Urs Fischer
Saturday, February 6, 2010



Finally made it to the Urs Fischer show, due to close this Sunday at the New Museum. I got many interesting impressions from it. Most of them had to do with being in a large, sunlit space full of large, conceptual objects; not a bad impression, but not significantly different from similar impressions. I suppose it's worth paying for. I had a guest pass.

Fischer has an interesting anxiety about organic form. One room features massive, Serra-sized sculptures, yet these sculptures are made from flighty aluminum rather than Serra's earthy leads and steels, and mostly hung from the ceiling rather than mounted on the floor. These are expanded from shapes formed from the modest dimensions of the artist's hands; they are as shapeless and absurd as the negative space of a hand when in pursuit of leisure or the flailing grip of small-hours indigestion. They are comforting in the way that King Kong's hand is a comfort to Fay Wray.

On another floor, you step off the elevator and are greeted by a 3-and-a-half foot long lighter with a picture of an underdressed lady on it. Further down, a similarly-scaled box of matches, half-opened, lay on its back. Closer inspection reveals that the mount for these blown up reproductions is a mirrored box; the mirror only pokes through behind the lighter's sparkwheel, where the thumb would ordinarily connect, or at the collapsed, rounded edges of the matchbox.

The gallery space is full of a few dozen of these Brobdingnagian objects. Many of them fit the 90 degree angles of the box; a VCR tape of Love Streams, a CD head cleaner, even a stomach-churning Froot-Loop-and-marshmallow dessert cube exploded to the size of a bus. More interesting are those things that do not fit the box; a pear, the artist's shoe, a motorcycle helmet, the seams of which objects become entire mirrored surfaces reaching forward into faceted, three-sided corners. The negative space of the artist's giant hand is once again represented, this time in the reflective surface surrounding a fizzy fluted mimosa. This is fun, but the message as I see it is self-evident: products tend toward a squareness the human form cannot mimic.

Funny, then, that he decides to open one of the exhibition's two reproduced books, an Italian collection of 19th Century nudes, so as to allow that negative space to shimmer through what it would not otherwise. After all, the book is the first reproducible and marketable media produced in the square format. Why the enforced organicism? And why not include a gun in this collection of objects?

posted by Greg Purcell @ 8:36 AM, ,


Poetry in its places
Wednesday, February 3, 2010




Building a context in which to write is dull work, yet it's the only work available to poets now. We've been watching--we poets are the last ones watching-- epistemology and ideology bat one another in a bloodless Punch and Judy show that reveals and inspires nothing equally. Poetry moves fast because it has no one to account to; if we as poets decide to erase history and replace it with radical epistemology we do it, boom, and the generations of poetry flash by with all the undifferentiated movement of a strobelight. If we continue on, no one will notice. If we pull back, no one will notice. Neither capital nor human solidarity nor the beasts of the field. So perhaps what is interesting about poets to the outsider, if it is interesting (and I am becoming more like an outsider to poetry every day) is in the way we flail around. After all, jobs are starting to look a lot more like poetic post-experimentalism every day, the product of libertarian dreaminess and anxiety.

What I'm saying is; poets lack context. It's hard to review.

Now, if geography as a theme could replace the specific context poetry has lost everyone would be doing it. It's been done often enough, though; it's a great context to borrow. Geography has a staid meaning; and, bonus, its boundaries become supple and weird upon inquiry (read Names On the Land from George Stewart to find out how). This is what a lot people think poetry is, or want it to be. Alas, maps do geography better than poetry. What geography lends us instead is a distorted mirror that's fun to look at but unhealthy to depend on.

With this caveat that I introduce, briefly, two new books of poetry. They are both from Ugly Duckling Press; they are Kevin Vallone's g-point almanac: passyunk lost and Rick Snyder's Escape from Combray. Their combination of poetry and geography are both worthwhile: better, I think they are both playfully done.

I nearly passed on Escape From Combray for the same reason that I passed on Proust Was A Neuroscientist. Yet it had a cover that looked a lot like the early, slim edition of The Maximus Poems from The Figures press. Except in this case the map was not of Glouchester (nor, thankfully, of Combray) but Chicago, a place I spent nearly a decade of my life. If this were a novel, I'd say he captures well both the gray, cozy eternity of its winters and the sterilizing creep of its commerce ("Gold Sounds" begins, "Having become/ the type of person/ who will walk/ to the Shell station/ on a Friday night/ to buy a KitKat"). This is a book of poetry -- a very comfortable, very nice book of poetry, refreshing mainly because the stuff around it is so sharp and niggardly-- that does much of the work that a novel or a short story does. This is not a bad thing, especially since few novelists I know this side of Aleksandar Hemon have have captured what it feels like to actually live in Chicago rather than go on bogus adventures there. This is a book of poetry in which the author goes out and does stuff. The reason "I do this, I do that" was so interesting when Frank O'Hara did it was that he lived at a time when middle-class, intelligent Americans could live interesting lives and write interesting poems without getting blown up by airplanes or mortar fire. Rick Snyder seems to know this but tries it out anyway, with all the requisite KitKats--and passive observation-- that approach implies. This is mostly a guy watching his city change, not someone changing his city. Still, a pastoral that begins "Somewhere between the wine and the nightmare/ my ex-girlfriend's cat/ comes to work with me" has a lot of charm, and charm is good for something.

Keven Varrone's book is the third of a tetrology; I haven't read the first two parts, though I've seen his work around. It's of interest to me because I've been spending time in Philly lately (Passyunk is a town outlying Philadelphia) and talking to some Philly poets in preparation for our upcoming event. I do not know Philly well. Having said that, I do not recognize Philly in these poems--streets are just streets and go unnamed, coal is burned here and there, gulls are displaced, "inland." It could be Gary, Indiana or someplace in West Virginia. Varrone definitely drinks from the postexperimental fountain, and so vague things float by on puffs of the author's intelligence and words go unmoored on the page (and, really, no caps? A la e.e. cummings? Why?). Still, there is too much here to like to pass it up. This is less a meditation on place then on time; in the long, continuing sequence, poems are numbered by season and date and have the literalness of a day captured half at work and half at rest, as most days are. "among the laterals, amazing upward structures" begins one of the poems for some unannuated January 11th. It is not only literally describing a spreadsheet, but has a similar cadence. A week later, "the birds made a dappled panic on the bocce court." Which strikes me a much livelier and in debt to Hopkins, which one never sees.

Buy these books and see for yourself.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 8:43 AM, ,


It's official
Wednesday, January 27, 2010



"Dungeons & Dragons could 'foster an inmate’s obsession with escaping from the real-life correctional environment, fostering hostility, violence and escape behavior,' prison officials said in court."

Dungeons & Dragons Prison Ban Upheld NYTimes.com

posted by Greg Purcell @ 1:35 PM, ,


Hey, neat!
Sunday, January 24, 2010

posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:34 PM, ,


Soldiering through
Saturday, January 23, 2010

I've given myself a deadline of Tuesday to finish a story.

This deadline business never goes well for me. The story keeps unraveling and I find myself rapidly stuffing the cotton back into the seams and stapling the seams shut. Why can't I just sit down and write a neat, clean ten-pager? It seems like a lack of good judgment, ultimately.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 9:38 AM, ,


Punch Kick Pause Punch
Sunday, January 17, 2010

To play this game in front of any human being over the age of 12-- indeed, just to play it in front of yourself-- is to develop a sense that something has gone horribly wrong with your recreation. This choice of leisure bespeaks some profound defect in your makeup. That niggling thought that shadows much of our play...is amplified to the point of palpable shame by Bayonetta's relentless barrage of steaming tawdry nonsense.


So begins Iroquois Pliskin's recent post about Bayonetta, which ends:

You cannot pass up this game for its visual and thematic inanity. The libretto for your average operatic masterpiece is some genuinely nonsense, and this does nothing to obscure the beauty of the music that is its rationale. As Frank Lantz astutely noted, games are more music than cinema. Let the music take your mind.


Unbridled admiration combined with mouth-watering disgust of just this sort seems to pretty much sum up what people have been writing about this game. As for me, I am truly enjoying the smooth, unapologetic, and nearly-mechanical videogaminess of this title. Its self-awarness is of itself as a Video Game, and not as a Video Game attempting to be something else.

posted by Greg Purcell @ 4:50 PM, ,


Canada Dry
Wednesday, January 13, 2010



1
It's the layering of gimmicks--rhyme schemes and repetition and metric jingles--that lend poetry its natural opacity. In fact, the whole history of free verse has been an attempt to replicate that opacity without the appearance of gimmicks at all. The Oulipo had a word for a text wherein the constraint is to produce a text which reads as if written under a restriction, without any restriction being imposed at all--"Canada Dry" (derived from a series of advertisements in the 60's that promoted ginger ale as a "kicky" alternative to real alcohol). In other words, the supposed difficulty of poetry is not a poem-to-poem problem, but a universal one. Assuming that, it's also not worth arguing. It's fortunate for the crossword puzzle industry that what they produced was never mistaken for soulcraft--they are neither expected to fill in the puzzles nor make them unsolvable.

There are poets who, in an effort to bypass the difficulty of poetry, write little synopses of the novels they would have written if they weren't so lazy. They aren't difficult, it's true, but they're also boring, too boring even to understand things like games and puzzles, boring even in translation, and are not worth talking about. It's the people engaged in the 30-year cult of difficulty (70 years, if you count The New Criticism) you have to try to talk down from this stuff. They're the ones getting too old to continue the pretense, who created our very difficult world in a situation of unparalleled ease, who are still squatting on a big chunk of poetic real estate, and we younger writers should know better than to allow them to fuck with our dignity, and especially with our fun. No other generation has folded so readily before their elders as we have before ours. They will die soon, and what will we have? Nothing of our own. Not an art, nor a legitimate politics: nothing. Just this meaningless word called difficulty.

2
After hosting a reading of self-identified "literary" science fiction writers this Thursday--a very talented group, and one of the more exciting and fun readings we've had--I was chatting with one of the founders of The Interstitial Arts Foundation. She was singing the praises of an annual science fiction convention outside of Boston called Readercon. She hit upon all the things that make it exciting to me: "it's science fiction writing, but it's the rare convention without the distractions. It's by and for writers." At first, I was excited by the focus of it. But something deeper hit me about it. I'm tired of the "focus" of poets. Because it's all focus, all the time. What luxury, I was thinking, to be in actual danger of being distracted by one's peers. I dream of being so distracted by another poet, instead of watching him or her pretend, in drudgery and recitation, to have honed their specific ideology of language to a killing point.

As we discussed the merits of Readercon, I was thinking the analog to poetry would be if we were in a situation in which there were regularly these fantastic Rhythm and Rhyme conferences featuring birdwatchers, video game developers, graphic designers, musicians and hopscotch athletes --conventions available from month to month in states all over the country, held together by the specifically unserious love of its participants-- and that at least one of them had the rare benefit of featuring only poets. This does not exist of course, because poetry shares with factories and offices and government bureaus everywhere an obsession with perfecting singular processes and the neat-freak abhorrence of the non-ideological.

Where else can you find such clarifying unprofessionalism as in science fiction?

posted by Greg Purcell @ 3:56 PM, ,