Check out the inaugural issue of Maggy. Elegantly printed and poetry only. With poems from John Ashbery, Tim Donnelly, Bernadette Mayer, Geoffrey G. O’Brien and Mark Strand among many more. Has my poem “Dress Rehearsal.” Launch party and reading tomorrow night at NYU with wine.
NYU Lillian Vernon House on 58 West Tenth Street, New York, NY
Thus, Jan 21 7pm
My essay “Karaoke Marfa” is out now in print in the new issue of Proximity (issue 5). It’s a sort of hybrid of art criticism and narrative, with photos. It’s not online, but it can be bought from one of these places (scroll to bottom), or online. Table of contents (pdf).
A poem of mine, “The Varieties of Knives“, is now up on Proyekto, which is refashioning itself into an outlet for new writing. The content promises to be anything but same ol’ same ol’. Check it out.
Baudrillard:
“Disneyland is there to conceal the fact that it is the “real” country, [and] all of the “real” America is Disneyland (just a prisons are there to conceal the fact that it is the social in its entirety, in its banal omnipresence, that is carceral). Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, when in fact Los Angeles and the America surrounding it are no longer real, but…[in] simulation. It is no longer a question of a false representation of reality (ideology), but of concealing the fact that the real is no longer real, thus saving the reality principle.”
Such an ostensibly ‘imaginary’ endeavor as Disneyland also is screen for the display of desires too real for other social expression (see also: ”role playing” games). Applying this principle to the “It’s a Small World After All” ride reveals the full-bore projection neo-liberal multiculturalist desire. Here we have all the “peoples” of the world cordonend off and presented via their difference, presented as the signifiers of cultural difference. But one travels from group to group effortlessly, reclined in a gondola. All are under the roof of the same ride, all the world’s difference displayed under a rubric of sameness, displaced by the constant substitution of its own sign. This is what Badiou calls the “pluralism of the shopping mall food court.”
And what kind of dream is this? Does it matter that Walt Disney himself was a virulent anti-communist who collaborated with McCarthy and possibly a Nazi sympathizer? How often does “cultural diversity” instantiate as the fastidious arrangement of difference? We are naive to think that there is anything inherently emancipatory in a cultural logic that demands this sort of parade.
…but unlike her Israeli counterpart, the Palestinian woman must renounce nothing, least of all her headscarf, which marks her as authentic, imbued with real cultural identity (that is, an identity that is not a choice, an identity admired for its very reality though we would wince at adopting it for ourselves), a believer, sitting squarely on the vectors of history, lines of force, subject to these vectors in a way we no longer believe possible for ourselves but fetishize, need. She is a bastion of belief which we outgrown ourselves, though we have not outgrown the need to know that it exists. Faith held in our stead. Last gasp nostalgia for what we believe to be the infinitely receding tides of history, tides which have left us for good. Hammas is accepted as an inevitability, and therefore blameless, the determinant output of factors which can only be added to the equation by Israel and the West, who have the only agency in this model. (It takes a suit to do business after all.) The logic here is something like ‘how can we expect them to do otherwise?’, which is also ‘how much can we really expect from them?’. We are left as either benefactors, or the voice of the voiceless, keeping a vigil of conscience for those whose conscience we will not recognize. And are the larger features of the Palestinian woman proportional relative to any ethnic variation that might be insisted upon? Indeed one can imagine a more truly incisive rendering of the image in which two identical women are backdropped by the flags of opposing nationalities. But the existing model requires this difference, requires this difference to be ethnic in addition to national/political. This is a gaze that requires difference in general, and engenders difference in doing so. We are meant to identify with the one (in her guilt — which, remember, requires conscience — and who, like us, must renounce her nation) and but sympathize with the other, which is to say sympathize with her otherness.
Last year, as if to pass a now obligatory Republican litmus test, John McCain made the fatuous claim what while a prisoner of war in Hanoi, he drew strength from catching wind of a inspiring new Governor of California named Ronald Reagan (who was at the time spending an inordinate amount of time trying to get Herbert Marcuse fired from UCSD). The Republican primary debates and the recent election for RNC Chairman turned into slobbery grovel-fests before the memory of Reagan. Daddy knows best and I love Daddy most.
Recently published excerpts from former VP daughter Elizibeth Cheney’s 1988 college senior thesis (Colorado College) offer another point of triangulation in understanding this oedipal Right. In the thesis, Cheney seems to examine every major war in US history and side with the actions of the then President against any and all Congressional opposition, not so much because the President is right (indeed she becomes an apologist for a dizzying array of Presidential policy from various political orientations), but because he’s President.
This condition of being so desperately ill-suited for fatherlessness perhaps explains the distinctive mid-election reorientation toward Mommy.
Ding Dong Reading Series
Nell Boeschenstein
Daniel Letchworth
Brandon Kreitler
Eric Burg + David Kutz-Marks
Sam Lipsyte
Wednesday, Jan 21
Ding Dong Lounge (106 and Columbus)
8:30-10:30
New York
