Wednesday, March 03, 2010

Norman Finkelstein and the Offending Adam



"A Scribe Turned into a Scribe,", my review of Norman Finkelstein's latest book, Scribe, is up and running at The Offending Adam. I don't know what I like more: Norman's book, or The Offending Adam itself, the brainchild of Andrew Wessels and his merry band of literary co-conspirators.

I think there's a good chance that The Offending Adam may be the model for how literary journals can make the transition to the online world. The best feature (shared with a more established online journal, Jacket) is the way writing is rolled out in front of the public a little at a time. This seems like a better use of the possibilities of electronic publication than the dropping of all the content down in a big one-shot pile every issue, which is just an imposing of the limits of print production on a medium that needn't be bound by those limits. Jacket puts parts of each new issue out on an irregular basis, adding content as the issue comes together under the guidance of the editor. The Offending Adam is a bit more disciplined, at least so far: there's a new issue every week, with a few items published every Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday. I like this, since in the age of democratized access to publication and massive literary proliferation, the best thing an editor can do for the writers he cares about is to present them in a way that draws attention to them — just a few items at a time. Poetry Daily has been doing this, but it relies on previously published material. Wessels and company do the extra legwork of selecting new material, and they provide a forum for reviews as well.

The intimacy of the presentation of material at The Offending Adam — you meet the contributions one at a time, not among a crowd of other poems — makes for something like a community-feeling. And community is also very much at the core of Norman Finkelstein's Scribe. Here's how I try to describe the phenomenon in the opening paragraph of the review:

Michael Palmer has said that to read Norman Finkelstein’s book Scribe “is to pass through a series of gates into the paradoxical heart of the poem,” where “the communal and the solitary” come together in the music of the poetry. He’s on to something, I think: what strikes one most strongly in Scribe are the repeated invocations of communal experience, and the ways the influence on collectivity works its way into the forms, as well as the subjects, of the poetry.


The book is available from Dos Madres Press, or here.

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In other news, the latest Contemporary Literature is out, and includes "Postnational Ireland," a piece I wrote about contemporary scholarship in Irish poetry, and about the end of the old nationalist paradigm that has animated much of the thinking about Irish poetry (and some of the poetry itself) for the past century or more. Here's the table of contents. If you have access to a university library, you can probably view the piece via Project Muse or JSTOR. Otherwise, they make you pay. But you were wondering what to do with your royalty checks anyway, right?

16 comments:

  1. Thanks for this, Bob. Hadn't heard of the book or the magazine.

    Your excerpt from the poem "At the Threshold" appears to echo Celan somewhat. Interesting sense of the victims shadowing or following Heidegger on his journey. No obvious condemnation of Heidegger's Nazism, but nevertheless the people are there...

    - but I'm extrapolating a lot from a poem I haven't read!

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  2. When I saw Norman in Philadelphia this past December he mentioned that he was thinking of Celan's visit to Heidegger in that passage, so I'm sure the echoes are deliberate. Good catch, Henry.

    B.

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  3. >The best feature (shared with a more established online journal, Jacket) is the way writing is rolled out in front of the public a little at a time.

    Hopefully this will still be the case after the coming editorship change at Jacket, January 1[?], 2011.

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  4. Tranter's out? What the what? Who's taking over?

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  5. You haven't heard? It's the post-avant news of the year, so far:

    Al Filreis, Charles Bernstein, and the PENNSound staff are taking over Jacket start of 2011.

    Things will change, from the ecumenical to the not-so-ecumenical, one might predict.

    It will be interesting.

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  6. Hmmmm. I like Al and the things he does. But Bernstein as editor? It may be O=L=D=G=U=A=R=D time at Jacket. We'll see...

    B.

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  7. Actually, I need to correct that. Filreis is the official editor. But the journal will be (the information is posted at Filreis's blog and was sent out by Tranter) under the management of PENNSound (the assistant editors, already listed, are closely associated with the project). So... Safe to assume that CB will have some kind of "influence"?

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  8. Bob, thanks for the kind words about the journal and thank you for providing us with a great review.

    It is certainly exciting and an honor to be compared in some way with Jacket.

    My impression from the Jacket-editorship-change was that the PENNsound move was largely to ensure that the journal has a long-term stable physical (digital-physical, I guess) home, though I guess by doing that it also opens the door to PENNsound influencing the journal. It'll be interesting to see how much crossover there is and how much Jacket remains its own separate entity.

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  9. Andrew,

    Past issues of the journal will be archived at Penn, yes.

    But Jacket will also be under new *editorial* direction. In fact, the whole new team already appears to have been selected. Again, you can find details about all this at Al Filreis's blog.

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  10. Kent et al,

    Michael Hennessey, who does the sound recordings for PennSound, is one of the editors and is as "ecumenical" as they come, though I find it humorous that the implication is that Tranter et al were, in fact, ecumenical...There may not be one "poetics" represented by Jacket--there are, in truth, a few--but its support of more-than-one poetics does not, I believe, constitute a kind of ecumenicism or pluralism...And I like Jacket...

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  11. Thanks, Tyrone -- sounds like good news, then. I'm all for the ecumenical!

    Bob

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  12. Rumor has it that there will be slight changes in the editorial program... Jacket 2011 will focus primarily on poets born in North Philly... with occasional features on poets born in South Philly... contributors will be asked to spend at least 2 years in West Philly before submitting... the logo will be revised to present a prominent cheese steak... these are only rumors, I could be wrong...

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  13. Including poets from South Philly? You've taken ecumenical poetics too far! Sir, we need limits. Limits! It's a thin line between us and chaos! I mean, if we admit poets from South Philly, what's to stop us from including poets from Baltimore, or even Scranton, Allentown, and the DelMArVa peninsula? Think of the consequences!

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  14. Well, I believe the policy in place at this time calls for allowing poets from south Philly to SUBMIT poems for consideration, if they have spent the stipulated 2 years prior in WEST Philly, and have filed an affidavit certifying that their FAVORITE (& occasionally ONLY) FOOD is the PHILLY CHEESE STEAK... plus the poems will have to display some of that special North Philly insouciance, savoir faire, je ne sais quoi... even if the poets hail from SOUTH Philly, originally... again, these are only rumors... I have also heard that John Tranter is retiring because of a digestive problem involving a certain famous meat-cheese delicacy of that Region, whivh shall emain nameless here... mum's the word...

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  15. A South Philly poet spending time in West Philly is voluntarily forgoing decent cheesesteaks, so perhaps your information is wrong...

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  16. I'll take your word for it, Not Lon. Perhaps Jacket will feature a cheesesteak theme issue! They might consider changing their name to "P-Eagles Sweatshirt", too. I'm full of good ideas.

    Bob, this is not to take away from your very interesting post on what looks like a neat book by Norman Finkelstein. Even if neither of you hail from Philly (I've only been here once, myself).

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