Danny Devito Explains "The Poet Resigns"

Just in time for the new year, the latest issue of Pleiades has arrived.  The current issue put me in a bit of a dilemma, since I didn't know where to turn first.  Should I plunge into the teeming multitude of promising looking poems?  Grab onto my colleague Rebecca Makkai's short story?  Or rush ahead to the virtuosic, and sure to be controversial, Mark Halliday take-down of Traci Brimhall's Our Lady of the Ruins (I have not read Brimhall's book, so I don't know if Halliday is right, only that he writes a hell of a take down).  Should I begin at the beginning and race on to the end?  These, I'm a little abashed to say, weren't the questions. Rather, I was stuck between wanting to read my own contribution—an essay on John Matthias' poetry, to see if the typesetters had changed innocent words into vile profanities—or to read Amish Trivedi's review of a collection of my own essays, The Poet Resigns.  Anxiety warred with vanity!  I won't tell you which won out, but veil the embarrassing result by quoting, instead, from both pieces.

My essay on Matthias is called "Indirections," and takes as its occasion the publication of his collected poems.  But it's really out to make a general statement of Matthias' poetics.  It begins like this:

John Matthias is so thoroughly a European poet he could only be American. That is, his poetry, now collected in three volumes from Shearsman Books, is so saturated with European geography, history, and, most importantly, personages from the history of high culture, that a reader coming to it for the first time would see at once an affiliation with Europhile American poets like Pound and Eliot. Like those poets, Matthias spent a considerable period of his life in Europe (mostly England), and like them he has read widely in the poetry of the continent. Like them, too, he takes Europe as a kind of whole, and as a single living tradition—very much an American thing to do, and not at all English, or Spanish, or Lithuanian. Every inch of Europe seems to open out into a richly storied past, and one senses that at least part of his attraction to Europe is that it offers an escape from a perceived American historical shallowness, the sort of thing Harold Rosenberg described when he said that America “builds and acts on a thin time crust—its constructions reach upward rather than down, its politics take account of the immediate future rather than the past.” 

One thing that the opportunity these three volumes—some 900 pages in all—offers is the chance to see the consistent appeal of Europe to Matthias, and to recognize a fundamental pattern in the way Europe plays into the poetry. Despite the serious religious concerns of poems like the 45-page “A Compostella Diptych” (which traces ancient pilgrim routes across France and Spain), Matthias does not seek in Europe a path back to a meaningful religious communion, as did Eliot. Nor does he use the European past as a way to cudgel Americanized modernity, with its preference for mass produced plaster over artisanal alabaster, as did Pound. Instead, Europe, and especially Europe’s past, provides a kind of Archimedean point outside of Matthias’ immediate experiences from which he can re-imagine them. From his earliest poems to his most recent, we find Matthias changing his perspective on experiences—often difficult or painful ones—by placing them in the context of distant geographies, remote pasts, or foreign lives.

Even the erotic poetry of Matthias’ youth works this way. Consider “What They Say,” a short poem written when Matthias was twenty and published for the first time in volume one of the Collected Shorter Poems. Grouped with other erotic poems like “Female Nude, Young” and “Swimming at Midnight,” it describes the Viennese painter Egon Schiele in his studio, posing his models and friends as “onanistic nudes,” then climbing a ladder to a loft to get the odd angle he desired. “And it’s the perspective that distorts,” writes Matthias, “The ladder and the beds/were Egon Schiele’s.” while “The postures and/the gestures/were all theirs.” It’s a simple poem, and very much juvenilia, but in a way it contains the poetic career that will to follow for another half century and more. It’s not just that Matthias’ erotic imagination, here, runs toward the visions of long-dead artists in faraway Europe rather than the proximate body of a lover: it’s that the important thing, the thing that makes Schiele more than a pornographer, is his distancing himself from his material, his climbing of a ladder to gain exactly the right point of distance and perspective.

Amish Trivedi's review of my book The Poet Resigns begins by explaining the book with reference to some lines spoken by Danny Devito's character in the move Other People's Money—a gambit that I never would have thought would work, but does:

"We're dead alright.  We're just not broke. And do you know the surest way to go broke? Keep getting an increasing share of a shrinking market.  Down the tubes.  Slow but sure" (Other People's Money, 1991).  In The Poet Resigns: Poetry in a Difficult World Robert Archambeau confronts Danny Devito's point: no matter how successful a poet may become, it is a success limited by poetry's ever-diminishing position within the world. While there are plenty of poets who wish that poetry were as marketable as popular fiction or Miley Cyrus, the central question Archambeau asks is whether or not poetry can successfully return to some imagined high point of a golden past...

Trivedi cuts to the core of the book when he says that its central question is "What is the role of poetry in contemporary society?"  Trivedi says some kind things about the book, but personally, I feel The Poet Resigns only starts to answer that question.  I'm hoping the critical book I'm resolving to finish in the year ahead, Making Nothing Happen: Poetry in Society, Poetry for Itself takes things further.  And in a way I'm kind of hoping a future reviewer will find a way to link that book to the Danny Devito oeuvre, too.

*

Pleiades 35.1 is currently available in print—online selections from the issue will appear soon.

10,000 Poets: The Problem of the Multitude in American Poetry

Not long ago the poet Alfred Corn noted that “Year’s Best lists are strewn all over the print and electronic media. One publication I saw asked three perfectly plausible deciders to list the top ten poetry books of 2011. They did. And there was not a single overlap. The same thing happened to me years ago when myself and two other poets more or less in the same ballpark were asked to judge an annual prize. We each submitted ten names. There were no overlaps.” Corn then went on to ask a deceptively simple question: “What to make of this?” It’s tempting to answer by saying something about the infinite variability of taste, to sort of shrug and mutter "de gustibus non est disputandum."  It’s even more tempting, if one is in a foul mood, to say that the differences probably have their root in the different tribal loyalties of the poetry demimonde, to shrug and mutter something about the folks at Foetry, with their documentation of poets giving prizes to their students and lovers, having been right all along. But neither shrugging-off of the question really takes it seriously enough. What are we to make of the lack of consensus about the best books of poetry? What does it say about the conditions under which American poetry is produced and consumed?


The dissensus about poetry is linked to another phenomenon people have been talking about lately: the sheer bulk of American poetry. Two of the most voracious poetry readers I know, Stephen Burt and Mark Scroggins, have both noted the enormous bulk of contemporary American poetry and the chatter—promotional, critical, gossipy—that surrounds it. “Every week, every day, I get email and Facebook notices and for that matter word of mouth about the latest debate or commentary or controversy or metapoetic metaconversation (sometimes it’s even attached to actual poems) on one of three dozen fine websites and active blogs and web-only or web-mostly mostly-poetry magazines… to be au courant, I should keep up. And I can’t keep up” says Burt on the Poetry Foundation’s Harriet blog. “It feels like there’s been an exponential explosion of poetic activity out there, so much being written & published & written about that no-one, but no-one, is able to grasp more than a tiny fraction of it,” says Scroggins on Facebook. And it’s not just people I know who’ve been feeling the enormous weight of America’s poetic output. When I attended the ALSCW conference in Boston this fall, Mark Halliday gave one of the best-attended talks, a lecture called “10,000 Poets,” in which he addressed what we might call American poetry’s problem of the multitude. The term (mine, not Halliday’s) shouldn’t be taken to imply that it is a bad thing that so many poets are writing and finding their way to publication—only that this particular cultural situation, like all others, presents its own unique set of challenges and conundrums, along with its positive qualities. And I believe some of the problems Halliday outlined give us a way to answer Alfred Corn’s question.


Halliday began his address to the crowd in a big, dark Boston University auditorium by noting that Alexander Pope’s England had some five million inhabitants, while the United States of our own day has some 300 million people, half of whom had MFAs in creative writing. He was joking, of course, but the point was made: those of us concerned with American poetry today must deal with gigantism of scale in both population and education. Defining a poet as someone who has published a book, or aspires to do so, continued Halliday, we might conservatively estimate the number of American poets at 10,000 (“or,” he added, “30,000 — when I’m in a bad mood”). But is the number of poets really a bad thing? Isn’t it an embarrassment of riches? So what if no one person could possibly read all of the worthwhile poetry? From one point of view, this isn’t bad at all—and what would one do to change it? Repress poets? “But this isn’t an ambitious poet’s point of view,” said Halliday, “and I have been ambitious since 1971.”


Ambitious poets, according to Halliday, are bothered by the multitude of poets, and those who say they are not are merely pretending to a serenity they do not in fact possess. But what is the response of the ambitious poet to the problem of the multitude? What do poets do with their agitation and frustration? According to Halliday, the situation generates five behaviors among ambitious poets:


1. A Proclivity for Ignoring. If there are too many poets with whom to keep up, one response is simply to rule out whole swathes of the poetry landscape. Online poetry? One can tell oneself it’s not serious stuff. Journals with small readerships? Not worth reading. Alternately, one might tell oneself that journals with large readerships are compromised and unworthy of attention. Or one could simply label whole schools of poetry as unworthy of attention, kicking them into the dustbin with a hostile label (“School of Quietude,” anyone?). It’s not just poets who do this: when Helen Vendler recently opined that there can’t possibly have been 175 American poets worth reading in the entire 20th century, she was revealing a fairly strong proclivity for ignoring. [The examples here, I should note, are mine and not Halliday’s—I was taking notes quickly in a small notebook in a dark room, and didn’t manage to get all of his explanatory detail down].


2. Dependence on Mutual Praise Networks. Whether it’s the crowd with whom one went to graduate school, or a group with stylistic affinities, or just a set of people with a habit of blurbing one another’s books, there’s a strong tendency for poets in the age of the multitude to seek not safety, but recognition, in numbers. People in the tribe are bound to end up editing a decent journal, or a magazine review section, or heading a writing program, or handing out prize money, or editing an anthology. Best, thinks the ambitious poet, to stay on their good sides, and praise the other poets proleptically and profusely. If you’ve ever been at the AWP convention, you’ve actually seen these networks in their re-enforcement phase, like some primitive mating ritual. And if one combines this network-oriented way of operating with a good dose of ignoring whole swathes of American poetry (see item one, above), one can begin to think that recognition from one’s tribe is the recognition of the world. “Corruption of the soul,” said Halliday, “lurks for the writer of blurbs.”


3. Buzz Susceptibility. In the great deluge of poetry, one comes to passively accept the importance of some other poet simply because of the publicity buzz his or her work has generated. “Jorie Graham, Donald Hall, Mary Oliver, Seamus Heaney—even if you don’t care, or have ceased caring, for their work, we desperately want someone to be famous,” said Halliday, and we’re willing to take it on faith—faith in publicity buzz, rather than our own judgement, since judgment implies comparison, and there’s no way of comparing any one poet with the whole of the enormous poetic field.


4. Quickie Responses. When confronted with new poetry, one relies on email or brief conversations to make a judgment: there’s no time, in the great deluge, to give any broad selection of new work our serious consideration. Under these conditions much bad work gets praised, much good work ignored, and much subtle work misunderstood.


5. Self-Mythologizing. “If you love the idea of greatness and are ignored,” said Halliday, “self-mythologize. Suppress any sense of humor about yourself. You may imitate self-deprecation, but you may not mean it in earnest. Act like someone whose greatness is about to be recognized. This will create an aura for you and, much more importantly, for your favorite students, who will be young enough to believe it.” These students will then bear your name out into the world and onto the syllabus, where others among the young and naive will come to see you as a great poet. [In the margin of my notes to Halliday’s talk I have scribbled something that looks like “Warhol’s ‘famous for 15 minutes’ is now ‘famous to 15 people.’”]


So, to return to Alfred Corn’s question about dissensus: “what to make of this?” With the exception of buzz susceptibility, the behaviors Halliday describes can all be seen as contributing to the critical dissensus Alfred Corn noted on prize committees and “best books” lists. When there is so much to read, many people will simply tune out certain presses, journals, styles, schools, forms, or even generations. With no way to keep track of the multitude of new books, many will come to rely on their own closed networks for advice. Fast responses will lead to a failure to appreciate complex or subtle work outside one’s own network, further reinforcing closure to voices outside one’s own idiosyncratic network. The self-mythologizing process, which sends acolytes into the world to create more acolytes—in the manner of the critic F.R. Leavis, who literally kept a map with pins indicating where he’d planted disciples—creates little cults of personality, invisible from the outside. All of this adds up to individual insularity, to a world of top-ten lists without overlap.


Of course many things have led us to this place. Technological changes make publishing more accessible and books more affordable; the spread of education has created a huge number of people who want to write poems, and can (we are only a few decades beyond a time when the big disputes in American poetry were disputes among Harvard classmates).  I believe that overall, the scale of American poetry is a good thing. But it does create certain problems for the kind of poet who wishes for recognition. Such poets (the ones Halliday calls “ambitious”) react to the situation with a set of defensive behaviors that have as a side-effect the sort of critical dissensus described by Corn. We see this across the poetic spectrum. If Helen Vendler, with her refusal to believe there could possibly be 175 poets worth reading out of the untold thousands of 20th century American poets, suffers from a kind of “proclivity for ignoring,” so also does Kenneth Goldsmith, who has argued that his kind of poetry is more “relevant” (to what, one wonders?) than other forms, which presumably no longer have any claim on our attention.


The multitude is the condition of American poetry in our time. The problem of the multitude, though, exists only for poets ambitious for recognition, and readers who wish to feel they can read everything worth reading.


*Update December 28: D.G. Meyers at Commentary magazine takes a different view of the issue.


*Update January 3: Johannes Göransson takes yet another view of the issue.

Us as Them, Now as Then: Sameness and Continuity in the Poetic Field

Gather round, boys and girls, and I'll tell you a tale of a long-ago magical time known as the Clinton Administration. Back in those charmed days of peace and prosperity, some of the good people of the land attended grad school, where they learned that we were to understand people in terms of otherness, and time in terms of discontinuity. Their professors taught them the gospel of otherness from yellowed texts written by a great, brow-furrowing, ancient wizard named Lacan; and from the yellowed texts of a great, bald-domed ancient wizard named Foucault they were taught the gospel of historical rupture and discontinuity. And happily romped the grad students in the sunny fields. All, that is, except one, a grumbling malcontent (let's call him me), who loved the wizardly teachings, but (forgive him, reader, he'd been reading Hegel) felt that the opposite ideas might also be a part of the truth. Snarl churlishly, did he, in seminar rooms; mutter uncharitably, did he, in the coffee shop; badmouth, did he, his kindly profs, who tolerated his general orneriness due to the mild kindness of their dispositions, with nary an eye-roll evident. Verily (ish). And so did pass the breezy days in the checkered shade of academe's quadrangles, until a great curse fell upon the land in the person of Dick Cheney. But of that sad tale we speaketh not.

Instead, we fast-forward to the dying days of Cheney's baleful reign, to test the grumbler's hypothesis that sameness and continuity are forces as strong as those of otherness and discontinuity. Let's start by checking in with the poets, tapping away into their laptops and eying one another across the coffee-joints and faculty lounges of the land. And it is with suspicion that they eye each other, oh doe-eyed and innocent reader (What's that? You're not doe-eyed? Not even one of you? And you lost your innocence when? Jesus, really? Ah, well, okay. Anyway). Where were we? Oh, right. The suspicion with which the poets eyeball one another. Okay. So consider these, the words of Mark Halliday, in his recent hatchet-job review of Joshua Clover's book of poems The Totality for Kids (he lays into Clover for pretension and twitchy insecurity, although to criticize a guy who writes rock criticism for the Village Voice for these qualities is like criticizing Los Angeles for the lousy traffic — of course it's true, but if you're going to get to what's valuable, you'll have to get past all that). After taking apart a few of Clover's poems in excruciating detail, Halliday says:

Will Clover or his admirers respond to my review? Probably not, though they blog constantly. Why should they respond? I'm on the other team (the lyrical and/or narrative mainstreamy team). We grant tenure to our players, they grant tenure to theirs; mostly we avoid shootouts.

There you go. The suspicion in the poets' eyes seems to come from a sense that poets play on two different teams, call them what you will (the prominent poet-blogger in the front row has raised his hand, I see, to suggest "School of Quietude" and "Post-Avant"). Otherness is rampant on what passes for Parnassus! And, as the generally reliable Al Filreis argued out in a semi-recent blog post, the lines of battle have been drawn for some time:

Robert Creeley wrote the preface to Paul Blackburn’s Against the Silences. Creeley there counted Blackburn as among those who starting in the late 1940s had hopes for poetry and felt “the same anger at what we considered its slack misuses.” Thus Creeley implicitly interprets Blackburn’s title phrase: this is a new poetry written against the quietude (to use that apt Sillimanian phrase) that Creeley and Blackburn, among others, associated with poetics that we can now describe as between modernism and postmodernism. I especially like the dating of Creeley’s realization: the late 1940s.

Okay, clarity-and-context wise it isn't quite up to Filreis' general standards, but you get the gist: the Big Division of Poetic Otherness between the School of Quietude and the Post-Avant (and that pre-Post-Avant phenom, Blackburn and Creeley's New American Poetry) is well established.

But this got the grumbly believer in the-truth-of-sameness equaling the-truth-of-otherness (let's call him me) thinking. I mean, when you compare what Paul Blackburn thought about the role of poetry in society to, say, what a representative of the square poetry community of the mid-twentieth-century thought, you actually find more continuity than difference. Sure, there's variability within the poetic field, but in the broader field of culture, the whole sub-field of poetry is actually pretty small, and pretty coherent. No matter how hot the debates may get, the two warring parties are in the end much more similar than they are different (make your own analogy to the American two-party political system here, if you like).

Check it out. Here are a few lines from Paul Blackburn's "Statement," a kind of declaration of ethos and poetics he wrote in 1954 (you can find the whole text up in an old issue of Jacket, where the line breaks and indentations are preserved better than I preserve them here, html-challenged creature that I am):

Personally, I affirm two things:
the possibility of warmth & contact
in the human relationship :
as juxtaposed against the materialistic pig of a technological world,
where relationships are only ‘useful’ i.e., exploited, either
psychologically or materially.

2nd, the possibility of s o n g
within that world

And then, later, this:

...if a man could sing the poems his poets write

— and could understand them — and if

the poets would sing something from their guts, rather than
the queasy contents of same,
then that man would stand a better
chance, of being a whole man, than
him who stands or sits and says but ‘Yes’ all day.

Enough man to stand where it is necessary to take a stand.

So okay. For Blackburn, the big problem of our time is instrumentalism, the reduction of everything to utilitarian concerns, or to a calculation of gain. Everything, including human relationships and human beings, gets reduced to its usefulness in a big, technocratic scheme. You know the nightmare he's talking about: something like the situation diagnosed in Dialectic of Enlightenment or One Dimensional Man, or embodied in, say, How to Win Friends and Influence People. And poetry's role is to help save us from that nightmare: instead of reducing us to our value as money-making machines, it cultivates the "whole man" (pardon Blackburn's sexist language, won't you? It was the fifties). And this cultivation of our whole character actually helps give us some ballast against the immoral, or amoral, imperatives of the big technocratic scheme, giving us the fiber to "take a stand" rather than bend, yes-man-style, to whatever wind blows from the direction of Power.

Not a bad role for poetry, eh? I mean, the view really honors the art, and makes big claims for it — it certainly seems more important than mere decor. It's oppositional, dammit! I mean: Woo! Yeah! Long may the counter-culture's mangy flag fly! And screw those squares in their uptight, formalist ivory towers, right? All they cared about back when Blackburn was laying down this righteous line was formal irony and the affective fallacy, right? Right. Except, you know, no.

Let's check it out by comparing Blackburn to the godfather of the New Criticism himself, I.A. Richards, when he talks about poetry's role in society. The presentation is more button-down collar than unbuttoned work shirt, but the points he makes are, in the end, strikingly similar to Blackburn's. Richards’ thinking involves a kind of theory of the balancing of opposed drives in the experience of art. Aesthetic experience tempers what Richards calls emotional belief with intellectual belief. Without such tempering, says Richards, we would behave as primitives, indulging self-interest and bending truth to fit our desires. This passage from Practical Criticism is as compact a statement of the kind as I can find:

In primitive man ... any idea which opens a ready outlet to emotion or points to a line of action in conformity with custom is quickly believed.... Given a need (whether conscious as a desire) or not, any idea which can be taken as a step on the way to its fulfillment is accepted... This acceptance, this use of the idea — by our interests, our desires, feelings, attitudes, tendencies to action and what not — is emotional belief.

Without a balancing of intellect and emotion, we’re left with little more than a crude will to power, and we end up treating the world as means to our own ends, or self-advancement. We end up becoming a part of what Blackburn called "the materialistic pig of a technological world, where relationships are only ‘useful.’"

By contrast, the aesthetic experience, for Richards, harmonizes our conflicting interests. The results are very much like what Blackburn seemed to have in mind when he described poetry as engaging the "whole man," since an engagement of a broader spectrum of our urges and impulses moves us toward a balanced subjectivity: “the equilibrium of opposed impulses” in “aesthetic responses,” writes Richards in Principles of Literary Criticism, “brings into play far more of our personality than is possible in experiences of a more defined emotion.” Our appreciation of the world becomes broader than it would have been had we made our perception and thought instrumental to self-interest, because “more facets of the mind are exposed and, what is the same thing, more aspects of things are able to affect us.” Moreover, Richards envisions this process as leading us past our own primitive urges to reduce everything to a means to our ends: "since more of our personality is engaged the independence and individuality of other things becomes greater," he says in Principles of Literary Criticism. "We seem to see ‘all round’ them, to see them as they really are; we see them apart from any one particular interest which they may have for us. Of course without some interest, we should not see them at all, but the less any one particular interest is indispensable, the more detached our attitude becomes. And to say that we are impersonal is merely a curious way of saying that our personality is more completely involved."

So there ya go. Someone like Richards and someone like Blackburn may be at different ends of the poetic field, but that field itself has a lot of coherence, and people who occupy different camps within the field end up offering a fundamentally similar view of poetry's position vis-a-vis society: for Richards as for Blackburn, poetry is a corrective to the instrumentalizing bias of modern society; a corrective that works by cultivating the whole personality and teaching us to see beyond instrumental ends.

And that's my argument for Sameness. But wait! No! Don't file out of the ponderous professor's lecture hall just yet! I know the seats are uncomfortable, but I haven't delivered my Peroration Concerning the Continuity of the Poetic Field over Time! Let me just dust off these lecture notes, and see if I can adjust the (admittedly feeble) air conditioning. Ah. Much better, and thank you, Igor, for wiping my brow with that moist towelette. Now where were we? Oh yeah. Continuity. Well, since most of you seem to have snuck out under cover of Igor's towelette intervention, I'll keep it brief. My point is this: the position held in common by Blackburn and Richards in the middle of the 20th century was already a well-established one, dating back at least to the Romantic period. I mean, check out what Schiller had to say about poetry's place in society, way back when he wrote Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man in the 1790s.

Letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man gives us a theory of a two-sided human nature. The first part of our nature consists of what Schiller calls the stofftrieb, a kind of sense-oriented self-interest, a collection of appetites and desires. The second part of our nature is the formtrieb, something like our reason, but more specific: it is our drive to impose order on our experience, to create moral and conceptual systems. Neither of these parts of our nature should be allowed to dominate the other, lest we become imbalanced creatures. An excess of stofftrieb would either reduce us to mere appetites (think of Charles Dickens’ image of the industrial workers of Hard Times as nothing but hands and stomachs), or turn us into monsters of self-interest, exerting a Nietzschean will to power over our rivals. For a creature of stofftrieb things exist “only insofar as it secures existence for him; what neither gives to him nor takes from him, is to him simply not there.” The inverse situation, in which we have an excess of formtrieb without sufficient stofftrieb, is no better. Without an appreciation for the senses and the particularities of the material world, the man of formtrieb becomes “a stranger in the material world.” Worshipping only his abstract system, he will be a figure as disconnected from quotidian existence as the scientists of Laputa in Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels.

For Schiller, we can finally become fully integrated creatures, in whom both urges are fully developed and fully reconciled. But we are capable of such a reconciliation only through the cultivation of a third drive, the spieltreib or play instinct. Man is “only Man when he is playing,” writes Schiller (forgive him his sexist language, oh reader, it was the 1790s), because it is only play that allows for a full recognition and engagement of both the senses and the urge for rules and order. The whole person is recognized and fulfilled in play. And play is most fully available to us through art and poetry, because the “cultivation of beauty” will “unite within itself” the “two contradictory qualities” of our nature. Blackburn's "whole man" comes from a long tradition of people influenced by Schiller, and Richards' ideas are even more rooted in this: he summarized Schiller in his early Principles of Aesthetics.

So sure, okay, poetry is divided into camps. And poetry changes over time. But in all our emphasis on different teams, and micro-evolutions of styles, maybe we should take a break and check out how samenesses exist, and continuities endure. And maybe I should head outside and knock back a cold one. All formtreib and no stofftrieb makes Archambeau a dull guy. And thirsty, too.