Hyphen-ing

Josh Corey, in the throes of academic job-applying (you have my sympathy, Josh, especially since I'm on the other side of the table this year, chairing a recruitment committee), has been doing some personal postion/soul-searching, wondering about the way one functions as a poet-critic. After saying some entirely unwarranted nice things about me, he calls me by name:

there's another rift between poetry/poetics and criticism: as a poet, I am primarily interested in what enables my own work and the work of other poets I care about. When I read a poet like Zukofsky, I am looking for news I can use: techniques and themes and turns of phrase that Zukofsky made more possible. For me, one of poetry's primary functions is the generation of more poetry—reading is writing, or wreading in Jed Rasula's phrase. That's a fundamentally different attitude than that assumed by the critic, who reads in a more specifically interrogatory mode, and with a more or less specific ideological axe to grind. It's the old battle of Beauty vs. Truth, really. And the question for a poet-critic like myself has to be not, Whose side are you on?, but: How are these different modes of reading implicated in each other for me? Why am I hyphenated? How can this tension be productive for both kinds of work, both modes of questioning? Mark, you're a poet-critic. Care to address this question from your perspective?

Something I've thought about a few times over the years. First, in regards to some of the talk going on in your comments box, I agree that one doesn't have to be a poet in order to be a good critic of poetry – I'm reminded of Samuel Johnson's comment to Boswell somewhere, the gist of which was you needn't be a carpenter to assess whether a table was well-made or not – but it helps.

It helps in a couple of ways. First, the committed poet almost always has the most basic piece of equipment needed for useful criticism – a deep investment in ("love of") the art itself, & that investment usually manifests itself in an immersion in poetry that one doesn't get in many critics. (I'm thinking at the moment of Terry Eagleton, a critic & thinker whose work I much admire, but who seems to write on poetry from the window of a speeding car – yes, I know, I haven't read his new How to Read a Poem or whatever its title is.)

More importantly, the poet-critic, who's reading as you say in this "predatory" manner, looking for tricks & tropes & techniques she can make her own, has a grasp of the poem from the inside, as it were, a perspective that one only rarely encounters in non-poet critics of poetry. That can be very enabling, tho it can also tend to blind one to certain approaches to literature – notably the sociological & the ideological – that themselves have great value.

[And such "inside knowledge," let's face it, is often vitiated if the poet doesn't have some sort of developed critical vocabulary in which to describe whatever insights she or he has into the work at hand. Otherwise, it all too often becomes a kind of shaggy emoting, an appeal to the lowest common affective denominator, & ends up telling one more about the poet reading than the poem read. Which is interesting at times, I guess.]
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The line between invested criticism & advocacy is a fuzzy one, but my own experience in writing about poets has been this: First of all, I don't write about anyone whose work doesn't interest me, give me pleasure, provoke me to composition, and make me want to steal something. Life is too short to waste on writers I find irremediably alien or uninteresting as poetry. But like you I have fairly catholic tastes, so I'm happy to think about Zukofsky, Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein and Geoffrey Hill or Ann Carson. I'm not really interested in debating sides of any Post-Avant/School of Quietude continuum, & am really quite uninterested in all such divisions except insofar as they bear on issues of literary & institutional history (a big "except," indeed).

And I have yet to read any poet who wholly satisfies me. (Perhaps Bunting, Blake, and Dickinson come closest.) Which means that every time I address a poem or poet, I feel somehow duty-bound to take both my enthusiasm and my dissatisfaction into account – which perhaps accounts for the "dialectical" impulse you so kindly attribute to my scribbles. In turn, one of my impulses in writing poetry is precisely to achieve (in MacDiarmid's words) "the kind of poetry I want" – tho of all of my dissatisfactions, that which my own work affords me is perhaps the strongest.
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I've never found the hyphen in poet-critic personally problematic or anything less than natural; but it can be problematic in certain institutional contexts. Like in grad school, for instance, where I did the concurrent MFA/PhD track, & often felt that critical insights I'd arrived at by thinking about the poem as a poet were more or less offhandedly dismissed as non-rigorous (Cornell had a big Paul de Man woodie back then) or even "bellettristic." Since then I've often found myself hesitating over job application letters, wondering whether laying stress on my activities as poet would be a plus or a minus when I applied for a job in (say) American modernism. From the other side of the table, it's rather easier, at least where I work now: when we see a candidate with creative publications, we often think "hey, maybe we can get this person to pick up a section or two of undergrad CW!" In larger departments, where lines between Creative Writing and Literary Studies are more boldly drawn, I suspect it's problematic.
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I'm least interested in poet-critics when they're most obviously "spinning" their own practice (Eliot on the metaphysicals, for instance). I'm most interested & moved when they're applying their own deep investment in the art to searching readings of things that aren't necessarily the most congenial or the most obvious reads for them, or when they're teasing out the self-contradictions in the works that have proven most influential for their own practice: Bob Perelman's Trouble with Genius is a fine example of the latter; much of Geoffrey Hill's is exemplary of the former.

Gore & Adorno

Try as I might, I can't make "Al Gore" work as an anagram for "Adorno"; but according to David Postman of the Seattle Times, he-who-used-to-show-all-the-charisma-of-the-cigar-store-Indian has been quoting TWA on the parallels between the current US administration & the Nazis:

Adorno conducted a kind of autopsy on the Third Reich and he said the first sign of this descent to hell was when this happened, and these are his words: All questions of fact became questions of power.
...
And I'm not drawing an analogy to what happened there. I'm not. [why not?] But it's dangerous when we allow questions of fact to become questions of power.

Noted

Ray Davis, on the excellent Pseudopodium – a site which has more good reading than most municipal libraries – put up a lovely post last month on Ruskin's Fors Clavigera that's one of the most thoughtful assessment of the grim one's proto-blog that I've ever read. Which isn't to say that I agree with it entirely – perhaps I have a higher tolerance for ranting & bad-tempered quarrelling. Or maybe because I'm reading the thing on a five-year plan, its frequent shortcomings aren't as apparent to me. I think I'd want it on the proverbial desert island, but I sure as hell wouldn't want Fors & nothing else – at least not after the first month.

The only person I know who ever consistently linked Pound & Fors was another lively stylist, Guy Davenport, & like so many of Guy's insights that linkage is striking & apt but doesn't bear pressing too hard.
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Re-reading Geraldine Monk's Interregnum (Creation Books, 1993), & well embarked on Peter Riley's Passing Measures: A Collection of Poems (Carcanet, 2000). Sound files of both of these poets can be found on Andrea Brady's very exciting Archive of the Now; go check out all the cool stuff.

Back [and in progress]

We're back from a long weekend in Connecticut, nursing stuff that ranges from mild sniffles to hacking coughs, but delighted to have enjoyed the fall foliage someplace that has fall foliage. The most WASP place in the world, I'm convinced.
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Mystic Seaport

Over some silent footage from the turn
of the last century, Ishmael
narrates the industrial techniques
of drawing forth Leviathan: cinematically
sterilized, the buckets of blood
rendered a gray-black celluloid
shimmer, the work of the precise,
wooden, floating abattoir before me
(for the first time) in living motion
echoes in dull but vivid déjà vu
of the video screen. Too neat:
fifteen, twenty chapters of viscous
dissection tried-out to six
minutes of jerky movement: the Book
of Job in Reader's Digest condensation.

Ron & the Brits ii

I’m dying to get back into that Adorno thang, now that Dave and Bob have both weighed in – but I’m off up north tonight for a long weekend among the autumn leaves. We don’t really have deciduous trees down here – there’s the season when the palm trees drop their nuts everwhere, then there’s the season where they shed their fronds and grow cute new baby fronds, there’s the unbearably hot season and then the warm season when the roads and restaurants are clogged with northerners, etc. So I miss autumn – and winter, and spring, for that matter.

But instead of Adorno, I’ll put up what I hope is the blogosphere’s very last post (yeah right) on Ron Silliman’s “Post-avant vs. School of Quietude” business. Here goes. It comes as intercalary comments to the excellent Michael Peverett, commenting transatlantically on my last post:

I consider the post-avant / SoQ distinction a perfectly valid one for alluding to the fact that there are two and only two audiences for US (and British) poetry that are interested in discussing the history and current state of poetry. (In other words, a child enjoying a nursery rhyme is an audience for poetry that I don't convict of being in either camp.)

[I think you overstate; a good counter-example: the critic Thomas Gardner (see the review earlier this week on John Latta’s Dumpster Island), whose latest book examines the Dickinsonian strain in Charles Wright (slighly post-Poundian SoQ, Susan Howe (definitely P-A), and Jorie Graham (???).]

The two disputatious audiences might indeed be better seen as one graded audience, related by a host of intermediaries somewhat like the interbreeding clines that connect species of mouse that are distinct at their extremes.

[Oh indeed, but why then are the “disputacious” extremes necessarily more defining or interesting than the hybridized middles? Yeah, I know what the Lord has to say about Laodiceans…]

KSM [Kasey Mohammad]'s essay didn't attack the binary distinction, only the validity of the suggestion that post-avant somehow maps on to other descriptions, such as politically activist or aggressively loud. An attack on the distinction itself needs to show that there are other coherent, independent, articulate, critical bodies of poetry-lovers who don't fit well into the existing paradigm. And in my opinion those bodies just don't exist right now.

[“coherent, independent, articulate, critical bodies” is a pretty high standard – & frankly, I’m not sure either the loudest advocates of P-A poetries or the blithe reviewers of SoQ works fit that description much of the time – but you’re probably largely right. I think it’s in the nature of those who think about & write about poets from across the spectrum – & I’d cite, in addition to Gardner, Eric Selinger, Norman Finkelstein, Lynn Keller, & others – to be more interested in insightful readings of particular poets, tropes, techniques than in polemics on behalf of large tendencies. It remains to be seen what will be more useful in the long run.]

I can't help thinking that among poetry commentators diversity is to be celebrated. [Hear hear!] Silliman could never have gained his infectious enthusiasm, his immense range of knowledge of the US experimental scene without his strict diet of never on any account reading Spenser, Keats, foreign-language poetry, novels or science (slightly unfair, I know). But don't you need someone who'll tell you - and will make you feel interested in - exactly how a poet fits into the Spicer circle or Bay Area poetics? I know I do.

[Ron is unsurpassed in his own balliwick – but he has such an indefatigable appetite for poetry, & sometimes a wonderfully unsclerotic ability to accept the “new,” that I’m disappointed whenever I run up against one of his blind spots – & Spenser, Keats, Wordsworth, all of British poetry on the 20th c. save his 4 horsemen is a really big blind spot, no?]

What else can I disagree with? Oh Mark - "ceremonial" - cultures do perceptibly differ, even such similar ones as British and US, but I think it's impossible to narrow down those differences to a phrase; people have written whole books about it, and even so the books are full of contentious generalizations about "tendencies" and "for the most part".

[I think I quoted Sean saying “ceremonious” – a minor distinction, but “ceremonious” also invokes simple “politeness,” “formality” in ways that “ceremonial” doesn’t quite.]

I suppose I am a British poetry person and it's true that I can find things in, say, Geraldine Monk that I couldn't expect from any transatlantic poet - bits of mainly demotic, insular culture that only we would know about. But I doubt if these aspects of writing are of outstanding significance and if I listed the English-speaking poets (and poetry-readers) I feel closest to I think there'd be more Americans than Brits. And really, the framework of nationality just doesn't seem helpful here. "Ceremonial" continues to suggest to me things in poetry that I usually don't like (except in Irish Byzantium) and they can be found on both sides of the atlantic but I believe you are tacitly dropping from view such US ceremonialists as Whittier, Longfellow, Allan Tate, and Berryman - and I don't blame you - but in that case it's not fair that British poetry should be characterized by Tomlinson! I don't feel an identification with the kind of poem he writes.

CT is an interesting case: if he were an American publishing with Athenaeum or Ecco, Ron would almost certainly consign him to the SoQ forthwith; but he's a Briton, & one who spent a good deal of early energy promoting WCW, LZ, Oppen & others, so that he gets at least a respectful name-check in Ron's blog. Which simply underlines the fact that the SoQ/PA distinction has every bit as much to do with social factors as it does with aesthetic or political ones. At base (one of its bases) it's all about "us & them," an us & them which tends to map the struggles of various tendencies in US poetry in the mid-1980s, & is of less & less use the further we leave that decade behind. For all the usefulness of naming what gets published in the New Yorker, designating it as a "school" rather than a default definition of what poetry itself is, the entire SoQ/PA thing is just too big & vague in the end to be of much use, especially in an era when the automatic equation of aesthetic innovation & insitutional marginalization simply no longer holds.

With respect to the transatlantic divide, I would speculate that Ron's scunner against a certain traditional voice (call it "ceremonious," call it "formal," call it broccoli) which can be heard in Whittier, Longfellow, & Tate, & which he associates primarily with the English poetic canon & thereby consigns to the dustbin of SoQ, is at least part of what keeps him from "hearing" much of contemporary British poetry*; I still hear that voice, that tone, in much of the most disjunctive work coming out of the British Isles, as part of a rather rich mix that doesn't exclude all of the vernacularisms contemporary American poets are so set on.

*Ron's enthusiasm for the American Jennifer Moxley, whose work openly embraces much of the diction & tropes of the English romantics, is one of those frequent and unapologetic inconsistencies in his program (programme?) that I always value.

Ron & the Brits

So Ron Silliman turns his attention to the other side of the Atlantic the other day and posts a glowing review of There Are Words, the posthumous collected poems of the Scotsman Gael Turnbull. That’s just fine – I’ve always thought Turnbull a dandy poet, and he was a lovely human being as well (not an inevitable combination by any means); problem was these sentences of Ron’s:

There are gems like these everywhere throughout this book. Small, brilliantly conceived, perfectly executed poems, with an unmistakable ear. This last feature is especially worth thinking about, given just how different accents are in the U.K. compared with the United States. The number of, to use Charles Bernstein’s apt phrase, island poets with an ear that makes sense to a Yank auditory canal is exceptionally small: perhaps, in the past century, just four – Bunting, Turnbull, Raworth, Thomas A. Clark. This is not to fault others – from J. H. Prynne to David Jones to Douglas Oliver or Allen Fisher – whose ears may well make perfect sense on their own terms, but who don’t, how shall I say this, travel well on at least that one level.

As you might imagine, for some reason this didn’t go over well with Ron’s transatlantic readers, & he received what he rightly calls a “general thrashing” on the UK Poetry (not “UK Poetics” – Freudian slip?) listserv. My own favorite bit of British snark came from one “puthwuth,” proprietor of a blog named georgiasam, who perhaps unfairly named Ron’s outlook “soft racism.”

I wouldn’t go quite so far, I think (after all, Britons like Americans come in all different races), but Ron’s inability to hear the maybe 50-100 British poets over the past century in whom he ought to be interested is indeed rather striking. One useful comment to puthwuth’s post was from Sean Lysaght, who opines that “I think the missing piece of the Yank auditory canal is the ability to hear 'ceremonious words'. American poetry is so tuned to the vernacular that it no longer recognises poetry pitched in a higher key.” I think that this is right on the money, with the proviso that when Ron says “a Yankee auditory canal” he means “this Yankee auditory canal” and when Sean says “the Yankee auditory canal” he means “too many Yankee auditory canals.” (No sense in overgeneralizing – that’s what got RS in trouble in the 1st place.)

For better or worse, Ron’s blog has had a enormous influence on the alt-poetry blogosphere. He’s become the Harold Bloom of the post-avant, and the number of pixels sacrificed arguing over his post-avant/school of quietude distinction is simply evidence of how inescapable his presence is. I for one read his blog every day, simply because I like to know what’s going on from the perspective of a poet whom I admire and a reader who seems to have a lot more time to take in contemporary poetry than I do (after all, he doesn’t have to read the book of Job to teach it tomorrow, or work up Ulysses and Paradise Lost for the coming semester).

The problem with Ron’s deafness to contemporary British poetry is in part a problem with the diction of British poetry, which is apt to be turned to a different angle than that of most American writing – what Lysaght shorthands as “ceremonious words.” It’s also a problem with tradition, with what one might call the “dialect” of tradition. Ron claims he “hears” Brit poets better when they write in short lines (the WCW-LZ-Creeley stock-in-trade), & trots out as example two passages from Charles Tomlinson – one of WCW’s best readers, & an early supporter of LZ.

It’s not just that I could read “Writing on Sand” aloud & derive considerable pleasure from the experience & that I couldn’t read ‘The Moment’ aloud at all (I’d dissolve into giggles), but rather I can’t hear its measure. It feels like so many pots & pans banging about in the kitchen.

Moments like this make me sigh. Those “pots & pans” are friggin’ iambic pentameter. (Yes, loose, yes, with some substitutions – but good old IP nonetheless.)

As a message just into my inbox from the estimable Geraldine Monk makes abundantly clear, it’s not that Ron can’t hear contemporary British poets’ music – it’s that his ears have never been sharpened on maybe 400 years of English-language poetry in general.

It's not that I recommend that Ron ought to go back & get a PhD in English – God knows that rarely teaches anyone to appreciate poetry, & Ron already reads contemporary poetry more sharply than 99.9% of the people out there commenting on it – but I'd love to see him doing more of what he did last year, when he dovetailed reading Stephen Greenblatt's (in my opinion dreadful) biography of Shakespeare with a dedicated work-thru of the plays. My RX for RS: tackle the whole of Bunting's list of English poets whose music taught him something (if I recall rightly, Wyatt, Spenser, Wordsworth), or work thru Peter Makin's excellent edition of Bunting on Poetry. Skip the American stuff – you already know Whitman and Zukofsky: figure out what makes Wordsworth & Spenser so amazing, & then (with a goodly dash of Jonson, Herrick, & Marvell) you'll be on your way to "hearing" the English voice.

clever but stupid

Why am I so attracted to British poets these days? I’ve just gone thru binges of reading Geraldine Monk, John Wilkinson, & most recently Robert Sheppard, & am right now in the delighted middle of Alan Halsey’s Not Everything Remotely: Selected Poems 1978-2005. Part of it I suspect is just unreconstructed anglophilia, of the sort that keeps me watching Monty Python & listening to the Watersons. But there’s also a different relationship to language, to history in these poets that I’m fascinated by.
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I learn from Henry Gould (I often learn from HG) that the Library of America has just put out a Hart Crane volume, edited by Langdon Hammer (fellow biographer – he of James Merrill; once we sat together on a panel in the strangest conference I’ve ever attended, smack in the middle of WCW’s Paterson – a strange event I’ll probably recount someday). Crane’s always been one of my blind spots – a poet I just don’t get, despite a semi-annual hauling down of my copy of Complete Poems & Selected Letters (ed. Brom Weber, in the old “Anchor Literary Library” edition, with HC staring balefully over a cigar on the cover) & a re-reading of "The Bridge" & whatever else catches my eye. Time for another try, I think.

By my count, Crane (born 1899) is the youngest of the modern poets to appear in the LOA’s flagship series (the others being Frost, Pound, Stevens, & Stein). It is of course high time for a real LZ volume – not to slight the selection Charles Bernstein did for the LOA’s “Poets Project,” but I worry that getting into the PP (nicely produced but all too short pocket-sized selecteds) is gonna become a de facto consolation prize for not getting a full treatment: We’ve recognized you, lad/lass (addressed to Yvor Winters, Muriel Rukeyser, LZ, etc.) – now fuck along & stop dreaming of those big black covers with their little redwhite&blue stripe. But when oh when will the WCW and Moore volumes arrive?
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Hugh Kenner once bitched that the LOA format was far inferior to that of the Pléiade, & he’s right: the books are too big, the gutter too narrow, not enough notes, covers easily stained etc. Shopping tip for Poundians: next time you’re in Rome, pick up the Mondadori Pléiade-style edition of I Cantos – translation by Mary de Rachewiltz, tons of notes in the back, & an English text that’s much better than the thing New Directions keeps tossing at us year after year.
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Clever but stupid. I’ve grown from being a brash, self-centered, clever but stupid young person to a timid, self-centered, clever but stupid greybeard, in whom a demon of wholly unwarranted ambition struggles with a torpid Oblomov who’d prefer to sit and read. (The Demon of Consumption – to eat books like deep-fried snacks.)

Why are so many academics unhappy?, asks J. “The best job in the world,” after all, once you factor out fiscal remuneration. It’s the element of self-examination, or an uglier gnawing spur “that the clear spirit doth raise / (That last infirmity of Noble mind) / To scorn delights, and live laborious days.”
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Dave Parks weighs in with entry #2 on Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.

Prize

The folks at the Journal of Improbable Research hand out yearly Ig Nobel Prizes for foolish, obvious, or just plain silly achievements. Last year's Ig Nobel in Literature, for instance, went to

The Internet entrepreneurs of Nigeria, for creating and then using e-mail to distribute a bold series of short stories, thus introducing millions of readers to a cast of rich characters -- General Sani Abacha, Mrs. Mariam Sanni Abacha, Barrister Jon A Mbeki Esq., and others -- each of whom requires just a small amount of expense money so as to obtain access to the great wealth to which they are entitled and which they would like to share with the kind person who assists them.

This year's prize has gone to what seems, once you get past its title, actually useful work. The author is Daniel Oppenheimer, a Princeton psychologist, and his article is titled "Consequences of erudite vernacular utilized irrespective of necessity: problems with using long words needlessly." The abstract:

Most texts on writing style encourage authors to avoid overly-complex words. However, a majority of undergraduates admit to deliberately increasing the complexity of their vocabulary so as to give the impression of intelligence. This paper explores the extent to which this strategy is effective. Experiments 1-3 manipulate complexity of texts and find a negative relationship between complexity and judged intelligence. This relationship held regardless of the quality of the original essay, and irrespective of the participants' prior expectations of essay quality. The negative impact of complexity was mediated by processing fluency. Experiment 4 directly manipulated fluency and found that texts in hard to read fonts are judged to come from less intelligent authors. Experiment 5 investigated discounting of fluency. When obvious causes for low fluency exist that are not relevant to the judgement at hand, people reduce their reliance on fluency as a cue; in fact, in an effort not to be influenced by the irrelevant source of fluency, they over-compensate and are biased in the opposite direction. Implications and applications are discussed.

In short: big words make you seem more of a dumbass than you are.

The one I really want to read is the winner in Medicine, "Termination of Intractable Hiccups with Digital Rectal Massage." Ouch.

on the verge of the weekend

It’s been a slow week, both around here & on the blogosphere. I guess everybody is busy watching the spectacular implosion of the Republican Party (one wishes…). I’m polishing up my molotov cocktails, dusting off my red flag, & putting new shoestrings on my Doc Martens in preparation for climbing up on some overturned SUVs.
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A very nice birthday celebration earlier this week, capped with the present to end all presents: the “16 Ton Megaset” of all 45 episodes of Monty Python’s Flying Circus. Expect many references to funny walks, deceased parrots, falling sheep, and suchlike in the months to come. My students are already suffering; some of them get the jokes, others just think I’m losing it.
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A chance step into a used CD place the other week netted me one of the odder cool things that have turned up lately: Hall Willner’s 2-disc Rogue’s Gallery. Willner is the producer known for enlisting unlikely musicians to interpret various (broadly defined) “classic” corpuses: John Zorn, Lou Reed, Aaron Neville, & Marianne Faithfull singing Kurt Weill (Lost in the Stars); Ringo Starr, Sinead O’Connor, Los Lobos doing songs from Disney films (Stay Awake). Rogue’s Gallery is an offshoot of the second Pirates of the Caribbean movie (Johnny Depp is listed as a co-executive producer), and consists of well, pirate songs. Actually, pirate songs and all other sorts of chanteys & ballads from the 16th thru the 19th centuries. Highlights thus far include Nick Cave’s psychotic version of “Fire Down Below,” Eliza Carthy’s take on “Rolling Sea,” David Thomas’s (he of Pére Ubu) extraterrestrial version of “What Do We Do With a Drunken Sailor,” and Richard Thompson’s heartbreaking and astoundingly beautiful “Mingulay Boat Song” – which at the moment I’m convinced is one of the five or six best tracks he’s ever recorded.
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Last night’s Netflix pleasure (?) was a second viewing of Volker Schlondorff’s 1996 The Ogre. I’m well aware of the film’s shortcomings – especially when compared with the novel on which it’s based, Michel Tournier’s Le Roi des aulnes – but I still find it incredibly moving, especially the tour-de-force final scene in which the blindfolded Abel (John Malkovich), who has spent much of the film as a dim-witted lackey of the Nazis, kidnapping neighborhood boys for a military academy, struggles thru the icy waters of a marsh with the Jewish boy Ephraim on his shoulders, shouting, “Go, Leviathan, go!” (Makes no sense? rent the thing & tell me what you think.)
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Hey, what happened to my Adorno homies? I need some backup here!

Dienstag mit Teddie

[Adorno monument, Frankfurt-am-Main]

It’s that grim and glum time of year again – no, I’m not entirely referring to my birthday, which happens to roll around with painful inevitability this day every year, reminding me of things undone, projects unattempted, chances missed, increasingly grey hair, & so forth – instead, it’s the time that three (or more?) largely unqualified (speaking only for myself) bloggers attempt to work their collective way thru Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory. Let’s call it “Tuesdays with Teddie” (Dienstage mit Teddie) (or whatever day we happen to get around to it).

This may be a weekly feature on the blogs of y.v.t., the goateed Bob Archambeau, & the doesn’t-have-a-picture-up-but-is-probably-better-looking-than-either-of-us Dave Park, or it may be more like a monthly, depending on how much energy we can muster. Anyway, since I seem to have a spare moment between manuscript revisions & grading midterms, I’ll throw out the first pitch, trusting that Bob & Dave will field – mibbe they’ll even repost what little I have to say here, with their own comments. So here goes –
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Ästhetische Theorie was Adorno’s last work, the manuscript he was beavering away at when he died in 1969, but in many ways it seems an inevitable book, the capstone of Adorno’s work & the grand theoretical statement to justify the many thousands of pages he’d devoted over his career to discussion of works of art – literature, yes, but to a much greater extent music. Adorno’s critiques of the “culture industry,” for which he might be best known in some quarters of the American academy, are like a mouse to the elephant of his music criticism.

The book itself is famously difficult – probably even more difficult in its “definitive” translation, that of Robert Hullot-Kentor (U Minnesota, 1997, & the one I'll be citing), than in the 1984 Christian Lenhardt version. In part pressed by his publisher, Lenhardt divided the book up into sections & subsections, broke various Joyce-length paragraphs into more manageable chunks, & even split up sentences – all in the service of a more reader-friendly Adorno. Which, as Hullot-Kentor rightly argues, is precisely not the point. This is a book that is meant to be worked through, clause by clause, sentence by sentence. I’m tempted to say that Adorno’s unit of composition is precisely the sentence – as long & Germanic as his sentences may be – so that while Minima Moralia spins its mordant paradoxes over one-half to five page, densely packed units, Aesthetic Theory both constructs a larger argument (with maddening repetition – only partly an effect of the unfinished state of the manuscript – and constant maze-like divagation) and crams whole volumes of argument into single periods.

The closest the book has to an “overture” (leaving aside the “Draft Introduction,” which is yes probably the best place to start, but I’m already typing) is the 1st section, “Art, Society, Aesthetics” (pp. 1-15). (Section & paragraph titles are indicated in the table of contents, but not in the text, by the way, which presents itself as a single 350-page block of prose – a Steve McCaffery poem, e. g.) The section begins with a discussion of the present state of art, now recognized for better or worse as fully autonomous, fully liberated from its former social function:

Artworks detach themselves from the empirical world and bring forth another world, one opposed to the empirical world as if this other world too were an autonomous entity. (1)

As a result of its inevitable withdrawal from theology, from the unqualified claim to the truth of salvation, a secularization without which art would never have developed, art is condemned to provide the world as it exists with a consolation that – shorn of any hope of a world beyond – strengthens the spell of that from which the autonomy of art wants to free itself. (2)

(See the dialectics machine kicking in? – dialectics, the art of thinking two opposed ideas at the same time.) Adorno’s starting right out with biggest single issue of Marxist aesthetics, the political or social function of the work of art.

It’s worth remembering that the most widely disseminated Leftist aesthetic of the last century – so-called “socialist realism” – argued that art had a responsibility to advance the cause of human progress, & further that it should do so by communicating with its audience. Adorno, one can’t emphasize too much, isn’t interested in art that communicates with the average viewer/reader/auditor, whether it’s a big mural of Comrade Joe Stalin, a touching film about a boy & his tractor, or a neo-Romantic symphony. Adorno is an intransigent advocate for modernist art; the last of the mandarins. For him drama means not “Waiting for Lefty” but “Waiting for Godot” (Aesthetic Theory was to be dedicated to Beckett). It helps to think of Adorno’s aesthetic canon in terms of the harshest instances of 20th “high” modernism: Webern, Beckett, Anselm Kiefer. Philip Glass, Tony Kushner, Andy Warhol, they won’t do – they’re all contaminated by the “culture industry.”

So on one level Adorno’s aim – tho he would never put it so vulgarly – is to justify the art of the 20th century in dialectical materialist terms, to show how forbiddingly abstract & esoteric artworks actually serve to reflect social structure.

Artworks are afterimages of empirical life insofar as they help the latter to what is denied them outside their own sphere and thereby free it from that to which they are condemned by reified external experience. (4)

If art opposes the empirical through the element of form – and the mediation of form and content is not to be grasped without their differentiation – the mediation is to be sought in the recognition of aesthetic form as sedimented content. (5, my emph.)

That artworks as windowless monads [Leibniz, anyone?] “represent” what they themselves are not can scarcely be understood expect in that their own dynamic, their immanent historicity as a dialectic of nature and its domination, not only is of the same essence as the dialectic external to them but resembles it without imitating it. The aesthetic force of production is the same as that of productive labor and has the same teleology; and what may be called aesthetic relations of production – all that in which the productive force is embedded and in which it is active – are sedimentations or imprintings of social relations of production. (5)

The basic levels of experience that motivate art are related to those of the objective world from which they recoil. The unsolved antagonisms of reality return in artworks as immanent problems of form. This, not the insertion of objective elements, defines the relation of art to society. (6)

So when we’re seeking the the “social” element in a contemporary artwork, we should be looking not for a direct portrayal of workers’ conditions (Hard Times) or an unsuspecting bearer of the destiny of history, but at the formal structure of the work. The fragmentation of “Wandering Rocks” and the profluence of “Penelope” are surer keys to the social significance of Ulysses than a mere totting-up of the number of unemployed alcoholics or repressed women in the novel.

Art perceived strictly aesthetically is art aesthetically misperceived. Only when art’s other is sensed as a primary layer in the experience of art does it become possible to sublimate this layer, to dissolve the thematic bonds, without the autonomy of the artwork becoming a matter of indifference. Art is autonomous and it is not; without what is heterogeneous to it, its autonomy eludes it. (6)

(Takes a breath–) Basta for now. I have in unguarded moments been accused of being a Zukofsky scholar, which might account for the cento nature of these comments. Your ball, folks.

Just when you think Florida can't get any more surreal –

first Katherine Harris & her India-sourced blog comments, now a local congressman, Republican Mark Foley, resigns when a series of sexually suggestive instant messages he's sent to a 16-year old congressional page becomes public. It is ironic – and not in the Alannis Morissette sense – that Foley made much of his name as vociferous co-chairman of the House Caucus on Missing and Exploited Children. (Our Governor's social services department, as well, has a bit of a problem with missing children – but that's another story.)

Word has it that Foley's seat is pretty much up for grabs now and ripe for the picking by his Democratic challenger, but the 16th is such a grotesquely gerrymandered district – it looks a bit like a semi-melted Giocometti sculpture, stretching from northern Palm Beach County to the Gulf Coast – that I'm not placing any bets on what'll happen five weeks hence.

One quote of Foley's that you'll hear a lot of over the next few days: “We track library books better than we do sexual predators."

Back to poetry in a moment,

but right now I just want to register how grateful I am to live in Florida – at least one never lacks for entertainment. Katherine Harris, the State Secretary of State whose intervention in 2000 went a long way towards ensuring that the Florida vote would never be adequately counted, & that her boss's big brother would take the White House, is (yes, it's true) still running for US Senate – despite the facts that Jeb Bush himself ("the bright brother") has pretty much pronounced her unelectable, that she's gone thru about a half dozen different sets of staffers because of her raging attacks of temper, & that she's made more missteps in various interviews than the Three Stooges performing Swan Lake. The most recent polls show her 18 points behind Democrat Bill Nelson – which her campaign is calling a victory, since she was a full 30 points behind a month ago.

At any rate, various Florida-centric, anti-Harris political blogs have been noticing pro-Harris comments turning up in their comments boxes. Nothing surprising there, since campaigns have been having flacks monitor blogs and plant comments for some years now, ever since the Dean people began to demonstrate the power of the internets for political communication. What makes these comments interesting is their rather shaky grasp of English idiom & grammar, a shakiness that goes beyond even your garden-variety right-wing illiteracy:

"Kathy showed great victory by winning the primary. Great show Kathy."

"Guys let us come out of this blue eye shadow... Let us not discuss such irrelevant details."

"At the end of the day what matters is her ability to lead the masses. Which I think she is quite good at."

Turns out all of the messages have been emanating from the same IP address – in western India. One suspects that this true-blue American Christian warrior is not averse to a little judicious outsourcing – if it supports the right cause.

[Update – fixed that wonky link, I hope...]

culinary choices

That last post a bit of experimenting in the off the top of the head vein, & heaven knows there’s often very little on the top of this head – but interesting responses: From Norman Finkelstein:

Not to be picky in regard to your perceptive contrast, Mark, but I think Pound said a ball of light in the reader's hands. You must have been thinking of that other great American poet, Jerry Lee Lewis.

Good God Almighty, Norman, but you’re right. (But who’d you rather be dancing to, EP or JLL? No contest there…) From Jessica Smith:

there are lots of "minor literature" modes that seem useful for understanding zuk--domesticity, family, heritage, craft--this is what i like about zuk and what i much prefer to read over pound's self-indulgent expansiveness. i don't think it's a matter of who's the better poet but of who one prefers aesthetically or politically.

I’m totally with you, Jessica. The odd thing is that while I started out that last post musing over Marjorie’s “ranking” of the two poets & overtly disclaimed the “horse race” mentality myself, the rhetoric of my musing seemed to fall right into that rank(ing) category. Ie, I found myself letting what some might consider EP’s “strengths” trump a rather wanly stated description of LZ. For the record: I prefer Phillips to Bacon, Picabia to Picasso – without claiming the former as in some sense “superior” to the latter. What I suppose Adorno would call a “culinary” choice.

Ben Friedlander does a nice job of showing what’s most distasteful in some of the things Poundians value most highly:

There's a lot more sex, drama, rage, and exultation in Bukowski too, and more grime, blood, or jizz than you'll find even in Pound. Not to make a negative example of poor Buk--he deserves his celebrity, if only for what he did for John Fante. But I don't see how the lack of these qualities proves anything about Zukofsky.

I don’t think Ben & I are the only readers of Pound who get regularly impatient with what one might call his “phallic” side, his endless celebration of all those “balls of light” and “rock-drills.” Ben continues:

For my part, I feel about Pound as I do about Emerson: endlessly fascinating prose, endlessly tedious verse. Like Emerson also in that he inspired such vastly different projects as Zukofsky's and Olson's. (And before anyone--OK, Marjorie--says that Zukofsky and Olson are hardly equal to Dickinson and Whitman, well, they come closer than Pound does to Emerson.)

Looking back over EP – not encyclopedically, nor in detail – I sympathize. The man could write wonderful prose: and not just forceful, browbeating, bare-knuckled “manly” prose, but at times wonderfully sensitive and complex, even self-consciously tentative, thinking in language. But then I turn to The Cantos, & for every passage of intriguingly knotty juxtaposition & mind-bending register-jumping, there’s one of those damned “epiphanies,” where panthers are lolling around in trees eating grapes or naiads are pirouetting thru groves like the hippos in Fantasia – Pound’s paradises, paraphrasing Bob Perelman, look suspiciously like Maxfield Parrish paintings on turn-of-the-century dorm walls.

Even the “lyrical” moments in EP, so celebrated by a thousand bald & bearded professors (shut up, Norman), after a while start to sound like recycled Swinburne & early Yeats. Gimme LZ at his most gristly. (Ron Johnson once told me, when we were talking about the “music” of poetry, that Swinburne was like eating Turkish delight: “But Zuk, that’s like gnawing a marrow-bone.”)
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(Thanks much Ben; I'm not nearly as dyspeptic as it sometimes seems!)

old obsessions

Re-reading bits & pieces of LZ, & re-reading the MS of the LZ biography, as well as dipping back into The Cantos & Pound criticism, sets me thinking about the relationship of the 2 poets once again. Marjorie Perloff confided in me in Chicago a couple years back – as with all of Marjorie's confidences, this was very public & expansive – that she was convinced that Pound was after all the superior poet by far. As I always say, I don't do horse races – but there're times when I see her point. Very different poets. Much more sex, sensuality, drama in Pound; more rage, more exultation. A sense of giddy discovery thruout The Cantos, the continual feeling that EP is making it all up as he goes along, discovering something new in every book he reads ("a ball of fire in the reader's hands," as he describes engaged reading) & immediately dumping it into the poem.

LZ much more restrained, careful – phlegmatic, to Ez's choleric. The conceptual basics all stem from EP: 95% of LZ's critical vocabulary can be traced to EP; his very cultural vocabulary (except for Shax & Spinoza – whacking big exceptions) comes out of Pound. But there's an architecture to LZ that's missing in The Cantos, a precision of dovetailing & structuring; at the same time "A" is missing the grime, blood, & jizz of Pound's poem, & with it the exhilarating sense The Cantos give (at their best) of discovering shapes, forms, & correspondences. LZ sometimes gives one the impression of the craftsman filling in a form rather than the dancer improvising a movement. Tom Phillips v. Francis Bacon. Picabia v. Picasso.

relief

The academics among Culture Industry's readers may know what I mean when I kvetch that I'd rather be in next semester. Not that I'd rather be teaching those courses – it's just that I really really really wish I had the time to re-read Paradise Lost and Ulysses right now, rather than scrunched up in teaching-time.
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Zach Barocas of the excellent & 5-year-old Cultural Society (& former drummer of Jawbox) has a blog. Go by & say hi.
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A bissel Sanskrit – or rather, the particulars will remain dark to those not "in the know" (rather like a particularly knotty Jane Dark post): went to the post office today and dropped off three signed copies of "the" contract. Delivery sooner than you'd believe; the big date sometime next fall. So part of me is (as Bridget Jones would say) v. v. happy.

More Moore

In a rare venture into the local megabooks, I picked up a remaindered copy of Grace Schulman's edition of The Poems of Marianne Moore (Viking, 2003), & was reminded why I didn't buy this book, after reading a passel o' reviews, when it came out, or even afterwards when it hit paperback.

Confession #1: I love Moore, early & late, high modernist & cranky retro. Confession #2: I've always been a little put off by how enthusiastically MM has been embraced by the poetry establishment, in ways that they've embraced no-one else of her generation except Stevens. This latest edition, for instance, includes blurbs from Stanley Kunitz, Randall Jarrell, and Robert Lowell – & Schulman herself, poetry editor of the Nation & former director of the 92nd Street Y, does not exactly move in the same poetry circles I like to imagine myself.

In theory, this edition is a great idea. As well all know, MM severely edited the work included in her Complete Poems (1967), leaving out lots of stuff, arranging things in non-chronological order, & including unfamiliar versions of poems that were already famous. ("Poetry" is the great example – "I too dislike it" etc.) Schulman's idea is solid: to present an edition of all the poems MM wrote, in chronological order. Period. So far so good. The problem is that MM often produced multiple versions of the same poem, & sometimes the earlier versions are arguably more interesting than the later. (Again, cf. "Poetry.")

Schulman, were she a conscientious textual editor, would have 3 options:

1) present all the poems in their latest, last versions, grounding that choice on the old saw of authorial intention; this is what MM wanted at the end, this is what you get.

2) same as (1), except including all the earlier versions in the notes – a "variorum" edition, in other words (certainly the most useful version for pointy-headed scholarly types)

3) same as (1), & including earlier versions of particular interest – the longer versions of "Poetry," for instance, in the notes; sort of a "demi-variorum"

Schulman has opted for none of the above, to my despair (not to say disgust). Instead, she gives us all available poems (and there's much, much more here than in the Complete Poems, for which I thank her), but she gives them in versions chosen – you guessed it – by Schulman. "Whenever possible," she writes in the Intro, "I used the Complete Poems... In many cases, I used versions that I liked from earlier editions and/or literary journals, aware that she [MM] changed her work continually." I'm even more taken aback by Schulman's note preceding MM's own "Notes" to the poems: "Change was a constant in all of Marianne Moore's work. The notes were altered as radically as the poems, and changes occur even when a poem's text does not change. Rather than reprinting each note faithfully [isn't this what an editor does?], which might confuse more than enlighten [whom?], I offer a partial view of the author's notes as they are found in all of her editions." [indeed]

Clearly, what's at work here is Viking's unwillingness to spring for a true variorum, which would probably run to over 1000 pages. It's the reader's loss. But in case the reader has begun to worry about putting her- or himself into the hands of a possibly capricious editor so fully, Schulman spends a good deal of time in her Intro telling us what chums she & MM were (MM was at GS's wedding, etc.). All very well & good, & I'll do my best to savor the texts of poems I haven't already read, even tho I have little idea of what I might be missing. But for the earlier stuff, I think I'll turn to a real edition – Robin Schultze's Becoming Marianne Moore: Early Poems, 1907-1924 (U California P, 2002), & look forward to the day – I hope I live so long – when the rest comes out of copyright.
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After a hair-raising hour at Room to Go Kids, we did it: we ordered THE bunkbed. The bunkbed with the fairy-tale castle. The bunkbed with the slide. Next step is to apply for frequent flier miles at the emergency room. (Tho I guess it can't be much more dangerous than Daphne's bungee-jumps out of her crib this past week.)

One-liners

So we've finally gotten around to getting that Netflix membership & plunging into the world of grownup movies. By some odd chance, the first two things that came up have been fanciful writer-biopics starring Johnny Depp, The Libertine (2005) & Finding Neverland (2004). Don't worry, I'm not gonna start blogging films, beyond a series of grunts indicating "enjoyed it" or "it sucked" – I've gone quite far enough in demonstrating my cultural ignorance in other areas, thank you.

But idly Wikipedia-ing Johnny Depp (who seems to have turned into a real live actor in all those years since I first saw him glomming wistfully about in Edward Scissorhands), I got really depressed to learn that he's actually older than me. Well – I can't do anything about the baldness or the lack of fine bone structure, but golly I've got to start dieting & working out...
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On one of those link-hopping stretches (avoiding work again, of course) I follow John Latta to Jordan Davis to fetch up upon a couple of interesting essays on one of my fave bands, Gang of Four. Timothy Sexton's "Gang of Four and Pop Music as Marxist Critical Theory: A Market of the Senses" is pretty heavy-duty cultural criticism; Scott McLemee's "Entertainment!" responds. The short version? Sexton: GoF Althusserians; McLemee: GoF Debordian Situationists. (Suspect he's been reading Greil Marcus...) Stay tuned for my own thoughtful assesment.

Anyway, Jordan D. two bits' worth runs like this:

With this kind of work -- I'm thinking now also of the Canadian poets Rod Mengham, Rod Smith, and Rodrigo Toscano -- the measure of the experience is not whether you can integrate their critique into a consistent theory, the measure is how memorable are their zingers.

Not entirely sure whether JD means by "this kind of work" "critical essays on Leftist 80s bands" or "Gang of Four & their ilk" (must be the latter). To which John L responds, with fascinating reference back to what sounds like some really lively readings by (of all people) Donald Hall back in the day:

Admittedly, tone is difficult to determine here, and maybe the remark is simply cheeky . . . If not, though, I got questions. Is an assault (or a sprinkling) of one-liners enough? (Is entertainment enough?) (A “zinger” entertains without instructing—meaning it’s unlikely to point to any coherent critique, or convince the unconvinced.) Is the “zinger”-style (call it Rod-kunstwerke) a direct result of performance-anxiety? (That is, writing written for reading, for “getting out the laugh.”) (One writes differently for the known audience.) (In places of thriving “community” or “scene,” most reading-audiences are (mostly) known.) Is the criticism leveled at the supposed showmanship of a Billy Collins inapplicable to the modèle zingeresque of the Rods? (Is the difference an innocuous-inane humor versus a fierce, pointed humor?) (A humor longing to be dangerous?) (Is showmanship (what I loosely term “showmanship”) a form insusceptible to any too-dangerous content?) (Do you think one could laugh oneself through a revolutionary change?)

My experience of the often painful business of poetry readings is that the one-liner plays a pretty big role in most all flavors of contemporary poetry. Charles Bernstein one grand example, a fellow who's written whole poems based around Henny Youngmanesque one-liners, but most of his compadres in the "experimental" scene write a lot less funny (except of course Bruce Andrews & the Flarfistas). Indeed, back in the day when I had poetry readings I really wanted to go to (the unending stream of cool things Rod Smith was hosting in DC, specifically), I found myself sitting thru a lot of performances where the only – the only – signs of response in the audience (sitting with bitten lips & knitted brows, often very Rodinesque) came when a one-liner broke the ice of seemingly endless scrolling parataxis. And this from poets whom I often found interesting & even compelling on the page.

Mibby I generalize from a period style & coterie method – call it the "Roof Books" mode – but yes, by God, I found that the "mainstream" writers – perhaps because they were getting paid more, perhaps because a larger chunk of their livelihood depended on performance, certainly because their work was more immediately accessible – were able to play on a much wider range of emotions in their audiences. (Tho I can't tell you how many times I looked up a poem that had sounded just grand only to find it stale flat & unprofitable.)

I want – oh how I want – to laugh myself through a revolutionary change.

slow/fast

Slow days on the po-blogosphere, it seems – at least from where I'm crouching. The real standouts in my limited surfing time are the steady stream of wonderful nuggets from Jonathan Mayhew's Bemsha Swing & the continuous paratactic splendor of John Latta's Isola di Rifiuti. Why waste your time here?
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Splendidly unchurched students in my Bible-as-lit course this Fall.
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Trivia from Antonia Fraser's biography of Cromwell: Sigmund Freud named one of his sons "Oliver" in honor of Old Noll's efforts on behalf of letting the Jews back into England.
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Best couplet from the first half of the 17th c.: the opening of Andrew Marvell's "Tom May's Death," satirical account of the journey into the underworld of the poetaster May, one of the least talented of the "Sons of Ben [Jonson]" (who appears to have died after a drinking bout):

As one put drunk into the packet-boat,
Tom May was hurried hence and did not know't.

Bastard Ashbery's already taken the 1st line for a title.

[placeholder]

Simply a placeholder, to let the world know that I'm not dead or (really) ill, but just up to the proverbial eyeballs – & that I'll be getting around to answering all those e-mails & posting those letters & packages in the next few days. In the meantime, if you need something to read, do stop by Steve Evans's Third Factory & check out this year's Attention Span listings of what everybody else's been reading. My own entry makes me feel a hundred years old, and very, very out of it.
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The Mai Kai – oh dear – wonderful Polynesian floor show, with nary a hint of South Florida stripper culture (it's always disspiriting when you go to a middle eastern place down here & the belly dancer is obviously feeling overdressed) – but the food is hopelessly mediocre & overpriced. Washed it all away Saturday night with a fine dinner at friends', followed by too many martinis & an indefinite period of thrashing away on the bouzouki.

Back (sort of)

Where've I been?, my 4 readers have been asking. Oh, you know – the first weeks of the new semester, always a punishing time; 2 of them, in fact, sick as a dog with some sort of viral thing; trying to work over a manuscript & chewing my nails to the quick over contract haggling; reading some books: poetry – Moxley, Swensen, Sheppard, etc. – theory & criticism, Samuel Beckett's More Pricks Than Kicks (why haven't I gotten around to reading this one before? It's got one of the funniest story endings of all time, that of "Yellow":

By Christ! he did die!
They had clean forgotten to auscultate him!

I can't really tell you why that's funny, except that the first line refers back to a joke (told a couple of pages earlier) about a highly devout amateur actor, and that the second line, for almost all of us mere mortals with non-Beckettian vocabularies, necessitates a trip to the dictionary ("auscultate," to listen to the sounds of the internal organs as part of a medical diagnosis – our hero, Belacqua Shuah, you see, is on the table for a tumor operation), & somehow I find that moment of having to look something up – right when the chap whose adventures one's been following thru the whole book has just kicked the bucket – deeply funny. Especially since knowing what "auscultate" means casts precisely no light whatsoever on the story's climax.)
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Amy comments last time on big words & bloggistry. I can only excuse myself by noting that "Cambridge Marxist-obscurantist" is not my but Gordon Burn's description of JH Prynne, & I [sic]ced it because I thought it was such a deeply dumbass thing to say in the first place. Was JHP a Marxist way back when? I don't know, but he was an English intellectual & a chap with his head screwed on the right way, so I assume he was. Was he an "obscurantist" (from "obscurantism," the practice of deliberately preventing the facts or full details of something from becoming known)? No effing way – just because Burn finds JHP's poetry "difficult" or "obscure," it's a logical error to attribute a certain set of (ultimately moral) intentions to him.
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But, oh, oh, oh oh, that Marxist-obscurantist rag.... It makes me think of Bob Archambeau's latest blast against "avant-smugness," playing off of Kasey Mohammad's thoughtful post-mortem (one hopes) on the cold corse of ye olde School o' Quietude V. Post-Avant dichotomy. I'll try to say something anent (not a big word, but a Scotticism) that sooner.
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And poised for a weekend of celebrating J.'s birthday. Tomorrow we have reservations for this place. We're telling the girls that it's the "Lilo and Stitch" restaurant, and hopefully we can keep them from throwing poi at the dancers.