Maintenance

I suppose that fooling around on the observation deck is a lot more bearable than toiling in the engine room. I do not post here, enough. I post the fuck out of tumblr. I will live here, the place of work, from now on. And that is a firm promise to myself and...whoever else is listening.

"The access code is 'Alone'"

If you deconstruct gender, you aren't a lady

I have a hard time respecting feminism. Not because its underpinnings are in any way unsound or fallacious, but because like any idea grounded in the higher realms of sociological or philosophical thought by the time it trickles down to the laiety it is nothing more than a loose conglomeration of slogans having less to do with its ideological corpus and more with the same unsavory forces which have always governed the intellectual drip-pan. In this case it has become little more than a mating evaluation with little other power.

I assume much about feminism's intent and basis, with good reason. If feminism indeed originated in the spirit of the snake-necked diva claiming her right to womynly power because her boyfriend just raised her allowance to stop her withholding sex, then the whole thing is bankrupt, and I renounce all involvement with the word and proudly instantiate myself as a born again chauvinist.

In the first place feminism as it is commonly encountered is nothing more than the last in a long line of arbitrary criteria applied by women to men in order to ascertain how pliable and inoffensive they are. Most of the criteria which are now decried as trappings of the patriarchy originated in just this way: social expectations of gender interactions which place women in a dominant or unassailable position, i.e. the right of a woman to be supported by her husband, "chivalry," the wearing of veils (are we really to believe the gender responsible for designing Bloodrayne's outfit came up with that practice all on their own? Men left to their own devices will NOT restrict their access to female sexuality). What these things have in common is that to contest them constitutes a failure on the part of any man who does so, and thus a legitimate cause to deny him sex. The only function of these institutions is to allow their male participants to demonstrate that they are docile and socially compliant.

Feminism practiced thusly permanently establishes the guilt of all (mostly heterosexual) men, living or dead, for the entirety of woe, oppression, and general disenfranchisement of women throughout all time. According to this capacity of feminism men are saddled with a permanent discursive onus. This then follows the pattern of the dominant, unassailable female against the male who is placed in a morally inferior position, and who is thus eternally "wrong."

Evidence of this abounds. Feminism is no longer an ideological technique or school of thought but an ideal to be striven towards, much as chivalry, modesty, piety, or chastity was. Women do not talk about whether or not they are feminist (rarely will any woman who does not grossly misinterpret the term declare she is "not a feminist") but about whether or not they are a "bad feminist." A woman who is perceived to grant concessions to the patriarchy is a "bad feminist." That is a woman who cooks, cleans, and does anything during sex other than close her eyes and pretend her lover is Janis Joplin. A man who expects a woman to do any of these things can forget about every obtaining a female mate, because to transgress against feminism would be as egregious as men in bygone eras expecting their veiled wives to show their hair, to not pull a woman's chair out, or to expect her to get a job, to pay her share of the bills.

The salient point of this is that feminism is something expected of all educated citizens. But because it is a social expectation, yet another criteria used for the evaluation of a mate, it lacks any power as a social idea. Most men a woman speaks to will declare themselves "feminist" or at least in sympathy with feminist ideals. At the very least they will proffer comments about how much more difficult it is to be a woman.

Let me let you ladies in on a little secret: men never speak about feminism when YOU ARE NOT AROUND. I have never spoken with another man in depth about feminist theory, not have I sincerely evaluated the position in which men and women find themselves from the perspective of gender. As feminism is practiced in the lay discourse, NO MAN is a feminist in private. Men make these pretensions for the same reason they consented to the other, now reviled practices: so you will fuck them. Those guys in "this is what a feminist looks like" shirts know what they are doing. Those shirts might as well say "I'll let you win any argument we have, now suck my cock!"

When a practice becomes an evaluative, it falls into the ideological stagnation I a few paragraphs up. When I made the caveat that I assume much about feminism's basis, I was NOT talking about the alogical guilt machine I described. I mean that I assume feminism aspires to something higher. Rather the exact opposite.

"Pop" feminism, the feminism which asserts woman as "right" and man as "wrong" throughout the entirety of social discourse, is NOT feminism. Rather it is simply a kind of intellectual chivalry. Men are supposed to defer to women: to "empower" them, to continually acknowledge their superiority of perception and judgment as a perceived "payback" for centuries of mistreatment and neglect. When a man agrees with you that Freud was a chauvinist pig, he is mentally holding the door for you.

Coming back to the title of this entry, feminism is NOT about female empowerment. Feminism is about the deconstruction of gender roles into forms which do not deny ANY person the right to whatever identity they choose, regardless of gender. The flip side of this is that if no rights are restricted, no rights are accorded. Which means the position of dominance which a woman is placed by pop feminism and similar "chivalric" practices must be relinquished in order to establish equality.

What this means in the language of the laiety is you cannot be a lady. You cannot expect men to pay for dinner, you cannot expect men to hold the door for you, and you cannot expect men to treat you with any more courtesy, dignity or respect than they would show to each other. You cannot engage in worship of your uterus as "the giver of life," you cannot gender violence (for you to hit a man is every bit as inappropriate as him hitting you: no more 'V-day.' The argument that women are physically less powerful is both fallacious in many cases, and a sexist generalization. The disparity in physical power between two individuals should be based on that power, not on their gender).

This is to say, you CAN do all these things. However when you do these things you are less than a "bad feminist," you are an active counterfeminist. A woman who expects pop-feminist-brand sympathy from men is a proud and enthusiastic subject of the patriarchy, and deserves the corollary subjugation based entirely on the fact that she encourages it vigorously.

Let's Start Blogging in Earnest, Shall We?

If everyone in the past was so great, why are they all dead now?

Stop complaining that no one uses land phones anymore. Stop complaining that no one writes letters. Stop complaining that people have bad handwriting. Stop complaining that people don’t look at each other on the subway. Stop complaining that it isn’t okay to let strangers give your kids candy. Stop complaining about how it’s the future and you miss the past.

If I brought back this computer to a 10th century scribe, painstakingly handwriting bibles or what have you, he would not be bemoaning the loss of the “Art of calligraphy” in the future. No, he would be shitting bricks because I had a magic fucking box that could reduce his workload from a matter of years to a matter of days. He would not be crying about how no one meets face to face anymore: he would be moved to tears by the fact that he could talk to someone in a place he had never even been as if he were meeting them face to face.

I love history, but the future is fucking incredible, and we need to shut up and realize that. Things like typewriters and snail mail letters are fun little affectations for us (and I fully support fun little affectations), but we should thank our goddam lucky stars every day that we do not ever HAVE to use these things. We don’t have to wait a month to know that our mother died, we don’t have to wait a month for vital medicine to arrive, we don’t have to spend weeks typesetting the pages of books before they are printed, we don’t have to take hourlong trips to go see each other just to see how each other is doing. Just because we think it’s somehow aesthetically pleasing doesn’t mean it’s a good thing.

I am partially so worked up about this because my life is made possible by technology: literally, I’m a diabetic, who also uses an insulin pump. I am very glad it does not take thirty minutes of boiling to test my blood sugar, and I am very glad that I have enough insulin to keep living. If we were all being moral and old fashioned and tipping our hats to each other on the street: I would be dead. Stop looking backwards.

Home

Lampshades spool out from the house, becoming clotheslines,
the mountains at dusk, the way the light
burrows under the island. You are invoked by it, your separate parts
become harmonics of a single string, your hair

bleeds out from the gash of the first and the second
retreats from your skin in the familiar capillary.
A third and standing wave reverberates.
Your image back and forth between the buildings, back and forth.

There are factories even here, it smells like flowers and
the metal rink of making.
Here are stories you won’t tell me, here are
two of both kinds of heart, and the vascular systems
wound around them. Here every star and its grey orbits hum with blood.

It is a place that you can simply move to, simply
turn to like a radio dial. You are so far away. You
are so much of my home here. I am stuck fast,
take me with you, take me with you.

Information

is free, always should be free, and always will be free. This is how computers will bring about communism.

From the industrial revolution onward art has enjoyed a kind of capitalist bender. The advent of new methods of distributing artistic works (most notably literature and music) has allowed these industries to transform into obscenely lucrative financial mechanisms in their own right, on par with heavy manufacturing and science in terms of the sheer amount of cash they produce. This is made possible by the transformation of these industries into capitalist machinery: musicians make music as a product, which is sold; novels are a product, movies are a product. Art itself is a product, and the more product you sell, the more money you make.

Todays musicians and actors are far richer than their historical counterparts could ever hope to be. Before the industrial revolution the mechanism whereby an artist supported him or herself was patronage: lovers of art gave money so that artists would be free to produce more art. Shakespeare, though receiving support from the queen and the lord chamberlain, was no Harvey Weinstein. Bach could not afford to eat diamonds or have a roller coaster installed on his property. These people made their way through the economy of reputation: people liked Bach's music, so they kept him around. There was not the formulaic relationship between worker and wage, producer and product that we have been conditioned into accepting as part of capitalist machinery.

When reputation is turned into this worker/wage relationship, it quickly gets out of control. People like art, a LOT of people like art, for a LONG time. If someone like Geoffrey of Monmouth were to turn this "reputation" into hard cash he could buy and sell pretty much every one of us (and if his estate had sued for copyright on King Arthur...well just think about it). Copyright and intellectual property law are NOT how art is supposed to work. Art is not a product, and it is not supposed to generate revenue like one.

The industrial revolution, then, was a transition period between the old reputation model and the new one. For a time, certain capitalist opportunists were able to set up models whereby art is tied in with product. This is akin to putting heroin in candy. People NEED art, and will always pay for it. Art behaves like an idea, which is to say that it lasts a long time, is required and desired by a larger number of people than a specific commodity ever should be, and can be controlled by a conscious effort of the producer. It's a capitalist wet dream.

So muscians, actors, and some writers got obscenely rich. I mean actually obscene, like it's inappropriate. A side effect of this is that art no longer develops under the selecting influence of artistic enrichment, simply rude market forces. Poetry is dying because the masses simply do no clamor for it: the demand is too low. Poetry still has all the staying power of the novel (in fact more so for its brevity) but it is difficult to package and sell, and to find people willing to buy (beyond those who are akin to those artistically minded patrons of historical rep-economy) . Art becomes about what sells, not about what is good or interesting to those who love it.

What we are seeing with the emergence of the information age is the dismantling of these capitalist mechanisms. There is now a way for all information to be transmitted through a single medium, a medium which does not follow the model of a commodity. People pay for ACCESS to information, not for each piece of information which becomes theirs. People are realizing that copyright law and DRM are bullshit, and that they shouldn't have to pay for something that their ancestors never had to. This is the essence of communism: the separation of money from product. It is not about moving property, or transfer of ownership. It is about GIVING people resources. Artists can still make money, simply not the obscene amounts they were capable of under the old system. The musicians who whine fearfully about file sharing "Stealing music" are simply greedy capitalists, nothing more. You're not stealing music from them, because music is information and information cannot be owned or controlled, not in a civilized society leastaways.

Do not buy art! Give artists money, fine, but remember ART IS NOT A PRODUCT AND YOU DO NOT HAVE TO BUY IT LIKE ONE.

There is nothing more upsetting than elderly people who have not only resigned themselves to the fact that the world they loved is gone, but seem to actively embrace it.

The image breaks, the material comes apart in the hands. Taking a picture preserves the most useless thing about an object

Idioglossia

I am comfortable enough being an outlier I tell you
in my broken english, and I even laugh nervously,
just to reinforce how true it is. but I still can’t resist
placing fragments of pottery in places where you will find them:

underneath your pillow, in geometric patterns
on the back of your hands or neck. you may even wake
to a noise at your door one evening, and find two or three of them
depending from the knob, clinking together softly in the breeze—

even if you manage to ignore these, I will grind
a few pieces into the gravel of my speech, the rusty flecks
tinting it a suggestive shade of red, like a stained shirt.
one day it will be enough, and you will finally come

to my door, face flushed and angry, to ask me to stop;
to tell me it isn’t funny anymore and I will laugh,
too tired by now to hide my unhappiness, and tell you that you
must not have understood, exactly, what I meant by I am comfortable
enough

A caveat

It occurs to me that I am not at all qualified to speak as grandly on poetry as I do. Hm, no matter.

To insert another grandiose statement of contemporary poetic fact, the power of the art lies it the ability of its practitioners to maintain faith in their abilties and truth despite all, even overwhelming evidence to the contrary. With a proper poetic sensibility, this messianic faith cannot fail.

To ber certain, though, it can. But one must still have faith, one must always continue with faith

Poetry

is the art, the enterprise.

There is much talk about poetry and its place in culture, and whether or not it is dead. It's tempting to call poetry dead because it is more difficult to see poetry's direct and explosive impact on the cultural landscape the same way one sees movies, television, or music wreaking their specious havoc on the world.

Students of poetry are obsessively taught that their art is esoteric and useless, (the most positive thing you are likely to hear about poetry from the preachers of this doctrine is that THEY "like" poetry, for all it's caveats) even by the most messianic of poets and poetry scholars. At best one can hope to find a professor who teaches a kind of ivory-tower disdain for the realities of art-as-culture: art being pursued for art's sake, almost reveling in the accusations of frivolity or irrelevance leveled at it by the unartistic laity.

That such a pessimistic vision of ultimate futility exists even in academic institutions, the home and nursery of poetry and poets, is troubling. Is poetry indeed dead, then? If its heart is dead, must not the body follow?

Fine, let's all give up and go home.

I kid, of course. The answer is that poetry is not dead, but suffers from an inferiority complex that has been built up through years of elitist thought and isolation. We, as poets, writers, and idea-artists, need to take thorough stock of our art. Not our craft, never our craft. The word craft implies the rude handling and abuse of media. This is one such truth we must acknowledge of our art: it is a pure art, and in certain senses of the word perhaps the purest art.

Poetry must, through the actions and ideological power of its practitioners, realize its true importance. We must not just believe in, or posit the power of poetry, we must know that it is powerful. We must know that it is not a trifle, that we are not wasting our time, that the things we do both in the zone of the poem and out are necessary, in some way, to the human process. We are not isolated intellectuals, and we are not obsessive hobbyists. We are human beings performing a human service.

Poetry, as they say, is due for a comeback.