Showing papers in "Chicago Review in 2003"
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Sleeping with the Dictionary as mentioned in this paper is a collection of short works that alternate between a wide range of styles, including sound-based, referential and even autobiographical.
Abstract: Harryette Mullen. Sleeping with the Dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002. 85 pp. $14.95 Harryette Mullen. Blues Baby: Early Poems. Lewisburg: Bucknell University Press, 2002. 146 pp. $24.95 Harryette Mullen's most recent collection of poems, Sleeping with the Dictionary, engages questions of racial, sexual, community, and cultural politics within a rigorous yet playful framework of formal experimentation. Most of Mullen's poetry to date makes use of word games and formal constraints (many of them borrowed from the OuLiPo), using these devices to push disruption and referential difficulty to its limit. While these formal and thematic elements are present throughout Mullen's work, the singularity of each of her books is remarkable. Where Muse & Drudge (1995), for example, is a long poem constructed of quatrains, Sleeping with the Dictionary is a collection of shorter works that alternate between a wide range of styles. Where the earlier book allowed the reader to grow comfortable in the formal frame of the quatrain, this new book asks readers to constantly change how they are reading and what they are reading for. Some of the poems in Sleeping with the Dictionary appear to be primarily sound-based; others are referential and even autobiographical-a return in some ways to the mode of Mullen's 1981 debut, Tree Tall Woman (reprinted in Blues Baby: Early Poems), although this move now occurs through the lens of formal experimentation. This mixing of styles keeps the reader 011 tiptoe as she shuttles between various means and modes. "Between" begins "My ass acts bad / Devil your ears Charybdis / Good engagements deep blue sea" (9). This poem is followed by the overtly topical "Bilingual Instructions": "Californians say No / to bilingual instruction in schools // Californians say No / to bilingual instructions on ballots // Californians say Yes / to bilingual instructions on curbside waste receptacles: Coloque el recipiente con las flechas hacia la callel Place container with arrow facing street" (10). Shifting styles again on the next page, "Black Nikes" is a prose poem that resists narrative development in favor of playful juxtapositions as each sentence draws on an idea or image from the previous one: "We need quarters like King Tut needed a boat. A slave could row him to heaven from his crypt in Egypt full of loot. We've lived quietly among the stars, knowing money isn't what matters. We only bring enough to tip the shuttle driver when we hitch a ride aboard a trailblazer of light" (11). What is instructive about these multiple forms and contents is the way each new shift expands the political potential for Mullen's work, demonstrating that cultural and political change is always an act achieved on the level of definition-Mullen knows that what matters is who controls what means what. In an interview with Daniel Kane, Mullen says "What attracts me to Oulipo, besides their sense of humor, is their systematic effort to demystify the poetic process."1 This comment suggests to me that Mullen's politics are based on the humor of disruption. Sleeping with the Dictionary seeks to find the pleasure available in language by exploring the various uses of connection and reference, but it is a pleasure aimed at rethinking the consequences of reading; when readers get a joke, or make a connection in any given poem, they engage poetic process on the level of creation rather than reception. Her poem "Elliptical," for instance, is a series of sentences containing implied or direct universal quantifiers such as "always" and "never" followed by an ellipses. The poem begins: "They just can't seem to... They should try harder to... They ought to be more... We all wish they weren't so..." (23). What becomes apparent in this poem is not the idea that cultural and racial dialogue, or even critique, is impossible, but that the form of such dialogue is complex, necessarily involving all the misunderstandings, assumptions, or insights that we bring with us. …
9 citations
Journal Article•
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TL;DR: Martha pats her spiky, old cat, Manet, studies cat's cradle from a book as mentioned in this paper, and plays Scarlatti in his underwear in the morning.
Abstract: I LOVE MORNING 1. We're in New Mexico. It's summer?all morning to lounge in bed, talk on the phone, read the paper. Martha pats her spiky, old cat, Manet, studies cat's cradle from a book. Time is ethos, as if we're engendered by our manner in it, not required to be in ourselves. With no cause to act on it, there's no pointing beyond, so he gets up and plays Scarlatti in his underwear. Being together, like scrim, defocuses space. Knowability (features) of her face, continually passing into expression, is detached from her, a para-existence beside the mother, halo, unraveling.
2 citations
Journal Article•
TL;DR: Aygi as mentioned in this paper pointed out that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the "spectator," and unconsciously introduced the'spectator' into the concept of beautiful.
Abstract: Kant thought he was honoring art when among the predicates of beauty he emphasized and gave prominence to those which established the honor of knowledge: impersonality and universality. This is not the place to inquire whether this was essentially a mistake; all I wish to underline is that Kant, like all philosophers, instead of envisaging the aesthetic problem from the point of view of the artist (the creator), considered art and the beautiful purely from that of the "spectator," and unconsciously introduced the "spectator" into the concept "beautiful." It would not have been so bad if this "spectator" had at least been sufficiently familiar to the philosophers of beauty--namely as a great personal fact and experience, as an abundance of vivid authentic experiences, desires, surprises, and delights in the realm of the beautiful! But I fear that the reverse has always been the case; and so they have offered us, from the beginning, definitions in which, as in Kant's famous definition of the beautiful, a lack of any refined first-hand experience reposes in the shape of a fat worm of error. "That is beautiful," said Kant, "which gives us pleasure without interest." Without interest! Compare with this definition one framed by a genuine "spectator" and artist--Stendhal, who once called the beautiful une promesse de bonheur. At any rate he rejected and repudiated the one point about the aesthetic condition which Kant had stressed: le desinteressement. Who is right, Kant or Stendhal? If our aestheticians never weary of asserting in Kant's favor that, under the spell of beauty, one can even view undraped female statues "without interest," one may laugh a little at their expense: the experience of artists on this ticklish point are more "interesting" and Pygmalion was in any event not necessarily an "unaesthetic man." --Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals (as quoted by Giorgio Agamben in The Man without Content) ENGLAND IN 1819 An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying King; Princes, the dregs of their dull race, who flow Through public scorn,--mud from a muddy spring; Rulers who neither see nor feel nor know, But leechlike to their fainting country cling Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow. A people starved and stabbed in th'untilled field; An army, whom liberticide and prey Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield; Golden and sanguine laws which tempt and slay; Religion Christless, Godless--a book sealed; A senate, Time's worst statute, unrepealed--Are graves from which a glorious Phantom may Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day. --Percy Blysshe Shelley PHLOXES IN TOWN as if in the impersonal thinking of the world quiet and clear here--as in the center of a clearing--purity trembles--and we pass by not disturbing it even with the imperceptible breeze of attention 13 July 1983 --Gennady Aygi So much depends upon collateral damage invisible through a night-scope in the evening sky (MP, with WCW) "Contingency" Close connexion or affinity of nature; close relationship. The condition of being liable or not to happen in the future; uncertainty of occurrence or incidence. The befalling or occurrence of anything without preordination; chance, fortuitousness. The condition of being free from predetermining necessity in regard to existence or action; hence, the being open to the play of chance, or of free will. The quality or condition of being subject to chance and change, or of being at the mercy of accidents. A chance occurrence; an event the occurrence of which could not have been, or was not, foreseen; an accident, a casualty. A conjuncture of events occurring without design; a juncture. (et al) --selected definitions from the OED In April of last year, Bradin Cormack contacted me to ask whether I would be willing to come to the University of Chicago to give a reading and a talk, and I happily agreed. …
2 citations
Journal Article•
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TL;DR: The best essay is a puzzle as mentioned in this paper, i.e., it is about startling the mind into action when much is at stake and intelligibility is poor, which is a worthwhile wager.
Abstract: The word Versuch, attempt or essay...thought's utopian vision of hitting the bullseye is united with consciousness of its own fallibility and provisional character. --Theodor Adorno, "The Essay as Form" "I'm looking for The Great Utopia. Do you still have it in stock?" "No, but we have The Rape of Utopia in stock." --conversation overheard at Guggenheim Museum Shop 1. The poet Tina Darragh has written some of the shortest, best essays I know. Piet Mondrian could write one in a title: "The Arts and the Beauty of our Tangible Surroundings," "Down with Traditional Harmony!," "The Evolution of Humanity is the Evolution of Art." (1) The prose that follows is almost superfluous. On their own, the titles exert aphoristic power. An aphorism is a sudden essay. Darragh's book of what one could call poetic essays, a gain)(2)st the odds, contains formal experiments with a new kind of narrative poetry and ends with "three manifestos": "The Best of Intentions," "Error Message," "Don't Face Off the Fractals (Revisited)." I don't wish to be contentious, but they are not manifestos. They are riddled with interrogatives of the sort the manifesto can't tolerate. Each is three or four pages long and, like John Cage's essays, articulated in part by its spacing on the page. "The Best of Intentions" has this: While following this line of questioning, I am consoled by the existence of the random function as an ordering principle. We think of "random" as "helter-skelter' but as a programming concept it is used to define parameters within which the direction of diversity is productive. ... It's a matter of becoming accustomed to this new mode of organization. ... If poetry can be thought of as having a role to play in our culture, one aspect of the job would be to make this random function--as a process, as an organizing agent--visible, tactile, part of our sense of the world. We know we can do it. (2) The random function exercised by the writer's I reader's mind is the operating principle of the essay as form. One might ask how to understand forms whose pleasure it is to violate or exceed generic expectations. Perhaps the point is not understanding at all, at least not in the sense of grasping. Essays, like poems and philosophical meditations, should elude our grasp just because their business is to approach the liminal spectrum of near-unintelligibility--immediate experience complicating what we thought we knew. In this case, "to write" means to engage in a probative, speculative projection of the often surprising vectors of words as they graze the circumstances of ongoing life. "To read" means to live with the text over the real time of everyday life so it can enter into conversation with other life-projects. Forms that move the imagination out of bounds toward pungent transgressions, piquant unintelligibilities intrude into our tangible surroundings. They maintain an irritating presence, pleasurable or not, as radically unfinished thought. They give the reader real work to do. If the essay is a worthwhile wager it is about startling the mind into action when much is at stake and intelligibility is poor. Which is to say, the best essay is a puzzle. What's a reader to think when in the course of reading Montaigne's "Of the Power of Imagination" ("A strong imagination creates the event," etc.) she comes upon a section on sexual impotence? People are right to notice the unruly liberty of this member, obtruding so importunately when we have no use for it, and failing so importunately when we have the most use for it, and struggling for mastery so imperiously with our will, refusing with so much pride and obstinacy our solicitations, both mental and manual. (3) Is Montaigne conflating penis and pen? For such flagrant erratics the term belles lettres is much too prim. The history of opinion on the essay is as full of disgust as admiration. …
1 citations