Golden Coach into the Future

Golden Coach Diner, where Smithson had lunch on his famous New Jersey drift (in "A Tour of the Monuments of Passaic, NJ") is now a Dunkin Donuts. Not too bad a fall into the future. I'm at a donut shop now, and this morning I heard someone asking "do you have, you know, those mini-donuts, the holes." At least Dunkin Donuts has a name for these. Although I think Smithson would like the idea of going to a donut shop and asking for a box of holes. "Can I have a thing that is a hole in a thing it is not?" They should be called do-nots, or do-knots.

The Mad Cartographer Falls to the Ground

Al Filreis gives a good parting shot about Paterson, at the end of this mappily-themed PoemTalk about Spicer's “Psychoanalysis: An Elegy.” With Julia Bloch, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, and CA Conrad.

Old Home Day, and the Old, Old Home

Just out, Zack Pieper, Erica Kaufman, and I celebrate old home day in the Kelly Writers House over Notley's I, The People. Whether the home was Milwaukee (where we all have lived), Pennsylvania (I can go toe-to-toe with Al Filreis on Action News trivia), 10 & A, or another virtual or metaphorical "home" is uncertain.
I've been thinking about one of my comments that, left on the cutting room floor, perhaps deserves some mention here and then elaboration. In our discussion of the actuality of 10 & A (the recurring theme of the reality or absurdity of using poems as maps has been a theme throughout this blog), I had mentioned the importance of 10 & A--allegorically and actually--as at the edge of Alphabet City. There is a sense of the primal quality of being on the edge of speakability/calculability, with the number 10 and the letter A signifying, respectively, the base 10 number system and the alphabet itself. We can also think of the history of gentrification, and this particular locus as a borderline, which indeed is impacted by the presence and presencing of poets. But this poem also engages with the mystical consciousness that goes beyond the place where number intersects with letter, the democratic systems that writers such as Poe railed against in their preference for visionary consciousness over systemic politicized rationality.
I'm rereading today a translation by Charles Doria of the "Secret Book of Moses on the Great Name, A Book About Everything, In Which Is Contained The Name of the One Who Ordains Everything That Is," a book that twists the name of God into all possible combinations until it is exhausted and the performer hence becomes God (in a lovely Arthur C. Clarke short story about a computer in a Himalayan monastery that sets out to do this, the results are less, let's say "hubristic.") In his intro to the "Secret Book," (printed in Kostelanetz's Text-Sound Texts anthology) one is "reminded"--perhaps from some great archaic echo--that this Tetragrammatic remix, written in Greek, is not based off of the Hebrew YHWH, but rather the Greek iota, alpha, omega, which transliterates as I-A-O. Is it a stretch to posit 10 & A, as I-A-O, with Notley riffing on the names of God? These lines from the old poem seem apt: "I want You alive/all the time of this My life here/make for Me all My soul desires/for You are Me and I am You/something if I say it has to be/for I possess Your Name/in the phylactery of My heart/and all flesh moved against Me/shall not hold Me back . . ./for I am Named You Your Name is in My Soul."
As if to seal the deal, the Horus eye, which I noted appears on the facade of the cafe at the northeast corner of 10 & A, appears as an image (mere doodle or mystic oogle?) in the original papyrus of this Egyptian text (home continues to evade us). Some intersection!

A House Call Brings Two Worlds Together

A colleague, Bill Seaburg, handed me a copy of House Calls with William Carlos Williams, MD without much explanation. The black and white photo on the cover (and those within) gave it the aura of an old book, as did the map of New Jersey and environs in the inside covers (no routes 78, 80, 95; airports signified by a propeller plane icon.) As one pages through, however, various anachronisms emerge: a car’s aluminum sunshade (on a blob-shaped hatchback); satellite dishes sprouting like mushrooms from siding; signs for free cellphones, pawning playstations. The back of a Tastykake van may give us the sense of old times and regional snacks, but the Butterscotch Krimpet on it can only be a product of computer design (in the foreground, a sign for “Official New Jersey Inspection Center,” hanging by two chains, is evidence of the more hand-painted artistry in past signs.) The authors have decided to hide the copyright info on the final pages (2008!), leading me to believe that this confusion was intended. Also hidden in the back is a note on the method, which is psychogeographical in spirit. The writers acquired records of addresses to which Williams made housecalls, and then took pictures of what they found there. So the gap between these two worlds, between what Williams must have seen when approaching each house and the site as it stands now, is as much the subject of this thin book, as are the poems and reflections that make up what at first seems just a simple tribute to Williams as doctor, poet, and Patersonian. Yes, Patersonian, because one of the things the book also makes clear is how much footwork this Rutherford doctor DID do in Paterson, at all hours. So hopefully, this quiet psychogeographic research project can heap a little of the deserved shame on the current citizens of Paterson who refuse to accept Williams as one of their own, even as he worked its inner chambers and touched "the secret of that form/interknit with the unfathomable ground/where we walk daily and from which/among the rest you have sprung/and opened flower-like to my hand."

Last Exit: Nothing

Keach Hagey, currently of Abu Dhabi, looks into my urban explorations in the Boredom issue of Last Exit. Keach has a great way with the constrained poetry of the news form. Consider this lead-in on the Beijing games that she got through the usually stodgy CBS: "Is kung fu a meditative path to enlightenment, or merely a really cool-looking way to deliver a beating?"

Word of the Day: Periplum

This past week at Conflux in NYC, I met Brian House, creator of the Yellow Arrow mapping project, who introduced me to the word "periplum" (click video link for definition). I'm surprised the term is not much mentioned in relation to Williams' Paterson, although, I also wonder how deep it's buried in the Cantos, and how long it took to harden into a concept that could survive its original context. After all, Pound didn't append each canto with a "word box." Any clues about the origins and trajectory of this term would be appreciated. One of Brian's projects is Periplurban: An Urban Experiential Dictionary, which was created with his students as part of a workshop at Columbia's School of Architecture, Planning, and Preservation.

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.

The Reality! The Reality!

A young William Carlos Williams and his mother translated a surrealist novel about a stalker, a prostitute, a murderer, and a gangster who haunt the streets of Paris. Referenced in the beginning of Book 5 of Paterson, Soupault’s Last Nights of Paris is not as racy as it sounds. Perhaps it is only a surrealist who can take the source material for a typical thriller and evacuate it of all thrill, returning the action to everyday. It is cold in tone, evocative of the ennui of city wandering that denizens of the night experience. Were I argue its conceptual strengths, however, I would hide the fact that, for me, the book did not have much going for it except its connection to Paterson. The publishers even tacitly admit this exterior source of literary value by printing the pertinent section of Paterson not once, but twice—as the book’s only blurb and as its epigraph. It may have been an important inpirational source of Williams’ own exploration of intractable urban mystery (here the city is a woman, not a man as Williams would have it). Nevertheless, while there is much promise in a story that starts with a narrator, a dog, a sailor and a prostitute wandering randomly together at 3 in the morning, it was a chore to glimpse the “inviolable secret of Paris” that their journeys turned up.
Of greater interest to me is Louis Aragon’s Paris Peasant (at least the first two parts of it I have so far read), more cryptically referenced in this section of Paterson's Book 5. I was introduced to the book by Holly Tavel who was using it for a summer-term psychogeography course; as she described Paris Peasant, she started to flip through it a few times, a sort of perfunctory gesture of “showing me the book.” What jumped to my eye was the following section, from which Williams seems to have pulled his "la realite! la realite! la rea, la rea, la realite!"(207) Williams is much more tortured (and in the end, impressed) by “the real,” while Aragon is clearly more contemptuous (if only because Williams' “reality” is almost Lacanian in its paradoxical unknowability, whereas for Aragon it is more synonymous with custom, albeit still paradoxical):

The Realities

FABLE

Once upon a time there was a reality
With her own flock of sheep in real wool
And as the king’s son came passing by
The sheep bleated Baaah! How pretty she is
The re the re the reality

Once upon a time there was a reality
Who never could get to sleep at night
And so her fairy godmother
Really took her by the hand
The re the re the reality

Once upon a time there was an old king
Who got very bored as he sat on his throne
His cloak slipped off into the evening
So then they gave him for a queen
The re the re the reality

CODA: Ity ity the rea
Ity ity the reality
The rea the rea
Ty ty The rea
Li
Ty The reality
Once upon a time there was THE REALITY

Aragon’s book is a much more fanciful and detailed exploration of the mysteries of public life in the city than is Soupault’s, and is in more in line with Williams’ aesthetic (menus, news articles, playlets, and street signs are pasted directly into the prose). His subject is the passages—“human aquariums” cut into the shadowy corners of the streets—which threatened to disappear under the impending Haussmannization of Paris. Or rather, the passages frame his various subjects—which include reflections on “blondness,” an accordionist with P-E-S-S-I-M-I-S-M written on the folds of his bellows, bathhouses, shoeblacks, cocktails, and postage stamps.