Room 4

            a room is not a

            /level/ room when

            the ceiling caves

            because of a weight

            like indecision

            on the roof

Ideology 13

            code drift

         like guesses

reverberating through a system

      from skin through synapse

   through wire through

 grid

into venues

   the guesser never

     could know

Ideology 14

not much remarkable

other than bones

aching through

the afternoon

calling us into stupor and longing

the wishes climb

the walls and every

tomcat in the neighborhood

cries into the dampness 

Purgatory Hill at Palmer's Bar

Last night we at Palmer's Bar in Minneapolis were treated to a visit by the inimitable two-person band Purgatory Hill. Composed of Pat MacDonald and melaniejane, they have one of the most unique sounds in all of American music.

MacDonald is a master at an instrument known as a Lowebow. Created by John Lowe, it consists of a square box with electric controls at one end and two dowels about the size of broomsticks coming out the other. Here is a picture and another one. MacDonald plays the lowebow with plenty of bottom and with a merciless, slashing slide. All the while he kicks out the beat on an electric stomp board, and sometimes plays a lonely and fragile-sounding harmonica on top of it all.

Purgatory Hill's music is boogie with a bad face, in all meanings of the word "bad." It is groovy, scary, and deeper than deep. While MacDonald plays his chunky, hard-bottom funk,  melaniejane ferociously shakes and bangs castenets, tambourines, bells, and other percussion instruments like a woman possessed. Sometimes she crashes the tambourine into the handle of the bells to create a textured and multileveled ringing.

The lyrics are about desperation, obsession, and actual prayers for redemption, to "reset me lord." The strange thing is this music does not sound as if it comes from a theistic universe. It is the music of wanting a lord in the face of psychological devastation and severe desperation.

I left Palmer's Bar at 2 a.m. feeling good. The music is danceable, and ended up being cathartic. MacDonald's music, with all of it's darkness, wrung all my troubles out of me. He brought me into a dark, dark place filled with anger and obsession, only to then leave me free for a time.

it's the pits

the snow killed my snowblower
I smell like gasoline
I think I have to sneeze

the snow covers the windows
thank god the furnace didn't die
we are stupid and less than sly

what would the neighbors do
left in their houses of snow
except die from cirrhosis

exaggeration whistles its stop
the snow hardened into drifts
this is like dying, it's the pits

                                            Jefferson Hansen

Story in UNREQUIRED READING

I have egg on my face. This entry originally said I had a story in THE BEST AMERICAN NONREQUIRED READING OF 2010. That's not accurate. My story was selected as "noteworthy" in a section in the back -- a lot less fancy. Oh well, there are worse embarrassments.

like

let it come like
snow like the breeze
like the air blowing
in from the furnace

let it come like
breath like blinking
like an empty car
warming on a cold day

let it come like
microwave cooking
like blood like melting
snow on the roof

let it come like
branches drooping like
a phone's ring like
skin turning to dust

let it come like
a grey sky like drifting
snow like a plow's
roar and rattle

and let it go like
demands and derivitives
like a mind
just not knowing

                                             — Jefferson Hansen

BARTLEBY, THE SPORTSCASTER, by Ted Pelton

This novella is far from an attempt to mirror reality or to point out how artificial novels are. It is neither realism nor metafiction.  Instead, it uses intimate experience to approach a literary classic in a manner that reinterprets it. It also uses the literary classic to consider experience in a profoundly personal way.

This novella is a triple-allegory: experience allegorizes literature and literature allegorizes experience. Finally, Pelton's book serves as an allegory for the original "Bartleby."

"Bartleby" is originally a story by Herman Melville. It concerns a law scrivener, or copywriter, in a 19th-century law office. The lawyer hires Bartleby and is stunned at his output, but haunted by his person and demeanor. He once describes him"scarcely human." A series of strange incidents ensue. The lawyer finds Bartleby living in his offices. Then Bartleby "prefers not to" do any more copying. Instead, he just stands silently in the middle of the office while work goes on around him. I won't spoil the ending, in case you haven't read it.

Pelton's book, "Bartleby, the Sportscaster," the lawyer is replaced by a minor-league sportscaster. He is joined in the booth by Bartleby. Pelton's story differs from Melville's in an important detail: The sportscaster, Ray Yarzejski, is forced to work with Bartleby by the team owner, Simonelli. This proves crucial because in the original Bartleby the lawyer was somewhat responsible for Bartleby given that he hired him. In Pelton's case, Bartleby and his eccentricities were thrust upon Yarzejski. Yet, he reaches out to Bartleby repeatedly, as does the lawyer in the original story.

The most original part of this book is chapter 5, where Pelton suddenly breaks in and provides us with a memoir of his, Pelton's, real break up with his first wife. In it we learn that his wife became mentally and emotionally paralyzed by a number of personal and familial circumstances. Pelton tried to get her out of her funk, but it all failed. He tells us how he became more sympathetic toward the lawyer in "Bartleby." He used to see the lawyer as the law-giving oppressor forcing Bartleby to live a certain way. Now he saw him as trying to help Bartleby.

Here's where Pelton decided to bifurcate the lawyer into two characters, Simonelli and Yarzejski — one is sympathetic and one is, well, capitalist scum.

This is where the allegories begin to be clear: the experience with his wife is compared to the lawyer's experience with Bartleby. Pelton's original interpretation of Bartleby is compared to Simonelli's behavior. Pelton's sympathy for his wife is compared to Yarzejski's feelings for Bartleby, Pelton's and Melville's books as a whole are comparable.

Comparison, of course, is the heart of allegory.

The book raises fascinating questions about the way the stories we tell each other affect the way we treat each other and the way we understand how we treat one another. This book is not "postmodern" or "metafiction," where the very makings of the novel are exposed in their artifice. This book takes the artificiality of the novel as a given, then offers us something new. While this is a funny book in many places, it is a dead serious book in a way many so-called postmodern works didn't seem to be.

It feels as if the author is convinced that literature and stories matter. Absolutely. Novels may be constructions, but they are necessary constructions that set up allegories with experience, if we let them.

hat was merely

The hat was merely

dropped. No

matter. It is what

was needed at the time

to get your simple

attention, to articulate

a necessary instant.

I wanted you.

A hat showed that just fine,

evidently.

Then the rest of the

universe trailed behind

us like ants.

Until we grew bereft

of the right signs,

like hats

like ants.

Ctheory.net

I came across the above site, edited by Arthur and Marilouise Kroker, which explores the way digital technologies have affected, infected, formed, taken over, mixed with and so on contemporary experience. The essay that has meant the most to me so far is entitled "Code Drift." The thesis seems to be that human evolution is now tied up with the drift of code as it is absorbed, remixed, and rearranged. Creativity stems from random combinations and recombinations of code, not from individual genius. While it is true that individual human beings do the recombining, it is the code itself, both local and global, that is the source of this recombining, the individual is merely the occasion.

Here are some quotations from the beginning of "Code Drift." 

We want to argue that data has come alive in the form of our extended network of technological organs, that the growth of information culture is the real world of evolutionary development literally, not metaphorically.

digital cosmology has its own laws of motion -- code drift; its politics are based on the deeply paradoxical situation of our being tethered to mobility

the beginning of something fundamentally new is now upon ... this new onrushing event of code drift, tethered mobility, enhanced data flesh, and digital trauma.

Code

 

"Who was ready for the immediate mutation of the human species into half-flesh/half-code?"                                                              — Arthur and Marilouise Kroker

in your ears the sounds

of another century

recorded in another

decade

framing your walk

down a busy city street

past a market with a fruit

stand out onto the sidewalk,

under a roof

over the sidewalk

to protect pedestrians

during construction

bumping into people

saying "sorry"

and sensing only

the slightest echo

of your word in the

bones of your jaw and

ear

Reader — give no significance

to the connotation

of the word "sorry"

it is just what

she said

made long ago and elsewhere

with little reason, 

gone running 

give the

best bestial cry and 

issue a less than solid

ultimatum — 

lives hang

in the grey haze

the grassy base

the torn, thorny tube

while your insistence

walks down a long

narrow hall

plenty else waits

in various 

unknown rooms

around unlit

corners 

wishing you

would do for them 

dependence and you

are dependence

elsewhere

someone says,

"this is a trial"

and the curtain

shimmers

across the side

of your path

you could go there

or here or here

none is

more insistent

and on your

choice may hang

nothing less

than a swoosh or

a creak —

may 

Debra Di Blasi, Miekal And, and Vernon Frazer at Moriapoetry.com

I am going to do a series entries where I discuss material that is readily available on the web. This has two advantages: 1) you readers can have ready access to it, and 2) I won't have to buy anything.

Today, I am discussing writing at Moriapoetry.com All three pieces are in the current issue: Debra Di Blasi, Miekal And, and Vernon Fraser.

1. Debra's is a fascinating piece of visual poetry. It appears to be two pages frayed from a larger book entitled "What the frond delivers." It looks like an illustrated novel or even an illuminated manuscript, but the sharp edges and off-kilter repetitions of the word "frond" give it an uneasy, maybe even menacing look.

Then comes the writing. While it looks to be two frayed pages from a prose work, it is definitely prose poetry. It is thorny, difficult and syntactically radical. Thematically, it also addresses ponds and dragonflies and other things associated with lots of fronds near the water.

We also come to see there is a third-, then first-person narrative buried in the thick language, language as "green pea" dark, thick, and full of fronds as any lake side. It tells the story of a male twin, apparently a drowning victim, saving his twin sister as she goes down screaming, three times. 

Diane refers to her at one point as "Little Miss Nobreath." Then later comes, "Golly, Mother." The tone is at times so flippant, that the subject matter is almost not able to come forth. When it does, it is all the more horrifying. The girl almost doesn't make it.

The second page gives the dead boy twin's perspective: "Was I pushed you through the jade blades." It also falls into Gerard Manley Hopkins sprung rhythm, even using some of his famous words "doppledreams," 'dappled." Characterized by internal rhyme and alliteration, sprung rhythm allows for a lot of repetition and reinforcement.

These two pages show what the green fronds deliver: life and death. The murkiness of green lake water, water dark as jade, we come from and go to. The text is surrounded by green on the side of death, and blue on the side of life. But the green will always swallow the blue, "that dreamy place my twin still hides, biding his time until my time's up."

2) Miekal And
I would have no idea what to do with this piece if I didn't know some of what Miekal has been up to the last decade or so. He is fascinated, if I understand him right, with the various relations between fonts and nature. I recall seeing one piece of his which had letters hanging in trees. Was the concept that letters grow from our nature, which is connected to wider nature, namely, trees?

This piece looks to me like a hide. On it are pictures, but they seem to be pictures verging on fonts. The philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty famously observed that song, historically and developmentally, precedes speech. In a similar manner, drawing precedes fonts. Written language evolves out of drawing. In this piece we see one font that is repeated. It is the second from left on top and the third down on the far right. This may be a representation of beginning of writing.

Leaving Miekal's piece at this level is a little unfair. There are other things to consider such as how the light is hitting the piece, the resemblance to animals and people that many fonts have, and the sheer beauty of the fonts themselves. One value of work such as this is that it helps us to see fonts rather than simply reading through and past them.

3) Vernon Frazer

Writing about nonrepresentational language is also difficult. How do we contextualize a line such as  "salmon feet" in "The Future Brings"? Obviously, we can't, if we try to look at it from a representational point of view. Instead, we have sound and rhythm.

How do we say this piece, and these pieces, work, as I think they do? How are they different from a child randomly putting magnetic poetry words on a refrigerator? What skill does it take?

It has tremendous energy, coming I think from all the active verbs, including some interesting ones such as "mottle." The energy itself is excessive, pushing the language and spilling beyond semantic limits and into alternative spaces. It's exciting. Finally, the poem is an event, not a meaning. It's about this excessive excitement, together with the rhythm and sounds riffing throughout.

This is the answer to why it's better than magnetic poetry: there's a controlled excessiveness, that breaks the taboo of "making sense," but does so in a musical way that keeps the poem from spinning apart.

And I don't think there is any more to say.