some writing reflecting some thinking from a current project

What kinds of books do we want to write? How can we, those of us who are heterotopian medieval critics and historians—think about, radically, how we construct our papers, essays, and books, in such a way that our bodies and others’ bodies are opened to each other, according to our politics? Many of us are historians of things in old books, or are book historians, or at least write or aspire to write things about texts we find in old books. What is a possible theory of the book for such medievalists as us? I think we need such theories—to fill Book History with radical recklessness. Also, to bridge Book Histories with a moment in which we need to learn about what kinds of books to make. What can we—we medievalists—say about what a book can do to a body today, today at the moment of Gautanamo? of AbuGrahib? Do we learn anything about what a book is for, what a book can do, and how we can refine our labor to produce such books, from Medieval practices? What are possible poetics of critical essays on medieval literature and history and language?

Well, Jacques Derrida announced “The End of the Book and the Beginning of Writing” long before I was a twinkle in the eye of any graduate seminar. So how can I ask these questions, today, which are about how poetic economies in a popular Romance can alter, theoretically, the functioning of a Medieval Book on the body of a reader, and what this might teach us about possible alternatives to what a book might do now. I think that the short romance Orfeo gives us its own hint about what a medievalist should talk about what a book can do to a body. Surviving within three Ms.s, and thus ostensibly ‘popular,’ the poem is famous for its tableau in the Fairy kingdom of bodies mid-brutal-death—which Jeffrey Cohen read last spring at Kalamzoo as an attempt to deaden the threat posed by memory of Celtic language and culture by freezing it, under a rock, in deep time. Such is a poem whose poetics are preoccupied with doing things to bodies.

And this is the first hint I will follow: poetics. Poetics provoke, and provoke well beyond the plans of any auctor. Poetics outlines, the chalk-outline, the always receding shoreline, of the call, the work and labor of language. I think we think to think alongside Heidegger’s thought, à la Poetry Language Thought to think such things, regardless of what we think of Heidegger. We need to think the poetics of the book, the history of poetics of books. The multi-author edited volume, such as BABEL’s recent book with Palgrave, bears testament to what might happen when we attend to such a construction, allowing a babel of critics in the same space at the same time. And, as medievalists, we are in a privileged position to think this history—a history which will have to link a phenomenology of a reader’s body with the closest readings of language, and careful attention to material condition of book production and the labors involved in producing as well as reading it.

But how do we consider a category like ‘poetics’ in the actual construction of our books? The rising popularity of print-on-demand book, for example, especially of low press-run books like those of medieval critics [even such as Stephen Justice’s infamous Writing and Rebellion, which is now laser and not offset printed, on demand, by University of California Press, as a quick check on the publisher’s page reveals if you have a recent-printed copy] reveal, like the so-called household manuscripts in which Orfeo appeared, that books might have a very strategic function, that they are constructed, and sometimes on an individual basis are for specific things. While Timothy A. Shonk dismisses the original hypothesis about the Auchinleck Ms. (the most famous home of the poem in question that book was produced in a bustling and well-organized London Bookshop, he does suggest that it was produced with a plan, of separate sections not ever intended for separate sale, but still produced by multiple scribes under the direction of a single scribes and then an artist who was the client was seeking a single volume which would fulfill the reading needs of his family and himself, much as people today order collections like the Harvard Classics.” (Timothy A. Shonk, “A Study of the Auchinleck Mansucript: Bookmen and Bookmaking in the Early Fourteenth Century,” Speculum (60:1, Jan. 1985) 71-91.) This whole process would suggest itself as an attempt at corporeal integration. Obviously, eternal optimist that I am (I am not sure if that is sarcastic or not!), I think Orfeo’s poetics might threaten a short circuit in this whole business.


I am asking how attending to the specific textures of the language of our work can alter what books are materially for, with respect to bodies. In a sense, this inquiry into Orfeo is old fashioned, in that it is not dependent on time with physical manuscripts and evidence that does not appear in orthographic form. But in another sense it is attempting to take seriously, very seriously, some of the hard-won yet still often forgotten tenets of that beast Theory, which teaches that language speaks us, and so to ask what language can do to how a book functions with a reader’s body. I am happy to say also, that poetics help us sidestep a kind of source criticism which depends on a kind of linear history of continuous recognizable strands that I do not think will help us think alternatives to our book-writing.

The Romance of the Borrowed Umbrella

Preface

I have made, since finishing my MFA in Poetry in April, several attempts at a return to writing fiction (I think I wrote about 10 pages of fiction while attempting over the last three years to channel all my writing energies into poems and seminar papers) which were smashed by the wyrds quicker than you can say 'ruined.' This is no surprise, given that I've written so little fiction recently. But recently I also stumbled on a thread that I like a great deal. I had generated some sets of scattered sentences which were vaguely narrative and loosely connected, and I found some aesthetic and pedagogical sinews to string them together, over the past couple of days.

I then thought that I wanted to keep working with this language, language that seems to resemble a narrative and, as H. James might say, 'see it through.' Yet I knew that, regardless of any intention to 'complete' a 'story,'that I would fall, inevitably, into the various doldrums of fiction-writing which usually best me--things like 'plot,' 'character,' and other such narrative filigrees. I knew, in fact, what any of my friends or colleagues who have read my Hemingway-"The Sea-Change"-"Banal Story"-4 page-prose-is this a prose poem or a story-labors have known: that I can rarely sustain a work of fiction beyond 4 pages.

A solution then presented itself to me. I would need the freedom allowed only by increment and periodicity, the hazy time of the hiatus, the pause, the spacing in writing which marks the crises of "am I still speaking/breathing" and human death (cf. Derrida). Then, I would need readers who were patient, who wouldn't mind having a story shot through with ghostly 'middle spaces' between the visitations of written labor. How can I write a story of any length in which any one line can connect with any other line (cf. Deleuze and Guattarri)? How can I write a story in which there are multiplied microcosms of mathematically engineered precision poetics connected by lines connecting lines with each other so many times that none emerge as the sovereign term? Writing that could occasionally, periodically, fizzle up in a flash of quickness and with the lightness of off-kilter mechanical-organic fungus-like generation, flash itself, suspended between the poles and posts of electronic self-publishing (which is a mess perhaps more elegant even than the algea of manuscripts piling up lost, unread, altered, adulterated, or re-doubled tha Italo Calvino describes in If on a Winter's Night...)? I would need the form of the serial, the medium of the blog.

This will, I think, allow me to work with a schedule, work in small enough bursts that it feels possible, and do so without the overt [yet still direct, google-owned-blogspot] influence of the market forces which once governed serial fiction production. Also, I have always loved the possibilities of loss and disjunction, the inevitability of ever-changing or incomplete multiple versions, etc., allowed by the serial. Those spaces between installments! And perhaps a Romance [and when I write a fiction, no matter how banal or short or secular, I almost always wish it to aspire to the conditions of Romance (see my previous post on Hawthorne), ringing true not so clearly with Hawthorne's truth of the human-heart business, but with the haunting between-ness of a 'foothold between fiction and reality' opening into a language so full of holes that when it finally speaks us we might slip back into the world, which is, I think, a part of what the middle spaces of future human hearts might feel like] and its haunting-pattern of periodic visitation might fizzle well together into the blogosphere.

And so, dearest readers, I ask you to read the first installment of THE ROMANCE OF THE BORROWED UMBRELLA.

§1

  "You better go to your favorite restaurant and eat your favorite dinner, because you ain't got much time left on earth," said the man with his belly pluming over the bar at the end of the bench on the subway. His upright posture was mostly compromised by his lean. Germy was interested, though perhaps also he was interested. Is interested, is leaning, is dying. The train creaked under its floor. What is happening and how is the character. Also on the train were Sammy and Eli, were Alisha and Remus. They all knew some things. Is knowing. The man with the pluming belly did not appear to be on a phone, though his voice seemed to plume also in the way a voice speaking into a cellphone would plume about a car and invade everyone. Germy first thought he would be on a cell phone because of how his voice sounded but behold Germy realized he was not on a phone because behold they were in a subway car and phones could not get a signal there and then also Germy looked at the man and saw no cellphone. That man was looking at someone but Germy couldn't see that particular person. Why not? Because Sammy was in the way, and Eli and Sammy were arguing: so Eli's arms, which are part of Eli, were also in the way. So Germy turned to Alisha and Remus who were seated next to him on the bench, which was across the aisle from the bellied man, but Germy didn't say anything. Remus had no tattoos but Alisha had a couple. They were black with the tiniest tinge of green-grey and they were on her arms. She got them when she was a rocker, which she was no more. Germy was pleased to look at the tattooed arms. The bellied man repeated himself: "You better go to your favorite restaurant and eat your favorite dinner." He was shaking his head. Is interested, is a plot. There was also no plot around or for Germy. "If he sent out 500 packets of bird and twice that of trays on those boats, he ain't got much time left to live."
   Sammy, by this time, had stopped to argue with Eli but Eli had not stopped to argue with Sammy. They were not brothers, they are not symbolic and their arms moved rather slowly when argumentatively gesticulating. Eli said,
   "Hey Jim-bo," and the bellied man nodded, successfully hailed and interpolated. "D'ya wannit er not? " Eli shot a winced glance and Jim-bo and then threw a victorious one back to Sammy, who was sweating.
   Alisha turned to Remus and asked him, with a secret imploring eye-twitch, if he was done reading for the day. Alisha was a paleontologist. Remus turned to her also. And then Germy turned to both of them. Remus had dark hair like a swamp, is a swamp full of the cover of factory. Germy decided to whisper to Remus, his friend.
   "I've been in the party too long." Germy turned his head, with its edges like a three-ringed binder, towards Jim-bo. Remus raised an eyebrow, sucked in his lips for a second. Germy then turned back and spoke at a regular volume. "I think I just watched to many of the record videos, clipped too many of those files, and gave too many farm-maps in that basement workshop we ran before the whole thing worked." Saying that made him sound like any little shop owner talking to his partners about being sick of work. Is sick, work, like a ribbon of river-oil jumping into your collection-pail. Remus raises again and sick, though there is no plot, he was happening and the party probably knew it. New York never was so before this little inscription on the edge of the sidelines of the ribbon of a carriage or car shifting along like a chip allows a zipping of energy through, this plot. The bellied man coughed. If plot, this language warns.

::

   Germy was nervous. He knew. Coming for him. The man in the car. Creak-tink, rrrrrrreeeeeeee. The car was not a message but its sounds might be, they were both a compression of the world: Germy and the Car--and was Jim-bo too? Germy and Alisha and Remus were pals. They did not know Eli or Sammy, but all three knew Jim-bo by sight and knew that he knew them by the same in turn, although none of them had ever spoken words to each other or so much as been introduced. They each had seen each speak at party meetings but they came from different corners. Eli spoke to Jim-bo about the birds and trays and the ships.
   "...'cuz I'm tellin' ya, ifin he doan givup what can't be..." Germy was now certain that Jim-bo knew he left the party that morning. Jim-bo wasn't actually party 'brain' (and, since the big hoopla there had been no need of the old style party 'brawn') but some people thought he was smart because he ran a good little shop in his hamlet, ever since the hamlets started, and so sometimes certain persons plotted that he should speak. Remus was still a certain person, but trying. Since the hoopla, he stuck with Alisha. Remus and Germy once shared an apartment and when to a party's, until Remus was plucked for a meeting-map.
   More nervous, Germy turned to Alisha. She he trusted much with lines outletted for hope of insights. She nodded and eyebrowed towards Jim-bo. They should head back to her city-rooms. She was lucky to have them anyway. Most didn't since the hoopla, if in the party. Most jetted when the sense was to start the flushout to the hamlets. But Alisha was a wily one. They should. Back to her city-rooms. When they left from the river-cubby that morning, the plan for the trip and meeting was to be eventful.
   But is happening. Germy wished it was raining, like when a kid and in a house. There was a raining at night for summers and he was usually pleased. Like that night he walked home with a borrowed umbrella. Then again, after the move for the party, even then in his tiny apartment carved out of what had been a Columbia University class-building. LIke from Prospect Park Boat house all the way with the borrowed. Clackity clackity.
   "Why not finally introduce yourself?" said Remus. "The last time was saw him--even from afar--was cycling from swamp-hill to the little ring of typesetters' cottages that were making posters for us upstate, he may not remember." The ring of cottages was not quite ribboned into the closest hamlet, not the closest hamlet roads. And, most of the party no had assented to the trend of no longer keeping annals, so they were slipping further off the Pale. Don't be fooled, if meant is the pulling of the ribbon not the thing itself, the ribbon-ing, an engineered ribboning ferns its way through around. Germy pointed to his mustache.
  "Are you kiddin? He knows me alright." Rain and train or, clackety clickety rain or train but the curving like a time. Train stopped, mid-tunnel. Germy to speak with Jim-bo up and lips set. Is wished, engineered, and away. It may have been engineered but not is symmetrical or standing like a block and there are a few and perhaps it is still a ribbon, not an object.
   "Jim-bo right?" Germy asked. Jim-bo turned like a rolling onion on a counter.
   "I wasn't talking about you."
   "Sorry?"
   "Just now. I was talking about a business deal outside the Pale of Slipp. A covered one but you looked nervous when I said something about someone's possible last day on earth, and since you were nervous and I said that, you probably are. But I wasn't talking about you.'
   "Oh, I'm--" Jim-bo would it. Creeeeeee! Train going again.
   "You've been in the party too long. You once wanted. You better go to your favorite restaurant and eat your favorite dinner, because you ain't got much time left on earth, Germy."

dan does, in fact, write poems

A few people commented to me at Kalamazoo this year that I do not ever put my poems on my Blog. Yes, I don't. And those who have asked me have generally recieved decent enough responses, I think. But, I thought it would not help to offer to guide folks to some of the publications of my work in verse which are electronic and not print--or at least not exlcusively print.

These poems, at Sidebrow, are part of a really interesting approach to a journal (electronic and print) which is electronic and is so in a way to promote at least some level of multi-authorship and collaboration in a genre that so rarely sees anything like that. Check out their own info on themselves, and the other work on the site.
http://sidebrow.net/2006/a110remein.php
http://sidebrow.net/2006/a074remein.php
http://sidebrow.net/2006/a073remein.php

http://www.zafusy.com/danielcremein.htm this is a poem in which augustine is a character

http://www.shampoopoetry.com/ShampooThirtytwo/remein.html this is a letter to julian of norwich

http://lafovea.org/daniel_c._remein.html la fovea is a poetry chain journal. so if you follow the chain my work is in you can see work from from of my poet-friends/colleagues.

Hope you like some of the work.

KZoo ’08, Remembering That Theory Saved My Life

Remember the part of this blog that was ostensibly medieval by way of concern? Witness its return.

The post concerns some things about Kalamazoo for immediate release in 2 parts: Part 1, Some Serious But Chaotic Comments; Part 2, Some Frivolous Seriousness (before I forget).

1.

My former instructor Hannah Johnson can give a hell of paper—her ideas concerning, and manner of thinking about, ethics and historiography, across times, is impressive, especially as she dares what I would risk calling both hopeful and an authenticity in her work. This is related to what Jeffrey Cohen underscored in a comment on a BABEL roundtable yesterday, that we have to do our work as if it matters—we should both imagine and want our work to have people to hear, respond—and, better: work—alongside our work.

Some new favorite people: Karl Steel, Dan Kline, Myra Seaman, Justin Brent, Dr. Virago, under the sign of Welcoming and Hospitable. Betsy McCormick, for thinking that I was actually Geoffrey Chaucer Hath a Blog (http://houseoffame.blogspot.com/), and the bit about welcoming, too. I had, honestly, a pretty awful month preceding Kalamazoo, and meeting these people, along with Eileen Joy and Jeffrey Cohen, some of whom I had only known electronically, or even only by electronic rumor (or as an audience of their scholarship in books or at conferences), in this context, was really very refreshing and nice.




2.

An angel swims silently to a flat rock in the night, where seabirds are sleeping, senses them,/ and stops. Their recognizing her in the moonlight, without waking, is the physical sensation/ of your dream, when you wake. The birds’ dream represents an angel, and later it shelters the meaning,/ angel. Royal palms glisten, fronds reaching stars their shape imitates, to show feeling for stars./ The general is concrete, here, in the birds’ memories and extends to the instinctual limits of perception,/ but this hasn’t been recognized, yet.
--Mei Mei Berssenbrugge, “Daughter”

Berssenbrugge’s poems, like this one, charge the line with a task of generously exhausting her readers—pushing them into a game of remembering as one reels further and further towards the right margin like an automobile towards a concrete barrier, with bad brakes. They can be for this reason, very forgettable lines, in a strange and moving way—hard to call up and quote, but nonetheless leaving a reader with a residue of specific affects. They are the scene of a hermeneutic juxtaposition (borrowed from a paper by Betsy McCormick) of something like the auditory imagination of Eliot with Phenomenology and leftist aesthetics. Her ‘Collected’ is titled I Love Artists (!). These poems construct a scene of affects in which we can move ideas and our selves and allow what our meanings shelter, to touch.

There were a number of sessions I attended this year which involved individuals I have been getting to know by means of blogs and blog discussions for about a year now (especially those at ITM http://jjcohen.blogspot.com/). Among these, was a moving and wonderful performance by Nicola Masciandaro on Sorrow and “The Cloud of Unknowing,” at a session organized for the Medieval Club of New York (http://medievalclubofnewyork.blogspot.com/) The paper, near the end, takes this fantastic turn, which I would like to call pedagogical:



Sorrow is thus positioned as both the precondition and the fruit of interpretation. And while these two sorrows, the sorrow of having and the sorrow of not having the text’s meaning, are different, they are fundamentally related. For the latter is already on the way to the former in the same way that, to use the classic Zen figure for deixis, sorrowing that one does not see the moon but only the hand pointing to it is already seeing the moon, in some measure. This measure is the measure of apophasis, the space of continuity between unknowing and knowing, and it is across this space that sorrow in the Cloud operates as an interpretation of being which reveals by negation. So this paper (still unwritten) accepts the text’s invitation of “whoso felid never this sorow” to sorrow, not as a crude advertisement for perfect sorrow, much less an unfriendly extra-discursive gesture of contemplative elitism, but as an opening or giving of its essential meaning as the ongoing, gerundive process of seeking it, of having by not-having it.

I am reminded rather much of a Sedgwick essay, “Buddhism and Pedagogy,” in Touching Feeling, although Nicola’s distinctly phenomenological approach moves me a bit more. Something that was important to me about this moment and this paper, though, was the manner of a paper in the mode of a kind of Heideggerian commentary (ie. On Trakl, or Rilke), in which Nicola enters a circle, follows a path, returns, and, generously and patiently provokes/allows-to-be-called the session’s affects towards a future which is really a moment in the present of those at that session being together and needing to be able to ask why. That is, the practice of performing this paper allows a medieval text to do theoretical work in the present, to open our humannesses to the hope that something is coming now and we know not what it is—but all have a hunch that is has something to do with each other. The “Cloud” does not just have contemplative effects for one individual, but, when cared it is for, when one is marked by this text and allows herself to be pulled into it, across time, like a kind of temporal gravity (also called affect, or better, feelings), this movement can open individuals to the facticity of their being together.

What is important about this, given the title of this post, is that this being-together is a theoretical practice. The encounter of the individual, in whom we both hope for and are terrified of: the possibility of an actual Other, the actual New, and the Actual Future or Event, is of course just as interpretive as that of a text. As such, I want to remember something my former instructor Paul Bové wrote in the early nineties (In The Wake of Theory), in a fierce attempt to resist a kind of ‘treaty’ along that seam we mistake as ‘pragmatism’ or ‘necessity,’ between the movements of ‘Theory’ and those that stood and stand (they may be different movements now) against it. Bové discusses, concerning Heidegger’s own reading of theory, or theoria, how we should understand what this term has concealed by idle talk, history, Plato (etc.). Rather than seeing theory as Sight, as a kind of third-term tool separating subject-object relations, as a kind of grasping for the object, we can understand it as Care. Care is an attending which brings near—but not a grasping. Such nearness is immeasurably far. More importantly, for Bové and for Heidegger, Care is a potential for, and condition of, DaSein’s Being in Time.

Such a ‘philosphic’ turn, I would hope, helps to suggest, more technically and theoretically (and it will become apparent in just a moment why I would want to do this), that Theory is not a tool. Learning is not by or for the individual. And learning, when allowed to arrive in the form how we might live in a community of scholars in which learning is not on the shoulders of individuals, but can be a communal event—a shared communistic labor, is a condition of life and a part of our affective relations with both the past and the present. Theory helps us wonder that something is happening and the we are all together.

Or (c’mon Dan, better, more concise), Theory is a condition of our lives, and theory moves, pulls, withdraws and pulls us with it, by means of the affective liens which arise between us and between our texts and the worlds and times they inhabit and abandon. Theory allows us to be together.

But, more than this, as Stacey Klein’s final response to the second BABEL panel reminds us, that we should expect even more from theory. That theory was supposed to connect us to everything. This reminds me of an friend’s recent comment to me concerning when Gender Trouble was said to have been waved at ACT UP events (he is older than me). This friend said me that theory saved his life. He has never fully explained what this means, but has hinted that it had to do with providing a certain hope and imperative for his work, beyond simple self-identifications and identity-politics shouting-matches. I can say, at moments, that ‘theory saved my life,’ for different reasons, and from a different historical moment. To lay bare just a little snippet of it, I enunciate this with reference to a moment in which the Evangelical movement in the US was digging deeply into the neurosis and psychological malaises of young people in this country, and threatening the very possibility of their Affective connection to this World.

So, I am thinking about ways that specifically Medievalists can do this. And, I am ready and willing to say why the medieval, though that will have to wait for another time.

As one who has done a lot of thinking and harping about Carolyn Dinshaw’s “touching” the past, and suggested a model of historiography which amounts, when reduced to slogan, to something like “queerly loving the past,” I am deeply concerned about the scenes we depend on for this sort of touching to extend beyond the bounds of one single historian or critic performing a touch for their own personal pleasure and that only. That is to say, who is touching what and who and why—and where and when (and will be thinking through this more all summer—ideas welcome!)? Sure, this is a lot of interrogatives. But sessions like the one organized by Nicola, with Eileen Joy, Karl Steel, and Anna Klowsowska, allow such scenes to arise, and give me hope that we are moving in the rather utopian direction of opening these theatres of affect towards radical but not naïve hope, and a more leftist sort of Care that attends to more radical Hospitality or more radical Open. The temporal/spacial site of touching the past, in such a moment, might consist of what allows a certain kind of phenomenological space-time to arise—much in the way that the temple, for Heidegger, or the work of art, Opens a World. These scenes allow us to feel the affective lines, crisscrossed and pulling like gravities that arise between each other and the past, part of the very world that we are part of (and this is why, for all the reasons is unnerves me, I love the last chapter of Bersani and Dutoit’s Forms of Being which forcefully does away with the boundary between world and individual—for whom we are phenomena of the world registering the world). And this is why I can say with Anna Klowsowska that “A queer reading is a deeply ethical approach to the text, in that it takes the text beyond itself in a necessary way. A personal pleasure in the text implies the reading is not less, but more ethically engaged” (Queer Love in the Middle Ages, NY: Palgrave, 2005, 6).

But that I have selected Heidegger here to anchor this contemplation (which is also a polemic about Theory, that it has never stopped being under attack and did not end its fight somewhere in the early 90’s (which is significant for someone who has said that he has nostalgia for a moment he cannot possibly be nostalgic for, and for which it is simply unwise in many ways to be nostalgic, that is, for something like ‘graduate school in the late 80’s.’ This is also to say that present IS always already unhinged and that a little fold of little soldiers lining up the fight the effects of Alan Bloom’s book are haunting us now even you among the readers of this blog)), that this post is about Heidegger and something that happened in a session on Medieval literature and history—this is significant. Heidegger, theory, and their histories, of course, find some of the hints they hinge most on, in the medieval. Heidegger would could not have thought Being without Duns Scotus. Heidegger could not have written narratives of thought, poems about linguistic and philosophical terms and unconcealments, or attempted to get beyond what he saw as the “Human” to something more Worldly and less Gnostic-religious, without the Creatures Dinshaw loves so much—mystics, (even, gasp) the ‘Church,’ and Aquinas. Derrida depends on the traditions of Medieval Jewish Commentary—and indeed takes his place among them.

I attempted to produce the above list not to write an apologetics for ‘why the medieval.’ I am not trying to respond to Nancy Partner’s paper at the first BABEL session yesterday, which suggested that when we inject queer theory or revolutionary politics into work on the Middle Ages, that we necessarily have to work harder to prove that this makes sense, because for her, queer theory and the middle ages don’t seem to ‘go together’ in and obvious way. That, as I said, is for another time. And besides, people like Derrida and Heidegger, theory itself, is exactly what asks more rigorously why we should or could put any two things together. Radically historicizing even our own moment, recent developments in neuro-science and perception sciences, not to mention the Pre-Socratics (my goodness! Parmenides, Democritus, the Pluralists!), call into question the possibility that ANYTHING necessarily follows anything else (ok, so I couldn’t resist responding at least a little bit). But, above, I am trying to highlight that we can think about and identify how specific theoretical, critical, and historiographic approaches might sew themselves into our writings, performances (here, commentary and phenomenology), and inter-locutions at conferences about medieval material. How might allow these Scenes of Heterotopian (and I need to say) Queer Affect to arise, to allow this connection to everything including each other—inviting whatever will then arrive, even if it is the Sorrow Nicola speaks of?

Berssenbrugge’s poem is in three parts. The first part I quoted from is titled “1 (THE DREAM),” and is followed by “2 (COMMENTARY),” a setup which seems appropriate for a post dealing with Nicola’s commentary-like paper (section three is numbered only, no parenthetical title). I’d like to open the ending of this post, I suppose, with the opening of the commentary on the dream:

The dream represents a meaning to me. Then, it’s a structure that shelters the meaning./ Emotion can represent evaluation or contain one, of interaction between an ethereal object/ and an organism. The angel bows down.

And the last lines of section 3:

What I thought I could lose of a person and what I thought I had lie next to each other,/ repeating, so the time in which you know her is a foliage during time and folds over on itself,/ hill filling with dogwood, tree of sky turning rose. A rose angel with the physical sensation/ of the meaning of your dream, holding a lamp, the waterfall behind her of some contemporary/ material like cellophane, achieves a cohesive tension exactly beside the contemporary.

look kids!

Well, even with everything else, I turned in, a few hours ago, my final MFA manuscript, title: libido register.

What remains of this degree at Pitt are: 1 seminar paper, on Henry James and Nate Hawthorne and affective relations to real in the novelistic art, 80 7-page papers on the Civil War to grade. Estimated completion date: about a week. Then, beware of 'certified' poets lurking at Kalamazoo...

I realize that this is the closest thing to a picture of myself that I have yet provided for anyone reading my blog, but this is the sheet of committee approval signature for the Ms:

julie granum

I am not entirely sure how I feel about doing my mourning on the internet. But, I need to say--if I believe at all in the value of this electronic-textual community as anything resembling that of a utopian hope--that I am. My friend Julie Granum, a poet in my program at the University of Pittsburgh, died last week in an an accident. I want to name her here.

The literary magazine Whiskey & Fox has published an obituary here: http://whiskeyandfox. blogspot.com

news on my future

So, friends. It will be official as soon as the institution receives my 'official' response in the mail, that when I finish this MFA thing next month I will not be done being a student, in those official institutional capacities. Instead, I will go to New York and undertake a Ph.D. at NYU.

I really have to say, I think NYU and I will get along just fine. I am happy to get to work with a number of new colleagues and the NYU faculty, having met at least one of them (of the student variety) already electronically by means of the folks over at ITM .