The Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar

I think it's because he dresses like some kind of heavy metal Lord Byron, and because he's known to read his poems at a New York bar called Otto's Shrunken Head, that Quincy Lehr gets away with calling his new book of poems Dark Lord of the Tiki Bar.  I liked it when I read it in manuscript, and wrote some jacket copy, probably the only jacket copy I'll ever write that quotes Mike Tyson:

I’m not sure Quincy Lehr knows the difference between affections & addictions, punches & prayers.  His topics, or his targets, include the greatest generation, world music, special interest porn, the “billboard sea of kitsch,” Macbeth, “that prick Baudrillard,” and God.  Like Mike Tyson, Lehr says “I’ll fight any man, any animal. If Jesus were here, I’d fight him, too.”  And he blasphemes like a true believer hurt as hell.

The book is out soon from Measure Press.

The tee shirt (yes, the tee shirt) is available here.

My Martian's Eyes are Nothing Like the Sun: Ray Bradbury's Sonnet 130

If there's one poem, other than "The Red Wheelbarrow," that you can bet on most Americans having read in school it's Shakespeare's 130th sonnet, the one beginning "My mistress' eyes are nothing like the sun." The poem trots out all of the clichés of the renaissance love poem—that one's love has lips as red as coral, skin as white as snow, breath like perfume, hair like spun gold, etc.—and dismisses them. None of them apply to the mistress of the poem, but it doesn't matter: she's as beautiful and wonderful as any of the stereotypical creatures hanging around in the sonnets of lesser poets. A sonnet like Shakespeare's is inevitable when a genre becomes so established and formulaic that its clichés jostle thickly together. Is it any wonder, then, that Ray Bradbury, writing for the science fiction magazines of the late 1940s, needed to pull a Shakespeare and write a little piece that scraped the clichés off another formulaic genre: the tale of the Martian invasion?

The story is called "The Concrete Mixer," and appeared in a 1949 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories before being republished in Bradbury's 1951 collection The Illustrated Man. It opens with a Martian named Ettil sitting quietly at home and resolving not to take part in a planned invasion of earth. "I shall remain on Mars," he tells his family, "and read a book." Men of Bradbury's generation knew well what happened to those who resist the call to war: first, society is incredulous ("Who ever heard of a Martian not invading!" says Ettil's father in law), then it tries to shame the objector into uniform, and finally it threatens imprisonment or worse. Already we're entering the "Sonnet 130" zone, in that our Martians here are not a monolithic, dissent-free society bent solely on war nor are they without quiet domestic scenes.  But the theme of the clichés of the genre is about to become far more explicit.

When asked for his reasons for resisting conscription into the invading force, Ettil says that he believes the invasion is doomed.  He points to an archive of literature seized from the lone, exploratory rocket sent from Earth to Mars, a rocket captured by the Martians.  He hauls out copies of seized magazines from Earth—Wonder Stories, Fantastic Stories, and Science Tales—magazines very much of the sort for which Bradbury wrote, and he says of the stories of Martian invasion contained in the issues:"each invasion is thwarted by a young man, usually lean, usually Irish, usually alone, named Mick or Rick, or Jick or Bannon, who destroys the Martians."  It's not that the invasion will literally be destroyed by a single, modern-day Huck Finn type, says Ettil, it's that a planet nourished on these tales will be filled with confidence, and have "morale.  A big thing.  The Earthmen know they can't fail.... Their youth of reading just such fiction as this has given them a faith we cannot equal.  We are uncertain: we know that we might fail.  Our morale is low..."

Ettil is right about one thing: the Martian invasion will fail.  Like Shakespeare's mistress, Bradbury's Earthlings will prove themselves every bit the equal of their clichéd literary counterparts without partaking in a single quality of those counterparts.  When the Martian fleet arrives, it is greeted with neither fear nor gunfire, but with a brilliantly rendered welcoming committee of the small town Rotarian type. "This is Earth calling," comes the radio message, "This is William Sommers, president of the Association of United American Producers!"  He continues, saying "Welcome! Welcome to green, industrial earth!"  When the Martians creep cautiously from their spacecraft, weapons in hand, they are greeted by an assembled crowd with officials giving banal speeches, kisses from beauty queens, a brass band, the man who grew the biggest grapefruit in the San Fernando Valley, and other creatures of 20th century American commercial hoopla and boosterism straight out of a Sinclair Lewis novel.

In the scenes that follow, the Martians are subjected to complimentary hot dogs, free beer ("courtesy of Hagenbach beer, Fresno, California"), popcorn, movies, and free product samples ("BLIX: the new sudsy soap!").  It's all mass production and mass consumption, not mass destruction, but Ettil sees that, as far as the invasion is concerned, there's little difference: "we have been dropped like a shovelfull of seeds into a concrete mixer," he writes in a letter home, "nothing of us will survive: we have been killed not by the gun but by the glad-hand, not by the rocket but by the automobile."

This is more than just an undoing of the clichés of the tale of Martian invasion: it's also a statement about the nature of American empire in the wake of the Second World War.  Coca-colonization.  The absorption of all differences into the single market, where everything exists as commodity.  But it's also more than that: in a way, Bradbury's story anticipates the critique of mass consumption and mass media that Guy Debord will make almost 20 years late in Society of the Spectacle.  We see this when a car pulls up beside a demoralized Ettil and a little man asks "You a Martian?"  When Ettil replies in the affirmative, the man says "Just the man I gotta see—the chance of a lifetime. Hop in quick.  Hop in.  Take you to a real nice joint where we can talk.  Don't just stand there."  As it turns out, the man is a movie producer, hoping to take Ettil on as a consultant for a film about the Martian invasion.  But it quickly becomes clear he's not going to be taking much input: the film will impose a set of conventions, mostly drawn from Westerns, and bend the truth to fit those clichés.  The producer lays it all out:

Here's how I get the picture in my mind—listen." He leaned forward excitedly. "We got a flash scene of the Martians at a big powwow, drummin' drums, gettin' stewed on Mars. Inthe background are huge silver cities” "But that's not the way Martian cities are!" "We got to have color, kid. Color. Let your pappy fix this. Anyway, there are all the Martians doing a dance around a fire!" "We don;t dance around fires!" "In this film you got a fire and you dance," declared Van Plank, eyes shut, proud of his certainty. He nodded, dreaming it over on his tongue. "Then we got a beautiful Martian woman, tall and blond." "Martian women are dark!" "Look, I don;t see how we're going to be happy, E.V. By the way, son, you ought to change your name. What was it again?" "Ettil." "That's a woman's name. I'll give you a better one. Call you Joe. Okay, Joe. As I was saying, our Martian women are gonna be blond, because, see, just because.

The spectacle of the invasion comes to replace the invasion itself, and Ettil, the real invader, is recruited into being a part of this.  Meanwhile, the Martians have become pacified, drinking beer and watching movie after movie in the theaters—we anticipate that soon they will be watching the movie of their own invasion, re-presented in terms far from their own.  The spectacle of experience will become more real than the experience, and the invaders will, in the manner outlined by Debord, let the characters in the spectacle do their living—and invading—for them.

It's a triumph of cliché, a fact that Bradbury underlines by revealing the producers' name to be Rick, one of the typical names of the hero of a standard tale of repelling a Martian invasion.  So, in a sense, Bradbury does Shakespeare one better, not only stripping away the clichés of genre writing, but having them come back and win despite it all.  It's as if Shakespeare's mistress, happily seeking the very banality the poet rejected, came back at the end of the poem after a trip to the day spa, with lips as red as coral, skin as white as snow, breath like perfume, and hair like spun gold.

Bullshit and Interest: David Kaufmann on Me on Conceptualism

"A year and a half after Archambeau’s article," writes David Kaufmann, referring to "Charmless and Interesting," a piece on conceptual poetry I wrote for Poetry, "can we say that he is still right? I am going to argue that he is, but not in the way it might first seem."

Kaufmann's article, "Bullshit and Interest: Casing Vanessa Place," appeared in Postmodern Culture, and now you can read it on Project Muse, where it is available without a paywall.  He has a lot to say about the kind of appeal conceptual poetry makes, the position in which it places the reader, and he even draws on philosopher Harry Frankfurt to offer a (complex, nuanced) answer to Doug Nufer's famous, or infamous, question about conceptualism: "isn't it just bullshit?"

We've reached a moment when we can look back on the initial burst of pro- and anti- conceptualist polemic and try to assess what it was all about, and Kaufmann's done it more interestingly than anyone else.  I'm glad he's decided my essay still has something to it, even if it's not quite the thing one might expect.

Litscapes 2015!

Not long ago a poet I know sent me a note asking if I ever blogged about anything other than publications in which my work appears.  Last week's post about Daisy Fried must have come as a terrible disappointment to him, but this week's won't: I've just seen the proofs for Litscapes 2015, an anthology of innovative writing edited by Kass Fleisher and Caitlin M. Alvarez.  It looks terrific, and, in addition to a little thing I wrote called "The Poem That Does Not Exist," includes work by:

Charles Bernstein

Maxine Chernoff

Andrei Codrescu

Johanna Drucker

Paul Hoover

Kent Johnson

Pierre Joris

Kevin Killian

Frank Lentricchia

Laura Moriarty

Susan M. Schultz

Mark Scroggins

Stephanie Strickland

Cole Swensen

Steve Tomasula

Anne Waldman

Susan Wheeler

And many, many more.  Look for it soon from Steerage Press—and, if you run into Kass Fleisher or Caitlin Alvarez, break out the confetti and throw a parade!

If I Were A Freudian this Post Would Be Called "The Mother's Penis": A Note On Daisy Fried

"Hot damn!" I thought, "it's Daisy Fried!"  I was paging through the May issue of Poetry, and there, on page 138, was Fried's poem "The Girl Grew and Grew, Her Mother Couldn't Stop It."  I've never actually met Daisy Fried, but I've been reading her forever, and we both spend too much time hanging out on Facebook.  One reason I feel closer to her than I do to many of the poets I read is that we both have small daughters, and post about them with some frequency (actually, the fact that we're both on Facebook a lot, rather than dizzily pouring ourselves off some barstool somewhere, is also probably a parent thing).  Anyway, I was happy to see a new poem by her, and doubly happy to see that it was on a topic close to my own experience.  The poem's first line nails something very true about being a parent:"The girl grew and grew," writes Fried,  "her mother couldn't stop it; it terrorized."  The phrasing seems like something out of a horror story—where some kind of Frankenstein's monster grows too strong for its master and runs amok.  But the terror here is subtler than that: its primarily the terror of losing one's small child, the inevitable result of successful parenting: they grow up, these children, they grow away from you, and you, acutely aware of their vulnerability, let them go.

What follows is, for a time, a nicely-drawn and keenly observed catalog of children's experience, a world of play and crafts and school projects, behind which we sense the child's ravenous acquisition of skills and symbolic codes—geometry, biology, systems of writing, fine motor skills, and the like: 

     What would the finger-dance do?  Kindergarten art a buffet of markers
gluings of stuffs to seasonally-keyed paper, Elmer's pools drying clear.
     A stapling and testing of cylinders versus spheres versus cubes
for kinetic and entropic possibilities, stuffing balled newspaper
     into paper dragons, two sweet silver elephants with heads too small
and trunks too long, situated off-center, snuffling flowers.  And silver rain.
     And 16 silver hearts stacked vertically and strips of masking tape, colored
in reverse rainbow.  Unnamable tendrils diffusing to scribbles.  A bird.
     Another bird, more rain, peace signs, a horse with sideways-flowing mane,

I enjoyed this as I read it, but wondered where it might go, how (if at all) the poem would turn.  And then there was this:

and knowledge: that the sky's full of blackstruck Ms and Ws, drifting
     clouds; that her kitty cats watch sunsets; sky doesn't reach
down to meet the earth;

Okay, I thought: we're getting a bit of a generalization, after all those particulars ("knowledge"), and we're getting a sense of the child's difference from the adult, the way the sky isn't represented according to the canons of adult realism.  But then something really interesting happened: the final half of the final line comes along, with an end-word that turns the poem so sharply in a new direction that I'm surprised the page doesn't emit an audible shriek of squealing tires:

                                     mother shrinks to the size of a penis.

What to do with this?  Well, okay, there's the literal to consider: we're talking about a kid drawing something, and in that drawing the mother could indeed be the size of a penis.  And we are invited to think about the diminishing importance mothers play in a child's life as that child grows up—the same diminishment that was so terrorizing at the beginning of the poem.  But one could have said "doll" or "crayon" or, for that matter, "vagina."  Why say penis?  It's such an incongruously masculine word to apply to the diminishing role of the mother.

One thing that's in play is simply surprise and novelty: it's an incongruous image, by being so masculine in a poem about motherhood, but there's a rightness in it too, in scale and in having to do with reproduction and therefore parenthood.  And then there's a real sense of disempowerment that you wouldn't really get, at least not in the same way, with another image: the penis is so connected to connotations of power that whole schools of psychology, from Freud to Lacan, use the term "phallus" to mean something like "empowerment" and "castration" to mean "disempowerment." We get a sense of the mother's disempowerment as the child, through all of the innocent and sweet seeming play and craft-making detailed in the poem, grows beyond the mother's control—and putting the word "shrinks" near the word "penis" gives us a sense of the detumescent loss of power or potency.

There's more than this, too, I think: there's also the simple fact that the penis, here, becomes not just another iteration of the traditional symbol of power and potency: it becomes an image of smallness and disempowerment.  There's something feminist in this, a reversal of the old Freudian model of masculinity as power and femininity as disempowerment.  In a way, then, the poem isn't just a mother's lament for her loss of authority in the life of her growing child. It's that same mother's intervention in the realm of symbolism, aiming to undo some of the patriarchal imagery that still contributes to the disempowerment of women.  It's a mother's attempt—as her daughter gains independence—to make the world that daughter will enter into a place less hostile to her.  The mother works hard to help the daughter grow into strength and knowledge and independence—and, in the end, she also works to make the world itself a place better fit to receive that daughter.

Fanaticism! Intolerance! Disinterest!—Toward an Aesthetics of Camp

I recently had the privilege of looking over the proofs for the next (and, sadly, the final) issue of the great Prague-based journal VLAK, set to be unleashed on the world in 600-page splendor this September. It's a wonder: Charles Bernstein! Jerome Rothenberg! Lyn Hejinian! Vanessa Place! Rachel Blau DuPlessis! Clark Coolidge! Philippe Sollers of Tel Quel fame! And my own essay, "Fanaticism! Intolerance! Disinterest! Toward an Aesthetics of Camp." Which begins like this:

Camp remains one of our most poorly theorized aesthetic categories. It has a certain status in queer theory circles, to be sure, but is rarely a part of a more general discussion of aesthetics—in effect, it is a ghettoized term. The continued centrality of Susan Sontag’s “Notes on Camp” shows how narrow the discussion of camp has been: her important but provisional notes remain the most authoritative poetics of camp we have. I don’t propose to offer, here, an aesthetics or poetics of camp. But if I may use a term so ponderous and out of keeping with the lightness of camp that it practically comes out the other side as camp itself—I do hope to offer a prolegomenon to such an aesthetics or poetics. If camp calls for fun and elegance, I fear I will provide precious little of either—and, since I am confessing shortcomings, I suspect I will provide less by way of evidence and argumentative coherence than one might wish. What I do hope to offer, though, is a rationale for understanding aesthetic experience in terms of camp, and a sense of what is at stake in camp as a category of aesthetics. It is through an aesthetics of camp that we can go beyond a dichotomy that has long divided the aesthetic field into a dominant Kantian tradition based on dispassionate, Apollonian contemplation and disinterest, and a reactive counter-tradition based on (to take some words from Asger Jorn) “fanaticism,” “intolerance,” and a Dionysian disavowal of disinterest. Both the dominant tradition and its other lie open to forms of ethical and political criticism from which an unlikely hero—camp—promises deliverance.

The essay  ends like this:

Camp, in the sense I intend it, is a kind of ludic and aestheticizing attitude that is also a kind of deep commitment. Christopher Isherwood, the first to use it in this sense, puts a good description of it into the mouth of a character in his novel The World in the Evening: 

High camp always has an underlying seriousness. You can't camp about something you don't take seriously. You're not making fun of it; you're making fun out of it. You're expressing what's basically serious to you in terms of fun and artifice and elegance. 

Camp, seen this way, is a cousin of aesthetic autonomy, since it elevates play and beauty over utility and morality—an elevation well understood by Susan Sontag in her seminal “Notes on Camp” where she writes: 

1. To start very generally: Camp is a certain mode of aestheticism. It is one way of seeing the world as an aesthetic phenomenon. That way, the way of Camp, is not in terms of beauty, but in terms of the degree of artifice, of stylization. 

2. To emphasize style is to slight content, or to introduce an attitude which is neutral with respect to content. It goes without saying that the Camp sensibility is disengaged, depoliticized—or at least apolitical. 

Sontag goes on to add:  

38. Camp is the consistently aesthetic experience of the world. It incarnates a victory of ‘style’ over ‘content, ’ ‘aesthetics’ over ‘morality’… 

So far, Sontag has framed camp as a form of disinterest—involving an Apollonian distance from its object. Framed in these terms, it lies open to the same sorts of criticisms Nietzsche, Jorn, and others have leveled at the tradition of Kant and Schiller. But even as camp involves a kind of Apollonian aesthetic distancing, it also—contradictorily—embodies the Dionysian impulse to break down the barriers separating self and object. “Camp taste is a kind of love,” writes Sontag, and it “identifies with what it is enjoying.”  The serious involvement of which Isherwood wrote is, in fact, an identification of self and object, a breaking down of the barriers of aesthetic distance, a Dionysian act of participation. 

What camp offers, then, is Apollonian and Dionysian, disinterested yet interested. It breaks past the pallid individualism of the dominant tradition of aesthetics, but at the same time provides a kind of distancing from the potentially dangerous enthusiasms of those who seek in art and play an expression of the general will and general desire. This play of distance and identification has been best documented when camp addresses gender, but one can see it in broader terms as well: the camp misanthropy of a Philip Larkin or a Frederick Seidel, to the camp patriotism of Trey Parker and Matt Stone, and far beyond, camp creates a play of interest and disinterest that awaits its full analysis. Camp’s pioneering theorist, Susan Sontag, ends the opening essay of the book that contains “Notes on Camp” with a call for an “erotics of art.”  What aesthetics now cries out for is a poetics of camp.

In between those two parts there's a lot of Schiller, Adorno, and Situationism, and a note or two about the camp and the queer.

Emergency Index: The Wake of Fallon McPhael

Trixie Sparx begins the burlesque portion of the Wake of Fallon McPhael

One of the thousand reasons Ugly Duckling Presse numbers among the most exciting small publishing ventures in America is the annual appearance of Emergency Index, a compilation that documents performance pieces large and small across the country and around the world.  It's a democratic assemblage, with big names and big-budget spectacles sitting side by side with the unknown, the marginal, and the full-on freakish.  The nature of ephemeral nature of performance makes something like the Emergency Index incredibly valuable: just paging through the 700 pages of the thing broadens one's sense of the possibilities for what kinds of events could be put together—and awakens an appetite to put on a show of one's own.

The latest volume of Emergency Index, #3, edited by Sophia Cleary and Yelena Gluzman, includes an entry on a performance I helped produce, along with Larry Sawyer, Valerie Archambeau, and Lina Ramona Vitkauskas: The Wake of Fallon McPhael, a fake wake for a non-existent poet, including tributes to the late, fictitious man by his former associates as well as audience participation, presided over by the Revered Pat McDonald, and concluding with an invasion of the stage by male and female burlesque dancers, as per McPhael's final will and testament.  It was, I'm proud to say, a TimeOut Chicago pick of the week, in a city with a lot of staged events from which to choose.  Here's the Emergency Index entry:

You will note the image of two unsightly mourners, Larry Sawyer and myself.  Frankly, I'm surprised the editors didn't go with a shot of the burlesque dancers, Saucy Jack and Trixie Sparxx, for reasons that should be evident in these photos by Valerie:

Saucy Jack near the climax of his act.

Trixe mourns Fallon McPhael's passing.

Saucy Jack in manly tribute to the late poet.

The grand finale.

Here, from the photographic archives, are a few more shots of the assembled mourners:

Kathleen Rooney and Virginia Konchan console one another.

Mourners consumed with sorrow.

Mourners grieve.

Palpable sorrow.

Surprise appearance by the late Jim Morrison.

Barbara Barg recounts her exploits with the late McPhael.

The view from the lectern.

The same crew of miscreants is hoping to stage a similar event this summer.  Working title: "Hollywood Pitch: Apocalypse Now Meets Mean Girls."  More as things develop!

Proud Men in Their Studies: On Mark Scroggins—New in GHR!

Rejoice! The new issue of Lou Rowan's always-too-cool-for-school Golden Handcuffs Review has dropped from the skies.  Poetry by Fanny Howe and Joseph Donahue and Jerome Rothenberg!  More poetry by Susan Schultz and Mark Scroggins!  Fiction by Ken Edwards!  Lost work by Reginald Edward Morse, edited by Rick Moody!  George Economou on translation!  Peter Quartermain on Jerome Rothenberg! And more! More! Including a little thing I wrote about Mark Scroggins' Torture Garden called "Proud Men in their Studies."  It begins like this:

"Poetry, drawing away from the collective life of the court, can only withdraw into the privacy of the bourgeois study, austerely furnished, shared only with a few chosen friends, surroundings so different from the sleeping and waking publicity of court life that it rapidly revolutionizes poetic technique.  Crashaw, Herrick, Herbert, Vaughn — all the poetry of this era seems written by shy, proud men writing alone in their studies… Language reflects this change.  It is a learned man’s poetry." 

 That’s a passage from Christopher Caudwell’s 1937 book Illusion and Reality: A Study of the Sources of Poetry, in which the young writer — who’d have proved a second George Orwell, had he not been gunned down in the Spanish Civil War — describes the formal changes that came about when English poetry stopped being a public game played at court and became the pursuit of solitary men among their books.  No longer something for public declamation, poetry became learned, private, knotted with a kind of profound cleverness that, requiring time and erudition to appreciate, wouldn’t have pleased much as a glittering gentlemanly accomplishment at court. 

Certainly 21^st century America has little enough in common with England in the 17^th century, but when I read Mark Scroggins’ Torture Garden: Naked City Pastorelles, Caudwell’s passage on Crashaw, Herbert, and company came immediately to mind.  Why, though?  It’s not as if anyone would confuse a poem like George Herbert’s “Easter Wings” with Scroggins’ “Perfume of a Critic’s Burning Flesh”:

 Animus deploys nurses exceptionally diligent
attention finely tuned skills culture
of detachment unreliable deceptive the
law of the negative everlasting
Nay structures of determination truth
of the labyrinth quasi-persons reeling
in customized systematic reeling pain.

But despite the very different texture, and the eschewal of reference and discursive meaning, Scroggins’ poems have a lot in common with the English 17^th century as described by Caudwell: they are learned, private, written for the few rather than the many.  And, like the works of that greatest poet of 17^th century England, John Milton, they are angrily at odds with the dominant culture of their time. 

To begin with, there are the matters of form and allusion....

Well, it goes on.  But you don't want to stay here.  You want to get your hands on GHR posthaste.

Tomas Tranströmer, R.I.P.

The Face of Glamour

I’ve seen a lot of them, lately: the bland, glamorous faces of models in advertisements for fashion and various luxurious commodities. They’re ubiquitous anyway, but my exposure has been amped up considerably by recent prolonged stays in airports and hotels, and a brief stint in hospital (I’m fine), where I’ve found myself leafing through glossy magazines.

The empty, blandly aloof gaze is everywhere in these magazines, in photo spreads as well as advertisements—a gaze we know from models on catwalks, too, a gaze so universally available that young people can mimic it effortlessly for the selfies they post on social media. But what lies behind that gaze? Why has it become the universal form of expression for glamorous images of human faces?

One possibility is that it exists to invite the viewer—that is, the potential consumer—in. As cool and off-putting as the expressionless face of the model may seem, it is, after all, an expression placed on the face of the consumer’s aspirational self. Whether the images appeal to the sexually objectifying male gaze is of secondary importance in most of the images, which exist to sell fragrances and clothing and accessories not to men but to women. The female viewer is, of course, expected to feel inferior to the woman in the image, but only because she has not yet acquired the product that (it is hollowly promised) will transform her, Cinderella-like, into the glamorous woman in the image. So a lack of expression could be a kind of invitation, a blankness or abstraction into which one is invited to project oneself.

The appeal of relative abstraction as a method of inviting the spectator to project his- or herself into an image is a well-established principle of graphic art. Scott McCloud, in his seminal study Understanding Comics, tells us “When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another,” however, “when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself…. The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled.” This has everything to do with the abstraction, the relative blankness, of the way characters are represented. We identify with the more abstracted features of the character, write McCloud, but

…on the other hand, no one expects audiences to identify with brick walls or landscapes, and indeed, backgrounds tend to be slightly more realistic. In some comics, this split is far more pronounced. The Belgian ‘clear-line’ style of Hergé’s Tintin combines very iconic [that is, abstracted] characters with unusually realistic backgrounds. This combination allows readers to mask themselves in a character and safely enter a sensually stimulating world. One set of lines to see. Another set of lines to be.

Certainly there is something to this, but it is equally true that, along with the pulling-in effect of the glamorous face, there is a pushing-away, a remoteness or aloofness. Roland Barthes, in his famous essay “The Face of Garbo,” gets something of the effect when he describes the blankness of Greta Garbo’s face in the film Queen Christina:

 …the make-up has the snowy thickness of a mask: it is not a painted face, but one set in plaster, protected by the surface of the color, not by its lineaments. Amid all this snow at once fragile and compact, the eyes alone, black like strange soft flesh, but not in the least expressive.

The abstraction of the face and the inexpressivity of the eyes elevated Garbo above the realm of ordinary mimesis: in Queen Christina she represented not a particular woman, in particular existential circumstances, but “offered to one's gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature,” a creature “descended form a heaven where all things are formed and perfected in the clearest light.” Her remoteness is the remoteness of an ideal, and the blankness of the gaze is an important part of this removal from the sublunary world of particularity.

The blank gaze of the glamour model shows how she inhabits a purer, more ideal world than ours, a world beyond contingency and circumstance, a world where everything is sufficient unto itself. It repels us and our messy, flawed world—even as it provides a blank space into which we can project ourselves, as the consumers of the advertised products (and therefore as the inhabitants of the idealized world). John Berger, in the passages on envy in Ways of Seeing, describes exactly the self-sufficiency portrayed in the glamour model’s bland gaze:

Being envied is a solitary form of reassurance. It depends precisely on not sharing your experience with those who envy you. You are observed with interest but you do not observe with interest—if you do, you will become less enviable. In this respect the envied are like bureaucrats; the more impersonal they are, the greater the illusion (for themselves and others) of their power…. It is this which explains the absent, unfocused look of so many glamour images. They look out over the looks of envy which sustain them.

There’s a reason the blank gaze has become the ubiquitous expression in advertisements for aspirational products: the combination of exclusion and potential inclusion, of aloofness and space for us to project ourselves, is a powerful vortex. And unless we enter some future mode of social organization in which social ratification is satisfied in more substantial ways than the promise that one will be envied if one buys what a particular glossy ad is selling, it’s a gaze to which we will continue to be subjected.

What Rhymes with Wallace?: Wallace Stevens and Rhyme

One of the unexpected pleasures of the recent Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900, for me, was running across Anthony Madrid in the corridors between sessions.  I hadn’t seen him for months, not since he pressed a collection of Edward Lear’s verse into my hands in a tiny used bookstore under the Metra tracks in Evanston, and was glad to let him pull me into a nearby room where he was about to join other members of the Wallace Stevens Society in a panel on Stevens and rhyme.

Madrid spoke first, beginning with a general précis of his argument about the trajectory of rhyme in English verse.  I’d heard this before, when Madrid joined Don Share and Lea Graham on a panel on the poetry of Michael Robbins I chaired at the Midwest MLA a year ago, but it’s such an intriguing argument I was happy to hear it rehearsed again.  The gist of it is that after the Elizabethan period, whole categories of rhyme are, essentially, decommissioned from English verse, or become far less common (critics of Madrid’s theory love to find exceptions, but a full reading of his doctoral work in The Warrant for Rhyme reveals a strong case for a general trend of the kind he describes).  Rhymes that involve strong semantic links—semantic similarities, or opposites, or rhymes from the same semantic category—greatly diminish over the course of the seventeenth century.  So me/thee, mine/thine, he/she, berry/cherry, and the like become far less common.  Madrid makes much of this: the link between rhymes becomes less rational, he says, and more a matter of mystery, as if the poet wills the rhyming words to belong together for reasons unknowable to the intellect.

The anti-semantic nature of rhyme becomes a norm in the eighteenth century, and it is only with Thomas Percy’s 1765 Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, an antiquarian’s selection of old ballads and other poems, that the older style of rhyme begins to return for the Romantic era.  A Romantic like Byron, when he is serious, as in Childe Harold, rhymes like an eighteenth century poet, but when he’s comic, as in Don Juan or Beppo, he makes rhymes that go out of their way to draw attention to themselves, and appear as stunts (as Butler’s comic rhymes in Hubridas did).  The rhyme becomes something deliberately original, frame-breaking and winking.  And this sounds the death-knell for rhyme, since over the nineteenth century rhyme becomes less a holistic part of poems and more of an attention-grabbing device, until in the modern era it is all-but abandoned.

This brings us to Wallace Stevens, whose poetry only rarely rhymes—11 early poems are consistently rhymed, and after that rhyme occurs as an occasional grace, like alliteration.  When it does rhyme, it almost always uses the classical rhyme of the eighteenth century, which does not seek to draw attention to its cleverness (an exception being “übermenschlichkeit/ word soon come right”).  There is rarely a semantic quality to the rhyme, and Madrid argues that this is aligned with Stevens’ belief in the mysterious powers of the imagination—the rhymes are convened only by the power of imagination, not on some rationally apprehensible basis.  Stevens rhymes less and less over time, too, as the poetry becomes less overtly musically-driven and more liturgical.

After Madrid, Eugene Vydrin of NYU took the stage to speak about rhyme and the adherence of the poem to reality in Stevens, and was followed by Joon Soo-Bong of Seoul National University, who spoke about schematic rhyme as essentially antithetical to Stevens’ aesthetic of flow.  All very interesting, but I was particularly fascinated by Roi Tartakovsky, who turned to empirical linguistic research to explain rhymes and other sonic effects in Stevens’ poetry. 

Tartakovsky noted that one of the most important recurring patterns in Stevens’ poetry is that of the recurrent pair of sonically similar words—as in the “sea” and “she” that come up at the start of the first and second stanzas of “The Idea of Order at Key West.”  Linguists have told us that acoustically similar words are actually less well reproduced in the memory than other words, and tend to become confused—but that rhyme words are, in fact, remembered well.  So Stevens works with a combination of words that aid in the recollection of argument or thesis, and words that actually blur rational or argumentative distinctions.  I’d be very interested in seeing a fully-worked out analysis of Stevens drawing on this insight.

Of course there was much more to see and hear (and eat and drink and argue over) at the conference, but I’m glad I was pulled into the little demimonde of the Stevensians, and I’m glad to see rhyme returning as a category of serious critical analysis.