OLD NEWS / DIDION / KATRINA / THE HILLS / FANFIC

Ok, so I'm working on a project re: the hurricane. Katrina Bikini. I've been working on it for the past three months. I'm using a variety of found sources to approach it, mainly articles from papers and blogs, but seeing as my experience of Katrina is purely the media event that was Katrina for most of us, I'm also looking at everything within its vicinity. I use a variety of computer software that runs this language (in different mixtures) through the linguistic grinder (Markov chain, Gnoetry, etc.).



Based on a suggestion from Eric Scovel, today I found myself looking for transcripts of the MTV show "The Hills". Coming up empty I began looking for fanfic based on the series (of which there is PLENTY). While scrolling among this heaping pile of trash, I happened upon some of the best fanfic I have ever seen. Ever. If you don't believe me look at this:

"Lauren goes downstairs to make breakfast. Breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but breakfast is also the easiest meal to skip. This is a difficult and complex issue. Darfur is also a difficult and complex issue. When Lauren did the public service announcement about Darfur, she felt good. People in Darfur don’t have enough to eat but they also have a lot of other problems like rape. Lauren remembers when Jason had been drinking too much. He would look at her when he had been drinking too much and he would have this look in his eyes that was different. Lauren knows a lot about how to control the way her eyes look, but Jason didn’t look like he could control the way his eyes looked then. Because of her life experiences and personal beliefs, Lauren can identify with the problems of all the people in the world and she wants to, she wants to identify with everyone, she wants to listen to them and understand them and help them be stronger and more independent and not get raped and dress well and make healthy eating choices."



Needless to say, I read a lot of "The Hills" fanfic today and loved it. On further research, I found a couple conspiracy theories that offered up Joan Didion as a possible author, which, after laughing for about five minutes started to actually make a lot of sense, though, I must say, it also sounds a lot like Stan Apps.



This is all a couple years old, and there may be more up-to-date info on who it is writing this blog, but anyway, a nice surprise, and worth a minute of your time.

Teaching Google Sculpting at Purdue

[Crossposted at what light already light, Feb. 20, 2009.]

Today, Fri. Feb. 20, I reserved a computer lab for my English 205 - Introduction to Creative Writing class--something that I am not sure that a 205 instructor has done before--in order to teach my students the art of Google sculpting, and it was the most exciting class I've led so far. Hopefully it will open them up to a larger world of language play and, as it turned out, political commentary that is almost an inevitable result of this process. I've encouraged them all to submit their newly composed Flarf poems (or one of the other types of "bad poems" I asked them to compose this week) to the SPD Bad Poem Contest by this evening, too.

I had never used Google in such a way before this class, so it was almost as new to me as it was to them. I've used the Google News archive before to generate a poem, and I've used other computer programs to provide cut-up output to be shaped into poems, so the process is not at all foreign to me; but I've never tried to replicate the process that, for example, K. Silem Mohammad used to compose Deer Head Nation.

We began the exercise by discussing two of Mohammad's poems from that book ( "Halloween in Atlantis" and "Spooky World"), and then I showed them how search terms put into Google could have created a poem like that. The exercise itself, if I had written it out, would have been something like this:

Exercise: Google Sculpting

Open a new document in a word processor and then open a web browser. Using the two poems by K. Silem Mohammad in your course packet as examples, type a phrase (or phrases) or a list of several search terms* into the Google search bar. Now look at the excerpts from each search result (the text beneath each link), copy words or phrases from it, and paste them into the document open in your word processor. You will continue in this fashion until you have a fairly long list (a page or so at least) of selected phrases to work with.

Finally, sculpt a poem out of these phrases, changing whatever you wish so that it "fits together" (or make/leave it disjunct if it pleases you). Look for themes and multiple meanings of the search terms you used. Try to create strange, amusing, or serious narratives and statements. Try to find a tone or voice in the poem as you sculpt it, either coming from you or from voices present in the search results that you selected. Once you feel you have "finished" the poem, save your file. Return to it if you like, expand on different themes or ideas that come up, or do whatever else you feel you need to do to make it into something that you enjoy and want to share with others.

This process is very flexible, so feel free to open search result pages if you want more material, to change search terms as you are making your list of phrases, or even to abandon what you started with for something more interesting that comes up as you are working. The form of the resulting poem is entirely up to you and the needs of your poem's style and content.

Have fun with this and enjoy the process of writing itself. The importance of this cannot be overstated. If you get something meaningful out of it, chances are that somebody else will, too.

* Note: The more different the terms are from each other, the more varied the results should be)

I chose to structure the first 8 weeks of the semester--the poetry unit--around a set of exercises that are diverse in style and aesthetic approach. I think the Bad Poem exercise and the Google Sculpture exercise have connected with them more than any of the others that we have done. I got the idea from Chad last semester when he taught his Introductory Composition students how to Google sculpt, and I decided that I had to do with my own class. It takes a lot of work to show (most) students that poetry is not always boring, stuffy, self-reflective/obsessed or moping, and my hope was that this process would help some of them to discover what various things contemporary poetry is to writers today as well as a range of what it can be for them.

Jackson Mac Low, in his 1999 talk entitled "Pleasure and Poetry," [Thank you, Al Filreis, for this fantastic set of articles and poems that you've put up for your UPenn course!] began by stating that "[t]he kinds of pleasure that poems may bring about are as various as the kinds of pleasure that poets may take in making them." Later on in the talk, he elaborates on this idea:

Ultimately, artmaking, including the making of poems, seems to me to be primarily the making of "objects" that are valuable in themselves. One can expand this "in themselves" in many directions with various "becauses." The most obvious one is what I started with: pleasure. Artworks are valuable because they cause pleasure--kinds of pleasure not usually available from other sources. And "otherwise" artworks are valuable because they bring about new kinds of pleasure.

Poetry, orthodox or "otherwise," should be about pleasure--what brings pleasure to the poet and what can bring pleasure to the reader, and this is different for different poets and different readers. But what poetry isn't is the most important thing I want my students to learn: It isn't just stuffy academic posturing, and it can be relevant to their lives, in whatever way and by whatever means this may be achieved.

Inaugural Poem

I hate to be a contrarian, but this lady robot, model # 3L1Z@B3+H @L3X@ND3R, who was programmed to read at Obama's inauguration really rubbed me the wrong way. I mean, I understand that a poem for this kind of event is designed to serve a very specific purpose, i.e. to celebrate a political moment in as universally acceptable a way possible, but this poem is particularly awful.

Just think back to when Maya Angelou read on Clinton's big day. That poem had dinosaurs (!) in it not to mention it made sure to hint at some of the lower moments of our nation's history: "You, who gave me my first name, you / Pawnee, Apache and Seneca, you / Cherokee Nation, who rested with me, then / Forced on bloody feet, left me to the employment of / Other seekers--desperate for gain, / Starving for gold." Alexander's poem, in contrast, was all gloss. This stuck out even more after Obama's fairly somber "we're-in-deep-shit" speech (though ultimately I thought it a triumphant one).

If it weren't for Rev. Joseph Lowery's benediction I would have walked away from the television feeling a little rhetorically violated. Lowery's little rhyme at the end of the prayer was a better poem, albeit somewhat offensive in such a wonderfully well-intentioned way: "We ask you to help us work for that day when black will not be asked to give back, when brown can stick around, when yellow will be mellow, when the red man can get ahead, man, and when white will embrace what is right." AMEN! (Why do I want a Mellow Yellow so bad right now?)

Well here is the official Obama inauguration poem in all its glory:
Praise song for the day.

Each day we go about our business, walking past each other, catching each others' eyes or not, about to speak or speaking. All about us is noise. All about us is noise and bramble, thorn and din, each one of our ancestors on our tongues. Someone is stitching up a hem, darning a hole in a uniform, patching a tire, repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky; A teacher says, "Take out your pencils. Begin."

We encounter each other in words, words spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed; words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark the will of someone and then others who said, "I need to see what's on the other side; I know there's something better down the road."

We need to find a place where we are safe; We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain, that many have died for this day. Sing the names of the dead who brought us here, who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges, picked the cotton and the lettuce, built brick by brick the glittering edifices they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle; praise song for the day. Praise song for every hand-lettered sign; The figuring it out at kitchen tables.

Some live by "Love thy neighbor as thy self."

Others by first do no harm, or take no more than you need.

What if the mightiest word is love, love beyond marital, filial, national. Love that casts a widening pool of light. Love with no need to preempt grievance.

In today's sharp sparkle, this winter air, anything can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp -- praise song for walking forward in that light.

- Elizabeth Alexander

The Poem as Diagnosis

I've been following Gary Sullivan's translation work of German poet Ernst Herbeck for a while now. Herbeck was a schizophrenic who in his early 20's, while working in a munitions factory, began complaining of various animals and other people taking over his body. He was institutionalized for good in the mid 1940's. At the request of his psychiatrist Leo Navratil, he began writing poems in 1960. From then until his death in 1991 he pumped out around 1,200 poems mostly short pieces, many with color or animal titles (obviously prompted by Navratil).

While the story may have a tinge of that Daniel Johnston-esque celebration of mental illness (complete with that misguided notion of "purity" or "honesty" one reads into such disorders), the poems themselves are hard to ignore. Take his poem "The Panther":

The Panther

The pole reached the panther leaps
The leaping panther
They leap on me
The panther is beautiful
When the panther leaps
The panther has a beautiful pelt.
The panther has beautiful eyes.
as beautiful as the tiger.
The panther is great. The greatest animal
The panther makes great leaps.

(Translated by Gary Sullivan.)

* * *

Der Panther

Der Pol erreicht der Panther springt
Der springende Panther
Die auf mich springen
Der Panther ist schön
Wenn der Panther springt
Der Panther hat ein schönes Fell.
Der Panther hat schöne Augen.
schönere Augen als der Tiger.
Der Panther ist groß. Das größte Tier
Der Panther macht große Sprünge.

* * *

This was the first of Herbeck's poems that I read, and I liked it immediately for its simplicity and its sense of playfulness. The poem stuck in my head for days, and I began to think of it as a sort of ars poetica, a way of approaching the page. It served as both an enactment and a metaphor (substitue "panther" with "poem"). This is, of course, reading into the piece, though ultimately I've found that for Herbeck's poems, this idea of leaping, of being leapt upon is somewhat vital to his aesthetic. Perhaps this is lent weight by the phrasing of his symptoms "the feeling of animals or other people invading his body".

This contextualization, however unfair, makes the poems themselves appear symptomatic of the way in which he engaged with the world of objects and others, as well as with language. And I don't think this is necessarily of disservice to the poems. The fact that Hannah Weiner "saw" words lends her jarring rants a sense of bombardment that can be read as an approximation of her daily experience. The poems are confessional in the best way possible: They convey a singular experience without groveling for emotional weight, or striving for transcendence.

The poems of Frank O'Hara, Hannah Weiner, and Ernst Herbeck could, with this reading, be thrown into the same category, for all three seem to me to be exemplary of a sort of diagnosable writing that comes from both their engagement with the world and their writing processes. O'Hara while not mentally ill conveyed a temperament, a taste, and a penchant for frivolity that is entirely singular, embodies his mental engagement with the people and objects around him. The offhand manner in which he wrote, and addresses ironically in "Personism: A Manifesto" is central to the way in which his personality is rendered in the poems.

Interestingly, Herbeck wrote only when directed to. It is unclear to me whether or not the poems were important to him, or whether this poetry-as-therapy (an idea practically lampooned in MFA pedagogy) was helpful to him. Perhaps it was an extension of his psychological examination. There are hints as to the relationship between Herbeck and Navratil in some of the "Psychiatrist" poems:

The Psychiatrist.

The psychiatrist is the care of the
Patient.
The psychiatrist thanks and thinks about
the patient.
The psychiatrist thinks and protects the
words of the patient.

Translated by Gary Sullivan.

* * *

Der Psychiater.

Der Psychiater ist der Sorge des
Patienten.
Der Psychiater dankt und denkt über
den Patienten.
Der Psychiater denkt and schützt die
Worte des Patienten.

I find the last two lines of this poem fascinating. That the psychiatrist is a protector implies that Herbeck had an attachment to his work: The poems were objects in need of protection. But it is also intriguing that "the psychiatrist thinks [...] the words of the patient."