The Haiti Earthquake & Aftermath

The Haiti earthquake, which occurred on January 12th, Tuesday, 2010, was measured as 7.0 on the Richter Scale. The epicenter was 15 miles from the Haitian city of Port-Au-Prince, the principle city on the west side of the island (of Haiti and the Dominican Republic). Destruction of structures and infrastructure was extensive, and the loss of life, based on wildly variable estimates, may run as much as 100,000.     

 

 

 

Haiti is a typically backward Third World nation, with widespread poverty, and an history of government instability and corruption. Like many Central and South American metropolises, Port-Au-Prince has huge areas of slum shanty-towns, where ordinary municipal services are marginal, at best. Even before the earthquake there was rampant unemployment, crime, disease, and shortages of all kinds. The economy has been in a shambles, per capita income is among the lowest in the world, and agricultural subsistence has led to heavy deforestation. The place is a mess, and has been for decades.  

     

 

Haiti is in a known earthquake zone, but the difficulty in predicting significant, potentially damaging quakes, prevents us from knowing, really, when a big temblor is likely to occur anywhere on the earth. Seismic science may never be effective in predicting events, since the underlying structure of the tectonic plates may never be susceptible to accurate mapping and measurement. Most earthquake science is empirical, rather than confirmative, and hence always subject to revisions. When it comes to prediction, we haven't really made any significant progress towards that understanding since the 19th Century. 

 

Preparing for earthquakes is a controversial subject, and one I can't cover here in any detail, but there's been a growing movement towards general "preparedness" in areas known to be candidates for big events, but there are still large cities--such as Port-Au-Prince in Haiti--where really nothing was done in anticipation. The last large quake occurred almost two hundred years ago. That infrequency accounts in large measure for the passive complacency seen almost everywhere that such things do happen. How much are we willing to spend to reinforce the construction of buildings, highways, bridges, etc., to safe-guard against the "secondary" effects of disastrous natural events? Tsunamis, hurricanes, tornadoes, hailstorms, volcanic eruptions, severe earthquakes, landslides, and severe ice- and wind- and snow-storms, all test our intention to maintain permanent settlements on the land. Given their relative infrequency, how much resource can we afford to dedicate to events that may happen only once in a generation, or even every four, five, or ten (or more) generations, or every five centuries? 

 

I live within spitting distance of the Hayward Fault in the East Bay of the San Francisco Bay Area, where geologists have been predicting a sizable event for the last three decades. But they really don't know for sure when such an event might occur. It could be tomorrow, or it could be 100 years from now. When it occurs, it might be a 6 or a 7 or an 8 or even a 9 Richter event--they really have no idea. Without more accurate data about it, what steps should a reasonably cautious populace (or government) take to guard its own safety? 

 

Why was the Port-Au-Prince earthquake so damaging, and could anything have been done to moderate its effects, short of designing a "bunker" city out of steel and reinforced wood frame structures? Could Haiti even have afforded to consider undertaking such a program? Can any society reasonably be expected to "prepare" (at great expense) for events that may be decades, or even centuries, away? 

 

There are several observations that are useful in reviewing the consequences of the Haiti earthquake. First, the Haitian infrastructure was a disaster waiting to happen. Most all the buildings were constructed in unreinforced concrete or concrete block, a building form that is notorious for not standing up in quakes. Anyone inside such a structure is at great risk during an earthquake of even moderate size. Second, buildings constructed on landfill, or on unstable slopes, are subject to sliding and slippage. One look at the photograph above should be very instructive in this regard. As a basis for comparison, the San Francisco Bay Area "Loma Prieta" earthquake, which was actually just a little larger than the Haiti quake, measuring 7.1 on the Richter Scale, did much less damage comparatively--indeed, except for the "Cypress [freeway] Structure" in Oakland, and a few elegant row houses along the waterfront facing the Northern Shore of San Francisco, there would hardly have been much severe damage at all in the Bay Area. The reason it was experienced as a much less damaging event was that the vast majority of structures here were either built from reinforced steel frame, or substantially reinforced wood beam. In other words, the potential for damage here, was many times less simply as a result of traditional regional building practices. 

 

The real issue in the aftermath of Haiti post-quake disaster, is the degree to which that nation, like almost all of the Central and South American nations and cities, was not only unprepared for any calamity of this consequence, it had been allowed to grow so far out of proportion and balance to its immediate environment, and beyond its ability to respond to such crises--not just of the "natural" kind, but to every other kind, including, for instance, plagues and pandemics, or political unrest, or economic fluctuations--that it had become a time-bomb, which any kind of small fuse might set off. Thus, a "relatively" mild quake of 7.0, nearly exact in severity to one which had hit a much larger metropolitan area in Northern California about 20 years earlier, caused 1000 times more damage. 

 

Estimates of the relief effort needed to address the dead, sick and injured, homeless, hungry, etc., as well as destroyed housing, infrastructure, etc., are in the hundreds of millions. The Haitian government is reported to be "non-existent"--completely unable to respond. Rather than wait for international aid organizations, and the United Nations, to act, the Obama Administration has committed the U.S. to a major intervention, involving the American Military, airlifts, food, supplies, medical and rescue teams, and money, to establish a baseline of relief for a nation in total chaos. 

 

How far should the U.S. go in expenditure of aid, to a country which took almost no responsibility for itself, or its people? Should there be a price-tag on our generosity?  Does humanitarian obligation outweigh every other consideration? Did our government respond to the Katrina crisis with anything like the same urgency and efficiency in August 2005? Did our government show the same compassion and dedication to helping its own citizens, that it now lavishes on the those of another Western Hemisphere Caribbean nation? Embarrassing questions, you say? 

 

At a time when our own nation is suffering the long-term effects of a declining economy, the erosion of its middle-class, deepening unemployment, decay of its industrial base, and two exhausting (and largely unsuccessful Asian wars of attrition), how far should we be willing to go in adopting yet another needy nation (and its burgeoning, out-of-control population and chaotic economy)? How about France, whose history of exploitation of Haiti is one of the great scandals of the Colonial Age--has it ponied up to help its old colony? Not bloody likely. 

 

What seems most needed in America's long-term diplomatic outlook, is a reasonable policy of self-help and orderly improvement. If we feel compelled to regard every other nation in the world--its citizens, its safety, its security, its prosperity--as our international "responsibility" we need some kind of reciprocal code with which to bargain. Paternalism and ethical sanctimoniousness may have worked for Western Nations in the Colonial period, but there are clearly limits to the sense of responsibility governments have a right to demand of their constituencies. After Iraq was shown to have had neither weapons of mass destruction, nor a real Al Quaeda presence, the Bush Administration prided itself (instead) on having effected the removal of the Saddam Hussein regime, enabling a new era of potential democratic reform. This claim was accepted by Americans as a valid (fall-back) pretext for our preemptive invasion and continued occupation, even though it was never posed as the original excuse. Now, in Afghanistan, we've apparently changed the game again, from our original purpose of ousting the Taliban and capturing the Al Quaeda cell there, to resuscitating the entire nation of Afghanistan (i.e., "nation-building").  

 

Now we're told that several tens of thousands of Haitians, here in America illegally, will be granted "TPS"--or temporary protected status--not subject to deportation, for at least one year, probably indefinitely. We can expect that immigration rights activists will use the Haitian crisis as leverage to open our borders to hundreds of thousands more from Haiti, seeking escape from hardships of life in their native country. If "hardship" were the determining factor in our immigration policies for the rest of the hemisphere, not to speak of the world, what limit (if any) could we put on the numbers of qualified candidates for refugee status? 

 

We give untold billions of dollars in TARP funds to our banks, money which ends up in the pockets of investment bankers as pay-bonuses and golden parachutes, but we can't tax them, because that might discourage initiative and hurt the rewards system on Wall Street (after all, a million dollars more or less in a given year, is insufficient movitation--right?--to discriminate between one fat cat executive or hot-shot trader and another). We can afford to rush immediate medical aid to the victims of Port-Au-Prince, but we can't afford modest health care to the poorest of our own citizens. We can afford to treat every Central and South American national who wanders into our hospital emergency wards, but we can't afford health plans for our own "working" poor.                        

 

Poverty, as well as injustice, tends to make people bitter. If we're such a rich nation, where's the evidence of it in the lives we lead? We're supposed to take responsibility for Iraqi and Afghan and Pakistani and Mexican and Haitian and Columbian and Honduran and Indian and Chinese citizens, but woe to him who would lay claim to his own birthright and demand the same benefits and consideration from his own government.              

  

         

I'm all for the aid and comfort we've committed to provide to the citizens of Haiti, but I'd like to see our government show the same compassion and concern for the welfare and needs of its own citizenry, not just in crisis situations, but all the time. And if we're committed to helping needy people everywhere, in every nation, at any moment, that generosity and largesse should come with a price-tag. First on the invoice should be birth control. If you can't control your population, or if 90% of your people live in abject hopelessness, you go to the bottom of the relief list. In America, we make a big deal out of earning rewards, of showing initiative, and rewarding success through hard work, preventative measures, and careful planning. Why shouldn't these principles form the basis of our diplomatic policies abroad? Should we demand of Americans that they must have a higher standard of entitlement than that which we ask of those we give hand-outs to? 

China vs. The Google Monster

The much publicized "dispute" between the online search engine Google and the government of China is something hardly anyone could have foreseen, or predicted, as recently as 20 years ago. During much of the post-War, "Cold War" period, America and the Soviet Union relentlessly attempted to out-image each other, in an attempt to influence world opinion, in a classic propaganda tug-of-war. Radio Free Europe, a media organization begun in 1949, and funded by American Conservative interests (which still exists!), was intended to penetrate the "Iron Curtain" of the Soviet Union and its "satellites" with alternative views of events in competition with the "official" state news emanating from Moscow.

 

Radio Free Europe had little effect on the Soviet Union, though the battle of the super states was "won" by America, when the Soviet Union finally capitulated in a break-up of its allied republics in 1991. This occurred largely because of economic factors within the Soviet Bloc, though America's military-industrial build-up during the Reagan years, is thought by some to have pushed it over the edge.       

 

History takes strange turns. Who would have thought that China, once the most regressive of totalitarian regimes (remember the days of Mao's "Cultural Revolution"?), now leads the world in economic growth and power, having adopted the capitalist model of production (if not its accompanying parliamentarian style of governance). 

 

With the coming of the internet, the movement of information around the globe has become a tsunami, with rapid, unfettered communication amongst people of all nations taking place at unimaginable speed and efficiency. Though this has its dark side (Arab terrorist networks apparently exist and connect by dint of electronic devices), it clearly has facilitated the "information age" in which data, opinion and transactions move freely across borders, jurisdictions and time-zones. 

 

In an attempt by China's "old guard" leadership to preserve its grip on its populace and institutions, censorship and persecution has been utilized to prevent people from seeing "subversive" content which might threaten its authority and dominance. "Firewalls" have been set up by the Chinese information agency through state-controlled ISP's to prevent Chinese citizens to access sites and debate regarding, for instance, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, which is widely available on the internet outside China.

 

In new developments, China was suspected of orchestrating "sophisticated" cyber attacks on Western internet systems (such as Google), in what has been interpreted as a campaign to obtain operating data, and protected information about users (e.g., Chinese human rights activists).

 

Meanwhile, forces and interests in the United States have been struggling to effect outcomes favorable to their constituencies. Economic and trade arrangements (the U.S. is China's biggest customer for goods, and China holds the lion's share of America's deficit bonds) may be threatened. The Obama Administration has reportedly sought to influence the Google Corporation to take a stand on freedom of information by insisting on an end to China's organized state censorship of the Web. If Google were to abandon the huge internet market in China (purportedly to number over 300 million users), as it has threatened to do, that share would then belong to competitors like Baidu.com.

 

The internet is now widely regarded as the "Trojan Horse" of Western Capitalism inside China, forcing open doors long closed to foreigners. Ironically, China has managed to adopt Western economic practices, without being persuaded or coerced into transforming its political institutions. It's a hybrid new regime, neither Communist nor Democratic, retaining some of the most egregious forms of totalitarian oppression, while economically leveraging its opponents. 

 

What is the most favorable outcome? If China were to adopt a quasi-parliamentary form of government, would this further encourage Chinese economic expansion, and facilitate its suspected possible military and geographical influence in Asia? Would it, in effect, put paid to a Chinese post-Cold War triumph over Western power? Could the World Wide Web--led by Google, the chief internet presence right now in the world--become the means by which America's 100 year dominance in world power (Gore Vidal's "American Empire") was finally ended?  

Two Early Poems by Barrett Watten - A Post-Structuralist View

 

       

  

The following two poems appeared first in L Issue #1, in 1972, a poetry magazine which I edited. They are interesting primarily because of the directions which Barrett Watten's work would take in the succeeding decades, long after he had been associated with the Iowa Writers' Workshop, where these poems were written. (Personally, I've always liked them, and think of them as among Barry's best work, though I doubt this is an opinion he shares.)  

 

 

 

the moon is in the fan

Tropicana

 

Wallace line indigo limelight

 

vermouth

 

                that crushed metallic

writing on black velvet

 

Nicaragua

  

            beautiful

let me blow it

 

Bodega Bay 

  

_____________

 

 

 

Natura Morta

 

 

palm fronds

 

*

Russian

bottles

 

*

my daughter

 

* 

my late

daughter

 

*

my late

daughter's 

pettiness

 

*

winter

window

 

*

 l'express

 

*

specimen

specie

specific

spectacular

 

*

spectacular

ornate

 

*

edge

 

*

im-

material

dark edge

 

 

_____________ 

 

 

These two early poems, which succeed by about one year the Author's first self-published pamphlet Radio Day in Soma City [Iowa City, 1971] show a more focused vision, albeit in an apprentice setting, than his earlier attempts, for instance, at appropriating the pop styles of Ted Berrigan or Anselm Hollo. 

 

On the most basic level, these poems can be read as attempts to objectify the sign, in the service of an investiture in a trumping irony, or as a contempt for aesthetic contexts from which cliche'd traditional literary models derive--as an exercise in critical dismantling. The speaker disengages from the jeopardy of an implied (narrative of) imitation, in order to distance himself from those sources--their limitation(s) of sentiment. 

 

Whereas Pound always self-consciously used formal models to raise the ante of meaning, to borrow an occasion that could support his rhetoric--here, detached fragments of assertion are laid out like specimens under inspection. Rather than emulating classic signifiers, Watten's program appears here to consist of a debunking or parody of their permitted uses.   

  

Indeed the authorial voice seems almost to detest its ostensible subject, as if it had been imposed as an external program, hence the neutral disembodied tone, the automatized sequence of terms, the lack of a sentiment traceable back to a motive-vector. The voice seems to be saying: "My dilemma is in engaging this rehearsal of archetypes, but I am not committed to it, it is just a means to an end, an end which I am not at liberty to define, or name, at this time" (which would certainly have been an apt position to take at that point--i.e., a resistant stance). 

 

The primary nodes in the first poem--Tropicana, Wallace [Stevens], Nicaragua and Bodega Bay--provide classic nomenclature--two geographical loci, a decorative Modernist poet, and the proper name of a casino/hotel or an orange juice brand. The references are intentionally broad (vague), and undeveloped, though striking in their simplicity. Their use is completely gratuitous, inasmuch as there is no need or purpose in developing their significance or meaning in the poem. They function simply as assimilated stereotypical signs, whose associations are generic, though vivid enough, to evoke a generalized sense of familiarity without requiring greater definition, or more decisive commitment (i.e., nothing of the political or economic facts of Nicaragua need be considered, the name itself is sufficient to the case).  

  

The first poem is not a description of an equatorial state of mind, or of a specific place; it isn't an intellectual exercise about a tropical aspect, the way a poem by Hart Crane or Stevens would be. It merely uses this frame to create an artificial linguistic setting for the launching of the exercise. It's discretely insulated from any describable experience. The speaker is not placed geographically (in "Nicaragua" or Northern California ("Bodega Bay"), is not on a stage ("limelight"), is not looking at a picture in a museum ("black velvet"); it is not nighttime ("the moon"). The poem exists in a kind of limbo--neither assertive, nor reactive.      

  

It asks to be treated as a rehearsal of stereotypical platitudes ( stock images) without conviction, a renunciation of the prescriptive etymologies of performance and methodology (i.e., the work of Wallace Stevens) under which the author's official pursuit of a writerly identity, at that time, was being carried out. As previously discussed in my piece on this blog ["Lewis Turco & The Workshop System," November 11, 2008], the workshop system is a version of the institutionalized master-apprentice relationship, one in which an established canon of acceptable models of imitation and aspiration is presented as a panoply of fixed, unchallenged alternatives. The purpose of this system is the perpetuation of normative values of specimen texts, and the grooming of candidates for entry into the machinery of literary production. Potential responses to such an oppressive structure are burlesque or satire, in which codes and formulae are rejected, or mimicked as it were from the inside out, like graffiti on the bathroom wall. As forms of routine resistance or futile (political) demonstration, poems designed to martial corroboration (protest) end up being subsumed within the larger sphere of synthetic debate, leaving the self predictably thwarted.

     

This aggression--"pestering the offices of intelligence"--against authorized centres of meaning, involves not just the deconstruction of the cliches of canonical form, but a renunciation of all known profiles of (the author as) agency. To adopt any such available profiles, at that point in time, would have required a capitulation, not just to the system of judgment and coercion it represented, but an acquiescence to exhausted modes of expression. By holding the level of statement just short of assertion, limited to an objectivist nominative, it was possible to exist incognito within the sphere of textual decision, as a renegade in disguise.                               

 

The second poem adopts a quasi-scientific incremental measure, using the left-hand margin--the individual words aligned vertically along it--to count degrees of progression. Still life, as a formal cliche, is a collection of linguistic objects (or signs), which organize into distributed arrays or sets:

 

 

palm fronds -- "Nature" - a frame

 

Russian bottles -- manufactured objects 

 

my daughter [my late daughter's/pettiness] -- the social milieu 

 

winter window -- Nature through a frame

  

specie -- scientific testing and measurement -- enhanced precision 

 

edge [spectacular/ornate/immaterial/dark edge] -- sublimation of the performance --dissolution

 

 

The sequence poses an imaginary progression, parallel, but not equivalent to, the time of the poem's unfolding. The sequence of ordered objects, otherwise gratuitous and accidental, involves an increasing narrowing of focus (the conjugation of the daughter's quality, the declension of the root specie--which prefigures the expansion from material specificity towards the spectacular ornate im-materiality), beginning from generality, gradually excising, arriving at a symbolic (w)edge, which is (an) atomized "im-/material//dark edge". Spectacularity (decor) versus the immaterial (abstraction). Like the other poem, this appropriates objects as totally discrete and arbitrary things, whose referential inter-relationship is crucially, and flagrantly arbitrated, and the whole argument--if it can be called that--devolves upon a crux of dissolution, like a hammer blow on an anvil. The (w)edge's immateriality, at the molecular level, means that any edge is an illusion, any assertion provisional.               

 

This metaphorical detonation, from a Platonic materiality (ideal) to post-Modern (or post-Einsteinian) immateriality suggests the slow, inexorable explosion, popularly described as "the Big Bang." A Cartesian materiality (Watten once earnestly said to me "all thought is geometric!"), expressed through objects as ideal forms, disintegrates. The progressive advance of physics towards smaller and smaller degrees of definition of space and matter--thus triggers an objectivization, or criticism, of the signs of predestined forms, a deconstruction derived from the expansion, or the historical progression, of scientific thought. A poem which self-destructs, or de-constructs itself. Which is--to the degree of its transformation--thrown into relief by its energetic process. 

   

Whereas the first poem spins in place as a gyroscope of futility, like a planet in orbit around a futile sun--the second confronts darkness, a dying sun, entropy.

  

If an effort in these poems has been made to deconstruct a system of given signs, as a reduction of the apprentice relationship, to nonsense, nothing is offered in opposition. Beside Pound's imperative to "stand beside one's word(s)"--a contrary concept of authorial agency is posed as de-personalized intelligence. Observer and observed become one, but identity is sacrificed through this process. 

  

Language is like flypaper, seductive, sweet, sticky--but also illusive, illusory, ephemeral, flimsy, and deceptive. Try as we might to draw a line in the sand, to assign to a shifting surface a meaning with authority or permanence, it's all a terrific waste of time--or a futile (temporal) use. Along the valence of time, matter can't hold the evidence of our intentions.  

   

Walking through great piles of the county dump, of respective materials, shifting and sifted, partially sorted, rotting, rolled, humped-up into clogged and tangled banks, mirages of matter, sprinkled with acids, ammonia, perfume, vinegar, oils. The overwhelming materiality of the quotidian masquerades as random thought, but animation may simply be a projection of a mindless consumption. Why do anything? Why churn the detritus of civilization? Why not?

   

The drug lord puts out a contract on a Richmond resident, so later that night shots are heard. Behind cyclone fences, cowering misfits fry rubbery steaks. Ashen exhaust residue tinges the cinder-block. Paint drips off the ceiling. Blood circulates through the arterial tree, percolating consciousness. Turtles crossing the road crushed beneath barreling treads. Foamy Niagara sleeps through the night, churning misty nostalgias. The Chinese plate cracks, revealing weak fissures in our thought. 

   

What is the relation between present event and received wisdom, between freshly minted fear and scarred memory? An unmanned craft hovers overhead. Roaches are climbing the lampposts, looking for light. The oncoming glare of blinding brights is a sedative, numbing as the fatigue motel.                  

McGwire's Fake Contrition an Insult to Baseball

 

Mark McGwire's "confession" yesterday on television--widely reported this morning in the media--that he did indeed take "performance-enhancing" steroid drugs during his stellar pro baseball career didn't surprise anyone. The only possible surprise was that the St. Louis Cardinals, with whom he'd just signed a new contract as a team batting coach, presumably demanded that he perform this duty as a condition of being hired. Did they think it made them seem more ethically clean? That would hardly wash, since McGwire was a big-time steroids user on their watch, from 1997 through 2001. 

 

In his statement, McGwire claims that he began using steroids in the 1989-90 season, at "someone's" suggestion, to facilitate healing from his various injuries. That's a bold-faced lie. McGwire played six full seasons (1987-1992) without significant injuries. It was only in 1993, after several years of drug use, that his injuries began to pile up. He wasn't driven to use drugs by injuries, the drugs caused his injuries! 

 

Then, from 1996 through 1999, he resumed full-time play, and it was then, pumped up to unbelievable proportions by the drugs, that he built up those power numbers which are the basis of his reputation as a star player. 

 

McGwire was never a total hitter: His numbers show that he had a good eye, but he seldom hit for impressive average, or produced runs or RBI's at an impressive pace. He was big, and slow. His home runs typically were huge "pop-ups" since he seldom hit the ball squarely. His steep upper-cut swing was designed to produce those flies, and as such, an increase in his upper body strength (facilitated by the drugs) could add those extra 15-25 feet of distance that would clear most major league park fences. Many of his homers were "cheapies" landing just beyond the edge of the fence(s). 

 

This "admission" begins to look more and more like a self-serving strategy on the part of major league baseball generally. It can claim to have "cleaned up" the sport by getting McGwire, one of a handful of high profile players of whom drug use was strongly suspected, to confess publicly. But this admission is an anti-climax. Everyone knew McGwire took steroids, just as we all know Barry Bonds did.

 

The difference is that Bonds was forced to take the fall for his use, because the Federal prosecutors felt Bonds would be a good sacrificial victim. Bonds was cheeky, an "uppity" Black athlete, cocky and manipulative. If they could "get" Bonds, major league baseball could hold him up as the convicted poster boy, while the other users, like McGwire, could have their cases quietly laid to rest.  

 

McGwire was always reputedly something of a primadonna, just as Bonds has always been. But his "image" as Mr. Redheaded Nice Guy, embracing his son at home plate when he broke Ruth's record, shouldn't have fooled anyone. It's a clear instance of the discrimination which still plagues professional sports.

 

If Bonds is denied the Hall, or his stats sprout asterisks, then McGwire should share the shame. 

 

This "confession" is sheer bullshit.         

Stein and A Very Nice Day

Gertrude Stein's work resists closure, resists easy analysis, resists quotation, resists description. It's slippery, and elusive. Often it seems too simple and deliberately naive. You think you have it figured out, and then you read another passage in which she throws all her (and your) assumptions about how a work proceeds out the window, and there's something ingenious and unique about it.  

 

 

 

After I took my MFA at the University of Iowa in 1972, I thought I would go on and take a Ph.D. at Berkeley. I had planned to do a thesis on Stein's work, which I thought had been neglected by the academy, and there seemed to be few people interested enough in it really to study it carefully enough to dissect and summarize its structure and signficance. Professor Richard Bridgman, at Berkeley at that time, had written a serious study, Gertrude Stein in Pieces, but when I talked with him about it, he seemed highly skeptical about the benefits of reading or studying her work; his interest in her seemed purely content-driven, as if the only point in reading an author was to discover what their private psychological obsessions might be, and how that was expressed in the work. He seemed totally uninterested in the technicalities of her writing. "She was obsessed with spiders," he told me, "among other irrational preoccupations. I can't say I'd recommend her as a subject for extended study." 

 

I ended up not resuming my academic career at that time, which was probably just as well. I don't know how it would have (re-)shaped my thinking about literature and art. The whole graduate student scene was too familiar to me, from my years of work at Iowa, and it seemed an uninspiring endeavor at that point (I was 26 at the time). The competition, the stress, the mountains of drudgery (reading). The constant arguing with professors. 

 

         

 

Reading Silliman's blog yesterday morning, in which he quotes a Stein sequence from A Long Gay Book, brought back memories of that time, when I was reading a lot of her work. Here's a selection from a series of imitations I wrote--along the lines of Jerry Rothenberg's A Stein Book [1966]--

  

There are nations, there are borders there are colors and colors are hot.

 

.

 

A rhythm, a ghost in a chance and a plaintive clopping, a snowy evening and a glass of punch, a glass of punch is a fine refresher.

 

.

 

Round ones, nice round ones dictate calm, a taste in surprises. A white surprise, a pink surprise and a color in appearing. Open and choose a custard.

 

.

 

It is essential to be a worrier, to be a worrier in need. It is essential to be a wearer of different tweed. In summer or in winter, there is need, but do not be a worrier, a worrier in winter. 

 

.

 

They have cars. They have cars and by the coast they have whistles. They know buckets and sand, they have paintings and frames and uncles. My dear rag.

 

...

 

Blotchy mountain.

We're up on

blotchy mountain.

 

.

 

How they lie in laps.

Provence.

Like they say.

These big wooden women.

 

.

 

Like a white wall.

In Portugal.

A black

and white wall in Portugal.

 

The relationship between Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway is one of the most interesting in literary history. Superficially, they had little in common, but at a certain point in their lives, they became mutually fascinated and affectionate towards one another. Hemingway picked up a couple of key features of prose narrative style from her--the so-called "cubistic" strain in his writing, supposed to be derived from Juan Gris and some of Stein's short prose pieces in Geography and Plays. Their friendship was probably doomed not to last, since their life-styles were so divergent. In many of Hemingway's early stories, you can see him building up impressions and descriptions in a way that he had learned from her, often jamming many declarative phrases together in a rhythmic, propulsive recital, but measured out in rounded bars of the utmost finality and discreteness. No one had ever written prose the way Stein had discovered, and Hemingway stole that trick from her.   

 

   

What We Mean by Beat Writers - A Finite Definition

 

This is an attempt at definition. Whatever you think of the so-called Beat Writers, or the Beat Generation--their affect on American or world culture, or their literary importance--it is useful to narrow the meaning of the term 'Beat Writer' in the interests of accuracy and pertinence. 

  

The term Beat Writer has been mangled and misused and expanded to include dozens and dozens of poets and prose writers, most of whom never had any connection with the "movement" itself, and many of whom do not in any clear sense exhibit any of the aspects of Beat. Who may be considered as a true Beat?     

 

There are several problems in defining Beat. First, the term was invented before there was either a literature, or anything like a social or literary group, to which it could refer. Wikipedia states that the term Beat Generation was invented by Jack Kerouac in 1948, and that this was codified by the novelist John Clellon Holmes, in an article he published in 1952. (Holmes published a novel, Go, in 1952, about the Beat Generation, but he is only peripherally considered himself to be a Beat Writer--perhaps only a documentarian).

 

The term Beat Generation is reminiscent of the phrase The Lost Generation, coined by Gertrude Stein ["You are all a Lost Generation"] to describe those (mostly American) writers and artists who had been drawn to Europe following WWI, in the 1920's. It is not altogether clear what "Beat" was originally intended to mean, or to describe, but its associations usually include modern jazz (circa the late 1940's and 1950's), the low life associated with a rather shabby bohemianism and/or illegal drug use, lower-class disenfranchisement (dignified or voluntary poverty), and poetic inspiration ("beatific" possession, youthful romantic indulgence of a type associated with French literary figures such as Verlaine, Baudelaire, Rimbaud).            

 

In attempting to define what a Beat Writer may be, one must be careful not to assign to it specifically either a geographical or thematic element. There is no single event or group, in time, which can be used as a baseline for taxonomic inclusion. 

 

Jack Kerouac, the single most important figure in the group, grew up in Massachusetts, went to Columbia, and then dropped out. His first novel, The Town and the City, published in 1950, is in style and substance an emulation of Thomas Wolfe. His next work, On the Road, written in 1951 (originally begun in Quebecois [French dialect] and revised and expurgated before eventually being published in altered form in 1957), provides the context and tapestry of the Beat identity, and is a roman a clef--in its original form--of the semi-fictional life Kerouac imagined he was living, or would like to have lived, during those years. Kerouac traveled around a good deal during the 1950's, and met and socialized with other figures who would eventually qualify for inclusion in the movement. Several other of Kerouac's novels document his further adventures, and those of friends and acquaintances whom he had known; but On the Road is the key work in the Beat movement phenomenon.                

  

 

 

The second key figure in the Beat movement, is William S. Burroughs, an unusual and unlikely progenitor. The child of well-off Missourians, he attended Harvard (graduating in 1936), and spent most of his adult life wandering from situation to situation, experimenting with sex, crime, drugs, writing and art. He published the novel Junky, in 1953, as a dime-store dos-a-dos paperback original, a verite expose of the life of a drug addict, under the pseudonym William Lee. While living in Tangier, Morocco, 1954-58, he wrote what would, with the help of Allen Ginsberg and Kereouac, become the novel The Naked Lunch [1959]. The Naked Lunch, together with Burroughs's close ties to the key figures Ginsberg and Kerouac, place him squarely in the inner circle of the Beat movement.

 

     

 

The third crucial figure in the movement is Allen Ginsberg. Growing up in New Jersey, Ginsberg attended Columbia, and encountered Burroughs, Gregory Corso, and Lucien Carr, among others. In 1954, in the San Francisco Bay Area, Ginsberg would meet his life partner, Peter Orlovsky, compose his signature poem Howl (at the Caffe Mediterraneum in Berkeley), and read it, at the Six Gallery, in 1955. Also reading there that night were Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, Philip Lamantia, and Michael McClure. Simply on the basis of their participation at this reading--though for other reasons, as well--all of these other four figures belong in the Beat canon. Snyder and Whalen had attended Reed College in Oregon, together, and had migrated to the Bay Area at the same time--both of them had been influenced by Kerouac, as well as by Eastern culture and Buddhism (as had Kerouac). McClure had come to San Francisco from Kansas, and after first attempting to be a painter, settled on an original poetic style whose beatific themes and content fit in well with the Beat consciousness.     

 

     

 

Lawrence Ferlinghetti arrived in San Francisco in 1953, and shortly thereafter co-founded the City Lights Bookstore and publishing venture (City Lights Books). Many of the early titles which Ferlinghetti published in his "Pocket Poets Series" would tend to be associated with the Beat movement, but only a handful actually qualify (Ginsberg, Corso, Ferlinghetti, Lamantia, Kaufman, Norse, Hirschman, Orlovsky, Kerouac); Duncan, Levertov, Patchen, Rexroth, O'Hara, etc., are not Beat writers, though books of theirs appeared in the Pocket Poets series. Hirschman, Norse, Kaufman, Lew Welch (a close associate of Snyder's), and Lamantia (a late canonical American Surrealist), Selby, Wieners, are Beats. Though peripherally associated with the Bay Area Beat figures, Meltzer, Loewinsohn, Bremser, Micheline, and Kyger are not Beats. Jack Spicer, Robert Duncan, The White Rabbit group, are not Beats.

 

Poets of The New York School (O'Hara, Berrigan, Waldman, Carroll) are not Beats. Charles Bukowski is not a Beat. D.A. Levy is not a Beat. Writers associated with Black Mountain College, The Black Mountain Review, Origin Magazine, Evergreen Magazine, Grove Press books, Olympia Press Books, etc., are not Beat by definition. J.P. Donleavy is not a Beat. Nabokov is not a Beat. Ken Kesey, despite his associations with Neal Cassidy, Allen Ginsberg and his rural Oregon background (which he shares with Snyder), and his interest in drugs and the counter-culture, is not a Beat--he belongs, with Richard Brautigan, to a later generation (perhaps the Psychedelic, or Flower Generation). 

 

The Beat movement is a phenomenon whose time-line runs from 1948 to approximately 1960. Those Beat writers included in the Allen Anthology--Corso, Ferlinghetti, Ginsberg, Kerouac, Lamantia, McClure, Orlovsky, Snyder, Welch, and Whalen--had all completed work which was clearly Beat in meaning or inspiration by that time. Adam, Broughton, Blaser, Gleason, etc., are not Beats. 

 

In limiting the definition of Beat, it's important to restrict the list to those who both produced work central to the meaning of Beat as a literary style, as well those who had clear social or professional connections to each other or to specific events. The San Francisco Renaissance, for instance, intersects or overlaps with Beat, but the two movements aren't synonymous. Claims are often made for overlap with Black Mountain, but there is no clear connection. Though Ginsberg and Burroughs and Kerouac all spent time in New York, attempts to connect them to others there during this period, don't work. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, published in 1962, is a watershed event, signaling a shift both in cultural and literary consciousness. The 1960's were in many respects a realization and flowering of the ideas and tendencies in the avant-garde of the 1940's and 1950's--and the Beats could rightfully claim that many of their inspirations, and criticisms of American life, had brought about important intellectual, political and artistic developments in that, and subsequent decades, but their period of important work was complete by 1960.

It often seems convenient, for various reasons, to imagine that the Beat movement continued through the 1960's, and even into the 1970's. Those wishing to claim an association with the Beat movement, or to co-opt later figures as continuations of Beat spirit or inspiration, usually have a poor sense of actual literary history. For instance, none of the poets included in Paul Carroll's Young American Poets anthology are Beats--because none of its contributors (except perhaps Kenward Elmslie--certainly no Beat!) had written anything before 1960. It's almost as if the concept of Beat is so pervasive, in its descriptive or adjectival sense, that it's applied without any discrimination whatsoever.

 

I often think that the true canon of Language Poetry is to be found in the early work of John Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Clark Coolidge, Larry Eigner, Jackson Mac Low and Robert Grenier, and that by the mid-1970's, that movement, such as it was, had really ended. What those in the Grand Piano project were doing, or thought they were doing, is probably "Post"-Language School work. Literary criticism and literary history usually identify what is actually happening about 10 to 20 years after the fact--sometimes even longer. What are the "canonical" works of the Language School? If you take away Ashbery's Rivers and Mountains, Tennis Court Oath and Three Poems, Palmer's Blake's Newton and Circular Gates, Coolidge's Ing, Space and The Maintains, Eigner's another time in fragments, Mac Low's Stanzas, and Grenier's Dusk Road Games, Water Farmer and A Day at the Beach, what's left?

 

It strikes me that the work that Kerouac, Burroughs, Ginsberg, Snyder, Whalen, Ferlinghetti, Corso, McClure, Lamantia and Welch all did after 1960 is interesting, fun, and different, but it does nothing to refine or modify our sense of Beat. That's because by 1960-62, what we think of as Beat had run out of steam. Each decade lays the seeds of later developments. The Sixties as a creative decade spawned the Conservative reaction of the 1980's and 1990's. What Barrett Watten refers to as "the turn to language" in the early 1970's resembles an introspection, an introversion, largely in reaction to the physicality, the indulgence and erotic sublimation of the Sixties. The reaction to that tendency, in turn, can be seen in the work and history of succeeding decades. We've just turned the corner at the end of the first decade of the 21st Century. 

  

Silliman's Alphabet has just been published. Am I living in the past, or does it seem like an anti-climax? Its first published sections are as far away from us, in time, now, as we were, in 1970, from Robert Duncan's early work (from the 1940's). Sometimes we forget how fast the ground is moving under our feet.