Adam Lambert and the Erotics of American Idol

Maybe it's because I finally got around to ordering up Milk on the pay-per-view the other day, or maybe it's just because I've got some gay friends, family, and colleagues, but one way or another I actually found myself caring about the fate of an American Idol contestant on last night's results show. Specifically, I became deeply invested in the fate of Adam Lambert. He's a pretty out gay guy, and (more importantly) I think it's fair to say he sang as a gay guy, and the question of whether America would be cool with that mattered to me.

For those of you who have lives, here's the lowdown: this week was country music week on American Idol, and contestants were coached by country star Randy Travis on how to sing songs from the country music canon. Most chose to give those songs fairly traditional, country-style performances, with mixed results. One excellent R&B singer did so to her detriment: it was like watching Glenn Gould limit himself to picking out the Goldberg Variations with a pair of chopsticks. But Adam Lambert took a bolder approach. He was quite bubbly and excited when meeting Randy Travis, saying that he'd found a wonderful, sitar-laden arrangement of the old Johnny Cash classic "Ring of Fire" (turns out it was the Jeff Buckley version). Randy, who otherwise seems like a decent guy, was visibly creeped out by Adam, saying to the cameras "where I come from we don't see many men with nail polish." Argh! I mean, why not say "I'm from some tight-assed village of homophobes, and I've failed to take advantage of the opportunities offered by a lifetime traveling the world and working in the music industry to broaden my horizons and become a reasonably tolerant person"? Maybe that was too wordy for the sound-bite format...

Anyway, Adam, who has — no lie — all the technical chops of Freddy Mercury, and a lot of stage presence to boot, went with the arrangement. The performance was overtly eros-infused, both in the vocals (and I regret I don't quite know how to describe the particulars of just how the vocals were eroticized) and in the stage performance (Jim Morrison-style writhing, plus thigh-stroking, butt-wiggling, and the making of eyes at the camera). It kind of freaked out the judges, and there was a lot of speculation among fans that Lambert might be kicked off the show. The speculation was further fueled by pictures from Adam's website (like the one above — that's Lambert on the left) which showed him kissing men, wearing makeup, and cavorting with a bunch of semi-naked guys at Burning Man. Was American Idol — and indeed, America — going to be okay with this?

It's not that American Idol has been unfriendly to mildly eroticized performances in the past. While the majority of the acts have been about as sexy as a slice of Wonder Bread served with a glass of skim milk, there have been exceptions. Idol seems pretty cool with a kind of low-grade female sexiness in performances. This can be overt, as it was with Brenna Gethers, who more-or-less flirted with Simon Cowell onstage during season 5 (Simon, it seems, likes 'em feisty). Or it can be in the slightly hypocritical mode that the great novelist Angela Carter described, in her study The Sadean Woman, as the "the good bad girl" act: the woman who's sexy, but acts like she doesn't know it (I'm thinking here of Kellie Pickler from season six, who spent an entire song crawling around the stage like a cat in heat, but got all doe-eyed and innocent when Simon called her "a little minx," responding "I'm a mink?"). The vast majority of the men who sing on American Idol do so from some kind of neutered, desexualized space (think Elliot Yamin, or the blind guy from the current season, whose music is so utterly bland I can't be bothered to look up his name), but there have been notable exceptions. Bo Bice, for example, would occasionally smolder with good ol' Allman Brothers-style southern heel-stompin' shitkicker heterosexuality.

But what about the gay guys on Idol? Well, Clay Aiken did very well and (I'm told) still sells out a lot of shows. Clay was in the closet, at least as a public figure, but then again so was the great Paul Lynde, officially. I mean, some closets have glass doors, people. But whether the audience knew Clay Aiken was gay or not, he didn't sing in an eroticized fashion: he had all the sexy, steamy drive of, say, Opie. Not so young Mr. Lambert. He comes across as an eroticized performer, and not in the way Bo Bice did. I mean, Bice was all about the straight male gaze: he performed a kind of burning desire for a female erotic object (women can do this too: Melissa Etheridge's "Come to My Window" is a clear case in point, though now that I think about it I don't recall ever seeing anything Etheridge-like on Idol). But Lambert performs differently. He performs as though he's aware of himself not as the desiring subject of eros, but (at least in part) as the desired object of the gaze.

I suppose I could get off my ass and walk over to the theory shelf, pull down some books, and look up some citations, but I probably don't have to in order to support the point that, generally speaking, most heterosexual guys are less aware of themselves as bodies seen by the desiring gaze of others than are most gay guys. I mean, all you have to do is take a random sampling of, say, a dozen heterosexual men in their forties and a dozen homosexual men of the same age, and you'll get a pretty clear sense of which group has been more body-conscious (I pick that age group because by then the results of how we feel about our bodies start to show. I mean, people in their twenties don't even have to be good looking to be good looking). There are exceptions to all of this (I mentioned Jim Morrison as a straight guy who moved like he was conscious of himself as the object of the erotic gaze), but we're speaking in broad terms here. And the point is this: Adam Lambert, unlike Clay Aiken, came across as both gay and eroticized. He wasn't (like Aiken) a singer who happened to be gay. He was a gay man singing as a gay man.

And the viewers voted to keep him on. We don't know how well he did, but we do know that out of eleven contestants, he wasn't in the bottom three. This is either a testament to the bad gaydar of the American public, or to an ever-increasing level of acceptance. I'm going with the latter, and thanking Harvey Milk.

The Aesthetics of the Cute, Continued

About a month ago, in reaction to the bombardment of comments I was getting about how cute my infant daughter was, I posted something about the aesthetics of cuteness. The basic argument was this: to say that a baby is cute is to get it backwards, since babies are, through some deep-seated Darwinian hoodoo, the basis of our ideas of all cuteness. It's not that a baby resembles the Platonic ideal of cuteness: the infant itself is the ideal, and cuteness the shadowy refraction of that ideal. Also, I harped on a bit comparing the sublime (big, awe-inspiring, even terrifying beauty, to which we feel inferior) the beautiful proper (elegant, refined stuff) and the cute (which is non-threatening, and to which we feel superior, even protective). I'm posting the definitions again, below the asterisk in this post, in the event that anyone cares, but not enough to click on the link to the old post.


Now here's some confirmation from what are probably the world's leading experts on the cute, the folks at Disney:

In other cuteness-vs-sublime news, here's an article that demonstrates how, in cartoons, it's always the cute who triumph over the sublime (not all of the villains here are sublime, but some hint in that direction, especially numbers six, three and one in the countdown). You have to read between the lines a bit, since the good people at Cracked magazine don't really foreground aesthetic theory. But it's all there.


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The Sublime (from Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful)

-Is vast in scale. (Ever stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon? That sort of thing).
-Appears rugged and negligent. (I think it's the idea of immense force that matters here: again, think of the Grand Canyon).
-"Loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation." Think of the gravitas of Mies van der Rohe's architecture: there's no whimsy here, no Frank Gehry crazy curves.
-Is dark, gloomy, solid and massive. (Again, think Miesian school architecture. All those classic Chicago buildings in the Miesian mode are big, black, imposing things).

The Beautiful (also from Burke)

-Is comparatively small (with reference to the sublime).
-Is smooth and polished.
-"Should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly" (you know, the serpentine curve and all that. The eighteenth century engraver Hogarth actually wrote a slightly nutty treatise on how the serpentine curve was the very essence of beauty).
-Is light and delicate.


If we can generalize about the difference between the sublime and the beautiful, it's that the sublime is in some sense superior to us: it is bigger than us, stronger than us, has more gravitas than we do, and embodies forces that could destroy us, if they bothered to take notice of us. The beautiful, though, we meet on more equal terms. It pleases us, without overwhelming us or trying to be ingratiating. But where would the cute fit in this scheme? On this point Burke is silent. But not me! Here's how I see it:


The Cute (my own speculation)

-Is tiny.
-Is soft and possibly a bit squishy.
-Is rounded or even pudgy, rather than elegantly curving or austerely straight.
-Is vulnerable, or at the very least non-threatening. Even perky.


It's just a step further down the continuum that led us from the sublime to the beautiful: if the sublime is superior to us, and the beautiful our relative equal, the cute is in a meaningful sense inferior to us. It is no threat to us, like the sublime: in fact, it calls out for our protection. Not awe so much as "awwww!"

The Michael Jordans of Philosophy

"John Stuart Mill," Karl Marx is said to have opined, "owes his prominence in English philosophy entirely to the flatness of the surrounding terrain." I've been reading Mill's essays on Coleridge and Bentham, and am inclined to think that Marx was being a little unfair. But only a little, and it's understandable: to someone who rose from the churning depths of nineteenth-century German thought, the little pool of English philosophy must certainly have seemed like a backwater.

I mean, German philosophers, from the late eighteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries, were the Michael Jordan-era Chicago Bulls of philosophy: dominant, confident, and effortlessly superior to the competition. I imagine a sense of this proud tradition informed Heidegger's infamous fulminations about how Frenchmen could only think seriously if they switched languages, true philosophy only being possible in Ancient Greek and in German (there is, said Heidegger in a 1966 interview with Der Spiegel, a "special inner relationship between the German language and the language and thinking of the Greeks. This has been confirmed to me again and again today by the French. When they begin to think they speak German. They insist that they could not get through with their own language." He says more about the alleged special philosophical nature of Greek and German in Introduction to Metaphysics, and in his Rector's address — sorry to belabor the bibliography, but a gentleman in a little newsgroup discussion of this post has alleged that this claim about Heidegger's views is "crap," and I wish to prove otherwise). Anyway, it's an odd, and kind of bigoted way of explaining the very real phenomenon of the comparative German excellence in philosophy. It's kind of like explaining the dominance of the Jordan-era Bulls as product of Chicago's superior hot dogs and deep dish pizza. But if we discard this kind of chauvinism, in which a rich tradition is explained with reference to some kind of bullshitty essential local superiority, how can we explain the tremendous power and depth of the German philosophical tradition? Why did the German-speaking parts of Europe give us Kant, Hegel, Schlegel, Schiller, Schelling, Schleirmacher, Schopenhauer, Herder, Fichte, Lessing, Feuerbach, Frege, Marx, Nietzsche, Husserl, Dilthey, Wittgenstein, Heidegger, Adorno, Jaspers, Popper, Benjamin, Arendt, Habermas, etc., while England gave us Bentham, Mill, Bertrand Russell, and, uh... Alfred North Whitehead? I mean, you have to go to the B-list pretty quickly when naming English philosophers. And it goes for the whole continent: while there are individual stars (Kierkegaard, say), no national tradition racks up the points like the Germans. Why?

I think I've got this.

I mean, when we consider the different historical origins and institutional contexts of the French, English, and German Enlightenments, the differences in the character of the different national philosophical traditions becomes clear.

The French Enlightenment was famously anti-clerical. "Écrasez l'infâme!" shouted Voltaire, and the infamy he wished to see crushed was that of the Catholic church. Voltaire's slogan is not, I think, unconnected with another remark of his, about how he found himself spending his time traveling from one chateau to another. That is: I don't think it's coincidental that Voltaire, who spoke against the church, was sponsored by aristocratic patrons (most notably the Marquis Florent-Claude du Chatelet). Sure, Voltaire had his run-ins with aristos (especially that odious knucklehead, the Chevalier de Rohan), but by and large it was they who buttered his toast, and one understands why: the French aristocratic and clerical powers were constantly at one another's throats. And this held true for the French Enlightenment in general: it was a culture sponsored by aristocrats, and it took place in their salons. It owed little or nothing to the church, and directed much of its energy into anti-clericism. (I'm sure the style of French philosophy, so prone to the cutting remark and startling observation, owes much to its origin in the witty salons — I mean, a guy like Roland Barthes is all glitter and quick-jab, whereas a guy like Habermas is all earnest thoroughness — this has got to be connected to the aristocratic salon origins of French philosophy and the earnest, bourgeois scholarly origins of the German tradition).

Then there's the Enlightenment in England. Which is really as Scottish as it is English, since so many of the big-league players hailed from Scotland (David Hume being the real marquee name). The Enlightenment here was notably less anti-clerical than the movement in France, and one understands why: church and state, like bourgeois and aristocrat, had found ways to get along in England, largely by not talking about the things they disagreed on (it's true! Addison's imaginary Spectator Club, for example, served as a model for how members of different kinds of elites could work together by leaving one another alone much of the time, and sticking to topics of common interest, or to what were seen as disinterested matters like taste. Don't get me started on this, or I'll cut-and-paste fifteen pages from the manuscript of the book I'm working on into this blog post and we'll never get to the Germans...). The English system had, and maybe still has, a tremendous capacity for getting along and letting-things-be. A big part of it seems to involve not talking about anything more interesting or controversial than terriers and the weather.

And then there's Germany, or, more accurately (since we're talking for the most part about the late eighteenth and the nineteenth centuries), the German-speaking lands. There were plenty of courts, but they were small compared to the French court, and historically the church had provided a high proportion of the administrative brain-power (and, along the way, accumulated much wealth, autonomy, and political power). The university system had developed in no small measure as a system for generating all this ecclesiastical administrative human capital, and it was here, rather than in the little courts, that the German Enlightenment's most important developments took place (eventually the university in Jena alone ended up contributing more to philosophy in the nineteenth century than, say, Spain) (please don't send me hate mail from Spain — I mean, I like Miguel de Unamuno, too, but that guy was totally channelling the Germans). So while philosophy in England during the period we're discussing often developed without too much of an orientation toward the church (positive or negative), and the French were generally anti-clerical, the Germans found themselves in an interesting position. They took up enlightenment philosophy in an overtly religious institutional context, and had a strong incentive to find some way of reconciling the old traditions of religious thought with the emerging forms of knowledge.

The challenge proved fruitful. For one thing, it led the Germans to develop historicism and hermeneutics and all the other things you need when you want to take a set of texts and understand them as true, but not literally true, or at any rate as having had a kind of truth in their time but not the kind of truth we have today. Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is probably the most obvious case in point. But it's not just that the Germans had a particularly difficult task, and built up their muscles to handle it: they had the university-bred culture of thoroughness and systematic thought behind them (and this makes all the difference: Hume is much, much more readable than Kant, but Kant's systematic method gives his work a power that Hume, every bit Kant's mental equal, can't match). Also, the Germans were able to draw on two traditions: secular Enlightenment thought and the long tradition of Judeo-Christian thinking. This is probably why a guy like Bertrand Russell is constantly dismissing the German philosophers as "mystics." I suppose many people will think Russell's got a point, but I always feel this lack of sympathy for half of what the Germans are up to is one of Russell's main limitations.

Anyway. If you want to get pseudo-Hegelian here, you could say that it was in Germany that the synthesis of Judeo-Christian traditions and Enlightenment secular thought came about. And this had everything to do with the institutional context in which the modern German philosophical tradition emerged.

As to how the Jordan-era Chicago Bulls came to be such a dominant force — well, that much simpler: Jordan was a basketball-optimized android, Scotty Pippin was a robot, and Dennis Rodman was clearly from another planet.

Jorie Graham's Disease: A Second Opinion ... and a Note on Belgian Surrealism

Stand down with the defibrilator! Put that syringe away! Dr. Mike Theune has arrived in the E.R. and tells me I made a misdiagnosis in labeling the seven poetic sins of our moment "Jorie Graham's Disease." One major symptom of the disease is a distrust of order, and Mike got in touch to tell me I've made a serious medical misjudgment. He drew my attention to a letter about Graham he wrote to Poetry a few months ago, a letter I really have no excuse for missing, since it appeared right after my own response to an irate letter about an article I'd written for the magazine. "My response ... isn't any sort of fully articulated response to your notion that so much poetry has caught Jorie Graham's disease. (Indeed, in broad strokes, I agree with your take on some of the major trends in contemporary poetry)," says Theune, "but it is an effort to say that Graham is not to blame for the disease that's been named after her."

Here's Mike's letter in it's full length (the one in the magazine had been edited to fit available space). Maybe he's right, and I'm due for a critical malpractice suit. Call my phalanx of lawyers! Ready my escape copter!

The letter:

I agree almost completely with Jason Guriel’s assessment (in “Not Just Poetry,” October 2008) that “what our era is lacking” is a focus on the, in Camille Paglia’s words, “‘production of the powerful, distinctive, self-contained poem.’” Such—dare we call them “great”?—poems, of course, are being written today, but an increased focus on the book, the project, and/or process does tend to override the centrality of the single poem.

That being said, I disagree almost completely with Guriel’s assessment of the poems in Jorie Graham’s Sea Change. Guriel claims “there are no poems,” that is, distinct poems, in Graham’s latest book. Guriel’s reasoning for this claim seems to be, in large part, formal; put off by Graham’s use of a combination of Whitmanesque long lines and Williamsesque short lines, he states that “[t]he ambition to create individually realized poems has been washed away by [this] tidal form….”

To focus so centrally on form in Sea Change, or in any of Graham’s books or poems, is to miss a truly vital aspect of Graham’s poetics: poetic structure, the crafting of turns. In “Something of Moment,” her introduction to the issue of Ploughshares she edited (in Winter 2001-02), Graham argues that “[i]n a poem, one is always given…a stage upon which the urgent act of mind of this particular lyric occasion… ‘takes place,’” thus offering the poem an opportunity to “break.” According to Graham, “All such moments—where we are taken by surprise and asked to react—are marked places in consciousness, places where a ‘turn’ is required.” In “At the Border,” the poetic statement she published as a part of American Women Poets in the 21st Century (Wesleyan, 2002), Graham speaks of the importance of “the many hinge actions in poems (turns, leaps, associations, lacunae),” and she connects such actions with, among other kinds of poems, “haiku image-clusters.”

Graham refers (in Poetry, March 2008) to the poems in Sea Change as “exploded haikus.” But, however exploded they may be, the poems in Sea Change very often retain their commitment to making vital, dramatic, surprising turns. (A number of references to turns in the poems emphasize this continuing commitment.) Though they do not look like poems by Coleridge, Keats, or Frost, particular poems in Sea Change in fact turn, enacting movements of mind, in ways similar to the descriptive-meditative “Frost at Midnight,” the dialectical “Ode to a Nightingale,” and the ironic “The Most of It.” And their endings clearly attempt to (and sometimes, as in “Futures” and “Undated Lullaby,” perhaps do) achieve the shockingly singular kinds of arrivals one finds in these great poems.

The fault for this oversight is not all Guriel’s. Though the turn is everywhere in poetry (including in Paglia’s Break, Blow, Burn, which features a number of sonnets, and in Sarah Hannah’s “The Riddle of the Sphinx Moth,” the only poem Guriel’s review quotes in full), the turn has received very little of the sustained critical attention it so deserves. However, we—poets, critics, and readers—must pay more attention to turns. This way, we might see more clearly what is lacking from so many weak poems, and what is essential in what moves us.

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Meanwhile, in news from the Belgian Surrealist desk, there's a new translation of one of Louis Scutenaire's essays up at Will Ashon's Vernaland blog. Called "Putting a Foot in It," it's a great piece of provincial resentment against the cultural establishment in Paris. Originally written to accompany a 1948 show in which Scutenaire's pal, fellow Belgian, and creative collaborator Magritte attacked the norms of Parisian artistic taste, it appears in what I think is its first ever English translation. I could be wrong about that, but I don't think so: if I could have found a translation, I wouldn't have had to recruit my pal, fellow Canadian, and creative collaborator Jean-Luc Garneau to help me cook up the current translation. It wasn't as easy as I'd thought: the thing is full of idiomatic expressions and plays on words. I tried to be more true to the spirit than the letter, when I had to choose one over the other. Anyway: if you want to see someone from the margins of Surrealism tee off on the central artistic powers of the day, check it out.

What Decadence Means to Me

When I recently posted a few comments complaining about the clichés of contemporary poetry and calling the poetry that uses them decadent, I thought I might catch some flack. But I thought the flack from people who admire the qualities I (following — indeed, quoting from — Jason Guriel in a recent article in Poetry) saw as clichéd: "reliance on buzzwords"; "distrust of order"; "distrust of linearity and having a point"; "anxiety over what words mean"; "romantic bluster"; "imprecision"; "sympathy for small critters." Instead, I caught flack from a different direction: a couple guys whose opinions carry a lot of weight chéz Archambeau (Johannes Göransson and Gabriel Alexander) objected to the use of the term decadent. They've got a point.

Johannes reacted, I think, primarily to a passage where, after listing the clichéd qualities, I said that "the point isn't that these are bad things, just that they've become a kind of decadent tradition in poetry, a set of gestures often made less because they have importance but because they are taken to signal 'poeticness.'" Here's Johannes, from his blog Exoskeleton:

I've seen this term [decadence] used very strangely around the Internet as of late. Here is Archambeau using it to mean the use of empty manners. So does CK Williams in the little article that made me so irate the other day.

This seems like a strange use of the term.

I'm totally for Decadence.

(But I think Archambeau is largely right about "poeticky" features.)

So in part Johannes and I are on the same page: we both think some elements of poetry are used more to declare poeticality than for any other reason. But he dislikes the use of the word "decadence" here, because it refers (with a capital "D") to the artistic and literary movement of the late 19th century that stressed a dissent from banal bourgeois ideas of 'progress,' that reveled in l'art pour l'art, that celebrated sexual and moral actions and positions beyond the accepted norms, etc. (you know: Gustave Mirbeau, Huysmans, Nerval, Beardsley, Rops, Symons — those guys). Johannes, with whom I share a distrust of anyone who uses "avant-garde" as a transhistorical term, rather than with reference to a particular moment, objects to my ham-handed abduction of the term from its context. Fair enough.

Gabriel Alexanderg, whom Johannes quotes in another post over at Exoskeleton, makes the criticism more explicit:

>I'm interested in the decadent, too. But, I think, less as an adjective that implies self-indulgence or as a platitude. I believe I bristle at its invocation in the same way I do when "avant-garde" is dehistoricized and implemented as a place-holder for any number of aesthetic possibilities. I'm all for the transformation of meaning and the mutation of words, so I'm not generally frustrated with [sic] But I do think that to use *decadent* as an indictment actually mirrors much of the Victorian backlash against the French Decadents and their off-spring (and predecessors) [*Note from Archambeau: I don't entirely buy the chronology of backlash here, but I also don't think that's too important for the present context]. It's much more fruitful for me to think of the decadent as deeply involved, as décéder implies, in death, disintegration, and the dissolution of boundaries. More provocative to think of the decadent as a coda with a Hydra head.

To which Johannes adds this comment: "I think the critique reflects a similar notion: the idea that there is a natural, strong poetry and a weak, artificial poetry."

In response, all I can say is "this isn't what I meant!" I don't think there is a single, transhistorically valid style, one that is naturally good and strong and that we fall away from at our peril. But I can see, given what I said, why Gabriel and Johannes would think that's what I was on about.

So, that mea culpa behind me, I suppose I should address the question of just what I did mean.

I suppose what I wanted to say was this: there are good things that can be done in any style, but style is at its best when it comes out of a deeply-felt engagement with current norms of thought, feeling, and art-making. This engagement may take the form of an affirmation of the current, a criticism of it, or even a total negation of it. It may even be an attempt at a negation of all norms. But a style tends to be less interesting when it is accepted uncritically, when it is taken up simply because it seems to be the way things are done. If we accept a style or a tradition because it is there, it's being taught, it's being published, not because it speaks to some more fundamental need, I think there's a strong chance that we'll produce work that's clichéd. The clichés may be those of clarity (think Augustan poetry), or they may be clichés of (to quote Gabriel) "disintegration, and the dissolution of boundaries." For me, it's not a matter of one style being the transhistorically good, and deviations being degenerations. It's a matter of a style being taken up uncritically and unimaginatively.

I'm not sure which C.K. Williams article Johannes was frustrated with, but it might have been the one in the same issue of Poetry that contained the article where Guriel listed his seven clichés. If so, it's an article in which Williams proposes that styles have an instrinsic entropy to them. He also makes sloppy use of the term "decadence," saying:

Another characteristic of creative systems, what is usually called style, is that they have a terrifically conservative tendency. Styles are always striving to perfect themselves, by which I mean that styles have inherent in them the potential for enactments that no longer depend on anything but the demands of the style itself: neither matter, content, nor, in other words, world. Stylistically, art is always moving from the transparent to the opaque, from trying to make encompassing and as comprehensive as possible its relations with reality, to a state in which its formal dexterity comes to be its most essential requirement. When this happens, usually during the late moments of an artistic era, the execution of style becomes an end in itself, the end in itself: art becomes style displaying itself, preening, showing off.

This is when an artistic style becomes decadent. Decadence in itself isn’t intrinsically bad, it’s unavoidable, and some of the very greatest art is created at the end of the innovation-decadence cycle. What happens then, though, is that some subtle line is crossed, and the gloriously decadent becomes the offensively empty, sterile, and, with no longer any portion of the quest of the artist’s blundering soul a part of it, produces work that is lifeless, stillborn.

I remember being frustrated with this article, not because I thought it was entirely wrong, but because I thought it presented a half-truth. I mean, obviously I agree that styles can become clichéd, but I disagree that self-reference necessarily pairs up with lifelessness, and (more importantly) I disagree about changes of the sort Williams describes being an intrinsic quality of any style. I think that when a style becomes a cliché, it usually has to do with particular historical conditions, rather than being simply something that happens when a style ages. I don't think there's a cycle to styles, separate from their intersection with events, institutions, and the like.

In our current moment, I rather imagine that the increasingly clichéd status (and I agree that cliché is the better word, not decadence) of the qualities Guriel names is connected with what Ron Silliman once called the 400-pound gorilla of our poetic scene: the academy. I mean, if Victorian doggerel came about because the book market of the time called for easy moralism and stylistic clarity, our own kind of institutional conditions influence what becomes clichéd in our own time. In fact, it was a post Johannes put up on Exoskeleton about his experiences in the Iowa MFA program that got me thinking about this some months ago. He described his fellow classmates thusly:

Lots of people bantered around the phrase "post-language poet" - as in "I am a..." This means that they - like Jorie [Graham] - used some of the textures of langpo to recreate high modernism, elegance, high learning - as opposed to ... "Images" which were vulgar and had to be controlled against their natural tendency toward excess; "confessional poetry" was ridiculed; "indeterminacy" was important... because it was "complex" and thus more "realistic." I remember a debate I got in because someone called something (not mine) "pornographic" because it wasn't complex...

The conformism was striking: everyone wanted to do what the charismatic, professionally successful teacher had done. It had the sheen of sophistication (academe loves this), it had pedigree (academe loves this), it seemed current (academe loves this). It wasn't for the casually-interested and uninitiated (acadme loves this). It's not that the style these guys were turning to was in any sense intrinsically 'decadent' — it's that the style was being adapted in what seems like a kind of herd-move, for what seem like professional reasons more than anything else (and for reasons very different from those that led to the genesis of langpo, from which much of the style derives). This is the sort of thing that leads to cliché, which is what I was trying to get at when I talked too loosely about decadence. Maybe a better way to discuss it is as suboptimal centrality, but that was a different blog post.

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In news from the stuff-I-wrote-now-in-print desk, I've got a very short piece on Bonnie Costello's Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World in the latest Boston Review.

{Errata: in an earlier version of this post, I said "Gabriel Gudding" when I meant "Gabriel Alexander." More mea culpas!}

The Seven Poetic Sins, or: Jorie Graham's Disease

Jason Guriel defends the negative review in the latest issue of Poetry, and for readily apparent reasons. Right after the defense ("for the love of poetry, be skeptical," etc.) he lays down some stern judgments on Jane Mead, D.A. Powell, and John Poch. Toward the end of the bit on Powell he lists seven clichés of contemporary poetry, and I hereby make a modest proposal: all reviewers should print them out, make laminated cards, and hang said cards from lanyards around their necks. I mean, I'll do it if you will.

Here are the seven "fashionable gestures" that have become the clichés of the moment:

1. "reliance on buzzwords" (think: absence, abjection, the body, ellipsis, etc.)
2. "distrust of order" (as both theme and compositional principle)
3. "distrust of linearity and having a point" (call it Ashberying)
4. "anxiety over what words mean" (or, I'd add, the pose of anxiety)
5. "romantic bluster" (think Hart Crane on a bad day)
6. "imprecision" (I bet a comparison of contemporary poetic syntax and that of Swinburne would be instructive)
7. "sympathy for small critters" (I think this one's pretty self-explanatory)

"But," you object, "some of my favorite poets do this stuff!" Well, sure. Some of mine do, too. And, for the record, I admire the Ashbery poems that appeared in the same issue as Guriel's essay. But the point isn't that these are bad things, just that they've become a kind of decadent tradition in poetry, a set of gestures often made less because they have importance but because they are taken to signal "poeticness." My touchstone for this sort of decadence has been Andy Warhol's very early soup can pictures, which were spattered-and-dripped-over in the manner of Pollock. A gallery owner asked Andy why he did that, and the still-young artist said "I thought that's what you did to make it art." It's not that the abstract-expressionist drip is a bad thing (and I'd take a Pollock over a Warhol any time, if I found both in a yardsale and only had the pocket change for one). But by the time Warhol was starting out, the drip gesture had become fashionable, and was too-often taken up by those who didn't really have any deep need for it, or understanding of it. Warhol became Warhol by breaking away from all that.

I'm sure there's life in an aesthetic of imprecision and distrust of order. And some of my best friends write in rhizomes. But I'm even more sure that too many of the poems I've seen in the past decade fall into the techniques Guriel describes out of an uncritical acceptance of the aesthetic predicated on those techniques. Call it Jorie Graham's Disease.

The New New Criticism

I've yet to see a copy, but judging from the email I've been getting from people who've read my contribution to the issue, the latest Pleiades is out. My piece is an essay called "The New New Criticism," which takes the occasion of the appearance of Garrick Davis' anthology Praising It New: The Best of the New Criticism as an opportunity to reflect on the nature of that oft-maligned, generally misunderstood movement. One of the things that happened when I sat down to read through Davis' anthology (and, after he got me hooked, a host of the main New Critical documents) was that I realized most of what I'd learned in grad school about the NC was wrong. The New Critics weren't, for example, all about formalism, nor were they, for the most part, ahistorical, nor were they particularly apolitical. I've heard people blast them for these qualities at the MLA convention, and heard people praise them for the same qualities at the ALSC convention. But they merit neither praise nor blame for qualities they don't really possess. The piece in Pleiades trots out some examples to show this, but here's the basic thesis (an edited-down version of the first couple of paragraphs):

*

I’m not sure who’s done more damage to the New Critics: their detractors or their defenders. Detractors condemn the New Criticism as a formalist movement, ahistorical and unconcerned with ethics or politics. Defenders generally don’t disagree with this depiction of the New Criticism—they just value it differently, hoisting it high as a tattered banner under which to rally the scattered remnants of the pre-identity-politics, pre-continental-theory literary intelligentsia. As in so many fiercely fought debates, though, beneath the clamor the two sides really agree more than they differ: both, after all, see the New Critics as formalists, and set them up against a set of politicized, post- 1960s approaches to literature. But does the consensus lying beneath the squabble offer an accurate view of the New Criticism? The challenge in reading the New Critics again is to try to see them without any of the preconceptions that underlie the debate between their detractors and their defenders. When we meet this challenge, we see in the New Critics a more diverse, less strictly formalist movement than we find in the distorted version so often invoked by both sides of the debate.

It may be of some service to us, as we attempt to wipe several decades worth of preconceptions off our critical lenses, to remember that the New Critics never actually saw themselves as locked in battle with the nascent forces of deconstruction, cultural studies, and identity politics... New Critics weren’t a rearguard action, but an advance force, launching raids against a host of other critical movements. Although the New Critics are often taught at the beginning of the literary theory seminar, as a kind of point of origin for modern literary theory, they didn’t emerge in a vacuum, but in a battlefield. The New Critics turned their critical artillery, first and foremost, on early-twentieth century academic scholarship, which they saw as a dull and dutiful business of the establishment of context: all dusty philology and dry bibliography. The New Critics fought, too, against the impressionistic criticism found in the journalistic world.... But it wasn’t just against the practices of the academics and the journalists that the New Critics struggled. Although all-but-forgotten now, colossi of literary theory like Max Eastman and Irving Babbitt towered over the literary scene in the early twentieth century, their tomes promulgating psychological and moralistic approaches to literary study, respectively. And the 1930s wasn’t only the period in which the John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren and company, their Vanderbilt apprenticeships behind them, set out to reinvent criticism: it was also time haunted by the specter of Marxist criticism, the decade of Christopher Caudwell and the young George Orwell, voices heard on both sides of the Atlantic. Emerging as it did in the context of more established, competing theories, it’s understandable that the New Criticism put polemical emphasis on its differences from historical, impressionistic, moralistic, and political approaches to literature. But we do a disservice to the New Criticism if we see it as turning its back on the insights offered by these approaches. Indeed, the goal of the New Criticism, more often than not, wasn’t to spurn history, politics, ethics, or psychology, but to bring these things back into contact with the specific formal qualities of the literary work. Synthesis, rather than aesthetic separatism, was the main project, a fact too often overlooked by both the defenders and the detractors of the New Criticism.

*

In other stuff-I-wrote-appearing news, the British journal Tears in the Fence features a dialogue between the present humble blogger and rising literary impressario Adam Fieled.

Beyond Margin and Center

I think it must have been the most recent issue of that bible of literary hipsterism, The Believer, that got me thinking about the strangeness of the margin-vs-center paradigm as a way of talking about poetry. I'd picked the issue up in no small measure for an interview with John Ashbery, but had been a bit flummoxed by some of the comments made in the introduction to the interview. I read, there, about how Ashbery had won just about every prize American poetry had on offer; about how he has legions of imitators; about how his social life in Manhattan involved dining out with other prominent poets, and so forth, but the introduction asserted, nevertheless, that Ashbery (who, I should add, is the only living poet to see his work published in a definitive Library of America edition) is an "outsider" in the field of poetry. If Ashbery's on the outside, I thought, we need another word for the all-but-100% of poets who are more outside than he.

Of course the label "outsider" was intended as a kind of honor. I suppose this has something to do with poetry being itself a kind of marginal art in America (compared, say, to the movies: people would be much more impressed if I had a vote on the Oscars than they are by my ability to vote for the National Book Critic's Circle Awards). There's a kind of homology of one's position within the poetic field and the position of the poetic field within the field of culture as a whole, right? I mean, if you're a central figure in a marginal art, you've somehow betrayed the art, or so the thinking goes. And if you're a marginal figure in a marginal art, you somehow embody the virtues and essence of the art. Think of punk rock, here: Green Day is a big band, and therefore suspect to many in the punk subculture, to whom their prominence and popularity as best-selling punk act is a dishonor. Whereas, say, The Minutemen, who never sold and never will sell any albums, are somehow of the essence of punk. (I'm not advocating this view: I'm just saying that I think this kind of thinking is out there, and is the probably-inevitable outcome of the kind of position both punk and poetry occupy in our culture).

Anyway. I began to wonder how we could make the paradigm for poetry subtler than a simple dichotomy of margin vs. center. The answer seemed clear enough, and it lay in the ideas of sociologist Neil McLaughlin. I ran into Neil once when he was down at Lake Forest for a conference on public intellectuals a few years ago. I didn't actually attend the conference, but when I stumbled into a local bar after a long day of jawing about Schiller and Blake, I had the good fortune to find Neil seated at a table of conference attendees and ended up hanging with the conference crowd while they drank and ate onion rings — the kind of setting where all the really good talk at a conference tends to happen anyway.

One of Neil's great contributions to the sociology of intellectuals comes in a Sociological Quarterly article called "Optimal Marginality: Innovation and Orthodoxy in Fromm's Revision of Psychoanalysis." It's a case study of Erich Fromm's strange position in the field of psychoanalysis (at the fringes of the respectable, institutionalized center, but nevertheless in a position to be taken seriously). But it also introduces a set of terms for analyzing one's position in a field of intellectual inquiry, terms which, I think, can help us expand on our tired old center/margin dichotomy. Here's the abstract of Neil's article (don't you love the way social scientists provide abstracts to their articles? I wish the practice were less sporadic in the humanities):

The sociological study of intellectual innovation has long been polarized between romantic notions of the creative marginal intellectual and competing accounts stressing the benefits of national, organizational and network centrality in the production of knowledge. I offer the concept of "optimal marginality" as an attempt to move beyond this longstanding but increasingly stale debate. The relationship between a certain type of marginality and intellectual creativity is discussed in the context of a case study on innovation within psychoanalysis. German psychoanalyst Erich Fromm's contributions to the modern revision of Freudian theory is highlighted to illustrate the conditions under which marginality is likely to lead to innovations within theoretical systems and intellectual organizations. What types of marginality lead to innovation? Under what conditions does marginality lead to insight, and when does it lead to marginal ideas? Four ideal types are outlined and a research agenda is called for that operationalizes and tests these theoretical ideas in the context of comparative sociological analysis of intellectual creativity.

This is great stuff, and really does add another dimension to the tired binary of margin and center. I mean, Neil literally adds another axis to the chart, giving us optimality and suboptimality as well as marginality and centrality. So we end up with four possible positions in a field of intellectual endeavor:

• Optimal Marginality
  
• Suboptimal Marginality
  
• Optimal Centrality
  
• Suboptimal Centrality
  

These categories have nothing to do with whether an intellectual or other positions are any good: they address questions of whether one's positions are considered prominent and legitimate by people in the field. If we need a figure who shows the marginal as more objectively valid than the central and "legitimate" set of ideas, we need only think of Galileo. He was a marginal figure in cosmology during his lifetime, forced by the central powers to recant the heretical notion of the earth going around the sun.

Here, very briefly, is a breakdown of the four positions:

Suboptimal Marginality

This is what it sounds like: a fringe intellectual position whose adherents are not well positioned to disseminate their ideas. As McLaughlin puts it:

Contrary to a recent tendency to assume that insights flow almost automatically from the borderlands, suboptimally marginal intellectuals have inadequate economic, cultural, institutional, network, and personal resources to carve out unique and powerful innovations in dialogue with centrally located intellectual traditions. Marginality can sometimes lead to sect-like behavior and increasingly bizarre ideas.

The extreme version of this, one imagines, would involve the sort of guy who lines his hat with tin foil so the gubment can't hear his thoughts, which, in all probability, consist in large measure of elaborate theories about how the nation that controls magnesium controls the world. But there are also more high-functioning groups in such positions. In poetry, I think of the Wintersians: people who adhere strictly, even cultishly, to the ideas of Yvor Winters, and who don't have access (or perhaps don't desire access) to the networks that would allow them to disseminate those ideas more broadly. (Again, this doesn't speak to whether those ideas are good or bad, merely to where and how they are received, and how far they travel). Some of the most fascinating stuff in British poetry — the Cambridge School around Jeremy Prynne — could also be seen as suboptimally marginal, even deliberately so. I mean, Prynne didn't even want his work published through the ordinary channels — there's a kind of insistence on suboptimal marginality at work. All that's started to change, I suppose, with Jacket magazine, the Bloodaxe edition of Prynne, the support of Cambridge poets by Salt Publishing, the Cambridge emphasis of Chicago Review, etc. But you get the idea, right? A group unable or unwilling to propagate its creed beyond a small, relatively unrecognized circle.

Optimal Marginality

If you occupy a position of optimal marginality, you stand outside the established institutions of a field, but you've got enough mojo, for one reason or another, to be taken seriously by what the Dude of Big Lebowski fame calls the "square community." In fact, said community is going to cherry-pick the more acceptable of your notions, and you may find that you serve as a (probably unacknowledged) conduit between the cultish suboptimal marginals (who are beyond the pale, for those in the center) and the mainstream of your field. Neil McLaughin lays it out thusly:

...optimally marginal thinkers often help transfer ideas from the creative margins to the center of intellectual and cultural institutions and traditions, creating external pressure for intellectual innovations within a tradition. Optimally marginal intellectuals have access to the creative core of an intellectual tradition, while avoiding organizational, financial, cultural or psychological dependencies that limit innovations.

So optimally marginal types aren't total outsiders: often, they've got credentials of the kind revered by the center (doctorates, say), and even though they've gone off the reservation, one kind of has to take them into account. Erich Fromm, to use McLaughlin's example from the field of psychology, wrote bestselling books and had a large popular following, so even though his ideas excluded him from the Freudian establishment, there was cause to keep an eye on him, and to hear him out. A poetic analogy, I think, would be Amiri Baraka in the 70s: after he changed his name from LeRoi Jones and ditched the downtown New York scene, he developed a following in African-American circles, among people who weren't otherwise hooked up to the literary scene. In cultivating a new kind of writing and a new kind of audience, he became someone to whom those closer to the center paid (cautious) attention. And through actions like his, identity politics moved from a marginal position to something that gets more than mere lip service from the more prominent institutions of poetry (is that about right? I think so...). Oh: Ron Silliman is the blogosphere's very own prince of optimal marginality. He's not really part of the center (no big prizes, no fancy post in academe, etc.), but the sheer number of people who stop by his site every day makes him someone with a source of clout, someone on the radar of those in positions of optimal centrality.

Optimal Centrality

Here lie the movers and shakers of the square community, the people who sit atop the most empowered institutions, the people with access to the resources to not only generate, but to propagate, ideas. As Neil puts it:

... optimal centrality .. allows access to core resources, intellectual and cultural traditions, and emotional energies while allowing freedom from cultural, intellectual, and institutional orthodoxies. Optimally central thinkers have the networks, cultural capital, institutional leverage, and personal abilities to create paradigm shifts that cannot be ignored within a tradition, discipline, or school of thought.

If you are Helen Vendler, or in a position analogous to hers, you know what it feels like to be optimally central in the field of poetry. This doesn't mean you're right or wrong — it means that you're in a position to do some thinking and to see that thinking turned into an orthodoxy, or something like it. Grad students bearing your ideas will occupy professorial, critical, and editorial positions, and people seeking prizes will do so with your taste (and the taste of your epigones) in mind.

Suboptimal Centrality

This position is a sad one, somehow. It involves those people who are attached to the central traditions and institutions of their field, but aren't empowered within those traditions and institutions. McLaughlin describes this crowd thusly:

Intellectuals, scholars, or cultural producers in a space of suboptimal centrality are stifled by the norms, institutional pressures, and privileges rooted in their relationships to core societal and organizational structures and personal opportunities.

I mean, think of it: here are the guys who want, or need, to get published, and end up stifling whatever wild-ass ideas they may have had in order to produce something that they think will meet with the norms of the prominent journals. Or they write what they think their profs will like, what they think will get them the residency prize or the teaching gig, or the published book. This can be a conscious self-limitation or an unconscious one, but it's real enough. Top dogs have a freedom to generate new ideas, or to import them from the margins, but these poor saps (the judgment is mine, not Neil's — he's a social scientist, and above crude judgmentalism) are convinced they have to play by the rules. Oh, the humanity!

McLaughlin's article calls for a series of case studies examining how ideas move from the margin to the center of a field, and I think we could do worse, in thinking about poetry, than to follow his model. I like to think it would be a fruitful thing to do: if nothing else, it would give me a great justification for having elbowed my way into a crowd of hard-drinking sociologists.

"She's So Cute!" The Aesthetics of Parenthood

"She's so cute!" I've been hearing a lot of comments like this lately from people who've seen my two-week old daughter Lila (that's her on the right). On the one hand, I totally agree: Lila's about as adorable as they get, and anyone who sees that makes me happy. On the other hand, the uptight prof in me wants pull out a pen, reach up into the big speech-bubble over the comment-maker's head, circle the comment about cuteness in red ink, and write "tautology!" in the margin. I mean, it's not just that babies can be cute: there's a real sense in which they are the Platonic ideal of cuteness, and everything else we think of as cute is cute only inasmuch as it resembles a baby. It's not that my baby is cute: it's that cuteness is like my baby. Cuteness is a manifestation of what she is, not the other way around. "Cute's so her!" would probably be the appropriate exclamation.

There's a biological basis for all of this, and thanks be to the gods of Google I was able to dredge up a vaguely-remembered New York Times article by Natalie Angier on the Darwinian core of cuteness from a few years back:

Scientists who study the evolution of visual signaling have identified a wide and still expanding assortment of features and behaviors that make something look cute: bright forward-facing eyes set low on a big round face, a pair of big round ears, floppy limbs and a side-to-side, teeter-totter gait, among many others. Cute cues are those that indicate extreme youth, vulnerability, harmlessness and need, scientists say, and attending to them closely makes good Darwinian sense. As a species whose youngest members are so pathetically helpless they can't lift their heads to suckle without adult supervision, human beings must be wired to respond quickly and gamely to any and all signs of infantile desire.

So sure. One can certainly see how natural selection worked in creating our affection for the cute. I mean, those who don't have a strong, positive response to the aesthetics of cuteness (who don't, to cite the lyrics of the Talking Heads song "Stay Up Late," respond to "little feet-feet, little toes") probably didn't show much enthusiasm for the fluid-spewing, squeal-making products of their procreation. In disproportionate numbers they stalked out of the cave, leaving their offspring to the mercies of the saber-tooth tigers, thereby removing themselves from the future gene pool.

But moving from biology to aesthetics, one wonders just where cuteness fits in the great scheme of things. Edmund Burke's Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful comes to mind as good a place as any to start, at least if you're too groggy from late-night baby feedings to feel up to dealing with Kant. Chief among the virtues of Burke's book is a handy comparison and contrast of two types of aesthetic experience: the sublime and the beautiful. It goes something like this:

The Sublime

-Is vast in scale. (Ever stood at the edge of the Grand Canyon? That sort of thing).
-Appears rugged and negligent. (I think it's the idea of immense force that matters here: again, think of the Grand Canyon).
-"Loves the right line, and when it deviates it often makes a strong deviation." Think of the gravitas of Mies van der Rohe's architecture: there's no whimsy here, no Frank Gehry crazy curves.
-Is dark, gloomy, solid and massive. (Again, think Miesian school architecture. All those classic Chicago buildings in the Miesian mode are big, black, imposing things).

The Beautiful

-Is comparatively small (with reference to the sublime).
-Is smooth and polished.
-"Should shun the right line, yet deviate from it insensibly" (you know, the serpentine curve and all that. The eighteenth century engraver Hogarth actually wrote a slightly nutty treatise on how the serpentine curve was the very essence of beauty).
-Is light and delicate.

If we can generalize about the difference between the sublime and the beautiful, it's that the sublime is in some sense superior to us: it is bigger than us, stronger than us, has more gravitas than we do, and embodies forces that could destroy us, if they bothered to take notice of us. The beautiful, though, we meet on more equal terms. It pleases us, without overwhelming us or trying to be ingratiating. But where would the cute fit in this scheme? On this point Burke is silent. But not me! Here's how I see it:

The Cute

-Is tiny.
-Is soft and possibly a bit squishy.
-Is rounded or even pudgy, rather than elegantly curving or austerely straight.
-Is vulnerable, or at the very least non-threatening. Even perky.

It's just a step further down the continuum that led us from the sublime to the beautiful: if the sublime is superior to us, and the beautiful our relative equal, the cute is in a meaningful sense inferior to us. It is no threat to us, like the sublime: in fact, it calls out for our protection. Not awe so much as "awwww!"

So someone like Nicole Kidman is (no surprise here) beautiful: delicate, exquisite and all that. And someone like Renée Zellweger is more cute: big round forehead, big eyes, a little vulnerable-ish. Although for the full-on pure cute, you'd have to go more Shirley Temple: the cute and the juvenile go hand in hand. One wonders if people can actually be sublime. I mean, sublimity is superior to us, and so one thinks of it as belonging to the gods, or to nature, or to grand creations. It must, says Burke, excite "ideas of pain and danger." Maybe some kind of dominatrix, though certainly not Ms. Kidman as Catwoman. There's too much kitsch in that character, and, while failed attempts at the sublime often end up being kitschy, there's no kitsch in the sublime proper.

While the sublime, the beautiful and the cute are ideal types, as actually embodied they can, of course, be mixed. As Burke puts it, "In the infinite variety of natural combinations, we must expect to find the qualities of things the most remote imaginable from each other united in the same object." One thinks here of the movie Amélie, in which two characters (actually two figures in a photograph who suddenly start talking — the movie's trippy that way) debate whether the eponymous heroine, played by Audrey Tautou, is "belle or "jolie" (that is, whether she's beautiful or cute). They can't quite come to a conclusion, no doubt because Tatou (especially when done up as Amélie) embodies elements of both the beautiful and the cute. I mean, there's something elegant in her jawline, and something grave in her coloration, that offsets the big eyes and perky haircut that argue for cuteness. Let us savor all this a moment. Ahem. Yeah.

So anyway: what about the possibility of a cute/sublime hybrid? Could such a thing exist? I can't think of a lot of artists who go for this effect, except maybe for Mark Ryden. I mean, he combines big space, the idea of the vastness of time, vaguely religious iconography and the like with chubby cheeks and big eyes. Does it work? You be the judge. I've got to get things done so I can go home and play with my baby's feet. They're the very essence of cuteness.

Louis Scutenaire: More Belgian Surrealism!

My unhealthy obsession with Belgian surrealism continues! In between hanging with my new daughter and writing an essay on the future of manifestos I've been translating the maxims of Louis Scutenaire (that's him in the foreground, with the poet Paul Colinet standing behind him). "Louis Who-tenaire?" you ask. Ah! Louis Scutenaire was an interesting guy. Lawyer turned surrealist, communist turned anarchist, friend of Magritte and namer of Magritte’s paintings, Scutenaire was active in the Belgian surrealist scene during its most vital years. His works include several volumes of “inscriptions,” or maxims, which give us a strong sense of his socially conscious but ever-skeptical ironist’s mind. Anyway, here are a few of my favorites:

It’s regrettable, for the education of the young, that memoirs of war are always written by people the war did not kill.

An angry cop: the usual, only more so.

Life will be good when work, for everyone, becomes a luxury.

To cry “Long live life!” is like shouting “Long live ice cream!” in a house that’s on fire. Shout all you want: you never know what may come of it.

I own up, absolutely, to the things that keep me a slave.

He who would enrage his neighbors charms their children.

Workers of the world: I have nothing to say to you.

There are a lot more. But they're like Valentine's Day chocolates: better when you don't wolf them all down at once.

Lake Forest Literary Festival Wrap-Up

Although I had a hand in putting together the list of readers for the just-completed Lake Forest Literary Festival, I had to be out of town for the events themselves, so I'm experiencing them vicariously, mostly in Josh Corey's blog (where they are reported in two parts including video of Christian Bök performing), but also from this article by Lake Forest College's very own Kristin Kojarek (from Lake Forest's campus newspaper, The Stentor). Check it out:

Poets Pounce on the Annual LFC Literary Festival

By: Kristin Kojzarek

The poetry seemed to leap from its pages during Lake Forest College's fifth annual Literary Festival this week as authors used hypertext, computer programming, sound performance, and other collaborative experiments to demonstrate how poems can function in realms beyond print.

One of this year's visiting artists, best-selling Canadian poet Christian Bök, collaborated with a group of students to perform poetry through a spectrum of sounds in the Lily Reid Holt Memorial Chapel on Wednesday evening. "Writing is a skill just like any other skill," Bök said. "It's a type of technical engineering."

This year's artist-in-residence, winner of the Madeleine P. Plonsker Emerging Writer's Prize, Jessica Savitz, performed a reading from her latest book, Hunting is Painting, for the first time. Savitz is the first recipient of the Plonsker award and her book will be published by Lake Forest College Press/ & Now Books.

Showing off another route of creative writing, Chicago-based poetry group Gnoetry and computer artist and hypertext poet, Stephanie Strickland, used computer programming to demonstrate how poetry can be combined with technology to create a new type of art.

"This encourages readers to look at art in more than one way. Hypertext does things rather than says things," Strickland said. "Poetry does not necessarily need to be stacked up on a page," Bök claimed.

Strickland used a Flash player to demonstrate poetry synergized with digital images in the Meyer Auditorium on Tuesday afternoon. A large gathering of students and faculty remained transfixed on Strickland's poems as she moved the mouse across digital constellations and waves of sand where her printed words blended with the visuals. Some text was printed over backgrounds of different types of moving water where the words wavered and became obscured by the ocean waves. When the text became more clearly distinguishable it often faded again. "This brings the reader to the brink of deciphering words," Strickland said. "There is an inter-relationship between the objects and the words, which can also appear as 3-D objects."

Some of Strickland's poems did remain as static text onscreen with a white background or were juxtaposed by a simple design or a picture such as MTA transit card. Every so often, a digital leaf floated across the screen or a flock of butterflies flew down from an upper corner and circled the page. Strickland explained that using moving images with text requires the reader to use new approaches to reading and focusing on poetry. "It is using a new medium to create a new poetic experience. Reading images while watching text requires new reading skills," Strickland said.

When asked how she first became involved in electronic art Strickland said she always had an interest in literature and science. One day, she attended a seminar where she learned about hypertext from electronic fiction writers. "It was around 1994, when we were on the edge of the Internet and I was exposed to many new and exciting things," Strickland said. Realizing that forms of art besides fiction could be used with technology as well, Strickland began hunting for images to complement her poetry. "There is no end in this type of work, but there are multiple beginnings," she said.

The Literary Festival first evolved from a lecture series founded by Professors Davis Schneiderman and Robert Archambeau in 2004 called On the Run. "We named it On the Run because we had no money and did everything on a shoestring, so we were literally on the run," Schneiderman said. However, a year later when Schneiderman and Archambeau decided to try hosting an annual Literary Festival, people were supportive of the idea and helped fund the event.

"[The festival] is a really nice way for students to have an annual event where they can read the work of an author in one of their classes, then meet that author and have a wonderful experience," Schneiderman said.

Junior Ashlee Norton said, "I was really looking forward to meeting Christian Bök after learning about his book, Eunoia and I liked being introduced to Stephanie Strickland's new and innovative ideas."

Senior Leah Scull said, "I really liked Stephanie Strickland's presentation because I admired the way she was able to mesh technology with poetry inspired from nature and science. The way she used a magnet in sand as part of her piece "The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot" was beautiful and inspiring."

Concluding the festival, poets Brian Teare, Karen Leona Anderson, and Richard Greenfield, will read from their work in Meyer Auditorium tonight [2/12/09] from 7:00 p.m.-8:30 p.m.

A Good Day

Lila Elaine Archambeau, born this day.

For me nothing. But that the child
    Walk in peace in her basilica,
The light there almost solid.
—Ezra Pound, Pisan Cantos