In Lebanon, history on repeat

Robert Fisk’s Pity the Nation: The Abduction of Lebanon is a book in which history, and the experiences of its author, pass in cycles. Read the rest of this entry »

Coyne v. Wright on the Evolution of “God”

At the New Republic, Jerry Coyne has a withering review of Robert Wright’s popular new book, The Evolution of God. In response, Wright has made a list of Coyne’s misrepresentations, which convinced me that Coyne should indeed have been more careful. But Wright’s response focuses on the “trees” (Coyne’s individual distortions) and leaves Coyne’s criticism of Wright’s “forest” intact.

To wit, Wright points out that Coyne took a quote out of context in order to attribute to Wright “the claim” that “God” is behind humanity’s moral progress. But of course Wright doesn’t “claim” any such thing; he only suggests that it is plausible, as shown by a passage quoted by Coyne that was not, it appears, taken out of context: “Maybe natural selection is an algorithm that is in some sense designed to get life to a point where it can do something — fulfill its goal, its purpose.” Wright thinks that that purpose might have been the achievement of moral order.

As Coyne says, and as I confirmed by reading Wright’s afterword (entitled “By the Way, What Is God?”), this focus on possibilities, as opposed to what we might call provabilities, is “characteristic of Wright’s intellectual style.” But talking about what is possible is almost never enlightening or fruitful. Wright admits as much when he says that a personal God “presumably” does not exist; what he means is that the possibility is not disprovable, but we can and should nevertheless discount it. But the same sort of skeptical approach to “possibilities” vitiates Wright’s own argument. Read the rest of this entry »

Boston Review: now worth 50 points!

BR recently got a shout-out from poet Steven D. Schroeder of St. Louis on his blog, Sturgeon’s Law.

Schroeder has decided that the best way to stay optimistic about the poetry business is

to regard it as a big game

and has set up a preliminary scoring system so that poets can keep track of “who’s winning.”

Apparently, winning the Discovery/Boston Review prize is worth 50 points!

That score puts us on par with The National Poetry Series, with getting a book published by a major university press or respected independent press, with inclusion in a Norton anthology or Best American Poetry, with having a poem published in The New Yorker, and with getting tenure as a professor in a top-tier program.

Thanks for the love, Steve. Good luck in the po-biz.

P.S. If you’re interested in getting those 50 points for yourself, make sure to late a look at the guidelines for the Discovery/Boston Review poetry contest – the deadline is January 15, 2010. Also, definitely check out last year’s winning poems:

• Briget Lowe’s “The Wild Boy of Aveyron Stands Up During a Dinner Arranged by the Doctor”
• Jynne Dilling Martin’s “Repercussions of the Current Import/Export Ratio”
• Jeffrey Schultz’s “J. Steals from the Rich and Uses the Money to Get Drunk Again”
• Annabelle Yeeseul Yoo’s “Bright Burial”

Sophie Robinson, a, and Francesca Woodman

Sophie Robinson
a, 70 pp.
Les Figues Press, 2009
Los Angeles

In Sophie Robinson’s a, the newest book out from Les Figues Press (a young press based in Los Angeles), she includes a small note taken out of the notebook of the young photographer, Francesca Woodman:

I wish Stein was here to shake me and kiss me.

I note the reference to Woodman because, in the past ten years, there has been an upsurge of interest in Woodman’s work (initiated with the 1986 retrospective at Hunter College, curated by Rosalind Krauss and Ann Gabhart). Woodman, for those unfamiliar with her work, was a prodigy who passed away before she was twenty-three.

She studied photography in high school, went to RISD to continue her work; her photos almost always focus on the body, as she often used her own as the subject of her photos. Her black, white images are luminously surreal, and she was nicknamed the “magician” for her uncanny use of lighting (even more remarkable because she did not have programs like Photoshop to retool images). Almost every one of her images blurs boundaries between body and environment, and there are rarely photos where individuals can clearly be identified (the face is usually distorted, hidden, or masked. In that sense, her intimate photographs emphasize a collective female identity through one body, rather than focusing on a particular person/identity/name).

At the age of twenty-two, Woodman committed suicide by jumping out of the window of her loft in New York. We then have the troubling legacy of her death to deal with when we view her images, this hyperbolic romanticism we attach to someone — and someone with so much talent –  who passes away well before her time.

In Robinson’s a, then, the inclusion of Woodman’s note (appropriately, if the poet is influenced by Woodman, Woodman shows her creative tie to the great American modernist poet, Gertrude Stein) is understandable within the framework of Robinson’s project. The book is dedicated to  “Aerin Davidson, 1985-2007. . . . XXX,” a young woman who, like Woodman, died when she was twenty-two. Robinson’s dedication also instructs one to read the book as a broken elegy, a collection of fragmented sentences and words, collages, expressing how one might try to express grief and pain verbally, without trivializing experiences that are, in the end, perhaps impossible to articulate in language.

None of Woodman’s photographs appear in the book. The photographs and collages in the collection (a is a multimedia book) are by Ken Elrich, the artist and writer based in Los Angeles. The single reference to Woodman is the short epigraph that introduces the third part of the book, “Disorder” (as well as in the introduction by Caroline Bergvall), which is enough for the reader to recall the hyperbolic romance surrounding the tragedy of Woodman’s death, within a book that was written in the/as an aftermath of a friend’s death.

I’m not quite sure what to make of the reference to Woodman, because in some ways, the short reference does so much work, and acts as a problematic parallel.  Even if the epigraph is short, and part of a‘s larger collaging efforts, the Woodman reference evokes a public’s/viewer’s voyeuristic romanticism of an artist’s early death, and then associates that public voyeurism with a more private experience of death.

The inclusion of Woodman’s epigraph feels relevant, but it also makes me squirmish. It’s like writing an essay about personal grief – an experience that is so difficult to verbally express – then connecting that grief with a reference to another writer, artist whose death (or more specifically, suicide) has been scrutinized under the public eye. Diane Arbus, Sylvia Plath. Despite good intentions, the parallel feels askewed, even, misused.

But is this more telling of what an elegy does, is? That is, why do we poets write elegies?  It’s not for the person who has passed. It’s the writer’s experience with grief that’s being rendered to an audience, and that personal grief – once it becomes expressed through an aesthetic project — becomes separate and distinct from the person to whom the elegy is addressing.

With a, I understand the intentions, the relevance, even the “inspiration” (for lack of a better word) created by Woodman’s legacy and images. At the same time, something that might be urgently important during the process of writing might need to be re-approached differently by the writer when rendering it into the published product.

Nicole Brossard’s FENCES IN BREATHING

Coach House Books, 2009. 114 pp.
ISBN 9781552452134

Translation by Susanne de Lotbinire-Harwood

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A poetry-break-post!

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Initally published as La Capture du sombre by Lemeac Editeur, 2007

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There are several worthwhile topics to discuss in Brossard’s newest from Coach House, Fences in Breathing. There are the real-life social implications to the imaginary war that ends the novella, the importance of pleasure (Jennifer Moxley described pleasure as “the word that first comes to mind at the mention of Nicole Brossard’s poetry”), and the associations between language, body, and desire. Yet it is the idea of translation that most fascinates me when thinking about Fences, as well as Brossard’s other works.

In an introduction to one of her readings, Charles Bernstein acknowledged that Brossard was the only native French-speaking poet anthologized in On The Other Side of the Century, a well-known poetry anthology put out by Sun & Moon Press (now Green Integer), and that perhaps the reason for the inclusion of Brossard’s poems was because her works seem to “flourish in English.”

In taking a look at her publications as listed by EPC (SUNY Buffalo’s Electronic Poetry Center), all of Brossard’s initial publications were published in French. Less than half of the listed publications have been translated into English, and most of the English translations are of her novels, not of her poetry. And unlike many poets and fiction writers, Brossard has not consistently worked with one translator. This raises interesting questions for any reader of Brossard’s work: how does each translation/translator render Brossard’s work differently? If there’s consistency of language in each translation of her works (which is rarely true of translations of an author’s works by different translators), does Brossard’s French (as implied by Bernstein) somehow lead to more “successful” English translations?

Translation plays a role in the novella, not only because the book is a literal translation, but as subject matter. Anne, the main character, is a writer who chooses to render her novel in a “language other than [her] own,” which for Anne is “[a] way of avoiding short circuits in [her] mother tongue.” Translation conflates body as language, where one — language or the physical body — represents the other, so when Brossard writes about a “[s]tory of words,” these typographical bodies are associated with “salt,” “origin,” and “delights.”

Interestingly, Brossard’s associations between translation, language, and body recall the works of other French (or French-speaking) writers/authors. In their works, Jacques Derrida and Abdelkebir Khatibi often conflate the physical body for the typographical letter. For both Derrida and Khatibi, translation equals destruction, which also equals transformation. This state of destruction/transformation/translation occurs on the “tongue” (i.e. one’s sense of being through language and speech), as well as the physical body.

What I admire most about Fences in Breathing it that although it is easy (and right) to read the text as “fiction theory” (which is how Brossard once described her work), theoretical interests in language are expressed through simple, elegant language. One has a strong visual reaction to the text: throughout my reading, I could actually visualize a loose version of a film being created from the language of the book. A prime example of Brossard’s skilled interweaving of language experimentation and description is expressed in the following passage, which describes the work space of Charlie, one of the minor characters in the novella:

He says tools but somebody will mention the cutting edges of things and will see billhook, scythe, fauchard, debris, wood chips and sketches all entangled like words in summertime, when crickets and corn, lives and vines, sunflowers and stormy hours touch and quench one another.

This passage is a simple statement that expresses the relativity of language, language as definition and sign. At the same time, the passage strays away from being merely a cerebral, dry exercise: a definition flourishes; a tool does not remain just a tool, but becomes a “billhook, scythe, fauchard, debris… .” As the passage expands, these objects become entangled with the smell of “woodchips” and sounds of “crickets” and “stormy hours.” There are bursts of colors, the “vines” and “sunflowers.” So much can be remembered from Fences that is concrete, vivid, and visual, so that this “fiction theory” also translates as accessible images.

My own, somewhat unrealistic conclusion is that as a fan of Fences in Breathing, the best way to read and understand the novella is to read both the French and de Lotbinire-Harwood’s English translation. In a sense, reading both the original and its English translation may be the most thorough way in understanding Brossard’s feverish explorations with language. Like Anne, I might conclude with the thought where by reading, struggling with the text in a language that I am not as readily familiar with, I will somehow “find a solution to the questions of meaning that do not come up in my language.”

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Walcott v. Padel: Media Coverage of the Oxford Poetry Professer Saga

By now most of our readers will have come across one or another story about the controversy surrounding this year’s election of the Oxford professor of poetry. One of the top picks for the prestigious award, Derek Walcott, withdrew his name from the running after Oxford academics were bombarded with e-mails about Walcott’s alleged sexual harassment of students. Walcott had been favored to win the award, but after he stepped out of the running, the honor was given to Ruth Padel, the first woman to ever receive it. Within a matter of days, though, news outlets were reporting that Padel herself had been involved in the campaign to spread the word about the allegations against Walcott; though she disavowed involvement in the campaign to notify Oxford academics, Padel admitted that she had tipped off two journalists to the matter over e-mail. She has since resigned as Oxford professor of poetry.

Most of the media coverage has focused on Padel’s actions, and on whether the two e-mails she sent to journalists notifying them of accusations against Walcott constituted reason for her to step down from the position. Reading articles in The New York Times, The Telegraph, The Guardian, and the Times Online, what sticks out to me is a question unasked by any of the major news outlets covering this story: should the allegations against Walcott have factored into the committee’s decision-making process, and, if so, was there reason for Padel to suspect that without her action the committee might not take those charges into account?
Read the rest of this entry »

Empathy and Rigor

In a recent piece in Slate magazine, Dahlia Lithwick provides a much-needed clarification of the meaning of the word “empathy” in light of President Obama’s citation of this as a crucial qualification in his nomination of a new Supreme Court justice. “The opposite of empathy isn’t rigor,” she writes.   “It’s pretty close to solipsism, or the certain conviction that everything you’ll ever need to know about judging you learned from your own fine self.”

This got me thinking about the much-maligned study of the Humanities. “Humanities doesn’t teach people to be rigorous,” a friend recently told me.  “It’s better to look at things scientifically.  Once you learn to see things in terms of the systems that drive them, you can address virtually anything in a precise and appropriate manner.”

He has a point.  So much of society is dependent on systems.  The Judicial system in particular tries to set a clear, generalizable set of standards for appropriate behavior that is enforceable in a wide variety of circumstances, abstracted out above the buzz and noise of the statistically unpredictable behavior of an individual human being.

The problem is that once a system has been set up and its rules formalized, it can be very difficult to break.  Staying in the realm of abstract theoretical principles and smoothed out statistical models, any kind of system can be unquestioningly, imperviously, indefinitely sustained to the point at which it loses sight of what it was created to manage in the first place.  Our immigration system, for example, has strayed so far from dealing, empathetically, with the problem of people that we now have close to 11 million people living on U.S. soil who are, according to the system, “criminal” solely because they are foreign-born.

It is at this point, when the legal system begins to perpetuate a perverse and even ethically questionable logic, that the study of the Humanities becomes relevant. Studying literature gets to the core of what makes us human, accounts for the static that all our vital scientific and civic systems have to leave out in order to be comprehensible.  Literature’s unique strength is that it explores what is, systematically (or legally) speaking, incomprehensible and makes it comprehensible.  In other words, studying literature facilitates our capacity for empathy.

If we want the U.S. Judicial system to function as it should, to do the correct – the rigorously correct – thing by its citizens even at the point where the law, humanistically speaking, breaks down, Obama’s call for empathy in a Supreme Court Justice is a crucial place to start.

Can’t Take a Joke

As reported in Science, the journal Personality and Individual Differences has recently published a series of studies on gelotophobia – the fear of being laughed at. Interestingly, the researchers have demonstrated that this is distinct from the more common neuroses around general shaming. The disease is, apparently, characterized by an inability to distinguish friendly and hostile laughter, to see no difference between teasing and ridicule, to “distrust smiling faces,” and even to use humor less than the average person does. The most significant conclusion the study suggested, however, was that gelotophobic individuals proved less able to manage their emotions, and, as a consequence, to tend towards more hostile relationships with others. 

Comedy has often been viewed as a fundamentally hostile pursuit – the great Groucho Marx himself explained that he stopped spouting one-liners at parties because it made conversation a competition: “I realized it was killing conversation… It ruins communication.” Freud, in Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, liked to characterize humor as a kind of psychological trojan horse, allowing conscious expression of socially unacceptable thoughts originating in that psychopathic homunculus he called the id. But this finding suggests instead that humor,  cruel as it may be (and, frankly, should be: see Family Circus for what happens when somebody ignores this basic precept) is essential to interpersonal understanding.

This can mean one of two things: that humor is not the expression of antisocial, competitive urges, and rather a way in which animals indicate readiness for friendly interaction; or, that humor is the expression of those urges, and they’re simply so widespread that to not acknowledge them means the breakdown of society. This first explanation, incidentally, is at the core of much of the evolutionary neuroscience that has looked at the roots of human laughter – most notably Panksepp and Burgdorf’s “‘Laughing rats’ and the evolutionary antecedents of human joy?” and Laughter: A Scientific Investigation, by Robert Provine. The second is more or less a logical extension of Freud’s landmark Civilization and Its Discontents. Either way, Paul Mooney remains a genius.

Michael Agresta recognized by storySouth

Michael Agresta‘s story “Mugger and Mouse get Married” has been recognized as one of storySouth’s “Million Writers Award Notable Stories of 2008“.

The contest, run by storySouth, one of the Web’s premier online literary publications, is dedicated to proving that a lot of high quality literary fiction is published online every year. They take a look back over the course of the year and compile a  list of 100 stories they consider, “notable”. Overall, it contains quite a few good picks, definitely worthy of their goal to bring attention to the fiction being published online that rivals anything in print.

As to Agresta’s story, originally appearing in the January/February edition of the Boston Review, it’s an odd but compelling piece. It focuses on the interweaving paths of two characters, a man named Mugger, and a woman named Mouse. As much as it is a compelling meditation on the circuitous nature of a romance, told in small chunks separated by asterisks, it also seems to be an exercise in creating a story that consists almost wholly of exposition. It’s charming in that aspect, and definitely toys with the reader’s desire to make it mean something. Why are the only named characters given such indecipherable names as Mugger and Mouse? Why is a story so full of quirks content to end with a “happily ever after?”

Ultimately, I think Agresta signals the reader with what exactly he is attempting with some of the words he has Mouse utter:

“‘I’ve learned a valuable lesson about friendship,” Mouse says. ‘It’s not what you get out, but what you put in that’s important. And besides, people change. A real friend doesn’t stand in the way of that. You should never owe a friend money, and if you lie to a friend you might as well lie to yourself.’”

Nothing new there, in fact just the opposite, they’re all things that have been reiterated by many people many times before.  Agresta forges a singularly interesting piece of fiction out of a series of just this type of utterance. I’m not surprised it was found to be “notable.”

Good on you Jason Sanford.

Cabbage, and Its Relation to the Brain, Love, and Jesus

The cabbage is from D.S. Sulaitis’s “Concerning the Correct Way to Make Cabbage,” a short so-called “Easter Story” about a stalker featured in the current issue of the Boston Review. Now, for the brain:

Several recent papers in Science have managed to garner a level of public attention unusual for such technical studies. Of course, it helps that the Times gussied up their titles from the somewhat anemic “Rapid Erasure of Long-Term Memory Associations in the Cortex by an Inhibitor of PKM{zeta}” and “Storage of Spatial Information by the Maintenance Mechanism of LTP” to the punchier “Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory.” Nevertheless, the findings are, no matter how you phrase them, fascinating.

The scientists’ basic conclusion is that inhibition of the protein PKM{zeta} effectively removes long-term memories – a result that Shema, et al viewed as an important step towards halting memory loss, but that the popular press has taken in a completely different direction. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, specifically, is what has popped back into the popular consciousness. “Millions of people,” says the Times’ Benedict Carey, “might be tempted to erase a severely painful memory.” And no memory is more painful than that of a lost or unrequited romance. Which brings us to love:

Love has been tied to disease and madness since the birth of medicine. Hippocrates himself recounts an episode in which he was told to treat a patient apparently suffering from tuberculosis, only to find that the apparently terminally ill man was simply lovesick. In recent times, psychiatrists have even developed specific terms for the various genres of hypochondria and obsessive behavior that can accompany any overwhelming passion, with erotomania – the delusional belief that another person is your soul mate – being perhaps the most dramatic and best known of these. John Hinckley, Jr. made sure of that after attempting to assassinate Ronald Reagan in hopes of impressing Jodie Foster, inspiring, for a brief time, a spate of fiction dealing with the subject. Aukse, the protagonist of “Cabbage,” is a newer and subtler version of these, developing a pathetic obsession with her coworker. Oddly, however, Sulaitis doesn’t subtitle “Cabbage” as “A Stalker Tale” or “An Account of a Dangerous Romance,” but rather as “An Easter Story.” Which brings us to Jesus:

Erotomania derives from the Greek root eros – which refers specifically to passionate love – the love of soul mates. Jesus, on the other hand, at least according to the New Testament, tends to traffic in a different sort of love: agape, now associated with a sort of holy adoration. In fact, the resurrection (what we could call the first Easter) was marked by the famous passage in John 21:17 in which Jesus asks if Simon Peter loves (agape) him and gets the reply that yes, Peter sure does love him a lot, though he uses a word (phileo) meaning an entirely different level of affection.

Now, the interesting thing here is, while the slightly fuzzy psychological definition of erotomania might still allow for these Greek distinctions and value judgments (of which there are five in all), what the papers in Science have done is to physicalize memory and, by extension, obsession to the point that all loves are biologically equivalent. This is, in a way, what Sulaitis seems to suggest in “Cabbage,” by setting Aukse’s infatuation during the preparations for Easter Sunday. Whether the consequence of this is to raise the poor woman’s fixation to the level of faith or to degrade religion to the delusions of a one-way lover depends on how you want to read into it, but Sulaitis – along with Shema, et al – have managed a subtle leveling of the psychological playing field.

In other words, happy belated Easter.