Kingdom of Madness

I just clicked on my computer to discover sad news: Randy "Mach Man" Savage is dead. He died from a car accident, having had a heart attack then losing control of his car. His wife, Lynn, had minor injuries. From all reports, he was happy, having just celebrated his one year anniversary with his wife.

While Hulk Hogan gave wrestling the cross-over appeal in the 1980s to become a global entertainment form, Savage was one of the few wrestlers who kept fans ringside, whether in their homes or at arenas, glued to the action in the ring. He was the technical half of the Superpowers, the man who stole the show the night Hogan slammed Andre in a beautiful match with Ricky "The Dragon" Steamboat. He was Shawn Michaels before Shawn Michaels. He made us believe that a little man could take on all of Hulkamania and hence the world.

While Savage was stellar in the ring, he was the champion of the mic, delivering insane promos that bordered on the poetic. He was a wordsmith as much as he was a matsmith. He taught me the importance of the "larger than life," the creative break with reality, the ambition to chase the dragon of inspiration, to bow down before the kingdom of madness. To say he will be missed will be to say we will miss a part of ourselves, the generation whose childhood hero wore cowboy hats, sunglasses, and entered the arena to "Pomp and Circumstance." He lives on as the part of us that's willing to go beyond the realms of possibility, in art and in life, the part of us that's cocky but loveable, the part of us that will do anything for his lover.

And as you knock on the gates of the kingdom of madness, know that you've left behind a legacy in and out of the squared circle. I hope they crown you prince, for you've done your service, shown each of us how to be a little more mad too. Oh yeah.

Reviewing Reviews

There is a great (overall, some of the responses are bunk) round table discussion over at MayDay magazine which discusses the phenomenon of Jason Guriel's exhortation to write negative reviews of poetry books. Personally, I think Guriel is a master of cheap shots and sensationalism, but his opinion may stem from a passion for literature and the promotion of great stuff (at the denunciation of the shit). It may not. The larger issue is that reviewers of poetry books are poets. And so due to an assortment of reasons (from thinking that the best way to criticize an awful book of poetry is ignore it and promote stuff you're enthusiastic about, to not wanting to insult people you will invariably run into, have taught you, or are otherwise important in our small, nervous community), most reviews of poetry are positive and blurbesque.

In my life, I have no problem mixing the poet and the scholar (though these roles remain compartmentalized for the most part). But being a poet and critic is something I want to avoid as much as possible. And emotionally, if I have to do a review, I'd rather be excited about something good or exploratory in what the poems do regardless of my tastes (for instance, when writing my sole published book review, which was of Circadian by Joanna Klink, I never lauded nor insulted the work: the careful reading I did, articulating the themes or whatever, was laurel enough, I thought). In other fields, artists criticizing other artists constitutes a "diss" and is always personal.

This leads me to my second point, which I will wait until next time to share: my newfound appreciation of pop culture, specifically hip hop. I will tell you that I am starting a project writing in a hip hop voice, the first poem of which is titled, "Elegy to the Saint Thomas Projects."

Beginning again and again

First, I would like to apologize. I have been away, both from writing and reading blogs. The demands of the MFA program and my own sanity have definitely taken their tole on the exhilaration of instantaneous publication. But here I am, for how long who knows!

To find the ruination in these blogposts will definitely be more esoteric work than before, as my main research interests are now eroticism, Cajana, and professional wrestling. Welcome to grad school, thank you for making my interests as schizophrenic as a Facebook account.

Right now, I am in the midst of working on portrayals of mystical jouissance and female sexual experience in the films of David Lynch and Peter Greenaway. So yes, I have come around to not only reading but kind of liking Lacan. You may get some psychobabble out of me now. And my writing may no longer make sense.

As for professional wrestling, I am preparing an essay called "Autoportrait with Choreographed Violence," hopefully for publication soon. I am quickly becoming a wrestling historian and have even turned the Ivy League establishment on to chair shots, DDTs, color commentary, and, especially, cutting promos. If I keep this blog up, it may be observations working out my feelings and connections to "sports entertainment."

I begin teaching courses at Cornell in June. The summer deal is a course about Natives and Strangers (a Freshmen writing seminar). I think I somehow conned the course leader into letting me teach my portion (it is a complicated learning to teach but still teaching internship of sorts) on Cajun literature. So if I can find a bulk supply of the amazing but out-of-print No Place, Louisiana, I'll be teach Martin Pousson. In the fall, I teach Mystery in the Story, which I will be able to design to include neo-noir films, Thomas Pynchon, Umberto Eco, Slavoj Žižek, and horror fiction. Needless to say, I am pretty much happy with this assignment.

Ithaca's cutting out of winter finally. I've been writing decently, I think. So there's that as well. Next time I post, it will be a post of some substance. And probably about the squared circle.

Welcome (back) to the now

Ok, I've been totally lame and not updated since September. I could say I was busy, which is true. But lazy is probably more accurate.

I just finished my final project for my City in Ruins course, which was a 60 page chapbook of poems, lyric essays, and photographs about ruins. The photos where taken by Linda and me (and one by my dad) of ruins in Louisiana both flood related and not. The poems were sort of persona/erotic/ruin poems, which can be said about all my work, probably.

This does not mean that I'll quit rambling about ruination. But I can probably throw a few non-academic things around, occasionally.

Semester starts this week and will be taking Erotics of Visuality, which is about portrayals of desire and sex in film, I guess. Workshop and poetry reading. Etc.

Because I've been such an asshole, I leave you with a photo from my project:

This was taken in Dulac, Louisiana. It is an abandoned boat filled with marsh grass.

Talking Statuary

In Medieval Italy, there was a fragment of a statue the Romans dubbed Il Pasquino. It was the head and torso of a male, badly damaged with basically a missing face, arms, legs, next to another even more fragmentary masculine torso. The Romans, for whatever reasons motivate a Roman, began scribbling bits of verse and attaching them to Il Pasquino--often irreverent satire aimed at the clergy and the politicians. What happens is that though fragmentary and though unnerving (especially because of the eerie non face), Il Pasquino began to be reconstructed, not through a physical refurbishing of the statue, but through a textual reconfiguration of both the statue and the Roman people. In essence, they saw ruin, but rather than becoming paralyzed by the morbidness of the mutilated human body, they elevated it and themselves and created something entirely new.

It is a common trope, especially for the Romans whose culture we inherit: the resurrection of the gods of the mystery cults (Mithras, Osiris, Dionysus, Jesus, etc), the myth of the phoenix, even the cliché of the reverdie during spring. But it is a trope that is nevertheless and unflaggingly interesting to us as humans. We are obsessed with our own mortality, right?

But as an artist, this age-old narrative becomes not only an easy fallback when creativity lacks, but also and especially an ars poetica. To create something out of the ruins. To never repair what is broken, but to reconstitute and rearrange. And also to revise.

For me, I go under a constant revision--not necessarily in my work, but in my life. There are memories that have caused me to recreate my past in my mind, first effacing both the good and the bad. One must work with a blank medium, so I thought. But now I am revising my methods, or at least acknowledging what I've been doing all along: pulling the voice out of the ruined face of my past. And now, I am rejuvenated in my work, having been inspired.

Il Pasquino is not as famous as other, more silent, ruins, such as the Belvedere Torso or the Venus de Milo. But he functions more as the bawdy and entertaining emblem of the community, rather than the classical and polished icon of a society. He uses foul language (did you know that shithouse is cacatorium in Latin?) and references sodomy, pederasty, and genitalia with wanton abandon. He even uses clever grammatical construction to attack grammar. But he is also the voice of the city and the patron saint of writers (this quote is taken from Barkin's Unearthing the Past):

pastore,
avendo per armento ogni scrittore [119, year 1516]

a shepherd,
who has every writer as a member of his flock.


In any case, this is all to say that ruins, even of your emotional history, are good, especially when you have the chance to reconstruct them and change them into something new.

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Also and Attention: I will make an appearance, poem in hand, at a concert of Bárbara Ohana, on the 27th. And she will be performing a song that she made of one of my poems. She is also performing on the 24th and in Washington, D.C. this weekend. Details will be forthcoming. Email me if you want more information.

City in Ruin Value

It has been a busy and long week as you may have guessed. I began coursework at Cornell two Fridays ago. And my home town and parish were ravaged by Hurricane Gustavo (my family and theirs are more or less fine, minor roof damage chez mes parents, no utilities until God knows when, the standard). But to avoid getting too personal, at least at this moment (although I do want to extend sympathy and prayers (of whatever sort) to those who've had to experience these such storms), I want to talk about a possible shift in topic for this blog based upon a seminar I'm taking.

The course is called City in Ruins, and the ultra-sexy course description includes readings from Mesopotamian and Hebraic lamentations of cities (think Ur, Babylon, and Jerusalem), paintings by Piranesi and others, poetry by Byron and Spencer, urban redevelopment by Haussman, urban warfare in London and Paris during WWII, speculative texts by Benjamin and Derrida, and a host of things that I cannot remember probably because I haven't actually heard of them until the syllabus was whisked into my hand. Basically, the course is to explore the aesthetization of ruin.

And as trite and removed as it possibly can be with posturing doctoral candidates and over emotional MFA students and a sharp emeritus professor from Johns Hopkins, this class is right up my ally and right up this blog's ally. So don't be surprised if I use this space for a sounding board of ideas and reflections on my readings and on my semester work, whether that be creative or critical. Such things as how in the destruction of Jerusalem, "even her lovers have deserted her" (Lamentations), or that each city lamentation ends with a regenerated hope and a transfer of grief onto the next city, who's about to get hers. Or how about how according to Jacques Ellul, whackjob theologico-philosopher and anarchist, all cities are necessarily doomed because the concept is a priori cursed and not of God regardless of the individual acts of the citizens and that in fact, doing anything to help the needy or improve life within cities is cute, but always futile and ridiculous.

As you can see, this will be fruitful and ire-inducing and a great horror class.