Fungi in Gatineau Park

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Warping light

I was going through some old photos and I found this one. I have always been fascinated by pattern, and I love how the glass of the wine goblet warps the light. 

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Artificial Intelligence

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Kasparov, young and cocky 

from last year’s match

sits down at the knotted wood table 

on which the flat chess board 

sits, tessellated with white and black 

space

and the pieces glower in anticipation.

a man sits across from him, a cypher 

carrying out the instructions of a machine – 

Deep Blue – a black tower with silicon chips 

inside

that pulse with coded information. 

move, countermove. again. a gain. 

hundreds of millions of possibilities 

course through the computer’s circuitry. 

then, Blue forces Kasparov into a bad move. 

a shadow flickers across his face, a twitch 

he cannot be aware of. 

he sees it, the mistake played out 

in quadratic lines blurred by time. 

the recognition contorts his face; 

he can’t believe what he’s seeing. 

he pushes the table away in frustration 

and stands up, walks away: one fluid motion. 

the people watching open their mouths; 

History has been made today. 

soon human dominance will fade

today chess, tomorrow the novel, 

the next day brain surgery. 

humans will have to stake their claim in a world that 

doesn’t need them 

any more.

White Guy Diary: The Cultural Appropriation Edition

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How can we reconcile the anthropological concept of cultural diffusion with the arising critique of the practice of cultural appropriation? I will never argue against the idea that systematic oppression exists, or that it marks with trauma wherever it goes, but the instinct to always protect against hurt -- a noble one surely -- is it always in our best interests? When I was hurt, I knew where my cards lay, where others' cards lay, so I could best play the hand I'd been dealt. The asymmetrical power of a host and a minority culture makes the profiteering off the minority culture certainly odious in a Marxist framework of understanding.

Critiques of cultural appropriation tend to be morally consequentialist. That is, they focus more on the outcomes of actions and behaviour, rather than on the motivations and intents of the actors in such actions and behaviour. They argue that the harm done to those traumatized by oppression by these images, by the act of appropriating culture, often rooted in rude parody, taken up by the host culture renders them morally suspect at best and simply morally wrong at worst. They tend to discount the intent of any member of the host culture as insignificant to their moral calculus, to use a term of William Vollmann's. Certainly the appropriation of cultural practices can come out of a place of respect, admiration, and love. But by sacralizing the trauma of the oppressed's experience, by prioritizing theoretical future pain against any notion of beneficial intent, they reify it and make it harder to overcome. I tend to lean consequentialist, but I must admit outright eliminating considerations of intent makes me uncomfortable. But who knows. . .perhaps this is white fragility, and perhaps they are right.

We cannot be killed with even a thousand paper cuts. On the other hand, pain is an obstacle to pragmatic organizing in anti-oppression work. Humans have always learned from each other; learning is always an appropriation. How am I, as a white guy, supposed to engage this great "shut-up and listen" exercise, without being somehow influenced by what I hear, by taking it to heart (too much, some will whisper to each other behind their backs). And hasn't this "taking it to heart" affected me, consciously and unconsciously, such that I might not appropriate that culture without any conscious intent at all, but simply through the processes of psychological sublimation and Freudian slips? Does this not produce a cyclical relationship between host and minority, where I listen, learn, appropriate, then lose the cultural war? Nobody likes losing all the time. Cultural diffusion: contact produces sharing, whether you like it or not.

One thing that irks me about cultural appropriation debates is how inconsistently they are applied. A straight, white man writing through the voice of a black woman is a no-no, but a Korean family in Toronto opening a Sushi shop is a-ok. Again, here is where the asymmetrical power card comes in handy, because we can aver that the Korean family is making a peer-to-peer cultural appropriation, whereas the white man, even if he is "raising awareness" of issues faced by black women,  is making a downward appropriation. No Korean family is going to chastise a white guy eating in their restaurant, no matter how blatant a downward appropriation it is because you don't bite the hand that feeds you. The irony cuts both ways. That Korean family could not give a flying $^$# about cultural theorists' arguments about appropriation, or they might have a college-going child who does, at most.

Cover art for bands that don’t exist 2.

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Cover art for bands that don’t exist

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The Daily Regimen - Trevor Cunnington

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The sound of aggregate activity

Breezy in the late, stabbingly bright blue

Of an afternoon

Soft yellows caress

The late-out-of-the gate lilacs

Smelling sensual, lurid.

What rest can be got from this swirl

Of smells overpowering

Malefactors everywhere

Actors and blinks, nods, and who’s hooligans.

Read them the Cactus riot act.

She flowers every seven years

Or if the new moon follows on the first

Friday after Easter infection,

Then, only then, will she spread her. . . petals

It was in a photograph, or –gram

Heavy metal pelt stain melt brain; ham radio

Operator; one caught in the electricity

Wires.

I saw him on my walk home from world.

Singing ‘ole glory to the world,

A face turned murderous

As if a cloud smirched the soulful sky.

In the corner of the photograph,

A figure in sticks, wrapped in the dangerous

Sourcery of the exorcism,

Darkness swirling off him in colour grids

Dextrous fingers of the toppling dominoes

In the foreground, under the table,

Barely visible.

Flim flam, hone it for the street corners.

In the hides of summer, wearing

Sun’s great glory on the sweat-sheened skin

We can write about life,

Or we can write about life.

Precipitating the “oh, not the ‘we’ shit again.”

II

The happiness of a single fuck not given

The apathy trickle-down vectors

Swerving high on unpredictable

Ever veritably new, improved

Dazzling desuetude.

III

Suet in a fur-trap.

A straw, balanced on a camel’s back,

Photographed.

For a response to a query

Responded to and refuted

From every corner of the crypto-verse.

The cacti, in a row, made a fence

To keep the cattle in,

Some do it,

Some don’t.

IV

The next time she appeared,

A blue streak ran rampant around

The orbituaries climbing out of the newsstands.

Surprise factor, attention disperser.

Social facts uncalled upon.

This is poetry’s rent.

Tantamount to a slope of fine powdered salt

To cushion our 20 feet jumps

Down a steep incline.

Don’t think too much

Or you will start to smell the cowpaste
Piling up in the meadow. 

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 Photo taken at Guildwood Park, Toronto

Filtered with Photoshop App

A Review of Frank Davey's Biography of bpNichol (2012), by Trevor Cunnington

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This biography, that connects the poet's life with his work, is a welcome addition to the corpus building around Nichol. It explores the relationship between Barrie Nichol - the living breathing human being, as excavated from conversations with friends, relatives, colleagues, and acquaintances; from letters; and from archives – and bpNichol, the authorial persona created by Nichol to pull himself out of the dreamworld he inhabited, according to Davey.

It forwards the theory that Barrie's psycho-therapeutic work is a crucial tributary of his poetic work. While I am not qualified to evaluate this theory (I'm not versed enough in Nichol's poetry, having read only Zygal and some excerpts of the Toronto Research Group, bp's theoretical, albeit playful collaboration with Steve McCaffrey in a course I took with Christian Bök at the University of Guelph in 2002), I would still like to offer some reactions and thoughts.

My initial reaction to the book was “I think this is the first biography that has made me less interested in the person it's about than I was before I picked the book up.” However, I persevered, and I'm glad I did. Davey is an engaging writer, although his thoughts are sometimes muddled. For example, take this passage:

“He [bp] told Bowering he was creating the whole narrative out of a series of images that would constitute a two-week period in the life of a family, a period in which, as one would expect, nothing is resolved. The reader enters and leaves the narrative in the middle, and 'hopefully' will experience a resolution through the leaving of it. The images will be all that the reader knows about it. That's why he's calling the novel 'idiomatic,' he told Bowering, because it's the normal 'family' story. The explanation, however, seemed to say as much about Barrie's understanding of family, or about what is usual in a family, as about the novel” (238).

Um, what? Seriously, what just happened here? Some of the clarity problem in this particular instance may have been inherited from Nichol himself, as he's the one being paraphrased, but if you're writing a biography, you better have enough of a grip on your subject to clarify some of the subject's more incoherent thoughts. Nothing is resolved, but the reader will hopefully experience a resolution? Is he talking about relating to the aimless structure of life portrayed by the in media res technique as itself some kind of resolution? Furthermore, idiomatic is a word used in linguistics to refer to expressions in language that are “more than the sum of their parts,” so to speak. Translating each of the parts of the expression literally will not produce the intended meaning of the expression. How does this relate to “normal family experience?” Idioms, I guess, are common expressions. So if you consider “normal” and “common” synonyms, this metaphor works. Ok, so with some very close reading, I could figure out that much. But what Davey means by the next sentence (beginning “The explanation, however. . . “) needs more elaboration as the logic is unclear.

Furthermore, Davey makes a big deal out of Nichol's intent from the 1960s onward to subvert the arrogance of many poets' preoccupation with precious (with that word's pejorative connotations culled from writing workshops) wisdom as the occasion for the writing of poetry. To express such wisdom, as an author with the mastery of experience, Nichol objected to stridently, apparently. However, in the sections detailing Nichol's work at Therafields, the experimental therapeutic community for which he served as vice-president, and Nichol's discussions of this work, he adopted the founder's discourse of mastery. Lea Hindley-Smith, the founder, “had been moved by Bergler's book to 'change her own destiny rather than blame others'” (82).This contradiction between his lived experience as a therapist, proclaiming mastery of experience and himself in a privileged position to help his clients do the same, and his avowed poetic intent to eschew such arrogant language, is a thorn in the side of Davey's poetry-therapy theory.

Furthermore, some of his poetry contains some of these golden nuggets he finds so repugnant and arrogant. Take, for example, these lines quoted by Davey, from “Book V” of The Martyrology Book 6 Books:

moving reservoirs of cells & genes

stretches out over the surface of the earth

more miles than any ancestor ever dreamed

. . .

tribal, restless, constant only in the moving on,

over the continents

thru what we call our history

tho it is more mystery than fact,

more verb than noun,

more image, finally, than story.

These lines are redolent of the “preconceived notion of wisdom” bp (and others such as Charles Olsen) rebelled against in poetry. While it is true that people certainly change their views as their experience changes them, it is Davey's job to elucidate this development in Nichol's poetry. Instead, Davey returns to this youthful rebellion several times, making it a central point or major departure for his poetic work. For a dedicated avant- gardist, the first stanza of this quote in particular has a harmonious sense of meter and rhyme (if partial, or slant). Most of it is insightful and “wise” as well. . . until the last line quoted. I find the frozen associations of the word “image” do an injustice to his previous line about history being more verb than noun. A photograph, after all, is an image extracted out of the flow of time. I suppose you could argue that this line is a subversion of the “preconceived wisdom” of the poem, but I think it weakens its internal coherence. I also think he missed an opportunity for a playful self-reflection of the line “tho it is more mystery than fact” as itself a fact, considering the always incomplete nature of archives. And by extension, this line and its implications allude to the challenge of writing a faithful biography, which by and large Davey has done.

Criticism aside, I found this book fascinating because of the connection it explores between Nichol's deep involvement with psychotherapy and his poetry. It was also edifying to learn about Nichol's peripatetic childhood, his hermetic “dreamworld,” and his relationships with other Canadian literary figures. I was familiar with his relationship with Steve McCaffrey, but his relations with other poets and writers such as Daphne Marlatt, Michael Ondaatje, Dennis Lee, and bill bisset came as a surprise and a delight to me.

I was also surprised at how high-profile his sound poetry projects were, such as the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. For a Nicholophile, to learn about how he felt like his creative input was constantly marginalized in that project is a must. The last chapter provides a useful summary of some of the main critical responses to Nichol's work: the “theological reception,” those that emphasize his “ideopoems” that merge comic strip art with conceptual visual poetry, and those that focus on The Martyrology as the keystone of his creative output. This summary is indispensible for those interested in a critical engagement with Nichol's work. Despite its shortcomings, Davey's biography was well worth the time.

 

Images from Zygal (1985), Coach House Press.