November 16, 2024

Entry 63: Communicating Vessels I

Surrealism in Paris
October 2024

Surrealism, as many of us had conceived of it for years, should not be considered as extant except in the a priori nonspecialization of its effort. I hope it will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and of love, of life for life and the revolution, and so on. —André Breton, Les Vases communicants (1932; English trans. 1990)

In the spirit of a thought experiment, I offer my time spent in Paris attending the International Society for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS) conference on Surrealism, one week before the American election, as charged with the co-presence of dream and reality. The first reality was Paris itself as elective site of a transformative moment—the 100th anniversary of the First Manifesto of Surrealism. Being in Paris at that time, as it condenses all time passing between that moment and the present, had the feeling of co-presence of many moments all aware of each other and on the same level though not directly in contact. The crowds going about their business under a gray sky, during a school holiday where there was some release of tension and many children and families on the street, were not in direct contact with us streaming in cab or Uber to specific destinations, for instance the conference venue at American University Paris (AUP). Those presenting in multiple rooms, with visual aids and in three languages, were not aware of the cabs or Ubers picking passengers up and dropping them off. Just so, the meticulously curated book display of surrealism was not aware of the content delivered above. The array of editions, including many facsimiles of original texts, had a remote and uncanny feeling, as with the difference between books being opened and closed. The conference, as site for special knowledge (of “specialists in revolt”), was removed from the “nonspecialization” of lifeworld unaware of it outside. … More

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October 4, 2024

Entry 62: The One Great Story

Remarks on Jameson and Narrative

Under any house is a basement of psychological dimensions, a surplus affective space. And as I read The Political Unconscious into the night, a sump pump in the basement would go on and off, shunting gallons of water out of its perpetual flood. An editor asked me for a theory of such drainage in the form of a critical review, which I refused as not entirely serious. —”Foxes,” Bad History, 60

The year is 1981. Carla Harryman and I are living in a working-class bungalow on Hampshire Street in San Francisco’s Mission District, competing with raccoon families and occasional gunshots to establish a relationship in an indeterminate time. Ronald Reagan has been elected, while the alternative arts are forging ahead on multiple agendas. Poets Theater is in full swing, with a character called “Jameson” in Kit Robinson’s play, as I discussed previously. Jameson has entered the Language and New Narrative debates and given his talk at 80 Langton Street, siding with Narrative while symptomatizing Language, but also has now published The Political Unconscious, a watershed work that would have long-term impact on questions of narrative and form. Jameson’s “questions of interpretation,” bringing together form and history, would anchor a more expansive, contextual methodology not confined to surface language—bypassing precisely the critique of Language’s dissociation of sensibility in the postmodern. The “turn to history” via poetic form begins right here. … More

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September 29, 2024

Entry 61: History Is What Hurts

Remarks on Jameson and Language

The media, for once, are getting it right: with the announcement of Fredric Jameson’s passing on September 22, one often sees a likeable photo of an engaged, outer-directed, smiling and welcoming, if prodigious and awe-inspiring scholar and critic in early or late days of his notable life and career. There is something of the Peaceable Kingdom in the intellectual devotion and worldly accomplishments evoked: “For Fredric Jameson, Marxist Criticism Was a Labor of Love,” per The New York Times. While Critical Theory, in both nature and practice, accentuates the negative, Late Jameson presents a beneficent gaze that is rarely encountered—especially with Marxists. The Grand Narrative of Progress Toward a Better Life seems activated by his very presence, a moment of positivity restored at the moment of loss. … More

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August 11, 2024

Entry 60: The Indexical Present II

The photo registers the scene: it is Ron Silliman reading, Krishna Evans following the text. Or perhaps Krishna is reading and Ron is following the text, as will be the case in a minute or two, as soon as Ron finishes his passage. The vantage point is from where I am sitting, having read my part some time ago and now listening as it continues. To the side are  Eliot D’Silva next to Ivan Sokolov; then to the right are Jen Hofer, leaning against the garage; Claire Marie Stancek is just behind the forked trunk of a tree; Jennifer Scappettone between the branches of the tree, and Jane Gregory, the host of the event, is to the far right. Continuing out of the picture one would encounter Lytle Shaw, whose elbow is just visible, and then next Syd Staiti on the stairs. Everyone is not especially solemn but bent to the task, reading Lyn Hejinian’s just published Fall Creek (Litmus Press), copies and xeroxes of which are out on the table. All of them have taken their turn. There are thirty-three sections, with Ron and Krishna reading the next-to-final two, before the group takes up the last section in unison. This was my proposal to the group at the break, recalling the pleasure of cacophony in our Grand Piano reading of “A”–24, whose plurivocality Lyn internalized and, some decades later, realized in one of her last works.  … More

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June 8, 2024

Entry 59: The Indexical Present I

Friday, May 17

Delta 361 DTW > SFO

Andrew Smith
Syd Staiti

The Lab
Small Press Traffic
Hal Foster, Unseen
@ Et al. Gallery

May 17 is a triangular nexus in my calendar: birthdays of Lyn Hejinian, Kit Robinson, and Kathleen Frumkin, often celebrated with light remarks about page turning and celestial inevitability. Now that has changed, while the date remains as an index. On that date, Carla Harryman and I determined to travel west, to reconnect and make new connections, prompted by Lyn’s passing but multi-tasking as usual. File under “persons”: “Leaving tomorrow AM for one-week tour of the West Coast (San Francisco, Alameda, Berkeley, San Diego), focusing on people, the best kind of travel,” I wrote on Facebook. But “persons” are an index as well, to their activity and the contexts that surround them. Thus we encounter them.

Andrew Smith, for instance, was a person not known to me—but it was a fine meeting. In his role as director of The Lab, he is the custodian, as it were, of its history as well as current reinventor of its mission. Space and time: The Lab was founded, I read, 39 years ago, which I know as one of my first promising students, Laura Brun, was its cofounder. At the time I was teaching—I think for three semesters, but it may have been two—for the Center for Experimental and Interdisciplinary Arts at San Francisco State. My credentials were minimal: emergent poet and editor making an uproar on the San Francisco scene, represented by readings and publications—reputational capital enough for contingent appointment, though it would not last (I remember the day I turned in my keys and ID after my appointment was not renewed). Nor would the program itself. But its success, and mine, was the students, memorably Laura—while a number are visible on social media and are doing things in the arts. Laura was dedicated to the cause, and she put in her time getting The Lab up and running at a storefront on Divisidero Street. Among the start-up arts spaces from the 70s and 80s—Capp Street, 80 Langton Street, Project Artaud, ATA—The Lab is one of the survivors, along with Small Press Traffic; many others have gone down. And Laura, too. … More

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May 5, 2024

Entry 58: Smithson and the Turn to Poetics

In a postscript to her major biocritical reassessment of Robert Smithson and his oeuvre (Inside the Spiral: The Passions of Robert Smithson), Suzaan Boettger recalls the arrival by mail of the just-published collection of The Writings of Robert Smithson (1979), edited by Nancy Holt and designed by Sol LeWitt. This watershed publication—at the boundary of literature and art, production and reception, content and design—truly launched Smithson into the “Domain of the Great Bear,” his art-historical destiny in the starry night. She sees it as a biographical convergence, writing in her copy:

“This book arrived in the mail on my birthday, 1979, as I was on my way to deliver my first lecture—on earthworks.” While I had prepared by reading Smithson’s texts published in periodicals, the collection’s appearance on the day of my lecture seemed nothing less than serendipitous. (339)

… More

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March 13, 2024

Document 104: Discrepant Analogy

“Discrepant Analogy:
Immanent Transpositions of Surrealism”

CALL FOR PAPERS/SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET

“Surréalismes Paris 2024
6th Conference of the International Society
for the Study of Surrealism (ISSS)
October 28–30, 2024 / pdf here … More

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March 3, 2024

Document 103: Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour

“Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour:
Destruction, Displacement, Emergence”

CALL FOR PAPERS/MULTI-SESSION PROPOSAL
SUBMIT BY MARCH 15, 12:00 P.M. CET

“Avant-Garde and War”
9th Conference of the European Network for
Avant-Garde and Modernism Studies (EAM)
Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland
September 17–19, 2024 / pdf here … More

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February 11, 2024

Document 102: Note on Conduit

“Conduit” (“Kanal svyazi”)
trans. Arkadii Dragomoshchenko and Vladimir Feshchenko
Vsealizm (Moscow), 11 February 2024

From Moscow, for the second week in a row, comes a new translation of my work into Russian—here, “Conduit” into “Kanal svyazi”—in preparation for a bilingual edition to appear, one hopes, later this year. This work, brought forward over decades and across continents, truly stands as a conduit in the distressed conditions of communication, between the “territories of the East” and the rest of the world assuredly, but more generally as “what we live.” As I wrote on receiving word of this wonder:

There was a line from a Poets Theater play, Third Man by Carla Harryman, early 80s, spoken by Eileen Corder: “Go ahead, Moscow—I’m listening!” That was transgressive in the Reagan Era; in the current moment, one listens carefully to say the least. And now this translation of my poem “Conduit” has appeared—it is all about receiving messages, and not letting them stand as commonplaces or placeholders but as samples of “systematic distortion.” It’s about the “systematic distortion” of communication as communication itself, which we experience every day.

… More

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January 27, 2024

Document 101: Loyal to Many Flags

And loveliness?
Death has an understanding of it
Loyal to many flags
And is a silent ally of any country
Beset in its mortal heart
With immortal poetry.
—Laura Riding, “The Poet’s Corner

From Moscow, under conditions of global duress, comes the online publication of Flagii (Flags), double issue, numbers 16/17. Clicking on this link gets the issue, and for those without Russian, using Google translate or its equivalent yields a sense of the incredible poetic activity going on right now, with an intent to find “allies of any country.” Also breaching the gap are a number of texts with visual properties, in a selection introduced by Vladimir Feshchenko with work by Jackson Mac Low, Bernadette Mayer, Larry Eigner, Robert Grenier, Hannah Weiner, Rachel Blau du Plessis, Susan Howe, and myself (“Introduction to the Letter T”). I am also represented by an interview with Vladimir Koshelev and a translation of a section of Under Erasure by Lisa Kheresh, linked here, as well as the note on a little-known collage by Sylvia Plath that I wrote about on this site in 2010 (here), with commentary in Russian (here). It is not only a real honor to be included in this work but an example of what we should be doing now, connecting across the greatest distances possible, aspiring toward the horizon of “this time we are both.” … More

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