Tales from the Bedroom

Good morning everyone,

Any exciting stories over the holiday weekend? I slept most of mine away, which is a tendency I have to get over sometime soon. I look forward to extra time off – I could be doing this rather than working! – when, in realty, my day is just getting started at about the time I’d normally be off work. How slothful does that sound?

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No poetry, and I’m starting to get sad about it. I meant to get an ink cartridge yesterday, but I was sidetracked by another event: our bed sheet ripped (and not from hanky panky. My wife, apparently, sleeps like an ocean of angry waves). So, in trying to remember what thread count and color of sheets to get, I forgot to look at what type of cartridge my vintage printer required. I’m just going to start pulling the poems up and manually rewrite them at this point.

And this whole postage hike thing has soured my feelings toward postage submissions again. 82 cents isn’t a ton of money, but it begins to add up, especially if places require postal notification of poems being accepted elsewhere (as if I have a shot of acceptance in the first place). Maybe just the occasional batch sent out to the old guard of poetry magazines, but there are numerous print mags that I’d love to get into that only take postage subs. Then again, there are increasing amounts that are happy with email subs.

I am thinking that, after I’m finished with Palsy Aria, I’m going to attempt more minimal / bare poems. Not necessarily in length but in terms of language. I’ve found, recently, that I don’t have the story-telling gift, that I can’t fill silence with rhythmic language or neat-o tales. Rather, I’m better turning language inside-out or brewing some weird syllabic concoctions, so that’s the route I want to explore. I’m thinking the title of my next series will be Psalms for No One, but I’m rather ahead of myself.

At some point, I’ll have to discuss my “poetics,” whatever the heck that means. I’ll begin the discussion when I know something definitive.

As an aside, probably half of Palsy Aria’s poems have been accepted, but I’d like to see that around two-thirds or three-fourths. Is that an acceptable number? I’ve seen many name poets have almost every poem of a collection accepted; conversely, I have several titles on my shelf where only a poem or two from the collection were published. I suppose it all depends on the quality of the work and, more importantly, how well the volume works as a whole.

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As predicted, I am just about finished with A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History, and it’s a book that I highly recommend to anyone interested in grand historical narratives. I don’t know if it’s better than Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel. It accomplishes more insofar as it examines world history through a broader disciplinary lens, but that doesn’t make it any “righter.”

The later sections on language have gotten a bit more abstract and have more pomo-isms that previous sections, but De Landa is also doing a fantastic job of grounding his assertions in a manner that brings everything into perspective. This volume has heightened my interest in Deleuze and Guattari’s work, but I want to read DeLillo, De Landa, Vonnegut, and Baudrillard (his first few economic works) more comprehensively before delving into new authors. Plus, I have two thick volumes on options trading and an absolute monstrosity that is Pynchon waiting as well.

A few additional highlights from A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History:

De Landa believes that capitalistic markets are characterized by the appearance of anti-market entities; otherwise, you simply have centralized marketplaces or meshworks of buyers and sellers with still heterogeneous interests. While he gives the reader a myriad of examples to support this notion, he focuses on the evolution of agriculture in the United States throughout the 18th – 20th centuries. For cities to grow, there must be an intensification of agriculture output (i.e. more surplus to feed an ever-burgeoning non-agrarian class). This intensification of agricultural output necessarily shortens the food chain, thus depleting the soil quickly. However, companies began to introduce manufactured fertilizers to regenerate the soil’s nutrients and, hence, allowed for more sustainable, intensive farming. A byproduct of this revolution was that many companies began to biologically engineer strains of crops to require high doses of certain chemicals only found in fertilizers. So, rather than merely working to replenish the soil’s nutrients, manufacturers have inserted themselves into nature, so to speak, and current crops are now dependent on excessive levels of fertilization in order to grow properly. Stated another way, agriculture cannot exist without industry. While agriculture was one of the last frontiers for anti-market forces, during the 19th and 20th centuries, these forces managed to find a way to dominate this market as well.

There’s a detailed, albeit somewhat familiar, discussion on germs and how modern medicine is essentially an arms race between research scientists and germs to see who can adapt the fastest. Interestingly, the reason germs can adapt so quickly is because their molecular structure allows for the transmission of “stuff” between different germs. Therefore, there’s a huge amount of genetic diversity, which accounts for how germs build up resistances to certain medicines and pass these resistances on so quickly. Since society is becoming less and less genetically diverse as the world becomes one homogenous gene pool, the body, plants, animals, and every other organic aspect of society is more and more susceptible to deadly strains of disease. De Landa offers an example of how, in the 1970s, a strain of bacteria almost destroyed an entire year’s worth of U.S. corn production. Crops are especially susceptible b/c industry has specifically engineered them to be increasingly uniform in their genetic composition.

The language discussion gets bogged down in places by linguistic masturbation (think Chomsky and Saussure) and hashing out differences between creoles, pidgins, minor, and standard languages. De Landa traces out an interesting history of the fall of Latin’s prestige, how Old English came into existence, and the rise and fall of French as the language of rationality and clarity. Obviously, colonization had tons to do with the various ebbs and flows of linguistic history. One particular point that caught my eye is that major languages, contrary to the popular belief in their “fixed” status, are the most susceptible to undercurrents from various pidgins, creoles, and minor languages. He references Deleuze’s belief that New York City is a city without a language b/c of all interaction between major and minor language as well as the dialects and “informal” terms. There are two or three specific mentions of “urban English” (think Ebonics) as a valid pidgin that is currently influencing the composition of the English language. (I believe many of the newest words added to the dictionary had distinct urban roots.) There are also discussions of the various colonial linguistic policies utilized by the Old World during their little global escapades into other lands. I won’t bore you with the finite details.

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I did a quick search to ensure that I was spelling Deleuze and Guattari correctly and came upon an essay entitled Deleuze and Air-Guitarri, which is probably the coolest essay title I’ve seen in awhile.

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That’s about all for now. Please, someone encourage me to begin revising and writing new poetry. I need a poetic kick in the pants.

Cheers,

-j

(Ever since B’s evisceration of the poor Amazon reviewer, I’ve been afraid that my posts are littered with typos. I was worried, but I’ll just let the typos stand as testaments to my fallibility.)