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An Epithalamium by Lisa Jarnot

I've been meaning to post this for oh, a year-and-a-half now. The world shouldn't be denied a Lisa Jarnot poem. Lisa wrote it last year for the Kansas City segment of my transcontinental marriage to Monika Lin; now that we're supplementing the love and marriage bit with a baby carriage, it seems fitting to recap the action with Lisa's lovely epithalamium.

A further note on fun with old forms: I wrote the first part of an Olympic Ode for Lisa on the occasion of her New York marathon run last fall, which I'll post next. By the time the Olympics are done, the rest of the ode will be done (unless poor air quality slows me down too much). Jia you, punks.

An Epithalamium

An epithalamium includes the date
which is June 23rd
which is a good day for
anarchists and poets
and for the flowers
since it's summer
and an epithalamium is also
called an epithalamion, and
I wonder what it means,
since this also is a found
poem, since I found out about it,
that David and Monika got
married in Shanghai, in a poem
that celebrates marriage
and that comes in from the Greeks
since they had weddings too
and now is the part of the
poem for the very nice things
and the good wishes and
maybe it should use
rhyme and meter like a
still unravished bride of quietness,
or maybe it should not use
rhyme and meter, since there
is more variation to the world,
like a dance party in Kansas City,
like Edmund Spenser's Epithalamium
and John Donne's Epithalamium
made at Lincoln's Inn, but
this epithalamium was made at
a Starbucks in Manhattan
with a tall dark roast blend
since an epithalamium is not
a short poem
and I am true to form,
thinking about Monika and David
and praising this bride and
this groom, like Apollinaire's
Poem Read at the Wedding of
Andre Salmon and I wonder
if they'll eat salmon for dinner
and Sappho wrote epithalamiums,
around 600 B.C., which was
a long time ago from today,
the 23rd of June and it's
2007 and we are honored
to request your presence
to help us celebrate since
epithalamiums are no longer
sung by a chorus of boys and girls
right outside the bedroom door,
since it would make the dog bark
and I almost forgot about Sir Philip
Sidney who wrote an epithalamium
for his own wedding in 1580 and I
wonder what he said about himself
and what I would say if I were him or
what he would say about David and Monika
how great they are, like shepherds
out in a field, with all the goatherd's
gods, with a dinner and some
dancing and great fun under the
stars, specific, and married,
and really quite unique.

Peter Middleton on Language Public and Poetry and Complicities

How public is language? Language requires intersubjectivity for its very existence, and even that most private of languages, a twin language, requires the two colluding children as a minimum condition. Yet maybe we should not so readily oppose public and private as if they were mutually exclusive and interdependent. To be public, a language or a poem have to do more than be exchanged between two or more people. Michael Warner suggests several criteria. A public consists of strangers, and a text that is public circulates in a time that it is aware of, or as he explains: ‘Public discourse is contemporary, and it is oriented to the future; the contemporaneity and the futurity in question are those of its own circulation.’ (94) He thinks that ‘the discourse of a public is a linguistic form from which the social conditions of its own possibility are in large part derived.’ (105) What is particularly interesting for poets about this analysis is that it shows that in the space of language (like the space of reasons) public and private are not necessarily opposites.

Certain specific lexical sets are used in public texts such as political speeches, newspapers, television news and internet reporting, contexts where the words and sentences have a meaningfulness that emerges within what Warner calls the temporality of circulation, the unfolding process by which a text locates itself in a history, however brief (think of a newspaper), that implicates its audience, its ‘public’ in a collective whose functioning may range from collusion to co-optation or community. This text might be a news conference, a rally, a morning tabloid, or an evening bulletin. Much of the language used to discuss the ethically repugnant issues of the day is active in such texts, and the problem for poets can be that these usages depend on their material context and outside it they become even more depleted than they already are. 

[...]

Sam Ladkin asks a question that presses on many poets: ‘Our identities are dependent for their making and sustenance on the catastrophic exploitation of the unfortunate inhabitants of other places. How can lyric, one of the traditions of which deals with the representation of immediate, personal experience, enact a fidelity to this dark matter of production’s displacement?’

(PORES) >

This on contemporary British writing, with clear application to American and other Anglophone poetries, at least and especially those written by the "we" that would readily identify with Ladkin's "our identities," a primarily white "we" (not that any of us should get off the hook, but Ladkin's incisive diagnosis and question are rhetorically tempered to resonate with a circumscribed public accustomed to considering its "complicities" in long-standing--if presently decaying at accelerating rates--imperial projects that rest on assumptions of cultural and racial superiority over and against a "colored" "other").

Given the radical heterogeneity of contemporary poetry scenes coming out of identity politics and political sensibilities shaped by resistance to projects of globalization that, in many ways, carry on in the forms of domination instantiated by European and American colonial and neocolonial projects; given the role of translation as a contested ground where poetries are subjected to a rendering from native tongue into other tongue; given these matters, how might the points made here (really important points to me, one who fits quite squarely into Ladkin's "we") strike, say, a Chinese poet writing in China? A Tian'anmen-era Chinese poet living and writing in globalized pseudo-exile? What happens when these (relatively white) Anglophone concerns are "translated" into different writing communities globally, and into different social, economic and ethnic contexts, whether across or within national boundaries? Does it make much difference, or are the points layed out here becoming more universally applicable by the moment, as globalization manifests, for example, in American high-technology companies assisting Beijing in building a "One World, One Dream" surveillance network to rival that of Great Britain's? What difference might it make if that spin slows, sticks or stops violently (crash) and the electrons and petrochemicals connecting the broader global "us" lose their stickiness?

Olympic Countdown

Dictation (Meeting)

Hammertown review from the Poetry Project Newsletter

 

Most happy to have received The Age of Briggs & Stratton via China Post the other day. A fantastic continuation of the long-haul Hammertown project, of which the new book stands as Book 2. Also happy to have found a cache of files I thought lost on a backup drive, including a review of Book 1 (Hammertown) published in The Poetry Project Newsletter a few years ago; having had Culley on the brain a bit lately (see link to Mosses in "Going, Going..." post below), thought the capricious godz of Coinkydink were trying to tell something. Figured it might be that I oughta republish that Hammertown review here, so I do:

*    *    *    *    *

“Probably intended for dance tunes or with dance tunes in mind.”

                        —Louis Zukofsky on John Skelton’s “To Mistress Margaret Hussey”

Presented in three sections of six poems each, Peter Culley’s Hammertown is experimental at its core—check the particle-accelerator serial mash of “Snake Eyes”—and, strangely, beautifully, classical on either wing of the triptych (or gatefold LP cover), as the poet deftly mixes modes and methods: a sustained lyricism shot through with riffs epistolary, pastoral, elegiac; leavened with sincere homage; ventilated by epic-ironic gestures.

And then there are complete surprises, such as the doses of “tumbling verse” à la Skelton. Culley’s rhymes and snapped lines, written “with dance tunes in mind,” help leash the poems enough to keep their wilder energies from spinning the work off into space while steadily nudging what can be a very dark book towards the light.  There is nothing emptily virtuosic in Culley’s polyverse. On the contrary, I repeatedly felt the thrill of the new while plunging into “a mix without edge or limit” and, just as often and importantly, the satisfaction of frequent enough snatches of “an air familiar” to keep from losing too many wits to bear witness.

D.J. comparisons are as inevitable in describing Culley’s work as comparisons to bop are with, say, Kerouac.  References—samples, quotes, splices, dubs—come quick and thick: to poets, musicians and artists by the dozens and to history, both global and local, with the local centered on the poet’s Vancouver Island home of Nanaimo.  A product of Culley’s numerous enthusiasms (see also his bricoleur’s blog extraordinaire, Mosses from an Old Manse), Hammertown’s rich intertextuality never unbalances the work with clumsily dropped names or awkward stabs at the merely clever; rather, it lends Hammertown a sense of the “blithe complexity” that Culley finds in, say, the Afro-beat of Fela Kuti as spun in “Eight Views of Ornamental Avenue,” wherein Kuti

… takes
a few stabs in that
Sun Ra meets Sly Stone
Fender Rhodes mode
that defers and defers [...]
all in the matter
of delaying
the reason we put the record
on in the first place,
that moment when the horns
come in and everything goes
    BIG and WIDE …  

That moment—the paradoxical moment of simultaneous perceptual dilation and pinpoint concentration, along with the resultant rush—is at the heart of Hammertown.  Such moments come with a price, of course: after a split second of ecstasy, textual, musical or otherwise, one returns to the rest of one’s life to confront, with heightened sensitivity, the banality and horror of the world-too-much-with-us. On this count, Culley doesn’t flinch and, in fact, Hammertown’s moments of brilliant release are bounded by an acute awareness of the fact that too often we humans seem hell-bent on boring ourselves to death outside big-box stores and up and down strip malls.  The book’s opener, “Greetings from Hammertown,” lands the reader squarely in the midst of a far different, if equally overpowering, scene from that of the audiophile’s joy at finding the perfect groove, one in which Culley’s native Vancouver Island’s pre-post-industrial beauty falls incrementally to post-“progress” progress:

Huge uproar lords it wide.
A tim’rous grader halts
before an overflowing ditch, its
big bad boy body slumped
as if thwarted in its gigging …

What follows is worthy of Dante’s Inferno, as “Greetings” leaves us, finally, within “the obscure forest” where the poet had sought a

vision … through grief and shame –

a caravan
of bright yellow trucks 
              […] bristling
with crab claws, with arms like
monstrous barbed
dog cocks, depositing
layer after layer of
sulphurous spoor
into a vale of rubber smoke       

       Sleep frightened flies,
       and round the rocking dome
       howls the savage blast …

The vision of this enduring Dis to the utopian moments that blip into being through art, music and poetry permeates, but does not dominate.  In fact, Culley often seems as likely to glimpse paradise in the “savage blast” as in the “streams of my late youth / cleared and flattened for you / even as I write this.”  However, it is art, poetry and music that usually come to the rescue, whether it’s the voice of Kathy Sledge, King Tubby’s dub, the rhythm & rhyme of the poet’s “disease skeltonic” or the poetry and friendship of contemporaries like Kevin Davies and Lee Ann Brown.  Culley repeatedly finds his way out of the dejection facing those who would see the world for what it seems to be, often by returning to what it is: a place where any quick value judgment is best suspended, as he warns us in an early, aggressive aside:  

If you want to read
   “decay” into this rocky heap
of nasty moss, this
eggy newspaper intrusion, that’s your
 quattrocento prerogtivo. 

Well all right then. Hammertown is just as likely to locate its moment in “decay” as in any well-wrought yearn: The book is virtually dedicated to Philip Guston, whose words provide one of its two epigraphs, the other coming from Olympian Oulipean George Perec’s Life A User’s Manual, which novel provides the literary-nostalgic analog to Nanaimo as an idyllic “fishing port on Vancouver Island, a place called Hammertown, all white with snow, with a few low houses and some fishermen in fur-lined jackets hauling a long, pale hull along the shore.”  And as for Guston, his later studies in self-decay appear to key the book’s predominant color scheme of pinks and “rosy grays” and the continual discovery of “…grotesquerie / affirming / the shapeliness of all things….”  In the quasi-romantic audiophile ode “Paris 1919” (dedicated to Kurt Cobain via John Cale, Young Werther, Parsifal, Bo Diddley and Sam Phillips, among others—“a mix without edge or limit”) Culley breaks down the case of “decay” thusly:

I’d walk six miles
    out of my way
To hear again    
the slow decay
Of that piano,    
far away— King Tubby’s    
Studio A.

And I’d walk further than that to stay on Peter Culley’s trail, one which stretches—like the epistolary poem “A Letter from Hammertown to East Vancouver and the East Village”—incredibly far and wide and into nooks and crannies long overlooked by the average bear, but nevertheless remains a trail that

…

is no secret, either.        
a deer trail,                
then a dog trail,                        
then Pete’s trail,

 then my trail. 
Sherpa Tenzing sits puffing        
on the roof of the world –

his belief in process absorbed        
by the throbbing worm

that mutters and sweats        
at the mucky heart                
of being …

If you haven’t taken vacation from your senses (but would like to), you simply must visit beautiful, terrible Hammertown. Go now.

City of the Past, City of the Future

Funnily enough, I always say that China is the only country in the world to have taken a conscious decision to knock down Paris to build Los Angeles. Ignorant as I am, I had no idea of Le Corbusier's French plans when I came up with this (or more likely read it somewhere, if anyone has a reference).

Modern Beijing, Becker notes, is an attempt to realise Le Corbusier's dreams. "Just as Le Corbusier wished, the inhabitants no longer live in individual houses with private courtyards but in immense collective housing projects." >

>

Sound Friend Going, Going...

Monika Lin, Magnolia Boys

This blog has been more or less dormant in recent months for a number of reasons. One is that I can't see it in China, where I'm living, without using a VPN (Virtual Private Network) application or Web proxy. The day-to-day hassle is just enough, and the vague and mercurial presence of censors is just discouraging enough, that I've found it less and less appealing to write in and for this space.

Of course, there are plenty of other reasons, mostly of the mundane daily busy-busy stripe (paying full-time gig, baby on the way (!), housekeeping, etc.). If I really wanted to blog here I could, as I have been, knowing that English-speakers in China can't access the site without workarounds and that many of those workarounds may be disrupted at any moment (the popular Web proxy anonymouse.org was recently blocked by the Chinese government, even as others remain in service).

Certainly another major factor has been uncertainty on my part regarding the nature and purpose of this blog. Poetry and poetics? Expat life in Shanghai? Sideline potshot political commentary and analysis? My Precious Thoughts^TM? Digital media? Art and literature? Big Ol' Monsterhonkin' China?

I've done a bit of all of blogging on all them in a rather half-assed way, which has proven unsatisfying, and I haven't had the energy or time or, perhaps, simple skill to pull off the kind of eclectic everything interesting blog I admire (I think Peter Culley's Mosses from an Old Manse may be my favorite in this category). In fact, I've taken Sound Friend offline for periods to allow time to think about what, exactly, this should be, and I remain ambivalent about the value of blogs and blogging in general—though I hope to be more productive in my ambivalence than in the past.

So, long story short, I'll be letting this version of Sound Friend wind down and launching a new one in the next month or so. No Blogspot or Typepad or Wordpress or any other public blogging platform, either: Beijing is scared of them. But the censors do tend to ignore independently hosted sites (so long as they aren't advocating Tibetan autonomy or Falun Gong or otherwise "hurting the feelings of the Chinese people"), so I'll be experimenting with Movable Type and sharing server space with my fantastic wife, Monika Lin, who's been hard at work in her Shanghai studio lately, making some great paintings.

Do stay tuned if you've been tuning in. I'll resume posting here until we figure out the new deal.

Do not frighten me more than you have to!

Cranky William Logan's NY Times review of the new O'Hara selected, edited by Mark Ford, will, no doubt, play out in the poetry blogosphere like a solid whack with whiffle ball bat to an already agitated hive.

The Times' copyeditor sums up in introduction: "This long-needed collection fair-mindedly presents Frank O’Hara’s unapologetic narcissism and often blissfully trivial verse." Really, you scarcely need to read Logan's review once you've read that tricky double-backhand of a complement, one that seems to praise everyone involved (editors, readers, reviewer..."fair-minded" people providing you, the reader, with a necessity) except O'Hara himself, let alone his work.

And why "long-needed"? Have we been laboring previously under horrible misconceptions with our reprinted Donald Allen selected and collected in hand? Does a slight rearrangement in works presented and those left out meet some desperate need? Fair-minded folk agree: Yes, obviously!

Half-assed Times copyeditors aside, if you read O'Hara, you likely already have most of this work and if you love O'Hara you definitely have it (I am boldly stating this without having the new selected in hand, but I am not fair-minded, so I am no doubt missing the editor's magic that makes the Ford anthology necessary). Regardless, this particular selected would seem largely an exercise in generational packaging: An O'Hara for our fair-minded time. If that's the case, then the review, too, should certainly be more about us and our time.

And it is. Indeed, the review and the new selected would seem far more an occasion for academics, critics, poets and bloggers to wrangle with one another about the canon of 20th century American poetry--with O'Hara as Exhibit A in this particular episode of The Poetry Show (Jim Behrle's probably already covered this ground in a cartoon) than it is an occasion to actually read and reread O'Hara's work, person to personist.

If you don't read O'Hara, this review can help you limit your reading to a designated best-of handful, pieces that would give you a taste of the "blissfully trivial" before moving on to something more Serious and Substantial. Still, Logan does grant with a lazy backhand flip that "however much one loves 'Four Quartets' or 'Lord Weary’s Castle,' it’s refreshing to open O’Hara and read:

LeRoi comes in
and tells me Miles Davis was clubbed 12
times last night outside BIRDLAND by a cop
a lady asks us for a nickel for a terrible
disease but we don’t give her one we
don’t like terrible diseases, then
we go eat some fish and some ale it’s
cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling
we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like
Henry James so much we like Herman Melville
we don’t want to be in the poets’ walk in
San Francisco even we just want to be rich."

Yet, in the end (and it's an end Logan arrives at immediately), "O’Hara’s physical world is curiously impoverished." and all O'Hara's poems really amount to are encounters with a "physical world" rendered in poems meant to look like they "take no work at all" (because they don't) and in which "O’Hara almost never faces up to the emptiness beneath this high life and low desire — if there’s a subconscious revealed, it’s very hard to detect." Indeed, as a fair-minded review about us and our time, this is telling: We lack curiosity, we're lazy, and we're empty. We don't psychoanalyze well. Which is precisely why we love Frank O'Hara and precisely why we need more of him, newly packaged or not.

But seriously, guys. Seriously. This review is primarily political: O'Hara's inherent personal and poetic anarchism (for lack of a better term, though "personism" is probably a better term in most ways) refuses to stay on the reservation while, on the one hand, estimable critics and serious contemporary poets like Logan are willing to grant O'Hara and his zany New York School buddies a footnote's worth of relevance in the canon while on the other someone like Ron Silliman enlists O'Hara into the "post-avant" camp to do battle against the School of Quietude. Meanwhile, O'Hara and his work remain irritatingly and insistently outside of easy critical categories.

And that, at last, is what makes it necessary: It repeatedly squirms--or tapdances or simply walks really fast en route to something better, more interesting, more exciting--away from being necessary to fair-minded assessment.

(A Last Minute) Reading @ Le Petit Xiaoxiao

Please join us for an informal (and informally bilingual) reading of (experimental) fiction and poetry followed by drinks, discussion and/or conversation of any persuasion or ilk.

Featuring: Los Angeles writers Teresa Carmody and Vanessa Place as well as resident Shanghai writers Sawako Nakayasu and David Perry.

We'll have a few snacks and little wine and beer. BYOB if you want YOB.

Vanessa Place is the author of Dies: A Sentence (Les Figues Press), and a chapbook, Figure from The Gates of Paradise. Recent work has appeared in Northwest Review, Contemporary Literary Criticism and Five Fingers Review. Her nonfiction book about sex offenders and the morality of guilt will be published in 2008 by Other Press.

Teresa Carmody's work has appeared in PoetsWest, Stolen Purse, Roar: Women's Studies Journal, and 4th Street. She holds an MFA in creative writing from Antioch University, Los Angeles. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is the editor of Les Figues Press.

Sawako Nakayasu is the author of nothing fictional but the accuracy or arrangement (she (Verse Press) and so we have been given time or (Quale Press). She also edits Factorial, a journal specializing in translation and collaborative writing. Her recent translation of a book of prose poems by the Japanese poet Takashi Hiraide, For the Fighting Spirit of the Walnut (New Directions), has just been published.

David Perry is the author of Range Finder (Adventures in Poetry) and two chapbooks, Knowledge Follows and New Years. A translation of German poet Bert Papenfuss-Gorek's work recently appeared in New European Poets (Greywolf) and new work is forthcoming in Tinfish.

Squid

The furniture bird. A pattern emerges. The drop of a vowel or replace of a consonant. Sonar in undersea woods. Coral, you say? We see six squid, big ones, red devils off the coast of California. The news this morning is the fresh squid in Yongkang Lu. They can't be farmed, their nature is unimpairable. That's is how it is in ocean floor chutes and crevasses. Hold your tongue literally literally. The construction dust is down this weekend because of the May Day holiday. Shanghai's lovely weather hurts my forehead. I'd quote Du Fu but he's been detained for questioning regarding portable ID laser label printer future scams. Yes, by Americans. Not sure if the Americans. In the forward base of our well-formed skulls. The bird is a butterfly eyebrow beauty in its bamboo cage and its song is just as the Sages had it. Rumbling trucks mean more in store. More stores mean less in the end. Says the bird. It's a classic mimic and it knows how to laugh. So we do.

Flet: A Novel

Early thoughts on a terrific new experimental novel that I'm halfway through (at Sound Friend, we only review books we haven't finished — more view and less re, that's our motto):

Joyelle McSweeney's Flet launches itself on a familiar narrative arc — an alienated inhabitant of a radically dystopian future world discovers that the foundational myth of that world is false — and as such, runs with the post-apocalyptic pack that includes works by Philip K. Dick, George Orwell, William S. Burroughs, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Kathy Acker, among so many others.

The narrative emerges in blips and bits, quanta delivered via an often intensely poetic language that oscillates between a familiar-enough experimental narrative and a more radical prose-poetry that foregrounds the materiality of the language. At many points, sound and rhythm take over, splitting meanings and releasing streams of high-energy semantic ambiguity. The result is a finely delineated spectral analysis of our present global moment.

Not to overstate the case: the more disjunctive moments — familiar enough to anyone at all accustomed to the experimental side of contemporary poetry — alternate with relatively stable narrative passages, in which the relatively stable character Flet thinks quite unstable thoughts, passes through hyperreal landscapes and has real-sounding conversations. The prose quotient of the novel delivers a story, characters and setting; it is, however, a narrative wonderfully prone to sudden blasts of disruptive info-laden linguistic static.

By way of exposition, Flet reflects on the events that brought her to where she is: A post-"Emergency" world (again, no new ground in pure plot terms, but the way McSweeney traverses this ground may be the book's greatest strength) in which "Nation's" city's have been erased from the map, though not yet from memory, following a bio-weapon attack on the Capitol.

That attack has since justified a near-total human self-removal from the "natural" world, or what's left of it, as well as from the urban world of pre-Emergency days. Life takes place on screens, in enclosed spaces (cars, trailers, underground bunkers) and in what seems like an interminable suburban/office park/industrial park landscape that's reduced the Outside to a predictable and repeated range of cultivated and constructed environments, all maintained by a totalizing Corporate-Government-Media aggregate.

Flet works for the "sub-secretary of education media," a woman who appears in a sequence of high-tech power suits, and with whom Flet identifies even as she recoils. As this is not a review, I'll spare us all any further synopsis, and briefly turn instead to McSweeney's language.

To follow up, after a fashion, on Sound Friend's (happily suspended) reading of China's top novel of the 21st century, Wolf Totem, we start with a far more realistic 21st-century wolf scene than anything Jiang Rong wrings from his Cultural Revolution days on the Mongolian grasslands. It's also a fine example of the relatively straight-forward narrative prose that alternates with the more poetic passages:

Flet is standing outside the car. Hyperfluorescents blaze from the enormous rectangular platform floating hundreds of feet over here head. The plinths that support it are erased by dark. The fueling pavilion is lit like a studio or an underwaters mine set. Fuel is promising itself into the car. Jingles and messages fray from the screen above the pump. Flet leans her back against the broad curve of the side door and feels he moisture soak through her suit. She feels grit and grime seeping through.

On the postcard-size screen, a flight of wolves over a snowbank. Flet watches the image stutter as the credit card reader chokes down her information; the wolves retract and launch again over the snow, their silvery snouts long with inclination. They sink towards their blue shadow. When the foremost paw breaks the snow's surface, the footage speeds up. The wolves crash down in a tide of white powder. A double-bladed logo is released and springs up to take the place of the moon. (pg. 2)

More interesting in a word-by-word, phrase-by-phrase, sentence-by-sentence sense, however, are passages like the below, in which Flet's inner life takes shape in McSweeney's lineless kinetic verse. From the chapter "Now Arriving over Airwaves, Airlines":

The black scarf knotted at her nape plots a green epidemic on her skull. The black skiff skirts a knotty sea, a needle in mourning weeds, a razor-edged reed, a toothed fish: a decision in motion. Not me yet. Whipping of the foam of the sea: a fate or a fait accompli. Who wants to be drawn out. Who would want to wear this crown. Poised on the crest, down in the flood, rests in the pit, hurled up. Aurora Dolorealis, spider writing, green vernal ink, dawning branch. Scrawl from which I'll never rise up. I'm down now, I lie in the graphite dust. Burning, the atmosphere snags and the child's writing lights like a fuse. These are the Russian-made night-vision goggles that were his eyes. (pg. 21)

Such blasts of linguistic static (Flet the character gleans information-that-counts from the static of her pre-Emergency car radio, recalling Cocteau's Orphee and Spicer's poetics) usually run for only a page and a half, comprising a section or short chapter, with more normative prose returning the reader to the narrative. It's a great effect, a bit reminiscent of the latter quarter of Alfred Bester's The Stars My Destination, when Gully Foyle starts to lose it (figure it all out) and Bester's prose breaks down (up) into Spaceman-Blakean riffing.

The chapter "An Oil Dream" opens with a reference to Flet's boss, the sub-secretary of education media:

The Secretary in a nimbus, a caul. Before a glittering wall, under the pinpoint spot. Sugarplum Frost. Mulled Wine. Autumn Leaf. Fresh Grape. The names pressed on bullet-sized canisters stacked behind a sheer acrylic plate. Skate Blade. Ice Princess. Cobweb. Bandolier. She glimmers and twists in a glare like a ribbon that pulls tight and belts around her. She ducks, bobs, weaves, throws her chin at its best angle, winks one eye, pivots on clear plastic heels. (44)

Here the icy character of the Secretary, who exists to be seen on the screen and serve as a medium for the government/corporate/media message, is absorbed in a language in which punctuation sharply controls rhythm even as tone-leading assonance and alliteration speeds one's reading toward a blur, doing more than any straight prose description could do in the same space and lighting up connecting points in Flet's larger textual matrix.  Take, for instance, the recurring figure of the spider and the web ("spider writing" and "Cobweb" above), mentioned here in the early chapter "First Envisioning of Missing Cities (Herbaceous)":

The missing cites grow taller and higher. They grow over the vat. They grow portable: they blow like living yeast. They spread out and take a breath. They build the strongest net in the world: spider webs. They build a grave-blue cotton in the joints and laddering. They build a planked floor that the dust silts through in lines. The lines form the blueprint for the second city. The second city: the plank city: the roof city: the sky city: the weather city: the tropocity: the atmoscity: the core: the mantle: the bodice: the beeline: the instep: the torch-sweep: the hatband: the screw: the driving glove: the foil tip: the eel cast: the net haul: the polished angle: the chopstick: the dagger: the dendrite: the patch-and-stain: the cobwebbed brain. (9)

In Flet, a world virtually emptied of the presence of anything not made by humans and a world almost entirely unmade by us, language comes to play a vital role in its possible  — if only partial (only partial is possible) — salvation, and it's an idiosyncratic, inquisitive, persistently irruptive poetic language that clear a space where the memory-work of narrative — building individual stories to counter the mass narrative and the erasures it requires — can do its quiet, constitutive work. "The strongest net in the world."

We'll see how sustainable this is over the course of the short novel. So far, so very good.

New European Poets & Another Kind of Nation

I received a contributor's copy of New European Poets (Graywolf) the other week. It's a beautifully produced book about which I hope to have much more to say, but for now I'll just note that I made out like a bandit. In exchange for one nine-line translation — of Bert Papenfuß's "auf der kippe," which I render as "on edge" — I've received a hefty 400-page volume full of what, at first glance, appears to be a wealth and diversity of work, selected and arranged in a balanced fashion that promises a number of great discoveries. Of course, anthologies are criticism magnets, by nature leaving out so many and so much, but it looks like NEP editors have thought through the critical issues without succumbing to either wishy-washy over-inclusiveness or a stubborn partisanship.

So, thanks to arch-editors Wayne Miller and Kevin Prufer and the German-section editor Elizabeth Oehlkers-Wright, who, much to my surprise, remembered work I did over a decade ago on the difficult-to-translate Papenfuß (lots of wordplay, German compound neologisms and multivalent cultural-political references specific to the DDR and post-Wende German East) and tracked me down to ask if she could use it in the anthology.

NEP makes for an interesting counterpoint to another ambitious anthology I've been reading lately, Zhang Er and Chen Dongdong's Another Kind of Nation: An Anthology of Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Given China's size and ethnic and linguistic diversity, it's tempting to set these two alongside one another and see what each might say about their respective fields, but I'm afraid it wouldn't be fair on a number of counts (which doesn't mean I won't do it anyway). I'm quite inclined to agree with most of the criticisms made in Lucas Klein's just-published Rain Taxi review, and it's clear that the publisher,Talisman House, has some serious problems. Another Kind of Nation comes across as a shaky galley proof rather than a finished book (I hesitate to lay too much blame with native Chinese editors working in English as a foreign language, though repeated instances of "Eza Pound" shouldn't have slipped past anybody).  Regardless, I'll be reading both anthologies more or less simultaneously, and thinking through issues of translation, anthologizing and editing in the next few weeks.

For more of my Bert Papenfuß translations, graciously rescued from the backup hard drive by Elizabeth Oehlkers-Wright, see Perihelion. Sadly, the original German doesn't appear along with the translations, which is understandable in a large print format like NEP, but less so online. Na ja. It's nice to have it out there, regardless.

Dances with Wolf Totem/A "Plastic Country"

It's difficult to get more than a few pages into Wolf Totem without thinking: Chinese Dances with Wolves. It's an all too easy thought, and as such, should be checked: The tendency to immediately frame any experience of China and "Chineseness" in terms of an American or Western analog is one of the greatest pitfalls awaiting the cultural tourist and the serious student of Chinese culture alike.

Yet, within only 30 pages, a series of pedantic wooden dialogs in which the merits of the nomadic ways of the Mongolians and other peoples of the grasslands are contrasted with the tame and settled habits of the Han Chinese have me thinking Dances. It doesn't help that the main character — Chen Zhen, a "Beijing student" escaping the worst extremes of the Cultural Revolution by living in a yurt and working as a shepherd with three Han friends in a community of Mongol hunters and herders — quickly comes to idolize the wise Old Man Bilgee and his deep knowledge of the Ways of the Wolves, and that by this device author Jiang Rong conflates Mongol identity with the nature of the Mongolian wolves that dominate theChen's  imagination and the symbolic economy of the novel. Furthermore, Jiang Rong makes it immediately clear, in a familiarly didactic Chinese manner, that his novel is to be read as a treatise on the nature of the Chinese nation and character and that — big surprise — the Han Chinese have a lot to learn from their nomadic Mongolian brothers. (For the Dances-esque Penguin promo copy, go here.)

Though it's been years since I inflicted Kevin Costner's painful cinematic American Ode to the Red Man on myself, the narrative and ideological moves are familiar: reconfigure the concept of national identity by including a largely excluded Other in a new narrative emphasizing a new inclusion, a hybridity, that in the end creates a stronger narrative of national identity. In short: "We Americans have been wrong to treat Indians the way we have, and we must recognize this and learn from our Native American friends in order to become a better people, a better America." Substitute "China" for "America" and "Mongols" for "Indians" and, though it may be unfair of me to jump to such a conclusion after only 30 pages, I'll go ahead and jump: You get a Chinese Dances with Wolves.

I'll try push myself to finish this novel — which is not without its pleasures, I have to say, even if they are often enough of the ironic-enjoyment variety — in part because we've been informed in no uncertain terms that it is one of the most important Chinese novels of the past several years. Penguin is pushing the Howard Goldblatt translation as a prime example of the contemporary Chinese novel, one that they hope can help create an appetite for Chinese fiction in the English-speaking world as healthy as the one that has existed in recent years for Indian fiction. Goldblatt appeared at the Shanghai Literary Festival to read from and talk about the book, and he was accompanied by a Penguin rep from Beijing  who laid the "Chinese fiction is the next Indian fiction" spin on the affair, though not without a hint of doubt and a healthy dose of skepticism from the literary festival crowd, many of them expats quite used to hyperbole-laden marketing language promising that this, that or the other New Thing cooking in China is poised to be the Next Big Thing.

The questions at the Literary Festival spent a good deal of time on matters of translation, Goldblatt's long and notable career, and Chinese literature and film, but two audience members in particular brought up questions regarding Chinese nationalism. Actually, one was a question about Chinese nationalism, the other was a question embodying Chinese nationalism.

The first ran along the lines of: A few critics, Wolfgang Kubin in particular (he of the notorious "all contemporary Chinese literature sucks" claim), have charged that Wolf Totem embodies and espouses a kind of Chinese fascism. Goldblatt responded in his reasonable translator's manner that this was taking interpretation too far, projecting too much onto the story, and ultimately not supportable, though one could certainly argue that if one liked, because, after all, literature is, as it were, a free country.

The second question — actually, the final one of the night, following a generally very pleasant hour of bookish chat with a few moments of comic relief (the giant Penguin promotional banner proclaiming "The Year of the Wolf" confused an earnest Chinese woman, who asked Goldblatt what it meant and he had no idea, having missed the banner and never having noted, apparently, what the Penguin marketeers were up to in this, the Year of the Rat). A clearly agitated young Chinese man rose with the air of someone who was about to get a whole lot of his chest. His English was barely adequate to the task, but he managed to attack Goldblatt, the West and pretty much anyone who might wish to translate China into Western terms rather than accepting Chinese terms without question. It was a bit of an inarticulate rant and it left most of the audience partly bemused and partly irritated, and when Goldblatt abruptly dismissed the young man with a few sharp retorts, members of the audience chuckled and exchanged knowing looks, glad to be in on the joke and happy enough to see the rude young Chinese man put in his place, there in the Glamour Bar overlooking the Bund, by the no-nonsense American dean of Chinese literary translators.

All of this took place during the first week of the Tibet rioting and a good deal of uncertainty hung in the air regarding Beijing's possible responses to this latest upsurge in minority discontent within the advertised harmonious family of the Han majority and the 55 happy ethnic minorities. The plush surroundings and comfy Shanghaiexpat bubble kept things from feeling too immediate — it was as if matters out in Tibet were all part of a good book about China, perhaps a nice novel (or at least a New Yorker piece), not an actual struggle taking place in the same country as us, as we sat there sipping our complimentary literary festival wine.

Anyway, I filed the Wolf Totem/Goldblatt event away in my mind with the other half-dozen or so readings and talks we saw during the festival. Monika and I picked up a copy of Wolf Totem and she tore through it — she reads like the hungry wolf (the X one, not the Duran Duran one, of course) — and I put it near the bottom of the list of the dozens of books I want to read, because Goldblatt's reading and my subsequent quick scan of the first few pages left me feeling like it wasn't quite my cup of butter tea.

That changed the other day, when I came across Lee Ambrozy's Art Forum notes on the recent Moganshan Sino-British Literary Translation Workshop, courtesy of Danwei. It seems that Goldblatt and his translation had been attacked by Jiang Rong, along with a number of important Chinese literati on hand. The primary issue, as Ambrozy writes:

While Wolf Totem can be read as a didactic exposition of the weaknesses of the Han character, it is often interpreted as a treatise on China's overwhelming nationality and its place in global politics. Thus, Wolf Totem's English translation is perceived as a weighty task of near patriotic importance, one that could only be entrusted to the most capable scholar: Professor Goldblatt.

Imagine the shock of these collected translators, then, when the cultural medium we idolized most was picked to shreds, scrutinized and questioned forthright by Goldblatt's latest "translatee." At an open discussion between the two, Jiang Rong expressed unequivocal unhappiness with this scholar's interpretation of his magnum opus. Aside from nitpicky linguistic details, the omission of the classical references to wolves that headed each chapter, and other maladies related to its abridgement, the greatest offense of this English version was the interpretation of Han people as "the Chinese."

Most of the Chinese translators in attendance nodded in agreement. They argued: it is ridiculous that Han would be translated as "Chinese," why, with so many other ethnicities falling under the banner of one nation, how could the English reader catch the author's true meaning, let alone the gist of the entire book? They protested loudly, citing China's multiethnic population, all the while taking for granted that all Western readers know––as Goldblatt himself surely does––that the People's Republic claims to enfranchise 55 national minorities, and is proud of them, each and every one.

I've been thinking a lot about Chinese nationalism lately, as would any non-Chinese who were living here and following the news as the Olympics approach, Tibet simmers and occasionally boils over, rumors of Uighur separatists with bombs pop up, the Chinese media conducts a running image-battle with critical Western media (CNN vs. CCTV, Der Spiegel vs. Xinhua, etc.) and, on a personal level, I feel like the relatively friendly open looks I'm accustomed to getting from many Chinese — men in particular — have lately become a good deal more wary and guarded, with a few stares tossed my way that, though I may indeed be paranoid here, barely mask anger and resentment (so not really a "personal" level, rather a superficial "racial" and "national" level, as I'm reminded that, oh yeah, I'm a white American in situations where previously I'd more likely think something like I really need to buy some new shoes or a Celtics-Lakers final sure would be something!).

I've also been thinking a lot about translation, though, sadly, not as a practitioner (my Mandarin is still painfully basic). I'm hoping to co-teach a class in the fall for an American university with a program in Shanghai, and I've been poring over texts by both Chinese and Westerners concerning Shanghai, China, and the complex interactions between all concerned. I've been trying to figure out better what's happening in Chinese poetry in China (it's rather easy, comparatively, to figure out what's happening with Tian'anmen exile poets like Bei Dao and Yang Lian, who have chosen to remain abroad and publish from Europe, the US and Australia), and as such have been doing a good deal of reading (including the problematic new Talisman anthology Another Kind of Nation, which I'd like to write about here once I've got a better handle on it.)

So: Translation and nationalism and China and the West and identity politics (what is "Chinese," what is "Tibetan," what is "Han," and so on). I find it most interesting — and uncomfortable — that the terms of Jiang Rong's Moganshan critique revolve around a question of national identity in this manner, especially given that, if I recall Goldblatt's Literary Festival talk correctly, the author had ample access to the translation before its publication. Why didn't this "Han" vs. "Chinese" matter arise then? And what of the fact that Goldblatt frequently does go with "Han Chinese" in the book itself, making the linkage clear? Is the Jiang Rong critique primarily a rather oblique response to the anti-Chinese (anti-Han) riots in Tibet and subsequent Western criticism of Chinese (Han) domination of Tibet and, by extension, Xinjiang and other non-Han (non-Chinese) areas under the rule of the People's Republic of China? Does the historical damage of Western colonialism in China entitle contemporary Chinese in China to play the kind of identity politics name games familiar to so many Americans, except on an international rather than intranational level?

This all brings me back to the function of a film like Dances with Wolves in American culture. Major cultural works — and within China, Wolf Totem certainly fits the bill, having been read and discussed by millions — that deal with questions of national unity and integrating resistant cultures into a larger hybrid culture, one primarily but not exclusively defined by a dominant one (Anglo-American culture in the US, Han Chinese in the PRC and its antecedent dynastic empires, Jurchen and Mongol intercessions notwithstanding) are often deemed "major" less on any artistic or aesthetic merits, but rather because they help articulate the terms of the cultural work (and struggle) involved in the reconfiguration of a national identity. Wolf Totem does this, too, while also using the "wolfish" nature of the Mongols as a means of critiquing Han softness, the farmer/peasant nature of the Han Chinese, and doing so in a way that has led Kubin and others to see a nascent Chinese "fascism" at work vis-à-vis the rest of the world.

I've no doubt overstepped my bounds here, having only read the first three of chapters of Wolf Totem, but I wanted to put down some of the questions I have about the book ahead of reading it all, and I'll return to them and check my initial questions and assumptions against the book as I read it to completion (if I can...I'm not a literary masochist, Comp Lit degree notwithstanding).

And to finish, a few choice passages from the first few pages of Wolf Totem, with an emphasis on the aforementioned wooden dialog, didactic droning and ponderous national-identity discourse:

    "War demands patience," the old man replied softly. "Opportunities present themselves only to the patient, man and beast, and only they take advantage of those opportunities. How do you think Gehghis Khan was able to defeat the great armies of the Jin with so few mounted warriors? And all the nations that fell to him? Displaying only the power of wolves isn't enough. You must also display patience. Even the largest and mightiest armies can stumble. If a mighty horse stumbles, it is at the mercy of even a small wolf. Without patience, you are not a wolf, you are not a hunter, and you are not Genghis Khan. You are always saying you want to get an understanding of wolves and Genghis Khan. Well, lie there and be patient" (pg. 24).

    *

    "It looks like your two-year fascination with wolves is beginning to pay off," he said. "I'll have to start studying their hunting techniques myself. Who knows, it might come in handy in a real fight one day…What you said could be a pattern. Living on the grassland over the long haul as a nomad, it makes no difference with ethnic group you belong to, since sooner or later you'll start worshiping wolves and treating them as mentors. That's what happened with the Huns, the Wusun, the Turks, the Mongols, and other nationalities. Or so it says in books. But the Chinese are an exception. I guarantee you, we Chinese could l9ive out here for generations without worshipping a wolf totem.

    "Maybe, maybe not," Chen said as he reined in his horse. "Take me, for instance. The wolves have won me over in a little more than two years."

    "But the vast majority of Chinese are peasants," Yang countered, "or were born to peasants. The Han have a peasant mentality that' impossible to break down, and if they were transported out here, I'd be surprised if they didn't skin every last wolf on the grassland. We're a farming race, and a fear and hatred of wolves is in our bones. How could we venerate a wolf totem? We Han worship the Dragon King, the one in charge of our agrarian lifeline—our dragon totem, the one we pay homage to, the one to whom we meekly submit. How can you expect people like that to learn from wolves, to protect them, to worship and yet kill them, like the Mongols? Only a people's totem can truly rouse their ethnic spirit and character, whether it's a dragon or a wolf.... [and so on in this vein for another several lines]."

    "In ancient times," Chen said, picking up the thread," the impact of Mongols on the world was far greater than that of the Han, who outnumbered them a hundred to one. Even now, people in the West call us members of a Mongol race, and we accept that. But back when the Qin and Han dynasties unified China, the word Mongol didn't exist. I tell you, I feel sorry for the Han Chinese. We built the Great Wall and crowed about what an achievement it was, considering ourselves to be the center of the world, the central kingdom. But in the eyes of early Western people, China was only a 'silk country,' a 'ceramic country,' a 'tea country.' The Russians even thought that the little Khitan tribe was China, and to this day, they still call China, Khidai."

    "It looks like your fascination with wolves was worth it," Yang said. "It's contagious. Now when I read history, I keep looking to the barbarian tribes of the four corners and am tempted to look for their connections to wolves.

    "Look at you," Chen said. "you're damned near a Mongol yourself. All you need is an infusion of wolf blood. Hybrids are always superior creatures."

    "I can't tell you how happy I am that you urged me to come to the grassland. DO you know what it was you said that touched that special spot in me? You've forgotten, haven't you? This is it: You said, 'The grassland contains the most extensive primitivism and freedom anywhere.'"

    Chen loosened his horse's bit and said, "I think you're putting words in my mouth." (pg. 34)

Violence in Tibet, Chinese Women in Rock and Shopping Cart Tossing

While taking a break from checking out the news on the protests and violence Tibet--and, apparently, Gansu, now, not to mention Nepal (a lot of unblocked video on CNN, stories on the New York Times) I picked up this great Sexy Beijing video via Danwei.

We don't have TV, but when I talked to a friend after work today she asked me if "something was going on" because almost all the TV stations in Shanghai had switched to canned rebroadcasts of political meetings. I told her what I'd learned online at work (a Chinese company...well, actually incorporated in the Caymen Islands, but whateva): that cars had been reported burning in the streets, protest had spread from the monks to the laypeople, that police and military were encircling monasteries. Very heavy stuff. 

This all at the end of the day. I told my Canadian coworker; our American marketing guy overheard us and, having followed the news himself, proceeded to freak (it should be said that he was operating on only a couple hours of sleep a night, being the Shanghai expat bon vivant that he is). What, he wanted to know, would our big Chinese travel company do about its first big ad in a major English-language expat A&E monthly? The ad features a huge photo of dancers in Tibet and, though the copy doesn't push it, it's an ad promoting travel to Tibet. At that point, the news that all flights into Tibet had been canceled (just heard via CNN streaming video) hadn't hit; perhaps now, at 4:30 a.m., he's drunk and freaking. It will be exceedingly interesting to see how this all plays out at this company next week. Don't think my idea of running a promotional contest in which the grand prize is a free Tibet trip will get much love.

*

So, what will Beijing do?  Apparently police are showing some measure of restraint. I just read a report from a Han woman saying the police were, for a while at least, not really doing anything and CNN reported that police had essentially withdrawn from downtown for several hours as protests among laypeople built, adding an ominous note to the report by noting that police had similarly withdrawn before returning in force in Beijing in 1989. But at this point, it's difficult to imagine the PLA moving in with tanks and crushing the protests outright.

A massacre--even the deaths of a handful of TIbetans--and the Olympics picture really darkens for China. They've poured so much effort and money into the spectacle that they can't jeopardize it all by simply cracking down, as they did the last time protest boiled over (Hu Jintao earned his hardliner credentials at the time as a party boss in Tibet; the heat he must feel now on the eve of the Olympics is a nice piece of historical irony). Yet, if the question becomes whether to sacrifice control over Tibet or to jeopardize the Olympics, which will the Party choose? (An added bonus in the event of any international boycotting could be an increased medal count for China! Win-win!)

The hopeful possibility--and I have no idea of how possible or impossible this is--would be that the government will have to ask the Dalai Lama to make the scene and tell Tibetans to stand down. For that to happen, of course, the Dalai Lama would have to get something in return, and it would have to be close to what he's been asking for: a much higher degree of Tibetan autonomy while Tibet remains a part of the PRC, along with guarantees against repression of religious practice and more Tibetan control over policy and the economy. This is something Beijing has shown no inclination to even begin to consider, publicly at least. Their firm belief appears to be that such a turn of events would be the first step toward the dissolution of Communist Party-led China, a la the the USSR. But what if it becomes the only way to save the Olympics? To save the economy (if that's even possible, given the current situation globally)? To save the New China they've worked so hard on building (the image of)?

*

I'm really looking forward to the Shanghai Literary Festival events tomorrow; Robert Gifford will be discussing his China Road, which means Tibet will be the topic (unless somehow the rather politically squeamish expat organizers somehow squelch it; unlikely, though I think they'd prefer to, just to be safe). I just finished it (thanks for sending the book, Mom), and it's much better than I'd anticipated. Gifford, who stuck to China's version of US Highway 50 in crossing the PRC, only deals with Tibetan questions in the part of the book where he swings through Gansu Province, which has a significant Tibetan population.

He saw photos of the DL in the temple he visited there and got some straight talk from locals on their dissatisfaction with Chinese rule. He spent much more time--and in the book, he spends the closing several chapters--on the Uighur situation in Xinjiang, which, in many ways, is just as dangerous for Beijing as the Tibetan (the other week's commando raid on alleged armed Uighur separatists and the reported heading-off of a hijacker all point toward bigger incidents this summer). The Muslim Uighur are far less sympathetic to the West than the Tibetan Buddhists but, of course, draw much support from the Muslim world. Contemplating all the fault lines in this particular arrangement of forces can make the head spin, no?

*

Random minor urban violence: Leaving work today, I passed through the usual gauntlet of motorcycle taxis outside the metro station. They're packed in so thickly and in such number that one often has to dodge and weave to avoid bumping into a guy on his cheap Chinese or Japanese bike, and sometimes the guys will grab at people's sleeves (generally not 6'4" Westerners, however) while making their pitches. I kind of get a kick out of it--they exhibit a lot of bonhomie and camaraderie, joking and smoking, jostling for customers, gunning their little engines and coming off like a good-natured Central East Asian Wild Bunch (they appear generally to be non-Han ethnic minorities or, if Han, at least recently arrived peasants).

Anyway, as I'm threading through this bunch along with the rest of the rush hour pedestrians, to my right I see a guy hurling a shopping cart, a big one. A full-sized supermarket shopping cart. It tumbles down the slight muddy incline between two levels of sidewalk, the upper which runs along the face of the Lotus Mall, whence the carts came, the lower parallels the street. At the bottom of the slope it crashes into two overturned shopping carts, joining them in a heap. All this in dusk light--a "clear" spring day's late sun filtering through the dust and smog as the mall lights begin to cast their harsh glare on the scene, making it feel a bit like outdoor theater. I push on with the crowd. Was the guy a mototaxi driver clearing space for his bike? A frustrated store employee taking it out on company property?

Whatever the case, I reached the metro entrance without my two companions, a couple of expat coworkers. They reach me and Rebekah, my Canadian friend, shows me where one of the large buttons on her coat was ripped off by a motorcycle (remember, this is all happening on sidewalks). She didn't stop to look for it both because it was getting dark and because you'd risk getting a finger crushed, whether by foot or by tire.

Listening to: Björk, Carsick Cars, Snapline

Cuz I know you totally did