No Face

My car's name can be CHIHIRO.

If I could take it in to work with me, I bet I'd enjoy my job more.

Monday, I'm meeting someone to talk about adjuncting for the fall.

I do love clever machines

Last week as I was heading to Wegman's, I heard my engine noise ratchet up suddenly, accompanied by an all-too-familiar metal grating sound.  Last time, my muffler had rusted apart midway through; this time, it was the joint between the muffler itself and the tailpipe, and when I tugged on the latter, it came off in my hand.  My car.  Oh, my car.  Stolen twice.  Mysterious things wrong with the back brakes that cause them to stick, but only when it gets really cold.  Wrecked hard, twice, and only minimally repaired the last time.  Separate keys for the locks & the ignition because the amateurs who stole it destroyed the steering column. . . both times.  A/C barely wheezing out anything you could call cold air, back speakers blown, carpets rained on several times, one triangle window replaced with bolted-in Plexiglas.  Possibly voodooed.  Now actually falling apart, pieces coming off in front of my eyes, and this wasn't even the first one.  Oh. . . my car.

I love to drive, too.  In high school, and for the first couple years of college, driving around Missouri highways at night was one of my main forms of entertainment.  Little-known fact: the smell of summer night air changes completely every twenty feet or so in rural Missouri, as you pass different forest types, weeds, pastures, grain fields, barbecues, newly-repaved roads, creeks, ponds, decaying barns and so on.  Mostly it's different wild vegetation, in an infinite and wide range of pungency and sweetness.  I had about a dozen tapes -- two or so each by Indigo Girls, Cracker, Pearl Jam, U2, Patsy Cline, Black Crowes -- and an 83 Accord with a worn clutch and swiss-cheese holes through the floorboards from rust.  If you lifted the floor mats, you could see the road going by beneath.  Holes in a lot of places, in fact; I used to drive around with half an AutoZone in my trunk because I had to top off oil, coolant & power steering regularly.  I loved that car, though, and I definitely loved the sense of autonomy it gave me.  When my parents used to ask where I was going as I left the house, I'd say, "going to go clean out my car" -- and I would, in fact, take a plastic bag & collect up whatever trash had accumulated, and then I'd start it up and drive somewhere.  I probably actually did throw my trash away when I got wherever I was going, too.  I'm not a liar, after all.

The Accord got to be too broken for my dad's comfort, and, after the first semester of my freshman year, he found me my second car, an enormous 88 Oldsmobile Cutlass Supreme, white with a red plush interior.  That spring, I'd use it to push up a truck bumper by about 4" through a stunning combination of not paying attention and being generally stupid.  I learned to do bodywork and learned that I do significantly better bodywork than my dad, who had decades of wrecking cars and motorcycles (and fixing them) under his belt.  Right before I started grad school, the engine seized up on highway 50, due mainly to me not keeping enough oil in it -- again, leaky seals & hoses everywhere, plus, again, inattention -- but it was never a car I missed.  It had been way too big for me from day one, and I missed the Honda's manual transmission and the way I could kick myself around corners by downshifting.  My brother stepped in then and helped me buy the 98 Civic I've been driving for, now, eleven years.  And when I say he helped me buy it, I mean he found it, test-drove it, did all the talking to the dealer to negotiate a price and a loan, and put down the down payment.  My contribution was assenting -- I liked Hondas; this one was green and I liked green; I needed a new car; that was about all I had to say -- and signing my name at the end.

I've been car-shopping for a couple months, and I've just-looked at a few and test-driven a few others.  I started out thinking I'd get into a Yaris, but their dash is designed by lunatics -- the gauges are over in the center instead of behind the wheel.  Why?  No one knows.  Plus, the name sounds like a sci-fi character's, and not in a good way, so I was fine moving on from that.  I looked at Versas and Sentras, and they were all right, and then got interested in Hyundais -- apparently in the last 5 years, Hyundai turned itself into a real car company.  Who knew!  Cheaper than the equivalent Nissans, and they drive ok.  The brand new Elantra, actually, is a gorgeous car for the money -- the body panels have a big chiseled angle curving around in the back that suggests Ferrari butt.  Not lying.  The new ones are out of my price range, though, and I had been looking at a more ho-hum 2010 -- a couple 2010s, actually, at a couple places, one that was about what I wanted to pay. . . but I wasn't in love with it and the car salesman hit on me -- predictable, and most of them did that, but I kind of didn't want him to get my commission.

Meanwhile, I'd started to notice the Suzuki SX4 in a couple searches.  Also who knew, Suzuki now makes cars, with 4 wheels and everything, that you'd actually want to drive and that aren't death traps.  The reviews intrigued me, especially when I realized that the "in its class" comparisons for this car were all to Mitsubishis and Subarus.  I wasn't looking at Mitsubishis or Subarus -- that's a full step above my price point.  A dealer halfway across the state had four brand new SX4s in stock, all at the same asking price I was looking at for an Elantra two years older with 26,000 miles on it.  They had some 2010 and 2011 Accents, too, also cheap, so I thought, eh, even if I don't get a car, there are worse ways to spend a day than driving around New York state, assuming my car makes it, and let's hope it will.  I'll go see what this Suzuki noise is all about.

The car salesman was super nice -- I genuinely liked him and I'd totally hang out with him, where everyone else I'd talked to had been on a spectrum from creepily dull to creepily obnoxious -- and despite having a skimpy website, the dealership itself was big, serious, professional, and even a comfortable place to wait around in.  We went for a test drive in the SX4, an adorable little white 4-door.  Adorable.  It's got some nice exterior features that give it character, including fog lights in the front beneath the headlights -- fun -- and a perky, energetic profile that's still curvy and, yes, cute.  Not perky-aggressive, in other words; perky-cute, like, check me out, I'm a cute car and you want to get to know me.  Narrow doors, which seemed a little odd, but useful in tight spaces like, say, the Wegman's parking lot or anywhere else I might park like an asshole, as, admittedly, I occasionally do, or anywhere an asshole might park next to me.  Inside, it's strange!  I can tell you how and why now -- and I can tell you why I immediately liked it, without knowing why, right off -- but my first impression was just, wow, this is good but odd. It's a cabin designed with some totally different take on what a car should be.

First, it's impossibly roomy.  Especially when you open the little doors, you expect quite a small ride inside, but no.  The salesman was a bit taller than me, probably 5'10", and like me, he's an animated person who talks with his hands, and we had plenty of elbow room.  It's also tall.  Really tall.  The cabin itself sits up higher than most coupes/sedans, with more of the powertrain underneath it, and then the seating is bolted up high inside there, so you're riding at eye level with people in smaller SUVs.  Let me tell you, I hate SUVs and I love that they aren't towering over me now in my sassy little car.  (Spoiler alert, yes, I bought it.)  I love even more that I now tower over people in the very cars I had considered but not loved -- over just about any regular car on the road, in fact.  I mean, it gives you good visibility, yes, and the car's very short nose adds to that, too, so it's safe and practical and all, but the enjoyment factor is in getting up in people's business in this cute little car that no one would expect to assert itself that way.

So you're up high, and you're driving a compact car with a 150 hp engine, which is what puts it up there with offerings like Mitsubishi's instead of sleepier Nissans et al.  It zips around corners; it accelerates up steep hills on the highway without flagging at all (seriously impressed me on the way home, through central NY).  The combination of height and power gives it a rough-and-ready feel almost like driving a small jeep, but it's in this pretty little sedan with a nice, cozy suspension.  The suspension was my biggest question mark, going in; reviews online made a big deal about its close, responsive handling, and in my experience, that's code for "handles like a Mazda," i.e., it's got a hard, sports car suspension so you feel every patch in the asphalt right in your tailbone.  Not at all!  Somehow, it's totally comfortable, easy going into things like steep parking lots with shitty, poorly-paved entrances, and yet, yes, exceedingly nimble and responsive.  You register the subtleties of the road without them bothering you.

Incidentally, when I was a teenager, I had a driver-crush on small jeeps, the Wrangler and especially the Samurai.  Suzuki Samurai, that'd be.  If I'd gotten one, I would have rattled around on its chintzy suspension and probably rolled right off the road and killed myself, but, ah, they looked like such fun.  The SX4 feels very stable and reliable, and it rates well, but it still gives you that cheerful, cowgirl feel in the drive.  Here's to my shameful redneck roots.

The seats themselves are very comfortable and have fold-down armrests, which I loved on the long trip back.  I'm already getting used to shifting around the driver's-seat one, too -- and, again, it makes it feel like a truck or something, not a compact car at all.  Chunky side mirrors play into that impression, too (and chunky in a good way, as in, big/great visibility), as do the short doors, once I started to put all these things together.  The front pillars are divided, with a triangle window in the middle, which is good for visibility, and again, just strange.  It feels like the future, but not the sleek, silver-and-neon future of Demolition Man or Star Trek.  It's innovative, smart, resourceful, hands-on, a little punchy.  Colors are odd, too -- the dash itself is charcoal, with the center console in black; above that, pillars & headliner are gray, and below, the carpets, door panels & seats are a warm beige.  It took me the whole drive home to figure out what it reminded me of, and when I did -- oh my.  It's the futurism of post-apocalyptic, usually car-oriented sci-fi of the late 1970s!  Mad Max and Deathrace 2000.  Bring in Buck Rogers and the original Battlestar Galactica if you'll let the aesthetic lean on space ship antecedents, too.  Right down to the color scheme.

I love this so much.  Adorable, friendly little car outside; groovy, livable, post-apocalyptic survival machine inside.  This is exactly the car for my personality.  I don't know what Suzuki's going to do with that, because I'm not the average American anything, but it's definitely a match for me, and I'm glad I took a chance on a 150-mile road trip to find out about it.

On the subject of road trips, not only do the front seats set you up very nicely for long drives, but while I was waiting (there's a lot of waiting in buying a car), I popped out and lay down in the back seat to check that out.  Curled up, I can completely do it, even comfortably!  I couldn't do that as well in my Civic, and between migraines & hanging out in New Orleans for years, believe me, I did some sleeping in that back seat.  I don't plan to get into those kinds of situations in the future, but I like that this car gives me the option if I end up needing it.  Especially as one can't plan migraines.

I could wish it came in flashier colors -- mine is pearl white with the multiple-neutrals interior, and metallic charcoal is about as wild as it gets -- and I would definitely do something about rear visibility if it was up to me.  The pillars back there aren't divided (why do that in the front and not in the rear?  no idea) and while headrests in the back seat are nice if you have passengers back there, I usually have things like laundry.  The headrests do fold down, but I'd rather they not even be there.  I'll never use them.  So I'll have to get more used to using the ample side mirrors, and just being generally watchful when I'm backing.

My loan terms, they're not shining, but as bad as my finances have been in the past several years, and as huge as my student debt is, I thought it might be likely that I wouldn't even be able to get a car loan, at least not without going through one of these services that coordinates sub-prime loans for people and tells you what dealers you can buy from (which, from what I can gather online, are never the ones with good prices).  The salesman told me MSRP was $16,600; according to AutoTrader, they run about $15k and up across the country, for the same (basic) trim level I got, so his figure is maybe inflated, but I still got a deal at $12,999.  I'm not 100% sure why they were so cheap at this place, but they do crazy volume -- 26,000 cars a year, over all their dealerships -- and the 2013s ought to be about to come out, so maybe they wanted to get rid of these to focus people's attention on the new-new ones when those hit.  All four of the SX4s they had sold the same day, including mine; evidently I wasn't the only one who bit.  I got a far nicer car than I thought I was going to be able to get for my wee dollars, anyway, and I want to take a day off work to just run around in it.  It's that fun to drive.

Poetry and our now: a salutary balkanization

A few weeks ago, BBC News posted one of the best bits I've read there in a while: Does Occupy signal the death of contemporary art?  The short answer this article gives is, likely so, and that's a good thing.  It does a nice job of pointing up some characteristics of the art of Occupy, defining it as a distinct movement, and discussing the ramifications of having such a movement appear at this moment in history, and in the history of art.  My vocabulary for talking about the visual arts -- any kind of art other than literary -- is relatively limited, so I can't speak to whether the author's claims about contemporary art are right, but they fit with what I do know, and certainly his assessment of the contemporary art scene lines up with mine of contemporary writing.  Moreover -- and this is why, 3 weeks after reading the article, it's still on my mind -- his analysis supports my aims for the poetry I write and intend to publish.

The poetry I love, however, is rarely overtly political.  The closest my own writing gets to that is in telling the stories of damaged little girls and largely paranoid rural people, the latter more in my first book than in what I've been writing since.  As difficult as it was for someone like me to grow up in that culture (see aforementioned poems about damaged little girls), I still feel like it's a piece of the world that poetry doesn't much acknowledge, and one that has some value for us.  That's where I got my stubbornness and my skepticism and also my sense of duty to higher goals.  My higher goals run along the lines of getting people to love language and use it expertly, helping to secure kindness and acceptance and stability for disempowered people, etc., where those of my home culture are more like, purifying America of nonwhites, gay people, the urban poor, cities generally, etc. -- but, however misguided the ends are, they're driven by a devotion to making a better world.  The instincts themselves aren't all bad; it's their application that goes amok, especially when the politicized right-wing media machine points these people in the direction of hatred, because they'll run straight that way.  At any rate, that's as close as I get to clearly political poetry.

I do, however, feel that poetry in itself is already political, and that the closer it hews to its own peculiarities, the greater is its resistance -- in this case, not resistance to abusive economic disparity, e.g., but to the economy of exchange itself.  Poetry falls out of the economy; to the degree that people spend time with it or pour money into producing and distributing it, it causes money to decay out of circulation, because it doesn't offer a return.  It disrupts communication, interrupts it, complicates it, destabilizes its norms; it makes people stop and think, rather than making thinking easy, and it makes the exchange of speech accordingly more difficult, too.  Monkeywrenching things because the machine itself is working more to fuck us up than to promote our well-being

The art of Occupy also wants to make people stop and think.  Its critical urge resonates with what I love about the poetry I love, as does its belief that people are generally fundamentally capable of thought, however underused that capacity might be, and generally fundamentally interested in making a better world, however poorly directed that interest might thus far have been.  The BBC article notes that Occupy art is quite figurative; I'd extend that observation to suggest that this is why -- Occupy artists care about people.  They're talking to us and about us.

A few years back, a new PhD student and poet at UB told me that one of our poetics students ahead of her by a year or two had dismissed her writing at a meeting, saying something like, "Nobody cares about subjectivity anymore."  This then-new student is from Israel, and a lot of her writing has to do with the conflict with Palestine, the violence (emotional, military, economic, etc.) and tragedy in that; a lot more of what she does is in feminist sensuality.  And nobody cares about subjectivity?  That's saying nobody cares about these issues.  Factually, obviously wrong, and even if we limit that to "nobody in contemporary poetry," it's still wrong.  Even if we limit it further to its probable real referent, "nobody in contemporary poetry's self-defined avant-garde," all that tells us is that the self-defined avant-garde is full of assholes.  (And I don't actually think even that group just dismisses subjectivity, not on the whole.)  People should care about subjectivity.  Poets and artists should care about it.  The autonomous subject collapsed, we determined that authors didn't really exist -- and, oh, hey, we kept on writing and making art, and it kept being distinctive depending on who made it at what time and what they were reading or thinking about or going through.  Artists are still people, even in our postmodern condition.  We might start talking about postmodern "complication" instead of postmodern "depletion" or "flattening" or "evacuation," and that might let us start talking about people as people again, more than as functions or channels or nodes within discursive frames of whatever kind.  Destabilization doesn't mean we disappeared -- it only means we got destabilized.

A lot of late 20th-century art (literature) has been about flattening out, and about spelling out that flatness, how we suffer from it, how we disappear into and because of it, even how we can use it.  It's been a lot about resignation, though, a helpless, ultimately bratty, IMO, generalized negation.  The banality in the Wondermark strip at the top of this entry isn't all that distant a parody.  This author's tiny little writeup on Occupy suggests an art of affirmation, and not some mealy-mouthed affirmation that everything will be ok, somehow, or that we're already ok (boy are we not); it affirms that things are possible.  Decisions matter; our futures can go different ways, depending on what we do, and some of them will be better and others worse.  I think back to Hart Crane in the 1920s saying that he wanted "still to affirm certain things."  We can make things -- everything we do isn't reducible to futile rehash and reinscription.  Things have changed, in a lot of ways for the worse, and we can change them again.  Imperfectly, perhaps, and incompletely, but it's not the zero-sum game we've been treating it as.  Subjectivity still matters.

The art of Occupy isn't, I don't think, about complicating its medium.  It's communicative, and it wants to complicate our understanding, but it targets its subjects -- social issues and the people they affect -- where the poetry I'm into wants to complicate our understanding of language itself.  Along that way, then, poetry and communication and all the things that depend on language.  This BBC article quotes Kulendran Thomas, about whom I can find only a little online, but who appears to be a London-based artist and/or commentator on art, saying, "Contemporary Art has sold itself as a non-specific, expanding, universal non-genre, much as neo-liberalism passed itself off as the natural state of things.  The realisation that Contemporary Art is in fact a time-limited historical period, that can end, is a radical moment."  I love this.  Yes.  It's what Jean-Luc Nancy points out as the determinative mono in monotheism -- we call it God, or the individual (as in the supremacy of individual rights), or capital, but in any guise, it operates the same: as a subsuming, consuming reducer of distinctiveness and difference.  In a phrase, general exchange.  Postmodern art (again, I'll attest that this is pretty accurate for postmodern literature; I have to trust that the other arts have undergone a similar phase) has presented itself as Art, capital A, a totality.  One thing Occupy is doing is to return us to a sense of movements, plural, of temporality and ephemerality -- distinctiveness.  It's not attempting to be all things to all people, or to be whatever it is and tell us that's all things to all people.  It's got a targeted goal and specific methods to work toward that goal.  It's a localization, ideologically speaking, and in many cases geographically as well.

People in my literary circles seem increasingly interested in localizing poetry, too, primarily in the geographical sense.  I'm not so persuaded by this, because it's easy to write something and call it a poem, but hard to write something that counts as poetry, and very few local scenes are big enough to include a large number of people with the talent who've developed their skills very much.  People who want poetry to be popular usually golden-age back to the days that what we called "poetry" and what we called "music" were one and the same, and they get riled up about how poetry today ought to be able to be just as popular.  No. . . I mean, I could wish, but no.  Music is still doing what music did centuries and centuries back, at least as well as it can under vastly different economic circumstances.  Plenty of other popular, creative modes give people that kind of pleasure -- catchy songs, flashy movies, tv, popular fashion.  The populist art that's coming out of Occupy is doing well by relying on well-executed implementation of accessible tropes: figurative work, personal interviews, type design, memorable slogans.  What we happen to call "poetry" in this era has a different set of excellences -- ellipticism, indirection, critical participation in a specialized tradition, etc.  It's hard to get a critical mass of people who can do those things in one place, enough even to make conversations happen about poetry as innovative language art, let alone do anything in particular, through innovative language, for their community.

I am, however, a fan of that more metaphorical form of localization, self-definition as something rather than as everything.  Political poetry, beautiful poetry, harsh poetry, hieratic poetry, emotive poetry, symbolic (or Symbolist) poetry, environmental poetry, workers' poetry, theorists' poetry, domestic poetry, poetry against meaning, mountain poetry, city poetry, cryptic poetry, nonsense, subconscious mutterings with line breaks.  Anything but Poetry, capital P, that forecloses all those other more specific possibilities by including and neutralizing them within itself.  This isn't new -- the reference back to the Symbolists there is no accident -- but a return.  A kind of salutary balkanization.  It needs to be ok that some things don't get praised or funded, and other things do.  We should reapproach the risk of being small potatoes, and see that art can do important work in obscurity.  Not because you're going to get discovered later, even after your death, but because it doesn't have to be about fame or reach at all.  It's hard, because, you know, you have to eat, and it's human to want to be rewarded for putting your life into something.  But the armatures of that capitalized and capitalist Contemporary Art probably are crumbling, thank goodness, and if so, we're moving into a world where specificity matters again.  Where it's probably inescapable.

Thinking this through has illuminated a new angle on why beauty feels like such a dangerous pursuit -- I've thought plenty about how manically contemporary poetry appears to protect its blandness, but I hadn't thought of that blandness as a manifestation of our postmodern, late capitalist mono.  My beauty soapbox resists that, not just by being nonutilitarian, but by being something rather than a generalizable everything.  It's subjective in terms of being arbitrary, and I knew that, but it's also subjective in that it's limited, distinctive, localized; general exchange rightly takes that as a serious threat, because its authority rests on its totality.  As soon as you have even one small exception, one difference from its rule, one scribble edging outside its lines, everyone can see how hollow is its law.  Same with the whimsical and interpersonally direct and copyleft principles that drive Occupiers' art.  They're different, and that's a threat, but their difference is a deeper strike.  It's going to be hard for Art to tokenize and subsume Occupy the way it has with, say, outsider art.  The whole teleology is different.

What I hope for in the coming couple decades will be a growing network of support among increasingly distinct kinds of art and politics, where we can agree to disagree about our methods and styles, under the larger principle that distinction is itself fine.  Crucial, even.  Not some blissed-out harmony; we should never lose our capacities for critique and disagreement -- but operating on a basic awareness that healthy human systems are at least ideologically local, and no single program, for poetry or for education or for anything else, is going to work across the board.  We need initiatives that respond to distinct and varying needs, using distinct and appropriate resources.  It's harder than running on theories of everything, but we've seen where those theories have gotten us: starved, spiritually and economically; subject to a multitude of violences; at a loss for viable routes to bettering our circumstances.

BlazeVOX's Chickens Came Home and Roosted

About a month and a half ago, the BlazeVOX dustup dusted back up when

THE NEA FORBID PEOPLE FROM USING BV BOOKS AS PUBLICATIONS TO ESTABLISH ELIGIBILITY FOR GRANTS.

Oh my goodness.  You guys.  SO SRS!  

The NEA requires applicants for its writing fellowships, which alternate between poetry and fiction each year, to have published a minimum number of works in the past few years.  One book or a double handful of individual poems/stories (I'm forgetting the numbers at the moment, but I've applied every poetry year for a while and never had trouble establishing my eligibility).  They accept online publications so long as it's a curated site that runs more or less the way print journals generally do; i.e., you can't buy awesomesexypoet.com, put up your own poems, and have those count.  They do not accept vanity press books, and this year, after the revelations about BlazeVOX's pay-to-publish model, they contacted applicants who listed a BV book on their application and asked them to provide a list of alternative publications to establish their eligibility if they wanted to apply for a fellowship.

I missed this initially and only had my attention drawn to it recently, so I'm a latecomer; I should have guessed something was up when I started getting hits again for "brett ortler blazevox" and "blazevox scandal," but my head was elsewhere.  The Huffington Post covered it, so to speak, in an interview with Anis Shivani where Gatza comes out in his first sentence saying "I was pilloried," then presents "information" from Mike Kelleher's blog and the local news, but not the Bark post that set everything off, any of the followups or conversation there, any of the coverage at HTMLGiant, etc. Nothing critical, in other words.  It's a poor sign when there's a notable body of opinion against you and you don't even acknowledge it; it's a worse sign when you present supportive opinions as "information."  I'd hope that my freshmen, for example, would start to see through that strategy at some point after we did our unit on counterargument, or at least after we went through peer review on one set of papers where I ask them all what counterarguments they're addressing and how they plan to do so persuasively.

The whole of the Shivani interview is. . . self-serving and pandering.  I can't come up with a gentler way to say it.  Viz. Gatza's explanation of why BV doesn't do a contest model, as many small presses do:

We choose to do something rather new. We live in a world of rejection and I try to offer acceptance. I know that we have set our own path but this all developed out of a love for poetry. I am a war veteran honorably discharged from the Marine Corps. Through writing I was able to find a way to way to get through the day and live a productive life.

No one has any problem with vets, I'm pretty sure of that, but Gatza's military service isn't even slightly relevant to the issues here.  It's an attempt to stir up positive feelings for Gatza the individual and substitute those for an analysis of what Gatza the editor and BlazeVOX the press are doing.

"Offering acceptance" is, of course, the snarl, and Gatza and Shivani leave the criticisms unaddressed as though they have no legitimacy whatsoever, which just isn't the case.  Offering conditional acceptance, conditional not even on editorial changes (which would cheese me off, personally) but on handing over $250 to get your book published.  Offering said conditional acceptance only after an author has sent a manuscript, thinking it's going to get read and accepted or rejected without cash changing hands, and then asking for money in the moment of appearing to notify said author that his or her book is worth publishing.  Offering said conditional acceptance inconsistently, picking up some authors' books without the hefty price of admission, but not all.  Doing all this for years without any public announcement of the policy, in a publishing climate where the norm is that legitimate presses don't charge their authors to publish their books.  And vanity presses do.

None of this gets into the shady, shifty, never-substantiated claims about the press's supposedly unfairly fragile finances (e.g., the claim repeated in emails for years that a substantial backer had "just pulled out"), or the failure of Gatza's numbers to add up, no matter how many different sets he let out in various emails and public fora.  Just dealing with the model itself, as he ended up explaining it.

That neither Shivani nor Gatza even explains why people were upset irritates me -- that's a lot of voices being suppressed.  That they act like this is some unfair, unreasonable decision by the NEA irritates me, too; more on that shortly.  But Gatza should be apologizing to his authors -- at the very least, a nonapology apology that would recognize that his authors are getting fucked by his haphazard and nontransparent practices, and still weep and moan about the NEA.  And, really, the situation demands a real, I-own-this apology, just as we're always asking our politicians to do, come out and say, jesus, I stepped in it, and I brought all of you down with me, and I can't make it up to you, and I am permanently, profoundly sorry.  Instead, he uses his moment in HuffPo's sun to panegyrize his catalog and present BV's pay-to-publish practices as evidence that it's a "rogue press," out there Robin-Hooding for the good of poetry.  Even if we were to buy that, he's gone and legitimated the NEA's decision right there -- they're a government organization.  It's not their job to redefine what poetry publishing ought to be; it's their job to take taxpayers' money and do things with it that most of our taxpayers themselves will never support, but that are probably good for the nation's culture as a whole, like giving poets some money so they have more time to write poems.  If you want to go rogue (and, sorry, but I can't help but hear Sarah Palin in that rhetoric now; it's spoiled for me for life), have at it and kick ass, but expect to come into conflict with TPTB.

The Shivani interview links to an op-ed from the Buffalo News that makes me want to tell people I somehow did a PhD at the University at Buffalo without ever having lived there.  Right from the headline, "NEA ban is unfair to BlazeVOX" --

1. "Ban" commonly has a distinct meaning when it's used vis-a-vis publishing, having to do with censorship, blocking and even criminalizing the sale of books, removing them from libraries, and so on. The NEA is doing no such thing, to BlazeVOX or to anyone.  Using that verb in this context is utterly yellow.
2. The NEA's decision doesn't affect BlazeVOX directly at all. The people to whom it's unfair are the authors BV published.

The piece goes on in predictable fashion.  The discoveries last fall "led some in the tight-knit publishing and poetry communities to insinuate—entirely incorrectly, as it turns out—that BlazeVOX was a so-called 'vanity press,' a label that spells doom for any serious aspiring poet." For my part, I've tried to stick to "pay-to-publish" as a term rather than "vanity press" when discussing it, because I don't think it's useful to try to label the entire press when some authors had to pay the $250 to get into print and others didn't, and, furthermore, I don't think you even have to assert "BV is a vanity press" to show "this model is unethical and fucked up."  I've been spouting Foucault a lot lately, and here he is again: essences don't matter, and they're virtually impossible to define, anyway; what we have to talk about are acts.  However, I wouldn't argue with someone who chose to apply that stronger label.  Even if it's only certain specific acts, the lack of transparency undermines the whole endeavor, because we'll never know which books got published just on their own merits, and which had to come in on a mandatory donation.

Dabkowski, the op-ed's author, then goes on to say the NEA's rule against qualifying to apply for grants on pay-to-publish books is a "hard-and-fast stipulation, created 29 years ago before the advent of the Internet age and the print-on-demand phenomenon that most small poetry presses now use," that "ignores the way small press publishing in America has evolved over the past three decades."  False equivalencies left and right!  Pay-to-publish vastly predates the Intertubes.  The NEA wouldn't have been moved to make a rule against submitting such pubs to support fellowship applications nearly 30 years ago if it weren't already around back then.  Neither the advent of the internet nor the availability of print-on-demand publishing have anything to do with whether presses charge authors to print their books.  In fact, since those technologies have made submitting easier and printing cheaper, they give presses even less of an excuse to ask authors to pay to get into print.  Editors ought to be getting more manuscripts, improving their overall pool, permitting them to select better books with better sales prospects, and presses shouldn't have to invest nearly as much up front to print.  You can get 50 copies from Lulu, send them to reviewers and put them in a couple local bookstores, and order more as you need them, instead of having to gauge your needs ahead of time and get one big run all at once.

The body of the essay is thick with gooey praise for BlazeVOX, and then, at the end, carries itself away with the conclusion that, "The NEA's definition of what counts as 'real' art, or 'real' poetry is far too narrow, its guidelines on literature far too restrictive and its vision limited by antiquated notions of literary or cultural success."  In refusing to count BV books as publications for fellowships, the NEA isn't telling us what "real" art or poetry are, and the accusation is purely, again, fallacious, begging the question to impute that that's what's going on here.  At most, the NEA's policy is making a statement about what "real" publishing is, and that statement isn't anything new -- 30-year-old rule, after all.  As I said above, the organization is perfectly happy to accept 21st-c. modes like electronic-only journals, too, so it's not about being antiquated.  There's a point at which you can stop picking out the individual problems in logic and call bullshit bullshit.  Here we are.

Moreover, I've known a couple people who've read for NEA fellowships, and the sense they've given me is that nobody pays much attention to applicants' lists of publications, or even to the paragraph we have to write saying why we want the money.  Administrative staff verify that the application has the requisite publications and pass it on to readers, who read the poems.  And these are poets; they know very well that Knopf has published some boners and that Crazy Nowhere Press Who Even Are These People can put out some totally amazing work.  Generally, non-poets are far more impressed with a press's name and age than poets are -- look how we savage The Paris Review and, well, the NEA, every chance we get.  We're not prone to institutional sycophantism.

The horror and shame of it is what happens to people who published on BV, thinking they were doing something these institutions would be down with, and who then applied to NEA fellowships.  The endowment has to reject their books, because there's no way to tell what came in on the $250 plan and what came in like any other book at any other non-vanity press; it'd have to be self-reported, and applying is already self-reporting.  I hope the authors had no trouble coming up with alternative publications to list -- I doubt most would have, since, like I said, I never have, pre-book or post-, and I'm no superstar.  It had to be a terrible email to have to open, though.

Speaking of savaging the NEA, far be it from me to register much approval of our creaking, inhuman behemoth of a federal government, but seriously, don't beat up on the NEA. They have $150-$160 million per year to support all the arts in America, across the entire nation.  Everything from summer dance and theatre camps for inner city kids to Kansas City's efforts to revitalize the 20th and Vine district to helping your local PBS station run British period dramas to helping museums in low-income cities like Buffalo buy crazy new sculptures and paintings to, yes, giving poets $25k so we can have time to write poems.  For the sake of comparison, the NIH has over $30.9 billion in its latex-gloved hand.  That's all just for medical research: drug trials, epidemiology research, running fiber optics into mice's brains so we can turn individual genes on and off with light, making new kinds of stents so people like my father don't suffer with 3-year-long arterial infections, and paying for shit tons of postdocs, research assistants, conferences, dinners, etc. -- things medical research outfits consider mandatory to make their work happen but that would boggle and appall most people in the humanities, even people who generally approve of spending money on medicine.  This isn't by any means all the money the federal government dedicates to science per year, either; that's just medical research.  And I like science, but I don't even want to try to find out how much the DOD spends on research, for example.  I'd probably lose all will to get out of bed.

The NEA would probably love to be able to support more writers, and to be more lax with the restrictions on their funding; they'd probably love to do a lot of things.  We don't have a culture that will support them in doing so, though.  Republicans, including RNC nominee presumptive Mitt Romney, win points for saying they'll abolish the NEA entirely.  It's not an organization in a position to take risks.  That's not the way it should be, no, but I doubt very much that's the choice of anyone at the NEA.

In fact, they don't offer individual fellowships to anyone but writers and jazz musicians.  Haven't in many, many years.  I'm not sure why they've kept up the writing fellowships, other than the problem that we make even less money than people in any of the other arts.  Getting aggro at the very small, beleagured part of the federal government that at least tries to help us -- what are you doing?  Take that indignation and point it at capitalism.  Point it at capitalists.  Point it at people who read more pages in the J. Crew catalog than pages of poetry every year.  Point it at the NIH and say, look, the fuckers you support can all start paying to go to their own conferences, out of their own well-lined pockets, and we're going to shift just that percentage of your budget over to the arts, humanities and education.  It would probably double all those agencies' capacity to make things happen.

Three Pennies

I've committed to Lumn to the level of putting up a very provisional website. Nervous, because my medium-term financial future remains pretty unsteady, but I'm going to do it as far as I can.  Let's hope I can get through one full year and establish a moderate subscription base and a consistent enough channel for submissions to carry on forward.

Versus, a turning back, a turning inward, a turning out

The Return

This past week, I had the pleasure of going back to my alma mater to do a Visiting Poet gig.  Read with two other alums who have books out and taught a class the next day.  The class, especially, went well.  We did a slew of Millay sonnets, so I got to talk about the evolution of feminism over the past century, and a lot about sex and women's sexuality.  The professor (friend of mine who put together the MSA panel I was on last year) and I got a beer afterward, and he said something I hadn't even thought of: he was glad to have been able to give his women students a chance to interact with a female intellectual.  I'd forgotten that we don't even exist in that area.  One of the huge revelations for me when I moved to Louisiana was that there was such a thing as a smart, ambitious, independent woman, that there was a group with which I could identify.  In the south, we were regarded as dangerous and crazy, but at least we existed.  Up here, totally fine.  To the degree that Buffalonians understand intellectuals generally, they have no trouble conceiving of intellectual women.  But in my home area -- even in Kansas City, let alone Warrensburg -- it's not even a thing people imagine.  A couple students stopped on their way out to talk to me, and one of them thanked me, saying it was extremely refreshing for someone to be so frank about sex.  I imagine so.  I told them I hoped I'd inspired them to go out and offend people productively.

And honestly, I wasn't anywhere near the top of my OMG game.  They should see me teach Donne.  I felt like I did a little glint of good for the universe, though, without even planning it.

The department did a nice job of taking care of us -- lunch before the reading, dinner afterward.  I would have liked to have talked to more students, but they weren't super friendly.  Maybe disinterested, probably just shy.  It's hard to grow up in that area and feel like you're allowed to talk to 1.) strangers 2.) with careers 3.) who come off as confident and accomplished.  I certainly didn't, although now I'll go up to Jean-Michel Rabate after a talk and chew his ear until he agrees to email me the notes from which he read.  I got to meet their new poet, Kate Neurnberger, who seems super, smart and cool and into beauty, which of course I regard as the age's best and most crucial transgression.  The whole English department there seems like it's coming into great shape -- they've made a lot of hires over the last several years and appear to have used them to pack their faculty with extremely interesting, smart, nice people.  The second day, as I was walking up to the building, I thought, I'd be really happy to land at a place like this.  Normal teaching load is a 4/4, which is non-optimal, but the environment is a good one, and that's worth a lot.

Being home was strange, though.  The town has barely changed at all, as far as businesses or housing, and I doubt its attitude has changed beneath that.  The one good coffee place turned into a shitty-looking sub shop.  A restaurant my dad liked turned into a place called "OC Oriental Cuisine" -- yes, "Oriental," like that's a thing we say in this century.  The Dairy Queen managed to do the only thing it could have done to make a Dairy Queen trashier, which was to turn into a gun and pawn shop.  "Muttly's Gun & Pawn," in fact, complete with overalls-clad dog mascot.  I'm told the town has not been left Dairy Queenless, though; a new one went in on the north end, in a strip mall I haven't been through.  The university knocked something down to put in a rec/athletic center.  The bars all change their names every few years, though for variety's sake, one of them kept its name but remodeled its interior completely, and another cracked into meta territory by renaming itself from Bodie's to Bodie's 2.0.  With crowdsourcing and shiny buttons, one could only hope.  Really, though, Warrensburg was still Warrensburg.  The worst-timed stop lights in the history of traffic control; shitty stores downtown and differently shitty big-boxes toward the city limits; pickup trucks and minivans; droopy-eyed, pale people.  The five-story junk store was still there, but I didn't get time to go into it (biggest tragedy of the trip).  I'd be happy to land at a place like my alma mater.  Not interested in going back there specifically.

Among Schoolchildren

I think I'm going to be teaching some one-off poetry writing classes for, get this, our local Jungian Center.  (Buffalo has a Jungian Center.  Your city should be so cool.)  I got on their mailing list a few months ago and have seen everything from art openings with mandala paintings to talks on crop circles and, of course, working with archetypes, come through it, and then I saw that they had someone doing poetry classes.  I figured, what the hell, so I wrote them to ask if they'd be interested in offering more such, and they are.  Hopefully start that this summer, and since barring some miracle, it looks like I'll be here another year, through the coming fall and so on, too.  I haven't done community poetry before, but I'm up for it.  We've also talked a bit about doing a summer program for kids, but I doubt my schedule would allow that.  I'm increasingly sure my day job is turning me into a worse poet, though, so I'm a little desperate to get that part of my brain in gear again.  All the better if I can do so in a way that helps other people get into poetry, and helps a kooky group of Jungians draw interest for their programming.

Standing there, actually, at the turn of the stair

I also finally (finally!) thought of a name for my poetry journal: Lumn.  Like limn, but where limning something means illuminating only its outline, lumning something is, I think, illuminating only the interior.  It might mean illuminating something really from the interior, not just shining a light on its surface without reaching its edges, but lighting its insides in a way that's never perceptible from outside, or perceptible from the outside only if the object is more or less transparent.  Appeals to my sense of paradox and enjoyment of festive excess.  Where limn sounds like limb, lumn sounds like loom.  Loom-weaving and loom-big.  It's short, it's distinctive, it's suggestive without, I hope, being heavy-handed.  It riffs on lunar, and feels vaguely girly and vaguely smart, without putting its finger out firmly in either of those realms, or any, which itself is both a feminine and smart move.  I call it a win.

For a while, I've been telling myself that when I had the title, that would be time to put things in motion.  Having the title, though, I'm now. . . doubtful.  I'm financially insecure and still generally life-uncertain; where will I be living in 1.5 years, when issue 2 would be about due?  No idea.  I'm still hemming and hawing over whether to keep my stabler, better-paying office job or whether to go back to adjuncting for the next year, and if I go the latter route, printing costs even for a limited print run could be rough.  I could try for a Kickstarter campaign; I probably will, but it seems like I'm in a poor place to take on a major editing & publishing commitment, with or without the cash.  When I was home, I caught up with one of my oldest and dearest friends, and he was all, "do it!  Just do it!" like a Nike ad or whatever.  On my way home, I was pretty convinced I was going to, but 13 hours' travel and one migraine later, I'm not so sure.

Valkyrie in the Culture Wars

You go to your PhD program, you come up with your brilliant concept for a dissertation, you kill yourself writing it for a few years, and then, at the end, you suddenly find out that you have to justify it.  That it's interesting won't be enough; that no one has said this about these books or poems or authors won't be enough; that you're intervening in fundamental assumptions or working principles in your period, believe it or not, won't be enough.  All necessary but miserably insufficient conditions.  By way of illustration, here are some of the ways in which I attempted to answer the question of why anyone should bother supporting my work, or even just liking it:

• I illuminate a heretofore unrecognized homology between innovative poetry and the ostensibly conservative activity of mythmaking.
• I offer a completely new interpretation of Eliot's Ash-Wednesday that connects, all at once and through a single, consistent image trope, his critical interest in the literary tradition, his later interest in English culture and social issues, his mid-life conversion to Anglicanism, his work in difficult poetry and popular drama, and the surge in popular awareness of and interest in archaeology during his lifetime.
• I show that there's something inherently queer in all models of artmaking that hew to inspiration.
• I show that there's something inherently queer in myth and mythmaking.
• I offer a new way to define myth that's vastly superior to any existing critical model, anthropological or literary-critical or anything; this model lets us distinguish myth from other types of communication based on ontological features, which I propose and demonstrate convincingly.
• My perspective on myth sheds new light on the most fundamental operations of human consciousness, i.e., how we transform immediate, phenomenological experience into arbitrary, articulable, language; how we rationalize our world.
• I use new queer criticism of Hart Crane's lyrics to reread The Bridge and offer an entirely new reading that uses principles from queer theory but applies them to resolve decades-old questions about The Bridge's status as a national poem.
• Counter to the well-established emphasis on modernism's break with its/our past and generally fragmentary, dissonant strategies, I restore the presence of continuity and even a kind of narrative thrust to the period, not through proposing alternative types of modernist activity, but within some of its most clearly dissonant, experimental and centrally characteristic texts.
• My critical framework uses models and concepts from anthropology, psychoanalysis, queer studies, archival studies, and freakin chaos math, and it brings them together intelligently and effectively to talk about poetry.

None of these answers the need for justification, though, believe it or not.  You have to be able to persuade people well outside your period, coming from vastly different critical perspectives (values systems, effectively), that what you're doing is worthwhile.  If you're a lit student applying to postdocs, you have to be able to persuade people who don't even share your basic assumption that studying literature is a valuable thing to do -- postdocs in the humanities are interdisciplinary and generally oriented toward solving problems out here in people's daily lives.  If you believe talking about 20th-century poetry and poetics is already extremely important, all those points are golden.  If you're more interested in things like how game theory can be applied to negotiations in sub-Saharan Africa to provide clean water to isolated villages in conflict zones, you don't really care about any of the kinds of things I do.  This poses a problem for me not only in applying to jobs, especially those tasty but extremely competitive postdocs, but in the longer view of intending to turn my dissertation into a publishable manuscript and convincing a decent press to put it out.

I've had a statement in there ("there" overdetermined to indicate at least two places in the dissertation itself as well as my abstract, the longer project description I send to postdocs, the slightly different longer description that's on my website, multiple versions of my job letter. . . etc.) to the effect that poetry presents us a discursive laboratory where we can experiment with ways to talk about the unreasonable and to be unreasonable in our talk.  I do some hand-waving to half-assedly link this to the genuinely urgent problem that unreason has run over contemporary American political and policy discourse -- it's not intentional half-assery, it's just the best I could do with a connection I intuited for years without being able to articulate.  Somehow, I have been sure, understanding poetic innovation as a form of mythmaking, a way we bring disruptive, unreasonable experiences into apprehensible language, would give us a way to. . . stop Orly Taitz from ranting about how Obama is a secret Kenyan Muslim socialist who hates freedom and old ladies.  Really.  I've been pretty sure this would work; I just haven't known how.

The Dana Gioia argument -- and actually part of the Eliot one -- is that when poetry innovates, it pushes the edges of our understanding outward incrementally, and this gradually percolates in through the rest of culture.  I sketched that in underneath what I was saying, vaguely, but it's a weak argument even when it's said outright.  A true one, I think, but it doesn't compete with a way to get warlords in the Congo to agree to stop interfering with rivals' towns' water supplies.

I may finally have come up with a better way to make the causal connection I want to make.  The problem, as I see it, is that irrational discourse pops up and exerts authority in extremely dangerous ways.  Name your RNC talking head -- and think about how normalized formerly fringe ideas have gotten, even in the years since I started on my dissertation.  I'll quote a crystal passage from an article on regressive politics and Social Darwinism Crooks & Liars today:

Over the last couple of years, we have seen the Supreme Court overturn 100 years of precedent in dramatically expanding corporate political power, and have seen Supreme Court Justices imply in oral arguments that Medicaid might be unconstitutional; we have seen leading Republican presidential candidates openly calling for the repeal of child labor laws, argue for letting the states ban contraception, and say that Social Security is unconstitutional and a Ponzi scheme; there was a Republican governor and presidential candidate, Rick Perry, who opened the door to his state seceding from the union; there is a Republican senator who called for a repeal of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (although he later pulled back from that under intense pressure); and the Paul Ryan budget, passed twice by the Republican House and unreservedly endorsed by their presumptive, ends Medicare and Medicaid as we know them, and calls for a 95-percent cut in domestic spending over the next four decades.

 (Let's all take a moment to applaud Lux's fluency and thoroughness here.  Yes.  The world has gone crazy, and here's the clear, jaw-droppingly consistent, proof, neatly summarized.)

These are just at the level of policy, too.  We have also to consider the dimension of virulent, manic hatred, from Rush Limbaugh to Fred Phelps to Rep. Joe "you lie" Wilson, that's grown so large in the 21st century I thought would be The Future.  What!  It's dystopian.  Craziness has come to rule our conversations because, as I see it, the rest of us respond as though these ways of acting and speaking are sane.  We want to debate with the Phelps clan.  We want to call heckling the President during a major speech with nonsensical ad hominems an expression of political disagreement.  We want to explain to Creationists why the Bible isn't a valid basis for science.  These interactions are doomed to failure from their first, chirpingly well-intentioned efforts, because reason is inherently rule-bound, and unreason is inherently resistant to rule.  We're bringing knives to a gunfight, and then not even drawing.

We need, therefore, to find effective ways to respond to the unreasonable.  For the most part, American culture represses unreason as unreason.  We ridicule and even revile intuition, inspiration, dreams, nonsense, art for art's sake, fun for fun's sake, spiritual and, in a lot of sectors of culture, even psychological experiences.  We are empiricists to the point of idiocy, resonating with idiocy's etymological connotations of radical isolation.  However hard we wish for the maximally efficient capitalist paradise, though, none of this messy goofball shit has gone away.  Our culture's norms create a system where only rational experiences, aims and discourse count; therefore, the forces of unreason have taken on the appearance of reason in order to appear at all.  Creationism has to be one of the clearest ways this manifests -- prophetic material dressed up in science's terminology, and although the entire rest the world can see how ill-fit the clothes are to the body, 2/3 of Americans manage to be persuaded.  In trying to debate with Creationists, we're essentially burning up a lot of energy talking to a mask.  The ungainly entity behind it remains untouched.

My model of mythopoesis revalorizes unreasonable experiences and discourse, and shows their fundamental importance to being human.  It offers a framework to talk about unreason as unreason, and to treat it as a powerful and potentially extremely salutary force.  It also shows it as deeply unpredictable, however, which is key in the context of American discourse and law.  My work admits that the disruptive forces with which myth grapples are far from inherently good, and that our ways of grappling with them, too, are far from inherently good -- everything seems to come down to Hitler these days, but Hitler's use of myth in building up his power base and wresting Germany from its people really is the best example anyone could ask for.  So, then, along with saying all the things I do about innovative poetry, my same basic framework gives us a way to make a place for, e.g., religion in the 21st century, and to draw a firm line between that place and the domain of law.  Defining the discourse of unreason shows why it's no basis for, say, making decisions about school curricula, access to health care, or gun law.

It's kind of an ancillary benefit, compared to the arc of the project itself, which may be why I've had a hard time trying to explain it.  Most my 360-whatever pages go to explaining poetry and talking about what it tells us about experiences like religious conversion, artmaking, sex, etc.  All that elaboration also serves to suggest what poetry can't tell us, though; my emphasis on myth implies that this consists of the same things religion and spirituality and dreams and instinct can't tell us.  The unreasonable can express for us what love is like, in all its torment and instability and paradoxical certitude; it can convey the strange experience of writing words with your own hands and, presumably, your own mind, that you can't explain -- the "that's just what it is" of poetry and prophecy; it can put grief and loss into words, making them comprehensible even if it doesn't actually lessen them.  It can testify that these are valid and important experiences, and thereby justify the continued existence of the NEA, arts curricula, etc.  (YES.  Let's do that yesterday.)  It can even legitimate decisions made on intuition or what one perceives as the word of God, as things healthy human beings do; however, it remains definitionally mysterious, unpredictable, and nonempirical, and so, decisions made that way remain outside the realm of social responsibility.

In short, my model of myth lets us say to the lunatics that their lunacy is fine and good and valuable -- and in its realm, it genuinely can be, as a force for liberation and innovation and healing we can't get from ratio.  But in the same move, it lets us call lunacy lunacy and simply disregard it, discount it, instead of running ourselves ragged on the hamster wheel of trying to talk sense to the nonsensical.

Would this ever happen in reality, across America?  Would we stop listening to lunatics?  Seems unlikely, although most of Europe seems to have done pretty well on that count.  I might even be back to the weak logistics of having ideas percolate inward from the fringe, over however long a time.  I think I can make a case, though.  Especially if I delineate using my core ideas to reframe the rules of political engagement as a completely different project from using them to understand poetry.  And I think, even so distinguished, the two angles can be part of one coherent book.  The poets themselves on whom I wrote are all deeply socially committed, even stridently utopian; I should be able to highlight that theme more clearly and use it to pose the notion that my poets show us how the unreasonable can let us envision a better world, which is a necessary step toward creating it.  But that, you know, it's poetry: like all unreasonable discourse, it's rife with paradox and chance operations and mystery.  We can go to poets -- and to religious crazies -- for help thinking and talking about the human subjects who are the objects of law, but we don't go to either one for straight-on law.  It's still a far cry from clean water for impoverished Congolese, but maybe working through this in the text will get me a little closer to a poet job (since those committees aren't just made up of poets!) or a book contract.

Westward

Flying to Chicago tomorrow for a few days of AWP.  Things I'm looking forward to:

• Restaurants with no fewer than five kinds of pie on their dessert menus
• Chicago, as a general and impersonal but usually really positive experience
• Doing a short reading for TSUP
• Seeing some people
• Taking pictures with Batman Duck
• Getting out of Buffalo for a few days, which is distinct from getting to walk around in Chicago, because the leaving part would be just as sweet if I was going to Nowhere, Some Terrible State
• Lyn Hejinian reading Saturday night
• The Field Museum's mummies/Egypt exhibit

Almost none of this is conference-related.  AWP itself is a lot of work, a lot of anxiety, and in my case, a lot of choking back gall.  Every year, explaining to person after person that my PhD is a literature one, not a creative one, and the wide-eyed awkwardness on all sides immediately afterward, because suddenly I've identified myself as an academic or, heaven save us, an intellectual.  Wincing and grimacing internally at how banal the panels are.  Fuming internally at the great jobs some of these dopey people have.  Yes, yes, I'm a bitter girl.  I think you would be, too.

I am cautiously looking forward to it, though.  That's not a bad list for a trip, and I always discover one or two new or new-to-me poets whose work I end up loving by going to a few readings.  Chicago's been a good city for me on past visits -- it's big and serious without being hectic or too aggressive.  Full of interesting things, large and small, and reassuringly impersonal.  The overwhelming book fair will continue to be overwhelming, but I doubt I'll feel bound to exhaust myself at it as I usually do, because this year I have other things to do, like eat pie and ogle mummies.  The reading I'm in has some cool people in it, and our slots are short, but it's in the evening, so we may be able to make it fairly fun, if not exactly the deepest literary experience in the history of the crafted word.  I'm jazzed for the Hejinian reading -- I'm reviewing her new book for Rain Taxi and, no surprise, I love it, and I like seeing her read.  She came to Buffalo a few years back, gave a good reading, and was really cool in person, friendly and super interesting.  AWP is, of course, another scene, but I still like seeing her read.

So far, I'm planning to avoid the discussion panels.  Hundreds of events and almost none of them look interesting -- as usual, it's inane topic after inane topic, studded with gushy encomia-fests for some grey-haired writer or other, and then readings.  One of the organization's newsletters a few months back said that they were trying to host as many panels as possible so people could get money from their institutions for travel.  I half-laud the sentiment, but for fuck's sake, that's not how you build a good conference.  The beast really is as bloated as it feels.

I could be headed anywhere and I'd be happy about it, though.  It's been just at a year since I left this city, and that was for a job interview that didn't go anywhere.  I need to leave wherever I'm living, even if it's a place I like, every 3 or 4 months to be happy, which makes me hideously overdue.  Plus, these last few months -- ai ya, as a former student of mine used to mimic her Korean mother when confronted with any maddening situation.  In her case, the maddening situation tended to involve dealing with her daughter, my student.  My times of late haven't been anything like as cool as that student.  I need in a fierce manner to get out of this geography to help me get out of my headspace.

Meanwhile: after a year and a half, Modernism/modernity finally rejected an article I sent them.  I even agree with the comments, although they're so negative (put politely; negative in content, not in tone) that I wonder now if the piece is worth working on further.  I like my still-quite-new Crane chapter a lot, though, and if nothing else, this might offer a license to work more on that.  Probably be too soon to send it back to the same magazine, unfortunately, but there are plenty of other places that might be interested in an article on Hart Crane.  Continued rough news about the job market, continuing to send off applications for postdocs and the couple TT positions that come through, and continued extreme levels of bleak thoughts as a result.  Watching a lot of terrible TV and crocheting a very large shawl.  (Interweave's Dahlia shawl, if you're curious; going to make it about double sized.  Using Cherry Tree Hill Supersock Merino in Spanish Moss.)  Wrote some new poems, but they're making me worry that my day job is turning me into a shitty poet.  It could be that I'm severely stressed and psychologically depleted, and that comes through in my words; it could also be that language works immersively, and I spend all day immersed in, at best, intentionally predictable language, pared to pure functionality.  Most of what I deal with is just flat-out bad.  Anyway, I wrote some new poems and I don't think they're very good, but I'd rather write crappy poems than none.  Still killing my orchids.  Backaches, skin troubles, something like asthma, although you don't develop that in your thirties, as a rule.

In other words, it's good I'm going to have other things to occupy my mind for a weekend.

Timing

Writing must become more optical, more eye-teasing, more eye-tasty, to give the word its due and tune-in on the age. Books are antiquated word containers. Let’s let writing out of books, give it a chance and see what it does with its liberty.

 Bob Brown, 1930

OpticsFast: scams, fraud, and now -- threats! Hat trick!

The company did refund my money, after many, many emails back and forth. However --

They still list as "in stock" the discontinued frames they can’t get.

"Becky S." asked me to remove a negative review I wrote on ResellerRatings.com in order to get my money refunded. Ridiculous, because I should get my money refunded because they couldn't provide the product I ordered, but I figured I'd give it a shot. The website had some issue, though, and just reloaded the reviews page without giving me options to edit or remove mine. (Note that this is one of many, many negative reviews of these people out there, one of many on that site, even.) That was all the effort they were getting from me, and I told them that.

This morning, "Becky S." asked me again if I’d gotten rid of my review. I responded that I hadn't and that I wasn't going to try again. She sent back this gem:

"Ok we will go the dispute route I guess.

I will be providing your credit card all the material details to support my claim.

The payment has been captured the lenses will be shipped.

Becky S.

Customer Service

www.OpticsFast.com"

Wow. My guess would be that this is an empty threat, because that has to be so many kinds of illegal. And because if she sends my bank all the "material details," it'll just support her being a lunatic and a thief. Nothing's posted to my bank as of this moment.

In another email, "Becky S." referred to TrustPilot.com, another review site, as a site that she "owns." I didn't follow up on that to find out more. The site itself appears to be run by people in the Netherlands, but who knows.

Grotesque behavior. I hope these people get put out of business sooner rather than later.