Techno-Dread, pt. 2: Thoughts on the Poetic Stylization of Emotion in the Age of Immediacy

Even though I’ve not written about it in awhile, I’ve been thinking a great deal about techno-dread, especially in relation to affect and the emotion that poem try to create in an age of immediacy where representations of unbridled, if uncultivated, emotion seems to surround us.

I’m thinking of the kind of raw, almost kitschy or compulsory emotion of social media, where the representation of emotion, although raw, is put on display in a certain kind of way, an expected way that counters the unfamiliarity of the medium in which it is delivered. Tumblr projects, like Kate Durbin’s Women as Objects, are examples of this odd mixture of form and kitschy sentimentality, which creates performance art out of the raw emotions and images of a specific kind of teenage girl culture emerging through the Tumblr space. To read and see stereotypical teenage emotions re-represented and removed from their previous semi-private space jars us with its mixture of the expected stereotyped teenage emotions undergirding thousands of quasi-unique instantiations of the emotion mediated by an emergent form (we know of them through films, music, and pop culture, but we used to lack a direct connection to these emotions). The form allows the thousand singular examples of prepackaged teenage emotion to jar us by the sheer vastness and scope of their emergence in immediate media, as if looking as a wave as a vast concern of molecules continually exceeding their objects in a tidal regularity.

To see this kind of raw emotion invade poetry is an equally jarring effect of techo-dread and the kind of technological occurrence captured by Durbin’s project. A poem may seek to affect the reader with a range of emotions, but the expectation is that these emotions will be stylized (or else categorized as perjorative low, light, or comic verse). In a poem that gets after a particular emotion, the emotion must be stylized, must be brought up to a level higher than its baseness, must push against the disgusting rawness that may have produced it.

Traditionally speaking, this rawness has not place in a poem, which is supposed to be human but not embarrassingly so, which means the (immediate) emotions we find disturbing or unpalatable get edited out or transfigured into higher, headier versions of their raw brethren.

One product of technology’s immediacy is to create a tension between a particular poet or poem’s need to fit this realm of seemingly heightened emotional awareness (a feeling of admitting that while we feel these base emotions, it is also the duty of poetry to redeem them by morally exceeding them) while contending with a new immediacy of forms permitted by technology. While I believe that refined immediacy in an art is possible and is called improvisation, that word still holds such pejorative connotations in poetry, equating to sloppiness, that it almost can’t be mentioned.

But then there is the bulk. The bulk by its vastness creates tension with the traditional need to redeem emotion through poetry’s possibility to affect the reader with elevated sentiment. The bulk is so huge as to be irremediable, which displays contemporary critic’s techno-dread by revealing that all of the poetic happenings of the moment cannot be mastered, creating a sublime void of idiosyncratic styles that must be fumbled through, ignored, or admired for the sublimity of their bulk alone. The bulk’s sublime bulkiness changes the project of engaging with poetic happenings from trying to master a meta-narrative of poetic progress to finding the idiosyncrasies of what’s happening now.

It’s no longer about the field of poetry, it’s about particles in relation to the bulk of that field, and the ties that we can argue bind each particle to it.

Seven Corners (7C), Spoon River Poetry Review (srpr), and Penguin Poets AWP Off-Site Poetry Reading

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Micro Review: The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing

The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing
by David Morley
(Cambridge University Press, 2007)

The Cambridge Introduction to Creative Writing is intended to be a textbook of sorts for beginning creative writing students at the university level, and it offers a primer on the field of creative writing for these students (as opposed to Myers’ The Elephants Teach or Dawson’s Creative Writing and the New Humanities, which are institutional histories of the field intended for scholars).

Morley offers fair coverage of the three genres generally taught in creative writing programs: prose fiction, prose nonfiction/creative nonfiction, and poetry. He does not seem to favor one aesthetic practice over another (i.e. official verse culture or experimental, etc.), moving from Mary Kinzie to Oulipo, often in the same chapter. Morley also does a good job of covering different modalities by including writing that is performed or writing as performance, either oral or digital, although these modalities are given considerably less weight than practical concerns.

The book is divided into ten chapters:

1. Introducing creative writing: This chapter merges the history and purpose of the field of creative writing, articulating why it belongs in the academy and theorizing its development since the start of history. Morley advocates for writers to also be voracious readers, mainly within their genres, eschewing how-to books and literary criticism.
2. Creative writing in the world: Morley uses a conflicts approach to show literary criticism and creative writing to be two sides of the same coin and advocates for writers to practice reflective criticism of their own work. He covers how to use experience as well as language play to make creative writing and briefly describes the field of publishing and editing.
3. Challenges of creative writing: In this chapter, various writing blocks are described, both imposed by the world and self-imposed, including indifference, rival media, procrastination, etc. Morley then examines challenges for translation, as well as experiment, design, and quality
4. Composition and creative writing: This chapter outlines different practical matters necessary for the writing practice, everything from establishing discipline to dealing with how-tos and rules to finding the right notebook. The chapter then covers ways to vary or change one’s practice productively.
5. Processes of creative writing: Morley describes seven process for creative writing here, all of which are heuristic: preparing, planning, incubation, beginning, flowing, the silence reservoir, and breakthroughs and finish lines. He then extends out into post-writing practice and some non-traditional practices like appropriation.
6. The practice of fiction: Genre-specific introduction to writing prose fiction.
7. Creative nonfiction: same as above
8. Writing poetry: same as above
9. Performing writing: In this chapter, Morley describes ways that writing goes from the page to the stage, arguing that since writing began as a speech genre, that the true measure for a work is to hold up when delivered as a speech act. Again, practical advice is offered first and then Morley branches out into lesser considered spheres of performed delivery.
10. Writing in the community and academy: This chapter talks about connections between creative writing practice and the larger community, arguing that many writers need to be active in the community by necessity, as the academy or self-sustaining practice is for the few. He also argues for multidisciplinary creative writing practice within the academy, sort of a CWAC approach, if you catch my drift.

One thing I did not like about the book is Morley is dismissive of criticism/theory/philosophy, going so far as to say these things will detract from writers’ practices. I am fond, however, of using theory or introducing theory to creative writers as a way to allow for the development of complexity, which Morley doesn’t allow for. I guess he has to be polemical to fight off the literary factions within the English department.

Overall, I’d recommend adopting this book for classroom use. The book is conceptually similar to Wendy Bishop and David Starkey’s Keywords in Creative Writing, but this book’s structure makes it more appealing to teach with (Keywords is organized alphabetically and it could be useful to assign readings from it as topics come up and need explication). In addition to the chapters that introduce the field fairly well, Morley peppers his pages with gray boxes that include writing exercises, each one with an aim (rationale) for doing them. I suspect this book would work well in a multigenre introductory workshop course, where class time might be devoted to generating new writing and examining student writing in workshops. The book will allow students to get a feel for whether the field of creative writing is for them, while allowing the teacher to develop a class that focuses on students’ writing practice.

Breaking Bad: Star Wars Allegory

Image: http://blogs.amctv.com/breaking-bad/BB-Episode-413-325-2.jpg

I read an interview today with Breaking Bad creator and mastermind Vince Gilligan where Gilligan talked about trying to re-make Star Wars in his basement with his brother, and I immediately contrived a Breaking Bad-Star Wars saga allegory that will sum up the remainder of the show’s run in a general way. Indulge me.

It’s no secret that Walt has become a father-figure to Jesse, and now that Gus can no longer attempt to divide and conquer them, it seems that this element of Breaking Bad’s plot will be what the remainder of the show is about.

Here’s where the allegory comes in: Walter White is an Anakin Skywalker who has now fully become Darth Vader. Now that Walt has moved from anti-hero to full-fledged villain, the only huge question that remains is what will happen to the conflicted, tortured hero, Jesse Pinkman, who still has a sound moral compass that is occasionally put askew (in a way that evokes Huck Finn) by his pseudo-familial loyalty to Walt as a father figure. Will Jesse completely turn to the dark side and lose all sense of moral direction? Will he be strong enough to simultaneously save and destroy father-figure Walt as Luke Skywalker did Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader in the Star Wars saga? (I am certainly in favor of the former, as it is rare for any show to completely plumb the depths of despair for its resolution. This kind of series ending would push the show into uncharted dramatic terrain.)

It should also not be forgotten that Mike, Gus’s main muscle and fixer, spent much of the season as a second father-figure for Jesse, building up his confidence as part of Gus’s plan to divide Jesse and Walt in order to eliminate Walt. Mike certainly built up Jesse’s confidence, not unlike Obi Wan Kenobi or Yoda in Star Wars, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike resurfaces in this sage-like, fatherly capacity in the coming seasons (Too, I wouldn’t be surprised if Walt needs to and does succeed in killing Mike off, which could undo his connection with Jesse as much as the Lily of the Valley plant at Walt’s condo).

I’m sure I could extend this allegory further. Is Hank like Han Solo? Is the US government, the DEA, the IRS (Ted Beneke thread), or the multinational parent corporation that owns Los Pollos Hermanos akin to the Empire? The writers have certainly left themselves with a great many ambiguities as the show moves forward. And it is certainly fun to speculate about these ambiguities and create wild allegories about how Breaking Bad will end.

Illinois State University’s Library Kerfuffle

Rancor has taken over the Illinois State University English Department listserv on account of the new dean of the library deciding to do a low-cost revamp of the inadequate and outdated library space by transferring up 40,000 (mostly history) to the Milner Library’s shadowy and not directly accessible storage space. The move will create more in-library study space for students at a time when the library needs a major overhaul but lacks the funds to do it.

Many ISU English professors feel this is a violation of shared governance of the university as well as an affront to these books as knowledge containers, as faculty and even department chairs had little input into the decision and little recourse in its correction (if that is what is needed). From what I understand, these volumes are not “going away” but will be accessible via librarians using Milner Library’s request system. So what we are talking about is a process change, as library patrons will not have the opportunity to stumble upon these volumes in the stacks but will instead have to browse for them online (the Milner library web access is not great, so I can see why this might upset folks, although a combination of Amazon.com, Milner, and iShare typically works for my searches).

The problem, in my estimation, is not really about the loss of precious books (and their archival purpose as housing the evolution of knowledge in a given field) in favor of more physical study space for students. The loss of access is not really a loss of access but a change in process. While the removed books may not be browsed in the brick-and-mortar library, they may be browsed at home from a remote location, ordered, and picked up without even venturing into the stacks. I see this as an extension of the debate about the fundamental purpose of a library.

Libraries have evolved to serve a number of purposes, but the library is rooted in an archival function. To the best of my knowledge, the changes to Milner Library are not abandoning that function, simply acknowledging that library patrons are in the midst of a technological shift where a wired space with access to digital resources is of equal importance to the physical object of the book.

Furthermore, addressing the issue of shared governance of the university, or lack thereof in this case, the relationship of the library to the colleges and departments of a university is flawed by design. Where colleges are archipelagos of related fields and departments themselves are islands, the library becomes a kind of colonial mainland with which the archipelagos and islands must have a strained relationship because they do not have control over the essential tools that provide for their day-to-day work. This essential division calls attention to the tension between disciplinary territory and interdisciplinary needs.

Most scholars realize early on they cannot function solely on the scholarship within a given discipline or even within an array of related disciplines. Eventually, even members of the English department seek out philosophy, history, sociology, gender studies, and maybe even James Gleick’s Chaos, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, or Gary Zukav’s The Dancing Wu-Li Masters from the science stacks (How I love those nontechnical science tomes!). If departments could go it alone could, then wouldn’t it make more sense to have a particular discipline house and govern its own library? If the university is going to remain a collection of loosely confederated islands of knowledge, then why should the library serve all of them as a collective entity?

The tension ISU is experiencing regarding Milner Library is the equivalent of when a large, colonizing body makes decisions that affect its colonies, throwing certain colonies into turmoil while affecting others less. Personally, I am for the dissolution of the archipelago-like setup of college and departments in favor of a holistic university centered around a universal focal point of academic pursuit like creativity (which I have written about at length in an unpublished article called “Creativity and the Holistic University” or something), but that is for another post, another time.

The Poetics of Techno-Melancholy, Part 1

The types of art that I find most engaging are those that include what I would call techno-melancholy or techno-dread. This aesthetic celebrates the possibilities of technology and the post-human-ness, which is a light, airy feeling, and is mitigated by a deep melancholy or fear of the vastnesses to which technology makes us privy. This vastness is a corpulent and ever-expanding waste land of code and data.

This aesthetic is also a catalyst for what I call the knowledge paradox, which means that part of knowing any given field or area of knowledge implies knowing what you do not know about that field. Accruing knowledge means that I also acquire anti-knowledge. This is the dark matter of anyone’s knowing, and it serves the ego to pretend that it does not exist, which sublimates the growing inadequacy that comes in tandem with knowledge to the culturally favorable status of mastery. Any work one does in getting acquainted with a field is mere surface scraping, superficial digging. Mastery is illusive and elusive. Technology is instrumental in servicing the knowledge paradox, but it does not do much to relieve the stresses created therein, except to offer capsules and headlines that aid in the breadth of one’s scrapings. These are like crumbs of dirt that get caught in one’s arm hairs.

Techno-melancholy mixes momentary deep satisfactions of access to and experience of things that heretofore I might not ever have discovered (let alone gained near-instant access to them) with the unfulfillable dream of also observing or engaging with the infoscape, the fat of the land. I would liken the old feeling of gaining knowledge of a field to climbing a mountain that was always enveloped in fog, save for the ridge or face upon which you happen to be climbing. In this way, the experience of the mountain’s vastness does not happen so quickly, as I have only the present moment’s discrete ridge to focus on along with the internal memory I am constructing of my experience in climbing.

As present piece and memory, the mountain’s totality is not revealed and feels more manageable. Technology’s addition to knowledge is more like climbing in the full sunlight of a clear day, in which the mountain is exposed for all of what it is, base to summit. In this instance, I have to cast my abilities as a climber in relation to the possibility of the mountain as a totality. In full exposure to a vast expanse of mountain, I am more inclined to succumb to the mountains stresses, as the illusion of progress often causes summit-thinking rather than focus on the singular task at hand. This can lead to premature defeat at the hands of the stress.

The tension of experiencing this kind of worldview, however, can fuel artistic productions that use the dialectic to edge us toward the sublime. In terms of my engagement, the kernels of techno-melancholy begin in Radiohead’s album OK Computer. This album uses concepts of avatar creation to revision the self in the midst of surveillance paranoia. Thinking and being, in the world of OK Computer, are not enough. The concepts of thinking ahead and being elsewhere become more important, which, when looking back, feels even more visionary and revelatory than the album did at the time.

The opening track “Airbag” is as good a place to start as any to reveal the techno-melancholic dialectic. The track uses the premise of self-mythologization as its premise, from the grandiosity of the opening guitar chords to the refrain “In an interstellar burst / I am back to save the universe.” This is not unlike the ubermenschen we create when we make our second self in Facebook, in our web presence.

The key into the dialectic and the feeling given off by the album is in the lyrics containing the song’s title: “In a fast German car / I’m amazed that I survived / An airbag saved my life.” The embodiedness of our speaker here does not matter as much as the technologies upon which his being is predicated, where the zero-sum game of existence is replaced by a technological waltz. One technology, the “fast German car,” needs another to offset the probability of disaster implied within car’s existence.

What really gives pause here is how the decision to live or not is mediated by the technological interplay. “Airbag” is decidedly ambivalent about how one should feel in the presence of technology transporting one literally in the vehicle and metaphorically by making us feel thought-ahead-for. Whether the speaker wanted to continue living or was attempting to commit suicide is irrelevant, the technologies’ accord make the speaker appear to be superhuman, so why not believe one is exactly that? That “Airbag” also was the vehicle for the Airbag/How Am I Driving? EP, which questions whether an airbag makes one less cautious behind the wheel, like the “How’s My Driving: Dial 1-800-Eat-Shit” bumper sticker, knowing that technology has thought ahead for potential human error.

Of course, Radiohead uses all kinds of technological artifice to create their techno-melancholic aesthetic (distorted guitars, computerized voices, computerized music) across the Kid A, Amnesiac, and IN RAINBOWS albums, pulling back some on Hail to the Thief and The King of Limbs, as if these more traditional rock-oriented albums are humanity checkers. The choice to use expand their use of technology has drawn criticism, citing Radiohead being not-music or being part of an altogether-new category of post-rock music. Technology is part of a dread- and paranoia-creating palette of musical options that appears to be at war with the ideal of the artist as genius creator. In fact, the criticism of Radiohead for their use of “synthetic” technologies is hilarious, considering rock music’s popularity is predicated on technology (electric guitars and amplification, both of which have ceased to be identified as technologies any longer because they are so taken for granted).

I see Radiohead’s music as having certain correspondences with newer bands like Battles and Animal Collective, both of which focus on obstructing the lyric elements in their music. The lyrics of a popular, each of these bands might argue, are distracting, using language to sway a listener’s attention away from the conceptual core of the song, rather than the lyrics being seen as part of the music. Lyrics help corporate media outlets to sell a song’s concept in a snippet, a sample, an iTunes preview, rather than forcing a listener to find a correspondence between the lyrics as part of the song in total.

On Merriweather Post Pavilion, I find Animal Collective to be experts at embracing divergent concepts in the music and lyrics, where the vocal fits in with the dreamy, pop-infused psychedelia, but the lyrics do not quite merge. My favorite example of this is the tune “Daily Routine,” which is the techno-melancholic answer to the Beatles’s “A Day in the Life” across forty-plus years. “Daily Routine” features tension in its slightly off-kilter organ music and the pounding synth drums. The lyrics are distorted and percussive echoing or echoed by the percussion and punctuated by the psychadelic organ, which sounds not unlike an alarm clock in the back of the lyrical dreamscape, populated by the narrator, his “kid,” and machines (presumably not only the machines used that make music but also seemingly the bicycle which transports narrator and kid).

Animal Collective and Battles, by using minimalism and deliberate obfuscation of lyrics, challenge the attention, and the pull of divergent forces on the attention is a large part of techno-melancholy that I will write more about in an upcoming post.

Matthew Stadler of Publication Studio: What is Publication?

This is a great manifesto on publishing and publication: