Frank’s Bruised Mandarin

Monday March 9 marked the 7^th installment of Karl Saffran and Mike Houser's reading series, Salacious Banter with an excellent reading by newcomer Magdalena Zurawski, Aaron Kunin, and veteran Phillysound poet, CA Conrad – a stop on the Midwest leg of their Frank's Bruised Mandarin Tour (the title is a mash up of their current book titles). Operating out of Karl's loft apartment in Milwaukee's Walker's Point neighborhood, Karl and Mike have been serving up these part Happening/part poetry readings with excellent food and cutting edge verse for nearly a year now. Run on a shoestring budget, Salacious Banter has amazingly garnered not only up-and-coming talent, but also better known poets as Aram Saryoin, Brenda Ijima, Brandon Downing, and old-garde New York Schoolers like John Koethe, and Lewis Warsh. This time around was no exception.

After the crowd had finished devouring the tasty tamales and guacamole the festivities centered on sofas and chairs around the poets. What seemed to mark this reading from the rest was that roughly the first half of the reading was dedicated to fiction, which while not out of the realm of unthinkable in non-mainstream poetry circles, is at least unexpected. For instance, Josh Corey has recently posted on his blog, Cashiers de Corey (here and here), about his reasons for disappointment with work that falls under the labels "fiction" and "novel" – that attention only to plot and character alone is akin to playing with wind-up toys (only without the awareness one is doing so). While even he admits that his gripe is more knee-jerky and reductive, it is more difficult to find prose writers willing to take the kind of chances with form and method that you see in scores of small press poetry magazines today. In fact, compared to poetry there are very few magazines solely dedicated to pushing fiction writing beyond its generic craft, and most magazines that include fiction only choose the most marketable pieces – which inevitably are content driven. One viable alternative is flash fiction or prose poetry, but both of these are more closely related to poetry in both length and linguistic play, so much so that Josh's question still begs to be answered – can there be, these days, a viable experiment in fiction along the lines of Stein, Joyce, or Beckett (and to keep up the Irish theme, maybe Flan O'Brian)?

I bring all this up because both Magdalena and Aaron's prose seems to investigate the very generic constructs of fiction writing that Josh Corey and others (myself included) find clichéd and dull. These novels that the writers were reading from – Magdalena's debut novel The Bruise(Fiction Collective 2) and Aaron's new novel The Mandarin(Fence Books) – are both structured self-reflexively in that the plot of the novel, if one can speak of plot in these books, focuses on the coming into being of the book itself. In fact, the first passage that Magdalena, the first of the readers, performed locates itself in a creative writing workshop with students discussing meta-issues of story formation, and yet the self-reflexivity of setting takes a back seat to the larger linguistic formation of the book. In an aural encounter it is hard not to notice the Steinian recursivity of the sentences in which, nouns in particular, get repeated from one sentence to the next but each time in a different direction or register as if the sentences were folded and stitched together to create a seam, making the rhizomic shape of the narrative hold the sharpness, or color, of its lines, much like the diffuse yet defined mark of a bruise on the surface of the skin. And yet, I would still categorize The Bruise as a novel – there is a "story" at work here, complete with characters, setting, and dialogue, only these are not merely vehicles replete with cushioned harnesses and scripted voices shouting "enjoy your day here at Updike Land!" The sentences bring us into the story almost as participants in the larger discussion of what a bildungs roman represents.

Aaron deftly followed this with a reading from The Mandarin, a novel told almost entirely in dialogue about a novelist writing a novel that puts people to sleep. The irony of the plot becomes far more apparent in performance than even on first read. While in concept the structure of the book sounds somewhat like an MFA student waxing Hemingway-esque, in which one expects efficiency – dialogue pounded out such as to negate the need for elaborate set and character description, a dictum I've more than once been rapped on the knuckles with when experimenting with dialogue. Here, the dialogue services something other than traditional plot and setting, and instead attempts to map the shape of memory. As the characters try to rouse the sleeping heroine from her "novel" boredom, we get the memories of once inhabited locales in what appears over time to be an intersection of different idealizations of Minneapolis. In short, Aaron's focus on the potentiality of dialogue to do more than serve plot, creates a detourè in which we as listener's are asked to participate in set construction, which may be as good a set up for the conceit of the evening personified at its most hilarious in the poetry of CA Conrad.

Conrad, as he prefers to be addressed, read from his new book, The Book of Frank (Chax Press), in which to tell the story of a semi-fictional Frank, he takes everyday objects as points of meditation, though meditations run through many mystic filters – one poem was written during an evening when Conrad ate only blue foods and listened to Bobby Vinton's "Blue Velvet" on a 12-hr loop. In fact, all of Conrad's work involves this type of methodology, whether he's locked himself up ozmosifying the logic of his '45s, or touring the alleys and estranging signage and sounds of cities like his home-town Phili, or even traipsing through Memphis reading all the sites through the hangover sunglasses of the King. And yet, it struck me that despite the crazy approaches to writing that appear to loosen the writer's control over the movement and content of piece, Conrad's poems (and Magdalena's and Aaron's prose) was remarkably easy enough to access. By ignoring oft cited demands of writing workshops and mass circular publishers, all three writers were able to focus attention on something more substantial than a clever turn of plot – the lively and colorful, almost oxymoronic turns of language and the reality we use words to uncover. While "real" fiction often puts me to sleep or drink at a live reading, these authors' negotiations of what function the component parts of "fiction" can serve has had my mind rolling for days. Praise be to the readers and to Karl and Mike and to poetry in living rooms and on sofas instead of behind lecterns and in theatres.

Aura and the Aesthetics of Politics

In his book, The Aesthetic State: a quest in Modern German thought (1989), Josef Chytry attempts to construct a genealogy of German thinking that could account for what the Frankfurt School saw as Germany's infatuation with an aestheticized politic in the period following WWI. He traces this line of thought down from Ancient Greek democracy through Schiller, Schelling, Hegel, Marx, Wagner and on through to Marcuse. His conceit is that an aesthetic appreciation of social relations was not unique to the Fascists but is an underlying function of what he seems to envision as a collective Western effort to scientifically analyze aesthetic responses. This can be seen most clearly in his chapter entitled "Marx: Communism and the Laws of Beauty," in which he dialectically opposes Marx's early interest in Aesthetics with the later writing that adheres more rigidly to a telos, or better yet an eschatology, of Capital. By focusing his attention toward the transitional Marx of the Manifesto, Chytry argues that there are three factors that inform Marx's concept of the "proletariat": 1) Marx's obsession with pre-Socratic Greece, which he claimed, in opposition to Hegel's telos, were more substantive or sensuous and only turned toward the abstract, or spiritual, after Socrates and Plato; 2) Marx's own statements on aesthetics, which seem to reveal that Marx saw aesthetics, as did many of the Young Hegelians, as a vehicle toward radical thought and social organization; and 3)Marx's relationship with various working class movements, like the Paris Commune of 1871. These influences then culminate, according to Chytry, in Marx's re-formulation of history as the progression of mankind's relationship to artisanal praxis and the use-value of his/her labor. In other words, Historical Materialism could be seen as reading forms of beauty into mankind's socio-historical narrative. What seems important to Chytry is to recapture and emphasize this quasi-romantic strain in the early Marx, so that he can rationalize Marx's move in the later years away from a politicized aesthetic (e.g. the form is only a means to making or a tool) and toward an aestheticized politic (e.g. the form itself being the end goal) of the proletarian dictatorship. It seems quite timely that Chytry takes this project up during the final stages of Gorbachev's glasnost, in which much of Marx's legacy is swept under the rug as just another misguided manifestation of the utopian impulses that dominated much of the 19^th century.

In that respect, Chytry's project seems a good counterpart to Walter Benjamin's 1936 essay on the politics of photography "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (or sometimes translated as "technical reproducibility"). Like Chytry, Benjamin sets up a dialectic between the failed utopianism of the later Marx and the core structural principles of historical materialism that could potentially undermine the capitalist enterprise and render theories of the present politics of art (i.e. art produced under "mature" capitalism) that are "completely useless for the purposes of Fascism." To that end, Benjamin constructs a history of fine artistic production that begins with a mythos of "aura" that surrounded religious artifacts. According to Benjamin, the aura of a work of art was significantly tied to it's unique authenticity (it's specific location in time and space) and it's ritual function within a longstanding tradition (in a secular sense this is akin to provenance and the ritual of museum spectatorship). Unlike Chytry, though, Benjamin directly goes after the mythologies that allow for such a tradition to seem natural. In fact, art by definition can never be natural or authentic but produced by particular techniques that have always been reproducible. What, for Benjamin is profoundly different, post-1900 (cf. the invention of devices such as the lithograph, daguerreotype, and phonograph) is that the human labor expended in re-producing a work of art has been abstracted even further by the use of modern machinery, thus eliminating the basis for a concept of aura – the uniqueness of the bourgeois individual that subsumes the labor of a work's creation. The political ramification of this move is not lost on Benjamin who then takes this rupture within the tradition to posit a thesis that seems counterintuitive in a vulgar Marxist teleology: that the crisis of authenticity brought about by mechanical reproduction might actually undo one of the last vestiges of Socratic/Platonic idealism – the mind/body split. In effect, the ability of machines to recreate artifacts that cause aesthetic reactions in "individuals" raises a serious challenge to centrality/importance of the human species as inherently special or purposive. And this, for Benjamin, is vital because if we cannot talk about nature, aura, etc, then we can only talk about reproducible technique and the possible uses of such techne to change social relations (i.e. the politics of art). Of thecourse that also makes the obverse true – that we can no longer discuss with any validity any true or authentic politic that must evidence itself in the inherent form of all activity, or what he called the "aesthetic state" at work in the fascism of Hitler and Mussalini, and in 1936 what he began to see at work in Moscow too.