Before I forget, I should post on the Nealon break-out now. First let me say that tongith was really cool. It's fun to have gotten pretty comfortable with one another but still be able to have a bit of an argument (I like arguments, probably more than anything). It's way more interesting to get these poetic statements at the end than at the beginning, 'cus really these statements only make sense in the context of the work we've seen and knowing each other's idiosyncracies (robots, cockroaches in the Taos desert of the real). It's been a fun workshop, we should all go get trashed after the last class on the 1st (or just get trashed at the class, although I doubt a bunch of sloshed grad students is what Juliana had in mind for a pleasant Wednesday afternoon).
So, Nealon. It was a motherfucker of an article. He started by situating himself in an accelerated version of Adorno's summary of late-capitalism, and even coined (or maybe borrowed) the term late-late capitalism to go along with post-language poetry. Then he went into his very particular readings of some pretty funny poems of a certain generation which he all thought were up to a similar project, reclaiming the detritus of our culture's recent past and present as a way of rehabilitating the culture. Or something like that.
We three, stretched languidly on the lawn in the warm days of yester-week, began with some uncoding of the references, mostly with me getting educated on the Frankfurt boys and a Marxian refresher. Dan pointed us towards the Benjamin quote several times, as that's where he thought the action was, which went something like: one day we'll write a history that includes all the little bits that get over-written by the Great Man theory (history as the record of the deeds of guys with something to prove, insert penis joke here) and this history will redeem us. Charles had the epiphany that this is what Messianism refers to in the title, a redemption of the readers of the new poetry (yipee).
I had some issues with his reading of the poems, like are they actually doing what he said they are, but Chuck and Dan-o liked his readings, so I dropped it. In the end of the paper, Nealon gives a defense of a certain kind of very programatic reading which was kind of cool, a revitilized way to do criticism that pushes for a place for the critic in the culture revolution. The reading we focused on most was probably the Kevin Davies poem where talks about robots (cockroaches in the Taos desert of the real) taking his job and stealing the money he needs for time travel. The tongue-in-cheekness of the time travel thing got funnier every time we read it (Dan had a particularly funny way of reciting it), and his point with it was, yes this outdated notion of time travel, from a sc-fi literature predating the author, was funny precisely because it, along with the robots (cockroaches in the Taos desert of the real), is an anachronism we threw away, but is now reclaimed- it's camp. Thus the second prong of the title, Camp: the reclaimed detritus of the culture, in almost all cases, material culture.
That's where we spent the rest of our time, trying to figure out why that gesture, reclaiming and parading around these camp wares, would be a positive program for social change, which Nealon seemed to be saying that it was, perhaps without irony (though i think it's safe to say irony is looming arond the whole project). Without being able to recall how we got there, and certainly appropriating a lot of D-mack and Chaz' ideas, we concluded that the mess of capitalism is so hard to decode in the present, as quick and bizzarely as it moves, our only hope is to go searching for a decoder ring in the cereal boxes of the fifties (Ralphie, are you in there?) and try to sharpen our detective skills. Somehow, pulling these camp objects into our present, absurd, human life, will bring about some humanizing realization. Well then, what realization? I don't know, but in the fashion of Marx, we can just say, you won't know until your consciousness is changed, so go read some poems, dammit.
Peace
So, Nealon. It was a motherfucker of an article. He started by situating himself in an accelerated version of Adorno's summary of late-capitalism, and even coined (or maybe borrowed) the term late-late capitalism to go along with post-language poetry. Then he went into his very particular readings of some pretty funny poems of a certain generation which he all thought were up to a similar project, reclaiming the detritus of our culture's recent past and present as a way of rehabilitating the culture. Or something like that.
We three, stretched languidly on the lawn in the warm days of yester-week, began with some uncoding of the references, mostly with me getting educated on the Frankfurt boys and a Marxian refresher. Dan pointed us towards the Benjamin quote several times, as that's where he thought the action was, which went something like: one day we'll write a history that includes all the little bits that get over-written by the Great Man theory (history as the record of the deeds of guys with something to prove, insert penis joke here) and this history will redeem us. Charles had the epiphany that this is what Messianism refers to in the title, a redemption of the readers of the new poetry (yipee).
I had some issues with his reading of the poems, like are they actually doing what he said they are, but Chuck and Dan-o liked his readings, so I dropped it. In the end of the paper, Nealon gives a defense of a certain kind of very programatic reading which was kind of cool, a revitilized way to do criticism that pushes for a place for the critic in the culture revolution. The reading we focused on most was probably the Kevin Davies poem where talks about robots (cockroaches in the Taos desert of the real) taking his job and stealing the money he needs for time travel. The tongue-in-cheekness of the time travel thing got funnier every time we read it (Dan had a particularly funny way of reciting it), and his point with it was, yes this outdated notion of time travel, from a sc-fi literature predating the author, was funny precisely because it, along with the robots (cockroaches in the Taos desert of the real), is an anachronism we threw away, but is now reclaimed- it's camp. Thus the second prong of the title, Camp: the reclaimed detritus of the culture, in almost all cases, material culture.
That's where we spent the rest of our time, trying to figure out why that gesture, reclaiming and parading around these camp wares, would be a positive program for social change, which Nealon seemed to be saying that it was, perhaps without irony (though i think it's safe to say irony is looming arond the whole project). Without being able to recall how we got there, and certainly appropriating a lot of D-mack and Chaz' ideas, we concluded that the mess of capitalism is so hard to decode in the present, as quick and bizzarely as it moves, our only hope is to go searching for a decoder ring in the cereal boxes of the fifties (Ralphie, are you in there?) and try to sharpen our detective skills. Somehow, pulling these camp objects into our present, absurd, human life, will bring about some humanizing realization. Well then, what realization? I don't know, but in the fashion of Marx, we can just say, you won't know until your consciousness is changed, so go read some poems, dammit.
Peace
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