what I’m reading

HYPERREALISM

Mircea Cărtărescu: Solenoid (Deep Vellum Press 2024) translated from the Romanian by Sean Cotter

Georgi Gospodinov: The Physics of Sorrow (Liveright) translated by from the Bulgarian by Angela Rodel

Aristotle: Poetics a new translation from Greek (somewhat) by Anthony Kenny

These two Eastern Europeans are taking literature back to magic and forward to its highest mission. They are reconnecting the novel to where Borges, Queneau, Eco, Dali, De Andrade and Marquez left it burning. It was an unattended fire almost extinguished by the streams of piss from memoirists. There is no blame here: the victims couldn't hold it any longer, their bladders burst into language. The language of memoirs is the frayed prose of therapy, which can clothe real victims, but also fakes. Every human is a traumatized victim for every reason imaginable, but memoir peddlers victimize readers, and worst of all, they bore children. Unfortunately, trauma-ramas sell and mint new writers who pass on the counterfeit currency of mindless language to the unsuspecting. The therapy memoir is the new pornography posing as the enemy of the old pornography, now online. There will always be consumers. And then there is Cărtărescu and Gospodin, descendants of Sheherezade, Ovid, Dante, the Bhagvad Gita, Cervantes, Rabelais and Lautreamont. They have burst into the crowd of pissing memoirists with the sturm und drang of their imaginations. These writers are holding on to the raft of poetry, they are the survivors of a cataclysm, and because they are survivors they are also memoirists. In other words, they activate  the awareness of trauma in the language of hyper attention, a language protected from harm by imagination. They rarely piss on themselves, but when they do they are sure to break your heart. There is no cure, there is no cure for love... So listen, readers: the new magic hyper-realists are taking back the light. The inclusion of Aristotle's Poetics in this company is to remind alert readers that poetry is the high art that knows how to talk about the new-old art of these magic hyper-realists.

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CHARLES BERNSTEIN'S GPS

"Recalculating" by Charles Bernstein (The University of Chicago Press, 2013)

 When they are not being performed, Charles Bernstein's poems are on the edge of performance. But they don't start that way. They start as notes from a mind that is never still, fueled by extensive reading, a constant regimen like a diet or a job. He reads the newspapers, the mail, and the philosophers. He talks on the telephone. This activity is divided between the pleasure of finding something new, the recasting of a text in a grotesque or alien context, stripping it for a good idea, and talking it out. Talking or thinking it out loud is a beta performance that may later be transcribed. His interlocutors could be dead (books) or alive (friends). Bernstein's engine is also revved up by an epistolary practice or lit up by a Jewish joke. Addressed to a a respondent, the "you" could also be anyone, so the "you" is automatically intimate. A joke often tips his thoughts into performance. When he is moved to perform, the transcription aligns itself in a poem, and a sound machine orders the words to his particular music.

 The mind of Charles Bernstein is local, but the locality moves with an ever-changing present, a circumstantial circus that needs to amuse or outrage him. Or else. A bored Bernstein you don't want to see. But performance is a slippery slope, it is rarely (if ever) totally successful. Sometimes, a text on autopilot pleases the audience, but embarasses the poet. Ideas are not as risky in notes, but if the notes stretch into essays the form can smother their spark. Fitting a good idea into any form runs the risk of the idea drowning in the form, and becoming irrecoverable in retrospect. How many ideas, not just Bernstein's, have disappeared in their genres? Great ideas are so tender they disappear on their bookshelf classifications. In bookstores I lose interest in sections labeled Essays or Fiction or Poetry. I still trust the alphabet, if only because there is mystery in its apparent disorder. Why are Berkson, Bergson and Bernstein together? Where are Baudelaire, Berlin and Bachelard? Somebody bought their books, leaving the other B's to huddle together. Call it a hazard of the market, or a game by ghosts. Next week it will be a different crowd.

 POMPEII

 The rich men, they know about suffering

That comes from natural things, the fate tha

Rich men say they can't control, the swell of

The tides, the erosion of the polar caps

And the eruption of a terrible

Greed among those who cease to be content

With what they lack when faced with wealth they are

Too ignorant to understand. Such wealth

Is the price of progress. The fishmonger

Sees the dread on the faces of the trout

And mackerel laid out at the market

Stall on quickly melted ice,]. In Pompeii

The lava flowed and buried the people

So poems such as this could be born.

This performance embarasses Bernstein, but it lands with the audience. I extracted this at random, by opening the book, titled somewhat apologetically, somewhat defiantly, "Recalculating." If the GPS led from a thought about economy to environmental disaster and to the fish market where the iced catch makes surrealist faces, it is because the poet can't stop himself. The avalanche is inevitable and pedestrian, the metaphor is awakwardly collaged, and the last line is apologetic (sort of.) It's not the poet's fault that the GPS is defective. It would not be difficult to trace this poem to its notes: wealth, decadence, disaster, fish and poetics. The price of fish these days! Check the iPhone Notes: the sources are there intact, not filed down to fit in a poem to be performed. This is not just about Bernstein, but literature sui generis. Ideas are constantly menaced by the bandits of convention. They threaten it as it travels, like a carriage in Stendahl. The woods on either side of the road are filled with murderous Essays, Novels, and Villanelles. To take an idea safely to wherever it might lead it must continually be on guard against capture by well-trained forms. An idea must be ready to do battle with every idea that resembles it, even with its twin. In the case of "Pompeii" we can watch a desperate struggle to escape from predictable capture, and its surrender in the last line.

 Here are other texts from "Recalculating" that reference the conflict between thought and performance at deeper levels:

 "The truth of the poem is neither in the representation nor the expression. Its truth dwells in what has never been and what will never be. Where possibility and impossibility collide, here the poem is forged."

"Digital poetry 2003: in 1975, everyone was worried about the idea that language is code; in 2003, everyone is worried that code is language."

The first note here is the thought in its almost pristine transcription. "Almost" because the last sentence is obligatory, a reminder that Bernstein has a job theorizing. That a poem is "forged" is an inconvenient truth, but not a revelation. That the forgery happens where the possible meets the impossible is not news either, though it bears some reflection. Where is that place? A street corner in Paris at sunset? We know what the possibility is wearing (a frock sonnet, a fractured lines dress) but what is the impossibility (Jack the Ripper, a shadow, a bodiless contradiction?) And why does our Parisian sonnet meet the mysterious impossibility in an understandable sentence? Why does this encounter between a known form and a shapeless phantom "forge" a poem? The answer is circular: we are trying to understand what a poem is because that is our job: poetics.

The second note attempts to inject some heft into the final canole-shell sentence in the first note. It establishes a timeline for a process (progress?) of language. It is approximate despite its dating. "Everyone" is Bernstein's friends, or, more generously, the philosophers he was reading. But were they really "worried" that language is a code? Seems to me that since the beginning of language, everyone everywhere knew that language is a code. What else can symbols be? More interestingly, we would like to know what about this code we call "language" was "everyone" worried about in 1973. I suspect that in 1973 everyone we knew and read, was paranoid. The codes of language were read in a paranoid key, justified by all the social horrors around us. This is also the year when The "Language School," a poetry society led in part by Charles Bernstein, upset all the poets not belonging to it. In retrospect, the poets of the Language School, were not so much "worried," asintoxicatedbythe discovery of language codes, aided by the poetic philosophies of the French deconstructionists, Foucault, Derrida, DeLeuze, Jabès, etc. Edmond Jabès was possibly Charles Bernstein's chief inspiration in his thinking about language, writing and Jewish identity. Also, published in 1973 was "The Theory of Communicative Action" by Jurgen Habermas, a book that may have been read by the more Left-leaning members of the Language group.  Habermas discussed the role of rational discourse in social institutions. And thus was the old rift between French poetics and German rationalism duplicated in miniature by American poets.

In 2003, "everyone" (a considerably larger group) was "worried" that code was language. That is definitely a graver thing to be worried about. That year it became visible to many people that numbers were shedding the layers of culture and meaning that words had acquired during their ages of use. Without the weight of centuries of reference, the codes became versatile enough to reprogram the human archives and to, eventually, create another history of humanity, based on numbers not on accrued meanings. In 2024, there is no need to worry any longer. Code has rewritten the future, and is in the process of rewriting the archives. Charles Bernstein second note is perfect. It nails one stage of the process, it identifies the second, and it points to the next.

Charles is occasionally Baudelaire, but he is always Witgenstein.

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Joel Dailey: New Details Emerge (New Books, 2023) The marriage of the quotidian with the unbelievable was never better done by anyone:

My awareness is expanding/ Does it make me look fat?

Jim Feast: Karl Marx, Private Eye, a novel (PM Press, 2023) Embedded in this Victorian noir like a razor blade in a Snickers bar is Karl Marx, PI dialectically activated to the task. Reminds us of Hegel in Queneau

John Kruth: Bed Crumbs (Jackalope Press, 1986), The Perfumed Firecracker (jackalope Press, 1988) Poems and stories fresh like a peach from a great musician:

MISS AMERICA: standing in line/at the supermarket/i noticed a herd of bison/grazing in your hair

Embodied Unconscious: the feminine space of sexuality, surrealism, and experimentation in literature, an anthology from the Naropa archive, Edited with an introduction by C.M.Chaddy (Spuyten Duyvil, 2023)

A rich compendium of lectures on female poets transcribed from the rich archives of Naropa University. Each lecture is introduced with an essay by a graduate scholar of this unique institution. Collected here are lectures on Mina Loy, Loraine Niedecker, Gertrude Stein and other poets, delivered in the 1980s and 90s by Joanne Kyger, Jane Augustine and other faculty. This is an interesting direction in the poetics of Naropa’s Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics where the mainstream teaching is the Beat and New York School. Feminism and surrealism are natural allies of that mainstream, but it’s refreshing to see them accorded focused attention. The immense Naropa Archives will birth other important critical and creative perspectives in the future: stay tuned

Poesis International 31, 2023, edited by Claudiu Komartin. Romania’s foremost poetry magazine. Translations from Czeslaw Milosz and Aleksander Wat, poetry by upcoming lyric lions, essays on poetry by Radu Vancu and Ruxandra Cesereanu, and sophisticated notes and interviews about the international poetry scene. Worth learning Romanian for

Valery Oisteanu, Cât ai clipi din al treilea ochi, (Editura Muzeul Literaturii Române, 2023) The renowned basso profundo of Lower East Side surrealism takes its depth charges to the language he was born in. With his own collages

Thich Nhat Hahn, no death, no fear (Riverhead Books) My friend Marie Cox gifts me books of poetry and wisdom now and then. This is one of them. I ask, “What’s up for me this week?” open to pg 61 and read: “Taking New Forms: When we lose someone we love, we should remember that the person has not become nothing. ‘Something’ cannot become ‘nothing’ and ‘nothing’ cannot become ‘something’ … matter cannot be destroyed — it can become energy.” Horrible oracle, hopefully wrong, but of course true. One of the things people you love become is guardian angels that zoom around your head to keep you moving. That’s the palliative “something.” Good for you. Then there is the “something” the missing become: that’s more H. Bosch, depending on what and how much you had to do with the missing “someone.” If your conscience is clear (i.e, you didn’t kill them) then they can be any “something” your better nature craves. But if you had even a smidgeon of responsibility for their missing, they grow a claw and a horn for every measure: a gram=one claw + horn, ten grams= claw + horn+ fur. For every added gram the “something” graduates its horror, it catches fire at one kg. Don’t mean to scare you, but it’s not all Hegel. Depends on how much you miss them, and how much you miss them depends on how much you did to make them go missing. Sophie’s Choice was Sophie’s, no matter how many nazis stood over her. She could have chosen to go missing herself, but then she’d have created two loved ones who missed her. That everyone will eventually go missing is no consolation to the “somethings” looking for what they were.

NB: I will check up later on these oracular readings to see how right or wrong they were

FOUND ON THE STEPS

Readers in my neighborhood put books they’ve read on the steps outside their homes to be taken by anyone interested — some of these books are so new they are still in their plastic wrappers, while others are swollen with marginalia (or rain and snow if weather is quicker than me.) I have built a separate shelf for the library I call FOUND ON THE STEPS, not because I want these books to live together in rejected (or philantropic) harmony, but because the majority of them are books I felt that I should have read at the time of their publication, but didn’t, and was thrilled when they disappeared from the news because then I didn’t have to read them. In other words, all the books on this shelf are an ongoing archive of my (slight) guilt at not having kept up with certain contemporary writers en vogue for the five minutes writers are allowed to be in vogue — these books are my repressed bon-ton obligation to keep up. This would be but a venal sin if the books on the steps were only new writing, but there are classics there too, in new translations or, worse, boxed old ones, like Oscar Wilde and Turgenev, who are the holes in my education that like holes in my shoes should never be seen by the beau monde. Picking free books off my neighbors’ steps is a furtive activity because of this field of hole-riddled ignorance: what if the ex-owners of these books are looking through a fold in their curtains at me, and gauge my level of cultural imposture in order to gloat at parties. “He’s a writer? He hasn’t even read Wilde? Not to speak of Karl Ove Knausgård!” Ok, then. This section, FOUND ON THE STEPS, is intended to survey books I picked up from your steps, my neighbors, briefly reviewed in retrospect, with mea culpas in the holes they are missing from, or self congratulatory notes to my holes for remaining correctly unfilled. There is nothing random and little escapes foresight. You force me to be au courant in the past, and I will try to see if I was right not to read them. The books themselves are either from the aforementioned shelf or from future plunder

Norman O. Brown, Love’s Body (Vintage, 1968) Quote from Freud: “The command to sleep in hypnosis means nothing more nor less than order to withdraw all interest from the world and to concentrate it upon the person of the hypnotist” (pg 122) Freud is relevant in the age of Trump and dictators employing the screens that are their eyes. Written at a time when dictators didn’t have the myriad of eyes they have now (to gaze into their subjects) this is one for Ziggy. How about Norman? “Intercourse is what goes on in the sentence. In every sentence the word ‘is’ is the copula, the penis or the bridge; in every sentence magically, with a word, making the two one flesh.” Oh, Norman O. Brown, you dick! What word in the sentence is the vagina? One dick a two does not make. I was right not to read you then. Freud 1, Brown 0.