WORKING NOTES: INTELLIGIBILITY OF CONFLICT

At the Steak-A-Licious sub shop on Main Street in Buffalo the irony is twofold. The door entering into the shop is flanked on either side by large storefront windows. On the window to the left we encounter a hand-painted steak sandwich with the word "Steak-A-Licious" above it and "Buffalo's Best" below. To the right is a portrait of Obama with a view of the Capital Building over his right shoulder. The words below Obama read, "STEAKS / 2 for $8.00." Further to the right we see Obama's campaign catchphrase: "YES WE CAN!"

Two cheese steaks for eight dollars is a surprisingly good deal, but the newsprint pasted behind the image of Obama and his catchphrase quickly transforms this "can" into an especially painful "can't." The shop's location — literally on Main Street — further intensifies the ironic intelligibility of the phrase. Next to this even the most outrageous détournement strategies are kid stuff.

The fifth rigorously revised and exponentially enlarged edition of The Oxbridge Complainion to Hummerican Anglisc posits that economic contexts for the fricative /r/ reside in springwells of power. Cowboys /r/ hard. But the dialectically inverted sliding tax scale insists Lyndon Johnson's Texarkkkana /r/ is structurally coeval with the /r/ discovered by linguistic anthropologists in the shit-stained shanties inhabited by Roscoe Holcomb in Hazard, Kentucky and Hazel Adkins in Boone County, West Virginia. Even more troubling, the Complainion fails to account for the silent but nonetheless savory /r/ in the cramped urban Po' Boy (a gRindeRRR) or the spacious iveyleague luxury sedan referred to by yokels as Ha'va'd, Massacheussetts.

Bluntly: this ain't no joke. Or, Why Marx? Since the rise of Marxism coincides with the ascendancy of the oil industry perhaps it should be scrapped in a gradual and whimpering manner as dependency on oil slowly gives way to other forms of energy production. Unfortunately, a shift in commodity (energy) production already fails to promise a commensurate shift in class difference — i.e. market-driven commitments to solar power rhyme ideologically with passive zen-like imperatives to just be happy (viz, bright sunny smiles in fields of swaying wheat invite us to calm down, take a step back, love one another and purchase products manufactured by solar energy). Put differently, single mothers exchanging WIC tickets for grape soda on the way home from a double at the slop barrel really should feel badly for Richard Cory. Like Jon Gosselin, he had everything and still he hung himself.

When not reduced to a quaintly charming but otherwise disposable "interpretive lens" for reading culture, invoking Marxism speaks to capital with an impressive measure of stubborn clarity. It insists (quixoticity notwithstanding): This really is a pitchfork.

Althusser and Jameson each offer useful and curiously compatible working definitions of a Marxism that provide ample wiggle room for climbing out of orthodox commitments to economic determinism, the base/superstructure model, the teleology rabbit hole and other troubling stumbling blocks that have allowed critics to toss baby and bucket out with the bathwater.

Althusser: ... Marxism should not be simply a political doctrine, a 'method' of analysis and action, but also, over and above the rest, the theoretical domain of a fundamental investigation, indispensable not only to the development of society and of the various 'human sciences', but also to that of the natural sciences and philosophy (For Marx 26).

Jameson: — I would prefer to grasp Marxism as something rather different than a philosophical system (incomplete or not). I believe that it shares, uniquely with psychoanalysis in our time, the character of an as yet unnamed conceptual species one can only call a 'unity of theory and practice', which by its very nature and structure stubbornly resists assimilation to the older philosophical 'system' as such (foreword to the second vol. of Sartre's Critique of Dialectical Reason xiii).

In their brevity and vagueness both definitions leave a crawlspace for contingency and invite expanding the field of investigation. Weirdly, however, each allows the elephant in the room to go unnamed. But if there's any confusion make no mistake: for both Althusser and Jameson the name of the enemy is clear.

Claude Lévi-Strauss died today. A related passage from Structural Anthropology:

... as soon as the various aspects of social life — economic, linguistic, etc. — are expressed as relationships, anthropology [&c &c &c] will become a general theory of relationships. Then it will be possible to analyze societies in terms of the differential features characteristic of the systems of relationships that define them.

Structures of kinship. Relatedness. Any relationship can be imagined as a blood tie.

My daughter sleeps best when we drive. When she fusses and seems sleepy but resists sleep we drive. We drive all over Buffalo and when I need a smoke while she snoozes I pull over, step out and spark up, looking in on her while I quickly suck down a cigarette. The disjunctive leap from the opulent stone mansions we drive by along the Lincoln Parkway, near the Albright-Knox, to the dilapidated hovels west of Grant Street or on the East Side of the city persistently astound me. However boring, intellectually unsophisticated or simply mundane calling attention to the disparity might be, radical economic differentiation from one neighborhood to another is nonetheless palpable and lived. According to a 2007 Census Bureau report, Buffalo is the second poorest large city in the US.

She hasn't gotten a handle on consonants yet, but the range of wildly inflected vowel sounds my daughter utters daily is something to behold. At four and a half months she is still without language. Unlike her mother and I, she is also without or prior to linguistic difference. She has no /r/ yet. What is at stake is the almost undetectable difference between an oil mogul's gritty Texarkana /r/ and the comparably hard /r/ located in a forty-a-month Kentucky shack or the similarly callous but distant /r/ in a Paterson project complex. Clearly the line in the sand ain't reducible to this alone but certainly a determinate pea in the pod of Hummerican Anglisc.

In the appendices to the "second volume" of Sartre's Critique there's what appears to have been a hastily sketched note on his theory of totalization (a concept a little too complex to parse here). In the note Sartre addresses mass culture, focusing on radio and television, insisting — like Gramsci, Laclau, Jameson, Zizek &c &c &c have with markedly different conceptual tools — that mass culture is ideologically bourgeois in character:

That means the dominant class finds a new means of diffusing its own ideology (i.e. the practical justification of its praxis) ... The part provokes the contradiction by posing as the whole (universal culture). This is called 'integrating one's working class'. But this integration is false, because it gives a culture of the advantaged to men [and women?] who remain disadvantaged. It gives the enjoyment of luxury by sight, rather than by lived reality. There is a working-class and peasant culture that is prevented from emerging or developing. Hence, a contradiction between the universal and the class divide. The latter being deeper and more definitive. However, even as the universal veils the struggle, this is a superficial unification which brings out more clearly the reality of the contradiction (bourgeois culture is exposed, as soon as the workers go back to work).

Admittedly this passage is just par for the course. Sartre's more fundamental contributions reside in his theorizations of scarcity, totality and, according to Jameson, the via media he navigates between idealism and materialism. But the passage calls my attention to two restaurants, one just around the corner on Forrest Ave going east and the other on Forrest Ave going west. Both were within walking distance. One was a small coffee shop admirably stripped bare of all the feel-good hypersentimental-but-youthfully-edgy illusion-of-fair-trade fluff. The other was the first fried chicken joint not KFC in the neighborhood. Both closed within two months of opening and I imagine both disasters were built on small business loans. Vacations are permitted before returning to work but they must be paid for. And I'm not so sure bourgeois culture is adequately exposed when the workers punch the clock. They might be bitter, they might have difficulty coping with the impossibility of being-your-own-boss and extending the vacation indefinitely, but it seems gratuitous or naive to insist any fundamental contradiction becomes patently clear in the return to work. A worker might assign accountability for a failed business scheme to the local economy, the neighborhood, poor business practices, or simply their own inability to "dig deep" for the pluck and determination essential to success — anything but the fundamental structure of the market.

Working people often hate themselves. Measured against the success of working families in mass culture, they know in advance they were never worthy. Even Rosanne's Dan managed to get a bike repair shop off the ground.

There's an /r/ in there somewhere and no one /r/ is ever quite like any other. South of the mesa there's a rolling leaf-blower /r/ hitherto undocumented and markedly different from Felipe Calderón's tumbling /r/. The absence of an /r/ of any stripe is baby talk. The adults are speaking.

O Fatthe' I gitten cowd
I kin sca'ce tawk

And ain't it a fucking riot when working people struggle to will away the busted texture of their devalued downhome speech in the company of highly ain'tchumacated professionals. The gesture is a reliable measuring rod that tells us there will be no riot. The practice proceeds as follows: 1. the voice is lowered; 2. speech is ground down to a snail's pace; 3. inflected tell-tale vowels are carefully reined in; 4. painstaking consonantal annunciation negates the calm dignity of a raised head and unswerving eyes, giving the perpetually shifting home-team advantage to whichever physician, loan officer, educator, officer of the law, gubernatorial candidate, bank teller, telemarketer, retail associate, or high sheriff of shit blood and filth the peasant encounters. At such moments the /r/ is dropped, acquired or hammered out with a flattening iron as needed.

Eliza Doolittle's a good girl. Her Cockney's no less London than Surrey. And she's no Liza Jane.

Today I feel the usefulness of subsemantic utterance while my daughter lives its potential — a brief moment before forms of cultural and economic belonging are inscribed on her vocal chords. The /r/ I offer her through repetitive exposure is in part a determinate one. In cahoots with other factors on a complex field of play this /r/ assumes a decidedly partisan position. One thing to be aware of this. Another to pass the exhaust fumes billowing from your linguistic torch downwind to your child.

Any away-game disadvantage can be recast as an against-the-odds salt-of-the-earth badge of honor. Mass culture, bourgeois in character, in fact encourages this. Such pride guarantees the beautiful losers a very specific relation to power. Remember the backside of the Alamo. Or Daniel Defoe on the Northumbrian /r/ in his 1764 Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain:

... the natives of this country ... are distinguished by a shibboleth upon their tongues, namely, a difficulty in pronouncing the letter r, which they cannot deliver from their tongues without a hollow jarring in the throat, by which they are plainly known ... and the natives value themselves upon that imperfection, because, forsooth, it shews the antiquity of their blood.

Difficulty. But the trouble rolls far beyond the beaten-to-death debates around Received Pronunciation and Standard English and in the Anglophone wo'ld rhoticity cuts across vertical social relations. Again and again, Po' Boys don't go to Ha'va'd.

Whurled or trilled (never in Ourmerican Hinglish), rolled or run through, /r/ can never be framed as a single shooter (i.e. the monophthongization — retraction of dipthongs — occurring before /r/ in labial environs, as in Northern England and isolated perts of the US). And like a shape-shifting comic book character /r/ transforms itself across time as the flesh of our throats moves through the world, from one location to another, one party to another, from home to job to street. A slippery character that discloses its masked identity and betrays the throat that spits it out when we least expect it, the /r/ economically embedded in us lays itself bare to the world in moments of reckless abandon, when we are most ourselves.

Sartre: "Stress the existence of the interiorized Other in everyone."

Small businesses, they say, are the backbone of Harmerica: the industrially-processed chemically-saturated chicken soup that feeds the sole. Shitheel. Be hardpressed to find a working slob that don't want to be their own boss. Elizabeth I'm coming home. When the workers return to work. Liza is a diminutive of Elizabeth. Not Donald Trump as such but a Donald Trump writ small. Archie Bunker eventually had his own place. Fred Sanford was forever the king of his own castle. Earl Hickey doesn't work at all. My Name Is Earl. There's clearly an /r/ in this title. Fortunately my daughter's name is not Elizabeth. There's no /r/ in Elizabeth. Nor is there an /r/ in my daughter's name. But the /r/ in praxis is unmistakably present. The pitchfork component of praxis is indispensable.

THE GANG EXPLOIT THE MORTGAGE CRISIS

Cheers laid bare: in a bold and au courant gesture delayed only by the merciless determinations of seasonally-driven programming schedules, the fall premier of It's Always Sunny In Philadelphia takes the ongoing US mortgage crisis as the principle point of entry into the fold of its misery. Synopsis: Frank Reynolds (Danny DeVito) ropes the gang into helping him flip a house purchased at a foreclosure auction. A study released earlier today by the Brennan Center for Justice (NYU School of Law) claims:

Over 1 million homes entered foreclosure in 2007. In 2008, over three million foreclosures were filed — an increase of more than 225 percent from 2006 — and one in 54 homes received at least one foreclosure filing during that year. Foreclosures were up 18 percent this August from the same month in 2008. At the current rate, nearly 2,900 families lose their home each day. The crisis shows no signs of abating. In the next four years, continuing foreclosures could mean the loss of 8.1 million homes. Although there was initial optimism that foreclosures would taper off in 2009, according to Jay Brinkman, Chief Economist of the Mortgage Brokers’ Association, “the effects of job losses and general economic deterioration make the 2009 outlook worse…”

Cheers is always already Cheers laid bare. It's a lie that never fails to disclose itself as such. It's Always Sunny on the other hand is something markedly different. In this case we find a narrative that masterfully disguises and reproduces the lie it pretends to critique by way of its own "edgy" speaking-truth-to-stupidity exterior. But It's Always Sunny can never not be Cheers. It's Always Sunny will always be Cheers. It can be nothing else:

Under monopoly conditions the more life forces anyone who wishes to survive into deceit, trickery and insinuation and the less the individual can depend any longer upon a stable profession for his living, upon the continuity of labour, then all the greater becomes the might of sport in mass culture and the outside world in general. Mass culture is a kind of training for life when things have gone wrong (Adorno, "The Schema of Mass Culture").

Recall the opening line to the theme for Cheers: "Making your way in the world today takes everything you got." We do not make things. We make ways (Heidegger would agree) and these ways are the intangible (but no less material) products of a labor with no conceivable end. Of course there are breaks to be taken, breaks granted, and time spent at the bar is time given to break. The bar in Cheers provides a neutral space, an almost Edenic garden-like space, for a thinking and dialogue exterior to the brute force of competitive market-driven economies. The bar in this way is the space of an aside, a note to self when self exists in the cultural imaginary as an internally differentiated and coherent community of people connected to one another through economic necessity: the neighborhood &c. To take a load off our feet. But (and this is the lie laid bare) the bar "in mass culture and the outside world in general" has always been a site of sport (competition), a construction site where ways continue to be made, where social relations are reinscribed and reproduced, where schemes to flip foreclosed homes are successfully hatched. The bar itself is never not a site of exchange or evidence of a way competing with other ways to be made.

But every lie metastasizes, extends to or creates the conditions for others. The lie in the Season 3 premier of It's Always Sunny is twofold: the "homeowner" living through foreclosure has legal representation; the gang's attempt to flip the house is foiled by their own greed. The thrust of the Brennan Center report focuses on the issue of legal representation in relation to the mortgage crisis:

By some estimates, 80 percent of the legal needs of America’s poor go unmet. The unprecedented foreclosure crisis has significantly intensified what has been a long growing and chronic shortage of legal assistance for low-income citizens.

Because lenders targeted low-income, Latino, African-American and other minority groups for subprime loans, there is also an explicit – and dramatic – race and class component to the current crisis. In these communities, a downward spiral can well be expected: the rolling contagion of layoffs and service cutbacks is hitting low-income and minority communities with disproportionate impact.

The report claims two-thirds of US citizens are homeowners, a shocking figure that, if we accept it, throws the concept of ownership itself (propriety; property; the appropriate) into sharp relief. Like bars, it seems sensible to suggest the shape of neighborhoods are determined by a confluence of factors (i.e. location, demographics, etc.). Cliff Clavin, whose apartment couch doubles as his bed, drinks at Cheers because it resides at the end of his postal route. His presence at the bar is contingent, even incidental. And he pays daily for this contingency through the constant devaluation of his labor and intelligence (Clavin is the only regularly-occurring blue-collar patron at the bar; a stock character framed as dim but loyal, unsophisticated but affectionate; his is a character willfully not developed). In other words, viewers recognize that unlike Frasier Crane (a psychologist) or Norm Peterson (an accountant), Cliff would not be at this particular bar were it not for the postal beat assigned to him. And within the frame of the narrative there's a direct relation between Clavin's intellectual capacity and his job which is immediately clear to the viewer. But the viewer might also recognize Clavin doesn't belong at the pub in It's Always Sunny either, a recognition useful in considering how neighborhoods and their bars ("real" or imagined) take shape. And in both shows, people of color reside beyond the pale.

According to the Brennan Center report providing legal representation for indigent Americans would effectively slow or even stem the tide of the mortgage crisis. But there appears to be a crisis in representation that shoots through the need for legal counsel — and through cultural representations of the unemployed and working poor — toward perhaps a culturally universalized ethos of sport that invests things like predatory lending practices with an unchallenged sense of fairness at precisely the same time it condemns the savage character of these practices once their results are admitted to vision.

DORN FOR PICKARD: AN UNCOLLECTED POEM

Luke Roberts generously sent to the Miami University Brit Po list a transcription of an uncollected Dorn poem, "To Tom Pickard and the Newcastle Brown Beer Revolutionaries" — not surprisingly a poem beyond the scope of materials available to Don Allen at the time he edited The Uncollected Poems (Four Seasons 1974, enlarged edition 1983). Roberts mentions that the poem appeared in The Lesser Known Shagg, mag edited by Pickard and Tony Jackson circa 1968. I suspect like Pickard's earlier mag King Ida's Watch Chain, this zine too was hastily printed, poorly distributed and abandoned after a number or two. Eager to know more about the journal, but for now the Dorn poem alone worth the price of admission:

that time's intestines took fake shit flower shit
and begged in those streets
for the mouth to take something in
where economy was agreed to be our debt
dropped into the nest, a machinegun nest
when the time's appropriation called
but a chit was offered when that time's times
were that old mother whore like a fixed address

(Photo above: Tom Pickard at the Old George Inn, presumably Newcastle, December 5, 1973. Posted by Jeremy James at Poets In A Lens, an extraordinary blog featuring the photography of David James. If I recall, there's a photo of Dorn at Morden Tower among the images.)

TO BE A HEGELIAN TODAY: SLAVOJ ŽIŽEK IN BUFFALO

Earlier today Slavoj Zizek gave a wonderfully contingent, wildly perambulatory talk on Hegel: "Is It Possible To Be A Hegalian Today?" Introduced by Joan Copjec and sponsored by the Center for Pyschoanalysis and Culture at UB, the talk ran nearly two hours. I was fortunate enough to catch the first hour on a hand-held digital:

Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Part Four. Part Five. Part Six. Part Seven.

Much of the talk a cursory circumscription of previously trod territory (Sublime Object; essays in Contingency, Hegemony, Universality; For They Know Not What They Do; Multi-Nationalism; The Monstrosity of Christ; etc.) — and further clarification (or reformulation) of his position on Hegel. Dialectical sleights of hand: i.e. Hegel = materialist; Marx = idealist.

In both the talk and The Monstrosity of Christ Zizek names by way of Hegel a structural principle fundamental to Christianity "still worth fighting for." The argument is compelling if not completely seductive. But in an ongoing and seemingly interminable post-911 moment the appeal to Christianity seems confrontational, aimed perhaps at a bourgeois left committed to a separate-but-equal species of multiculturalism. Cf. Zizek's first essay in Monstrosity: a reading of the New Testament through the Book of Job recognizes Christ not as symbolic representation of God on Earth but a God willfully thrown into his own creation and consumed by it — the same God that in Job turns against himself in an atheistic gesture of abandon, self-loathing and negation. For Zizek the fundamental Christian principle worthy of struggle = Holy Spirit = totality without social relations set against a vertical scale of power. The God Zizek locates in scripture is neither compassionate nor angry but a self-effacing God that eventually disavows, through the figure of Christ, the privilege of his own social position. (Rexroth: "If offered a crown / Refuse.")

Like struggling to thread a needle in a maelstrom. Grateful to the Center for Psychoanalysis for bringing him to town.

TREASON TO MY INSTRUMENTS: BARRY MACSWEENEY

After listening to Sunday's Radio 4 broadcast on Barry MacSweeney I was grateful to see MacSweeney receiving some affection from mainstream media. But I also felt a little stunned and disappointed by the pathologizing rhetoric of alcoholism through which so much of the work was read. Given this it seems especially important to recall Clive Bush's reading of MacSweeney's Book of Demons (1997):

It is no less than the destruction of the poet as a measure of value that MacSweeney takes as his theme and he takes it, too, from the bourgeoisie who like to see their artists wounded, crippled, dying, or in some way at least fatally produced by a culture they have, less-than-secretly, little desire to change.

This reading of MacSweeney's Demons — with the movement of capital at its center — should have been integrated into the BBC program. That it was not reduces the force and complexity of MacSweeney's work and the extent to which he was fully aware of his contradictory relationship to the interpellated role of self-destructive poet within a market system.

Looking through some of the work he produced in the '80s and '90s after the program, I was particularly taken by the relentless rapid-fire rhythms of "Blackbird: elegy for William Gordon Calvert." The metrical contour of Sean Bonney's ongoing series Commons bears a striking resemblance to some sections of "Blackbird" and is perhaps informed by it:

rude unwelcome guest
luckless wind
at family's four doors
nothing fever eyes wear
solid fern
narrow compass
abjuring life
treason to my instruments
of you taken
beamed
invisibled counterfeit
midnight stealer
quiet roofs pigeon croop
sponge boots caress
aching sills
stare at rough slot
magnets on the heart
aery chambers lift
handsome filings
from dust to a star

This poem may very well be included in the Bloodaxe MacSweeney edition, but its useful to recognize that it was first published through Ric Caddel's Pig Press in Black Torch, presumably in a run of no more than two or three hundred. The poem circulated within a fairly intimate community of poets unlike the work of, say, Dylan Thomas or Simon Armitage, both poets whose work is mediated through a rhetoric of disability (alcoholism in Dylan's case and regionally-specific economic disadvantage in Armitage's) in order to market it toward a broader reading audience. Nothing sells quite as well as the mad visions of a raging alcoholic (i.e. Kerouac) or the market-friendly rise-above narratives produced by peasants that somehow yanked themselves up from the dregs through determination and biologically innate talent (i.e. from Stephen Duck, John Claire and Robert Southey's notion of untutored genius to Philip Levine). In short, it seems something of a disservice to MacSweeney to frame his work through the disabling narrative of an alcoholism articulated with a regionally and economically specific Geordie identity when in fact it was precisely the destructive character of such narratives MacSweeney consciously challenged in confronting his own alcoholism.

RABBIT PUNCH : CAESURA : SUNDAY PUNCH

Philosophy of Right: "The external embodiment of an act is composed of many parts, and may be regarded as capable of being divided into an infinite number of particulars. An act may be looked on as in the first instance coming into contact with only one of these particulars. But the truth of the particular is the universal." Or the Volosinov passage David Harvey quotes:

Consequently, a word is not an expression of inner personality; rather, inner personality is an expressed or inwardly impelled word. And the word is an expression of social intercourse, of the social interaction of material personalities, of producers.

And where the wiggle room for agency? It is there. Somewhere. Althusser insists ideology almost never misses its target. And sometimes it does. Horseshoes and hand grenades.

I suspect the problem of agency has something to do with rest. One is at rest when one is arrested. The fourth section of Andrew Crozier's Veil Poem published by Burning Deck in 1974:

Bend back the edges and pull what you see
into a circle. The ground you stand on
becomes an arc, the horizon another
each straight line swells out
leaving no single point at rest except
where the pitch of your very uprightness
bisects the projection of your focal plane.

Leaving no single point at rest — a ceaseless wave of antagonisms, sonic or otherwise. No rest. No rest except. It is not enough to respond to contradictions or aspire to reconcile identifiable antagonisms; one must insist on the generative power of further unanticipated and contingent antagonisms. The Veil Poem for my own purposes the Crozier poem that counts most — one that makes a gesture toward his relationship with Prynne.

In Prynne there is no rest. In Prynne antagonism and internal contradiction are greeted with comparable force, generating a further set of contradictions. And in a contradictory sort of double movement the poems pile wreckage on wreckage, ascending away from the material base as they perform philological excavations that descend into the engine room of living. I see this as a general movement in the work that characterizes all except perhaps the earliest poems. And if such a broad-stroked reading ain't completely off center one must wonder how much rest was had within city limits during the siege of Stalingrad.

Intercourse is always social, always an erotic species of commerce informed more or less by the interminable exchange of goods and services. Where this is the case there is no room for rest. Rest = caesura. Some poems epic in scope and breath are nothing more than an ongoing caesura extended across far too many miles. Caesuras are the park benches of poetry and like undeveloped commercial properties, ideological caesuras are material vacuums that will be filled one way or another sooner or later. Force at rest is never force as such.

CRIS CHEEK: PART: SHORT LIFE HOUSING

cris cheek's Part: Short Life Housing is a curiously peripatetic selection of texts. Excessively so. The subsubtitle of the book tells us these texts are "poems performing thematic extraction." So the work walks and extracts through a process of distillation and reconstitution, circumambulating geographical spaces, poetic practices, and genres as they intersect with the active performance of recording, transcription and editing across three decades. Many of the poems have been revised and edited several times and in some cases the interval between one revision of a poem and the next is more than a decade.

Much of the work is grounded in the transcription of recorded utterances. From the preface:

Many of these pieces were initially spoken into a voice recorder. Often during one walk and sometimes a sequence of walks that went onto tape until it felt like time for another beginning.

I am reminded of Wordsworth — or more specifically Antin. Text as the reconfigured residual traces of a walking and talking. But what separates cheek's practice from both Wordsworth and Antin is his commitment to an ongoing reworking of his texts. For cheek no one piece appears to be closed in any way. The poems are not a Wordsworthian struggle to reimagine or construct the contours of an evening walk. Nor are they characterized by the directionality that characterizes David Antin's wonderful straight-from-the-Athenian-Academy talk poems (viz. recorded talk followed by heavily revised transcription = talk poem). In Wordsworth and Antin we see an underlying structure — orality and/or lived experience somehow precede the poem as text and are somehow prior to the poem as print object. cheek's work seems fluid and open to contingency in a way markedly different from Antin — somehow an extension of Antin's project.

Wordsworth travelling: "This is the spot." Or Susan Howe: "Historical imagination gathers in the missing." For cheek both are the case. Each poem as an event articulated through and constitutive of an overdetermined complex of other events.

Transcription as poetic practice. The first section of the book, "mud (and fluff)" is dedicated to Allen Fisher and includes an epigraph by Margaret Thatcher: "It is not enough to delve deeply / into the surface of things." There is no alternative. The poem "and fluff":

Crazy memory
Punches its way to me

[...]

Under snow
Bound lovers
Coding flow

Skimming through the interdisciplinary transcription number of Interval(le)s edited by Jot Cotner and Andy Fitch — a wonderfully curated and overwhelming constellation of writers and artists — I was surprised not to see cris cheek's name among the ninety or so contributors. I was just as shocked by the inclusion of other names, figures I don't typically associate with transcription (i.e. Zach Finch, Ammiel Alcalay, Richard Price). Here Cotner and Fitch seem to be working toward theorizing transcription in a way that widens the scope of the practice. Their introduction to the feature is itself a transcribed talk between the two editors that begins with a question:

J: Did you even bring a swimsuit Andy?

The feature is in excess of a thousand pages. The task of editing the work must have been grueling. To wade through the muck with or without trunks.

In an interview filmed sometime in the 1970s, no more than a year or two before his murder, Pasolini said, "I wish to do things with editing." When I first heard the statement it struck me. To do things with editing. Ronald Johnson's erasure of Paradise Lost came to mind — as did Antin's talks. Other things also came to mind: i.e. the bits of found Appalachian speech in so many of Jonathan Williams poems, the excavated fragments of fossilized language in Caroline Bergvall's work, Thomas Malory playing the role of author as collator, Plato's transcriptions of Socrates, Niedecker's redaction of Thomas Jefferson's life, the centrality of textual assemblage for Paul Metcalf in imagining a critical fiction, or the demoralizing return to transcription that signals the failure of Flaubert's copy clerks Bouvard and Pecuchet.

Intervalles. In Cotner and Fitch's Socratic-dialog-as-intro Fitch wonders what Eileen Myles' contribution to the feature might look like and says:

She writes in Chelsea Girls that a sloppy look always seems good to her, and I consider transcription inherently sloppy. I mean the meticulous itself gets messy — as soon as it becomes obsessional.

cheek's poems are messy — muddied by contingency and the material fragments of history and historical necessity that gather themselves in the missing. Bergvall remarks in her blurb for the book that cheek is "inhabited by Dicken's dark maze of industrial streets as by mind-altering years of activist art lodgings, smoggy thoughtful wanderings or the eerie shock of the thatcheritic city. That's at least two hundred years of grim and energy you'll find distilled in the celluar lines and in splashes of this great volume."

And it is this which I find most useful in the work: the unrelenting attention in the work to the determining conditions of its own production. commenting on the range of technologies that came together to make the work possible cheek notes in the preface:

Machinic interventions forcing amendments to a text have been those that interlinked considerations of spatiality and typography. Much of this writing maps an intricate conversation of anomolies between those writing technologies utilized in the process of the production of the writings and those reproduction technologies used for their further circulation. This conversation, whose elements are sometimes separated by several decades of technological modification, not only impacts the content of the practice in evidence, but also serves as a kind of parallel to the always changing domestic and public circumstances which frames it.

Attending to his own locatedness in the making of this edition, cheek closes this passage by noting that "the original texts have been changed to bring them into alignment with North American usage." Spellings have been Americanized so that a work like "Canning Town Chronicles" — first assembled through walks, talks and composition in what was "an industrial area on the edge of London during the reign of Queen Victoria" — carries ideologically charged fractals of its further editing and revision in North America. Or as cheek writes in the poem "Part: Short Life Housing":

Stitching market intertwines top sequit
Into stress, dredges the law
Breaks
Down points where system
Claps
Instant replay

But for cheek technological, economic and ideological determinations don't appear to shut down the possibility of agency:

Draws its strength and resilience
Around itself throughout negotiations
Undermining the details with the straights inform
Belief pulls off road

Exeunt: Antin: "and schwitters was like a little rag picker going through the mess and / producing these elegant little works."