Driving--

Downtown Paterson, especially on a hot summer day, is a driving nightmare. However, I am feeling a little nostalgic for those packed streets, the slow crawl through that knot of intersections where buzz the mysterious commercial convergences between hip-hop clothiers, cellphone wallahs, dollarstore clerks, Peruvian restaurateurs. All more lively than the “dead” industry around the nearby Falls.
Before I left, I wanted to capture (with my Vidster) at least some small sense of one of the more disconcerting elements of this traffic pattern, the way in which pedestrians will walk right out into the middle of traffic—perhaps a form of territorializing, protest, or more simply, impatience. Even parents with baby carriages will make their way in front of slowed cars—of course slowing things down all the more—to get from exactly the point where they were to exactly the point they want to be. And for all that impatience, oddly enough, Paterson comes off as a city of flaneurs.
The soundtrack on the radio seems appropriate now in retrospect, but the sound of Paterson itself has more poetry. I felt almost embarrassed listening to NPR’s wistful, effortless version of poetry while crawling through the Williams’ hard-worked-upon source material as well as through the bodies of the actual hard-working themselves, “Who are these people (how complex/ the mathematic) among whom I see myself/ in the regularly ordered plateglass of/ his thoughts, glimmering before shoes and bicycles?” I have no idea who Bob Edwards is interviewing, but the poet on the radio regales us with this bit of stellar scholarship: “You know Whitman was not an English professor. As far as I know, he didn’t have an office or tenure.” Gee, thanks. I’m sure if there were any poets on the streets of Paterson at the time, they would also be able to add that he wasn’t having no Sunday tea with Bob Edwards on the radio, either.

“no focuses . . . no certainty”

They took the Buick today, the Le Sabre that in 6 years I put an extra 100k+ miles and which, in the end, introduced me the the actual streets of Paterson. Looking at my notebooks, trying to reconstruct that first visit, I must have been driving a lot. A long series of pages on Deleuze’s “plane of immanence” signified the stasis of home in South Carolina, and the relatively untrammeled concentration of summer. Then follows some poem-notes about Milwaukee—was it just restlessness that brought me there? Something particular?—mentions of a meeting in Chicago, trying to sell a stock in Cleveland, some notes on bromeliad (which would seem to bring me back to Florida, but notebooks dictate the chronology of memory more than the order of fact) . . . neither Spanish, nor moss . . . Smithson on enantiomorphic chambers and Hotel Palenque “no focuses . . . no certainty” (and here, there is a time stamp with a entrance sticker from the Whitney dated 7/27/05), and then some poem-notes on Paterson when I first visited, at dawn “before the city remembers the psychosis/a thousand silky automatons/have cocooned its brain in . . . the cataract of the falls/like a stereoscope slide/in a restaurant dumpster./The Krishnas who turn out to be/convicts in bring orange jumpers/ Enlightened!”, relatively blank pages=NYC, a page on Lacan and angels—which again may have signified a return to home (Lacan: “the signifier is stupid”), but some notes on daucus carota led me to believe that there was also a trip to Montauk in there somewhere as the Buick always had camping gear trunked for spontaneous trips— that fine weed of summer, aka Queen Anne’s lace, was all along the way, but it was the end of Long Island where I finally attained its natural history.
All this, I guess, is vicarious living, since I haven’t been able to have that kind of spontaneous summer for a while (this is the third summer consumed by moving), although the Buick did some good work getting me from the South to Rochester and back (with stops in Philadelphia and Baltimore and Asheville) and then all the way to Seattle before conking out for good. It completely died on the BQE last year while driving with L______ back to Providence, but, against all odds was resurrected at an Amoco in Queens. This particular 88 Buick was called a “poem” by N_____’s mother, and many a day it got me through the poem-streets of downtown Paterson, sometime festooned with lavalier mics—a make-shift and moving talk-show set. Because Leonard seemed to like it, I picked up Gabriel Gudding’s Rhode Island Notebook recently, and I could neither relate to the poet’s problems nor believe the veracity of his accounts of them, because he begins with an unfortunate travesty of Buick owners . . . and he has yet to own up to the model of his car. He only calls it “my efficient Toyota” (it’s obviously a Prius). No I prefer the Cortázars’ red Fafner from Autonauts of the Cosmoroute.










In the last few days, as I moved the limping Buick from parking place to parking place to prevent it from getting ticketed as an abandoned car, it would billow smoke from both ends; since this is Seattle, people would stop and look at me as if I were a baby-killer.

RiP also Nishiki 91, which was usually strapped onto the back of the Buick, and which, also, on that first morning in Paterson, glided me in a way more effortlessly than the Buick could between my random parking place, the Falls and the factories. The Buick was donated to Youth Radio, and hopefully it will be transmuted into at least a flash audio recorder; the Nishiki, by virtue of its being left there by mistake, will have many a Gothic intrigue in the VSW haunted mansion of art.

Last days in the Badlands:

On A Clear Day, You Can See Secaucus

Sometimes the farther you get from Paterson, you wind up there anyway. Last month while I was in Brussels, I took an unplanned trip to the Palais des Beaux-Arts, not knowing that therein was an important inspirational source for Williams, turning up in, among other places, Paterson Book Four. “I salute/ the man Brueghel who painted/what he saw—" (224) I think the weakest parts of Paterson are Book Four's references to “high” art, precisely and paradoxically because Williams wasn’t writing “what he saw,” or rather that “what he saw” was once or twice removed. This is perhaps why, while in Belgium, I didn’t take heed that I was being pulled into a Paterson vortex at the other end of the world. It makes sense that Williams would have been drawn to Brueghel’s penchant for painting birds instead of holy revenant, his decentering of the Nativity to include the ahistorical bustle of the masses. There’s an interesting point in Book Four's description of a Brueghel Nativity that feels like Williams has had it with the word, that he’s envious of the innocence of paint, since he describes “a Baby/ new born!/ among the words.” And these words are equivalent to the (s)words present: “Armed men, savagely armed men/armed with pikes, halberds and swords/whispering men with averted faces/ got to the heart/ of the matter.” Their knowledge seems to pale in the face of the “Baby (as from an/ illustrated catalogue/ in colors).” (here there is almost a Joseph Cornell-type fascination with the image rather that what might be interpreted as a snarky reference to pop culture undermining it.)
The Palais des Beaux-Arts seems haunted, as does Williams, by the break that Brueghel makes from the representational practices of the past and the move towards the everyday. I seem to have fallen into the right frame of mind as soon as I entered—bored with paintings of biblical events and smirking patrons, I was looking at how different painters dealt with the sky. I thought that, by determining where these painters mapped transcendence, I could easily tell if they were a court toady, a closet alchemist, or an outright heretic. And these questions come from whether one sees gods as bejeweled floating bobble-heads or rather as something implicit in the whole picture. There’s a big pay-off for this in Palais des Beaux-Arts, because the argument extends from Brueghel and Bosch up through the surrealists (e.g. Yves Tanguy’s “Avion;” Magritte’s “The Secret Player;” and Dali’s addition to the history of "Temptation of St. Anthony" paintings . . . I had entered, in a sense, into the museum for the history of the UFO). So when I came to Brueghel’s "Landscape with Fall of Icarus," which Williams writes about elsewhere, I had the full effect. Looking into the golden-milky sky—that seemed like it held something of import—I kept on asking myself “where? where?” A shepherd looks skyward, bored; the worker in the foreground keeps to the plow. The “humor” of the painting lies in the fact that hapless Icarus’s fall has not been registered, and is a minor element of the composition, the “splash quite unnoticed/this was/ Icarus drowning.”

Passaic Under Paris

With poet-geologist Jonathan Wonham and cataphile-author Gilles Thomas, I took a 10-hr walk under Paris, in the quarries where the architects of Place François 1er perhaps mined the "gray stone cleanly cut and put together in complementary masses” that Williams admired during his Paris hangover. There, 20 meters under the surface of the city, we found German bunkers, bone piles from Montparnasse, punk crash pads, catacomb art, defunct phone cables, a scrabble game abandoned by gnomes, beer can lanterns, and inscriptions dating back to the French revolution . . . when they started to realize that the mining that was done under the city was making the city cave in. Accordingly, most of the tunnels consist of supports at regular intervals which serve to keep whole city blocks from collapsing. Jonathan thought it would be appropriate to read Williams’ geological-cross section passage down in the depths, and so, we staged a group performance with fellow travelers to liven things up. We later found a room with a geological cabinet of curiosities, where each step carved into the stone would have at one time displayed a sample from each geological level, in much the same way that Williams' arrays the strata of the Passaic.

Williams' Hangover

In his biography of Williams, Paul Mariani describes a trip Williams and Floss took to Paris, and a humbling evening out with the Parisian intelligentsia. The morning after, Williams must have felt like Pa Kettle and Andy Capp combined, and was perhaps confirmed in his commitment to the local environs of le Jersey. But that’s nothing that a little flaneurie and warm water won’t cure:

The next morning, suffering from a bad wine hangover, Williams downed six glasses of warm water and went out for a long walk. When he came to the Place François Ier, he was suddenly taken by the French austerity of design he saw in that medieval edifice, "gray stone cleanly cut and put together in complementary masses," unlike anything he'd seen before. That quiet moment of insight into that other France restored his sense of balance and he felt chastened. There was, after all, still much good in France.

It took me a while to map the Place François Ier, because the way it’s typeset in Mariani’s book, one would imagine Ier to be a word unto itself. But it was not until I realized it was 1er (i.e. François Premier) that I was able to zero in. After my own little hangover from two mini-bottles of cognac and no sleep after the flight over, and not before walking through Notre Dame, the Latin Quarter, the salles of the Louvre and the grounds of the Tuileries—all lively and radiant today—did I make it to this dismal little “place.” It was the only corner of Paris not sunny on this February day, and it seemed nothing more than the gallic version of a gated community. I was struck by the same thoughts gnostics must have had when then reflected upon the idiocy of the demiurge. Is the designer of Paterson just a complete imbecile, bent on his own contrarianism and unable to have a fine time exchanging ears with the surrealists? Looking back on the passage in Mariani again, I think I am still confused because while what is being described is one edifice, the reference is to the whole of Place François 1er. Nevertheless, while I was there, further attention revealed that perhaps the Place Francois 1er was once stunning and austere, but that it has been uglified over the years by more recent additions distracting from the symmetries and beauty of the buildings as they radiate from the center of the traffic circle. There may be, after all, still much good in Place François 1er.

The Thing Itself!

In July, I took birdwatchers and filmmakers Michael Gitlin and Jackie Goss to Garret Mountain and Rifle Camp Park to look and listen for some fine feathered friends and talk about the references Williams makes to them. Unfortunately, it was too late in the day and too hot to see any wildlife, and Rifle Camp Park’s nature center—an unexpected find—was closed. If you go early enough the mountain teems with bounding doe and wild turkeys, in addition to birds of many stripe.
We discussed, again, the “realite!” section of Book V (p. 207), and I asked them whether bird mnemonics might help one understand what Williams was getting at, if he got at it at all—since as always, he seems to be to showing us the gap between the “getting at” and the “it.” There’s a kind of archaism to bird mnemonics, akin to the language of flowers, that responds to a worldview in which a deep appreciation of nature is more a function of the literary than the scientific. (I kind of like the illusion of objectivity that this form of bird sound analysis gives!) But there is still the dark wall behind the mirror of nature, making Williams wonder whether our apperception of it, literary or otherwise, is fundamentally flawed. Is “the art/ with which these flowers have been/put down . . . to be trusted” (213)? Need the brain “be grafted/ on a better root” (214)?

Mapping the Void

This summer, I looked into using Yellow Arrow as a possible means to map Paterson. By the time my arrows came in the mail and I figured out the confusing instructions, my stay in Paterson was almost over. Nevertheless, I used one to mark the portal for a trek I took with Anne and Alita along the freight rail that cuts through the city's notoriously turbulent 4th ward all the way to the fetid shores of the Passaic. You can check out the exact location by typing "Paterson" into the search engine at Yellow Arrow's main gallery (one of the many drawbacks to this site/service is that there are no distinct urls you can reference). I think this site may have been a pioneer in terms of Internet mapping experiments; however, other larger entities have surpassed them with their ease and accessibility (e.g. Google, Flickr). Pictures from the trip are above: I love the fake super 8 (courtesy slide.com)! There may be only 8 millimeters between heaven and earth. Such are the mysteries of photogenie.
I'm reading some essays on mapping and psychogeography for a talk I'm giving at Parsons next week via iChat. I'm interested in a point about Situationist techniques of alternative mapping made by Tom McDonough in "Delirious Paris: Mapping as a Paranoiac-Critical Activity": "Freud notes the way in which the animism of 'primitive man' (which bore striking similarities to the neurotic mind) altered the spatial arrangements of the phenomenal world into a new configuration that obeyed a logic all its own. . . . It was the task . . . of the Situationist derive . . . to induce that hallucinatory state, to adopt the obsessional neurotic's belief in the omnipotence of thoughts and desires, in order to momentarily assert the possibility of radical change in the form of a world fully accommodated to the subject." (np) Even though he is appreciative of the Situationists, his language seems to me unproductive, as if this type of remapping is an aberration of the solipsistic, rather than a healthy impulse which civilization has repressed, and which is crucial for survival in the modern city. The value of Situationist experiments is to point up how the habitual experience of the city is neurotic and obsessional, not the derive. Undoubtedly, the neurotic has a positive value in McDonough's essay, but I think this backhanded valorization (similar to his use of the word "animism") points to a deeper suspicion he may hold.
The popularization of alternative forms of mapping may bear my position out, even though most uses of Flickr, for example, are more what I would call obsessional or neurotic proper. But maybe these are the wrong words. Since McDonough is bringing up Freud, I must add that I think the crucial shift in perception may have to do with a shift (unpackable here?) from Freud to Lacan, and within Lacan from the symptom to the sinthome. The sinthome, as Zizek has described it (especially in The Fragile Absolute), announces a constant and fragile arrangement of "quilting points" as they attach to the real. Instead of imagining a "real space" to which we must submit our perception, the network of points composing the sinthome is the reality itself, not a neurosis which must be overcome.

Music It For Yourself

Last weekend, the artist duo eteam "made a song out of it: concretely" with their Stadium Reverberator project. Their goal was to turn Paterson's abandoned Hinchliffe Stadium (interior pictures of which are in this Impossible Object entry) into an instrument: "Looking at the stadium from above, it reminds of a huge loudspeaker. Unfortunately this loudspeaker hasn't been used in a long time. On Saturday we will try to use this dormant possibility and trigger a composition, which will be created through knocking, jumping, scratching and clapping on the outside walls of the stadium. These sounds and movements will be captured on video and later on edited into a musical composition." I took some rough video and pictures (click on image or here) while taking a break from climbing walls, tossing chains and chunks of metal and concrete. Hopefully we'll get to see eteam's own video in the near future.

Thursday in Paterson

". . a mass of detail
to interrelate on a new ground, difficultly;
an assonance, a homologue
triple piled
pulling the disparate together to clarify
and compress."

Mighty Alternative Media

The falls were overflowing this weekend in Paterson. The rains and the floods made the waters fierce, which, combined with the arrival of sunny weather, brought crowds to the park. I am again reminded that making an audio recording of the falls is about as exciting as holding your mic up to television snow, and I think that’s how Williams conceived of their sonic presence—a constant white noise in the background, out of which sense emerges, and into which it just as quickly gets pulled under and swept away.
Today, I was visiting with Flux Factory, the group with whom I will be collaborating in June to conceive of a monument to Paterson. Race seems like it will be—as it had been for me—the elephant in the Passaic for this project; we were greeted with “are you lost?”, “what are you doing here?”, “here comes the spirit squad,” and “Mommy, where did all those white people come from?”
We bumped into Mighty Joe and his tricked-out bicycle, who welcomed us with a radiophonic urban alternative to 1010 WINS on his CB. We also met a guy who quit his day job in New York City to start a Socialist-Christian farm in a markedly unbucolic section of Paterson; empty lots and abandoned structures predominate, and he hopes to expand from his small backyard to some of the unused land that surrounds him.

Mystery Mountain, Part Two

If you are following this vlog, way back in September we had Part One of a journey to a inconspicuous-conspicuous hummock that had haunted our guest-drifter Kyle Lapidus whenever he passed it on the highway. Turns out that this haunting led us to Garret Mountain itself, and constituted New Jersey as an Impossible Object's first trip to this place, central to Williams' poetography (a word that--if you force it between a volcano, a tectonic plate, and a word processor--becomes topography). While Williams found ghosts of a German Singing Society transformed into a vengeful mob, and dead babies killed for crying too loud, we found Middle Eastern women posing on tanks for boudoir photos, and plentiful cries of little children.

Make A Song Out of That: Concretely

When I first saw this extant poetry, I couldn’t write it down because I took all my pens out of my pocket so they wouldn’t explode while I slept in the back seat of my car. I thought about the generations that must have puzzled over Paterson’s most prominent concrete poem, especially because the Q in JACQUARD—hardest, most lost and ancient word!—was the letter most eroded. Once I secured a pencil from a mini-mart, I appended my transcription with the line “a daily deformity to be deciphered,” which I think must be from Paterson but I can’t find the citation at this moment. In any case, I immediately crossed out this line, perhaps thinking it a bit much . . . maybe my initial lack of equipment let me appreciate the purity of this string of words that conjured and crafted string itself. Googling them, I imagined that there would be umpteen references on historical and city sites. However, it seems only the Japanese are hep to their poetry, and these particular tourists were even curious enough to find the referent, which I did not know existed. The actual Silk Machinery Exchange Building is now a half-way house, and the Paterson Museum, where you will now find the machines, is oddly across the street, which I guess is also half-way, between use and oblivion. The museum is hard-to-find for those of us who move more by serendipity than by travel guides, and it is over-shadowed by the more prominent “Cultural Center,” a stone’s-throw away.
The Paterson Museum is a bonanza of found language. A yellowed tag provided an addendum to the Silk Machinery Exchange text: Reeds, Harness, Lingoes, Shuttles, Quills, Pickers, Twine, General Weavers Supplies, Loom Fittings. I wondered how the pride of the “lingo” went apace with the development and mastery of the machine. We’ve (weave?) come a long way from the crack of the Jacquard Q to the narcissistic buzz of terms MySpace, iPod, and YouTube, even though the Jacquard card started it all, the origin of the computer. (Let’s not get sucked into the eddy of the mise-en-abyme again.) The words--like the machines whose noise once filled the air of the streets here--are now silent.
In a dark corner of the museum, a lexicon of nostrums: delphinium, quassiae, jalapae, digitalis, pimpenell, aether, lavender, anisi, citronella, myrrhae, cudbear, Syrup of Rhei, Mavis Talcum, Tancro Cough syrup, Unguentine, Salva-cea, Anti-Drink, Granulated Black Draught, Larkspur lotion, Vinol, Kondremul, 4-Way Cold Tablets, etc.

A Thousand Automatons

Day Seven
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There is No Direction. Whither?

I spent Thursday exploring Paterson. This time, I set off in the way Robert Smithson suggested in his "Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, New Jersey" (1967): starting from gate 223 atop New York's Port Authority bus terminal, accoutred with a cheap still camera. Accessible thru labyrinthine warrens of glass and escalator, the bus makes the journey every 20 minutes, at all hours. It was a much more leisurely option than driving in, except for the shrillness of the bus's brakes at every stop, which I guess you might be able to listen for before you get on, and wait for the next if it is too deafening. By taking the bus, I would be able to see an ingress to the city that I had not mapped myself, and be forced to walk once there. The bus goes through the Secaucus swamp lands, then through Williams' Rutherford ("Borough of Trees"), through Clifton, past the Middle Eastern enclave in South Paterson, and finally to the downtown area (the bus stop at Broadway has a snack shop where the drivers hang out and everybody seemed happy). After having my picture taken in front of the falls for tomorrow's Paterson Herald, and recording some material for future vlog entries, I had a bowl of fish soup in one of the many Peruvian restaurants on Market, and then took a long walk south down Main Street. I tried to find a way to climb up Garret Mountain, since it looked inviting, but since it is almost winter (even though it was about 70 degrees), the day was over before it could begin. Instead I walked until I found a Turkish pastry shop, had an arabic coffee, and hopped on the local bus back to New York.

Mystery Mountain, Part One

Day Six
“In ignorance/ a certain knowledge.” There are places on the highway that I think everybody has an intimate knowledge of, yet knows nothing about. They are those little inconsistencies or changes that mark time or space in an otherwise monotonous forward motion, curves of road that suddenly say “closer” or “farther” or “amidst,” if only to you. For me, maybe for you too, it is the place on route 78 where the highway starts to be walled with tan concrete (sound baffles for bedroom communities?) and promises the approach of New York; there’s the barn that is painted “Vote Republican” where the highway makes a sharp turn taking you that much closer to Chicago on the way from Milwaukee. You might also remember that moment in John Barth’s classic deconstruction of forward motion, “Lost in the Funhouse,” where the boys look for the electrical towers and the standpipe on the way to “Ocean City.” For Kyle Lapidus, it is a hill in Paterson that has this kind of insignificant-significance. He has only ever seen it from the highway but, in his estimation, it is the most important hill or mountain of any he has experienced . . . or rather, despite never having experienced it. We take a closer look. Who needs Pedro? In two parts.

A Dissonance in the Valence of Uranium

Day Four
Desparate to get some Paterson footage, even if it is ersatz Paterson, I convince Max Goldfarb to be the next special guest, even though our main objective was to explore a Wal*Mart parking lot in Hudson, NY for wormholes into another dimension. We ride out to the site in a red step van, M-49, a mobile unit once used by the fire department in Stockbridge, now a mobile vehicle for radio experimentation, but maybe also literally still a "fire" truck, since the heat from the metal floor is melting my flip-flops and it only gets worse outside where the air is dead from heat. Fire, tar, dead grasses, Queen Anne's lace, rotted palettes, birds, and (somewhere, like the angels) money: where is Paterson in it all? Again, we are nowhere near Paterson, but closer to an idea of ruins that might be more mid-industrial, Pennsylvanian, quaint. The Patersons proliferate: loose copies of the Platonic mess; yes it is a paradox, since the inner city and this particular poem are in general considered the opposite of the luminous form. But there is an ideal even in a mess. Radio mics give out, hypotheses fail. The real Paterson shames our senses.
Max will be broadcasting an evening of live talks and performances from his van on August 4 in Hudson, NY. (Among others, I'll be giving a talk/tour called "The Theogony of the Parking Lot"). Email argot@mit.edu for more information.

Pat(t)erson: Two T's or One?

Day One
In search of the elusive Paterson--both the poem and the city--we find ourselves not in New Jersey but in Patterson, Georgia, about 40 miles north of the Okefenokee Swamp. Our special guest drifter, Clark Lunberry, has a good sense of the pith and essence, the quiddity and je ne sais qua of Paterson, yet has never been there. This Patterson was conveniently at hand, perhaps too convenient compared to the chaos of Paterson, NJ where the falls--once the unmanageable, excessive, flowing-matter against which the poet would fail to measure--is now a quaint vignette compared to its environs. Clark talked about how Williams at one point started to hate the poem and its failure. I found it hard to believe that Williams didn't start the poem knowing full well his barrel was heading for the Passaic River's misty plummet. We found a dead library, a rocket to Jesus, and a very good cafe with a jangly piano in the next town over, where Clark requested I play "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (he's from Kansas) and I obliged with an approximation.
Clark's work on Williams and Robert Smithson, "So Much Depends: Printed Matter, Dying Words and the Entropic Poem" can be found at: http://www.unf.edu/~clunberr/research.html