Madison to Accept less than 1% of MFA Apps (in fiction, this year)

I just read that Madison’s MFA program accepted less than 1% of its fiction applicants this year. Crazy stuff. This doesn’t affect me (as a poetry applicant)—I couldn’t apply there this year because they alternate genres each application cycle.

I hope this increased level of selectivity has more to do with the new rankings that came out in Poets & Writers (and Madison’s place in those rankings) than to do with some massive jump in applicant numbers this year specifically due to factors like the economic recession. The later makes me slightly worried. I’d love a chance to learn with some of my favorite contemporary poets but many of them are at highly selective programs. I suppose I’ll see when schools get around to sending out decisions in a few months.

I did apply to the other big research institution in Wisconsin (Milwaukee) for an MA. They have a great program in 20th century and contemporary literature and were one of the pioneering schools for bringing 20th century continental thought into the US (among great company like The New School and Berkeley). I guess a lot of people are set on the “MFA” degree, not that it tends to equate to much employment wise. I’m quite sure that the acceptance rate at Milwaukee is much better, although it is probably rather challenging to get into their PhD program. I also applied to some MFA programs (obviously, why else would I be contemplating admissions statistics) that have quite amazing and exciting faculty. I wonder if the spike in applications is a general trend? I personally thought I was taking a bit of a risk by applying to MFA programs as there are few jobs in the area and the economy is in a horrible state right now.

After I finish up the rest of my applications, luckily, I have quite a few other things to keep me occupied over winter break so I won’t be overtaken with application anxiety. Besides, there are lots of things I can do if I don’t get in anywhere (I’d just love to be in a challenging and fruitful learning environment again… I guess I’ll see).

Anyway, that 1% business does not look promising, that is, if it is more than a localized thing. I do wonder if it says anything about the current economy and the massive unemployment that everyone has felt on some level or another. Really, there is no way to know. As more schools publish application numbers I suppose a general picture will emerge. I wouldn’t be surprised if the poor economy equated to a spike in MFA applications, as I’m sure there are many people who see it as a way to ride the hard times out. It is just a conjecture.

Given that I am applying to programs and all, I do feel somewhat intrigued by a program that accepted less than 1% of applicants and what that might imply for the general state of MFA programs (if anything). I think that puts Madison’s numbers at the top of the selectivity charts historically. Although, there might be a general spike in applicants this year as I already intimated. Also, selectivity data is published so sporadically that such information may never come out in any real way (and other schools may have received greater numbers of applicants in past years without reporting it to the general public).

Nicki Minaj

I don't think there has EVER been a female rapping at this level. Each bar is a double or triple entendre. Well, not the last one: "I'm killing these bitches/ Mike Vick'n it up!" But: HA!

This is how one stuffs tennis balls down the throat of the referee with lyrics. The referee is white, rich and racist. He'd rather you weren't 'balling,' or using that word to describe a sport that obtains its ad revenue from products that normal people don't even have on their radar (Rolex, Mercedes and any number of absurdly expensive clothing lines).

This barbie doll comes with a warning label stating: "Warning: if you pull the c(h)ord on the back of this doll it will spit fire."

That fire burns apart the purchaser's face and the plastic box the product came packaged in.

The Internet and Care

This video is worth watching. The style of the lecture is a bit strange and classically rhetorical. This soap box rant does illustrate what I like about the internet—the radical democracy of the whole “mosh pit.”

The internet (and the collections and interactions of data there-in) creates a flux where people are asked to radically reconsider what they care about and how they care about.

Our trite mindless goings with our sad little ifs (could haves and should haves) get broken apart by the internet. Expensive possessions, violent leanings, illiteracy and sexually repression get thrashed a bit… even if only slightly. I guess this might be grasping at straws… but things like blogs, youtube and pornography (although this is often horribly reductive and objectifying) don’t cost money to use… and they open people to seeing different perspectives (or hold the possibility of this).

It is strange that this radical network is based off trite binary codes and logical if/then structures. As interesting and powerful the internet is, it is also troubling—things get reduced by logical systems and whatnot.

Example: people spend hours upon hours on facebook—a medium of interaction that favors trite reductions. There is a whole set of phenomena that can be described in relation to facebook but that isn’t my goal here—I just want to point to the tension between the reductive aspect of the internet and the radically democratic aspects.

The reductions prevent people from taking long term (prophetic) stances within the medium. I have a nostalgia for the newsgroups and discussion groups I used to participate in on my 14.4k modem back in the day—but I think the inclusion of more people in the discussion is wonderful (even if a large portion of these people are just in the discussion to go on youtube and call things “faggot-y”).

Poet as Platypus

“The analysis of motor habit as an extension of existence leads...” 
–Merleau-Ponty

For as long as I can  remember, whenever I came across a survey asking “What’s your favorite animal?'” I’d write in, “Duck Billed Platypus”  (supposing that one is supposed to have a favorite animal, which is itself a strange supposition). Likely, the rebellious child in me wanted to stick it to the “man” (often a female grade school teacher) by picking the weirdest animal I knew. And what is weirder that the platypus? In time, the platypus became my go-to animal. Not necessarily an existential commitment, but, the commitment I made to the platypus, came to function as a minor ‘myth’ to my childhood self (and now, through this essay, my current self). This version of ‘myth’ is not to be taken in a stagnated (or harmful) tone, but in the sense of a perspectival pocket of meaning that takes hold.

The sources of these ‘meaningful-myths’ become further varied and sporadic in the sped up domain of modern information consumption. It does get harder and harder to create these from exceedingly less complex sources—as one experiences more, the metaphors presented become proximally dead. The way one engages these words then changes: I turn on Vh1 to die (and, after a long day, I enjoy that death).

To pause, for a moment, it may be representatively beneficial to sparse the above sentence: “In time, the platypus became my go-to animal.” Although the sentence could be presented as the creation of the author of this text (by that perspective ‘me,’ which strangely ‘I’ now, itself, reads as ‘me’), at a certain point their has to be a renunciation of authority. So, if we take the text of the above sentence as text what does it illustrate? The modifier “in time” frames the rest of the main portion of the sentence with temporality. The subject, “the platypus” is a “go-to animal,” though not in terms of an actual animal—here, the platypus is text used to fill in a blank on a questionnaire. The reality that a textual element is adopted as a “go-to” serves to illustrate the ‘always occurring’ nature of text: text is action. Action framed always, meaningfully, by temporality (using the widest definition of meaning).

“Platypus,”  written, is a word-action, and while that is important, it does not express a reason to equate the platypus to the poet. What the platypus does do (as a word) is defy categories and break apart assumed truths. It is an anomaly. Statistically? I’d guess that it falls somewhere on the edge of a normal distribution curve, yet, the specifics aren’t as important as the idea here. What is important is that there is a supposed ‘truth’ that sets this particular animal outside of it. A quote from the Wikipedia entry on the platypus says it all: “The bizarre appearance of this egg-laying, venomous, duck-billed, beaver-tailed, otter-footed mammal baffled European naturalists when they first encountered it.” Indeed!

The blatantly European cold-objective qualification that relegated the Platypus to categorical obscurity is particularly important to some of the recent online discourse on “poetry and relevancy.” Explicitly in the terms used to explain the structure and nature of relevance and its connections to different poetry movements—there is, among many participants a blatant disregard for the cultural weight that many words bring with them. If anything is to be gleaned from the last half-century of theoretical discourse it is that the very words we use are full of theoretical assumptions. We all fall victim to this, but we should also all actively engage the words, not disregard such actions as post-modern/structural.  We should take what the post-modernists have given us seriously, because the disregard of the theoretical being used to disregard their line of thought is, in reality/discourse, a disregard of a particular theoretical stance via the assumptions of another particular, yet unacknowledged, theoretical stance.

There are no words that connect directly to objects in a metaphysical escapism from a particular perspective. And, as politically convenient as it may be, there is no “humanness.” Nor can we escape theory by defaulting to the unexplained practical or pragmatic (and, I tend to think that Dewey bridges into post-structuralism more than many are willing to acknowledge… though, that is better left for another day). Practical and pragmatic are themselves weighted words.

Words are always referent to other words—I do not think I have seen a platypus to this day (possibly in a zoo, but not that I remember). If I look up Platypus in the dictionary, I just get a series of references to other words, and in turn to other words and so on. It is not a new thought, but it is important to remind oneself when looking at a dictionary that the words are endlessly self-referential within that particular text. In turn, to point out one of my own pet peeves about contemporary poetic discourse, one cannot use a word like ‘aesthetics’ to describe poetry without being connected to the Enlightenment, and then imperialism. This is why the idea of the anti-aesthetic became popular in post-modern criticism; though, more properly, the term should have been tossed off completely and replaced with ‘meaning’ or ‘care’ (or some more specific term related to those).

However, I hold back from applying this directly to the act of writing poetry—these ideas do shape my perception of the world, but the artistic act needs not comport directly to a line of thought—one can try very hard to achieve this, but, likely, one will produce a poem that is both uninteresting and a failure in terms of one’s prescribed theoretical ‘goals.’ A poem seems more apt to swerve around and fail or not fail in the presentation of a word-action/idea-action. That does not imply that theory should be avoided completely—only, that to solidify a poem around a particular conceptual framework is near impossible, and poetry is better off keeping this in mind. Charles Bernstein's poem “thinking I think I think,” from his collection With Strings, does a wonderful job of engaging in this self-questioning multiplicity directly in regard to the word ‘aesthetic.’ Take the lines:

What are aesthetic values and why do
there appear to be lesser & fewer of
them? Quick: define the difference
between arpeggio & Armani. The baby
cries because the baby likes crying.
The baby cries because a pin is
sticking into the baby. The baby
is not crying but it is called
crying…

Enjambment and the resulting half-meanings are more prominent in this poem than are the originating sentences themselves. In fact, so much so that it was hard to choose the point at which to stop quoting—the poem works like a mechanism that clicks and turns at each line break. One can sparse each line into a thorough meaning. It makes the poem a mental delight to read. Here, I want to focus on the first few lines of the above quote for my purposes. “What are aesthetic values and why do” applies the word “aesthetic” to action (all words are actions), and then through the next line “there appear to be lesser & fewer of” implicates the traditional “aesthetic” with a productive/generative imagination. “There” becomes a general place that is appearing less frequently, and a place which connects to the half-meaning produced definite pronoun “them?” (it is ironic, here, that a definite pronoun has a question mark). The line “them? Quick: define the difference” has three apparent meanings (and possibly even more): first, it applies a quickness (acceleration) to the other (or “them?”) through the question mark which creates a strange interconnection between the two. That syntactic block as a whole, “them? Quick,” is then applied to “define the difference” which likely is referent to Derrida’s dual meaning wordplay on that very word, which, in short, implicates a holism in the space between sign-meanings; second, the line creates a tension between itself and the whitespace past it—is there a difference between “I” and “them?”; third, this line’s meaning runs down into the half-meaning of the next line declaring that the defining space “between [the words] arpeggio & Armani” (which have sound alignment on their first-consonant) as a delicate thing full of potential: “The baby.”

Like I said, there are probably even more possibilities of meaning one can stretch out of this (as well as the original sentence meanings)—but that is just it, what is most interesting here, is the possibility of infinity within the finite and, in turn, the opposite. The word “aesthetic” is engaged as a question and not a solidity, and this ties to the point I made about poetry and the theoretical—poetry need not be confined in the ways prose often needs be, as the poems tends to fail at directly stating its theoretical purposes. Yet, here it is taken even further—as a way to crack open an idea into multiple meanings. This infinite and the finite tension of each line (or syntactical phrase, prose poetry is also very capable) ties back to the nature of the dictionary—a physical object with obvious limits, yet, an object that is internally, endlessly self-referential. This also reminds me of Charles Olson’s essay “Projective Verse:”

It is true, what the master says he picked up from Confusion: all the thots men are capable of can be entered on the back of a postage stamp. So, is it not the PLAY of a mind we are after, is not that that shows whether a mind is there at all?

The specific word choice of ‘PLAY’ may be off-putting to some, but it is the function of challenging the status quo within the scope of the finite. For the human life is as temporally finite as the dictionary is objectively. Bernstein’s baby, here, “…cries because a pin is/ sticking into the baby. The baby.” The baby sticks into itself in an internal recurrence—the tension between the finite and the infinite placed into the temporal meaning of a life.  The amount we press against the leveling deadness with a miniscule bit of infinitude becomes our myth-meanings, but always within that backdrop of finite sameness. There is no metaphysic to that sameness, it is just the line of meaning that draws our chaotic, often untold (/untellable), narratives together.

Existence and thought become coextensive within discourse. Existence is finite and thought is infinite. There is a contemporary truth at that point in the Phaedrus where Socrates points out the etymological similarity between the word ‘prophecy’ and the word ‘madness.’ The prophetic is that inkling within discourse which always looks forward, and to look forward into an infinite scope of possibilities is to invoke a madness in the face of the finite.

The highly contrived list of wonder that is Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, is a great example of madness in the finite (a poem we ‘grown’ poets don’t seem to spend enough time talking about, given its influence, as we are caught up in the pedantry of our Pound fetishes… though, no doubt, Pound is a wonder-full fetish). The title itself is evocative—for what is a howl coming from human lips but a mad cry both against and within language. Within the screach of the howl, the poem in its pressing together of words, explicitly culturally ‘high’ and ‘low’ words, utters its cry. Its a poem you can’t stop reading as the rhythm draws you on through and onto line after line—and, as such, is a singular howl (the first section, at least). It references Blake and finds the religious (the prophetic) in the smallest aspects of the everyday. Howl is a poem brimming over with so little.

Speaking of Blake (who, quite poignantly, was considered a madman for half a century after his death), I was recently thinking about the small poem “The Clod and the Pebble” as the snow began to melt the other week, and what showed up was sticky Wisconsin farm clay (do to the fact that our driveway needs another layer of gravel). Honestly, we should start a “Tuskegee” type institute and have poets build structures from scratch by making bricks from the clay on the property.  I like to imagine the possibility anyway. Lisa Fishman’s Orfordville farm comes to mind—what a wonderful poet, and what a wonderful idea. Though, I doubt they have the clay problems we have here being down in the southern part of the state. Anyway, returning to Blake’s poem:

"Love seeketh not itself to please,
Nor for itself hath any care,
But for another gives its ease,
And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."

So sung a little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet,
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:

"Love seeketh only self to please,
To bind another to its delight,
Joys in another's loss of ease,
And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."

This is particularly poignant on the backdrop of the Phaedrus—it is the division between the two versions of love (the capricious sort, and the ‘mad’ prophetic sort). But it is also an apt demonstration of how the finite and infinite can be applied to perception (or the ‘subject,’ if we choose to refer via stale, philosophically out-moded language) and perceptions interaction with its world. The infinite expanse of the clay clod who loves out into the world, and the pebble who loves into the finite—these are two sides of the same coin. A coin on one side “builds a Heaven in Hell’s despair,” and on the other, “builds a Hell in Heaven’s despite.”

So, where does the Platypus (as a subverting element) come into this? I think, at the point where the finite and infinite meet—a myth that binds the infinite into a finite context. That holistic wire that is hard to balance on as feet trod forth in the dirt. Yet, in the standard language that assumes the stagnated theoretical,  it is OKAY that the platypus (by their very genetic composition) takes a different stand on truth—they’re platypuses (or poets, or artists), that’s what they do. As long as that myth making remains relegated to an obscurity it remains ineffective and irrelevant. Here is where the question of poetic relevance rests!

To avoid taking any hard stance on contemporary poetry that makes this discussion divisive between experimental and traditional camps, I will make my example of bad poetry Shel Silverstein (though, I do very much enjoy reading his poems to my younger relatives with much hyperbole: “You'll see catsandratsandelephants, but sure as you're born/ You're never gonna see no Unicorn[!!!!]”) When I read his poetry to myself I often die in the same way I die watching vh1 (though, not always, as some of it contains personally referenced meanings, as does vh1 from time to time… well, rarely). Poetry shouldn’t make the present die. If poetry has any relevance it is in that.

On MFA Rankings

I am applying (again) to MFA (poetry) and PHD/MA (theory) programs this fall (I attended Colorado State’s MFA program for a semester several years ago), so, I thought I might chime in on this rankings debate. It seems to be a bit out of control and I found some of the comments on BOTH sides to be rather distasteful. Though, I do feel a certain interest in the debate as I go about putting together applications. Rankings _ARE_ interesting and important to those teaching in MFA programs as well as to those applying to them. In fact, the lack of rankings and useful information on the theory end of my applications likely means that I probably missed several schools I would have loved to apply to. I do read a lot of contemporary theory, I suppose, so I did have a decent idea… but if not for preexisting knowledge in regards to this area, it would have been much harder to find programs to apply to. I would have been limited to a few rather cursory and useless lists. The US News list of theory programs is completely useless. There are a couple other lists floating around that are more helpful but they are FAR from complete. There is nothing like Seth’s rankings available in terms of programs that favor theory. There is a philosophy ranking to this end… the philosophical gourmet report breaks down rankings into specialties but this does not extend into English programs that favor theory. There is nothing that breaks down funding and selectivity. It is a shame, really.

[Aside: I’ve had a few exchanges with Seth Abramson in the past and while we don’t agree on much ‘conceptually’ or ‘aesthetically’ (well, we are fond of many of the same poets… except out of the middle ground I lean more towards the post-avant side of things) I think most of his rankings have the right thing in mind. Not because they are rankings per se--they have the right thing in mind because they are filled with useful information.]

The two primary aspects of the rankings that I found the most useful were the selectivity and funding. I think Seth is right to privilege funding. If I can’t go to graduate school with a relative level of funding, I might as well return to truck driving. The selectivity ranking helped me to check my list and make sure that I didn’t only apply (on accident) to schools that only accept some minuscule percentage of their overall application pool.

In terms of the MFA applications, my first and foremost concern in creating my list was the faculty. Which poets I know and enjoy are teaching in MFA programs? Who do I think would be exciting to learn from? And so on. I then factored things in like teaching opportunities and literary journals. I then cross-checked this list with the information Seth compiled on rankings and selectivity to make sure I had a solid and diverse list. By looking up some of the programs on the list, I even found a school where I was extremely fond of several books of poetry by the faculty that I for some reason managed to overlook. This process also led me to read poems by poets I wouldn’t have bothered to look at and to order several collections. I even found a couple of poets who publish in journals and presses that I don’t keep up with, which legitimately excite me from what I’ve read so far. Aspects of the rankings are useful. (And until someone else comes along and creates something new and more comprehensive) I think we need to take them for what they are.

That said, it should be okay to criticize them. I definitely think some of the points made against the rankings are legitimate. This debate shouldn’t have turned into a shouting match.

Knowing which schools provide funding is important. Having an idea of how hard each program is to get into is also very useful. The AWP is a wonderful organization but their information on MFA programs is dreadfully inadequate. The criticism they leveled, to me, seemed rather moot—if they decide to step up and create a more widely available (and actually useful) collection of data, more power to them. I hope they do. Or, I hope someone does. It doesn’t make sense to lump low-res programs with regular programs—there is rarely significant overlap between the two types of programs in terms of applications aside from local oriented applications by people who can only afford to move so far way from a certain location. From everything I have read, the 13,000 figure is probably the total number of applications. I don’t know this for sure, but it seems more logical to me, since most everyone seems to throw an application at Iowa. Iowa only gets 1300-1500 applications per year. If many applicants apply to several schools (many applying to upwards of 10) then that would put the figure around 13,000, I think.

And, it is right to worry about the fact that the reputation ranking is based on polled students. Ignoring the fact that the poll was done on Seth’s blog (and on the PW forums as well I believe, though I’m not sure), I think that students don’t know enough about schools to make a judgment about their reputations. Faculty and current/past MFA students would be better fit to make judgments like this. This is how the philosophical gourmet creates its reputation based list. I do like that Seth mixes reputation with factors like funding and selectivity. I do like that the student has a voice in the rankings—it is a good way to counteract favoritism. That said, a reputation ranking IS needed. I also know that a lot of students would like information on GRE scores and GPA (as some schools privilege this more than others, or require a certain GRE/GPA for funding)—this isn’t something that should factor into rankings, mind you. Based on what I have read, some schools don’t even look at this information at all.

From personal experience I think that a ranking system based on which schools students are applying to the most is troublesome and I think someone needs to compile and updated reputation ranking based on faculty, current students and graduates. What the applicants have to say does have its place as it gives following applicants a sense of what students in previous years discovered in their application efforts. Yet, the students applying, generally, don’t know enough about the contemporary poetry landscape. Hell, I read a lot of poetry nowadays, and I don’t even feel capable of giving and informed ‘vote.’

Mind you, I can only speak to the poetry side of the debate as my knowledge of contemporary fiction is limited (especially in terms of how it extends into the academy)... but some of the lists students compile are strange to me. There are lists of schools put together by students that I find completely confusing and cannot see how they could possibly be interested in both school ‘A’ and school ‘B.’ Well, I do see why, but not in terms of students creating informed lists of schools that jive with their interests/styles. Both school ‘A’ and school ‘B’ are ranked high and have good funding. There are some schools I know I have little chance of being accepted at simply by reading poetry by the faculty (or through a preexisting familiarity them). Further, there are some schools that I am fairly sure I have no interest in aside from having time to write and study. It is good to know which schools have faculty that excite you, or, at least, faculty that might be willing to work with your particular style (it will save a lot of application fees, at least).

That said, it is hard to expect this from you average MFA applicant. Given the wide extent and availability of quality education, I’d suppose there are plenty of blossoming poetry students in all sorts of nooks and crannies who have little knowledge of the poetry community at large. These students are going to apply based almost solely on rankings and online word of mouth. This is what I did when applying a few years ago with an education from a small-upstart-public-liberal-arts-college. There were no poetry readings on campus. My contemporary poetry knowledge was limited to whatever random books I scooped up at Barnes & Nobel. Mind you, there were no poetry readings on campus. I made due with what I, seemingly, had. So, I can see why I students put together lists directly taken from Seth’s rankings (almost randomly). I did a similar thing using forum and live journal posts last time I applied.

I can also see why certain programs fear/dislike these rankings for the wrong reasons. If you have bad funding poor selectivity, though, I think it is fair. That said, the reputation side of the rankings is a somewhat self-fulfilling prophecy as students apply to the highest ranked programs on the list over and over again. Schools with horrible funding are surely likely to fall in rank (as I think was the case with Columbia and a few other schools)... but those schools with decent funding are never going to be judged reputation wise by anything but the whims of students who, proximally and for the most part, don’t know what they are getting into.

I also don’t like the fact that this ranking isn’t willing to submit query letters around to schools to get up to date information. Any fully and professional effort would do this, if schools choose not to reply (as many seem unwilling to do) that is their prerogative. I know there are some schools (Rice I believe) that opt out of participating in the US News undergraduate rankings, that doesn’t stop them from contacting all of the other schools that do want to contribute (though, I suppose there is a lot more money to be made here, so they can fund such an effort). I already brought this up with Seth somewhere on his blog, mind you.

Anyway, the information that is in P&W is worthwhile, though it does have some obvious flaws. I’m glad it exists. Better than having piles of students applying randomly to schools that will put them horribly in debt.


[Now, a list of suggestions:]

1. Send a reputation query to all schools to be distributed to all faculty to let them pick the schools other than their own in descending order that they like. Or, something to this relative end.

2. Send query letters to schools asking for general up-to-date information.

3. Create some special rankings created by panels of faculty for different types of poetry (Post-Avant, Experimental, Hybrid, Native American, and so on and so forth).

4. Query schools for faculty statements about things like teaching method and the faculties favorite poets/influences [I think this would be wonderfully helpful to many applicants: if they don’t know much about the contemporary landscape at least they can find someone who jives with the same varieties of poetry that they are familiar with.]

5. Have information about average GRE/GPA available (not in ranking format). This could be troublesome though--someone is likely to go ahead and rank it anyway online. Still, I think the information would be valuable.


My goal here is to be productive, not to cause trouble.

So Wonder/full:

~

John Coltrane: A Love Supreme

~

First Snow of the Year

"hands clap/ invoking warmth/ beating time to/ a slow snow." -Cid Corman

Obama

There is something completely suburban (and implicitly imperialist) in the criticism of Obama’s Nobel Peace Prize. It is extremely inconvenient in terms of the in-house political debate, as the same blatantly racist tendencies that bring firearms to presidential meetings are going to jump on this like it is going out of style. Yet, those who are so quick to question it really do fail to understand what a symbol of hope Obama is to our world (of people of mostly darker skin tones). After hundreds of years of racist military imperialism (followed by another 50 or so years of oppressive racist capitalist hegemony) a brown skinned brother is the leader of the free world. It is astonishingly wonderful.

In the Favela’s in Brazil… In the slums outside of Cape Town, South Africa… In all the brown skinned places of the world they can now scratch “Obama” on the wall next to the likes of “Tupac” and “Jay-Z.”

Act with Tech

The following thoughts are fragmentary and train of thought. That is how they were written. They have not been edited (yes, ‘I’ often write/think/text in parenthetically… a sort of flesh like variegation, maybe… maybe my flesh hasn’t yet figured out the bracket…).

There is so much upheaval about where we are and what label we should put on the current modes of going on the forefront of the poetic. This is usually referred to as ‘discourse’ and that ‘discourse’ is then posited as having moved somehow into the post-post-modern period. To be a bit ironical—“po po mo,” to my body (that flesh that is always already my own), sounds like more police. It is also said that we have moved back to (regressed maybe? not being sure what those who posit this mean…) what they call “modernist tendencies.” I often wonder how much of a conceptual revolution has/can take place after Nietzsche. That seems like the re/volution—ever since, we’ve been inflecting on it. Husserl (who I haven’t read enough of), Heidegger, and the whole series of students they influenced them inflect upon his destruction of both the self and metaphysics. The ‘NEW’ as it goes is an always already.

How we interact with technology and the sort of objective mindsets that allow for the technocratic state (since it is the most powerful narrative controlling out systems of meaning) seems like the largest question of our time (still!), as it inflects on how we treat other parts of the world and if we how we live (deeply into our ecology?)… STILL, most of the arguments in this realm are rather reductive. Academics feel comfortable in the rhetorical structures of a two camp system—a division that is as uninteresting as it is meaningless. Each camp has its variety of inflections and different theoretical bases—they are all boringly in the comfort of their place as a part of whichever camp they fall into. This is NOT a musing in and about a third way or a middle ground, but simply a call for complex and joyous interaction within living (free from easy answers).

Take my fruit juicer—it is marketed on the television in strange ways that remind me very much of ‘infomercial’ products. It seems like a disposable product that one just HAS to have based on the mystique created by the consumerist directed myth that surrounds it. One gets it, and then the myth wears off when one realizes that there is actually quite a bit of work involved in actually juicing piles of fruit and then cleaning up the rather out of control mess that the machine creates (despite advertising the opposite). There is no instant gratification (aside from grinding out random whole fruits, which is both exciting and relaxing at the same time in a strange way).

This is why the machine gets stuffed into a closet/cupboard and becomes a totally wasteful piece of the consumerist/technocratic narrative—a boring and useless appurtenance that has little to nothing to do with what the living body actually cares about. Indeed, left in the cupboard the technology is little else.

When ‘I’ take that technology out of the cupboard and use it for the sake of some greater care, it then begins to have deeper and more complex relevance. The fresh organic garden vegetables grind and juice become part of my flesh as I ingest them, and they are out of the soil I worked, and extend out in significance to the relationship I have with my local, national, and international community. The technology was in this case (as I am able to enjoy the products of my local environment more fully, without negatively affecting outside of it) have been appropriated for the sake of a ‘care.’ That care then inflects within my comportment to the world. The juicer no longer grinds up vegetables that have been turned into a sort of organic “vitamin water,” the act of grinding the vegetables becomes something sumptuous… the ‘flesh-y’ of the tomatoes shows forth. There is something ‘dirt’ about the tomatoes/carrots/flesh. By dirt, the dirt as something going; something lived.

This lived flesh is quite a different thing from the technological thing that the juicer is when I see it simply as some stale object that dissects the tomatoes and extracts nutritional facts and ingredient lists. The care allows this. It is a much harder thing to care out into something like the political landscape without relying on trite concepts like ‘human nature’ (which is the sort of totally boring rhetoric that is often defaulted to), but to care out into that is an interesting complexity that is a challenge like no other (no other thing that one can care about). Though, it is not proper to simply still call it ‘the political,’ it is better to move to call it something more like ‘community.’

Forward Directed and Prophetic

A while back (see a few posts below, since I haven’t been keeping up on posting…), I posted a collection of quotes from contemporary poets, and the mass of ‘guilt’ they have collected in regards to what is expected of them.

I think this guilt is a rather ubiquitous socio-cultural trend, and, a troublesome one at that. It is a way of going that is completely devoid of joy, and it is a way of going that attempts to still the going in an abstract flesh clot of morality.

The reader’s typical and expected response here is ‘Why not morality?’—and, indeed, our legal system and our discourse we abstractly refer to as the social contract necessitates our thinking in this way. Every revolution of thought that has taken place in the last half of the 20th century should give us an inkling of another direction (at least in the Anglo-American tradition of theory; not to say that such thoughts were not already prevalent on the European continent, and it some literature… as well as Asia, though, dealing with all the hubbub of cross cultural discourse is a whole notha’ bag of cheat-toes).

‘care’ is fundamentally different than MORALITY, though, MORALITY may be founded on ‘care’ on some level. Not a big revelation, but I had an experience recently (which I don’t feel like ranting off here, mind you) that necessitated my need to rant off a couple of paragraphs of text to this end.

Joyous care does not attempt to stop or turn back the abstract clock… it is forward directed and prophetic. It is not an overlay. It IS flesh.