Deploying Disgust

Yago Feliz makes use of Michael Sowa's disturbing painting entitled Invitation to represent discomfort in Christian-Muslim relations. I'm not sure that this is the first thing that would have occurred to me, but given that we must all sit together at the same table, he does have a good point. Anyway, your chair is waiting, and whatever you do, watch out for that little dog. If you click on the picture, you'll see what I mean.

Cold are the hands of time that creep along relentlessly, destroying slowly but without pity that which yesterday was young.
Alone, our memories resist this disintegration as we grow more lonely with the passing years.

                               -- Preston Sturges, The Palm Beach Story, 1942

[Michael Sowa's painting is entitled Untitled. Click upon it to embiggen.]

The Long View

I prefer to avoid re-blogging, but Brad DeLong’s entry for March 26th “The Long View” is surely worth disseminating for further contemplation:


If all goes well in China and India in the next generation—and if nothing goes catastrophically wrong in the rich post-industrial North Atlantic core of the global economy—then the next generation will see a real milestone. For the first time ever more than half of the world will have enough food not to be hungry and worry about famine, enough shelter not to be wet and worried about trenchfoot, enough clothing not to be cold and worried about hypothermia, and enough medical care not to be worried that they and the majority of their children will die of microparisites well short of their biblical three-score-and-ten years. The big problems of the bulk of humanity will then be those of finding enough conceptual puzzles and diversions in their work and play lives so as not to be bored, enough relative status not to be green with envy of their fellows—and, of course, avoiding and quickly disposing of the thugs who used to have spears and will have cruise missiles and H-bombs who have functioned as macroparasites infecting humanity ever since the first farmers realized that now that they had crops, running away into the forest was no longer an option.


Matt Yglesias quotes Brad as well, but many of his commenters, worried about collapsing global ecologies, remain unconvinced. And of course if you're a poet, I'm afraid you're screwed no matter what happens.

German bookfans are still locked in furious debate over a new best-seller by a 17-year-old high school drop-out who was nominated for the Leipzig Book Prize this month. Helene Hegemann’s Axolotl Roadkill has sold over 100,000 copies, and since this kind of fame is forbidden to ordinary mortals, let alone to crabby middle-aged writers trying against great odds to scarf a living from their work, literary detectives descended upon the book like flies on cow-plop, and they quickly discovered it contained—quelle horreur! —a variety of passages lifted (actually lightly re-written) from online German blogs.

Helene, who considers San Francisco writer Kathy Acker one of her influences, defended her obviously successful methods, asserting that cut-ups, collage, sampling of existing texts are interesting and legitimate artistic and literary techniques. Her publisher agreed and the book was duly entered in the Leipzig competition.

Critics meanwhile cried plagiarism, and a veritable shitstorm of commentary has thundered through the press, at least in Germany and England, with allegations of literary shoplifting flying around like ninja throwing-stars. If I view matters correctly, the debate has proved to be of more interest than the book which started it. (German pet-shop owners have also profited: the sale of axolotls—a Mexican species of chameleon—have reportedly skyrocketed this winter.)

One of Helene Hegemann’s defenders argues that if the repeated processing of standard melodies by jazz musicians were subject to the same scrutiny, there would be no jazz. Most agree that plagiarism is odious, but the problem is that given the incredible rate of information-exchange on the Internet, how could writers possibly hope to avoid plagiarizing someone, let alone being plagiarized themselves?

If you read a half-dozen blogs a day, aren’t some of those thoughts and formulations going to become a part of your own, and how could one formally credit their original appearance to begin with? If you rip off a blogger’s ideas or language, how do you know they weren’t ripped off from someone else? After all, nobody owns language, and if you spread your ideas and self-projected memes among the digitized public, how can you expect to control them?

A larger theoretical issue is that of intertextuality, a term created by Julia Kristeva in 1966 alluding to the ways in which a given text necessarily references others. Enlarged upon by pomo critics in various contexts, the concept is rather spongy, but it does generally argue that texts do not emanate in 19th-century authorial  fashion from the mind of some hyper-talented genius. Instead they emerge from other texts that precede, and mix it up with whatever texts have influenced the perception of the reader. In other words, texts do not exist independently, and authorship is a complicated structure to say the least.

Helene should have credited her Internet sources, at least generally if not specifically, but the suspicion arises that her publisher forbade that for marketing reasons. The ensuing controversy now propels book sales to record levels. Despite the fortune she has accumulated, it appears to many that she has fallen victim to capitalism, rather than to have made any progress in opposing it, if that was her intention.

What makes this something of a cause célèbre is that a young author has blundered into the world of professional book publishing with the experience, modus operandi  and predelictions gained from the blogosphere. The result is a confrontation involving opposing ethical standards for writers, and indeed the practical course of their careers.

The simple fact is that people who write on the Internet need to embrace the idea that they will contribute to the information pool in which we are all swimming for the good of the community, while those writers scheming for fame and fortune should get themselves selected by a mainstream publishing house who make bucks off someone’s talent and who, like Disney Corporation or the music industry, have a team of lawyers at their disposal to save every dime that might get lost from copyright infringement.

Meanwhile, as we wait patiently for a mainstream U.S. publisher to cough up a translation of Axolotl Roadkill and market it in our nicht-Deutsch-sprechen (but nonethless recently health-reformed) republic, you can get an impression of our teen-aged punkgirl author from her MySpace page at http://www.myspace.com/lovelyskizze,
from which I have borrowed her photos. Personally I wish her every success and thank her for touching off the fascinating debate which revolves around her, but which clearly affects writers everywhere.

Vilhelm Hammershøi - Interior with Young Man Reading - 1898

What to Write about

It has been said, by someone far wiser than myself, that nobody is boring who is willing to tell the truth about himself. To narrow this down further, someone equally wise said that the things that make us ashamed are also the things that make us interesting.

                                                — Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby

Jakob van Hoddis: The End of the World

THE END OF THE WORLD

Hats fly off the pointy heads of citizens,
Shouts and screams shriek in the wind,
Roof-builders fall to the ground and and break in half,
And—so one reads— floodtides are rising along the coast.

The storm is here, wild seas leap ashore,
Crushing thick dikes.
Most everyone has caught cold.
Trains fall from the bridges.


This early poem by Jakob von Hoddis, his most famous, dates from 1911 and is seen by many as a tocsin for the expressionist era in German literature. What is innovative stylistically is the accumulation of separate images which don't seem to follow one another logically, but which taken together form an intelligible whole. The painting by Meidner illustrates the same principle.

Thematically, the poet stands apart from the apocalyptic events he has read perhaps in a newspaper or magazine, and his ironic stance is reinforced by contrasting these calamities with the mundane reactions of the bourgeoisie, whose nerveless reaction to the approaching end of the world is to lose their hats in the wind and catch cold. So you might read the poem as a critique of sensationalist journalism and its effect on a benumbed or stupified public.

It is interesting that because of the mixed metaphors, one hardly notices that the poem is cross-rhymed: abba, abab. The poet plays also with alliteration, as in the phrase dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.

Jakob van Hoddis was the pseudonym of Hans Davidsohn, born of a Jewish family in Berlin in 1887. He died in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. Here is the poem in German:

WELTENDE

Dem Bürger fliegt vom spitzen Kopf der Hut,
In allen Lüften hallt es wie Geschrei.
Dachdecker stürzen ab und gehn entzwei
Und an den Küsten – liest man – steigt die Flut.

Der Sturm ist da, die wilden Meere hupfen
An Land, um dicke Dämme zu zerdrücken.
Die meisten Menschen haben einen Schnupfen.
Die Eisenbahnen fallen von den Brücken.


The painting is by Ludwig Meidner, Apokalyptische Landschaft, 1913.

La Strada Combustabile

Entrance to Hell in San Francisco #789

An empty car garage on Clarion Alley here in the heart of the Mission District, you’re asking? And how much might the monthly rent be to get your brand new Ducati Multistrada 1200cc off the streets at night, you’re wondering?

Think again, my friend. The wiles of the Horned One are infinite in their variety and exigent in their terrible consequences. What might appear conventionally as a possible accommodation for your overpriced imported Italian motorcycle is in fact a cleverly disguised portal to La Strada Combustabile, a six-lane highway to Hell. Marauding gangs of demons burn rubber in and out of here after midnight, so I suggest you get back on your machine and ride it right back to Bernal Heights. 

Dodie Bellamy and the arrival of the "Mission School"

I’ve always thought that an art museum is like a zoo, where artworks instead of animals are held prisoner and displayed for public gawking at some extortionary admission price. Zoo animals behave like they've been lobotomized, but what's missing in the case of artworks is their history—how they tumbled forth from the mind the artist, how they were meant to be one thing and turned out another, and how the artist lived and worked in a community that nourished and sustained him/her. Sanitized of a context and paraded on display in a museum, an artwork loses its subjectivity, referencing an absent agent whose biography and community of friends seem to have gone missing. 

Dodie Bellamy backgrounds the hidden life of museum art beautifully in a recent  SFMoMA blogpiece. Speaking of the “impenetrable cleanliness of the institution,” and the corresponding lack of memory of the “living community that created the objects,” Dodie goes on to lament the impermanence of neighborhood art scenes in general, and her perceived vanishment of an artist community in the Mission in particular.

This aching after forgotten scenes and lost communities unfortunately does not abate with age. Writing recently about Bob Kaufman took me right back to Grant Ave in 1959, the year of my initial discovery of San Francisco. Where hundreds once gathered, nothing remains to remind but a few faded pages of print and a photo or two.

The Summer of Love 1967 on Haight Street proved life-changing. It was followed by the Castro era, which in many ways produced some extremely imaginative social and street-artsy behaviors--it wasn't just politics. There were mini-scenes elsewhere: on 24th Street in the 70’s, in the Lower Haight in the 80’s, on Valencia Street from the 90’s and after, intermittently also on Telegraph Avenue going back to the political 60’s and Café Med days, where poetry arguments often raged among total strangers.

It is a trick of the mind that if you are involved with a scene, it seems considerably more stable than it actually is. I can remember some hippie friends in 1967 talking about buying property in the Haight-Ashbury, thinking that the life of the community would endure for decades, so forceful the outbreak of a major cultural revolution seemed at the time.

The years of yuppification have all but put an end to low-rent neighborhoods and cheap places to eat, the essential requirement for artist scenes and popular culture movements in America since jazz music was born a century ago. As poets retreat from the streets to the "impenetrable cleanliness" of college classrooms, digitization fills local cafes with laptop zombies and young nerdlings chatting online to remote locations. People are now everywhere but here. Or as Gertrude Stein might put it, there’s no here here. It seems to have disappeared in a cloud of electrons. Certainly there’s hardly anyone left to chat with about obscure pieces of blues music over a cup of coffee or herbal tea.

Dodie remarks upon a cat with bladder problems at the Adobe Bookstore. I knew that cat, but I was more impressed by two others resident at the Aardvark on Church Street. The first was a somnolent tabby which sat meditatively on a stack of books on the counter and looked benevolently upon the proceedings but without a whole lot of inner involvement. And there was a black cat, which mostly didn’t like anyone, and would rise occasionally to stalk patrons around the store, rejecting strokes from all but a very few.