STEALING AND GIVING ODOR.

I am packing up my library. Yes, I am. The good books below (mostly critical theory and poetics titles) are looking for some new shelves to occupy. I’m moving to Florida this fall—early retirement!—and, alas, have decided not to take them with me. I need to downsize my library. Drop fuel. Before I cart them off to the University Bookstore or wherever to meet their remaindered ends, I thought I’d try my luck as a virtual book vendor on the grad list first. Sort of gross, I know. I’m selling the books for $5 each. They are all in Good to Very Good condition, many of them nearly new. If you want to add any of them to your library, just send me a separate e-mail and I can drop the book(s) in your campus mailbox. Again, that’s $5/book. Everything must go! Thanks, and have a great summer. Adieu Derrida, later Deleuze…

That was an e-mail I wrote about a month ago now, on May 14th, a “Critical Bargain Blow-Out” as the subject heading read. It was both a practical attempt to sell some of my books (about 40 of them) and cut my losses. And also, I suppose, a fare thee well, see you later alligators. I pressed SEND at 7:55 p.m. and by 10:30 that night all the books were claimed. I was trying to figure out which books to sell, which to take home to my parents’ house, and which to bring with me—my essential portable library—to Florida. All of the books I sold that night were critical theory and poetics books, some Agamben, some Benjamin, some Deleuze, a ton of Derrida, Lyotard…the usual critical suspects. Heavy reading and heaving lifting. Not stuff that would particularly help me become a better creative writer.

I lugged a few boxes of books back to my parents’ house, to keep in my little library there, books I wasn’t going to bring to Florida for whatever reason, but nevertheless wanted to save for my future library. I kept all of my Paul de Man books. Just couldn’t get rid of them. I was up late the other night reading the title essay of Blindness and Insight and remembered why I felt compelled to study literature in the first place:

the encounter with literature involves a mental activity which, however problematical, is at least to a point governed by this language only … A literary text is not a phenomenal event that can be granted any form of positive existence, whether as a fact of nature or as an act of the mind. It leads to no transcendental perception, intuition, or knowledge but merely solicits an understanding that has to remain immanent because it poses the problem of its intelligibility in its own terms. This area of immanence is necessarily part of all critical discourse. Criticism is a metaphor for the act of reading, and this act is itself inexhaustible. (106-107)

Rain all yesterday, sunshine again today, and tomorrow more rain. Waking this morning the house full of the perfume of flowers. A red peony floating in a glass bowl on the kitchen table; three more peonies blooming out of a slender white vase, red and red and red; small roses two in a blue vase. Flowers broken by last night’s rain and rescued by my mother’s hand. I breathe the fragrance myself and know it and like it. Then later this evening we watch on TV the “Garden Roots of Emily Dickinson’s Poetry“.

Flowers–Well–if anybody
Can the ecstasy define–
Half a transport–half a trouble–
With which flowers humble men:
Anybody find the fountain
From which floods so contra flow–
I will give him all the Daisies
Which upon the hillside blow.

Too much pathos in their faces
For a simple breast like mine–
Butterflies from St. Domingo
Cruising round the purple line–
Have a system of aesthetics–
Far superior to mine.

“In these pictures, Edward Burtynsky shows the man-made world—the human ecosystem—that has risen up around the production, use, and dwindling availability of our paramount energy source. The mechanics and industry of extraction and refinement; the development, products, and activities associated with transportation and motor culture; and the wreckage, obsolescence, and human cost that lies at the End of Oil. These photographs are about man, and what he has made of the earth.“

“Filip Dujardin creates imaginary buildings by resampling pictures of real buildings; that is, he digitally pieces together elements of existing architecture to create fictional structures” is the Chazen Museum’s description of their recent exhibit of the Belgian photographer. I wanted to revisit Dujardin’s Imaginary Architecture at the Chazen before the exhibit closed, but of course I had to miss it. (J and I briefly walked, more like ran, through the photographic exhibit a month ago, when the weather was heating up in Madison. This last week has been an early summer scorcher and I thought it’d be nice just to stroll through the cool museum air looking at art.) I really liked some of the pieces, though I thought the exhibit was rather small, with only sixteen photographs, and the photographs themselves could have been more out-sized so as to give the viewer the impression of actually standing in or before a landscape. Instead, I was happy to stumble across BLDGBLOG, which has an excellent post on Dujardin’s resampled space, with a nice gallery and discussion. Dujardin’s impossible structures assert (or insert?) an alternative reality, closely aligned with this one, but all aslant and askew, as if obeying an-other gravity. Walking through them this time online, what struck me about the imaginary architecture of Dujardin was the total absence of inhabitants. It’s as if I were glimpsing into a future where built space no longer corresponds with the lives of real people. And in a way, because you can see it in today’s real architecture, I felt like I was looking at the imposing and bloodless facades of the present.

On a related note, the cover art for a number of recent literary journals features some striking images of imaginary architecture by various artists. I’m thinking of Canarium One, Pleiades 28.2, and perhaps my favorite cover for a literary journal this year, Ben Edward’s “Tower” (2009) for the bigger, badder Baffler.

The poems below by Phan Nhiên Hạo are “fueled by a mix of strife, hope, love, and futility.” Phan Nhiên Hạo’s elusive, surreal, yet emotionally charged poetry gives voice to an emergent consciousness and conscience formed in diaspora. The five poems that I translate (“Meeting a Taxi Driver in New York,” “Manufacturing Poetry,” “Sunday, May 10, 1998,” “Paper Bells,” and “E-mail to Nguyen Quoc Chanh”) exhibit to varying intensities the qualities that readers, critics, and fellow poets have admired about Phan Nhiên Hạo’s work: his conversational ease and stripped down idiom in Vietnamese; his spare, matter-of-fact description of physical and emotional geographies; the way his seemingly smooth surfaces are punctured by arresting images, surprising phrases, and shocks of insight; the spectral presence of war and exile; his faithful acts of excavating buried histories and mourning the unmourned; the bluesy, melancholic, and ironic consciousness at the center and circumference of his complex and moving music. Unpublished and unpublishable in Vietnam, Phan Nhiên Hạo’s poetry circulates underground, on-line, and overseas. Fortunately, for English readers, his work is available in the excellent translations by Linh Dinh collected in Night, Fish and Charlie Parker (2006). I try my hand at translation here, out of a creative and collaborative desire to respond to the call of the poems themselves, which appear in English for the first time. I hope this small clutch of poems by Phan Nhiên Hạo will do justice to his necessary poetry–or at the very least shine a spotlight on an unnecessarily neglected poet.

Last weekend, J and I drove to Mt. Horub, where we walked around the sad and sleepy town, greeted by CLOSED and FOR RENT signs, poking our heads into the remaining thrift and antique shops still open. In one of the antique malls, I stumbled upon this striking picture of Mockingbirds (Mimus polygottos) defending their nest from an intruding rattlesnake (Crotalus horridus) and immediately snatched it up with my claws. For only $1.80, it was a steal.

When I went up to the shop owner to pay for it, we both marveled at the print for a moment. Drawn to the Mockingbirds, he didn’t see the concealed rattlesnake at first, as I hadn’t either upon my first glance, but was startled too when I pointed him to the center and the snake jumped out at him.

Returning home, I discovered that the picture was a reproduction of a print by John James Audubon originally painted around 1825, eventually included in his famous Birds of America as No. 6, Plate XXI (21), Mocking Bird. According to this website, from which these images have been taken, the painting excited much criticism and controversy because of Audubon’s inaccurate depiction of a rattlesnake in a tree. Still, whatever its scientific shortcomings, the image is one of Audubon’s most dramatic depictions.

Those yellow flowers on the twining vine are Florida Jessamine Gelsemium Nitidum. Poor man’s rope, or yellow jasmin. High climbing vines; leaves simple, opposite, and lanceolate, with lustrous, dark green surface; flower clusters bright yellow, fragrant, tubular blossoms, with flared petals. In winter blooming send a sweet fragrant scent. Sometimes mistaken for honeysuckle, all the parts of this plant are extremely poisonous.

Growing up, my sister and I used to take piano lessons from this sweet old lady named Hazel Chapman. She was born in 1903 and, as she claimed, a distant relative of Johny Appleseed. I have forgotten how to play piano altogether, except for a few of the most simple tunes like Yankee Doodle Dandy, but what I remember most of those piano lessons, apart from Hazel’s wondrous stories of traveling across America in an R.V. with her late husband or the day she first saw an automobile drive down the dirt road by her country house and with her siblings each bent down on their knees to smell the traces of the car, what I remember most was sitting in the armchair by the window while my sister received her lesson and quietly flipping through page after bright page of Hazel’s Birds of America. Did I see the Mockingbird? Did I catch the rattlesnake?

The only time I’ve seen a Mockingbird in real life was in Australia. They seemed a nuisance to everybody else, probably akin to the feeling people here have towards crows, starlings, and blue jays, but I was enamored by them. They had attitude, and I enjoyed greeting them wherever they alighted.

Then yesterday, J and I went to Goodwill and found a cheap, but nice frame for my Mockingbird print. The Mockingbird is the state bird of Florida, which made me extremely happy when I found that out. I’ll make sure to hang this picture somewhere in my new apartment down in Gainesville when I get there this fall.

A bright beautiful morning w/sun shining thru the blinds. E-mail, coffee, and talking with Hans Magnus Enzensberger, a profile in the Guardian. One of “the holy trinity of postwar German literature (alongside Grass and Walser) whose voice has been most audible in public,” Enzensberger is a literary beast if ever there was one; poet, polemicist, essayist, travel writer, contrarian, and omnivore. Enzenberger’s got two new books out, an experimental history of the Weimar Republic, The Silences of Hammerstein (read an excerpt here), and a collection of poems, A History of Clouds: 99 Meditations–both published by the smartly edited and lovingly designed Seagull Books. An excerpt from the article I like, Enzensberger on Enzensberger and poetry:

One of the advantages of poetry is that it is an omnivore. It can absorb anything within the human experience. Sometimes I am confused by why fellow poets limit themselves to one subject: they are astonished when you talk, say, about mathematics within a poem.

On the soundtrack to My Life. Track 29. Maybe 30.

My first post is up at the new diaCRITICS blog:

“Visit Ho Chi Minh City these days and eventually you will bump into Colonel Sanders. In January 2008, burning-out from the grind of four continuous years in grad school and full of unsatiated wanderlust, I happily made a return trip (only my third) to Vietnam with my father. We weren’t in Vietnam just for kicks, however. My sister was getting married back home in the States that coming summer and my Bà nôi in Sài Gòn was getting closer to her death. The trip then was part trans-Pacific shopping spree for the big wedding and part unspoken final farewell to my aging grandmother. So, between helping my father deliberate over which wedding invitation package would give him the most bang for his đồng and watching Korean soaps dubbed into monotone Vietnamese with my grandma in a frigid air-conditioned bedroom, I didn’t have too many opportunities to explore the city on my own. It was like being under voluntary and not-entirely-unhappy house arrest. At least, I thought, it wasn’t the solitary confinement of my dissertation or the gradschool madhouse.

One day, however, I did manage to break free and go into the city. But soon enough, I was completely lost, trapped on some corner of a busy intersection in the congested heart of Saigon. That’s when I saw him…”

[Read the rest here]

Spent a couple hrs last night and this morning with erasure and books. I was furiously erasing my notes, underlining & marginalia from books I don’t plan to take with me to Florida and plan on selling instead. Dropping fuel. Lightening the load. Downsizing my library. It’s no coincidence that most of these books are academic criticism and lit theory. These are books I bought, read, studied, and took notes on/in as a lit studies grad student @UW-Madison. Many of these books and authors remain important to me and have undeniably impacted my thinking. But they bear the stain of my time here, which I nearly let destroy—who would have thought—my love for literature and which in all my erasing I suppose I am trying to forget and leave behind. A violent and ultimately futile act, no doubt. The more I erased, the more the gum piled up in little gummy piles on my kitchen table, the more I had to sweep away with my hand, or blow with my breath off the pages of my forsaken books, the more that fell on the floor to be vacuumed later.

Then I got to one of the books I read as a first year grad student in Jacques Lezra’s terrific Critical Methods seminar, my memories of which still remain untainted, though tinged with the embarrassment of taking an Incomplete in the course (“a badge of honor,” Jacques called it) because, as I rationalized it, I was so thoroughly absorbed in writing and wanting to write something consequential on the place of hospitality in Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx, which was the book I picked up and began erasing this morning, but with an elegiac feeling in me now, reading erasing and reading erasing the graphite evidence of my intellectual curiosity and active engagement with the book in question, talisman in which, there on page 65, I see that I have circled “infinite promise” and “just opening” in an extended period of Derrida’s in which he offers this poetic meditation on spectrality as hospitality:

Awaiting without horizon of the wait, awaiting what one does not yet expect yet or any longer, hospitality without reserve, welcoming salutation accorded in advance to the absolute surprise of the arrivant from whom or from which one will not ask anything in return and who or which will not be asked to commit to the domestic contracts of any welcoming power (family, State, nation, territory, native soil or blood, language, culture in general, even humanity), just opening which renounces any right to property, any right in general, messianic opening to what is coming, that is, to the event as the foreigner itself, to her or to him for whom one must leave an empty place, always, in memory of the hope—and this is the very place of spectrality.

Some things you can’t erase, or won’t—in memory of that hope.