Noun poetry

This isn’t normally my taste, but this poem feels especially relevant given the Christmas break.  It’s titled “Mr. Extinction, Meet Ms. Survival”, by Philip Appleman.

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They’re always whispering:

missing buttons, crow’s-feet,

rust–

and I try to ignore them at first,

but they keep it up:

half-soles, dry rot,

biopsies, Studebakers–

that does it,

and I have to yell back:

virgin wool! fresh coffee! tennis balls!

new pennies! robins!

and that holds them a while,

but they always come again,

sometimes at night, sometimes

in crowded elevators: loose shingles,

they whine, soil erosion, migraines,

dented fenders. I hold my ears

and shout: high tide! fresh bread!

new shoes! oranges! and people around me not

and straighten their shoulders and smile,

and I think for a moment I’ve won–

but of course you never win,

and it gets to be almost a game:

they give me oil spills,

sewage sludge, tobacco smoke;

I come back with swimming pools,

butterflies, cornfields!

They give me Calcutta,

Gary, Coney Island;

I rattle off Windemeere,

Isfahan, Bloomington– but

by the time I’m at work

it gets serious, all

lapsed memberships and auto graveyards

and partial dentures and sub-

committees and leaves in the eaves,

and right there at my desk I bellow:

daffodils! and sailboats! and Burgundy!

and limestone! and birch trees! and robins,

damn it, robins! and my boss

pats me on the shoulder, and my secretary

takes it in shorthand, and everywhere

efficiency doubles, I’m doing it, after all,

for them.  And yet,

deep down, I know, in fact,

it’s no more daffodils than it’s half-soles–

what it really is,

is morning without a hangover

but a fifty percent chance of rain,

it’s a cost-of-living raise

and a slight case of heartburn; well,

we all know about

the slow leak, the scratch

on our favorite record,

the 7:12 forty minutes late, sure–

but passenger pigeons? Studebakers? That’s

going too far,

we have our pride, our good

intentions, our metabolism, we won’t

be shunted off with clipper ships

and whooping cranes, we’re going

to hang in there, all of us, because

the robins may be showing wear,

but still, by god,

they are robins.

.

This style of poetry appeals to me is because nouns are uniquely responsible for the poem’s emotion.  Compromised noun poetry like this still makes logical sense; it hasn’t been fully stripped down; it follows poetic grammatical convention.  I would like to criticize Appleman for these compromises, but when I try to write noun poetry I’m criticized for being unreadable.  I question if my noun-poetry is an immature phase, or if I’m just developing my poetic style.

A Great Day in Harlem

Picture a

horse

with the legs

shot out by a cannon ball and

this is what we’re having for dinner,

with chicken pot pie. I

will add rosemary.

Travel Journals: 12/4/09

I once read a poem in

which the author

recounted to us in

great detail

GREAT WALL OF CHINA

&

Asian noses.  I

think I

read this in a bus,

in the back

The bus fan has

voyeur breath.

Once, I let go on my leg in

the bathroom

of the Famous Famiglia’s & it

had the warmth of an egg yolk.

I can no longer recall

if I’ve read

the journal of a man

who died

in a plane crash over Bogota.

He penned his death.

What letters assemble

onomatopoeia

for a jammed engine?

In his journals

I read

I am being cannibalized

by men with fibula earrings.

Sublimity and language

I have been considering how language intersects with the sublime.  I know many scholars assert that our obsession with sublimity arose in response to the increasing secularization of daily life.  This is why the sublime prospered under romanticism, under modernism, and now, under postmodernism.  But if sublimity is impossible to fully represent (as was God, pre-romanticism), why is the sublime featured concurrently with high modernist works whose main focus is language, itself?  And a second question–how does broadcasting, with all its promiscuity of communication, interact with the postmodern sublime?

These contradictions seem to me too deep to overcome without some fundamental re-examination of Jameson’s “postmodern sublime”.

Lost Cat

Bowls

hole with

the rims snot

rimmed nostrils–the

thin sheet

weak spot

olieaginous

 

In the teeth

in

the teeth

Snaggle-

toothed

building

Gold cap

mandible:

Old light

shutter

shade

the fur is

shutter shade a

blind

panopticon sphincter

 

Applause

Applause

the shingles

smack shot

fast

wife beaters

keep your wives

 

O

Polyethylene mount

top

the cock

top

swift click pick

shut the mouth

agape

Swing jaw

Retard

swing jaw

shut

 

Pandora never knew too much

 

No no no no no

no no

no no

no no

no no no

nahhhhh but–

picket fence

lace gate

doily done

doily

the great

grey grand-

spittle-mother

No

white sepulcher

sleep

in the dis-

carded Africans

on 43rd be

one

 

more lonely god

Hard Candy

I’m watching Hard Candy, the Ellen Page movie nobody cared about before Juno.  I was very impressed by the first fifteen minutes, right up until Ellen Page transformed from spectacular nymphet to a fatal attraction.  At first, the camera’s extreme close-ups on Page’s face were indulgent and disturbing at once.  Truly, she was grotesque.  As the movie progressed, however, it alternated between excessive sentimentalism and “realistic” austerity, abandoning its original, objectifying mode.

Regardless, check it out, the first fifteen minutes, at least.

Also, check out the Psycho shower scene at 1:00.  It’s not particularly subtle in its allusion, but I did appreciate the substitution of Page’s tazer for Norman’s knife.  The director was very careful never to use penetrating camera movements toward the objects of Page’s gaze, nor to diegetically arm Page with a penetrative object.  To the phallocentric, virginocentric dialogue typically represented in pedophile narratives, Hard Candy adds a third, subductive option.

Inward Bound?

I didn’t blog yesterday.  Instead, I wrote in my journal.  Perhaps this is overanalysis, but I’m curious to what degree bloggers  find their crafts interchangeable with keeping a personal journal.  I, obviously, find them very interchangeable activities.  This could be because I haven’t fully bought into the logic of broadcasting.  Equally likely is that I have bought into that logic, but that I don’t have a reception wide enough for my attempts to achieve “broadcasting” status.  For the moment, writing to myself is functionally equivalent to writing to the limited audience of The Carrier Pigeon.

There is a (less attractive) third option:  writing in my journal is a form of broadcasting.  As an aspiring author I have planned, from the start, for my collected journals to be published post mortem if I have any professional success.  Even more vilifying, I see these journals as a vehicle by which my work might be illuminated or elevated.

Retrospectively, I can see that my journaling adheres to the most important characteristics of broadcasting:  the commodification of an aesthetic medium; its teleology of reception and characterization; promiscuous communication; pornographic confessionalism.

What is fascinating about this possibility is that we have developed a dynamic in which self and other might be conflated.  It’s a relatively old assumption of social theory that we define ourselves through the eyes of others.  It is not, to my knowledge, as widely believed that the postmodern era has blurred that distinction altogether.  I think here of Frederic Jameson’s words on contemporary theory’s critique of hermeneutics:

The very concept of expression presupposes indeed some separation within the subject, and along with that a whole metaphysics of the inside and outside, of the wordless pain within the monad and the moment in which, often cathartically, that ‘emotion’ is then projected and externalized, as gesture or cry, as desperate communication and the outward dramatization of inward feeling….Contemporary theory…has…been committed to the mission of criticizing and discrediting this very hermeneutic model of the inside and the outside. (See Postmodernism, pp. 11-12).

Jameson’s observation is advanced with regard to the existence of an autonomous self and other, but I think it applies equally to the self and other as receptive entities.  This is consistent with the erosion of the old private/public dichotomy.  Broadcasting mandates that we define ourselves according to external reception; but, paradoxically, it might also be responsible for the other’s appropriation of self altogether, at least regarding communication.

The only problem with this theory is that if self and other truly were conflated, I wouldn’t have to conceive of my journaling as a vehicle of external communication.  Writing only to myself would be enough.  But perhaps that is less a comment on the validity of my hypothesis and more a comment on the inertia of time.

If you’re a blogger or diarist, do you find that writing in a personal journal is equivalent to writing on your blog?  If not, how would you characterize the difference between the two?  As always, I look forward to your comments.  Follow me!

Facebook QOTD: “How come nobody told me about the raptor Jesus?” (Courtesy of W.A., taken without permission)

http://twitter.com/Demo310

Initiation!

The Twitter project is now fully under way.  So far, my experience hasn’t conformed to my expectations.  I always assumed I would get addicted, but I didn’t think I would get addicted so early in the process.

My first couple of tweets felt stilted.  I wasn’t sure how to navigate this new medium, and this surprised me.  In the past year I’ve developed a pretty good feel for what makes Facebook status updates successful.  You need something weird or funny or informative for your readers to attach to.  Earlier this week I read a Donald Justice essay in which he talks about dramatic correlatives.  Sublime prose (the focus of Justice’s argument) is memorable because it offers a specific image in which the meaning of a passage might be cathected.  Facebook statuses work similarly.  There should be a specific image (very much like a meme) that Facebook friends can broadcast as representative of their own perspectives or identities.  We are most likely to Like a status when it is metonymic of our own perceived identities.  These updates affirm our own authenticity as members of a community because they require some prior knowledge to really get the punchline.  At the University of Chicago, for example, I can count at least one message about the Regenstein Library in every news feed because allusion to the Reg affirms our authentic membership in the UChicago community.  The Reg — although this is, I think, secondary in importance — also subscribes to the dramatic correlative by offering a definite, stress-laden image as the metonymic key to this community.

On Twitter, however, I have only three followers — not much of a community.  I didn’t know how to cater to their needs.  On Facebook, I don’t always go for the popular status updates because that feels duplicitous.  Now that I’ve become conscious of these rules, it’s much more difficult to utilize them without feeling inauthentic.  (But that is a blog post in itself.)  On Twitter, however, I would gladly sacrifice authenticity if the oblation would only lend me a foothold.  Instead, I floundered to provide a narrative grounded uniquely in the self, with no eye to popularity.

Actually, that is a lie.  As I tweeted, I was overtly conscious of popularity.  Perhaps a better way to think of it is that I desired a popularity that would have to originate from the inside, out.  Intrinsic popularity.

In desperation, I tweeted excessively.  I rationalized this by saying I was working on acquiring more followers, or that I needed the practice, but I doubt both of these claims’ veracity.  I knew my tweets were going unread.  If we use these things — tweets, status updates, whatever — to alert others (and therefore, ourselves) of our being, my being was going by the wayside.  Without others to perceive me, I do not exist.  This is, I realize, rather melodramatic.  I can excuse this excess of emotion only by saying that I am a very dramatic person, and this was my experience, uncouth as it may be.

I tried to change this by reading articles online about Twitter and blog promotion, but all I got out of it was the ineptitude of my blog.  It’s not, I realize, very interesting to most people.  Regardless, I scoured the web until 2AM looking for advice.  Interestingly, this nighttime pursuit also made me feel increasingly incompetent with social media in general.  My intuitive understanding of Facebook slowly dissipated.  I don’t know if this is because I was feeling insecure or if some unconscious rationale was in play.  I’m interested to see if I feel similarly tomorrow.

What was your experience?  Can any of you relate?  Let me know by commenting on this post.   Also, follow me on Twitter @Demo310.

Facebook status QOTD:  “I have a calculator watch and I couldn’t be happier”  — Nick B., without permission.

Sin-ing out,

J

Neurosis: II

I’ve been thinking why I, too, was so compelled to broadcast myself online.  Cognitively, that urge makes sense.  It’s a good way to communicate.  As much as I might gripe against broadcasting for its ability to dilute intimacy, I’ve read at least one study, whose link I cannot currently find, which determined that Twitter does indeed improve intimacy in networks of close friends.  It’s also a useful tool for adolescents to cement their social identity.

Ultimately, however, these explanations cannot rationalize the cross-spectrum popularity of networking tools like Facebook and Twitter.  It was the popular kids in high school who were popular online– networking only amplified the social capital they’d already established in person.  If tools like Facebook were compelling uniquely to outcasts who seek alternative expressive outlets, there would be no reason for the Gatsbies of the world to be equally, if not more, attracted to the same media.

So why do we do it?

I won’t elaborate too much in this post, because I value this theory too highly to demote it to this forum.  The outline of my idea, however, is thus:

Beginning in the Second Industrial Age, Europeans and Americans almost universally began to experience alienation.  I’m not sure what that means, exactly, but we’ve all experienced it.  One of the problems with the term “alienation” is that it means different things to different flavors of Marxists.  For me, alienation means that we begin to conceive of ourselves as objects, not subjects.  Or — and this is central to my theory — we conceive of ourselves as characters.

Characters can be manipulated.  They can be written into or out of scripts; their attributes might be magnified in one chapter and ignored in another.  Anyone who has experienced trauma knows that this is useful.  In high school, when I was at my worst, I repeatedly found myself appraising my existence as a character in a novel.  I was dually author and object of authorship.  I think this is a trend to which most residents of postmodernity can relate.  It restores to us a sense of control.

However, alienation also de-contextualizes our personas.  We feel compartmentalized; there is a distance between ourselves and our communities.  That is to say, we become characters who have yet to be integrated into a narrative.  I like this character/narrative heuristic because it’s so easily integrated into other fields of postmodern scholarship.  Frederic Jameson, for example, discusses the fragmented nature of postmodern narratives.  If modernism (let’s pretend that term has integrity) has de-contextualized our characters, postmodern narratives would be fragmented, broken.

.

Accordingly, postmodernism can be considered a neurosis.  Modernism and its corresponding alienation is the source of trauma, and broadcasting is our attempt to fix it.  We create narrative streams in the form of status updates and Twitter feeds in order to re-inject our characters into coherent narratives.  Broadcasting is (we feel) integral to this restoration because it’s such an external process– stories only really become stories when they’re read.  Because I’m not suggesting that broadcasting is just whistling in the dark.  Its utility relies on its reception.  Postmodernism is the first mass social neurosis.

.

This is, of course, almost purely speculation.  I’m better educated in postmodernism than most of my peers, but I’ve only read a couple original sources on the matter, and this is the sort of field capable of occupying my attention for a lifetime.  One way I can improve my theory is by offering it up to public scrutiny, which is part of why I’m blogging about it.  I admit, I’m uncomfortable with these blog posts.  They feel insidiously close to the broadcasting I’ve been criticizing.  But I do need feedback, even on a theory as sparse as this one.  I would also like to know if someone else has already thought of this character/narrative, neurosis framework.

.

More importantly, however, I recognize that this field of study requires more original research.  I will continue to read books on postmodernism, but that’s insufficient.  Most of those books were written by old white men.  They’ve been initiated into postmodernism, but they’re not the postmodern generation.  We are.  We are at a great crux, and it is our obligation to study it, to document it.  My goals, therefore, are threefold:

.

1.  Document the trends in facebook status updates.  What do different social groups publicize?  What does my generation consider valuable information to share?  What kinds of information establish social capital?

2.  Join Twitter.  If I’m going to study it, I need to be a part of it.  Admittedly, I worry about this step.  What if I’ve embarked on this project only as rationale for my desire to broadcast?  I’d like to be more honest about my intentions, if that’s the case.  I know that I sometimes intellectualize social processes in order to conceal my distance from them, or to distance myself further.  Second, I worry that I might immerse myself in the community too fully, and that my study will loose its integrity as a result.  Some distance is, I think, necessary for objectivity.

3.  Blog about it.  These are only the first of many blog posts regarding social networking services.  As I become more familiar with Twitter, I’ll blog about my transition into the broadcasting world, as well as how my tweets are received.  My Twitter account will exist completely independent of this blog in order to be as realistic and personally honest as possible.

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Please return to  The Carrier Pigeon for future updates.  And, follow me on Twitter at Demo310!  Finally, comments are more than welcome.  I’d love to hear from you.

Neurosis: I

I was talking to my dad the other day, with whom I rarely speak, and he asked me how I was spending my time.  What was I doing?  “Not much,” I replied.  A noncommittal verbal shrug.  I hate those.  At one point I tried to start a podcasting organization at my university, but I didn’t make the deadline and the effort’s been put on hold.  Talking to my father, however, made me realize how much more I could be taking advantage of my low work level this academic quarter.  Which is why I’m beginning a new project.

It’s about internet broadcasting.  I’ve always been perturbed by social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.  Only recently, however, have I been able to figure out why.  In high school, when I would rant against social networking, most of my peers assumed that this was a defensive reaction.  In part, it was.  Opening myself to vulnerability in another social frontier when the world of irl was so daunting didn’t make much sense.  I thought it was more astute to accrue social capital in the real world.  Of course, this stand wasn’t as politically savvy as I’d hoped, and eventually I did join Facebook, fully buying into the trip of hourly status updates.  For a high school student who neglected to form personal bonds face to face, the adrenaline rush of making, accepting, and denying friend requests online offered an unanticipated edification I could satisfy nowhere else.

It felt dirty.  Fantastically dirty.  Every thought became an opportunity to gift myself to the world.  With the rise of photo sharing, routine happenings were transformed into spectacular events.  Their legitimacy as newsworthy was verified by their very raison d’ etre– people were reading.  In more traditional news sources, if you see your name in a headline it means you’ve made it, really made it.  There’s a screening process that guarantees somebody thought your story would be valuable.  Even sensationalist media employ screening processes; the only difference is they use criteria geared toward entertainment, not “significance.”  On Facebook, there is no screening process, but we still confer the same status to printed fame that we did when it actually meant something.  As a result, we now conceive of the most quotidian of communications as  historical documents of each of our lives.

It felt dirty.

 

TO BE CONTINUED…