Entries tagged with San Francisco

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

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

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

November 14, 2023

Entry 54: The Transmission of Poetry

MATERIAL TRANSMISSIONS:
DEMOTIC SURREALISM/HIERATIC LANGUAGE,
SAN FRANCISCO, 1975–1980

Plunged each day into the fog of received ideas, man is led to conceive
of all things and to conceive of himself through a dizzy series of quickly
hidden stumblings, of false steps rectified as best as possible.

—André Breton, “The Automatic Message” (1933)

… More

January 26, 2010

Document 08: Laura Ulewicz

Stephen Vincent, in response to my entry on Sylvia Plath [Entry 06: “Sylvia Plath’s Collage”], sent a poem by little-known California poet Laura Ulewicz. Ulewicz, who was born in Detroit, spent the early 60s in the U.K., where she met Plath, returned to San Francisco in the late 60s, then lived in Locke, Calif., where she died in 2007. Vincent is editing a selection of her work. His note follows the first section of the poem (which is set in Detroit). Of particular interest to me is the narrative/sentence interface, between confessionalism and the New Sentence:

from Nightmares to Be Born

I. Reality

Elizabeth Barrett hunched up in a book
While the foxes in my head ran round a tree
The foxes in my head ran round a tree
Under the ether. The nurses joked together,
“Freud at five.” Everyone (my father
And mother) disapproved. Baba, I cried
Because they’d bury the foxes that were so happy.
I hid the foxes alive inside my crying.

The Brontë sisters—But my own real friends.
Detroit a sex machine. Joey
And I, thirteen, peddling into Duns Scotus.*
Trees. Sanctuary for birds, God.
But then she was racing, racing. The boys put a stick
In my spokes. Falling I hit them. Hit them old
As the naked man in the basement who pumped his head
And lied. Oh, if I should grow up Beatrice.

… More