Author: asitoughttobemagazine

ART REVIEW

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Theophilus Brown, untitled work on paper, 1998. Currently on exhibit at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery and previously shown at the Charles Campbell Gallery and the McAllen Art House.

LOOKING AT THEOPHILUS BROWN: WHAT THE OTHER IS NOT

by Esteban Ortega Brown

I most recently had the opportunity of exhibiting Theophilus Brown’s work Five Decades of Rendering the Male Nude in McAllen, Texas and also of attending one his openings in San Francisco, Recent Abstract Collages at the Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery. The works were viewed on two separate weekends, May 8 and June 8, 2009. However, prior to that all his work was viewed at his studio, flipping through the nude figures and alternating abstract collages all in about two one-hour visits, in July and October of the previous year. Rather short visits considering the volume of his work.

The Male Nudes featured at the Art House Gallery on May 8, 2009, consisted of 65 male nude figures captured with ink, acrylic, or charcoal on paper. I felt that the general public in South Texas would find them interesting and challenging. A large exhibit of the nude figure in McAllen has never been done, much less that of the male nude. The artist represented the body language of the male being, body gestures, a glance, or mannerisms. The figurative work itself formed an idealized aesthete presentation of the male figure. The pieces themselves lacked in passionate intimacy and are divested of any sexual content.

The actual Art House gallery is a rather small cottage in a conservative residential neighborhood that has been converted to a gallery out of the owners interest in art. Simple, and nonsensical. The venue was felt appropriate, consistent with the actual nude figures on paper that are placed in a utopian setting, pastel colors, interacting with an austere landscape of light and shadows.

The exhibit itself was curated over a coarse of five decades by the Bay Area public The male nude renderings were in the artist’s possession because those of the female nude had been found more desirable, been purchased, and on display elsewhere. The 65 male renderings had been saved and available for South Texas. As described by Anthony Torres….. as a cultural intervention. Accidental? An accidental encounter in South Texas between conservative males, both straight and gay, and a nude gaze on the wall that was neither. A matrixial of partial subjectivity, the male psychic dissolving, linking with those of others and experiencing the potentiality of maleness.

The viewers at the University of Texas Pan American panel discussion commented on Brown’s sensitivity, and sensibility in how the figures are balance. All attending were artist or art professors and enjoyed the work nicely displayed under the auditorium stage lights. With Theophilus Brown commenting, “ I am still learning how to draw the male nude.” All consistent with the male body language interacting with abstract geometric colors and light in a quest for the aesthetic male.


On June 8 through his Recent Abstract Collages at the Elins Eagles-Smith Gallery in San Francisco he extended and devolved the abstractness of the figurative work into a sensuality of the abstract collages. This work revealed a sensuality that is commonly more figurative. The work is sensual, rich in tactile forms and textures where the nude figurative work is not. One is reminded of childhood figure painting. His abstract collages captures past memories, recognized in accidental placement of skin–like peels of acrylic paint; cut, trim, and circumstance. His abstract shows a sensual tactile sameness, and again embodied through different viewers. The abstract work on the wall offer us a grid free of borders, space, and time; resting and linking their sensuality.

Neither the figurative work nor the abstract work however exists without the other. Each work is what the other is not. The collage work is sensual where the figurative work is not. Both works complement each other and create a different plane of intimacy, removed from either canvas. In doing so, what is left is eternal in the form of a separate intimacy and outside the canvas or figure, an impersonal intimacy for all to share.

His older figurative work reminds us of the present collages, and the new collages reminding of the past figurative work. It is a whole. Theophilus Brown’s work presents a whole, a body of work that continues to challenge us. He continues to passionately paint, freely, and provocative. He has the power to make us look. With graciousness and generosity. Thank you.

–Esteban Ortega Brown

EDITOR’S NOTE: Many of the works that were exhibited in Texas are currently being shown through February 27 in Theophilus Brown: Nudes at the Thomas Reynolds Gallery, 2291 Pine Street, San Francisco.


MEMOIR

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ÉXPO-SEE: A MEMOIR

by Mark Van Proyen

In the early months of 1983, artist and curator Rolando Castéllon started Éxpo-See magazine: a small, photocopied, eight-page pamphlet that initially functioned as an advertising instrument for Bannam Place Exhibition Space, the underground gallery he started in 1983. The gallery was literally underground, located in the basement of the building where Don Soker had his above-ground gallery in North Beach.

Rolando had been an associate curator at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, but in 1981 he was “let go” because the museum was becoming part-and-parcel of what was then called “The Manhattanization of San Francisco.” After that point in time, few big shows of local artists were organized, and the situation seemed ripe for some DIY hijinks.

As a project of Bannam Place Exhibition Space, in the summer of 1983 Rolando and I organized a big exhibition of new figurative painting titled “The Impolite Figure,” which showed the work of twenty-eight artists at the Space and the Southern Exposure Gallery. During that year, Éxpo-See reprinted two essays by Michael Peppe (originally published in the LA-based High Performance magazine); the first was titled “Why Performance Art is So Bad” and it was soon followed by “Why Our Art is So Bad.” These essays were and still are nothing less than unalloyed masterpieces of art criticism, the kind of things that nobody writes anymore for fear of what it might mean to tell the truth about the art world of expectations diminished by programmatic sensitivity and nurturant-personhood. Now, what passes for criticism is all “educational explanation,” which is sycophantic cheerleading called by another name. Tedious, very tedious. In a saner world, Michael would be widely recognized as a living cultural treasure, at the very least, a treasure-trove of inspirational quotability: For example, from the former essay we read: “…what can be done about the rest of this halitotic idiom, this Thalidomide Muse with neither eyes nor ears but only a gigantic sucking mouth? Easy. Ignore it. Go to a movie, read a book, attend a concert, dance. Without witless, automatically-clapping audiences like ourselves to feed on, performance art faces the same choice we do: mutate or die.”

Those essays set the tone for the moment when I inherited the pro-bono editorship of Éxpo-See in the Fall of 1983. Rolando was hired as the Director of the Mary Porter Sesnon Gallery at U.C. Santa Cruz, so he had to liquidate some aspects of his underground publishing empire. At that point, we separated from Bannam Place and became a project of the Friends of the Support Services for the Arts, which was an organization affiliated with the South of Market Cultural Center. The new production team consisted of Christa Malone, associate editor, Bill Roarty, production manager, and Armagh Castle, the designer. None of us made any money, but we did pay our writers, which is something of which I am still very proud. Cecile McCann, founding editor and publisher of Artweek, was very supportive with advice, practical information and encouragement. Soon we were publishing three issues a year, and our little pamphlet grew into a small magazine of 48 pages, half of which were devoted to editorial content.

By the spring of 1984, we actually sold enough advertising to cover a press run of 1000 issues. This was funny, because we were publishing commentaries that often attacked the people who bought the ads. One of my own was titled “A Few of My Least Favorite Things,” which emptied both barrels on an art scene that had grown feeble on a diet of self-congratulation, petty cronyism and minimal financial support. This was published in the summer of 1984, at the time when San Francisco hosted the Democratic National Convention at the Moscone Center, an event that was memorable because it occasioned the naming of Geraldine Ferraro as the first woman to be nominated Vice-President of the United States. Those were the years when Punk was just starting to run out of gas, but Mark Pauline’s Survival Research Laboratories events were gaining momentum and recognition, and I still regret that Éxpo-See didn’t do an issue devoted to the work of that group. We had the opportunity.

Looking back, it now seems clear to me that our graphical and editorial tone was influenced by Vail’s punk fanzine, Search and Destroy, which ran from 1977 to 1980 and was very popular with the neo-bohemian gang who were students at the San Francisco Art Institute during those reckless years of wild shows at the Mabuhay Gardens. The first issues of his more widely circulated “Re-Search” books were contemporaneous with Éxpo-See, and they, too, shared the spirit of those times, those being the times of Ronald Reagan, which were times of fear.

The best thing that Éxpo-See did was run long interviews with established artists such as Squeak Carnwath, Joan Brown, Fred Martin, Anna Halprin, Tom Marioni, Wally Hedrick and Bruce Conner. Those interviews had a tell-it-like-it-is candor to them, which is something else that you don’t see in today’s brave-new-world of blind faith in our own self-impersonations. In 1984 and 85, we also launched a collector’s frenzy for the work of an artist named Harry Fritzius, who Christopher French and I mischievously dubbed the “last real beatnik artist.” That was not true, since the Beat movement in San Francisco ended in about 1964, a full decade before Harry came out from New York City. But Harry’s winning personality had a way of hypnotizing people, and for a few years he became the toast of the town. Harry was a an old friend of San Francisco Chronicle art critic Thomas Albright (who died in 1984), and he lived and worked in an apartment on 19th avenue making paintings and collage objects that evoked a mythopoetic shadow world. Harry died in 1988, a self-destructive victim of his own sudden success.

During those early years, Tony Reveaux was writing some very searching essays on technological innovation in the visual arts, so we invited him to guest edit an issue on art and technology in the Fall of 1985. That issue featured interviews with Antenna Theatre founder Chris Hardman and sound sculptor Bill Fontana, and their remarks proved to be prophetic of the wave of technologically-oriented art that would emerge in northern California a decade later. But that prophesy also signaled our demise, because we couldn’t interface with computer-driven changes in printing procedure, simply because none of us could afford a computer. After finishing our fourteenth issue, we bagged the whole thing in 1987, in large part because we were tired of working for free.

###

The age of art is over. Due to the democratization of education, the cheapness and availability of art technology, the increase in leisure time, the spread of literacy, the expansion of mass communication, the growth of population and the decentralization of art culture away from strictly urban areas, it is now possible for everyone to be an artist.
— Michael Peppe

Mark Van Proyen was editor of Éxpo-See magazine from 1983 to 1987. He is now Associate Professor of Art History, Painting and Digital Media at the San Francisco Art Institute, Contributing Editor and Columnist for Artweek and Northern California Corresponding Editor for Art in America.

This piece was originally published in Stretcher.

Beyond Quirky Chic: A Review of Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel

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Beyond Quirky Chic: A Review of Chris Adrian’s A Better Angel

by Raul Clement


Let’s start with the obvious. Chris Adrian writes autobiographically. Or maybe that’s not so obvious—not obvious at all if you aren’t familiar with his biography.  The stories in A Better Angel, his first fiction collection and third book overall, feature murderous children and out-of-body experiences, drug-addicted doctors and, yes, angels. Not seemingly the stuff of autobiography.

But read some press on Adrian and it’s clear where his material comes from. A pediatrician and former seminary student, his second novel and best book to date, The Children’s Hospital, is about a biblical flood that consumes the earth, leaving only a children’s hospital to float, ark-like, on the seven-mile-deep waters.  Another big theme is loss and grief, and so it’s unsurprising to learn that his brother was killed in an automobile accident. In fact, several of the stories in the collection feature dead or dying relatives.

Adrian writes in a style I would call magical realism, though I can imagine the stories in this collection being described as fabulist, allegorical, and occasionally even sci-fi. Whatever you want to call it, the way a standard Adrian story works is this: the magical, supernatural, divine or surreal sit squarely on top of the real, buoying it and giving it a kind of mythical importance. The effect is pretty darn cool, honestly. Seductive.

But is that always a good thing? Sometimes this technique can feel like a crutch, something to truss up an otherwise psychologically unconvincing story. “The Vision of Peter Damien” describes a plague in 19th-century village. The character Peter Damien contracts a sickness that makes him hallucinate falling people, a pair of silver towers, birds racing through the sky. The other children in the village begin to have similar hallucinations. Gradually, it emerges that the towers are the Twin Towers, and the birds the two planes that crashed into them. There is a further 9/11 allusion in the fact that Peter’s brother, Tercin, ends up hiding in a cave.  It’s pretty clear what Adrian wants us to get out of this: 9/11 was a sickness, but one that may prove uniting and redemptive. Adrian is big on the redemptiveness of suffering.

This is not and of itself an uninteresting suggestion—though I do think it forces a positive meaning on an event that, regardless of your interpretation of world politics, has none. But the main problem is that the characters are mere vehicles for the theme. Why is the story set in a 19th-century village?  Why is it Peter who is first blessed or cursed with the vision? If there was something unique about him—some special sensitivity—it might make sense. But he seems like an ordinary little boy. And why does Tercin, though admittedly a tormenter  of his brother, play the role of Bin Laden? There is no suggestion that he precipitated the sickness. Due to these unanswered questions, this story doesn’t work as allegory, and yet it doesn’t present enough depth of character for us to want to read it otherwise.

At other times, Adrian falls in love with his own quirky conceits, language, and images, becoming just another contemporary writer of a style you might call quirky chic. If you’ve read journals like McSweeney’s or seen any recent “indie” romantic comedies—Juno, Little Miss Sunshine, Away We Go (the latter written by McSweeney’s founder Dave Eggers)—you’ll know what I mean. These works make a fetish of the odd detail—the hamburger phone Juno uses, the bizarrely-themed restaurants in the works of George Saunders—sometimes at the expense of real character work. Again, “The Vision of Peter Damien” is a perfect example of this—perhaps all the more egregious an offender because the 19th-century setting allows Adrian more wiggle room. And so within the first paragraph we have “the pearly botch,” “the oak gall,” and “the yellow flux.” Now, no doubt there were diseases with these names (it’s not hard to guess that “oak gall” is poison oak), but one example would have sufficed.

These details are supposed to make the story more believable—because as every good liar knows, it’s the unexpected that convinces—but in reality they do the opposite. They are either too outlandish to be believable or draw too much attention to themselves, and once having done so, don’t bear up to our scrutiny.  Or they just feel arbitrary. Should I care that a character always wears a particular quirky article of clothing or would my time be better spent learning how she feels about her father’s death? In the case of “The Vision of Peter Damien” Adrian is trying so hard to prove that he knows what he’s talking about that, paradoxically, we end up less convinced. And other stories, like “Stab”—about a Siamese twin grieving for his other half by murdering neighborhood animals—go so far over the top that we lack an empathetic reference point.

Here’s a typical Adrian story, and given the fact that it’s the title story, one might think that Adrian or his publishers thought it was one of the better one’s in the collection: a drug-addicted pediatrician reluctantly returns home to take care of his father.  Since childhood, he has been visited by a harpy-like angel, who has tells him he “will be great and do great things.” So far, he has not done so: he is incompetent as a doctor, having cheated his way through medical school, and has since coasted by in the relatively undemanding world of family care.  Now that his father is dying, the angel’s injunctions take on a more specific theme: he must cure his father and all his sins will be absolved.  “Just put out your hand,” the angel tells him.  “Touch him and make him well.”   The laying-on-of-hands symbolism should be obvious. Nor is it the first time he’s used it. In The Children’s Hospital, the female protagonist, a semi-incompetent intern, is given the ability to cure all the children in the ward simply by touching them.

But Adrian’s miracles are complicated, ambiguous. In The Children’s Hospital, the cure is only temporary, a postponement of Judgment Day. And in “A Better Angel” there is no miracle at all. The father dies; the son does not save him. Or maybe this a miracle, after all. The father has been released from his misery, with his estranged son there to comfort him in his last minutes. That the son falls asleep with his hand on his father’s shoulder and his head on his chest—and that it is after this that he wakes up and finds his father dead—suggests that death was the cure.  And maybe this small redemption is miracle enough.

Back to the angel, though. What does she—for it is female, though it can take on any form—represent? Is she the hallucination of a drug addict in withdrawal (she grows calmer and less demanding when he self-medicates)? But if so, why has he seen her since childhood? Is this merely a case study of a lifelong schizophrenic?  Is she his conscience made visible? Or is she a literal agent of God come to command him? Or is she just a convenient literary symbol for things like duty, kindness, charity, and redemption?

To Adrian’s credit, he never answers these questions. But at the same time, I have a hard time deciding whether all this scaffolding is richly ambiguous, in the way good literature should be, or just distracting. Because the thing is, the character in “A Better Angel” never really emerges, for all the originality of his conception.  Does he want atonement? Does he even care? Or does he refuse it because he’s too afraid? The latter is closest, I think…but why? What is the root of this fear? Instead of delving into the narrator’s head, all his problems are externalized in the form of this angel—who, even if she is a product of his subconscious, still seems a little too forceful a way of presenting the same.  As a reader there’s a joy in discovering— through subtext, through telling contradiction, and through concrete action—the secret part of a character, the part that he doesn’t even fully admit to himself. Like dream sequences, the angel in this story deprives the reader of a lot of that joy.

And I think this goes to the heart of my problems with this collection—inventive, seductive, thrilling and just downright bad-ass as it sometimes is. It’s rhetorical technique—this mashing together of the everyday and the divine, most notably the worlds of medicine and childhood and loss against the worlds of angels and prophecy—distances us when it should draw us closer. I don’t think this is necessarily a mistake on Adrian’s part—in fact, it feels pretty intentional—but it does seem like Adrian doesn’t trust his base material enough to let it be.  If he adds angels—and when I say angels, I mean any of the supernatural or surreal elements of this collection—then it will be important. Never mind the fact that a story about a doctor helpless to save his father, and written by someone with intimate medical knowledge, carries its own interest. In the world of quirky chic this is not enough.

I am probably being a bit unfair lumping Adrian’s writing in with the rest of the quirky chic. The best Adrian stories use their techniques to explore things they could not otherwise. My personal favorite in this collection is “The Sum of Our Parts.” In it, a suicide victim is maintained on life support in a hospital. Her spirit hovers in a kind of limbo, unable to leave the hospital until her body dies. She floats from room to room and in this out-of-body state discovers a new capacity to read minds. She is privy to the secret lives of doctors—their thoughts about each other, their lusts and petty grudges—as they go about their rounds. The inner workings of a hospital are described in fascinating, authoritative detail while the story is moved forward by Beatrice’s ghostly wanderings. The title, at first just a reference to  Beatrice’s multiple organ transplants, takes on a richly layered meaning as we come to understand how humans as a whole are more than the sum of our parts—all of our actions spread out in a web of consequence not unlike the invisible net that pulls Beatrice back whenever she tries to leave the hospital.  Each person is an organ, humanity a body. Adrian might have arrived at this idea through a simpler omniscient story about the people in a hospital ward, but in the creation of Beatrice—a literalization of the omniscient narrator, disembodied, outside the action, able to go anywhere—he has given himself justification for the technique and added levels of metaphor that wouldn’t exist otherwise. The story was written this way because it had to be; it was the only way of saying what Adrian wanted to say. That is not true of all the stories in this collection.

For better or worse, Chris Adrian is a writer of high moral seriousness: even when the conceit overwhelms a story’s effect, his aims are large. He is concerned with no less weighty subjects than grief, loss, redemption, and the apparition of the divine.  Maybe to tackle those subjects, a bold, elevating technique is what’s required. At their very best, Adrian’s stories allow us to hover, angel-like, above the action, observing it all with the cruel, tender detachment of God.

And that in itself is pretty divine.


Raul Clement is a fiction writer, musician, and poet living in Greensboro, NC. His work has appeared in various literary journals.

Sunday Poetry Series Presents: Raul Clement

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AFFLICTED
by Raul Clement

Doxycycline, Ciprofloxacin, Ranitidine—
the names remind me
of distant stars whose light
I will never see
or else just what they are,
wishes instead of cures.

The doctor sticks a gloved finger
up my ass with one quick
motion. Not quick enough.
It is cold with jelly,
like the finger of an alien,
an inhabitant of Ranitidine.

No blood in my stool.
Bilurubin normal, no jaundice.
No hypoglycemia, lime tater negative.
Chest X-rays, brain MRIs, EKGs.
Blood pressure good, temperature 96.8,
nothing to worry about.

No AIDS, no syphilis, no clap.

I drink the contrast dye.
It tastes like something I can’t remember,
something from elementary school,
the smell of new blacktop against
my bloody face
and the laughter of Leah German,
or any other girl I hoped
would love me.

I lie still until the machine beeps—
nothing like a tolling bell,
so I do not ask
for whom?—
and then I turn on my side.
Ten more minutes and I’m done,
the nurse says.

All around me, the machine
buzzes and hums like an alien
landing pod.


Raul Clement is a fiction writer, poet, and musician living in Greensboro, NC. His work has appeared in various literary journals. The above poem was originally published in Coe Review and is reprinted here by permission of the author.

Sunday Poetry Series

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A Hot Minute

by Okla Elliott

-for S.P.

What a strange phrase.
We’ll stop by the bar for a hot minute, you say, or:
Talk with me for a hot minute.
As if what I had to say was so burning
a minute’s explosion would release it all.
Or that the seats at our favorite bar were heated
beyond comfort, guaranteeing a brief stop,
not an elongating evening with a friend’s
friends, whom we can’t stand.
As if time itself suffered a feverish longing.
Or after the bar—as the stop signs
blur by like ambulances—
and I’m facedown on your front lawn,
my eyelids flame-red membranes,
you lean over me, coaxing,
and I paw at your breasts like a blinded bear.


[This poem originally appeared in the International Poetry Review]

Sunday Poetry Series Presents: Andrea Scarpino

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HOVER

by Andrea Scarpino


The research shows that the self can be detached from the body and can live a phantom existence on its own, as in an out-of-body experience, or it can be felt outside of personal space, as in a sense of a presence.

~ Dr. Peter Brugger, quoted in The New York Times


Weeks before you died, you told me you’d been

in the hospital bed when you felt your body rise,

hover near the ceiling lights, heard your name called

again and again. Probably the doctors, I said,

arranged your flowers, get well cards. You shook

your head. You were a scientist, taught me to believe

what could be seen through a microscope lens,

truth in beveled glass. Next day, you seized again.

They’re saying Pasquale, you said as the paramedics

arrived, carried you back to the hospital.

You never spoke your full name, called yourself Pat

instead. I played the scientist, blamed your medication,

seizures, hearing aids. What else could I believe?

Truth like beveled glass: for weeks before you died,

your name was called, your body pulled away.


Andrea Scarpino is the author of the chapbook The Grove Behind (Finishing Line Press). She received an MFA in Creative Writing from The Ohio State University, has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and is a longtime activist. Her current interests include sijo (an ancient Korean poetic form), elegy, the intersections of art and politics, and the politics of clean water. She currently teaches with the Union Institute and University’s Cohort Ph.D. program in Interdisciplinary Studies and is the West Coast Correspondent for the blog Planet of the Blind. The above poem originally appeared in Prairie Schooner and is included Scarpino’s chapbook, The Grove Behind. It is reprinted here by permission of the author.

SATURDAY POETRY SERIES PRESENTS: COMMERCIALS?

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Editor’s Note: I will neither say that poetry is a dead nor a dying art. Okay, if you are a dedicated reader of this Saturday Poetry Series, you are able to quote me as saying that today’s is a world in which poetry is nearly as much of a dead language as Latin. Nearly.

There was once a time when poets were revered. Today poets have day jobs. When I read the rich history of poetry in this world, when I hear of the great Ovid, of Shakespeare, of Homer, I wonder what happened? What did Alan Ginsberg do right that the rest of us are doing wrong? How is is that in my life’s fairytale, once upon a time there was a famous poet, and now there is none? Shel Silverstein and Dr. Seuss aside, save Maya Angelou, what average American reads poetry at all, let alone knows a living, writing poet by name?

What, then, can be done to make poetry viable in the 21st century? What can we learn from other arts that now flourish? Like so much in today’s America, perhaps the answer lies with commercialization.

I make this statement in the wake of Okla Elliot’s profound article, Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy. The essence of Elliot’s article is that we as consumers can make the world a place we want to live in by speaking in the only language that today’s America understands: money. As consumers, we tell companies that we support or oppose their practices by buying or not buying their products. So if consumerism is our true democracy, if our voices will be heard only in dollars, how does poetry flourish in today’s market?

Levi’s might have an answer for us. With their most recent “Go Forth” campaign, Levi’s is using the poetry of Walt Whitman to sell their product. In its “America” ad, a recording of what some believe to be Whitman’s own voice bellows, reading an excerpt from his poem America, as an artsy black and white film portrays a vision of today’s America. In its “O Pioneers!” ad, a narrator reads an excerpt from Whitman’s poem Pioneers! O Pioneers! (from his famous work, Leaves of Grass), while yet another artsy film shows us images of today’s pioneers – the youth of this country. And while Levi’s jeans are (of course) featured throughout both commercials, in both ads neither the “Go Forth” campaign phrase nor the Levi’s logo are prominently featured until the end, until the art has been given its due spotlight.

I must say, I love poetry getting exposure, in any form. And in both ads I appreciate that the Levis logo flashes only at the end – that the poem is not itself commercialized. I appreciate that art is given its due, that poetry is at the core of this commercial campaign, and that in being used in such a way it is not, in my opinion, being cheapened. At least it is not being cheapened any more than is inherently required for a piece of art to be used to sell a product. And, perhaps most importantly, this campaign is spreading the poetry of Walt Whitman to a whole new generation, a generation which otherwise may never have known him.

I am not saying that the commercialization of poetry is ideal or that in a Utopian society poetry would have to “sell out” to be beloved. I am saying that in a world where money talks, and is often all that can be heard, perhaps we as artists have to adapt and commercialize poetry if we want it to proliferate like any other money-fueled art. Bravo to Levi’s for sharing Walt Whitman with today’s youth. I hope they’re listening.

“Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy” By Okla Elliott

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Living in the Dollar-Amount Democracy

by Okla Elliott

 

Depending on how cynical we are, we will admit that the US government and American culture as a whole are either mostly or entirely controlled by the heavy influence of corporations. It is no secret that we live in a market economy, and that, as the saying goes, money talks. Considering some alternatives, this is a state of affairs I can begrudgingly support—though, as a so-called ‘market socialist’ or ‘democratic socialist’ (depending on how you define those terms), I believe our system needs massive overhauling. But, in the way of -isms, I prefer (the possibilities of) our form of capitalism to outright fascism or monarchism or any form of communism that has thus far existed, and our multicultural democracy has much praiseworthy about it. I do not, however, mean to suggest that all is well in the state of the republic—not by a far, muffled cry. We have all heard of the dozens of outrages that occur monthly or weekly, to say nothing of the daily atrocities of which we never hear. What I do mean is that there’s hope in America, where there might be none in another society with a different social structure. As America becomes ever more centered around businesses, the methods of voicing our concerns change. It is no longer sufficient just to vote politically. Today, financial votes are the votes that matter most.

Noam Chomsky, Ralph Nader, and Gore Vidal, among others, have pointed out that there is one party in American politics, the Big Business Party. Corporate interests donate huge sums of money to aid politicians in running for office. Individuals donate money as well, but there is one major difference. Individuals tend to donate to one candidate, while corporations (via PACs, lobbyists, bundlers, etc) make it a habit to donate to both candidates. Why would they do such a thing? We’re supposed to donate money to the candidate we want to win, right? Corporations don’t care who wins so long as the winning candidate owes them a favor; therefore they make both candidates indebted to them (notice, for example, how much Goldman Sachs money went to Obama and McCain in 2008; Obama got much more than McCain, since anyone with half a brainstem and one functioning eyeball knew a Democrat was a shoe-in in ’08, but they gave McCain money too, for just in case). The moral rottenness of this and the question of whether this should even be legal are topics for another day. All we’re currently concerned with is the fact that money plays a major role in the decisions made by our government officials (no matter which party they belong to), and that our government is not entirely (at all?) on the side of small businesses or the common citizenry.

So, why did I say there was hope in such a bleak state of affairs? Because we are free to purchase—and more importantly, free not to purchase—as our hearts and consciences dictate. How many people remember when the supermarkets, which are certainly major corporations, had only one shelf dedicated to organically grown foods? Now there are entire aisles, sometimes multiple aisles, populated with soymilk, vegan cheeses, organic vegetables, and countless other such products. It is not due to kindness and a sense of moral rightness that these corporations have begun harming fewer animals and using fewer toxins in their products (though many well-known problems exist still in the production practices, but every improvement is exactly that, an improvement). These corporations were taught, due to the consistent purchase of such items, that these products would sell. I ask myself: Could we someday see collections of poetry or short stories in the checkout lane? Could we have truly organic foods there? Or clothing produced by workers in third-world countries whose rights were protected just as those of the first-world are?

My point is not that these particular products are somehow better than others (though I personally believe quite strongly that they are), but rather that an engaged demand-side economics can work. Every purchase is a total affirmation of the product purchased. By purchasing any product we are saying that we agree with the methods of production, storage, transport, handling, and sale. Though I harbor hopes that my readers share certain concerns with me, it is ultimately immaterial to my argument what interests they may have. So long as they understand that every purchase is a vote of approval. By purchasing any product ranging from pornographic magazines to McDonald’s burgers to foot powder to books of poetry, the purchaser is saying—and in a language much stronger than words—that she supports the product’s continued production and distribution in the exact ways that product is being produced and distributed. Companies, individual humans, chimpanzees, dogs, and pretty much every organism in existence will be more likely to continue a behavior that is rewarded and will be less likely to continue behavior that is reprimanded. The only reward a purchaser can give manufacturers is a purchase, and the only reprimand—a refusal to buy.

In a (largely) capitalist state like the US, our votes, like everything else, cost money. The aforementioned purchasers of organically grown foods had to pay outrageous prices for these products at first. Now the prices are coming down to a more reasonable level because more people are purchasing them, and it is therefore cost effective to sell more at a lower price. This is also true of hybrid cars, which we see more of every day. The purchase of hybrid cars is more politically charged than ever, considering the current problems in the Middle East. Is it not possible that by reducing our dependency on fossil fuels that we could avoid situations such as the current “war” on terrorism, our continued support of Middle-Eastern military groups, and the eventual need to battle these groups armed with US weapons?

If at first we have to pay extra for a product we believe in, we simply have to tell ourselves that the extra sum is the cost of our vote on this matter. If shopping at a locally owned store or at a farmer’s market is slightly more expensive, or if a small press novel is more expensive than a harlequin romance, then that difference is the cost of the vote. If we want the arts to flourish, then we must support them in the only way our society recognizes, with money. Small presses, art galleries, community theatres, and locally owned businesses of every stripe go under every day in America, and usually not for lack of verbal cheerleading. There are thousands of people who bemoan that loss, but there are too few supporters and too many opportunists who want support without giving any in return. Unless we want to see the total homogenization and commercialization of our culture, then we must, to use the cliché, put our money where our mouths are.

How many nights have I listened as friends and I racked up sizable bar tabs while discussing the sad state of literature or community theatre or what-have-you, and then thought at the end of the night that we could have each subscribed to a literary journal (or three) with the money we’d wasted? Or donated the money to Oxfam? Or to progressive candidates?

Here is an incomplete list of ways we can make our money work for progress in the US and the world:

1)      Invest in green companies.

2)      Buy locally grown food as often as possible, preferably from small farmers.

3)      Refuse to shop at chain stores or to eat at chain restaurants.

4)      Donate to members of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, which is where the small handful of actually progressive Democrats group together in the House and Senate.

5)      Donate to humanitarian organizations, of which there are many reliable ones, and of which many suffer from constant need of donations.

I don’t mean to suggest that there aren’t other ways to effect change—e.g., volunteering time for campaigns or at soup kitchens or with Habitat for Humanity, and of course voting is essential, etc—but I am saying that in the final analysis, money matters so much in every action we take in the current system we have. There is no utility in pretending we don’t live in the society we do. We live in a dollar-amount democracy. We have a freedom and a power that are awesome, but that freedom and power imply a responsibility as well. Our political votes are one way to exercise our will as citizens upon our society, but more powerful, I believe, are our financial votes.

 

[The above piece originally appeared in a different form in Main Street Rag.]

Practical Food for a Practical Future: A Review of Michael M. Bell’s “Farming For Us All.”

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine

by Liam Hysjulien

Last year Wes Jackson and Wendell Berry—two eminent figures within the environmental and sustainable agricultural movement—wrote that “our present ways of agriculture are not sustainable, and so our food supply is not sustainable.” If these authors’ predictions are even remotely correct, the future of food systems in this country is dire. In its current state, the usage of Big Ag practices—heavy reliance on petroleum-based machines, usage of genetically modified organisms (GMOs), accruement of large debt, and the declining median-age of farmers—puts our food systems in a dangerous position. It is easy, when talking to people about a possible future food crisis, to sound overly dramatic about the situation. Still, the weight of current evidence—the continuous erosion of topsoil (a resource as valuable and scarce as potable water), the declining incomes of small farms, and the ever-increasing global population—makes it hard to ignore the warning signs. With a growing awareness towards food production in this country, it seems as if many people are no longer ascribing to a dated Green Revolution adage:  Whatever you want to eat will be available always.

In Michael M. Bell’s book “Farming For Us All”, themes of big agriculture, loss of land, and costs of farming are not merely explored, but seamlessly woven into a story of dedication, community, and the love of farming and the land. Bell orients his book around a series of interviews of members of the sustainable farming organization, Practical Farmers of Iowa (PFI). In using the stories and responses of the PFI members, Bell explores how changes in farming practices have moved agriculture away from the romantic (often by people who don’t farm themselves) image of pastoral, green landscapes into a new frontier of monitoring price commodities, heavy machinery, and aggressive undercutting of your neighbor’s acres. It is through the usage of personal narratives that Bell arrives at the crux of his argument: the importance and uniqueness of sustainable farming lies in its dedication towards community and dialogue. The reality of contemporary farming is that community relationships have largely been replaced by the avaricious nature of “treadmill of production” farming.  It is within Bell’s book that we see how members of the PFI use the organization as a means of engaging in dialogues with others and strengthening a sense of self.   Instead of strictly seeing farming within economic terms, PFI members have a more holistic approach towards the idea and practice of farming. For these farmers, being a member of PFI is a process of opening oneself up to feedback, advice and self-reflection. It is through this process that new practices emerge, entrenched ideas become challenged, and cultural ties become forged. It is this need for community that seems to resonate so strongly with our—to use the Weberian term—Protestant Work Ethic. If we are, as some political polls would lead you to believe, moving towards a Libertarian temperament in this country, farming would seem to epitomize those values.  Even so, there is something woefully misleading in idolizing the isolated, rugged individual. We, as a nation, are more than a collection of fearful and jealous capitalists. No money, or land, or crops can fully compete with the need for fellowship, for community, for the importance of dialogue with each other.

It is in this way that Bell sees farming as being a practice that we all can understand. As we seem to be transitioning into a new era of farming, it will become increasingly likely that sustainable farming, community supported agriculture (CSA), and buying direct from the farmer, will become more prevalent.  Unless all predictions are incorrect, the sun seems to be setting on the industrial farming model.  While the future of food and farming in America is impossible to fully predict, it seems that our understanding of food will continue to grow.  In the future, people won’t wander aimlessly through the grocery aisles, being blissfully unaware of where this food came from, how it was grown, and the person who grew it.

Michael Bell’s book offers us insight into both the world and future of sustainable farming. We see how sustainable farming has helped farmers traverse the difficult path from industrial farming into new identities, relationships and perspectives.  Hopefully the seemingly endless year of 2009 will turn out to have helped usher in a new era of reflection in this country.  Instead of valuing individuals who cut tracts of derivatives into complex, meaningless formulas, our support will shift towards the individuals who engage in tangibles—the cutting of wheat, feeding of cattle, the rising of the sun, the feeding of people, the tending of the earth, the growing of knowledge, identities and food. There is a naiveté in this thinking, but sometimes that’s what all of us need.

To learn more about the Practical Farmers of Iowa, visit their website at: http://www.practicalfarmers.org/


Liam Hysjulien is a graduate student in sociology at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville.  His areas of study are Food Systems Theory, food sustainability, food policies, and urban agricultural projects.

Notes on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: Part 1

Posted on by asitoughttobemagazine


BOOK REVIEW by Christopher Higgs

(All references are to the First Picador Edition, 2009, trans. Natasha Wimmer)

[Note: This massive book is separated into five parts—not chapters, because, as I understand it, Bolaño intended for them to be published individually as separate books.  My plan is to unpack one part per month here at AIOTB, starting right now.  You will notice that my presentation style is probably more free-form than a traditional review or critique, but will hopefully incorporate both of those elements.]

Part I: The Part About The Critics

Let me begin by establishing some context.  First, I must admit I have until now avoided Bolaño’s work with ferocity because I am skeptical of trends—and Roberto Bolaño is the epitome of literary trendiness.  Critic after critic hails him as the savior of literature.  One looks left, one looks right, and all one sees is a wash of superlatives: brilliant, genius, spellbinder, etc.

“Oh my god, have you read The Savage Detectives?  Oh my god it’s the greatest book ever written!”

“Oh my god, have you read 2666?  Oh my god, it’s the greatest book ever written!”

In fact, to my knowledge no critic has ever said anything negative about Bolaño’s work in any venue, be it digital, print, or conversation.  I’m only halfway kidding, but even so I find the perceived level of unanimity seriously uncomfortable.  It puts me in the position of approaching his work ready – no, eager! – to be the boy who shouts “The emperor has no clothes!”  Obviously, this isn’t the ideal vantage point from which to begin reading a book.

Couple that with my personal affinity for what Gary Lutz calls “a page hugger” versus “a page turner,” which I take to mean a novel that values sentences over stories, and all of a sudden the cards begin to stack up against me reacting positively to 2666.  Yes, I am an aesthete.  (It always feels good to get that out in the open asap so there’ll be no misunderstandings.)  I read for the pleasure of words and word arrangement rather than the pleasure of a good yarn or believable characters.  I read for beauty and spectacle rather than meanings and messages.

With that said, my initial response to 2666 was negative because it seems to work from the opposite assumption: it seems more concerned with telling a story about characters than celebrating language for the sake of language.  By contrast, to offer an example of what I mean, I’ll use Joyce’s Ulysses—which seems appropriate given the comparisons that adorn the back cover of my edition—where the privileging of words, word play, and word arrangements trumps the conveyance of the story.  You can think of it in terms of Jakobsonian dominance: in 2666, story is dominant, while in Ulysses, language is dominant.  For my time and money, I always tend to enjoy a text that is language dominant rather than story dominant.  (For the record, I fully understand the common argument against my position: a work of literature should strive for a balance of both aspects—a position arising from the tenants of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics—but I humbly disagree with it.)

Thus, I found the first part of 2666 challenging.  Not because of complexity—there is very little, until the final sixty-some pages—but because of the demand it made on my patience.  With less than five noticeable exceptions, boredom was the predominate emotion I felt as I worked my way through the first hundred pages.  Boredom and longing for something interesting to appear.

What you get in those opening hundred pages is the mundane tale of four academics whose field of focus is the work of an obscure German author named Benno von Archimboldi.  Three of the academics are men and the fourth is a woman with whom all three of the men copulate at one time or another.  And that’s pretty much it for the first hundred pages: the boring lives and sexual tensions of four academics.

The exceptions to the banality are:

*This passage on page 9, which is a poetic anomaly – by which I mean that the majority of the first 100 pages fails to sustain this level of defamiliarized imagery:

“It was raining in the quadrangle, and the quadrangular sky looked like a grimace of a robot or a god made in our own likeness. The oblique drops of rain slid down the blades of grass in the park, but it would have no difference if they had slid up. Then the oblique (drops) turned round (drops), swallowed up by the earth underpinning the grass, and the grass and the earth seemed to talk, no, not talk, argue, their comprehensible words like crystallized spiderwebs or the briefest crystallized vomitings, a barely audible rustling, as if instead of drinking tea that afternoon, Norton had drunk a steaming cup of peyote.”

*An engaging five-page sentence that begins at the top of page 18 and ends at the bottom of page 22, which rivals any of those beautiful long sentences in Garcia Marquez’s Autumn of the Patriarch in terms of twists and turns, breath, propulsion, and strangeness.

*This passage on page 40-41, which reminds me of the mathematical, categorical, OCD-like tendencies found in Samuel Beckett’s Watt:

“The first twenty minutes were tragic in tone, with the word ‘fate’ used ten times and the word ‘friendship’ twenty-four times. Liz Norton’s name was spoken fifty times, nine of them in vain. The word ‘Paris’ was said seven times, ‘Madrid’, eight. The word ‘love’ was spoken twice, once by each man. The word ‘horror’ was spoken six times and the word ‘happiness’ once (by Espinoza). The word ‘solution’ was said twelve times. The word ‘solipsism’ once (Pelletier). The word ‘euphemism’ ten times. The word ‘category’, in the singular and plural, nine times. The word ‘structuralism’ once (Pelletier). The term ‘American literature’ three times. The word ‘dinner’ or ‘eating’ or ‘breakfast’ or ‘sandwich’ nineteen times. The word ‘eyes’ or ‘hands’ or ‘hair’ fourteen times. Then the conversation proceeded more smoothly.”

*Also, there’s an artist who chops off his own hand as a conceptual art performance, which I thought was an interesting and provocative idea.

Aside from those four instances, and maybe the insane scene where two of the critics beat the living shit out of a Pakistani taxi driver (pg. 74), the first hundred pages dragged its slow knuckles across my eyes.

But just as I was on the verge of giving up something very cool happened.  Around page 100 three of the critics go to Mexico in search of Archimboldi, which turns everything around and suddenly the book began to sink its teeth into me.  All of a sudden the sentences began to get stranger.  All of a sudden mystery gets introduced.  Where is Archimboldi?  Who is Archimboldi, really?  Who is Amalfitano?  And what is with the overlap between dreams and reality?

Yes, dreams play a significant role throughout part one, but they seem to really begin to ramp up once the characters get to Mexico.  In fact, I’d argue that dreams threaten to completely replace waking life by the end of this section. (see page 135: “After that moment, reality for Pelletier and Espinoza seemed to tear like paper scenery, and when it was stripped away it revealed what was behind it: a smoking landscape, as if someone, an angel, maybe, was tending hundreds of barbeque pits for a crowd of invisible beings.” – now that’s a freaking badass sentence!)  Characters begin to lose their individuality, seem to become other than themselves, begin to make decisions that are (excuse the pun) uncharacteristic.  I even started to wonder if two of the critics were actually just one person all along, a la Tyler Durden.

The more I think about it, the more I wonder what I would notice about dreams if I were to go back and reread part one?

My hands-down favorite bit in part one is the crazy story Amalfitano tells the three critics from page 120-123, which is maybe worth all the time and energy I put into reading those dull preceding pages.  Won’t spoil it for you, but will share the reaction it engenders from the critics, which pretty much sums up why I loved it:

“I don’t understand a word you’ve said,” said Norton.

“Really I’ve just been talking nonsense,” said Amalfitano.

Brilliant!

So for me, the final sixty pages of 2666 save it from a huge ugly thumbs down.  On one level, I find this terribly annoying: the fact that I had to trudge through 100 pages to get to something interesting.  On the other hand, I recognize my role as an impatient reader: some folks might be willing to give a book 100 pages before giving up on it.  Not me.  In my most generous mood I give a book one page.  If I am not hooked by the end of that page then I set the book aside.  More often than not, I only give a book one paragraph.  By that measure, I would have certainly given up on 2666, which would have been too bad because now that I’m about to enter Part Two: The Part About Amalfitano, it’s finally starting to get good.


Christopher Higgs curates the online arts journal Bright Stupid Confetti, and is a proud member of The Marvin K. Mooney Society.  He is currently pursuing his Ph.D. in literature and critical theory at Florida State University, where his research involves theorizing a rhizomatic approach to understanding transnational/transhistorical avant-garde literature.