[This is a continuing series of posts that reflect on Nathaniel Mackey's Songs of the Andoumboulou, a series of poems that Mackey has been working on through three books. His latest book with Andoumboulou poems in them, Splay Anthem, won the National Book Award. I take into consideration his allusions, Mackey's prose, interviews with him, and critical discussions of his work. As always, I look forward to hearing your thoughts. To access all of the posts, click on "Nathaniel Mackey" in the list to the right.]
[I am currently discussing Mackey's book Whatsaid Serif. If for some reason you cannot buy it (and I sincerely hope you do), many of the poems can be found here. Also, Mackey reads 10 of the poems with musical accompaniment on an album entitled Strick.]
Allusions / Vocabulary
Paulinho —
minha primeira vez — Portuguese for "my first time"
loquat —
Såo Paulo —
Algeciras —
Djbai — See Mackey's Atet A.D. pages 111-112
Bittabai — See above
Quantam —
Strick —
Lag — I think he is using the verb, meaning "to fail to keep up," as a noun
Apse —
Aliquant —
Samba —
_________________________________________________________________________________
This poem seems to be a continuation of the previous one. Mackey allows for such readings because he says in interviews that the poems in Song of the Andoumboulou can be thought of as overlapping.
That said, we must ask what the effect is of making the break between the two poems where he does. I think it is rhythmic: while all of Mackey's poems look fairly similar on the page, the way they work out specifically can be quite distinct. In Song 20 toward the end, the words are placed in a highly vertical and tilted fashion. You will have to trust me on this, because this blog form will not allow me to do justice to a quotation. In addition, pounding allusion and repetition add to the momentum.
In 21, the feeling is much more horizontal, and more space is given within and between lines. It seems that the break between poems is used to slow us down and to get us to view the same series of events (the poem begins with the word "next") within a more relaxed rhythmic medium.
"Next a Brazilian cut" -- Thus the poem begins. Mackey is referring to a song, a "cut", on an album of the Braziliam percussionist and singer Paulinho. They are also still in a train: "loquat groves hurried by / outside ... in southern Spain." Nevertheless, the sound of the Brazilian's music means that Brazil is placed within Spain, the air of the train as much of the distantly recorded song as of the earth of Spain.
Attention then shifts to a train in Brazil, "a train / less of thought than of quantum / solace, quantum locale." I believe that Mackey is getting at the still not fully understaood physics term "action-at-a-distance." Physicists have observed causal connections between particles too far apart to have any sort of typical interaction. What Mackey seems to be offering is quantum poetics, a way of thinking about music and poetry and culture that is also quantum, not hampered by overly determined notions of locale.
Put another way — a youngster from Pulaski, WI today may very well know less about his town's legendary polka music than of Scandinavian death metal. Action at a distance.
This continues in the final stanza, which seems to represent Brazil at carnaval (and it doesn't matter if Mackey was 'actually' there — action at a distance): "crowds milling," "loco, lock-kneed samba," polyrhythmic remit." Mackey does not seem very positive about this event, emphasizing the "book of / it" more than the it.
Heidegger (a philosopher I have deep reservations about, but he is useful here) in the 60's wrote about how when he first saw pictures of earth from orbiting satellites, he felt that we had lost the earth forever. Granted, Heidegger's concept of "earth" was extremely complex, but ultimately his pronouncement must be seen as conservative. There was a right way to experience earth, it is forever in the past, and we have lost it. Nostalgia.
There seems to be a bit of that nostalgia in this poem. There is no home here. We are in a cultural situation where we are always on trains, not to escape slavery as we saw in poem 20, but because it is simply where we cannot help but be. The mood of this poem seems a little downcast about this complex cultural place.
But Mackey has other moods. Mackey does not stay with this conservative mood.
Sunday, August 23, 2009
Simultaneous Interview II
by John Bullock and R.A. Riekki
This simultaneous interview is between the Ghost Road Press authors John Bullock and R.A. Riekki. Bullock's novel Making Faces was released by Ghost Road in 2008, the same year they released Riekki's novel U.P.(www.ghostroadpress.com):
RIEKKI: Who are your favorite experimental authors?
BULLOCK: What do you mean by experimental? Everything's an experiment. Saying that, Penn and Teller, and that thing that Kris Angel does when he levitates in front of gobsmacked kids in the stret. That's what I want to make happen with words. So, basically, I'm my favorite experimental author, plus the great Finnish mambo king R. A. Rosnicky. He moves me. As does Jacqueline Susann. So, what's the prettiest skateboard you ever saw?
RIEKKI: Easy answer. The first one I ever owned. Let me just back up and say this though--the only reason that skateboarding is so huge nowadays is because of Back to the Future. Tony Hawk owes his life to Michael J. Fox and Robert Zemeckis. I bought a skateboard because of that movie. A cheap one, rickety, orange, but a weak orange, a cheap orange, and my mom has a photo of me on that thing, wobbling. Our street where I grew up wasn't made for skateboarding. It was bumpy and sandy and with that type of skateboard impossible to ride on. So that skateboard rotted. But despite being a lumpenproletariat skateboard, I'd have to say it did have an element of pretty to it. By the way, one of my fave experimental authors is Crispin Glover. See how things just came full circle. George McFly as center of universe. So, John Bullock, author of Making Faces, available at www.ghostroadpress.com, you're currently reading The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. You could be reading the Bible or James Joyce or did I mention the Bible. Why are you spending all these hours reading The Kindess of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. And one other thing, I heard you've been quoted as saying, "We could save the environment by doing one thing. Ending NASCAR. The most boring sport in the world that's not a sport that kills our environment for no reason except to make hillbillies have something to cheer for." Did you really say that? And don't you think you're being a little bit harsh
BULLOCK: I have sympathy for all kinds. That's why I'm reading this outdated Tennessee Williams biography, because I'm trying to learn something about the kindness of . . . hang on, it's Gordon Ramsay. TV. Peaches. "Will you stop that, for goodness' sake." Love handles. A baby rhino on my back. So, Tenneesse was this beautiful fierce flower like myself, amd I don't believe any purer poetry has been or could ever be writen for the canteen or bus stop or for a pair of zookeeper's pants. The Life of Kind Strangers is riddled with myxomatosis, which is like hallitosis for rabbits. "When was the last time you chopped a chilli?" "Never." "That's what worries me about chillies." I ask you. I'm scared of the fire too. Gorgeous smell, said Gordon Ramsay's zookeeper. Don't need to be scared of something. Just climb the ladder and . . . As the author of Making Faces and a big fan of the underground Finnish miracle "U. P. I'd like to know for certain whether Bruce Spunkstain died a slow, muscly but musicless death in an Illinois public library on Tuesday, or was I dreaming? Dies irae.
RIEKKI: Good question. I'm just not sure what it is. Which reminds me, any trepidations about writing experimental fiction? You're basically the Christoph Waltz of Ghost Road Press. How are you going to find an audience when the world loves Harry Potter and Twilight and shows about people dancing can't really dance that well. Please answer is seven words or less.
BULLOCK: I'm sick of these questions. Look, Making Faces is the best book ever written. If you haven't read it, you'll be doomed with a shower-less life. For God sake, what do you think this is? I'm sick of your questions. Go away.
This simultaneous interview is between the Ghost Road Press authors John Bullock and R.A. Riekki. Bullock's novel Making Faces was released by Ghost Road in 2008, the same year they released Riekki's novel U.P.(www.ghostroadpress.com):
RIEKKI: Who are your favorite experimental authors?
BULLOCK: What do you mean by experimental? Everything's an experiment. Saying that, Penn and Teller, and that thing that Kris Angel does when he levitates in front of gobsmacked kids in the stret. That's what I want to make happen with words. So, basically, I'm my favorite experimental author, plus the great Finnish mambo king R. A. Rosnicky. He moves me. As does Jacqueline Susann. So, what's the prettiest skateboard you ever saw?
RIEKKI: Easy answer. The first one I ever owned. Let me just back up and say this though--the only reason that skateboarding is so huge nowadays is because of Back to the Future. Tony Hawk owes his life to Michael J. Fox and Robert Zemeckis. I bought a skateboard because of that movie. A cheap one, rickety, orange, but a weak orange, a cheap orange, and my mom has a photo of me on that thing, wobbling. Our street where I grew up wasn't made for skateboarding. It was bumpy and sandy and with that type of skateboard impossible to ride on. So that skateboard rotted. But despite being a lumpenproletariat skateboard, I'd have to say it did have an element of pretty to it. By the way, one of my fave experimental authors is Crispin Glover. See how things just came full circle. George McFly as center of universe. So, John Bullock, author of Making Faces, available at www.ghostroadpress.com, you're currently reading The Kindness of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. You could be reading the Bible or James Joyce or did I mention the Bible. Why are you spending all these hours reading The Kindess of Strangers: The Life of Tennessee Williams. And one other thing, I heard you've been quoted as saying, "We could save the environment by doing one thing. Ending NASCAR. The most boring sport in the world that's not a sport that kills our environment for no reason except to make hillbillies have something to cheer for." Did you really say that? And don't you think you're being a little bit harsh
BULLOCK: I have sympathy for all kinds. That's why I'm reading this outdated Tennessee Williams biography, because I'm trying to learn something about the kindness of . . . hang on, it's Gordon Ramsay. TV. Peaches. "Will you stop that, for goodness' sake." Love handles. A baby rhino on my back. So, Tenneesse was this beautiful fierce flower like myself, amd I don't believe any purer poetry has been or could ever be writen for the canteen or bus stop or for a pair of zookeeper's pants. The Life of Kind Strangers is riddled with myxomatosis, which is like hallitosis for rabbits. "When was the last time you chopped a chilli?" "Never." "That's what worries me about chillies." I ask you. I'm scared of the fire too. Gorgeous smell, said Gordon Ramsay's zookeeper. Don't need to be scared of something. Just climb the ladder and . . . As the author of Making Faces and a big fan of the underground Finnish miracle "U. P. I'd like to know for certain whether Bruce Spunkstain died a slow, muscly but musicless death in an Illinois public library on Tuesday, or was I dreaming? Dies irae.
RIEKKI: Good question. I'm just not sure what it is. Which reminds me, any trepidations about writing experimental fiction? You're basically the Christoph Waltz of Ghost Road Press. How are you going to find an audience when the world loves Harry Potter and Twilight and shows about people dancing can't really dance that well. Please answer is seven words or less.
BULLOCK: I'm sick of these questions. Look, Making Faces is the best book ever written. If you haven't read it, you'll be doomed with a shower-less life. For God sake, what do you think this is? I'm sick of your questions. Go away.
Saturday, August 1, 2009
The Illustrated Version of Things by Affinity Konar
The initial chapters of this fine book caused me to wonder if a truly original writer was emerging. Konar in this, her excellent first novel, uses a particular style to explore the mind of a disturbed, unwanted and unloved teen-age girl. I recommend it highly.
But this is far from The Catcher in the Rye. Here, Konar plays on the distinction between the sense manifold and perception. The sense manifold refers to the data picked up by the senses. We sense much, much more than we pay attention to: rather, we focus on what needs doing, saying, thinking. This focus is made possible by perception, which processes the sense manifold into what is useful in a given moment or series of moments.
Konar's first-person narrator perceives with an incredible freedom. While keeping us grounded by referring to some sense material, Konar has the first-person perceiver not recognize the usual boundaries between animals and humans, between genders, between prostitution and mere trading.
Konar uses a highly individual style to create this tension. Layers of nuanced, detailed language combine with other such layers. This long quotation should illustrate:
"I'm about to replace [my brother] ... I can do better than this, I figure. After all, what's the point in keeping a brother that I have to share with my father?
Down in the alley, I decide that I'll trap a new brother by sunup. I have my red dice and my best wishbone for bait. No one can resist those dice, they're always rolling high and getting even, and the wishbone has some clingy meat on it still. I figure I can catch a pretty decent brother with bait like this ... Soon, the trap is approached by a gang of cats, a homeless pack of limpers with damp paws...
When I don't respond favorably to the cats' offers of brotherhood, they circle the trap and mew...
The sound of their howling unions makes my eye tear, but before I have a chance to surrender, a different kind of paw ventures out into the trap and pockets the bone. It's a human paw. I can't see who the human paw belongs to, because its own is shrouded in knits and newspaper, but I can see it roll the dice between frostbitten fingers."
The narrator goes on to bring the person home, put him or her in the bathtub, and unpeel the layers. Underneath, is an old woman. The narrator has no problem identifying her as her brother, and she demands that she dress like him and so on. The brother who was replaced is then referred to as the "demi-brother."
This writing style opens profound questions about the connection and disconnection between the sense manifold and perception. Are some responses to the sense manifold better than others? What happens to someone who processes the manifold differently, according to different values and assumptions about the way the world works? To what extent are the categories that we divide the world into, in the needed effort to create a socially-based perceptual given, also blinders? What is the value of realizing that our categories are a mere convenience and not connected to nature in any way? What is the relationship between possibility and the processing and perceiving I am discussing?
Reading Konar's highly detailed rendering of this issue is a profound, and disturbing experience. When what is assumed becomes ignored entirely, when what is taken as a given can be instantaneously violated without the least forethought, when deep values are shown to be permeated with alternatives, we are left unsure, to say the least.
Now comes my reservation about this excellent novel: she turns it psychological. I admit my bias: I believe that most novels work best when character is not at the center so that other aspects of the work can bring up issues wider and more trenchant than psychology. We don't need real people in fiction: we already have them. And I am rarely in favor of having a character suffer from mental illness, as does the narrator, in a novel because then the book's complications can be explained away as the result of a diseased mind.
While taking two isolated passages from different parts of the book does little more than illustrate a point anecdotally, I want to offer another quotation from when her mental illness was more or less at the center of the action in the book:
I can promise to stop visiting the mental ward where I can talk to and bother the nurses who cared for me "as easily as I've promised it once before, and so many times before that. To nurses and nuns and elevator boys. To bus drivers and Ferris wheel operators and bunny handlers at the pet store. The tattoo parlor had me put it in writing. The butcher shop wanted it in blood."
It goes on from there. In this passage the narrator becomes a simply pitiful human being-like entity, and not one of a group of narrative strategies that pose questions and provide tentative answers about highly complex, and essential, issues.
My emphasis on concepts, ideas, and the intellect over character may seem to some as too masculinist. My answer is that plenty of women writers would seem to agree with me. To take some canonical examples, Jane Austen named her novel Pride and Prejudice, not Elizabeth and Darcy. Emily Bronte named her book after its setting, which in many ways is the overpowering force in the book. Finally, Tender Buttons is in many ways a domestically situated book: Stein wrote it soon after she and Alice B. Toklas had an apartment all to themselves. In part, that book is about the giddiness and joy of having a private space.
I don't want this reservation to cloud my admiration for this book. I have often wanted to write using details in this concentrated and free manner, but I have never been able to pull it off. Affinity Konar does it in spades. I am definitely reading her next book.
But this is far from The Catcher in the Rye. Here, Konar plays on the distinction between the sense manifold and perception. The sense manifold refers to the data picked up by the senses. We sense much, much more than we pay attention to: rather, we focus on what needs doing, saying, thinking. This focus is made possible by perception, which processes the sense manifold into what is useful in a given moment or series of moments.
Konar's first-person narrator perceives with an incredible freedom. While keeping us grounded by referring to some sense material, Konar has the first-person perceiver not recognize the usual boundaries between animals and humans, between genders, between prostitution and mere trading.
Konar uses a highly individual style to create this tension. Layers of nuanced, detailed language combine with other such layers. This long quotation should illustrate:
"I'm about to replace [my brother] ... I can do better than this, I figure. After all, what's the point in keeping a brother that I have to share with my father?
Down in the alley, I decide that I'll trap a new brother by sunup. I have my red dice and my best wishbone for bait. No one can resist those dice, they're always rolling high and getting even, and the wishbone has some clingy meat on it still. I figure I can catch a pretty decent brother with bait like this ... Soon, the trap is approached by a gang of cats, a homeless pack of limpers with damp paws...
When I don't respond favorably to the cats' offers of brotherhood, they circle the trap and mew...
The sound of their howling unions makes my eye tear, but before I have a chance to surrender, a different kind of paw ventures out into the trap and pockets the bone. It's a human paw. I can't see who the human paw belongs to, because its own is shrouded in knits and newspaper, but I can see it roll the dice between frostbitten fingers."
The narrator goes on to bring the person home, put him or her in the bathtub, and unpeel the layers. Underneath, is an old woman. The narrator has no problem identifying her as her brother, and she demands that she dress like him and so on. The brother who was replaced is then referred to as the "demi-brother."
This writing style opens profound questions about the connection and disconnection between the sense manifold and perception. Are some responses to the sense manifold better than others? What happens to someone who processes the manifold differently, according to different values and assumptions about the way the world works? To what extent are the categories that we divide the world into, in the needed effort to create a socially-based perceptual given, also blinders? What is the value of realizing that our categories are a mere convenience and not connected to nature in any way? What is the relationship between possibility and the processing and perceiving I am discussing?
Reading Konar's highly detailed rendering of this issue is a profound, and disturbing experience. When what is assumed becomes ignored entirely, when what is taken as a given can be instantaneously violated without the least forethought, when deep values are shown to be permeated with alternatives, we are left unsure, to say the least.
Now comes my reservation about this excellent novel: she turns it psychological. I admit my bias: I believe that most novels work best when character is not at the center so that other aspects of the work can bring up issues wider and more trenchant than psychology. We don't need real people in fiction: we already have them. And I am rarely in favor of having a character suffer from mental illness, as does the narrator, in a novel because then the book's complications can be explained away as the result of a diseased mind.
While taking two isolated passages from different parts of the book does little more than illustrate a point anecdotally, I want to offer another quotation from when her mental illness was more or less at the center of the action in the book:
I can promise to stop visiting the mental ward where I can talk to and bother the nurses who cared for me "as easily as I've promised it once before, and so many times before that. To nurses and nuns and elevator boys. To bus drivers and Ferris wheel operators and bunny handlers at the pet store. The tattoo parlor had me put it in writing. The butcher shop wanted it in blood."
It goes on from there. In this passage the narrator becomes a simply pitiful human being-like entity, and not one of a group of narrative strategies that pose questions and provide tentative answers about highly complex, and essential, issues.
My emphasis on concepts, ideas, and the intellect over character may seem to some as too masculinist. My answer is that plenty of women writers would seem to agree with me. To take some canonical examples, Jane Austen named her novel Pride and Prejudice, not Elizabeth and Darcy. Emily Bronte named her book after its setting, which in many ways is the overpowering force in the book. Finally, Tender Buttons is in many ways a domestically situated book: Stein wrote it soon after she and Alice B. Toklas had an apartment all to themselves. In part, that book is about the giddiness and joy of having a private space.
I don't want this reservation to cloud my admiration for this book. I have often wanted to write using details in this concentrated and free manner, but I have never been able to pull it off. Affinity Konar does it in spades. I am definitely reading her next book.
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