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August 20, 2023

Entry 50: Magnetic North (III)

Friday, June 9
SAS 347 TRD > OSL

Heimdalsgata 35, Gamle, Oslo

Carla Harryman

According to my source, there are three kinds of space: absolute, relative, and relational. Looking for the proper airport code for Trondheim, I became enmeshed in the military and aviation history of its location in Værnes (not, evidently, the Værnes where the village church is located; the place name is repeated at two locations on the coast). Reading the entry, I stop at the exact description of the runway, its length, manner of construction, and what kind of air traffic it serves. “The main runway is 2,999 metres (9,839 ft) long, and runs east–west at 09/27. It is 45 metres (148 ft) wide, plus shoulders of 7.5 metres (25 ft) on each side. The runway is equipped with instrument landing system category 1. . . . ” In absolute terms, the runway thus materially exists. Should an airplane positioned at one end of the runway develop sufficient thrust, given the mass of the airplane and the lift of its wings, it will take off. Pilots know this and rest assured at the controls while passengers suffer through the mysterious event time and again. “Værnes has a theoretical capacity of 40 air movements per hour, but this is reduced during bad weather, so the airport has a registered capacity of 25.” In a given year, three to four hundred military aircraft are served by the facility, the entry goes on to state. What follows is a history of the transition from its use in the German Occupation to an important outpost for NATO, with continuing American military presence, likely being increased as I write.

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August 13, 2023

Entry 49: Magnetic North (II)

Monday, June 5
Icelandair KEF > OSL

Sjøgata 4, Oslo

Carla Harryman

Travel consists in the denial of any goal for travel. Often one travels from point A to point B, but the experience of travel is otherwise than reaching the destination. This is why, for agéd traveler William S. Burroughs, “It is not necessary to live; it is only necessary to travel.” An interstitial space, the Interzone, the in between points of origin or destination, with the sensation of and material means for movement. One can become addicted to travel. Moving from a point of origin, it is often impossible to discern where that is—the “mooring of starting out” John Ashbery recalled as a condition of his availability at the outset, wherever that may be. We certainly did not begin our travels in Rochester, N.Y., though we passed by there recently on return from celebrating Ashbery with his tribe. One can adapt the field of aesthetic experience to the road map of travel and its discontents. Thus the rental car outside our hotel in Reykjavík must be returned directly to the scrappy terminal at Keflavík, site of former American airbase built on bare lava fields, roughly an hours drive south. The difficulty of locating the final gas station turned into a near catastrophe, but was masterfully overcome. Our transition continued through ticketing kiosks, baggage drops, crowded spaces, and passport checks where a border official tried to personalize each succeeding applicant before giving them a stamp. Once in the air it was normal, or anxious, or asleep. Then out the window the clouds parted and we saw the Farœ Islands, now the destination of a lifetime, soon to be passed by. After an intermission of blank time the massive coastal ranges of Norway loomed, with substantial snow cover, frightening in their immensity and lack of any habitation. The dramatic muscularity of glaciated ranges and valleys resolved into a flat plane of arrival and modern transit to an overpriced and inconvenient city and its arranged destination for one night. Whose amenities were mainly its proximity to the renovated harbor zone where one could find something to eat at a substantial price.

 

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July 29, 2023

Entry 48: Magnetic North (I)

Thursday, June 1
Icelandair DTW > KEF

Carla Harryman

The lonely imperative of travel, as if one is uniquely hailed. That is ideological, covered in pin feathers (illustration by Icelandic expatriate artist Eero above). It was an idea of mine to go north, to seek out the (scratch that). Over the long duration of our disease, the two survivors had lived on only home cooking and streaming Nordic crime series on Netflix. In the event, something was missing or being covered up—that is what is meant by “the body,” which kept us glued to our seats. The disused warehouse of narrative effects is where all bodies are kept, we would find, each waiting to be worked into the upcoming narrative. Not really—for years there had been a blank place in the narrative, now determined to be “magnetic north.” At some point in early winter it was decided, she suggested. Putting in place a plan, all would unfold but not necessarily the way it was predicted. I believe there is no drama here, only the outer shell of a fate that would be enacted, to be revealed. The crime genre is never really surprising, as we are gripped in our seats. The seats were booked on a newly refinanced Icelandair Boeing 737 Max, now returned to service, on a stopover in Iceland. The real thrill was seeming to go nowhere and ending up in a place we had imagined. Blank fields of lava unfold under the belly of the plane with special webcams for passengers. It will be early morning the next day when we arrive at our destination.

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April 21, 2023

Event 102: Can We Still Teach the Beats?

 

Can We Still Teach the Beats?:
Holism, Antagonism, Poetics,
and Pedagogy

A talk by Barrett Watten

Wednesday, April 26
WSU Humanities Center
12:30–1:30 PM, 2339 F/AB
In person/Zoom (here)

This talk will be drawn from a theoretical and historical reading of Beat poets Michael McClure (famous for transgressing species barriers and writing in “beast” language; now seen as a pioneer ecopoet as well as a poet writing at the intersection of language and the body) and Lenore Kandel (famous for her 1960s sex-positive collection The Love Book and other erotically charged writing; she is now seen a proto-feminist representative of the 60s sexual revolution). Both poets were subject to censorship in the 60s—McClure for his play The Beard, featuring a dialogue between Billy the Kid and Jean Harlow; and Kandel for The Love Book; both would be vindicated in the long run. Encompassing this moment are the poetics of “open form” promulgated by Charles Olson and others, as the pedagogical framework for Black Mountain College through the 1950s, and at later experimental programs. In adapting my research to the present talk, the question on the table is how to teach the work of the Beat poets today, with their expressive/embodied excesses and absolute refusal to comply to with normative decorum. This is not a hypothetical question. The recent decision at Cornell University not to require trigger warnings for difficult material was a significant pushback against content restrictions in the classroom, and supported the discretion of faculty to present course material. But this issue is not simply a matter of Right or legal guidelines; how does one present and interpret the transgressive work of an earlier period, both as a research topic and a teaching occasion? How did the Beats themselves imagine their work as “teaching, and being taught,” as we see in the publicity photo of Allen Ginsberg from 1965? How do we contextualize their historical present from the perspective of ours? The stakes for our pedagogy in the increasingly corporatized university are high. … More

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December 30, 2022

Entry 47: Liberating Gertrude Stein

“Liberation and the Historical Present:
Gertrude Stein @ Zero Hour”
In special half-issue on “Feeling in Time:
Radio Free Stein,” ed. Adam Frank
Textual Practice 36, no. 12 (December 2022)

To mark the end of 2022, and all its openings and reversals, the last thing I would do is indulge any form of triumphalism. The times do not permit it—the bare facts of pandemic and war, ideological gridlock and narrow avenues for hope are what we live. But the experience of this historical present recalls earlier moments; thus, during the longue durée of COVID sequestration, I took on a project of writing and researching Gertrude Stein at Zero Hour, her experience of exile under Occupation, in the larger context of theorizing the “end” of the war that was . . . not a new beginning but the punctual inception of the global order to come. This is a project that has compelled me over the past fifteen years, and will ultimately emerge as a book, one hopes.

The essay was originally framed for presentation at a meeting of EAM (European Avant-Garde and Modernist Studies), set for Leuven, Belgium, in September 2020. That meeting was canceled, so I organized, with Lauri Scheyer, a webinar colloquy in April 2021 with the title “Avant-Gardes @ Zero Hour.” The line-up of topics and presenters was exceptional, and many of the works found their way into print. Some time earlier, Adam Frank had been in contact about his Radio Free Stein project. In framing Stein at Zero Hour, I thought to take up her neglected play Yes Is for a Very Young Man, one of many significant post–1945 works produced in the immediate aftermath of the war. Stein was no Beckett, however; while she may have influenced Waiting for Godot, she did not have her finger on the pulse of the absurd. What she produced more of an historical afterthought, a retrospection or even a covering up of her earlier politics of “unreality” as tested by the experience of isolation and dread, and not a theatrical success. Coming to terms with Stein after 1945 turned out to be a major research project as well as detailed textual reading of Wars I Have Seen, the writing project by which she survived the war and “became historical,” on her own account. The larger argument is summarized in the abstract; for a limited time free downloads are available from the publisher (for both see below). … More

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December 3, 2022

Entry 46: Theoretical Autobiography

Grand Piano TV episode 6: Barrett Watten
original recording, 17 November 2022
take 2: 27 November 2022

The name “theoretical biography” is intended to distinguish its territory from that of philosophy and physiology better than before, and to expand that biological approach which has been one-sidedly parad­ed and, in part, greatly exaggerated by the most recent school of psychology (Darwin, Spencer, Mach, Avenarius). Such a science would have to account for the mental life as a whole as it progresses from the birth of an individual to his death according to certain laws, just as it does for the coming into being and the passing away, and all the discrete phases in the life of a plant.

—Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (1903)

Introduction: method/technique

[Original recording] I’ve been thinking about how to represent The Grand Piano in this reading. One thought was simply to take a section and read it straight through with comments, build a structure out of it—like the concept of “reading out” I spoke about the other day at the Kelly Writers House event, using the text as a platform to make more text, more interpretation. I decided not to do that; rather, I decided to sample from the text and let the text do the work of commenting on itself. (If you want to experience the section that I would have read straight through, you can go to The Grand Piano part 4 and read that section.) I’ve done quite a lot of “reading out” of The Grand Piano; in Questions of Poetics there is a whole chapter on it. Even as the work was coming into focus, not yet complete, I was giving lectures on it—the whole process was entirely immodest. … More

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July 23, 2022

Event 96: Travels in Reparative Space

Monday, June 21
Delta DTW > LHR [canceled]

Carla Harryman

What does it mean to travel? And what are the risks? You could hit an iceberg, for example. In this age of global devolution due to war, pandemic, climate change, and supply chain disruption, the risks are increasing. The magic “reward miles” that purchased at least one ticket were offset by ambiguous reentry requirements and increased insurance costs. Our awareness of global supply chain disruptions came with the brutal cancellation of our fully boarded flight. The air conditioning had heated up, needing to be replaced; the parts were in Atlanta, but no means to get them to Detroit; by the time they would arrive, crews had to rotate; no additional crews were available. By the time this was decided we had wandered the Detroit airport for some hours, only then to be automatically rebooked. The gap in expectations was predictive: this would be no easy trip, but still worth the attempt, we believed.

Tuesday, June 22
Delta DTW > IAD
Virgin IAD > LHR

Refreshed by an extra night of sleep before departure, we renewed the attempt. Now we are less concerned with global supply chains, as the aviation network is algorithmically rebooted to our advantage. Now it is a question of mask behavior and the algorithms of disease transmission. Universally, or in the metropole, the “unfulfilled democratic demands” for global travel had become a surge of pent-up consumerism; with the release from austerity, as a form of repression, off came the masks. They were no longer required to board a flight, nor were negative test results required for readmission, at least for passport holders. The politics of the New Normal are us. Willingly confined to our cubic meter of seating, we endured the deprivation of freedom as a contract with global mobility. One flight took us to the sterile, remodeled Dulles Airport, with many murals of JFK, and then onward to Heathrow, on an airline named for the “Virgin Queen” during the heydey of Thatcherism.

Wednesday, June 22
189 King’s Cross Road, London

“Surrealism Beyond Borders”
@ Tate Modern

Our trip was structured around several agendas: for me, catching up with global exhibitions, literary friends, and Berlin; for Carla additionally, a launch of Cloud Cantatas, published by Pamenar Press and delivered that very day in London. After presenting at last November’s virtual conference on surrealism, I had wanted to get to the New York version of the show before it closed in January at the Met, but omicron put an end to that. The Tate Modern was the next venue, the monumental showcase for New British Art responding to the global, decolonial imperative. To what extent this exhibition truly understood or could identify the theoretical horizons of the global dispersion of surrealism was, however, in doubt. Static art-historical orders of style and periodization remained in place, tending toward inadequately framed concepts of history and space. There were groups of painters in Mexico City or Cairo, for example, who carried on the tradition of group activity in surrealism. But what could be seen of the decolonial moment, precisely the moment of surrealism’s global dispersion through emigration and emulation after 1945? There was not nearly enough education on postcolonial liberation, not enough hard connection between the “inner” liberation of surrealism and the politics of liberation as a post-modernity. That said, there were many revisionist moments to be explored: the rise of an African-American “demotic” surrealism with Ted Joans, Amiri Baraka, and Bob Kaufman, for example; or the anti-Eurocentric contributions of second-wave women surrealists, from Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo to Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, and Ithell Colquhoun, not to mention Lee Miller and Dorothea Tanning. But this was still surrealism as art history, alas. The lesson for global exhibitions is to radically contextualize the exemplary work in an unfolding horizon of global negativity—a globality that is not one thing.

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July 7, 2022

Document 99: Making Modernism

“Modernist Poetics: New Genealogies
of ‘Making the Work’ in Modernity”

Seminar for “Making Modernism”
Modernist Studies Association
Portland, Ore., 27–30 October 2022

NOTE EXTENDED DATE FOR SEMINAR REGISTRATION
AUGUST 31: REGISTRATION HERE

Seminar led by Barrett Watten, Wayne State University
and Herman Rapaport, Wake Forest University
with invited guest Lyn Hejinian, UC Berkeley

Seminar prospectus (to enroll see below)

This seminar takes up the conference rubric, Making Modernism, as a question of “poetics”—a discourse of “making the work.” Poetics may either immanent to a modernist work of art or a supplement to it; it is an aesthetic or theoretical reflection that offers a blueprint for how the “work” is made and how to read it. Poetics may take the form of a separate instance of writing, a preface or explanatory essay external to the work of art, or it may be described or enacted in the work itself, as a set of instructions to the reader on how work may be read. In this seminar, we will seek new ways of understanding modernist poetics, at or beyond the epochal date of 1922, as a response to the crisis of modernity. Modernist poetics is often characterized as “formalist,” after avant-garde manifestos, the New Critics, or the Russian Formalists. For this inquiry, Eliot’s “Notes” to The Waste Land and his editorship of The Criterion would be as important for modernist poetics as the poem itself. Extending this principle, Joyce’s turn to writing “Work in Progress” and its serial publication in transition from 1927 on would depart from the modernist masterpiece into another kind of writing; Stein’s “Composition as Explanation” (1926) would supplement the publication of Geography and Plays (1922); and McKay’s development of vernacular prose romances from Home to Harlem (1928) to Banana Bottom (1933) would augment the formal poetics of Harlem Shadows. After 1922, a reflection on the “making of the work” emerges in numerous works of poetics that address the modern present and its “condition of possibility.” Such a deliberate inquiry into the making of the modernist work motivates the prose/poetry dialectic of William Carlos Williams’s Spring and All (1923); it is found in the self-reflexive explorations of women authors such as Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Laura Riding, and Djuna Barnes; it extends to the social discourses on poetics in the Harlem Renaissance and the Popular Front; it is everywhere in the manifestos of the avant-garde, especially surrealism; it appears in the turn to fascism in Ezra Pound and Wyndham Lewis; it is central to key works of Critical Theory such as Walter Benjamin’s “The Author as Producer” and Theodor Adorno’s many writings on modernism. This seminar invites literary, historical, cultural, and theoretical inquiry into works broadly seen as “poetics” in modernism. What will count as a key work in modernist/modern poetics is the task of participants to determine; our aim is to establish a broad and productive series of works that represent the aesthetic, cultural, political, and critical “making of the work” under conditions of modernity. In so doing, it seeks a broad discussion on modernist poetics in line with our earlier work on contemporary examples in A Guide to Poetics Journal and Poetics Journal Digital Archive (Wesleyan UP).

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March 26, 2022

Document 97: xxx / Ekaterina Zakharkiv

xxx
by Ekaterina Zakharkiv
(trans. Joseph Simas)

fucking sky: because it is open, it is occupied, recognized as an extremist organization, acting as a foreign agent, banned across the territory of the russian federation.

discrediting actions
with the help of words. how do you act on the sky with words?

don’t look up, don’t cross its borders, don’t read paul celan under its vaulted blanket.
the sky before dawn is buzzing, collapsing without warning.

it’s no longer a metaphor, no longer a generalization of conflict.
blinded, we roll into the sleepy suburbs and strike. we harm the defenseless.
we lose our sense of smell and fail to notice the stench of black smoke.
we get caught off guard in the mix.

now is not the time for quotations. all the marks have been forged into antitank hedgehogs. nevertheless

days go by, and we lay never-roses at the foot of myth. what have we seen with our own eyes? transmissions, streamed from a billion bloodlines. childhood dreams burgeoning into political imagination in airports and hotel rooms. craters blown into our former tongue suck up shards of grass, hallways blasted in. language is tongue-tied. it leaves neither trace of name nor address. in its vacant alleyways the hissing utterances of an orange serpent. no one’s, again … More

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March 21, 2022

Document 96: To Russian/Ukrainian Poets

From Scales (11)
by Carla Harryman

to Russian/Ukrainian Poets

—checking email every five minutes for an answer. I got it I got the answer and it didn’t make me look so good.

Pounding on your own goodness sounds a bit tarnishing.

Say stinging.

Have a latke.

The smell of onion in the vapor of potato reminds me of the Russian poets in our kitchen drinking vodka at a somewhat earlier hour than this.

They did not sleep.

They do not sleep much now either.

Up all night in your fantasy. Some of them dead.

No not in mine. In mine they sleep willowy sorts of idealisms smothering vast plains sequestered in small farms and mushroom gathering.

They are almost all gone now, but there are more.

Some. Alexei. Others too are lauded on the lips of the still living.

Alexei turned vitriol blue.

Hmmm . . . I thought it was a reference to hydrated copper.

Ukrainian rubble recalls each dead poet in Russia as Ukrainian.

They have to be careful now. That rubble disseminates in the elements spreading across the globe.

As ever but more so.

Tabling the turn and turning.

So. Let them leave as they did.

They leave again and again.

So and so is arriving.

A ways off.

They are arriving.

We break hearts with them when they arrive with stoic pretense.

And then we get out the vodka.

They have not yet slept.

We keep the vodka in the freezer in case someone is looking for it.

I confess I didn’t understand entirely, these males. But Alexei—

Now understanding, forget.

—I was a poet in the company of Alexei.

The point is disbursed in rubble—

Yes forget understanding.

—and never made again in the same way.

That’s right. It’s missing varnish.

—March 20, 2022 … More

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