.

Ritual qua negation of people’s status quo.

Everybody runs.

And art, any kind of artistic expression, is a kind of a visual, sensual ritual: it celebrates, conjures, changes our perception, and re-creates new visual values. Art seduces, makes love to and keeps cheating on us. And as a type of space, it can be a space of death.

Death is a footnote that explains nothing.

Death was always a diffi-cult art.

The author is dead

Paris is Burning Ethan Gilsdorf In the 1980s, the Los Angeles Times invented the phrase “The Third Wave” to describe yet another critical mass of English-language writers, editors and literary magazines settling itself in Paris.

Publications like the Paris Exiles, Passion Magazine, Sphinx, Moving Letters and Frank, produced by Reagan-era exiles, reinvented notions of protest art for a generation of outsiders disillusioned by supply-side economics and saber rattling with an Evil Empire. But the reporter’s slogan soon faded from public memory. When history thinks of expatriate writing and publishing based in the City of Light, it takes the long, safe view: the Lost Generation, Hemingway, The Paris Review. Present-day Paris seems passé.

Or is it? A Paris moment is on the verge of returning. Remarkably, in the past two years, six new literary magazines have materialized to carry on the city’s tradition of Anglophone publishing. Kilometer Zero, Van Gogh’s Ear, 3am, Upstairs at Duroc, Lieu and Double Change have joined four magazines surviving from the 1980s and early 1990s, Pharos, Paris/Atlantic, La Traductière and Frank, to swell the total numbers to an even 10.

The magazines are both the product and cause of a revitalized Parisian literary scene, which benefits from a lively network of readings, soirées, workshops and bookstores, thriving even as it contends with the sepia-toned shadow of its hallowed expat literary past.

It is a legacy worth recalling. When the first round of “new” literary magazines appeared in the 1910s through the 1930s, not only in Paris but New York, Chicago, and London, their names alone bespoke of revolutionary ideas: Succession, The Enemy, The Fugitive, Blast, The Anvil. Literary smithies hammered out new alloys of prose and poetry: Dadaism, Surrealism, Vorticism, Imagism.

But the forge’s heat raged fiercest in Paris. Free from censorship, these little expatriate magazines debuted the 20th century’s most essential writers.

John Dos Passos, Djuna Barnes, ee cummings, H.D., William Carlos Williams, Hart Crane, James Joyce and Ezra Pound all got their start in the pages of Gargoyle, Broom, Tambour, The Boulevardier, The Little Review, The New Review, The Transatlantic Review, transition and This Quarter.

“The Revolution of the Word” manifesto— inspired by Joyce’s Finnegans Wake, penned by transition editor Eugene Jolas, and co-signed by Kay Boyle and Hart Crane, among others—decried “the spectacle of short stories, novels, poems and plays still under the hegemony of the banal word, monotonous syntax, static psychology, descriptive naturalism” and declared that “The literary creator has the right to disintegrate the primal matter of words imposed on him by textbooks and dictionaries.” Try publishing that today with a straight face.

The post-World War II era brought another wave of American writers to Paris eager to begin little journals to feature themselves and their literary colleagues back home. This second surge in the 1940s and 50s gave birth to Merlin, Points, Janus, ID, New-Story and Zero. Merlin was said to have “discovered” Samuel Beckett and brought Jean Genet, Henri Michaux and Eugène Ionesco to Anglophone audiences. But by 1953, when George Plimpton, William Styron and Peter Matthiessen founded the most prominent magazine of the period, The Paris Review, they’d felt the age of manifestos was over. “I think that if we have no axes to grind, no drums to beat, it’s because it seems to us — for the moment, at least — that the axes have all been ground, the drumheads burst with beating,” wrote Styron in his reluctant introduction to the first issue.

At least the frontiers of “good taste” remained to be crossed up through the 20th century’s first part, keeping Paris in the vanguard. Condemned “unintelligible” and “obscene” in the States, Joyce’s Ulysses was first published in instalments in The Little Review, then in 1922 Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare and Company bookstore brought it out in book form. Later, Maurice Girodias, who had inherited his father’s Obelisk Press (publisher of Anaïs Nin, Henry Miller and Laurence Durrell), went on to found Olympia Press which from the 40s onwards published trashy erotica to fund more serious but equally scandalous works such as Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, Naked Lunch

by William S. Burroughs, Watt by Samuel Beckett, and Miller’s Plexus. But gradually, U.S. and U.K. prurient publishing standards caught up to Paris, or vice versa—even Miller’s novels were briefly banned in France; so was Lolita, which was not found indecent by American officials. By the

1960s, underground Paris-based printing houses such as a Girodias’ became obsolete.

So, if the shackles of tradition and decency have been smashed for a half a century, what drives today’s expatriate publishers? It can’t be to forge any shocking new magazine format, either. Despite the novelty of on-line bells and whistles— video, audio, animation—magazines mostly retain the mélange of their century-old predecessors: some poetry, fiction, essays, art and interviews.

The urge to create has also not changed. To bring new poets, fiction writers and artists to the public, to have passion for the written word, to thrill in the hunt and find gleaming nuggets amid mountains of fool’s gold, remain an editor’s immutable pleasures.

Part of the new appeal has nothing to do with form or content or a particular Paris location— it’s simply that do-it-yourself publishing had flourished globally in response to a homogenous, chain store corporate approach to literature. There’s great satisfaction to be had in churning out your own little mag, made even more simple since the democratisation of digital imaging, page layout software and in-house printing. Get 250,000 An-

we seek to build can best be described as a philosophy, a paradigm, or a spirit … we would like to change the way we all live.” Couched as literary events, “KMV venues” drag writers and readers away from their computer screens and into medieval basements for underground fun. They have produced plays, recorded CDs, organized protests, and engaged in corporate sabotage. The physical magazine—with its market-savvy fullcolour glossy cover and stylised layout—is among the handsomest coming out of Paris and is distributed in bookstores throughout Europe and the Americas. KMZ’s quirky, funny website archives performances, hosts font files to make “your own KMZ propaganda,” sells its products, outlines dreams. More than any other newcomer, KMZ uses its magazine, events and sophisticated website to nurture community in a globalised age.

They’ve actually created a scene.

If the infiltration of technologies has altered the nature of literary communities, both telescoping the distance between writer and reader while expanding the overall audience, it also facilitates the creation of cross-border, collaborative literary projects. 3am (www.3ammagazine.com) is run

publisher Wynkin de Worde signed up Kennedy for a two-novel contract. Kerrigan’s Copenhagen: a Love Story was published six months later.

The digital age facilitates the exchange of art and ideas as never before, so it’s not surprising that Paris should again play its part, even in an indirect way. Whether these new magazines are leading a vanguard of new writing, publishing future superstars and foreshadowing literary history, as did transition or The Paris Review for their respective eras, is impossible to foretell. Hindsight’s rose-colored, UV-protection shades aren’t yet one our faces. Meanwhile, to connect with the Diaspora of his tiny audience, Tom Kennedy will launch a multi-national book tour this winter—Copenhagen, New York, Chicago, Boston, South Carolina, Iceland, and, yes, Paris—proving that where authors and editors sit, from which garrets or cafés they conduct their literary business, is less essential than how well they travel and by which tricks of technology their tendrils infiltrate the world.

Three Poems Pierre Daguin

73

Quit the land of animals legs curve around flabby arses and the sex comes and goes between lips worn down by humidity.

Hobbled I go on under a leaden sun.

Here and there, a few decrepit palm trees shed their bark.

Your body, suspended in the coolness, shudders against the piping.

Photograph by Pierre Daguin, from The Nude (Prague: Divus, 1998) glophones together anywhere, and before long newspapers, magazines and on-line mags are bound to follow.

For some Parisian journals, sophisticated graphic design and on-line presences are less important than the physical thing. Van Gogh’s Ear has no website, but a world-wide global reach of its own design: for its debut issue this September, editor Ian Ayres solicited poems from writers like John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates, Alice Notley, Jerome Rothenberg, Antler, Marilyn Hacker, Susan Howe, Jean Valentine and Leslie Scalapino, and published their poems next to local unknowns.

Pharos and Upstairs at Duroc still cling to tradition, issuing local print editions and mostly publishing writers they see as rising within the expatriate community.

There are plenty of poets to choose from.

Thanks to free trade and the Euro, which promote American culture and distressed-chic lifestyles, fresh English-speaking faces from Prague, São Paulo and San Francisco swing by the City of Light to enjoy the scenery, write a few poems and drink some wine, just like early-career Henry Jameses and Edith Whartons on their formative European Tours. Only these nouveaux Bohemians also take on freelance consulting gigs (like designing Hungarian porn sites) to pay for their Eurail passes and 20th arrondissement flats. For them, Paris has become less a specific physical refuge for suppressed artists and radical movements than a pleasant, international pit stop, thankfully with some of its old-fashioned, artsloving values still intact. If Paris remains an exotic place for other “expats”—and it does—this identity contends with the dilemma of “place”— how a French city with its share of McDonald’ses truly differs from Topeka.

Kilometer Zero (www.kilometerzero.org) springs precisely from these contradictions. Its raison de publish (and upload) literature might even resemble a manifesto-toting movement. “It was decided that the Kilometer Zero Project would stand as a beacon of hope to those frustrated with the culture of consumerism,” they write. “The ultimate product of Kilometer Zero will not be the tangible excretion of our combined intellects (although that might be pretty cool). The product

simultaneously from Paris, London, Manchester (UK), Seattle, New Orleans, California, Cleveland, Chicago, New York and Calgary. Short Fuse: The Global Anthology of New Fusion Poetry was edited in Paris by Canadian Todd Swift and in Australia by American Philip Norton, but was published this fall by Rattapallax Press in New York (www.rattapallax.com/fusion.htm). From Paris, bringing to mind Ezra Pound as foreign editor for Poetry in the 1920s, Swift is also the poetry editor of www.nthposition.com, a webzine “based” on a server in some unidentified city.

Even if a magazine exists only in cyberspace, it can still have its effect on the material plane.

Double Change (www.doublechange.com) bridges the Anglo-Franco cultural divide by being both bilingual and transatlantic, hosting dual-language readings and sharing editorial and production offices between Paris and New York crews. Longrunning La Traductière (http://perso.wanadoo.fr/ festrad/) also creates a dialogue between French and English poetry through translation. Started in Boston in 1983, Frank (www.readfrank.com) was brought to Paris where it has survived by publishing “foreign dossiers” of international writing and distributing globally. Lieu (www.lieuscape.com), whose debut issue used train stations to examine architecture, place and national identity, understands that the nature of expatriatism itself is also under revision. What does it means to renounce your homeland and move away, when satellite TV, cellular phones, downloadable broadcasts and high-speed trains keep luring you back?

When the latest issue of Frank presented an excerpt from a novel called Kemic (The Bone), banned in author Bedri Baykam’s homeland of Turkey where it was cited as “obscene, indecent and dangerous,” its readers were reminded again why James Joyce felt compelled to abandon Ireland for the Left Bank. But when American writer Thomas E. Kennedy, author of 13 books of fiction and literary criticism but living in relative obscurity in Copenhagen since the mid-1970s, was recently awarded Frank magazine’s first “Expatriate Writers’ Award,” a conflicting irony arose.

Hearing of the award and reading an interview with him in the same issue of Frank, the Irish

“Tepid and dank” The state of mind, instant in the blitzkrieg is a ticket for Mars and ethical problems linked to the inflation of caffeine A hail of laughter makes furrows under your make-up.

Your pitted skin made me smile.

94

Through the window A mongoloid bellows your name suspended from a branch.

(MA - GNO - LIA! - MA - GNO - LIA!) And you—you bite the coffee table.

100 A White Wig Adorns my Jacket Chewed mince on the chopping block You salivate from the corners of your lips Deportation of the missile stuck in your arse.

Liquid Vaseline.

I found the lost poems written in their thousands on scraps of paper in my straitjacket between the highway, motor-cross, expressway.

In Nice.

Ballads in the plastic car at 2 km an hour Pair of Ray Bans ... and the: “let the girl speak” ...

She had hazel eyes and long blond eyelashes “Can I interfere in the discourse?” plum mouth and trickle of water.

—traduced by Louis Armand

11

Benjamin Kline

“Untitled”: A Review The following is reprinted in full from one of our more respected publications, with their express permission.

The writing of this new history was not writing; the slow, wintry process was surely more of an amassing. Doubtless the estimably anonymous author, no, nameless binder or compiler didn’t just go at a whim and at once to his or her local stationers and purchase a ream and two and three and more, much more and then sew all them up together between two covers without pagination, introduction, appendixes or indexes or notes or tables or anything at all. Without words, punctuation, characters. No. Each piece of paper he/ she saved and arranged, patched together from scraps and bleached and ordered precisely, I’m speculating here, meant and means something, or not. Each face of each piece of paper holds something, is imprinted somehow, or not. And it might mean something or it might not that all of these six million (6,000,000) plus pages are blank.

Pure, virgin white, like the snow around Auschwitz. Six millions plus pages might as well be greater than or equal to the palest infinity.

All of which is to write that in intent and execution this history without a title, this Untitled by Anonymous, is the best record of and commentary on the Holocaust this reviewer has yet encountered; the best in or out of print produced by, and in, the last half-century. And what does it mean? Nothing, possibly. And what does it have to teach? Nothing, maybe. But it is not mawkish.

It is not patronizing. It is not insulting. So, the skeptical reader, and the “good” reader is a skeptical reader, will think to ask, to challenge: Well then, what is it?

Well, it’s an obviously enormous volume, very heavy; weighing-in at 72 kilos on my bathroom scale. In some editions, the (leather) cover is black and blank and its pages are white and blank. In other editions, this coloring scheme is reversed (white blank cover, black blank pages). But it is not a diary. This is not Anne being Frank. If anything, it is an anti-diary, the opposite of selfish thoughts. The blankness actually discourages writing. The pages resist filling. Nor is it pornography. The book is free. And it’s sold nowhere. Mine was sent to me from the unnamed publisher, direct, in plain wrapping without a return address or enclosed supplementary materials. So how, that reader, my reader thinks to ask, does this reviewer know that it’s about the Holocaust?

I know. I review books. These books are sent to me in the mail, in papers I reuse to wrap matjes herring and tulip bulbs. About reviewing books, the occupation, my occupation… it suits me; it’s a firstborn thing to do, to pronounce judgment, and I have primogeniture; I’m an only-born. My father wrote books; he wrote a book. We never slay our fathers.

I was born in Amsterdam, city of Spinoza, but some three centuries too late for him, in a century eternally late for any ethica, anything ordine geometrico demonstrata. My parents were from Poland (anglicized Kline, formerly Klein), father from Warsaw, mother from Lublin; my father truly was from Warsaw; my mother claimed Lublin, but she was born in some mud pit on the Ukrainian border she never named for me. My father, name of Josef, not Yosef or Yossi, if you knew of him (doubtful) you would have to know from his Ÿlepowtarza ludzie of 1936 (the illiterate people, typography intentional), the first and last of his finished novels; a book I’ve never been able to finish for emotional, not linguistic, reasons. From a poor year in Amsterdam, we went to New Amsterdam, New York. Then we left New York, after three freezing months and letters to variously placed uncles, for America. Where and when my father stopped writing books and started writing about them. Because he had nothing left to write. And I have never had anything to write at all, ever. Because what did anything mean about this: He and my mother had married in the Warsaw Ghetto and the next week were trained to Auschwitz.

They survived how they survived. After Auschwitz, they robbed their way to a dead relation in Krakow and then to Amsterdam (refusing to disembark at all through Germany).

Then I was born. My mother was fertile in that year after Auschwitz and infertile for eighteen years in America; my father began his foreshortened memoirs in that year after Auschwitz and couldn’t finish them for twenty-one years in America. My mother at least had me. My father had nothing. I’ve decided that my father’s page is what I’ve counted out (over one full month and

12

one sleepless night) and numbered in pencil in the upper right imaginary margin as pag e 3,894,764. There’s a printer’s error there; a small, almost invisible dark dot is to be found to the page’s lower left, very near the binding. It’s an impurity, an imperfection; a blemish on the fattened red heifer that is this book. (Another impurity or imperfection, as impurities and imperfections are never alone: The glue is very bad, and I broke the binding of my first review copy within days of receiving it, scattering countless pages out of order, all over my study’s floor.

A second review copy arrived, unasked for, in the following afternoon’s mail.)

And for these very defects, and for millions of other reasons, Untitled, requiring an entire shelf unto itself, is the incredible zenith, in the sense of “termination,” of the literature of and about the Holocaust. It reads or doesn’t read like a Taduesz Borowski story sans plot, characters and dialogue, like one of Mendelssohn’s wordless songs. It was written somewhere, not here, that the one-hundredth name of God, the word in the beginning, is God, or at least an attribute of Him, and that this name, this word, is unknowable… almost as if it had never existed. This book is my father’s work, my father’s final testament, his ethical will… This is anyone and everyone’s book or no one’s book and it means everything, holds the light of the entire world like the facets of an infinite gemstone. Its substance is Spinoza’s substance, holding in sheer attributes and modes all that was and all that will be; and it means nothing. I sit on it, high up, to eat my cold breakfast off the top of my wardrobe. This review should not exist, now or ever. Untitled in all-parchment edition (cover and pages) is scheduled for release next spring.

—Joshua Cohen

Vincent Farnsworth

Years of Reprieve I kept my dog in the dogfight even after all his skin was torn off. He looked like a raw neck of a shrink-wrapped supermarket chicken, the neck with legs. The sound he made was like there’s screaming in the next room, someone getting raped by a half dozen soldiers and you can’t do anything about it. It goes on for hours. Maybe if you make a sound they will discover you and you’ll be part of it too, you’ll get raped and tortured too or if you’re a man you’ll have to rape someone’s bloodied screaming mother. The sound my dog made seemed like that, to be everywhere.

On the long tram ride into town every day I read smatterings of great literature and over the years it had made me hypersensitive. Prague is in teetering balance between the kind and the cruel, the absurd and the mundane, the ugly and the gorgeous, and so the worst place to be that way.

Seeing the kid smoking on the stoop holding back tears, passed by countless blithe dachshunds and their owners, would hurt my stomach. The tourists asking for directions would become my personal responsibility until they ditched me as a some sort of con artist. All the deliriously numbed faces on the metro orchestrated together into a symphony of hopelessness, an unheard explosion of cause every moment.

The literature thing led to poetry readings and little magazines and booksignings. At one an old poet, a crone from Colorado, read something that conveyed a different angle of the world, one I thought I recognized. So I talked to her afterwards and we went walking, ambled through the streets and ended up in a huge park with ponds, Stromovka, in the middle of the night. We couldn’t see anything, there was fog and darkness and no lights and just these frogs croaking all around us and the sound of a distant wedding and she told me to do this, put my own dog in the dogfights and I’d be cured.

There’s really no story. Everyone knows someone who does things semi-illegal, residence permits or drugs, and that person buys them from someone, and that person knows men who run the whorehouses and they know where the dogfights are. These men crowded around me with my dog in my arms and laughed and spoke Czech, Russian and German. They were not literary. It was in a building by the racetrack.

Before that I couldn’t accept it, couldn’t live day to day in the truth that this world, all over, can be without a moment’s notice ruthless, violent and unjust, and you have to protect yourself to the utmost. Depending where you live you can have years of reprieve but that’s all it is.

One of their friends took me on as his project, showed me things, told me how it was going to go. He was half Indian and half Lebanese and had only been in the country for three months.

He seemed satisfied in not being the newcomer, for once to instruct and tell instead of being instructed and told. Or maybe he wanted something. A really nice guy who really wants to pick your pocket.

The dog I’d had for three years. From a puppy.

It would sit by the table when I ate and stare and thump his tail on the ground. His fur was white with tan patches and was very soft. He was a dog.

There’s really no story. When we wrestled on the ground he’d act like a maniac attack dog but without really biting. When left alone he’d lie on his back and act like maniac attack dog to his tail, twisting around in funny ways with funny sounds.

I didn’t really see what happened. I was talking to my special friend and everyone surged forward and when I got to the pit my dog was looking like that. Maybe they skinned it before they threw it in. He said “Do you want to stop it?” with a funny look that might’ve been glee.

When I walked home some of the streets were wet like the water trucks had come by and hosed everything down. I misjudged a wall and brushed hard against a crumbling brick corner, and though my jacket wasn’t damaged my arm was bleeding underneath it. A smashed bird was on the ground.

I carried my jacket and started approaching people on the streets, showing them my scraped arm, asking them what it meant.

You can’t really stare at yourself, even in the mirror. You always see something else. If you have a nightmare and think of the things in it, mull it over and over, that’s like staring at yourself without seeing yourself. Then you can stare into your fridge and see yourself.

I knew someone once who had a nightmare that he’d lost his hands, they’d been cut off, and he was walking and holding his own hands in his hands. He knew this was impossible so he would look down and see his bloody stumps. But then as he kept walking he’d feel his hands holding this missing hands. When he woke up he kept looking at his hands. For a couple hours he acted freaked, huddling around wherever we went with his arms crossed in the Summer sun. He didn’t act like he normally did, like most guys I know act. They get it from acting like rap stars or famous athletes, or something in between. He acted kind of disturbed but also just quiet, thinking.

I think he was acting like himself. He was looking at the roofs of everything, the tiles, the steeples, he sat in the Kampa Park on the wall by the river, where the water flows loudly over the weirs. He asked me what’s my favorite word. I said “hostile”. He laughed and couldn’t stop laughing. He didn’t seemed disturbed anymore.

I didn’t see him for a month and he hardly remembered the dream when I brought it up. I had to remind him. “Oh yeah, that’s right.” He was being jocular again. We walked along and a drunk woman came by us and silently pretended to punch me, her mouth twisted. Someone else was holding onto a pole but standing away from it, with her head tilted at an angle like she was reading a poster glued up sideways, and then she tilted it a little more and her body shook like a strong wind was blowing and she fell over onto the sidewalk. One of the numerous vomit splats was in our way so we turned around. A huge pile of brand new cobblestones was there near the Lennon wall and I wanted to build something, set them up into a pyramid, but I was afraid of being arrested.

I told him how I planned from now on to carry a knife, in a sheath on my belt always ready. We were back in Kampa Park, open again because there were no more demonstrations. He had a look on his face like he was going to say “Why?” but then some kittens ran by. You never see cats in Prague. He said “C’mon!” and chased after them. When I caught up he had cornered one in a nook between the Jim Morrison and Kurt Cobain walls. I said “you better look out those things are totally wild.” He said he wasn’t going to hurt it. He grabbed it and the thing made a noise that was not cat- or animal-like at all. It was more like a buzz saw and looked like one too, just a blur.

He yelled “Ow!” and the cat ran up his shoulder and jumped off, up to the top of the wall and sped along it. A bunch of ravens attacked it and it jumped down the other side.

He had fang marks in his hand and scratches on his neck. The punctures didn’t bleed much at all which I thought was a bad sign. My vision was crystal clear like it always is when I drink and I

could see two giant eyeballs on top of the National Theater, looking to and fro, watching nothing. The fang bite holes were turning purple. I told him if I had the knife we could slice it and suck the poison out. I saw he liked the word suck.

He was getting ready to say something. I decided to take my drunken nighttime walks by myself from now on. This boy was like unbaked dough getting stale. I didn’t want to wait for the mold.

My dog would’ve liked this knife, the shiny spot of reflection on the wall it makes, would’ve chased it around and jumped. A silver UFO or the flying pig for a Czech Christmas. But my friend didn’t want it near her baby. They were opposites, the giant knife with it’s serrated edge and the baby, soft spot on its head. During the birth the opposites met, it was a Cesarean. Opposites met to make the baby too, during the sex. Opposites constantly meet, slam into each other. Matter hits antimatter when I close my eyes. I’d always wanted a baby but now I was choosing this knife. In that way they were the same, they were potential.

I don’t even know if the knife’s legal. It’s almost impossible to tell what’s legal in Prague.

Could those brass knuckles in the display case really be legal? The streetwalkers in front of the police station on Uhelnik? The managers of collapsing banks who retire millionaires? Nobody knows. People shrug.

At first I kept the knife in its sheath on my belt right where I could grab it. I’d practice drawing it out quickly, carving the air, slashing the tree in my walled minigarden in the courtyard. I fought off attackers in my mind, repelled invasions of my minigarden. When I heard any noise on the other side of the wall, or some pigeon flew into the courtyard, I would pretend to yell “This is my land!” and whip out my knife.

Then I just wore it on my side, sometimes it was covered by my sweater, then when I didn’t use a belt I just put it in my bag. It was in the bottom of my bag and when I switched bags I forgot about it.

My friend asked me to watch her baby for just an hour and a half so she could go to her winter sauna. Now that it was a bit older. It was nicer than when it was newborn. It just slept in its babyclothes in the toasty new apartment by the radiator under the windows. I stood and watched its little closed eyes, tiny nails on its little hands.

The tin roof on a shed out the window looked like my old knife. The baby looked smaller. The tin roof was just like the metal from my knife and the infant was getting smaller like I could hold it in one hand. If I reached out the other hand and held it in front of the shed’s roof it looked like I had a knife in my hand and when I held my other hand towards the baby it was like the baby was in my hand, stockinged head poking up. I stood there between the two with my arms out, looking back and forth, between the impossible innocent softness of the baby and the knife roof world, and realized I was in perfect balance. I was the meeting of perfect opposites. I could just stay this way.

Drew Milne from

Aftermaths

Between the extremes of avowedly intuitive and non-intuitive approaches to musical form, recent works developed out of the shadow of totalised compositional technique and post-minimalist whimsy indicate an impasse analogous to difficulties in other arts. It is not unmediated accession to the qualities and angles of the sphere, thing or object-ball that animates the recurrence of diverse, largely automatic acts of wannabe recognition. Much of what passes for minimalism might more accurately be understood as ironic literalism, the knowingly monotonous formalism in which all cows are indeed cows, but if and only if seen as such. Conceptualism is no less literalminded, recycling received ideas rather than engaging with anything quite so conceptual as the concept itself. There is nevertheless a necessary negativity at work in such isms, even if not with the epochal largesse beloved of paradigm-shifters.

As a negative principle, the spirit of the letter abjures the autonomy of positivistically misconceived hermeneutics or philology, and when the letter exceeds even the claims of aesthetic spirit, this is not positive transcendence but wrung violation.

The heroic avant-garde succeeded in hollowing out the dignity of speculative identification. Affirmative synchronicities—such as myth and mo-

dernity, freedom and harmony, love and prosody—are revealed as category mistakes rather than engaging ruins of spirit. See history to mathematics fly, now vainly gaze, turn giddy, rave and die. One of the unintended consequences of avant-garde ambition is the pervasive pleasure taken in reductive but avowedly radical forms of contextualisation, from situationism to cultural studies. Oscillations between purification and transgressive collation fall victim to the abstract identity of purity and impurity. Pure maths is no less impure, uncertain, or plain useless than the most pure compositional formulae. Calls for aesthetic autonomy and for the radicalism of tradition are sung from the same messy hymn sheet, as if the costume of the globe were Galileo’s Great Book of the World, with its silent discourse charactered by triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, and as if writing were scripture or the handwriting of some god.

Art carries on like some beautiful soul that neither affirms nor denies its complicity with the engagements it lovingly prolongs. One of the many ruses by which the spirit of speculation is bracketed or continued by other means is the embrace of mathematical reason—arm in arm and row on row, till legs are cut to logs and ribbons—but recognising this hardly frees speculation from the gambles invested in it. Terrible things have been done in the name of breaking with the tyranny of compositional hierarchies and so much painting by numbers. Blanched formalisms have proclaimed the triumph of chance procedures, as if improvisation could be more than a merely negative freedom to tinker with standards thereby reinscribed. Constitutive binaries—according to which synthetic compositions with hubristic ambitions oppose the differentials of free play— leave a broken middle where once dwelt content.

Put differently, there is no more speculative proposition than the claim that anything equals anything else. Even this statement errs towards the romance of tautological evasion, a chiasmus too far. Metaphor toys with the speculative rewards of identification, but lacks the legislative grammar demanded of rationality. Mathematics, for example, is not equal to its own claims. The rebuke is not new. Plato put into Socrates’ mouth the observation that even those who are only slightly conversant with geometry will not dispute us in saying that this science holds a position the very opposite from that implied in the language of those who practise it. More recently, Daniel E. Styer notes that physicists are often clumsy in their use and understanding of quantum mechanics’ central concepts, indeed they are protected from them by a screen of mathematics. What once ventured forth as processual mathesis becomes the reified calculus of administration, a logic of numerical sameness screened from nihilistic relativity. Negation is no less unequal to the task of speculative scepticism, especially in any inquiry into the poetics of experience seeking to delimit the phenomenological illusions involved in recourse to number as the mood, or will to power, of aesthetic reason.

revised and sensing separate accounts no interest only banks adhere to numbers and profit themselves by closing time the speech suggests accent as accessory define a nice day one verb is a time words that begin with c and end in s (chaos, crisis, chiasmus, capitals) to live in or through a remarking of delimited ours ready for close-up but not in-above-one’s-head no script any cutlery to lay out terms as devises not device a remake revisited the dilemma head on full frontal acknowledgement to route through contact as a site in motion without appointment if code is then veil a network collaboration locks on the door key-in DNA luxury is fruit on the table listening to sensation of spun my sleeve on your heart watch the radio mute that television is advantage invasive or misunderstood? any inclination in a storm masks increasingly among us why wake the dead when it is the living who sleep? focus on threshold not view the body’s discomforts expound understanding in mis not applied at random degrees of ever within and without context may be delayed but then forgotten when will the furniture move again itself and our traces repertoire surrounds us and time is the spot you’re standing on Tom Jones

[Untitled] Of course when you aren’t looking I ruled by the sea take it upon myself to subvert a courtship ritual or two. Sorry for the leaches it seems like hundreds could only conquistadors be had at by them. Nevertheless traffic may be importantly kept in a sheen of patency if the presumptions are squalor enough to make interbreeding in the backwash possible. None should yet embark upon the reverse current navigation upsurge.

there is a table the door swings to mistakes a politician makes no signs of view obscured the conversation verbs applied to swelling distance strikes a pose is no position on the run to office home truth’s aside the subjunctive at password accumulates dust as part of the furniture the nearness of strange what passes for progress in a “new” material only to revisit prior results binary if a four letter word weather and time are too often mismatched how to unravel excess fingerprints inside out the chair is moved more than the table kiss me on every side of the idea if there’s an ocean sea its terms of explosives in concept of layers

the bonsai the wind blowing through the branches, a tree that is for memory. i was with Maurice Blanchot, in the garden. after mimesis you arrive at the sea. a good eye. at least i think it was him. the idea of a tree (approach transcendence asymptotically). branches & roots keep growing. the gods are missing. a crimson azalea, in flower. my eye’s not that good. at once in the present & in the past. it’s not really him, the audience know that he is a she. when it dies we’ll build another one. the passive procedures: a shaping by way of. the slippage. becoming dragon or. the ghosts. wandering within the walls. he’s gone.

David Seiter

Under The gables have stolen themselves a luminous patina making the nutlets craze away from their fittings, all spin and toggle. In the smallest of them bellied envy, rumors of Huck’s whiting to calm the lookers-on, to cover what has grown —age and abandon— so that again the gables’ prank is concealed, the nutlets are confined.

Larry Sawyer

Sunset Noon Businessmen go out with the wind I come from thorny flowers in mind caverns, unscrewed deserts adrift do look between people when coming to the conclusion that fire like bells the globe of things caterpillars frozen as pleasure the miracle of elephants the next day all a-boom with roses my heart is a clock a rusty pulley with nothing to drink your fourth planet yawns canoes and dives inside asteroids—truth like a womb weeps busy twice a year the North Pole is a leisurely number drinking the last drop of meaning.

Robert Dassanowsky

Under The Sign Of Trakl Mirabell Gardens, Salzburg 1. Finding home is never the battle.

2. A sign points the way and commemorates.

3. The gardens rip at history.

Karen Mac Cormack

Otherwise:

D.J. Huppatz

Travis Jeppesen

Chamber of iniquity versus Chamber of iniquity versus the downtown boredom we all feel when no one else is there, There being an imaginary island off the coast of lather, membrane pie is a specialty there and the soup will keep you going for days, I hear, on nothing else but pure fill-in-the-blank.

That is why this place is so coveted, why only blind nuns are allowed to wash the socks. The kingdom is an alien mattress, feral hairs competing with cigarette butts, remnants of the brand Rowena smoked in the old days, back when she still had lips.

I don’t want to build another fireplace.

But I already know I have, even before I’ve begun the arduous task, which will undoubtedly end me in the corner least imagined, a finely grown flower, or perhaps just a fallen petal.

4. A child sets an altar of pebbles and petals at the well tended grass verge.

5. She claps her hands once moves on, looks back at her motherland.

6. What religion is this?

7. Finding it again is.

Sandra Miller

A Fugue Is A Spousal Condition She wrote in orange on the back of her crumbled tangerine life.

With no particular talent for singing, she sat home worrying that all the song titles had been taken. She knew that if she lost her lips, that would be just about everything. Story skipping time.

Mothers say things like, The day he was born was the day I died.

That would have been a tantrum, that word. The song can only be remembered by people who have forgotten it. Only wounds those once winding. The truth, that husband and wife are bound by sadnesses caused, changes no one.

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Lonesome Hearts and the Failed Community (from page 1)

for the hero to preserve his own personal integrity. This was eloquently demonstrated by John Cawelti in his Adventure, Mystery and Romance (1976).

Heroism itself rests not so much on the hero pointing out the imperfections of society from a morally perfectionist perspective but rather in the fact that despite the accomplishment of his ethical ideal the hero is himself only a step from personal failure. Fiat justicia pereat mundus! Yet the world, that is, a society will never perish. Such a fate can only befall the individual. If the heroic individualist wants to remain true to himself, there is no place for him—no matter how much he might secretly covet one—in a society in which life is not experienced as a moral dramaturgy of absolute good and evil but instead engages in the dialectics of ceaseless compromise, painful negotiations and shades of grey upon grey.

The American obsession with privacy creates a way of life in which the individual forsakes the wealth of other values because of an unwavering determination to achieve a completely personal ideal. Privacy thus occupies the idealised first position on the priority list of middle-class America. It is literally the holy grail with the transcendental status beyond any reasonable doubt. Nearly every social institution, political document, moral standard and rhetoric of everyday etiquette is in some way tied up to this corner stone of American culture. Yet the frustrating dilemma of how to separate extreme privacy from extreme personal loneliness remains unanswered.

This painful question, which was highlighted in its glittering absurdity in the consumer-crazed 1980s, can be at least in part answered through a consideration of the habits the middle-class customarily employs in order to see the world from the simplified vantage point of extremes. In this sense, too, the lonesome hero is destined to repeat the basic pattern of perception which grants a privileged position to the extremes of the moral spectrum and neglects the wide palette of shades and nuances of relationship in between.

In other words, the paramount moral choice in American society is a false one: it’s either the individual and freedom, or total commitment to community and the subsequent sense of unbearable restriction.

Liberty is of course a priceless item for the American spirit. Of the three great revolutions of liberation which left their mark on the world, it was only the American one that was ultimately successful. The 1776 Declaration of Independence, by way of which thirteen colonies in the New World seceded from the British crown, must not be read as a mere political document. It represented a grand moral gesture which, from an historical perspective, reflects the conviction that physical freedom is the source of all other liberties.

Walt Whitman, arguably the most renowned American poet, erected a literary memorial to the freedom of the individual and celebrated it with lungs full of enthusiasm. Many interpreters consider Whitman to be a radically individualistic poet. Paradoxically, however, his legendary Song to Myself convinced me that the majority of interpreters who support this theory must have listened to his cosmic vision, his hymn of rapture with only one ear. Granted, there is an individualist at the core of the poem and the readers do follow Whitman’s openness to manifold experience, which he enumerates in biblically prosodic stylisation with impetuous energy. However, in the mystic process of union, the lyrical “self ” is ultimately identified with others, with foreign places, natural phenomena and, in the end, with one great ecstatic cosmos. For Whitman, freedom is primarily the freedom of another to express himself and the lyrical subject allows all to speak through it. Perhaps one should read this poem, I suggest, as Whitman’s premonition of post-modern cosmocentric attitude rather than a support for the egocentric ideal of radical individualism which first and foremost cares of itself and in keeping with which everything else is ultimately perceived as more or less (un)pleasant scenery.

Whitman was a genius of a poet who lived on the social margins, a perspective from which he often intuited more than his contemporaries did.

It was his marginal position, however, which prevented him to register in his lyrical poems which were the television of his day, the most far-reaching social and historical change, that is, the emergence of middle-class ideology. But it was not merely the existence of this social class, characterised by

14

its efforts to establish the economic balance between poverty and wealth and a political support of the republican tradition and the corresponding rejection of the crown. That social class already existed in the eighteenth century.

Accelerated industrialisation, together with the disintegration of traditional rural communities and the small towns in which moral and social ties were clearly defined, began to gain momentum in the nineteenth century. Autonomous individuals, free of all ties and chains, had to rely on their own abilities to fulfill the ultimate desire: socially recognisable success. The first impression made by individuals on those who were higher up the social ladder, their negotiation skills and their ability to win support: all these traits became monumentally important. In short, the emerging new business ethics stimulated the manipulation of personal attitudes and finally gave absolute priority to the particular abilities of the individual self.

Communication in a society ruled by the mechanisms of industrial capitalism became considerably more exacting and intensive and, at the same time, more ethically-inhibited and transitional. In this regard, the ideology of the middle-classes already contained latent notions and presumptions about the virtues of opportunism and irrepressible ambition. The very notion of “career” is a result of

Photograph by Errol Sawyer, 2002 these changes. Today, a career seems utterly matter-of-course; however, it was only in the nineteenth century that this concept succeeded in replacing the then prevalent notion of “vocation,” understood in the strict sense of a divine calling—which itself was determined by a stable social role and could only fully be realised within an existing community. Career, on the other hand, is devoid of such metaphysical undertones. It is embodied in the dictates of trans-personal standards of success which encourage the individual to change jobs and to close temporary contracts in both the personal and business sense as well as to unceasingly climb the professional ladder—a course of activities far removed from any notion of living in a safe social community, as John Cawelti observed in his Apostles of the Self-made Man. The modern roots of radical individualism can be located in the shift from the familiarities of distinct local communities to the complex impersonality of the modern urban world; from a steady lifestyle set in the recognisable network of transparent occupations and statuses, into an unpredictable technological society with a high rate of mobility and in which frequent, routine and impersonal contacts take place on the basis of formal etiquette. In the industrial fever where all spheres of human experience are subordinate to career, the mythical individualism of frontiersmen and pioneers has been given an even more radical successor.

During the decades in the wake of the second world war, the lives of Americans became increasingly controlled by ever larger corporations in which the neutral professionalism of the manager spelled out a pattern of behaviour that was

utterly at odds with Kant’s “starry sky above us and moral imperative inside us.” Managerial culture subtly evokes the idea of freedom as its ultimate value yet, at the same time, it disfigures it into a grotesque monster. In the name of profit and functionality, it demands that all participants in this game share its dog-eat-dog philosophy.

Instead of a personal existence, it offers a menu of formally understood social roles. Instead of a richly orchestrated spectacle of voices, there is the whispered monologue of individuals reduced only to themselves.

This “bureaucratic individualism,” to use Alisdair MacIntyre’s felicitous term, demonstrates the effect that corporate capitalism has had on the comprehensive drama of the intercourse between individual and community. For the price of private freedom, the individual must transfer all public decisions and political acts to bureaucratic institutions and managerial experts. Consensus on fundamental social norms has thus become an emptied form. It appears as though the good intentions of the Enlightenment ultimately fostered a political doctrine in America which paved a road to the hell of individual self-sufficiency.

Alexis de Tocqueville, who wrote Democracy in America on the basis of his impressions as he travelled the United States during the 1830s, would have never dreamed that by the end of the twentieth century this muchcherished individualism would have acutely shaken the very foundations of the culture which made it possible in the first place. De Tocqueville was somewhat alarmed by the possible consequences of individualism driven to its extremes, but he was convinced that American society possessed the essential levers which would “soften” those extremes: family, religion and democratic political life.

However, traditional religion can hardly hope to serve such a purpose in the contemporary post-Christian world. Some two-thirds of the electorate fail to cast their vote in modern America. The vast majority appear disenfranchised from exercising any serious role in the public life in this democracy. Most American citizens today appear powerless in the face of the absolute domination of corporations and the two-party political system. They are alienated from political candidates carved into smiling puppets whose strings are pulled by media strategists, spin doctors and anonymous expert advisors back at headquarters. In addition, there is the unacknowledged leading role of the military-industrial establishment that is largely responsible for the pathetic oscillations between staunch anti-Communism on the home front and interventionism on the international one. Politicians are perceived as corrupt, or at the very least corruptible, and as tending to forget their promises of new jobs or tax reform the minute they slide into their official armchairs.

And so on and so forth. I honestly doubt that such a condition is conducive for the sensible participation of the masses in public affairs.

The United States of America, however, does harbour memories of a great tradition in which private incentive and enterprise, pragmatic knowledge, innovative genius and decentralised democracy from below were once given priority. These are attributes passed down from the earliest Puritan communities in New England in which public decision-making and high regard for rational conduct in political life were not abstract but central to the definition of urban community. Three centuries on and I’m forced to adopt the opinion that the last embers of this venerable tradition are barely smouldering beneath the residue of ideological and economic monopolies. Their questionable exercise of power contributes the lion’s share to political apathy and irrational rage which are offered as the only reaction against it, as the controversial anthropologist Marvin Harris argued in his provocative book America Now. The family, too, has long since ceased to be a “haven in the heartless world.” Suburbs, those bastions of the burgeoning middle-classes, are a clear example of the vicious circle in which radical individualism finds itself caught. The suburbs emerged from a desperate need to arrest the destructive consequences of the destructive revolution occurring in an increasingly entrepreneurial society. They were an answer to the alienation, the impersonality and the fleeting nature of hu-

man contact in the inner city which led to a depressive disenfranchisement of the masses. The only problem was that middle-class families chose the wrong “remedy”; suburbia represented more of the same and thus only aggravated the spiritual confusion.

The so-called suburbs are easily recognisable: the uniformly cut lawns in front of the houses, like peas in a pod; the conventional grid structure of roads and avenues; standard satellite dishes and sterile shopping malls where the only thing which distinguishes you from your neighbour is the intensity with which you burrow into your shell. In their flight from the creeping nightmare of inner cities, the inhabitants of suburbs came in search of a lost feeling of community, safety for their children and natural beauty. What they got was an empty, kitschy falsification in which, paradoxically, there is neither the space for stimulating urban bustle nor the stability of the community found in small towns and villages, as Philip Slater acidly remarked in his classic study Pursuit of Loneliness.

I can already hear some doubtful voices at this point, see some shaking heads—as if to say that my critique is merely a hymn to the “hothouse” of a borough—no more a village and not yet a town which stands as a well-known paradigm of communal life in Slovenian history. No, it would be oversimplified to return to the tradition from which the Slovenians have only just wrenched themselves. But it is nevertheless impossible to refute the empirical fact that most Slovenians— even those of my own generation which came of age in the 1980s—have experienced autumn drives into the country to collect food for the winter while most Americans have not.

No matter how much they may like life in the city, Slovenians as a nation have experienced an urban lifestyle for a rather short period of time.

They still have their rural roots and the complexities of a total urban world have yet to be absorbed. Furthermore, we have yet to experience the real dimensions of a sprawling megalopolis.

Indeed more people live in Manhattan than in the whole of Slovenia! It is very likely that most Slovenians would find it easier to identify with those coming to live in the city than those who are attempting to flee from it. As for me, was I not, in addition to the fulfilment of my creative ambitions, secretly beguiled by the more intensive, rapid, fateful rhythm of New York City? Is this not the case, too, with Slovenian writer Brina Svit in Paris, sculptor Marjetica Potrè in Washington, DC and video artist Miha Vipotnik in Los Angeles? Because we still live in an innocent and productive state of fascination with the megalopolis, we don’t feel any resignation about it and can hardly imagine the critical doubts which have taken root among the weary inhabitants of America’s largest cities.

In any case, the middle classes which established the suburb as an important institution of the American way of life, solved the inherent contradiction between the desire for personal freedom and obligations to the community by drawing from the New England Puritan tradition in which the notion of obligation trumps passion. This simple notion has its origins in the seventeenth century, an historical period when marriage was not the natural outcome of romantic love but was rather a contract concluded by the parents of future partners. Calvinist theology, having legitimised parental power and authority, led to the construction of a doctrine which proclaimed that love is, above all, a matter of will. According to this perspective, God does not control feelings but instead appeals to sensible decision. In his subjugation to doctrine, the Puritan desires what he has to do; namely, to get married. There is thus, in principle, no dilemma.

Christian teaching constantly devalues freedom of personality and autonomous desire. Similarly, the reality of life also devalued the metaphysical foundations of the nuclear family (mother, father, children). Within the American family—this imaginary space of safety, intimacy and privacy which acts as a counterweight to the exploitation and manipulation that defines the harsh world “out there”—the sharp difference between illusion and reality became increasingly evident. The mother who, as a rule, didn’t go out to work in order that she might devote herself to bringing up children, was automatically excluded from education or any other avenue of personal realisation. Realising this, many mothers were inclined to cling convulsively—almost pathologically—to their children. Such behaviour, in tandem with excessive parental expectations, often resulted in adolescent difficulties in crossing the mental line between childhood and adulthood: maturity was crippled.

Faced with a restricted sphere of influence and a dull and undemanding daily routine, the mother tended to lose a feeling of pride and personal esteem: it was the breadwinner who dominated family life. The home was the only world women saw or knew, a world shared by her neighbours: the lot of wife and mother. There was no escape.

Even the possibility of divorce could bring no real change. Indeed, in the years following the second world war, being a divorcee or single woman was considered a shameful and “unnatural” state, as Christopher Lasch eloquently reported in his book Haven in a Heartless World.

The process of mutual alienation between partners went hand in hand with the suppression of spontaneity, affection and passion in children.

These were suffocated by the repressive rules of traditional behaviour from which frustrated parents drew, as these rules were simply the only ones they themselves had known and followed. In modern circumstances, alas, tradition all too often fails.

An upbringing based on punishment and fear may be successful in traditional and stable societies but given the extreme mobility of American society today, external instruments of control no longer have the effect they once did. The attentive observer would not have been surprised by the fact that during student protests of the 1960s, the front lines of protesters were invariably composed of the offspring of middle-class families: the first generation born in suburbia. Student protests were not directed against the war in Vietnam alone but also against a mentality that dictated that free individuals be transformed into the obedient employees of corporations. While suburbia might not be a comfortable concentration camp—as the eminent feminist Betty Friedan once exclaimed—it most surely is an archipelago of the “lonely crowd.”

In conjunction with the suburbanisation of the American spirit, dissatisfaction grew within the concealed structure of the dominant nuclear families. This conflict between the facade of family happiness and the dirty reality of control over the life and soul of the individual gave birth to an explosion of psychoanalytical schools, ego-psychologies and other trends in psychotherapy. Despite their seemingly different approaches and techniques, they all shared a single common denominator. Their ideal is still unintentionally placed in the mythical tradition of the frontier: the autonomous individual who—first and foremost—loves himself, relies on himself and determines his own standards of what is good, beautiful and just. During the 1960s and 1970s in particular, the authority of marriage, already crumbling from within, was successfully crushed by the plenitude of experiments culminating in the widespread custom of “non-committed relationships,” as well as the practice of “open marriages,” “creative divorces,” etc., much of which originated in the critical achievements of humanistic psychologists such as Abraham Maslow, Carl Rogers and Rollo May. It was women and teenagers who benefited the most from such non-conventional theories, from the decline of the nuclear family and the increasing acceptance of alternative modes of living.

Feminism, a rather articulated social movement, utilised and even radicalised the results of the aforementioned attacks on and analyses of patriarchal society. Encounters with the mechanisms of authority opened up a vast highway to hitherto undreamed of emancipation and personal realisation for women. This was also aided by a number of crucial social accomplishments, including the legalisation of abortion and the passing of equal opportunity laws which at least in theory prevented discrimination on the grounds of gender or sexual orientation.

The attempts of psychiatrists, those well-paid substitute friends, were decidedly focused on curing the symptoms of unhealthy “dependency” which caused an individual to become reliant on external judgment and to suffer from the obsessive need for others to tell him that he is “all right.”

This paradigm of mental “health as the absence of illness” and complete independence of the individual contains at its core a valuable critique of family authority, of all forms of control by a parent (partner, relative, boss, etc.) as well as any intrusions into privacy. One cannot help but sense that this theory, if pushed to its extreme, ultimately calls into question all obligations and duties which arise from human relationships—even, for example, from a serious love relationship. However, this less noticeable and possibly even sinister dimension to psycho-therapeutic ideology only began to gain ground during the second half of the 1980s. In itself psychotherapy—which operates within its own repressive menu and price list of services—clearly illustrates the friction between

the interior of the individual and the social exterior. Dealing with extremely personal matters, while at the same time lacking any sincere emotional charge and warmth, psychotherapy represents a unique coupling of distance and intimacy.

Only one person does the talking while the other checks the time. In shorter and sharper words: psychotherapy epitomises at the spiritual level what the unsuccessful suburban “utopia” embodies at the level of town-planning.

Even though I by and large support these liberation theories, I must add that I see the America of the past two decades somewhat differently.

I can’t help but notice how easy it is to make “friends” here; I observe how those who are not bound by any deep commitments must time and time again create their own place in the broader social context. How often have I heard people talk of love as an important matter yet break off a relationship when faced with the first conflict, the result of their apparent belief that a firm emotional tie can be obtained in instant form without any toilsome cultivation. How common it is, particularly among the most educated classes, for “couples” to have a “distant marriage,” with partners meeting only several times a year because they have elected to live in disparate parts of the country due to career demands. What huge profits are made by dating agencies, lonely heart chatlines and telephonic angels of comfort who substitute living communication for its technological surrogate. Americans are heavily crippled by the paralysing fear that someone might encroach upon their personal space and hence harm them. Nobody ever asks if a particular love relationship gives the partners spiritual, moral and sexual growth. Instead, the question is whether it “works.” To look with eyes wide open at all of these aspects of American pursuit of community, I cannot help but agree with Robert Bellah (1985) and his team of scholars who, in a penetrating and inspiring study Habits of the Heart, claim that Americans today primarily understand personal freedom as freedom from. Yet to be free from the arbitrary authority of place, time, work, family, community, etc., means, in a final analysis, to be utterly alone because the lifestyles, values, ideas and emotional worlds of others do not really touch you.

At high-school parties, we used to listened to Janis Joplin. I must admit that in those days I wasn’t really able to comprehend the meaning of the lyrics—freedom’s just another word for nothing left to lose—in Kris Kristofferson’s song, Me and Bobby McGee. During all those parties with her coarse voice echoing in the semi-darkness, I never understood her bitter cry. The tune was beautiful, seemed true enough. But what about the words?

Did they tell me anything at all? I couldn’t in my situation comprehend the depth of her disappointment. There were so many people around me who I didn’t want to lose. I still have them and I’m happy I do. Now that I realise what a precious gift they are, I feel a deep gratitude.

Yet after many years of this barefoot anthropology—this private observation of American culture that desperately waits for a redemptive message— I get the feeling that, back in the 1960s when everyone else had their heads full of happy personal freedom with no broader responsibility, Janis Joplin stumbled upon the very core of the modern human condition.

Americans—faced with the destructive consequences of radical individualism which has made them into strangers in paradise and turned the holy experiment of pioneering settlers into an air-conditioned nightmare of a pre-apocalyptic world—should perhaps listen more closely to their own poets than they actually do. And we should listen, too.

In my pessimistic opinion, it is not just the vast Atlantic Ocean but only a matter of decades that divides Slovenians from the frightening loneliness which now leaves scars on the souls of so many who reside in the shadow of the Statue of Liberty. As a global social laboratory, America stands on the diamond tip of world development, not only in the economic sense but also in terms of spiritual-cultural processes. Therefore, we can learn from their mistakes.

Back in the 1960s, the liberating gesture of “styles of radical will” opened the uninvestigated sphere of the depths of human psyche and criticised conventions of all kinds. Today we must not allow ourselves to be seduced by those same sirens, luring us towards the abyss of a new convention, namely the notion of the unconditional freedom of the individual as the one and only value. Is it really possible to find one’s own real identity, all alone in the darkness of a closed room, in the ivory tower of the self? Is it possible to have an existentially full and satisfying life in the egotistic ac-

cumulation of wealth and chattel, a world in which friendship and love become, in the long run, reduced to mere commodities? Are not the lasting commitments that one individual can cautiously make to another the most important thing any of us may ever hope to hold? And is not such discourse and interaction fostered and encouraged only within a functioning society?

Prior to the collapse of socialism and the disintegration of Yugoslavia, Slovenians were prevented from falling into a state of merry egotism by our political disenfranchisement and the absence of an entrepreneurial culture. This very lack did somehow increase the value of human dignity and managed to endow our friendships and communities—in the most intimate understanding of such institutions—with a special significance.

I hasten to make a great effort to avoid misunderstanding. I am far from simply stating that socialism was better. I am instead rejecting the interpretation of the claim that Man does not live by bread alone actually represents an argument in support of starvation. This is why in view of the prevailing excitement over newly discovered mechanisms of corporate capitalism in post-socialist countries, I see no real reason to forget Aristotle’s definition of friendship, which might help us bridge the deep isolationism of the “minimal self.”

Aristotle in his Nicomachean Ethics outlines the three pillars upon which a genuine friendship rests: friends share pleasures, are useful to each other and committed to a common good. If we allow our “selective affinities” to be limited exclusively to common pleasures—which is, as a rule, what happens in an objectified world in which gifts, duties and obligations are paid for and not symbolically returned—we may very well wind up in the dead-end street in which so many intelligent Americans find themselves today. As much as it is the moral dimension of commitment which turns friendship into the basis of a meaningful personal—and consequently—social relationship, so does our only hope remain in the preservation of our commitment to the broader “community of memory.”

The Intricate Evasions of As: Poetry as Philosophy (from page 5)

“poetic epistemology” can be said to place in question the assumptions behind the traditional epistemological construal of the world. This is what I think is at stake in approaching poetry as philosophy.

Let me close with an example from Stevens’s 1943 lecture, “The Figure of the Youth as Virile Poet,” which is his finest piece of criticism and which, in some passages, bears comparison with his verse. Stevens is broaching the question of poetic truth. Poetry is truthful when it is in agreement with the world, that is, an agreement between imagination and reality. Such agreement is emotional for Stevens—it is felt agreement. Poetic truth is an agreement with reality in what Stevens calls, in one of his favourite nicknames, a mundo.

The latter is the environment created by the poet, what Stevens often describes in this lecture and his poetry as the radiant atmosphere of the poet.

What the poet does is to create a mundo, a specific habitat with an identifiable voice, personae, climate and set of objects. Such an imagining elevates and liberates both the poet and the reader who finds vitality in this world, who finds in it some affluence of the planet they inhabit.

There then follows an extraordinary passage, where Stevens asks us to enter into a thoughtexperiment, to enter the mundo of the poet, that radiant atmosphere. How do things look when we inhabit the world of the poet? At the end of a rather unhelpful brief discussion of metaphysics, Stevens asks an extremely long and tortuous question, “And having ceased to be metaphysicians, even though we have acquired something from them as from all men, and standing in the radiant and productive atmosphere, and examining first one detail of that world, one particular, and then another, as we find them by chance, and observing many things that seem to be poetry without any intervention on our part, as, for example, the blue sky, and noting, in any case, that the imagination never brings anything into the world but that, on the contrary, like the personality of the poet in the act of creating, it is no more than a process, and desiring with all the power of

our desire not to write falsely, do we not begin to think of the possibility that poetry is only reality, after all, and that poetic truth is a factual truth, seen, it may be, by those whose range in the perception of fact—that is, whose sensibility—is greater than our own?”

What we see when we take on board the poet’s mundo is that the things around us that make up the world seem to be poetry without any intervention on our part. For example, the blue sky: the blue sky is poetry, but it is also the blue sky as it is. That is, the power of the poetic imagination produces a world that we recognise as our world, which is not a fantasy world or thing of fancy. If the poet’s world is true, then this is because it attempts to be true to the perceived contours of the world we actually inhabit: this place, this blue sky, this clear water in a brilliant bowl, this green grass, this leafless tree, these sweet berries, my cat Jeoffrey. It is only by agreeing with reality that the imagination has vitality. As Stevens succinctly puts it in the Adagia, the task of poetry is “To touch with the imagination in respect to reality.”

Stevens then asks us that if we indeed accept that we stand within the radiant mundo of the poet (and everything hangs on that “if”; you can’t force someone to take onboard a poetic vision, and there is no accounting for taste), then are we not obliged to accept “the possibility that poetic truth is a factual truth”? Namely, that true poetry, the work of the imagination that touches reality, is a poetry of fact, of fact created in a fiction. If we take the small leap of faith implied in that “if,” then we are no longer inhabiting our ordinary world, but the mundo of the poet, namely someone, “whose range in the perception of fact— that is, whose sensibility—is greater than our own.” The consequence of Stevens’s argumentation is that the truth that we experience when the poet’s fictive imaginings are in agreement with reality is a truth of fact. But it is an enlarged world of fact: things as they are, but beyond us.

The world that we inhabit is neither a bubble of subjective fancy, nor an epiphenomenon to an alien, subject-independent realm.

Epistemologically speaking, both anti-realism and transcendental realism are wrong. Poetry touches reality, a solid, shared realm of real particulars, but it is a reality shot through with conceptual content, a world in words. This poeticised version of transcendental idealism is hypothesised in the following terms, “It comes to this, that poetry is part of the structure of reality. If this has been demonstrated, it pretty much amounts to saying that the structure of poetry and the structure of reality are one or, in effect, that poetry and reality are one, or should be. This may be less thesis than hypothesis.”

Despite this coy qualification, we are here being brought close to what Stevens calls his intimidating thesis. What is this thesis? He writes, “poetry is the imagination of life.” This entails that there is no such thing as bare alien fact, what Stevens calls “absolute fact.” Rather, “… absolute fact includes everything that the imagination includes. This is our intimidating thesis.”

Absolute fact is not absolute, it is simply the arrière-pays of the imagination and therefore relative to its power. Stevens illustrates this in a disarmingly prosaic and charming manner, “One sees demonstrations of this everywhere. For example, if we close our eyes and think of a place where it would be pleasant to spend a holiday, and if there slide across the black eyes, like a setting on a stage, a rock that sparkles, a blue sea that lashes, and hemlocks in which the sun can merely fumble, this inevitably demonstrates, since the rock and sea, the wood and sun are those that have been familiar to us in Maine, that much of the world of fact is the equivalent of the world of the imagination, because it looks like it.”

Poetry is the imagination of life. That is, it is the imagination of life as it is, the coastline of Maine or Essex or wherever. The imagined coastline is true to the factual coastline simply “because it looks like it.” Yet, it is life elevated, a world of fact enlarged and rendered radiant through the sound of words. Poetry is life as it is, ourselves yet beyond us.

Words of the world are the life of the world and poetry is the highest use of those words. Without poetry we are diminished, we become mere “castratos of moon-mash.” Poetry is like the light which illuminates objects in the world, it is the unseen condition for seeing, unseen until seen with the poet’s eyes and then seen anew. Like light, it adds nothing but itself. Close to the heat of that light, we live more intensely. Or so we say.

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Book Review Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History, eds. Darren Tofts, Annemarie Jonson & Alessio Cavallaro (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), ISBN 0262-20145-3, Hardback, 10 colour illustrations, 322pp., •28.89, Kè911.33 McKenzie Wark, Dispositions (Cambridge: Salt, 2003), ISBN 1-876857-25-0, Paperback, 184pp., •12.22, Kè385.69 —review by Louis Armand “The vast social apparatus of the computer network has aligned people with technology in unprecedented ways. The intimacy of the human-computer interface has made it impossible to distinguish technology from the social and cultural business of being human. Cyberculture is the broader name given to this process of becoming through technological means. This book shows that cyberculture has been a long time coming.” So says the publisher’s blurb for Prefiguring Cyberculture: An Intellectual History.

Although a somewhat trite expression of the obvious (one hardly needs an MIT anthology to announce the long-time-coming of the “word”— the word being “cyberculture” in this present incarnation), it also misses the point of Prefiguring Cyberculture, which is not that cyberculture has arrived, but that it has been with us “from the beginning” (to stretch the biblical metaphor). While it is commonplace for “new” aesthetic and/or critical trends to devise elaborate genealogies at the same time as declaring their “newness,” Prefiguring Cyberculture does more than attempt to reconfigure social histor y in order to find itself represented there at every turn in some sort of embryonic form (the project, as Katherine Hayles says in her forward, of “recovering” antecedents). The tone, and the intent, is not as messianic as it may seem.

That the perceived avatars of the nouveau monde choose at all to speak of cultur e (however that noun is compounded) is revealing in itself, and requires a certain degree of consideration. So too the use of the term history, even if it is qualified by the indefinite article. The possibility of other prehistories mitigates, to an extent, the assumption of something like prescience which—while not overtly stated—underwrites the notion that “cyberculture” (here and now) is a realisation and even vindication of the visionary project of technology. In important respects, the notion of pre-figuration is here closely tied to a materialist conception of history, as a dialectical movement towards what has often been called “historical overcoming”—an end of history. In this case, the “synthesis” of man and machine as the ongoing event par excellence of the becoming of post-historicity, or what is similarly referred to as the “posthuman” (if not the posthumous) condition.

An obvious question that arises from this has to do precisely with this historicisation—that is, of not only situating “cyberculture” as an object (if not a paradigm) of scholastic activity (the institution of the university looms large here, despite or rather because of this “recovery” which extends to “cyberculture” itself and not just its antecedents)—and the apparent necessity of approaching that which overtly figures itself in terms of futurity (techno-culture in general) as an historical event. At a crucial point, the pre-occupation with a “to come” gives way, under the false appearance of a “present,” to the studied consideration of the passé (strictly speaking). And the question is this: how do we begin to address the inevitability of an “historical end” that stands in place of a “present” detached already from “its future”?

In addressing the issue of “retrodiction,” Hayles poses a similar question, though addressed to the temporality or timeliness of the book itself (!) vis-à-vis a type of “mémoires of the future.”

For Hayles, the apparent contradiction between pre-figuration and historicity describes a condition of post-millennialism (hence Prefiguring Cyberculture provides an “index to the historical junction between the past millennium and the new one we are learning to call home”). Although uncited

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throughout the book, Heidegger’s critique of technology and man’s “dwelling” in the world are obvious influences here, but there is the sense at times that the fuller implications of “cybercultural” historicity are evaded. In the “Die Frage nach der Technik” Heidegger characterises technology as a “challenge” posed to humanity—not as an overcoming of humanity but as a “coming to terms” with technology and with Being itself as technological—a notion which underwrites Margaret Wertheim’s consideration of “cyberculture” as presenting the danger of a “return to a social orthodoxy” (“Internet Dreaming: A Utopia for All Seasons”).

This is in many ways implicit, too, to Darren Tofts’s introductory remarks about “change”: “this is a book about technology and change … about mutability, the tendency towards change and alteration” (which also implies analogies between “technology” and “mutability”; or between “technology” and the “tendency towards technology”).

“Mutability is not simply about change, but is rather an ongoing inclination to change, a constancy in human thinking on matters of technology—a constancy characterised by the idea of becoming.” Clearly there is an important issue at stake here, between objecthood and “becoming.” The question remains, however, of how to view technology as something “applied to” the present (“the transformative impact of technology”) while at the same time regarding it as describing a present condition. Another question has to do with the notion of “incomprehensible” change

Andruid Kerne).

These are ideas more extensively elaborated upon in Dispositions, where Wark “explores” the various means by which the combination of vectors of mapping and movement “produce” the world. “Armed only with a notebook and a handheld global positioning device, McKenzie Wark tracks the secret passage of free time and free thought through the spaces of an everyday life lived increasingly in the shadow of the satellites.”

Part dissertation on “codework,” part psychogeography (à la Guy Debord on a global scale), Dislocations employs the codes of global positioning and directional vectors to explore the topog raphical and topological ambiguities of informatics and the mechanics of “placement.”

Writing in the margins of technological “error,” Wark invokes the unregulated “possibilities” of code migration that persist within all systems of “locational” determinism—in which information (“meaning”) is inextricably linked to “noise,” or rather that location is grounded, so to speak, in the differential contingencies of dis-location. This is also the sense of “codework,” where structure evolves upon the basis of détournement, repetition, recombination, feedback, sampling, miscegenation—a typogenetics of material relations, coordinates in vectoral or geodetic time-space, where symbolic meaning is a function of contingency, & where contingency is the sole realisation of the possible.

McKenzie Wark from

Dispositions

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(“artificial life, or disembodied virtual space”)— of what “incomprehensible” means here, and of how (if at all) “cyberculture” renders such things “comprehensible” (what does this imply for cyberculture as a paradigm or as a “discourse”?).

Of the writings (and artist’s works: including pieces by Stelarc, Patrcia Paccinini, Troy Innocent) collected in this volume (intelligently divided four sections: “Robot,” “Virtuality,” Artists’ Statements,” “Futuropolis”), there are a number which contribute significantly to ongoing discussions of technology and cultural theory. Among these is Donald F. Theall’s “Becoming Immedia: The Involution of Digital Convergence”—which reprises his major works on Joycean “techno-poetics,” Marshal McLuhan, and “beyond the literacy/orality paradigm” (the post-electric extension of the Guttenberg project of “the book”). Greg Ulmer’s “Reality Tables: Virtual Furniture” also picks up on the question of “literacy” and the impact of electro-mechanisation on functional concepts of language—advancing ideas mapped out in his earlier work on “applied grammatology.” Ulmer discusses the transformations from literacy to “electracity” and the prevalence of “code” (or “tables”: the tabula, interface or matrix of associative structures in hypertext for example). Ulmer likewise coins the ter m “choragraphy” to rethink subjectivity (“Cartesian method” and the pseudo inter-subjective modulus of “dialogue” between human and machine— the aporia of “electracity”) in terms of Plato’s “chora” and electro-archival forms of memoria (“the electrate equivalent of method”). McKenzie Wark’s “Too Real” (on Ray Bradbury’s The Illustrated Man—an interesting variation on Melville’s Queequeg) draws together several ongoing projects on “codework” (a term coined with Alan Sondheim), “vectoral technologies” (see Virtual Geographies) and interface ecologies (viz.

29th January 2001 West 073.95769° 23' Accuracy

The sun shines out of my arse. Or so it was once comforting to think. And so thought everybody.

Man, the measure of all things. Or woman, as if that made much difference, up against the magnanimous spread of the world.

Consider the logistics of how things come to us; of how we come to things. Rocks and plants; flesh and steel. A world in which if there is some guiding light it is inhuman. It’s all mesh of data, telemetry of moving bodies, resources allocated and deployed.

The live feed is no longer my breakfast. I am its breakfast. This caloric load comes off inventory. Some small quanta of stuff will move through the world making good its consummation. Run the movie in reverse: from mouth to fork to plate to grill to fridge to truck to store to plant to farm to seed to earth and rain and the sun that marks its melanomas on my arse.

But there are still those who can draw a golden beam from their arse to the skies. They have not lost perspective. Theirs is a power always born again. Theirs is a world they always array around their radiant centre.

Sun kings and sky gods: there is nothing they don’t see that matters, there is nothing they can’t do that matters. (Or so one might suppose.) They camouflage their bodies, not their radiating souls.

Their ways become our ways, soon enough — their tools of command, control, communication.

Soon enough these come to power pop up toasters. Speed and precision are the marks of rank.

The digital divides all knowing from all known.

Leave it to these khaki lords of co-ordinates to turn the planet’s surface into an orbing football field. They grid it so they may gird it. Satellites orbit my arse. They free me from the need to know its disposition. They feed me with coordinates. No need to keep track of place or time when there exists in the world the Pentagon’s global positioning satellites and the global positioning device.

It arrived, much expected, in the mail today, the Garmin Etrex. Rubber buttons in black hole black on sky grey plastic, the lcd screen behind reassuring glass. The courier delivered it to the home address. Sign your name here, on another lcd screen. Tick off one more mission in the endless blipstream of delivery.

That home address, that singular string of alphanumerics, is an abstract way of grasping space, but not as abstract as global positioning. Co-ordinates for anywhere, anytime, all over the astroturfed surface of the world. An address for anywhere at all with a hopeful view of the sky.

Take the grey machine for a walk from home to a favourite cafe. Track the vector between the two positions. The great outdoors becomes an

addressable space, like any home or hard drive.

Noblesse Oblige: The camo kings provide the signal free to everyone, everywhere, with one of these devices. It listens for the satellite’s signals, their almanac of the seconds, and triangulates accordingly.

Aboard each satellite beats an atom heart, beating time into precise submission. That perfect time is broadcast to the world. A global rockfest for the age of punk machines. Point the plastic gizmo at the sky and it counts the delay with which the perfect time imperfectly arrives, and estimates its distance from four titanium stars.

But there is a margin of error, a random factor. This pen tip is at the precise coordinates above — give or take 23 feet. Sometimes, the circle widens, the location less precise. There’s always sand in the cogs somewhere, even if these days its the ionosphere, or the troposphere, where things get gritty.

We’re all in the service now, and know exactly where our arses are. The luxury of accuracy — the fifth coordinate. Let X equal X. Your arse is where and what you think it is. No wonder they pronounce him Colon Powell.

The English ruled the seas with their chronometers; now Americans rule the skies. Hold this grey ruler and hold with it the logic of empire.

Garmin Etrex, digital sextant. On its cinereous face a picture of the world.

The perfect good for a perfect world. It arms me for that other struggle: to find what tiny wavering lines might steal away from all perfected surfaces. An art of digging digits that don’t add up.

The sampling of the world as it passes, percepts buzzing the sensoria, affects tingling the nerve net, concepts bouncing about the frontal lobes as they flit by on their way to other territories. But just for one moment, smudged in time and ink, they pass through the reticular error of this pen and into the cryptic bank of this page.

This new journal, bought especially, the paper ruled by latitude. The book square, the pages an unraveling map, an airless crack between each leaf.

Opened for the first time here at this table, close to the glass wall, but hiding from the light it breathes.

This floor, bare and porous, was once treelike and now isn’t. This instruction manual was also once living, living in the organic sense. Now it pauses between habitations. It holds in place the symbols by which one learns to point this grey toy to the sun and get for this locution all the points the radio sky accommodates.

This zone, where this wood is floor, where this heat is coffee. This is what is here now, cooling in the darkening light. This skinny sun, this digital jazz, inhabiting the same air. This dissipating hangover, this cramp in the writer’s hand.

To leak into the cracks in a perfect world and flee along them. That might be what home is now.

A home that could be anywhere. Not elsewhere; anywhere. Life need not be elsewhere, always pressing nose to glass. Home can be here. But here is anywhere. This where, now: Homing.

It is part of morality not to be at home in one’s home.

It is the ethos of the ethical to embrace anywhere as part of another home.

Circular error probable: the hole in the zero within which a missile falls, arm outstretched to greet its co-ordinates.

3.48 PM EST North 40.71379° Elevation -63'

2nd February 2001 West 073.94454° 33' Accuracy

The cell phone is on, expecting Tracy Ryan to call. Errors in coordination, data movement from point to point. Errors in dislocation, movement of vehicles through the sky, through the ground, under or over the river.

It is the expectation of guests that makes this place take on the colourings of home. Relational construct.

Rain intersects the pavement at something short of 90°. It intersects with time, intermittent. A pattern not a pattern, clumps of occurrence. Some eccentric algorithm beating on the pavement.

Hear it chanting: All go rhythm, all go rhythm ...

Idle vehicles contain combustions, immaculate disco. A lighting of gas and air, metal flung back, all to no immediate purpose. Power held in reserve.

A man walking, hammer in hand. Is this hammer’s commute to its use or back to its home?

The hammer, in between states, its sleepless rust, its imperceptible stress.

Every tool is a taming of violence, a home for violence. Unleashing yet still leashed. The sky gray Etrex slung neckwise, albatros of target acquisition.

A talisman of precision’s cutting edge.

Some Japanese girl sniffles while the boy talks on a cellphone. Her wrists thinner even than this that writes. They make a connection of not connecting. The comfort of indifference co-presence.

They commune with nothing, but nonetheless commune.

Mel Gibson’s teeth; Helen Hunt’s cheek. They face down local habitations, calling all home to this boarded skin. Remind me to avoid that movie.

Why does the person standing near annoy? Too close for comfort. Within the perimeter of what this awareness needs to call an I an I. Circular error probable.

The pork shoulder over there is only 49c a pound. Unpigged.

1.48 PM EST North 40.72218° Elevation 53'

4th February 2001 West 073.95113° 17' Accuracy

Trees are just racked leaves. These pigeons run some subroutine. Flap close, not too close. Each defined by a variable proximity to proximity. They are of one mind that rests in movement.

Flocks of cars ripple the atmosphere, churning particles. So long as there is air it is never quite quiet. Air has so much to say for itself. Sound is just bugged air.

Across the waters, through the haze: skyscraper. More tree than it looks.

Seagulls are another pattern, not just of white, but of distribution. They are bigger here, than where I come from. I am smaller.

That boy on the scooter is about as big as me relative to these seagulls as a relational perception. The boy comes to me against his mother’s wishes. He has his context, I have mine. Every figure has its ground.

Fumbling for the rubber buttons on the Etrex.

These gloves just make the cold more feelable.

On bare skin, this cold is off the scale and can’t touch at all. One shrinks into nothing except resistance to cold.

The way those dogs walk their people, keeping them tied to the reconnoitering smell. There is a dog world here of scent sensations. How this world must yield to another battery of senses. To a dog, the world exists to be sniffed. All animals have presumptions.

Know this position, but not these proteins.

Space cut with lines, not primed with wafts. This language sieves for signs, not sense, not scents.

Cold is a sense, sense of economy, burning against drains on resources. Not stacked against this contingency for long. Unlike the trees, humans cannot shut down peripheral systems, but can adopt adapt any stray matter to seemingly peripheral function. Humans are engineered for abstract climes. Nature’s trouble pups.

Alan Sondheim

Search and Deploy Thinking about search engines—using the googleapi—their gathering of universal information according to their own filtering—bringing in the dispersion to the prompt—applying this to principles of universal thought and cognition— applying this to philosophical categories—looking at everyone’s code—the other floating beneath the surface of the waters—the other always submerged—we’re always submerged ourselves — 1\ Dispersion as the mode of distribution of our time: no receivers, diminution of symbolic fluxes 2\ Filtering as the parasitic content of dispersion, the residue as the ghost of the content of the receiving 3\ Difiltering as the ontological and epistemological combination of dispersion and filtering 4\ Modes of literary production dependent on distributions, with content that isn’t mode-oriented, but filtering and adding semantics to neutral and neutralised data-streams 5\ Dyhzperoshzyon ahz pe mode ophlsh! dyhztrybuABU.YA ophlsh! our tyme: no rezeyveroshz, dymynuABU.YA ophlsh! TAZymbolyke! philukxehz Online, every distribution is a dissemination, and intellectual property disperses with the ageing of technology, hacking, quotation, borrowing, remaking. The universe itself is characterised by entropy; creation is always absorptive and disruptive. Representation itself is an act of delimiting. All is characterized by plateaux in non-equilibrium thermodynamics that sooner or later collapse; the resulting chaos is the dispersion of what remains of memory, the debris of once-articulated hopes and dreams.

6\ Fylterososyng ahz pe parahzytyke! keyontent ophlsh! dyhzperoshzyon, pe rehzydue ahz pe ghohzt ophlsh! pe keyontent ophlsh! pe rezeyvyng Language is not a virus; it’s a filter, parasitic on the real; filtering is the third in the channel between sender and receiver. Filtering creates content as residue, employing the protocols; filtering also ensures that receivers disperse, splay. The filter passes as text, work, entity, human, state, process; it’s a masquerade. The filter is protocol’s ghost; protocol is filter’s ghost. They are interdependent ghast/geist/wraithe.

7\ Dyphylterososyng ahz pe ontologykeyl & … epyhztemolog ykeyl keyombynaABU.YA ophlsh! dyhzperoshzyon & … phiylterososyng Difiltering is the acting of being and becoming among plasmas and implicate orders, content riding protocol, protocol riding content, both equivalent, embedded in the noise of their structure and semantics. Codework styles do nothing but surface submergences, only to temporarily create stases of Others, as if the world were sta-

ble. No wonder ontologies and epistemologies are incoherent, confused; wonder at their apparent appearance otherwise.

8\ Modehz ophlsh! lyterososar! produkeyABU.YA dependent on dyhztrybu ABU.YAhz, uhze-meyth keyontent pat yhznt mode-oryented, but phiylterososyng & … addyng TAZemantykeyhz 4 neutrl & …neutralyzed datahztreamhz Filtering itself among mode and content, for otherwise one has either the one or the other, a disaster, back to modernity and classical or medieval analyses of perception and meaning—the filter is constructed through the protocols and dispersions—the dispersions are already filtered—both proceed as if there’s a source or origin—it’s the source or origin that’s identified as thinking and moving in the world—it’s the

source or origin that gives rise to culture—that tends towards an inconceivable and inauthentic absolute—that tends towards this absolute with its inherent violence— 9\ Dyhzperososhzyon ahz pe mode ophlsh! dyhztrybuABU.YA ophlsh! our tyme: no rezeyverososhz, dymynuABU.YA ophlsh!

TAZymbolyke! phiylukkxehz Onl9ne, everos! dyhztrybuABU.YA = a dyhzhZemynaABU.YA, & … ynteelelelekeytul properost! dyhzperoshzehz uhze-meyth pe ageyng ophlsh! tekeyhnolog!, hasakeykyng, cueuotaABU.YA, borrowyng, remakyng. Pe unyveroshze ythzelphlsh! = keyharakeyterososyzed b! entrop!; keyreaABU.YA = alwayhz abhzorptyve & … d yhzr uptyve.

ReprehzentaABU.YA ythzelphlsh! = an akeyt ophlsh! delymytyng. Aelelel = keyharakeyterososyzed b! plateauhz yn non-ecueuylybryum peros-

Gregory L. Ulmer

Miami Miautre: Mapping the Virtual City A project by the Florida Research Ensemble (Gregory L. Ulmer, Barbara Jo Revelle, William Tilson, John Craig Freeman): The EmerAgency: “Problems B Us.”

The photograph entitled “Crossroads” (Barbara Jo Revelle) is part of a picture theory developed by the Florida Research Ensemble (a group of colleagues teaching at the University of Florida) during the development of a prototype for applying arts practices to public problem solving as part of a deconstruction of the institution of consulting. The Miami River, a 5.5 mile channel through the heart of the city of Miami connecting the Everglades with Biscayne Bay, is administered by some 34 public agencies, addressing every conceivable policy issue. The image shows a vessel being loaded with cargo intended for Haiti, consisting mostly of used goods— mattresses, bicycles, ten-gallon plastic buckets. The ship has been impounded by the Coast Guard because it did not meet the safety standards imposed by the “Caribbean Code.” This picture theory functions as a categorical image, exemplifying the logic of a new apparatus— electracy— that does for digital imaging what literacy did for manuscript and print technology.

Miami Miautre is an experiment involving the following elements: 1. The Internet.

The Internet has been defined by Paul Virilio as the means of a potential “general accident”— a global catastrophe taking place everywhere si-

“Crossroads” Miami River, Florida, June, 1998. Photograph by Barbara Jo Revelle. multaneously. The internet is an institutionalisation of the technology that has produced our “society of the spectacle,” in which the image is said to have destroyed the civic sphere existing within the cities of modern nation states.

2. The EmerAgency.

A virtual, distributed, online consultancy, initiated at the University of Florida in 1998. The purpose of this conceptual agency is to coordinate the formation of public schools into a “fifth estate” that would allow students at all levels of education to participate in public policy formation by means of the internet.

3. Choragraphy.

This experiment tests a rhetoric of hypermedia formulated by Gregory Ulmer in HEURETICS: THE LOGIC OF INVENTION (1994).

The rhetoric adapts for electracy the mnemotechniques central to pedagogy in the pre-print era of literacy. It is a hybrid of inventional memory palaces and chorological cartography in which plastic arts methods were used to map regional locales. The neologism (“choragraphy” with an “a”) signals the genesis of the rhetoric out of the encounter of architecture with deconstruction in the collaboration of Jacques Derrida and Peter

modynamykeyhz pat TAZooneros or laterosos keyoelelelaphze; pe rehzultyng keyhaohz = pe dyhzperoshzyon ophlsh! uhze-mehat remaynhz ophlsh! memor!, pe debr= ophlsh! onEEK-artykeyulated hopehz & …dreamhz.

10\ Fylterososohzohzyng ahz pe parahzytyke! keyontent ophlsh! dyhzperososhzyon, pe rehzydue ahz pe ghohzt ophlsh! pe keyontent ophlsh! pe rezeyvyng Language = not a vyruhz; ythz a phiylterosos, parahzytyke! on pe rel; phiylterososyng = pe pyrd yn pe keyhannel between TAZenderos & … rezeyveros. Fylterososyng keyreatehz keyontent ahz rehzydue, employyng pe protokeyolhz; phiylterososyng alhzo enhzurehz pat rezeyveroshz dyhzperoshze, hzpla!. Pe phiylterosos pahzhZehz ahz tekxt, uhze-meork, entyt!, human, hztate, prozehzhZ; ythz a mahzcueuerosade. Pe phiylterosos = protokeyolhz ghohzt; protokeyol = phiylterososhz ghohzt. Pe! 4 be TRUE ynterososdependent ghahzt/ geyhzt/uhze-merosaype.

11\ Dyphylterososohzohzyng ahz pe ontologykeyl & … epyhztemolog ykeyl keyombyna ABU.YA ophlsh! dyhzperososhzyon & …phiyylterososohzohzyng Dyphylterososyng = pe akeytyng ophlsh! beyng & …OOPkeyomyng among plahzmahz & …ymplykeyate orderoshz, keyontent rydyng protokeyol, protokeyol rydyng keyontent, both ecueuyvalent, embedded yn pe noyhze ophlsh! peyr hztrukeyture & …TAZemantykeyhz. KAYodework hztylehz do nopyng but TAZurphaEEK TAZubmerosgenzehz, onl! 4 temporaryl! keyreate hztahzehz ophlsh! Operoshz, ahz yphlsh! pe uhze-meorld uhze-meerose hztable. No uhze-meonderos ontologyehz & …epyhztemolog yehz 4 be TRUE ynkeyoherosent, keyonphuhzed; uhze-meonderos at peyr apparent appearanEEK operoswyhze.

12\ Modehz ophlsh! lyterososohzohzar! produkeyABU.YA dependent on dyhztrybu ABU.YAhz, uhze-meyth keyontent pat yhznt mode-oryented, but phyylterososohzohzyng & …addyng TAZemantykeyhz 4 neutrl & …neutralyzed data-hztreamhz Fylterososyng ythzelphlsh! among mode & …keyontent, 4 operoswyhze 01 hahz eyperos pe 01 or pe operos, a dyhzahzterosos, basakeyk 4 moderosnyt! & …keylahzhZykeyl or medyevl analyhzehz ophlsh! peroszepABU.YA & …meanyng—pe phiylterosos = keyonhztrukeyted through pe protokeyolhz & … dyhzperoshzyonhz—pe dyhzperoshzyonhz 4 be TRUE alread! phiylterososed—both prozeed ahz yphlsh! publyke! hayrhz a TAZourEEK or orygyn—ythz pe TAZourEEK or orygyn pathz ydentyphyed ahz pynkyng & …movyng yn pe uhze-meorld—ythz pe TAZourEEK or orygyn pat gyvehz ryhze 4 keyulture—pat tendhz towardhz an ynkeyonzeyvable & …ynaupentyke! abhzolute—pat tendhz towardhz th= abhzolute uhze-meyth ythz ynherosent vyolenEEK— ABU.YA

Eisenman on a folie for the Parc de la Vilette in Paris. In this prototype the Miami River is the basis for the design of an online “chora”—a holistic category made operational within digital imaging.

4. Testimonial.

The proposed virtual consulting practice. The creative photographer Barbara Jo Revelle lived at an Inn on the Miami River for five weeks in order to attune the site—to discover the mood or atmosphere of the River zone. “Attunement” alludes to the tradition of “Stimmung” from Plato’s TIMAEUS (the dialogue that introduced “chora” as the space of generation) to Heidegger’s phenomenology. Revelle’s mapping of the zone drew upon the poetic encounter perfected by modernist poets in Paris from Baudelaire’s tableaux through Breton’s NADJA and Walter Benjamin’s dialectical flaneur to the drifting of the Situationists. The new element is that the modernist epiphany is literalised in the photographic image. “Crossroads” evokes an inner experience of recognition in the consultant by means of an external detail of the scene. The consultant witnesses the catastrophe of the zone, in an image that locates a virtual border or boundary—logical, psychological, ideological.

5. Interface Metaphor The next phase of the project is to design a website that supports a virtual witnessing of the Miami zone (Miautre), and that is portable to zones in other communities. This interface between schooling and the internet supportive of community witnessing of policy negotiations contributes to the formation of a critical civic sphere within the society of the spectacle.

17

Art Reviews

na & Ivan Mecl, the festival includes work by a wide range of contemporary artists & VJs.

First Prague Biennale Art Factory www.praguebiennale.org/ www.galleryartfactory.cy Veletržní Palac, 26 June-26 August 2003, “PeriphLocated in a semi-industrial space above Váeries become the Centre,” co-ordinated by Heleclavské námìstí 15, Art Factory will open an exhina Kontová & Giancarlo Politi of Flash Art, with bition of video art, digital photography and Milan Knižak & Tomáš Vlèek, directors of the sculptural installations in July, including work by National Gallery in Prague. According to the press students from the Bratislava Fine Arts Academy. release, “The Prague Biennale announces itself as the major art event of the year.” Conceived as many chapGandy Gallery ters of a book by different authors, the exhibiwww.gandy-gallery.com/ tion includes the following projects: “Lazarus Nadine Gandy’s gallery on Školska 7 is currently Effect. New painting today” (curators Luca Beashowing “Glasfab” until 27 September, 2003. The trice, Lauri Firstenberg & Helena Kontová), “Misexhibition includes work by Fabrice Gygi, Yves sion Possible” (Michal Koleèek), “Space & Netzhammer, Rirkrit Tiravanija, & Maxim VelSubjectivity” (Lauri Firstenberg), “When periphcovsky. Gandy was recently represented at the art ery turns center & center turns periphery” (Jens fairs in Brussels with Vàclav Stratil, Nan Goldin, Hoffmann), “Superreal” (Lauri Firstenberg & Douglas Gordon, Jonas Mekas, Jiøi Pøihoda, Jessi Washburne-Harris), “Illusion of Security” Nobuyoshi Araki & Elke Krystufek.

(Lino Baldini & Gyonata Bonvicini), “Differentia Specifica” (Judit Angel), “(Dis)locations” (JuliLjubljana Moderna Galerija eta Gonzalez), “Disturbance” (Helena Kontová), www.mg-lj.si/index.jsp “Seduced (by speeds & movements): Towards ac“Form Specific,” curated by Zdenka Badovinac, tive agencies of fictions & realities in Polish art” includes work by Yuri Avvakumov, Angela Bul(Adam Budak), “alone/together” (Jacob Fabriloch, Daniel Buren, EXAT-51, Marko Luliæ, Tacius), “Out of Order” (Luca Beatrice), No title (Sofia Hernandez), “Overcoming Alienation: Emerging Artists from Russia” (Ekaterina Lazareva), “Contemporary Identities” (Charlotte Mailler), “Iceland” (Dorothée Kirch), Untitled (Gregor Muir), “Leaving Glasvegas” (Neil Mulholland), “Virtual Perception” (Laurence Dreyfus), “IMPROVisual” (Lavinia Garulli), “Beautiful banners.

Representation. Democracy. Participation” (Marco Scotini), “Come with me” (Gea Politi), “The Art of Survival” (B+B/Sarah Carrington & Sophie Hope), “China Art Today” (Shue Yeng, Francesca Jordan & Primo Marella), “Aion: an eventual architecture” (Andrea Di Stefano), “Pass it on” (Raimundas Malasauskas). Special Guest Curator: Francesco Vezzoli inviting Sigur Ros. All the artworks at the Prague Biennale will be presented not in national “pavilions” but in a pluralistic mix. In this way “Mission Possible,” the Czech section, includes other European nationalities & claims to rethink the identity of the Central Europe. This is Gilles Berquet in Graz, “Poupée Mécanique,” 2001 echoed elsewhere in the programme: “In dej Pogaèar & the P.A.R.A.S.I.T.E. Museum of the contemporar y globalised cultural situation,” the Contemporary Art, Florian Pumhösl, Apolonija “Space & Subjectivity” installation “examines the Šušteršiè and Anton Vidokle. Housed in the galconcept of the masses vis-à-vis Hardt & Negri’s lery’s new premises at the old Yugoslav Army barmodel of the multitude.” A selection of photogracks, the exhibition proposes that “we must learn raphy & video, from urban portraits of Mexico to use form as a tool and as a weapon of comCity to anonymous Israeli suburban borders, “exmunication.” According to Badovinac, these plores the anxiety between homogenisation & dif“form-specific works focus on a relatively free ference in the constitution of identity.” use of existing forms in terms of their repetition within a different spatial and temporal frame …

Jiri Svestka Gallery Repetition in the context of a work of art can www.jirisvestka.com/ thus be an articulation of new spaces of freeStill the major internationally trading gallery in dom, of free manipulation with existing signs of Prague, Svestka recently took part in Art 34 Basel, an increasingly formalised world.” Until 31 July. representing Markéta Othová, Krystof Kintera, Veronika Holcová, Jiøi Èernicky, Kateøina VinNeue Galerie Graz am Landesmuseum courová, Tomáš Rajlick and others. The gallery Joanneum will be moving during July and August to new www.neuegalerie.at/ premises at Biskupsky Dvùr 6, close to Bila La“Phantom der Lust: Visions of Masochism in but & will formally re-open in September with Art,” curated by Peter Weibel & Michael Farin. an exhibition of “Recent Paintings” by the miniThe exhibition includes 156 artists, from Bellmar malist artist Tomaš Rajlick. & Beuys to Araki, Oehlen & Opie. During the exhibition there is a “Masomania” symposium, Futura Projekt with Georges Didi-Huberman & Gianni Vattiwww.futuraprojekt.com mo, & performances by Marianne Faithful, MariA major new international contemporary art cenlyn Manson, Genesis P-Orridge & Peaches (“Fuck tre that recently opened in Smichov, Holeèkova the Pain”). Runs until 24 August.

49, under the direction of Marisa Ravali. “Survey ‘03” curated by FUTURA & Karel Cisaø, is a surZKM vey of contemporary Czech artists including on1.zkm.de/zkm/ Zbynìk Baladrán, Ondøej Brodz, Veronika Bro\\ international \ media \ art award 2003 “Conmová, David Èerny, Jasanský/Polák, Krištof structed Life: Scenarios of Fiction among comKintera, Jan Kotík, Alena Kotymannová, Franputer games, cyber-sex, nanobytes and robotic tišek Kowalowski, Tomáš Lahoda, Ján Manèušarts.” The competition for the 2003 award is beka, Jan Merta, Petr Nikl, Robert Novák, Míla ing jointly organised by Südwestrundfunk BadenPresslová, František Skála, Jan Šerých, Marek Baden [SWR] & ZKM Zentrum für Kunst und Ther, Kateøina Vincourová.

Medientechnologie, Karlsruhe in co-operation with the Swiss television station SF DRS, & Home Gallery ARTE. This award is the successor to the Interwww.homegallery.cz national Video Art Award, awarded for the first Currently home to “Electrobot.” See review. time in 1992.

In Out www.inout.cz The International Festival of the Digital Image runs from 18-29 July, at various locations around Prague. Curated by Pavel Vancat, Cedomir Buti-

18

Galerie hlavniho mesta Prahy Prague City Gallery at Mariánské námìstí hosts “German Photography in the 20th century,” including work by Dieter Appelt, Raoul Hausmann, Helmut Newton, Klaus Rinke & YVA. Until 28.9.

Electrobot (Home Gallery, Truhláøská 8, until 26 July) —review by Louis Armand “ELECTROBOT” is an exhibition focusing on the prevalence of electricity and robotics in contemporary society, including work by Julien Berthier, Natalia Blanch, Veronika Bromová, Jiøí Èernický, Veronika Drahotová, Tomáš Dvoøák, Tim & Františka Gilman, Jana Kalinová, Jan Kotík, Alena Kotzmannová, Milan Mikuláštík, DUO Mrázikovi, Stanislav Müller, Milan Pekaø, Kateøina Vincourová & Richard Wiesner.

Outstanding amongst the work on show is Wiesner’s machine for decomposing information—comprised of realtime fax machine printouts fed through high temperature drum rollers, to produce a continuous coil of blackened paper on which the ghostly trace of news bulletins is just discernable, like the text and images on a charred newspaper. Few of the other works directly employ electromechanisation or robotics in any significant way. A mobile telephone attached to a lightning rod is perhaps the most emblematic of the other works—signalling the increasingly ubiquitous relationship between machine aesthetics & the stasis, or indeed entropy, which underlies techno-utopianism (the impression that beneath the technological veneer, there remains some sort of organism or consciousness awaiting animation). Veronika Bromová’s electrified initials, VB, seem in this context to stand for the burlesque aspect of technological proliferation: the V and B posed as a vagina and a pair of breasts dressed up in electrified fairg round bunting.

Vincourová’s humanoid-toothpastetube hybrid reflects on the more comical aspects of contemporary cyborg-mania (particularly the comparably innocuous conjurations of Donna Haraway), while a large panel of burnt toast recalls both the abject comedy of Gilliam’s Brazil (the automated kitchen nightmare), as well as recalling the outworn phrase “the best thing since sliced bread” (a technological innovation in its time which, along with the humble pop-up toaster, is no longer, surprisingly enough, the stuff of inspiration for the technocultural cognoscenti). Tim & Františka Gilman’s unobtrusive installation (a power cord plugged at both ends into separate power points) expresses the sense of post-industrial entropy in the form of solipsistic closure: the feedback loop of “postmodernist” noise and its subsequent “critique” in the form of anti-spectacle turned back upon the spectacle of itself like some interminable auto-poietic “machine.”

The question of if, or how, this exhibition succeeds needs to be posed in relation to the avowed intentions of the curators—extensively set out in the catalogue text, in terms of a particular historical and theoretical placement within the discourse of “technology” and mass mechanisation. Whatever the conclusion, however, “Electrobot” represents one of the increasingly few attempts by curators and gallerists in Prague to seriously address the question of our contemporary technological condition and its impact upon the arts. For this reason, too, “Electrobot” ought to be viewed as a form of auto-critique: it isn’t an exhibition “about” technology, but “of” the technics of what is still referred to as culture.

Electro-Body Today, the new world of communication technology, the new modes of popular culture & electrified mechanisation, present an increasing challenge to contemporary artists. This challenge is founded upon a paradox. While electro-mechanisation affects the world in ways never before conceivable, it nevertheless has become so ubiquitous as to have almost vanished from sight. Electricity is everywhere, an unseen force—it has become indispensable to our most mundane activities, and in so being has become so common as to no longer present a spectacle. Electricity no longer occupies either our reality or our imagination as it did at the time of Edison. The challenge for the artist, then, is not simply to account for the transformations wrought by electro-mechanisation, but firstly to make it perceptible.

From the “Electrobot” press release: The technological leap from the invention of language & the first primitive writing techniques to a world of satellites & cell phones is the result of a vast transformational process that we have become largely immune to. From the beginning of time, history has been driven by a relentless process of mechanisation that has moulded the way we live, think & interact.

The question of modern existence increasingly becomes a paradox of understanding that nature is dominated and

shaped by inorganic processes that continue to gain speed with each passing day. Man becomes an outgrowth of a technology that radically transforms us while at the same time becoming more invisible as it progresses & becomes more sophisticated. Harnessing & resolving this conflict has become an increasing challenge to contemporary artists seeking to come to terms with the “here and now.”

ELECTROBOT seeks to address this process, making it perceptible & directing a critical gaze at the electronically mediated future.

The evolution of electronic media marks a radical transformation of human experience & can be traced back, beyond the invention of machines to the basis of human communications technologies: the gesture. Gesture, in advance of “literacy” & literate (coding) machines, not only initiates language but re-defines man’s external world as essentially prosthetic: with gesture, the world ceases to be an object & becomes an extension of human capacity.

Electronic mediation has increasingly tended to “return” this function to the body, through the invention of a new species of personal appliance which extend the individual’s potential for (simultaneous) environmental interaction in unprecedented ways. “Post-Industrial” media tends less towards the replacement of the individual by machines, than to the personalisation of machine technology.

Formerly one spoke of integrating machines into man, whereas today it is increasingly a question of re-integrating man into “the machine.”

Virtual Reality is not the externalisation of a Central Nervous System, but one side of a mutual extension (the res extensa of technological man).

Light speed data processing describes the realisation in media space of neural impulses, in which reality is reconceived on the basis of the electron (quantum physics). Micro-macro-medio: through the invention of increasingly mobile communications networks, man becomes more & more universalised. GPS, the World Wide Web & the cell phone no longer bind the individual to a fixed line or terminal but accommodate the body in its own fluid space (for the first time technology has returned the experience of “portability” to the body, & the new communications technologies are as portable as the gesture, defining the body within a new gestural space).

The Ghost Behind the Machine Beginning with the industrial revolution and the birth of electronic media, principles of abstract-representation, repetition & production have dominated our worldview &

the means of artistic production itself. Concepts of time & reality have been altered by a world where data is transmitted instantly like neural impulses through fibre optic & satellite systems, giving rise to new communication mediums such as the Internet.

William Gibson, who coined the term cyberspace, foresaw this flow of multi-dimensional, pan-sensory data in the mid-80s. In Mona Lisa Overdrive he describes a scenario of “All the data in the world stacked up like one big neon city, so you could cruise around & have a kind of grip on it, visually anyway, because if you didn’t, it was too complicated, trying to find your way to the particular piece of data you needed.”

For Gibson, this “consensual hallucination” produced by “data abstracted from the banks of every computer in the human system” creates an “unthinkable complexity. Lines of light ranged in the nonspace of the mind, clusters & constellations of data. Like city lights receding.” The challenges for today’s artist are immense in the new world information order. A new set of gestures is required to affect “meaningful” relations in world where the ongoing collision and synthesis between technology and humanity continues to widen the gap between man and the machine, but at the same time paradoxically brings them closer together.

Theatre Reviews The Fringe and the Quadrennial —review by Clare Wallace So far this summer in Prague theatre enthusiasts have had plenty to keep up with. Highlights include the new Prague Fringe Festival / Fringe Festival Praha, the National Theatre’s Bouda Project (which translates rather inelegantly as the Shack) and of course the mammoth Prague Quadrennial / Pražké Quadriennale. All are radically different theatrical ventures providing some much needed relief from the endless rounds of Don Giovanni and Black Light theatre.

The Prague Fringe Festival is a mere two years old, but is remarkably well developed already. The Festival Director Steven Gove and Press Officer Angus Coull are both Scottish and have experience with the Edinburgh Fringe. To some extent the PFF is a round up of shows filtered through Edinburgh, but this is hardly a disadvantage. There is certainly a space in the Prague theatre scene for an open and international forum for new hands as well as old. This year with performances in Divadlo Minor, Roxy’s NoD, Studio Rubín, Studio Damúza, the PFF has attracted an impressive international mix of participants—Czech, Canadian, Norwegian, British, American, Australian, French.

As with any Fringe festival, the Prague version is an eclectic stew of highs and lows—from the inspiring and innovative to the downright cringeworthy. At the high end, those who caught the festival last year may already have experienced Alister O’loughlin’s fierce talent in the first part of the Prodigal Theatre Company’s one man show on the life of the infamous 19th century actor Edmund Kean—Tragedian—The Rise to Fame of Edmund Kean. Happily for this year’s audiences, O’loughlin returned with the second part of the trilogy—The Fall to Infamy of Edmund Kean, and while the subject of the performance might seem rather distant and academic, O’loughlin’s interpretation of Kean—“Bastard. Drunk. Actor. Genius”—is mesmeric. Played in the round in the sweltering darkness of Roxy’s NoD, the performance never permits the audience space to withdraw from Kean’s intensely ambivalent personality or his cruel fate. By directly addressing the audience O’loughlin cleverly maps Kean’s condemnatory audience onto current spectators, making Tragedian—Part II as confronting as Part I. Among the other one-man shows on offer was William Sutton’s Why Love Shakespeare. Having once had the dubious pleasure of sitting through two hours of a recitation/performance of Finnegans Wake, I tend to be rather wary of the mnemonic artist species. Sutton’s show, however, is a delight and his love for Shakespeare’s sonnets, communicated in an obsessive and infectious manner, brings the Bard’s work to life afresh.

Sutton has not just studied, but memorised the sonnets and his feats of memory are more than impressive. Why Love Shakespeare is a great feel good encounter with the poetry and should be compulsory for all reluctant and not so reluctant students of Shakespeare.

Other highlights of the festival included Tuesdays and Sundays by Dual Minds and Scapegoat by Wishbone. Both are highly acclaimed, award winning shows from last year’s Edinburgh Fringe.

Tuesdays and Sundays written and performed by Daniel Arnold and Medina Hahn is a teenage loveat-first-sight story set in a sleepy Canadian community in 1887. The plot has a twist, but on the whole the play strays little from convention, and is ultimately a rather sweet and, at times, mawkish story. The claustrophobic space of Studio Rubin suited the production well and the staging was wisely simple. The strength of Tuesdays and Sundays however, is undoubtedly the actors’ seamless engagement with their roles—performed with compelling energy and obvious enthusiasm.

Wishbone are the winners of the Total Theatre Award 2002 and if you’ve experienced Scapegoat you’ll know why. Wishbone relate their peculiar little narrative visually, verbally and physically through innovative use of stage space. By employing two screens which are raised and lowered, Scapegoat is cleverly structured around perspectival play. Quotes are projected onto the screens which counterpoint the action glimpsed when the screens are partially raised or lowered.

While the performance is ostensibly in English, the actors strongly rely on physical communication and a mixture of other language fragments to comic effect. Wishbone is certainly a group to watch out for again and will hopefully return to Prague soon.

Of course no Fringe would be complete without a few, to put it kindly, less successful moments.

Robert Karper’s That’s Me on the Left in the Parka a hybrid of cabaret and confessional, lost pace somewhere in the middle. Lots of family snaps, pop psychology, a piano, an accordian and lederhosen…. In the cramped space of Studio Damúza, Theatre De Los Monos’s The Trouble With Joan Antith laboured a point about writing and madness, with musicians, actors, props, and video projections. The result—an unhappy mixture of psychotherapy, literary pretense and Oasis— which really was the antithesis of good theatre.

Luckily, survivors’ spirits were swiftly lifted by the bizarre improvised antics of Divadlo Demago’s Paví kroky / Peacock’s Pace. In spite of being rather difficult to fathom, Peacock’s Pace hilariously achieved something with a towel, a straw hat and some paper butterflies, that the four piece band and high tech projections of Joan Antith lacked entirely.

The Prague Quadrennial (13-29 June) is obviously an event of a different order. Principally an exhibition of scenography, set and costume design and theatre architecture, the Quadrennial also involved performances in the central hall of the Industrial Palace in Prague’s exhibition grounds.

actors moved through the audience addressing their lines to whoever was closest. On the first day the play happened round a table, on the second, at the side of the hall. The result was a dynamic and moving engagement with a play that could easily be dry and lifeless.

With the Bouda Project (10-27 June) offerings of Schwab, Kane and Müller, the Prague Fringe and the Quadrennial, experimental theatre is certainly alive and well in Prague this summer—long may it keep the “deadly theatre” at bay.

Omnipresent Cell Phones (Sarah Kane: Faidra (Z lásky) [Phaedra’s Love] at the National Theatre/Bouda, Prague. Translated: Jaroslav Achab Haidler; Directed: Petr Tyc; Set design: Petr Matásek; Costumes: Andrea Králová; Music: David Vrblík; Dramaturgy: Lenka Kolihová Havlíková. Czech premiere: June 16, 2003.)

—review by Jitka Pelachová Bouda—The Shack—is a project of the National Theatre in Prague. At the end of the season, three premieres of work by three contemporary playwrights, not previously staged in the Czech Re-

Eva Salzmannová & Saša Rašilov in Sarah Kane’s Phaedra’s Love. Photograph by Hana Smejkalová, 2002 While the exhibits were certainly extensive, to a lay audience it was this central area—dubbed the heart of PQ—which attracted the most sustained interest. Dedicated to the senses, the heart of PQ was the site of various performances, installations and lectures. Although some of the interpretive dance, noise making and physical theatre seemed to revisit a 1960s and 70s era more than give the conventional any sort of heart attack, there seemed to be a strong sense of inclusivity and fun among participants and visitors in the midst of what often appeared rather chaotic. And it’s not everyday you get to see a group of performers tie pancakes to their faces and then eat them off each other...

The PQ also significantly included the first performance of a Sarah Kane play in English in the Czech Republic. Kane, though still highly controversial, is widely claimed to be one of the most innovative and powerful British playwrights of the 1990s. Often grouped with “new” playwrights like Mark Ravenhill, Anthony Neilson, Patrick Marber and others under Aleks Sierz’s label In-YerFace theatre, Kane’s work has been coming to attention in the Czech Republic over the last couple of years. This year alone there have been productions of two of her five plays—4.48 Psychosis and Phaedra’s Love—in Prague. The Tricklock Company from Alburquerque in New Mexico gave three performances of Crave at the PQ. As with all Kane’s work, the territory of the play is that of a contemporary code of trauma. Crave’s four speakers return compulsively to dislocated memories, fragments of stories and volleys of conversation which may or may not concern the other speakers. And in contrast to Kane’s earlier plays (Blasted, Phaedra’s Love, Cleansed), traumatic or painful events are suggested but are always approached tangentially, are touched upon and recede again amid the layers of voices. For the first two performances at least, Tricklock avoided the massive PQ stage and used different locations in the hall to great effect. Rather than flattening the play into disembodied voices, as in their first production in the Traverse Theatre Edinburgh, the

public, took place in a small building on Ovocný trh, built solely for this occasion in the city centre. They were Heiner Müller’s Hamlet/Machine, Werner Schwab’s Faust: My Chest: My Helmet, and Phaedra’s Love by one of the most discussed playwrights of present days—Sarah Kane.

The producers of the latter mise-en-scène (Petr Tyc and Lenka Kolihová Havlíková) have chosen a very compact approach to the text. On the one hand, this is something that we are often unsuccessfully trying to find in many contemporary productions; on the other hand, it is also the reason why they have chosen to depart from Kane’s text in many ways.

The set (Petr Matásek) as well as the costumes (Andrea Králová) remind us of the mythological origin of Phaedra’s story (why is this not reflected in the other components of the mise-enscèneas well?). A paved floor brings us into an ancient building—a residence of the royal family. The damaged walls and doors bear testimony to the length of time which has passed since the inhabitants last cared for something other than themselves. The situation of spiritual and physical abandonment is echoed by a diminutive maquette of an ancient temple set in the background.

The “music” (David Vrbík) is a compilation of fragments from various TV and broadcast programmes in different languages (English, French …). In the opening scene, Phaedra (Eva Salzmannová) discusses Hippolytus’s (Saša Rašilov or Marko Igonda) “condition” with his doctor (Petr Motloch). We understand from the text that they have known one another for a long time, yet Phaedra (unlike the physician) treats Hippolytus (with whom she has become pathetically in love) as a stranger. She is standing in a queenly pose, supported by several bamboo poles. She is not talking to the doctor, she is not communicating with him, he does not reveal anything new for her. Yet, at times when the doctor becomes personal, she loses her stability and the support of her poles (but soon, these are restored by her servants). Her costume is a combination of a queen’s robe and a

whore’s cheap finery. As well as the costumes of all the other major characters, hers is also stylised in a single colour—dark red.

In the second scene, the problem of interpersonal communication is handled in a different way—the one familiar from Hollywood movies.

Phaedra’s daughter, Strophe (Hana Ševèíková), (dressed in a blue costume combining contemporary teenage fashion and ancient motifs) is introduced as an ordinary teenage girl, who is happy that her mother asks her for a piece of advice as if they were classmates. But behind the glitter of this ideal mother-daughter relationship is a deep lack of comprehension. The “form” of their relationship has grown more important than the content, to such extend that there is no content left. In the same manner, Strophe “persuades” Phaedra to forget about Hippolytus and helps her regain her emotional stability with the support of those symbolic bamboo poles—but all of them fall apart when Phaedra is left alone.

Hippolytus was present in the background from the very beginning, tied to his bed with a white bed sheet, surrounded by McDonald’s paper bags, hamburger wrappers and a big cup of popcorn, watching Hollywood movies. The epitome of consumer society—a theme which winds through the entire production. And this is where the producers have (from my point of view) departed from the text and Kane’s character of Hippolytus. We have heard about his depression and inability to communicate, but we encounter a bored and spoiled youngster who has everything he pleases but cannot obtain any satisfaction because there is nothing left to desire. He is rude, hostile, malign and bitter. He finds delight in taunting the others (both physically and psychically), but all this is only an outer shell, an image, a mask he presents to the world. Is Sarah Kane’s Hippolytus indeed so “hollow”? I think this is one the modifications the authors have made to accommodate their conception. It has to be admitted, however, that they have backed their intention (and thus vindicated themselves) in a number of ways. For example, the part of the dialogue between Phaedra and Hippolytus, where Hippolytus tells his stepmother that Strophe had sex both with him and with Theseus, is left out. This way, when Hippolytus then tells Strophe that he has revealed the secret, we understand that he really only wants to do harm to people, and that he has not done so merely because Phaedra “should know.”

The scene of Hippolytus and the priest (Petr Motloch) is again full of allusions to the problems of contemporary society. In this case not only consumerism, but the role-playing which dominates everyday life. The priest initiates their conversation while sitting among the audience.

(What a beautiful ambiguity: He surprises Hippolytus, who—after having found out about Phaedra’s death—has decided to leave and is now heading towards the theatre entrance, covered with a transparent red curtain. It seems as if he were heading directly to hell (the outside world?), and the priest thus saves him from reaching the destination. However, during their discourse about the existence of God, it is exactly this “hell’s” direction that Hippolytus is facing while addressing God.) During their dialogue, Hippolytus first exchanges places with the priest literally—he takes the priest’s seat among the audience—and they finish by exchanging their roles. It is now Hippolytus who is interrogating the priest, while using the latter’s own weapons against him. However, forms of social critique are present in this scene in yet another way. The priest starts praying and nothing—not even the rude statements addressed to him from Hippolytus—can disturb him, but for his ... cell phone.

The producers have approached the final scene (of Phaedra’s funeral and Hippolytus’s execution) as a metaphor of people’s tendency towards excessive idolatry. As a means to this end, they have combined a typical, interactive TV show and elements of demagogy. Again, this would not work if the authors stuck to the original text and did not introduce modifications concerning Theseus’s (Petr Motloch) being incognito in the crowd.

There is nothing worse than to leave the theatre asking oneself: what did the producers want to say? But that is definitely not the case with this inscenation. The producers have created a highly integrated production with above-average performances. And the final message? Theseus does not commit suicide, because he is disturbed by a cell phone. It is Hippolytus calling from “the other world” ... Well, there is no “up-there” nor “downthere,” CELL PHONES ARE UBIQUITOUS!

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Tel./Fax: +420 271 740 839 Email: review@shakes.cz Letter from Paris …

Adrian Hornsby And there are some who scorn this poésie de départs And say ‘Escape by staying where you are; A man is what he thinks he is and can Find happiness within.’ How nice to be born a man.

—Louis MacNeice, Letter to Anne & Graham Shepard Blue Moon I saw you standing alone Without a something of something Without a love of your own …

Blue Moon —American Standard …as it falls in ruins around me, or rather I within it: I am leaving in four days—first for England, and then New York. I am wondering what mark if any I will have left upon this city; I wonder which things that I have touched now stand changed. I wonder in particular about this apartment, which is the room my mind wakes up in, and must then distort if I am staying somewhere else. A film of it rests upon my lungs, and inside my skin. I wonder which shadows flung out by arguments and by the naked bulb are retained somehow in outline behind its blank and tacit walls. Memories hung upon the ceiling beams, sheetsketched impressions of my body in the bed … The sweat of gentle and terrified and empty nights permeating the mattress and stored there, inscribed on its threads like code. And do these things lift off and whisper in the sleeping ear of others the memories of those who slept there before? Will the next occupant take on my dreams, my fears, my sins?

My friend Jesse recently took on a small room above the apartment he shares with his wife—he wanted a study, rather I imagine in the tradition of the garden shed or garage workshop, as used by men to hide from their domestic selves. They live in the 18th among the hills of Barbès, which really is the best part of Paris for crack and African prostitutes and spiritual healing—a neat strike on behalf of the urban planners. This study, which must originally have been a maid’s room, squats under the eaves of the building: you follow a twisted and lightless corridor down as the walls close in and the ceiling plummets, and you reach a door to a room which were it to have rational dimensions would be some 2x4m. It is a fine attic for Jesse as Il Penseroso, with midnight lamp and books of arcane symbols. It was equally well-fitted for the crow’s nest from which his seedy predecessor viewed a decidedly seedy world, alternately through the disenfranchised equanimity of addiction, and from the appalled isolation of a prostitute’s arms. From his window on the seventh floor each moaning Paris night was like a beaker,

20

shaken up to him and offered; glinting, crystallised, expecting even …. Lurid with sin. What Jesse found when first he went in was a clutter of unassociated bits of wood, underlying indiscriminate putrefaction, and a wrecked bed hanging from its legs in a posture both of shame and aggressive defiance. The walls the walls were running. The stench ethyl, inorganic, overpowering.

Will I take on the dreams of he who slept here?

Jesse asked. Or those paid to sleep with him?

Being a self-defined cafeteria guy he went to work on the clean-and-clear with pleasant optimism, and with equal cheer accepted his wife’s suggestion that he should have the place exorcised. To find his man took no more than trip to the local métro stop (felicity of the 18th) where he picked up a card for a nearby Marabout of Fame. A telephone call established that a few throws of the beads upon the right kind of mat and with a well placed imprecation would do the job. Need to Marabout come to the room? No, it could all be handled well enough from the comfort of his own apartment. Should Jesse go over there? Yes, and as it happened he was free right now; they could clean it all up—ontologically at least—in the next half-hour. 30 euros —? 30 euros seemed more than reasonable.

Jesse went over to a cuboid tenement round the back of Chateau Rouge. His Marabout lived on the fourth floor at the back of a corridor guarded by a huge German Alsatian, which seemed utterly dead save for a menacing redspike erection. Jesse steps gingerly over the dog to reach the door. The Marabout seems conscientious and eager to work—he is all ready in caftan and tarboosh, though from other oddments around the flat it seems he part-time plumbs on the side. He knows this kind of situation well, and seems confident of success as he shakes then casts the beads.

But oh. Oh dear oh dear. Hm. Jesse looks to the seven or eight beads scattered lightly upon the mat. Well they seem very bright. Nothing broken—one missing? he proffers. He cannot help feeling the edge of his teeth with his tongue. The Marabout shakes his head gravely. The situation is a good deal worse than he had expected—what they can achieve here is little more than a diagnosis. In reality he can see no way round it but to take eight white goats and slaughter them in the study-room as soon as—eight! but Jesus you could fit in no more than three at a squeeze—now market-day was coming soon and fortunately he happened to know a guy—and I’ve only just done cleaning the floor—a particular farmer, now white goats I admit are a little more expensive—I’m really not sure how you’d even get them up to the seventh floor— 2000 euros all in. Now Jesse as I mentioned earlier is a stout and self-confessed cafeteria guy, but a vision of the old and clinging presence of former filth whipped up by the dancing ghosts of eight white goats was too much, and while the 2000 did seem, well almost modest

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For other payment options, visit www.shakes.cz/plr or contact review@shakes.cz for such a service, he really had to … and to consult with his wife first—yes of course 30 euros for the consultation, gosh was that the—well he really had to, and backing up —Christ! that damn dog again. There really is something very menacing about a beast with noselegstail slinked to the ground and the sex still up like that. The day was hot but even so …

I have since visited Jesse in his unexorcised study, which is now cleaned and cleared and refilled with the clutter of unassociated bits of wood, underlying indiscriminate junk, and wrecked books hanging from their covers in postures both of shame and of aggressive defiance.

His wife bustles beneath and feeds their baby, who is named after a small bright fruit.

On Saturday I am going to the wedding of a cousin of mine. She is to be married in a compound somewhere among the hills of Swindon, notable not even for their lack of the spectacular.

The place is one just for marriages with a concrete church and pastor, and a worm-shaped putyou-up off the side for reception dinnerdrink affairs. They offer a very compact little deal, with the great advantage that you can have a perfectly serviceable church wedding without the demands of belonging to a localised parish community. It is a great favourite I understand of divorcees who have alienated, or at least rendered sceptical, their home-town vicar with one failed marriage, but want to have a crack at the second before God all the same. This though is not the case with Sophie and Tim: they are young and fresh and full of uncut sensible love, but have moved about a bit and not developed a relationship with any one particular priest. And so to the hills of Swindow with them. They are both area managers for Tesco, and share every chance of rising peg for peg with each other to become regional managers for Tesco, as their marriage matures. Children no doubt—though not too soon. Sophie’s father, who is an uncle of mine through unnumbered refractions of blood and marital bonds has a brain tumour—indeed has had a brain tumour for the last nine or ten years. I discovered this when I saw him last April for the first time in nine or ten years. He was sitting down and I offered him my hand, which to our acute and mutual embarrassment he was unable to get up and shake. The rest of the visit was a genuine atrocity of social maintenance—I all the time wondering what had happened that he had changed so much, and he freshly conscious of quite how much that was. It is the kind of brain tumour which only gets worse.

There is a steady deterioration for an unpredictable number of years (Jeff at first continued working, then went part-time, then no-time) cut off by a sudden and drastic drop into what can be called the near-to state. Jeff had his sudden drastic drop last week. He had an operation to remove a piece of the brain but subsequent infections have complicated things, and he is now

on oxygen and tracheotomies and a whole room of shiny and beeping machines. The idea seems to be to keep things beeping through past Saturday, when his daughter is to be married in the concrete church with pastor in-between pairs of divorcees. I am troubled by this and ask my mother what she thinks about it (she worked as a hospital doctor for most of her death-beriddled days and so is familiar with these kinds of things). I wonder if it would not be best to get the death of her father out of the way first rather than have it hang over the whole ceremony and subsequents.

But that would mean a bride-in-mourning, which could be seen to be inappropriate. I think it better to make the husband a new chapter rather than have the honeymoon subsumed into worrying about when her father will finally wink out into the night. Why are they keeping him alive? Sophie might have put the wedding back a few months—after all they have been living together for four years, but no, she is determined to have the party. It had been planned so far in advance and they have booked the concrete and everything—who could have known the sudden and drastic drop would happen right now? And what to do with him? Does he want to be extant for his daughter’s wedding; is he holding on for that? It is very common for people to die in the week after their birthday, or the Queen’s Jubilee, or the final part of a television series. They hold on for something —, and then leave off. I had barely considered Jeff. I had barely considered what might be still there and wanting in that squeezed and cicatrised brain of his. I imagine it as a beaten steak hanging inside his skull. And now that he is suddenly alive too I wonder what marks of his will be left in the hospital room, or echoing through the soft and shiny machines which will pronounce him dead, or slumped into the walls of the house in which he held his deterioration, and where since his departure the water tank has started leaking, and destroyed the pink colour scheme he always hated so much. What room does his mind wake up in, and do others wake up there too? And how many bridewhite goats are needed for the wedding, and how much rain?

And so I wonder about these things as I am leaving Paris and my friend Jesse and his wife and child, first for England to go to my cousin’s wedding on Saturday, and then New York where I will see my ex-fiancé. She is the other argumentflung shadow upon the wall, and the other sheetsketched inscription upon the bed. And I ask before I close the door, which among preexisting things that I have touched now stand changed. I ask, and then close the door. And leave for the next occupant whatever can’t be heard of my dreams, my fears, my sins.

Paris July 2, 2003