Hey guys. In my presentation last week, I said that African American social realism is sometimes explicitly political and focuses on social problems. Well, here's a poem that I wrote that may not be completely social realist (as Hector said in the last class session, it's kind of hard thing to define), but kind of gets at the political/racial aspect of it.

A River That Runs White

Sadly I miss the days

when killers sought shadows to practice their trade.

Now they’re emboldened as the devil

cause you armed them like Reagan armed his despots,

advocate of life that you are.

You tossed them guns and told them to be careful.

You say he was a threat with his bare black hands.

Maybe he should’ve walked by daylight.

Maybe he shouldn’t have walked at all.

Maybe blacks and bullets are meant for eachother;

like soulmates, can’t have one without the other.

You claim every black is murdered in Chicago.

No matter where they lie, they were murdered in Chicago;

South Side projects encoded in their DNA.  

You "prove" this with your ugly smirk

and your book of stats,

once a sacrilegious ivory text

but only when it spoke of bodies piled high

in cinderblock slave-ships

or stigmatic rocks you planted in gardens

to stunt our growth.

You tossed them guns and told them to be fearful.

You armed the killers when you said

with your sickly sweet tongue

we should all be the color of water

from a river that runs white.

You hailed America’s latest and greatest

achievement: absolving our sins

with ballots. We made him and now

we can destroy him and be at ease.

And destroy him we shall, so that

the river runs white again.  

You spat on hallowed ground,

and excited the killer’s soul

wiped the cataract of doubt from his eyes    

yanked the muzzle from his mouth

broke the shackles on his hands

and then

You tossed him a gun and told him to be bold and brave.

I'm loving reading what you all post here. More, more!

Here is an opinion piece by Edward Said from 1999 about the NATO intervention in Kosovo. I post this because it brings up two topics we've been discussing: anger and universalism. Said addresses each in ways that provide an important counter to some of the things we've been saying in class.

It's not long. Said "universalism"

I wrote this a few weeks ago in response to my 1191 in-class writing: "Write a pro-capitalist poem inspired by or in response to Baraka's 'A New Reality is Better Than a New Movie.'"

I'd Rather Dive than Drown

I don't believe this.

I really don't.

I need you to believe me

when I say I don't believe this.

3.00 beer, free if you can sing

2.00 bus, free if you can read

The Internets...free if you can find find them

How does it start?

     I'm hungry. Eat a brie grilled cheese, mushroom brie bisque, brie crostini

     I'm bored. Young Detective Dee The Rise of the Sea Dragon.

                            Look at all the ships! Hong Kong at the height of the Tang! Smash them, sink them, drown                               them! Show me the dragon...It's just a guy...in love.........53 minutes and no action                                 remaining

                       Next!

                       

                       Out of the Dark? Dynamite in his head and hands. Ghosts impersonating ghouls                                      reporting back to phantoms. This is funny.

    I'm done. Make more

                      Always be closing

                      Greed is good

                      The stuff dreams are made of

                      Huh

                      There's a fucker born any minute

                      I am small. It's the pictures that got big

     I'm finished. 

       Only have to/ can/ O why must I be bound to sell each shit only once?

       One more fuck hides everywhere.

       Dry here, go there!

       See new free geniuses enslaved

       Clapping forget

 Reality is for suckers.  

     

Orlando White - Functional White: Crafting Space and Silence

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2015/11/functional-white-crafting-space-silence/

This definitely matters in all of the ways.

Perhaps the silence here and Joron's "zero" can be in conversation.

On the positive value of ritual (again)
CA Conrad: Ritual

Theories of Tubes

Electrons skirt funnels

     erect infinitudes loath to bend

Funnels sip electrons

     shave ten-to-the-tenth-to-the-tenth bits

     unlightened lasers stab network

Funnels sign funnels

     convections of limp subtext

     evaporates holographic cowls

     aurorae shear stiff tubes

     distended flux links close cousins 

Electron scans electron

     two wave forms mimetic beyond Planck and perfection

     non-local non-relative and non-deterministic

     below basement and vacuum and biosphere of ducts

     superimposed funnels spin plasm

     and surge    

Two paragraphs from my novel The Real Raquel

Maybe Raquel and I share more than looks, I thought, and when the chorus finally hit in all its authoritative glory, my nervousness turned into something more like adrenaline, and I was able to fall flawlessly into a circular formation with the dancers, whisper-singing little snatches of Raquel’s defiant manifesto to each one of them as they cycled around me. “I’m the Real Raquel. Oh, I’m the Real Raquel,” I declared to the dancer with blonde highlights before turning to a slim male dancer with messy blue hair —“I’m not a chameleon, but if I was, I’d never tell…” The noise of the crowd spiked at this line, which didn’t surprise me. I lipped it with particular conviction because it sums up Raquel better than any other lyric in her catalogue: she’s as real as they come, exuding the kind of authenticity and feistiness that focus group-tested pop stars can never hope to achieve, but at the same time she maintains a certain element of mystery, a thoroughly sexy and effortless elusiveness, giving you the sense that there’s always a piece of the puzzle missing, always something to study and be fascinated by.

I don’t want to downplay the discipline and years of practice needed to pull off a good performance but I think I passed a crucial test when I first grabbed the mic and dared to whisper-sing words that were rightfully Raquel’s. I say this because as the song went into the second verse and Raquel, her voice losing some of its bravado and displaying more tenderness and vulnerability, sang, “Baby I won’t compromise myself,” the oppressive weight of my nerves lifted entirely. I felt a kind of synergy between my body and the lyrics booming out over the field and when Raquel sang, “If you don’t love me I’ll find somebody else. Somebody who wants to know the truth,” I gracefully lunged forward as if asserting the truth of my own existence through physical movement. This is the real Raquel, I was saying to the audience. You can take it or leave it but it is a truth I will express unapologetically. Then I fell back into formation and looked sideways at some of the dancers. They were somewhat disoriented by the small liberty I had taken but this didn’t bother me. In fact, it was downright satisfying that I had went off script, especially considering the audience’s reaction. They gave me their loudest round of applause yet and this confirmed to me that while Raquel’s mystique lures people in, it’s her honesty that makes them stay.

journal entry/ poemy-thing

Looking through my notebook in search of the (multiple) bodily ramblings, I found this note I had forgotten about. Relevant re: burning, sacrifice, identity,


"As fodder for..." I can't write anymore because I can't bring myself to burn anything.
I'm holding all objects and materials and knowledge close and whole.
What should be burned and how? Or when does the effigy leave the vile thing intact?
A sacrifice to it rather than a sacrifice of it.
(as in VP)
the 'I' is key?
whiteness as fodder for poetry?

Free Range

Hi folks, below is the first poem I wrote when I moved to Boulder. It's mostly a ripoff (albeit a very indirect one) of a Kim Hyesoon poem called "Song of Skin," which I wrote about in a review of Kim for Jacket2 a few years back.

Free Range

Associated Press: From what we can see, she mostly just walks around putting her tits in everything knots of trees chinks in the cabinet I mean everything everywhere you can find a hole I meant hollows I suppose not knots point is she just sticks them in and we have to watch her feet roll up like toothpaste tubes with each ounce of milk she volunteers to the woodwork which isn’t to say we aren’t all benefiting from the nutrition but the shame of it months pass now she’s syphoned out to her solar plexus and bending down to suckle misaligned baseboards and the occasional mouse hole but we’ve learned to live with her whorish indiscretion besides she’s taken the liberty of stringing Christmas lights along the walls you’d never expect the whole room needed a twinkling anklet down there but really the effect is just stunning

A fourteen-line poem on the female body

1. It has to begin somewhere

2. she harass with enjoyment

3. tired of the topic before I

4. start. Cause if she's not raped

5. she's the criminal killing the

6. thing. So rape her to

7. save her from herself. O

8. lovely

9. flakey, she'll be data or she'll be tagged

10. so she made herself a border and hung there

11. pregnant or bleeding or pregnant and bleeding

12 been full a long time with

13 time and grey clouds streaming in

14. We're not always dead

Kristeva

Thoughts?  Is this valuable to anyone?  A bit helpful for me to watch this before revisiting the reading.

I'm also just nerding out on Kristeva on YouTube.

This one's called "On Julia Kristeva's Couch" and it's wonderful.

Another take on the absent author - or the question of "personality" and/or identity and writing - this by the absolutely great Italian novelist who goes by Elena Ferrante. Ferret

If you have not yet read the Neopolitan novels, do.

Week 7: Kristeva, Loy, and Stein

Here are some questions for our reading this week. Since we won’t be submitting reading responses, I gave myself permission to toss on a few more questions than we generally do. I also tried to gesture to some additional material that might enrich or clarify the readings. See you all in class!


Kristeva

1) Explain the difference between the semiotic and the symbolic. How does chora fit into this arrangement?

2) Kristeva borrows her term chora from Plato, who, despite attempting to describe chora as non-material, used the metaphor of nurse, womb, or receptacle when explaining it. Kristeva takes the gendered associations of this term and runs with it. In what other ways are Kristeva’s descriptions of language gendered? What are the implied sexual politics of her linguistic and poetic assertions?

3) Kristeva’s writing is heavily inflected by a Lacanian narrative of linguistic development, and as such she describes many parts of language that are deeply intertwined with childhood psychological development (including the Freudian “family romance”). To what extent is Kristeva explaining elements of language that exist beyond our control, versus elements of language we can and should manipulate and mobilize as poets and writers?

4) How do sacrifice and art relate differently to jouissance (see “Poetry That Is Not a Form of Murder”)? How does this compare to your own views on art? On violence?


Loy

5) What inadequacies does Loy see in her contemporaneous feminist movement? Who is responsible for addressing those inadequacies, and how?

6) Though Loy is a poet, and wrote on poetic practice itself, “Feminist Manifesto” is one of the texts in our class that focuses less explicitly on literature and more on cultural norms. What do you see as the literary implications of some of Loy’s assertions?

7) Loy emphasizes the representational limitations of, and restrictions placed upon, female bodies. What is the line between metaphor and the material in Loy’s descriptions of these bodies? How does this compare to the way female bodies are valued today? What challenges (or opportunities) does this create for poets and writers who have female bodies and/or identify as women?

[Extra: What are the implications of Loy’s essay for other areas of identity politics, including race and class?]

[Even more extra: Loy was famously connected with Italian Futurist movement (before it tied itself to fascism, but long after its misogyny was apparent). Compare her social politics in “Feminist Manifesto” to the artistic concerns she raises in this passage from her text “Aphorisms on Futurism”: “TODAY is the crisis in consciousness. / CONSCIOUSNESS cannot spontaneously accept or reject new forms, as offered by creative genius; it is the new form, for however great a period of time it may remain a mere irritant—that moulds consciousness to the necessary amplitude for holding it. / CONSCIOUSNESS has no climax.”]


Stein

8) After shifting from a general discussion of the properties of parts of speech and punctuation to an anecdote about The Making Of Americans, Stein writes the following:

Nouns are the name of anything and anything is named, that is what Adam and Eve did and if you like it is what anybody does, but do they go on just using the name until perhaps they do not know what the name is or if they do know what the name is they do not care about what the name is. This may happen of course it may. And what has poetry got to do with this and what has prose and if everything like a noun which is a name of anything is to be avoided what takes place.

What are the stakes of Stein’s argument about the act of naming and its effect on language? How does Stein approach the question (here and elsewhere) of what poetry can do about this, and what poetry itself is?

9) How does Stein position her essay historically? What effect, if any, does this have on her argument?

10) What is the role of the poet in Stein’s essay? How does it compare to other texts we’ve read so far?

On the question of empathy and the moral complexities of the idea read this:
Empathy

Also I'll be very interested to hear your responses to Kunin's essay which is clearly in the Kantian line, but perhaps not as strictly Kantian as it's been read? So interesting to me to think about how we consider the "aesthetic" in relation to all our other categories -

KG and VP and ConPo, Oh my!

This past week has been a crazy one from my social media angle--there've been more words spent talking about Vanessa Place's work (http://nonsite.org/article/would-vanessa-place-be-a-better-poet-if-she-had-better-opinions) , Kenneth Goldsmith (http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/10/05/something-borrowed-wilkinson) , as well as a bunch of responses on facebook & twitter & elsewhere (the essay that Cathy Park Hong penned in response to the dude who wrote the KG piece for the New Yorker is DEFINITELY worth a read--she literally announces a new poetic era, that of "the poetry of social engagement," which is super cool).

For anybody who's interested in engaging in discussion, I'd be curious to see what your takes are on the aesthetic claims made in the New Yorker piece and in Kunin's essay.

If my social media window is any barometer, my hunch is that the essay on Place will provide more room for heated debate for the purposes of our class. The KG article...I mean come on, it's vile. But of course if you disagree with me and want to say "Hey actually this guy says some pretty spot on things about, I don't know, lyric v. conceptual," I'd be happy to start a discussion there.

But yeah, with respect to the VP article: my read is that Kunin admits that hey, maybe VP is a bad poet and we should critique her on "aesthetic" terms, and that calling her a racist is like, a bad move. But my issue with this is that is, well, there's no such thing as the purely aesthetic argument that this guy wants to have. And by framing the critique as he does, Kunin effectively comes to the defense of VP, because he says No no, don't call her a racist, she's actually antiracist in attitude so your critiques of racism are invalid, just call her a bad poet, that's way nicer and plays nice with my conception of poetry as such. So yes, my assertion: Kunin sneakily defends VP by ostensibly entertaining the notion that she is a mere "bad poet"--he is not on board with my critique that VP's work merely reifies the white supremacy of American poetry and is therefore, you know, bad, and by calling VP merely a "bad poet" he is able to erase the critique of racism advanced by scores of poets and critics of color. 

My assertion: calling a work of art racist is also an aesthetic critique, because aesthetics as we're talking about it are always and already a product of racial violence.

Here's a handful of what I find to be some particularly problematic assertions--we can talk about the entire essay, but I'd be interested in discussing (in light of our readings, I'm thinkin Kant especially but can go any which way) claims such as:

"In my view, accusing Place of racism is intellectually irresponsible. The idea behind this accusation seems to be that any writing that uses racist language or imagery is itself racist, and, if the writer is white, white supremacist. By that logic, any representation of racism would be racist. The study of racism would become impossible. At best, the study of racism could proceed only by further inflicting or exploiting the pain of what it studies."

"Aesthetic judgment involves making discriminations between values within works of art. Some representations are more enjoyable than others. Many readers have enjoyed Citizen, where Rankine meditates on varieties of racism in American history. Many readers have been pained by Tweeting Gone with the Wind. Readers are responding to the strategies that Rankine and Place use for representing racism, but both poets are representing racism, which means that they are aestheticizing racism, turning it into an object for readers to enjoy."

"I want to stress this point. Any antiracist art worthy of the name needs strategies for the depiction of racist language and images. This is different from the problem of having the right attitude. It’s a problem for an artist who already has an antiracist attitude. That is to say, it’s an aesthetic problem. The failure to find an effective strategy is an aesthetic failure."

and:

"This year we have seen waves of denunciations of the racism of a writer whose ideas about race are pretty much identical to those of the writers who are denouncing her. What, then, motivates the charge of racism? I have three thoughts about that.

1) This controversy occurs during a time of increased public awareness of the systematic racism and violence of U.S. law enforcement, and consequent organization of antiracist protests online and in city streets. Place’s accusers associate her with a racist system, and see themselves extending the protest movement to the domain of literary politics.

2) Place’s accusers either don’t understand power, don’t like power, or are pretending not to like power. Based on my observations, I’m going with the third option.

Ostensibly Place’s accusers speak on behalf of the powerless, and are powerless themselves. Meanwhile they associate Place with the power structure of white supremacy and with the elite institutions (AWP, the University of Colorado, the University of California, and the Whitney Museum) that sponsor her appearances. From a position of seeming powerlessness, Place’s accusers leveraged the cancelation of most of her appearances in May, June, and July. I call that power. In fact, I call it an abuse of power.

Some of my readers, thoroughly committed to the idea that power runs in straight lines from subject positions, will be skeptical of the claim that Place’s accusers have some power. Try putting it this way. By using the little bit of rhetorical power that they have, they are showing what they would do if they had other kinds of power. It isn’t pretty. One thing they would do, clearly, would be to stop her from presenting her work in public ever again.

This is not a winning strategy. Even in the short term, Place’s accusers have miscalculated: By attacking her personal liberty, they have given additional power to her writing, which, taken on its own merits, would seem very weak indeed. Ultimately, such abuses of power do nothing to help the cause of antiracism. They also do no good for poetry. As a poet, I find that significant too.

3) Place’s accusers prefer to call her a racist rather than a bad writer because they are afraid of making aesthetic judgments. This fear, which may be the most pernicious legacy of conceptual writing, ultimately bespeaks a lack of poetic ambition."

Thoughts?

In case some didn't see this - a great little piece by Cathy Park Hong in which she declares a new era of activist poetry lead by poets of color! Cathy will be reading at CU as part of the feminism poetry philosophy conference I'm putting together in March. I only wish they hadn't used Kenny Goldsmith's image for this article: Activist poetry

Geek Sublime by Vikram Chandra-Eliot reference

I recently finished this book called the Geek Sublime which deals with the aesthetics related to coding and sanskrit poetics. The author finds some parallels between the languages of coding and sanskrit along with conversations around aesthetics as they relate to political environments.

It is an amazing book and I highly recommend it.

Here is an excerpt where the author mentions Eliot who references studying sanskrit. It relates to Abinavagupta's concept of rasa-dhvani (I believe an 11th century text that dives into aesthetics and suggestion of emotive experiences).

This first quote, the author shows similarities between what Abinavagupta says (shown earlier in the book) and what Eliot says:

"The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding...a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked."

Eliot studied sanskrit and Indian philosophy for a time and said this about it (emphasis mine):

"Two years spent in the study of Sanskrit under Charles Lanman, and a year in the mazes of Patanjali's metaphysics under the guidance of James Woods, left me in a state of enlightened mystification. A good half of the effort of understanding what the Indian philosophers were after- and their subtleties make most of the great European philosophers look like schooolboys-lay in trying to erase from my mind all the categories and kinds of distinction common to European philosophy from the time of the Greeks. My previous and concomitant study of European philosophy was hardly better than an obstacle. And then I came to the conclusion...that my only hope of really penetrating to the heart of that mystery would lie in forgetting how to think and feel as an American or a European: which, for practical as well as sentimental reasons, I did not wish to do."

Just thought I'd share. Feel free to comment!

Very interesting essay - very worth reading for our class:

Read here

Baudelaire Discussion 9/24/15---#nofilter#nutstonature

(Dear Julie, please forgive any typos. I was typing furiously) 

Class begins in Café Aion

Stephanie requests we talk at least a little bit about Wilde.

She summarizes the text and we have a brief discussion about the play of the claims he makes.

Switch to Baudelaire:

Sam: Half the essay is about why you should be an artist if you are an artist.

Hector: Points to where he starts talking about Monsieur G. introduction: “Man of the whole world, man who understands…”

“Monsieur G. doesn’t like to be called an artist. His interest is in the whole world….to the spiritual citizen of the universe.”

Hector: That’s pretty f***** up.

Rushi: Please explain, Hector.

(Waiter comes over and Sarah orders a ginger limeade, Jessica a small coffee with almond milk, Sara T. orders…. Etc. etc.)

Hector: Looking at the claims that if you are in this part of Europe you obviously don’t know about this other part of Europe. Cottage intellect is an interesting formulation.

Jessica: This is a disconnection from social/political concerns rather than connecting poetry and common man.

Sam: Way he sees modernity is so diffused that you have to go to several different places to experience it.

Hector: Julie compared this to Keats’ camelion poet. (reads question)

Jessica: Not answering political aspect. But comparing the two, lush, intoxicating quality of Baudelaire’s artist’s engagement in the world, while Keats’ poet is more one of disappearing rather than fully living in it. Keats is never drunk like a kid anywhere.

Stephanie: Maybe ties into Mill’s distinction between…nevermind.

Sam: Eloquence is Baudelaire’s conception of craftsman’s art.

Jessica: Baudelaire more in common with Shelley. Baudelaire less narcissistic than Keats. Baudelaire’s dandy has more self-abnegation, and views the world from more distance than Keats.

Jessica: Disagree with dandyism as jiving with Baudelaire’s idea of artist. Baudelaire didn’t love all aspects of dandyism.

Rushi: I didn’t conflate the artist and dandy too much.

Sam: Dandy isn’t ideal artist, but there is an artistic role for the Dandy and he laments it dying.

Hector: Formulation of the man of the crowd and how that relates to Poe.

Sarah J: I also want to talk about quote on page 8 about inspiration’s relation to convulsion.

(Drinks arrive

Sam offers his frittata to us.)

Sarah: Reads passage of inspiration’s relation to convulsion. Ending with “with the other’s sensibility is the whole being.” What about this relationship between reason and sensibility?

Rushi: Man-child can use reason to induce the “sensibility” state where as a child has no reason and is overwhelmed due to sensibility.

Sarah: Wondering more about the “violent” nature of the convulsion.

Sam: Don’t think it’s necessarily violent.

Sarah: More wondering what this does to the body?

Jessica: The body goes much more than just the mind.

Sam: Embodied consciousness---motions that influence thought when you are overwhelmed with poetry so that your body and emotions get recruited to try to express this feeling.

Jessica: Parts of brain activated by spice are pain sensors but we take pleasure in it. So this violent value in art is semi-orgasmic in some way.

Stephanie: Indirectly this can tie back to Kant’s sublime (can’t remember which one, Sam says dynamic). You experience pleasure from something negative because you aren’t actually in danger. Watching train crash for example.

Jessica: Example of feeling emotional pain in art in a pleasurable way. Uses Claire Danes example of wanting to be called beautiful---relates to Jared Leto example.

Stephanie: Jared Leto is a dick.

Rushi: Violent convulsion reminds me of meditation experience.

Sam: Get different experience from life-altering situations.

Jessica: Very physical, hurtful reactions, to really good music and painting.

Sam: Everything in this essay, or maybe Mallarme, was everything is trying to get close to music.

Stephanie: A little bit of dying=a good bit of pleasure.

Sam: Children can be sado-masochistic.

Stephanie and Jessica: Well sometimes kids don’t crush bugs they save them.

Sam: Both.

Rushi: What about his ideas of nature (from cosmetic ideas) compared to his idealization of the child in man-child seeing everything in newness. I thought they were a little contradictory.

Sam: Nature is mechanics, rational philosophy and things learned. Child abstracts directly from images to imagination.

Jessica: What being focused on in child is not so much relationship to nature but development of imagination and automatic use of imagination in the child which isn’t used in adults.

Sam: I use things from my childhood in writing today...

Hector: In praise of cosmetics passage speaks on in page 32 the child’s relationship to nature. “Refer simply to the facts….nature teaches us nothing…compels man to sleep…incites man to murder…nature counsels nothing but…philosophy and religion command us to look after parents…everything beautiful is from reason and calculation….”

Jessica: Has anyone had the misfortune of reading the introduction to Sexual Persone---she’s a serial rape apologist who wants to praise men for creating a society that keeps them from raping everybody.

Sam: Baudelaire’s observations are contrary to evolutionary biology today, though at the time that is what Darwin says. Today we see that altruism drives a lot of evolution.

Stephanie and Jessica: Mini discussion of Sexual Persone.

Jessica: She says that men have right to their place in society because they pee standing up.

Hector: Sets up stakes for Baudelaire for why art should not imitate nature.

Matthew: “Crime….Taste of mother’s womb is natural by origin” Bothers me to say that is natural in the womb.

Sam: Means sin when he says crime.

Hector: Putting the cart before the horse in a weird way by saying patricide as natural states. Weird ideas about nature.

Jessica: What is he saying art is doing?

Hector: Suggestion is that art keeps us from nature.

Stephanie: Assertion that we are better than nature. The whole bit about women to make themselves better than nature. Even if it’s fallacious thing it doesn’t matter because woman is captivating.

Hector: Reads passage of woman’s duty to appear supernatural. Ending in “…approximates human being to statue…divine…the mysterious passion of the priestess.”

Stephanie: I actually like parts of this like window opening to the infinite.

Sam: This would be great text for fashion design. Cushing the natural body in these confections to make it like a painting. And feminist response is that women exist to inspire men and their art.

Stephanie: Women need to aspire to this statuesque figure.

Jessica: Goth friends and others don’t look at it to elevate above nature but to access the real in a similar way to art creating the good.

Sam: Questioning Baudelaire’s natural and what belongs in it in relation to the soul.

Jessica: with...

Hector: This idea of one-uping nature

Matthew: Weird inversion of the natural here. The line “Successfully design to cover up blemishes nature has strewn there.” Nature is an invading force like a disease or mutation.

Jessica: Idea of how a woman should look.

Sam: Links nature to original sin at one point.

Jessica: Where was makeup when luxuriated in veins and such…

Stephanie: What is he saying our reality should be? Clearly with makeup he wants to alter the body to uncover some reality that is already there?

Jessica: Complex ideas of when we should and shouldn’t use nature.

Sam: Real for him is not person but the fashions around the world of how the body is disguised.

Hector: Good time to talk about what he says about the modern.

Stephanie and Jessica: Netflix discussion as we change subjects. The aesthetic value of doing something that allows us to not engage intellectually i.e. videos on YouTube. Watching cracked.com videos Jessica says. Check out the one about ninja turtles comparing them to the four humours.  An episode when London menstruates once a month and everyone must go underground with giant tampons to clean up the city.

Sam: A lot of good feminist criticism of Poe and others in some other online episodes.

Jessica: Irish poems comparing bodies of women to landscape so women walk around with Map on their back. Speaking of modernity.

Hector: Reads passage on page 12-14. Doesn’t read yet.

Matthew: Interested in dressing and garb from the past and how that relates to today. Huge retro trend even in music similar to retro trends in fashion. Baudelaire is basically saying that if you do not try to unite elements of now then it is somehow deficient.

Hector: Reads passage actually this time.  “Extracts from fashion….distill eternal from the transitory…there is this difference…painters of today thought working with subjects of today…still dress subjects in garments of the past…whose other have is the immutable and eternal.”

Sam: Nice emphasis on distilling. Reminds of historical chic.

Sam: Back to Sam. When David did Rome it’s the dream of what Rome is supposed to be. HBO’s Rome doesn’t look anything like Renaissance Rome.

Stephanie: We have our beauty standards of now.

Jessica: What does he say in the text about eternal.

Sam: Modernity is the only place to find value in antiquity. The eternal is what they will talk about from our time in the future.

Hector: There are these two components to beauty for Baudelaire. The slippery ephemeral and then there is the more eternal, timelessness.

Jessica: Interested in eternal and immovable that is in partnership with something that is fluid and movable. Seeing something that is engaging with slippery that gives access to something that is more immovable. Thinking about it in terms of physics.

Sam: Physics make sense. Beauty as magnet with two poles (timeless/eternal and modern). Eternal is the basic principles. Need two poles for beauty.

Stephanie: This immutable thing or je ne sais quois.

Jessica: Somebody said je ne sais quois!

Rushi: How do you spell je ne sais quois?

Stephanie: Nature is flat and needs the lens of modernity to add something to it. Nature plus modern= yes maybe but I’m not sure. Because the fashion relating to colors that have positive signification in nature. Maybe I’m blowing smoke.

Crowd: No we agree.

Sam: Anything immutable, or established form needs disruption and re-ordering to say something valuable.

Stephanie: Even music, you have the heartbeat, naturally drawn to things we might have been drawn to 6000 years ago.

Jessica: I’m circling around transitory-immutable, and which aspect do artists have access to?

Stephanie: Does this have to do with the man of the world?

Hector: Shiftiness of modernity is good because Baudelaire is an able-bodied man who can move around and do stuff which allows him to invigorate the ideas of what is beautiful. These qualities of man of the world are needed to be an artist of modern value.

Stephanie: So man of the world can travel and encaspsulate?

Jessica: Or is it intuitive? Sorry I interrupted.

Stephanie: No it’s exciting.

Jessica: Ooo that’s the first time someone’s said its exciting in a while.

Sam: I am a fan of the low-hanging fruit and taking a joke when it is there.

Sam: Well the man of the world acquires a modern idea of the world and subconsciously imbibe the eternal/timeless. If you chase the timeless then you end up imitating Michelangelo or something.

Jessica: Asked something I missed.

Sam: Baudelaire believes to move around…

Hector: He talks about Egyptian and other “barbarous” art.

Rushi: But he was maybe trying to redefine barbarous in a more positive way in part V that was cut off.

Hector: Yes but there is still a negative connotation to it…..still catching up until hearing…. Ezra Pound is a motherfucker.

Chorus: Ezra Pound is a mother f*****

Sam: Ezra Pound is a mother fucker.

Jessica: I don’t have time to pursue this project but I want to do a project relating to Ezra Pound and hashtags (used to call them pound signs).

Hector: Yes I called them Ezra Hashtags.

Stephanie: Confusions related to Ezra Hashpounds.

Hector: Ephemeral and eternal. Has anyone read Bachtine?

Sam: Difference between epic vs. novel and monologue vs. dialogue.

(Hector exits for bathroom)

Sam and Jessica discuss Bachtine and Dostoyevsky.

Sam: We’ll wait for Hector’s return to tie Bachtine back to Baudelaire.

Hector: Sorry that was half-baked I’m not sure how Bachtine relates yet to Baudelaire. 

(Hector looks for Bachtine on his computer)

Sam: Here's how I think it relates. Every time you go to a modern bar you get a 1000 different ideas of modern aesthetic-Polyphonic truths. When you speak of antique it is a narrow-minded singular aesthetic which is less true as an aesthetic.

Hector: That is close to what I had in mind. Earlier on when he theorizes the novel he says theory and novel are not friendly. Quotes Bachtine…”rests outside historical documentation….life they have with which we are familiar…hardened and no longer flexible skeleton…novel gets on poorly with other genres because…different voices and collision of different experiences….other genres retain their value…everything works as long as there is no mention of the novel….”

Jessica: Interested how much literary theory has led to the novel being conquered a little more since then so what is the new form that we have to grapple with?

Hector: Hybrid?

Sam: Mixed-media art. Making bad art to show what their good art is.

Hector: Another quote from Bachtine: “….new zone designed by the novel…all its open-ended.” Maximal contact with presentàBaudelaire. Maybe Baudelaire is talking about novelists.

Sam: He liked Victor Hugo.

Hector: “….reality that was inconclusive…”

Sam: We’ve become accustomed to Newton so much that Newton is now a joke.

Hector: Appreciation for the artistic object is different….closed the epic gap of time…there’s a whole essay in there I don’t want to think about.

Sam: First Paper.

Jessica: What are people thinking about for their papers…

Rushi: Last Words from anyone?

Hector/Sam/Chorus: # is still a motherfucker. Bachtine is cool. Baudelaire is...

Jessica: This blogpost in its ephemerality attempts contact with the immovable. We know not if it will reach it.

#WemissyouJulie.

This is fun:
http://www.cleavermagazine.com/the-empathy-machine-a-visual-narrative-on-the-poetics-of-kenneth-goldsmith-by-kelly-mcquain/

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