Probably all comparison is specious. At least wrong. There was feudalism and then there was capitalism. There were horse drawn carriages and then there were cars. For a while there were both and it was natural to compare them as ways of getting somewhere. Or the telephone as a way of communication soon to be replaced by ‘texting’ message.  (The mayor of Las Cruces, surprised by the sudden wave of opposition to the development of a privately built ICE Detention Center, proposed to my friend Dana that they ‘text’ on the matter.) I suspect that the invention and proliferation of instant text exchange has altered the face to face encounter – speech upon being in physical proximity is no longer self-evident. As far as manners and etiquettes of compassion in our new textual spaces, I suppose we just need to figure them out. When I think like this I think maybe it isn’t true that there is nothing new under the sun. Maybe that is all there is. Negation, replacement.

There are three books on my mind this week. They are kari edwards, Bharat jiva (Belladonna/Litmus, 2009), Spring Ulmer, Age of Virtual Reproduction (Essay, 2009) and Catherine Wagner, My New Job (Fence, 2009). Each of these books, written during the oughts and published on the eve of their demise can be placed under the category defined by Wagner’s serial title “Everyone In The Room Is A Representative Of The World At Large”—although perhaps the more accurate phrase would be “Every body in the room represents and receives the world at large.” These books, two of which are poetry books and one, Ulmer’s, is a book of poetically informed essays. Ulmer’s essays study the self as part and parcel of our moment of genocidal current and aftermath. Note: here the collective first person ‘our’ that I am utilizing is informed in part by the premise of Ulmer’s work: in times of virtual representation, we are not only overwhelmed by information and reality, we become it. Aware of the world and its injustices since her birth, being born and growing up in rural Vermont in a kerosene lamp-powered house her radically-left parents built, Ulmer writes of brokenness as hers and also not her own. “An Atlas of the Itinerant Nature of Perspective,” which touches upon her study and time in post-genocide Rwanda (I keep stumbling over writing that, thinking the concept impossible, there is no post-genocide), ends with the line “I will then concede that Abraham’s broken heart is much more broken than mine. There is, of course, no comparison (45).” Since this quote is out of the context, I will explain that what I think is being said is that while there is no comparison, neither is there a clear line of demarcation.

edward’s book, Bharat jiva is in some way a poetic-political-existential-spiritual accounting of her year in an intentional spiritual community in Tamil Nadu, India. The book, like our list of 1970’s movies, ends bleak, perhaps even bleaker than its beginning: her final attempt to find hope in community has failed edwards, it’s the same as every other flawed attempt to get beyond consumption, and the spirit-murderous branding required by consumption (for more on this see Rob Halpern’s excellent essay “Reading the Interval, Reading Remains” in Bharat jiva’s companion volume, NO GENDER, published simultaneously by Belladonna/Litmus—in this Halpern publishes edwards’ emails critiquing ‘community’). The flip side of the abandon and rage and frustration implicit in Bharat jiva is an accounting that the poet brings onto her self-same body alongside every other body (once again, ‘our’ as radical ego collectivity). A passage from the preface reads:

“…when we mention the people, we do not mean the confessional body of the people, we mean the particularly itinerant bodies in mechanic flux, preaching freedom beyond flesh pamphlets of authority, concealed in blind devotion.” (3)

Through the duration of the book, this preaching, edwards’ critique, her attempt to render a different story through witness and poetic action is (now, from the aftermath), “replaced by a generous claw/with nothing to say (115).”

Wagner also makes a statement of poetic negation: “If a poem is active/Its action aborts in you/A colored light flies into black.” (36) Overall, My New Job asserts a practice of poetry as a shared fact, if not reduced than joined by the grunts and sighs that are the facts and banality of contemporary work and getting by. Not without pleasure, penises, vaginas and good fights with lovers, the poem is brought into the world physical body with sound gestures, and nursery rhyme, and commercial jingle

STILL not finished review

but productive day and feeling

GÜT

like a fine mama

SHÜT

putting down some

RÜTS

like the lost queen

TOOT

TOOT

TÜT TÜT TÜT

These poetries, which all put the subjective body forward as a shared space suggest to me that yes, the fantasy of ‘wandering on alone” is forever gone and that ‘our’ bodies, behind screens that watch us back and no longer able to be removed to some colonial outpost, are in fact themselves the site of our new public, our new commons.

Epilogue

Though I’m fairly sure I didn’t get very far in the great project of considering confinement in our times I did learn something about blogging in our times which may after all be critical to the thinking about confinement in our times. Every time I mentioned the blog to someone, their response was inevitably, “Oh you blog???” The way they might inquire if I were a skier, or a practitioner of S/M…”So, you’re into S/M?” And this appeals to me as an analogy because like skiing and S/M, blogging is in fact, not something I ‘do’ but rather now something I have tried, done, dipped into like I have dipped into so many things that one can ‘do’ with no intention of sustaining them as a practice in the way that I practice things like swimming or getting tipsy or sitting on the couch and watching tv or reading New York Magazine talking to Dana now often on the telephone since she has moved so far away. Like skiing and S/M, I find blogging does have its fun but is too much machinery, too ritualistic, its accountrement of too many steps, so much always themselves in the same way for me, i.e. the ski lift and its line, the leather and its fittings, the constant presence of the format. Perhaps holding onto a fantasy of escape, I prefer my watery little dream world where I get to just jump in.

[Note: you can listen to Catherine Wagner read “Coming and I did not run away” in our Audio section.]

Poetics of Speed

What is a blog and how do you do it? I had a plan and now find myself surprised to be without internet so I can’t get into facebook to check on my list of bleaker 70s movies and where is the Melanie lyric? But I was talking about confinement and there was a thought about the body in the interface, and my anxiety to not meet the fact of speed, of easy speech, and what if I forget my lines? I’ve been fixated on a notion of the poetics of speed and how badly, truly I fail at this, how disappointing I often feel when I’m looked upon to speak and cannot. I’m amazed at Eileen Myles’ ability to rise when she’s looked to, and speak/testify to the injustice, even suggest something new. When I see something bad I begin to grunt, because I find I must say something, yet when I turn my grunts into slow speech or writing it hardly gets any better, I’m accused of being negative, of getting in the way, my mental meandering generally unrecognizable. (Are there not multiple languages and can’t we all be talking at once?)

Both Gertrude Stein (“Composition as Explanation”) and Paul Virilio (Speed and Politics) recognize the 20^th Century as the one in which turns in military strategy (of the 19^th Century) become the rhythm by which everything turns in the 20^th, i.e. the masses militarized into a constantly roaming shooting machine, through cities, across continents and over oceans, deployed in total eternal war, whose civilian arm is the affordable automobile. Stein makes the point well that military advances are always a hundred years behind and so does Virilio, citing Carl Von Clausewitz as the 19^th century engineer of the strategy that would serve the bourgeois cause toward domination of the proletariat—by the method of uproot, displace, keep them moving.

“In order to know one must always go back” (Stein, Lectures “Plays”)

Besides using the above spin as a statement/complaint against speed pressure, besides pointing out its relation to confinement–as my friend Rick Karr points out in his PBS special: the internet too is a highway upon which we move as directed, paying toll collectors along the way–I would like to use it as an opportunity to acknowledge some movies from the 1970’s (and a few from the 60’s) which perhaps theorized the present tense of our ‘dromological progress.’

“Let’s make no mistake; whether it’s the drop-outs, the beat generation, automobile drivers, migrant workers, tourists, Olympic champions or travel agents, the military industrial democracies have made every social category, without distinction , into unknown soldiers of the order of speeds…” (Virilio 136).

In the mid 1970’s (I was born in 1963) I began to feel that something was going on and that I was going to miss it…like the waft of bread from a bakery whose load has already been trucked away. I could smell it, but I could not see it. Based on that sensation, I built a nostalgia for an imagined time of resistance to domination—and responded quickly to any opportunities I had to join radical collective action in my sphere. And then in the 1990’s I stopped…to write poems and make connection to other people writing poems. This too felt like a potential, but different, means of resisting, by joining in imaginative activity with others, and in building a viable counter-culture. My imagined late 1960’s, early 1970’s life—the one that I had just missed–was one which (in my imagination) expressed idealism, connection, advancement of thought, the sense of possibility.

So it came as a surprise to me when I returned to the movies of my youth and found my lover to be correct when he said that they always end worse than they began, offering an even bleaker picture of the world.  This is not our expectation of the movies we watch today, which all seem to end with a joyous wedding.

I don’t have the facebook list or the internet so I have to speak to the ones that are fresh in my mind. Spoiler alert! Some movies and their endings: Dog Day Afternoon (end with the cops shooting Sal in cold blood), The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3 (original version), Soylent Green (“Soylent Green is People!”), Death Wish (kids keep being cold blooded criminals, the vigilante architect keeps killing kids), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (we know how it goes, and that it is 1969 but can’t resist, Burt Bacharach soundtrack and all) 2 Lane Blacktop (ends with the love object taking off with some guy and the film reel, it’s image of the lonesome drivers, catching fire), and my most recent favorite, and one that has truly haunted me since watching it on ‘instant watch’ – George Lukas’ first film, the beautiful, high design THX:1138 (filmed in then spanking clean and space age state of the art BART stations). THX 1138 ends with THX (pronounced ‘thicks’) climbing out of the structure, circumventing his first attempt at escape into the inescapable hell of the superstructure (see dromological progress), pushing up the manhole, standing up on the OUTSIDE, only to be silhouetted by a skin melting, melting sun.

Not hopeful, these films take as their  premise that everything is all fucked up, the system has us all by the balls and our options are only ever diminishing. What I find remarkable is how willing, how spunky and resistant the characters are, knowing the system is bigger than them and will eventually do them in. One of my favorite lines of all times is Al Pacino playing the queer bank robber Sonny Wortzik (aka John Wojtowicz) negotiating hostage release with the cops saying “Kiss me. When I’m being fucked, I like to be kissed a lot.”* Rather than making good with the system that has the better of them, they do their own thing.  They don’t act against the system in order to beat it, they resist because they still can. Which is maybe as ‘outside’ as it gets.

END

*For John Wojtowiczs’s dramatization of the story see “The Third Memory” by Pierre Huyghe

The internet is working, I’m about to send this to Stacy but quickly, here are some bleak 1970’s movies my ‘friends’ on facebook offered:

*Note: Dystopia or not, things are always getting worse.

McCabe & Mrs Miller

Taxi Driver

The Wicker Man

Fox and His Friends

Don’t Look Now

Beneath the Planet of the Apes

Carrie

Chinatown

The Stepford Wives

Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Kaufman version)

(And it’s 1968, but it seems like an important precedent): Night of the Living Dead

The Conversation

Killer of Sheep

Wanda

Night Moves

Blow Up

Picnic at Hanging Rock

The Champion

Five Easy Pieces

Two Lane Blacktop

Vanishing Point

The Exorcist  (no kidding: my father took me to see this when it came out, I was 9)

Apocalypse Now

The Last Picture Show

The Night Porter

The Kremlin Letter

The Friends of Eddie Coyle

Caddyshack

The Last Tango in Paris

Klute

Nashville (“the ending appears bright but this Altman” says PSJ who offered this one)

Boesman & Lena

Mean Streets

Saturday Night Fever

Jesus Christ Superstar

Star Wars

Jaws

Panic in Needle Park

“the first Godfather film? What about King of Comedy, the ending of which is at least weird, if not bleak?”

Shadows

A Woman Under the Influence

Faces

Ali or Fear Eats the Soul

The Bitter Tears of Petra Van Kant

Alice in the Cities

Oh, and here is the Melanie:

“We were so close, there was no room

We bled inside each other’s wounds

We all had caught the same disease

And we all sang the songs of peace.”

YOURS in struggle,

Rachel

(Note: “Melanie and the Movies” postponed until next week)

Just “Hey” is frequently how my students begin an email to me (and this despite a long schpiel I give at start of each semester on how they can call me Rachel or Professor Levitsky whatever is easier/more comfortable for them). I confess I find it crushing, and distancing, though I know that it is meant to be casual and familiar, at least meant as some sort of non-deferential treatment. I miss ‘dears’ and ‘hellos.’ I even miss my name or being called something which designates me as more than a random body. I know I sound sickly nostalgic. And I know that in the movement into casual, non-descript address, there is some deliberate eschewing of formality deemed oppressive, manners rejected as antiquated and hierarchical forms.

Again I’ll quote Dana Greene who helped me with statistics last week – I have a long sustained conversation about liberation with Dana, she is the interlocuting voice in my thinking about Confinement. Dana tells a story that when visiting facilities researching Restorative Justice, at a Maximum Security Prison in the mid-west where she was hosted by two elderly ex-school teachers, let’s say Mrs. Pinewood and Miss Jones, perfectly coifed and neatly dressed, who ran a Life Skills Program which included instruction in writing skills. Mrs. Pinewood and Miss Jones designated all their students as “Mr. …” and demanded formal address. At one point in the day, one student picked up a candy out of the bowl on the teachers’ desk and was reprimanded “Now you know Mr. Allah that those candies are meant for our guests.” Later at dinner the ladies told Dana about how they had another sort of communication with their students in which they deposited certain items, writing tools, notebooks and the like, into the trash bins on the way into their office and these were retrieved by the guys in the know.

In my fantasy about courtesy I imagine it as a kind of commons, a collective space that creates more room for difference and distinction and in the case of this story, maneuvers of resistance. The informality, the heys, the lack of hellos in advance of speaking, seem to me to assume not a level of equality, but a level of affective sameness, in which the salutation, the moment of assessment, is skipped. An this lack of assessment makes us vulnerable, puts us on the defensive. Individual and defended, of course we need to create our own safe insides, frat houses where it’s okay to be a little bit cruel.

Sincerely,

Rachel Levitsky

P.S. Thank you Cara for pointing out the construction of the ‘inside’. I think that’s right, there is an impulse or a conceit amongst poets to create an alternative universe as a way out. Interesting and troubling. I thinking here that any inside is the inside (I too like to be inside). And of course there is no generalizing, every poet I know has a different life. I was talking to ETG yesterday about the television show “House” (an inside we can both enter for untold hours) and how it works on a similar premise, ranks close again the “outside” (e.g. the investigator of House’s vicodin/methadone/booze addled days at the hospital) to protect the fragile but complete system inside of the hospital. For those of you who don’t watch television, imagine Sherlock Holmes as a brilliant but ill-mannered and unwashed doctor, and Watson as the slightly effete, squeaky clean chief oncologist and a super petite, succulently curved, determinedly jewish, hospital chief as Irene Adler — http:/ /en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Irene_Adler —the only woman who could ever slay … A mutually protective theater of cruelty, when push comes to shove they sometimes have each other’s back.

P.S.S. Disclaimer: I was not raised in the ways of politesse. My chaotic working class parents and people put their fingers in their plates when they ate on plates and not directly from the big dish and did not, as matter of course, great a person with a salutation when addressing someone/encountering someone anew. My father, horrified that he had raised one just like himself used to bemoan the fact that he had not sent me to ‘finishing school.” I did not end up in finishing school but in October, 1993 I wandered off to Mexico, alone. I happened to be there in January 1, 2004 the day of the Zapatista rebellion and participated in some supportive organizing from El D.F. Always I found myself mesmerized by the universality of courtesy and what I perceived that it enabled, politically.R

Stacy asked me to do the February web log, the first one due today and I said yes, what might you like to see me log about? Stacy said, ‘your work teaching in prison.’ I can’t probably do that very directly but, since last semester’s teaching at Woodbourne and Arthur Kill, two New York State Medium Security Correctional Facilities (NYS has 67 facilities, housing between 60,000 and 90,000 people, depending on the report), I am beginning to think more coherently and/or obsessively about confinement. On one hand how could I not—just last week a friend was arrested and processed because the police had no record of her payment of a speeding violation (which she had paid but that seems moot—they picked her up on 5th Ave in Brooklyn’s Park Slope and kept her for five hours). But also I have come to realize that in fact I think about confinement all the time anyway, that this thinking is always already before my thinking on liberation. I understand confinement to not only be the condition of the massive prison population in this country (600% growth since 1970s despite declining crime rates–more stats listed below), the massive incarceration of young men of color from cities, the 1 in 3 African American males that are predicted to go prison at the time of their birth, and the fact that they are/will be mostly ‘kept’ by white non-urban prison guards—but also the condition of our policed cities and bodies on the outside, the disciplining of the emotions implicit in pumping psycho-pharmaceuticals into children and students and now their professors too, and also the condition of gates and walls built against those these ‘unruly’ policed cities and borders and migrating bodies looking for food and work and home. Fear run amok making room for surreal and politically/humanly horrific experiments in safety. I like the way that Jena Osman talks about this in her introduction to the Chain Links book Refuge/Refugee while discussing the constricting aspect of ‘sanctuary’ (writing adjacently about camps designed for both animals and humans): “In order for a refuge to keep its contents safe, contained, and “carefree,” it must maintain a radical separation from that which exists outside of its frame.” And while as Osman notes, “such detachment is impossible,” it is these more and more radical efforts to hold the lines that increase our state of confinement. The computer poses another question: does the internet/world wide web obliterate or proliferate the razor wires we find ourselves writing behind?

And then there is the question of what we as poets do when we enter and intervene in conceptions of reality. I have a rough thought that one of the things we do when we represent reality, is to delimit it, and by doing so imagine what it is not, or what is outside of it, and that it is possible to view representation as a craving for liberation/autonomy from the world and its heavy totality. Here, I would like to place Gertrude Stein’s book The Making of Americans, and her attempt to construct “an orderly history of every one who ever was or is or will be living” alongside consideration of the refuge or refugee camp, psycho-pharmaceuticals, police arrest for traffic tickets, and the generally increasingly radical efforts being made to contain human and animal lives.

I propose that by in this exercise, Stein, in putting down entirely the whole of what was inside her (the there no longer in Oakland as Joan Retallack aptly points out, refining the sense of that famous comment) imagines she might then step outside, exist separately from that whole, become the unrecognized (by ‘little dog’) “figure” wandering “on alone.” (The full quote from “Identity a poem” is “I am I because my little dog knows me. The figure wanders on alone.”)

In this vein, I’ve long been confounded while tickled by Walter Benjamin, who at the crossroads between centuries (writing on the Nineteenth century in the Twentieth), identifies the writing process as so much perpetuation of the notion of the isolation, singularity and genius, i.e. the poet of the original in “The Task of the Translator” separated and protected from any consideration of the work’s “receiver”, writing in “the true language”; or those adorable rules for writers of the “major work” in the “Post No Bills” section of “One Way Street”; i.e. don’t read from the work until it is complete, have the right pen around at all times, let no thought pass without writing it down in the notebook you always carry, etc.

Echoing Benjamin’s sentiments in this century, Giorgio Agamben has a great piece in Profanations on how the god Genius is profanely and dangerously bowed down to in secular society. And yet this is the same 21st century that, in poetry at least, begins with a massive proliferation, even might I say fad, of conceptualisms, and full on use of the internet as medium for generation and distribution, where we claim no ego, no defining difference, no authorship (well, we still put our names down, as the authors of ‘projects’ but who’s counting?). The notion of waiting until a piece or a project or a conception is finished before considering the audience seems ridiculously solipsistic and absurd, since there wouldn’t be a piece without the audience there to begin with, and we all know it, feel it, pressing on our in-boxes, blogs, facebook pages. And in our desire for nothing special, no extreme emotions or political stances we get confused by that which moves us, when we find ourselves feeling it or calling it especially beautiful and well-wrought: god Genius rearing profane head.

For now, here is my question: Is our recycling of material, our full embrace of technology and networking devices, our DIY culture in which it’s really hard to get anyone to actually show you how to do anything toward mastery because you are supposed to be able to figure out how to do it yourself or pay someone to teach you—do they represent merely a continuation of the modernist urge to capture the world and wander on as autonomous figures alone or is there a new urge to mix and merge, be one with the political and metaphysical world as it is presented to us? Am I correct when I sense that poets no longer crave an outside? Is that a capitulation or radical participation?

And what has this to do with our condition of confinement?

Next Week: the singer Melanie and the bleak outside-less landscapes of our favorite 1970’s movies.

-Rachel Levitsky

—-
Prison Statistics as compiled for me by Dana Greene, a professor of Criminal Justice at NMSU:

Race & Prison/Corrections:

Figures vary significantly by state, however, nationally:
5,000 per 100,000 African-American men are incarcerated
2,000 per 100,000 Latino men are incarcerated
800 per 100,000 White men are incarcerated

African Americans comprise 40% of the prison population but about 13% of the U.S. population.

Self-report studies consistently show little difference in criminal behavior across race.

Almost 1 in 10 (9.3%) of all African American children have had a father in prison or jail; 3.5 percent of Hispanic children and 1.2 percent of white children.

U.S. Adult inmates by race: (national data)
36.5 African American
48.3 White
9.8 Hispanic
5.8 ‘Other’

Correctional Officers:
30% of all correctional officers are from racial and ethnic groups labeled ‘minorities’ (21.7 African American; 6.3 Hispanic; 3.2 other; 69.7 White).
23% of all correctional officers are women.

There are under 1 million correctional officers in the United States (between 800,000 & 900,000 thousand).

Prison Growth: (data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics most of this is copied verbatim)
Between 1940 & 1973 the incarceration rate held steady. Since 1975 continuing exponential increase is the norm.
The incarceration rate in 1973 was 96 per 100,000 United Statesians
The incarceration rate in 2006 was 497 per 100,000 United Statesians (a growth of about 600%)

The U.S. incarceration rate is the highest on the globe. The U.S. spends about 70 billions dollars a year on corrections (probation, parole & prison) About 7.5 million United Statesians are under correctional supervision. About 2.5 are in prison.

Of today’s men in their 30s 1 in 28 has been to prison; 11% of male children born this year AND a third of male African Americans born this year) will go to prison.

Crime rates between 1993 & 2005 fell by more than 50%.

The Big Four:
4 states dominate U.S. corrections (2006 data)
California (largest in the country) 170,676 prison inmates; 384,852 on probation; 110,262 on parole
Florida: prison = 62,743
New York: prison = 89,768
Texas: prison = 169,003

Women and prison:

Since 1960 the feminization of poverty has accelerated = women and children currently comprise 80% of the poor in the United States.

The growth rate of women in prison has surpassed that of men since 1995. From 1995 to 2005 the male population in state and federal correctional facilities increased by 34 percent & that of women 57%.

Feeding the prisons:
The Children’s Defense Fund have an interesting report called the ‘Cradle To Prison Pipeline’ the url is http://www.childrensdefense.org/helping-americas-children/cradle-to-prison-pipeline-campaign/

What fuels the pipeline: (from the report)
Pervasive Poverty
Inadequate Access to Healthcare
Gaps in Early Childhood Development
Disparate Educational Opportunities
Intolerable Abuse and Neglect
Unmet Mental Health needs
Substance Abuse
Juvenile Justice System

(The source for much of CDF data is the U.S. Department of Justice)

Lifetime risk of a boy born in 2001 of going to prison:
Black boy: 1 in 3 chance
Latino boy: 1 in 6
White boy: 1 in 17

Lifetime risk of a girl born in 2001 of going to prison:
Black girl: 1 in 17
Latina girl: 1 in 45
White girl: 1 in 111

While more white children are poor in the United States Black and Latino/a children are more likely to be poor:
1 in 3 Black children is poor
1 in 4 Latino/a children is poor
1 in 10 children is poor