Reading In Paris Next Tuesday Night

I'm delighted to be reading again next Tuesday night with Virginie Poitrasson in Jen Dick's and Jacob Bromberg's IVY reading series. It will be a sort of launch for Homo Sentimentalis. Always a joy to read there in the cosy basement marais of Le Next. 


If you're here in Paris, do come: 

IVY Writer's Reading Series
Nicholas Manning et Virginie Poitrasson
Mardi 20 novembre, 19h30
Au sous-sol de « Le Next »
17 rue Tiquetonne 75002 Paris
M° Etienne Marcel / RER Les Halles

Authors' Bios 

Nicholas Manning

Nicholas Manning is Maître de conférences in American Literature at the Sorbonne (Paris IV). He is the founding editor of The Continental Review and the author of two poetic cycles: Novaless. Elements Towards a Metaphysic, and now Homo Sentimentalis. A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy. His study of sincerity in 20th century poetics, entitled Rhétorique de la sincérité. La poésie moderne en quête d'un langage vrai, is forthcoming from Honoré Champion. 

Virginie Poitrasson is a writer, performed, translator, and artist who explores the borders between languages, genres, and modes of expression in the arts (sound, video, and silkscreen printing).Originally from Lyon, she has lived in the United States (New Orleans and New York), and currently lives in Paris. Her fascination with the plurality of languages and interdisciplinary academic research led her to write her master's thesis on the creative process in the paintings and dramatical writings of Valère Novarina (Université Lyon II). She has translated a great many American poets, including Michaël Palmer, Lyn Hejinian, Cole Swensen, Marylin Hacker, Charles Bernstein, Jennifer K.Dick, Michelle Noteboom, Shanxing Wang, Rodrigo Toscano, and Laura Elrick. Her latest book, "Il faut toujours garder en tête une formule magique," was adapted into a radio performance that was broadcast during the Micro fiction program on France Culture (2012).

Virginie Poitrasson

In her capacity as a performer, Virginie Poitrasson has been invited to participate in numerous
festivals throughout Europe and the United States, such as Scène poétique, ENS, Lyon (2012), Festival Relectures 8, Khiasma, Les Lilas (2009), Poezia presente, Milan (2009), In/Out Poetry, Théâtre de la Comédie, Saint Etienne, (2007), Espace Agora-Tête d'or, Lyon (2007), Expoésie, festival de poésie, Périgueux (2011 et 2006), TEXT/styles, Bowery Poetry Club, New York (2005), and Winds, Haim Chanin Fine Arts gallery, New York (2004). She has also been invited to the Ricard Foundation in Paris, the Kunsthalle art center in Mulhouse, the Galerie L'Ollave in Apt, the Poggi & Bertoux Gallery, the Paul Frèches Gallery, the EOF Gallery in Paris, the Carré d'art in Nîmes, and the Centre d'études poétiques at the ENS Lyon.

The Critic Writes Nonsense No.1853

I just added a new contender to my list of all-time hilariously bad critical blunders, to wit this blurb from Publishers Weekly :

Jodie Picoult returns with two provocative questions: can a human join a wolf pack, and who has the right to make end-of-life decisions? — Publishers Weekly

Oh my God... Thankyou Publishers Weekly. Just... thankyou. This is an absolute nonpareil, a jeweled masterpiece of comparative bouffonnerie.
One of my favourites ever.
Those are truly two questions which I ask myself every day.
Though it seems to me that one of those questions is perhaps more important than the other?

The Suspension of Judgment

So much of writing seems to me, increasingly, to be linked with an understanding of judgment. More precisely: with one's incessant judgment of oneself. More precisely still: with the necessary cultivation of a state in which judgment is suspended or deferred, a state in which that part of the mind which crowlike caws "this is awful" or "what clichés you are producing!" is temporarily waylaid and silenced. And yet, not so as to produce an unthinking, unconscious mess. The act, then, of being generous with oneself. Understanding and forgiving. Of knowing and repeating, to the mind itself, that we all, and it, make innumerable mistakes, constantly. That all our produced representations are impartial and imperfect, and that it must, in spite of all this, go on: that it must feel free within its own land of play, its deserted night garden, and will only be remonstrated, perhaps, later, in the morning, and if so, then, still lovingly.

It is thus a very localized part of the mind which must be silenced. That part which allows the free play of doxa must be coaxed and reassured, while being at once limited and directed into appropriate pathways. The part which must be silenced is our endless extrapolation of others' opinions about us, the "what will they think of it" reflex, which is intricately interlaced with our internalized "what do I think of it", the latter but a partial reduction, necessarily incomplete.

And all this (reading today of Elizabeth Browning's laudanum) is clearly redolent of the transparent linkage between writing and addiction. Various. Choose your drug. From hash to wine to tobacco to coffee to cocaine, all intervene, for so many in the poetic and fictional Republic, in order to sever the incessant judging voice, which can be silenced without these aids, and part of pushing through into a mature understanding of these processes is most certainly learning to do without the artifical scissors which make us feel free. This is not a condemnation of artificiality. Merely - pushing into this space without aids, if only to create a greater awareness, and possibly, a more cogent, deeper work still, which bears everywhere within it the traces of a struggle, against the distinct possibility that it could not have been.

For if the remembrance of the struggle is erased, or forgotten?

That the work carries traces of the battle against its own non-being is crucial. If this battle is lost or utterly masked, then surely something is lost, surely the risk of an unfettered surrealist slander (the worst pages of Lautréamont) is not far behind, and thus the fall once more into a tardy adolescence, the ever-present spectre of immaturity, which haunts some phrases like the cat-call of naivety, from the imagined critics' mouths.

The deal, then, is a toss-up between two distinct options: the decision to produce, to push on through it, ever accepting the pain of the wrong thought, the clichéd scene, the awful line, and pushing through all of it like so many vines in the densely covered pathway, hacking with a violent machete swathe of onwards in spite of that voice.

Or to stop.

Choose the machete. Choose the vines.

New In The Continental Review

Wonderful new work from Timothy David Orme has just gone live over at The Continental Review.

New In The Continental Review

Somme utterly extraordinary pieces from Norwegian video artist Kristian Pederson and poets Simen Hagerup, Erlend O. Nødtvedt, and Sigurd Tenningen have just gone live.

Here is a small taste below, and for the full suite, rendez-vous at The Continental Review.

BORN

The first poems from Homo Sentimentalis : A Guide In Verse To Modern Emotional Intimacy date from shortly before nightfall on a snowy evening, looking over the courtyard of the Ecole normale supérieure in winter 2005. 

It has been seven years... I never expected such a long fruition of this cycle, which has stayed with me throughout various stages of my life. Bad and good, lost and found (more or less in that order, with crests and troughs).


The first poem of the cycle, written in ten or so minutes with no corrections or alterations - this is no praise of energumen : all the others were touched and retouched and fiddled over with the fine tools of techne a thousand too-many times - came from a moment of deep despondency, a sensation of personal loss, and of enclosure within dead or dying conventions.


So the conventions needed to be pushed... Garnered with stars and roses. If they could not be beaten, they were to be made king.


And thus, having written before so much dreadful lyrical expressive treacly half-baked rolling-sea-Swinburnesque verse, the following words came like an overly-simple mantra to me : Nothing before has worked. Do it different.


The first poem of Homo Sentimentalis was thus a strange sort of speech to another aspect of myself, an ironic and playful part remonstrating a sentimental, twilight sensibility (equally present in my self). The result was this, at odds in some ways with the rest of the volume, and yet somehow containing, I think, the kernel of it. The poem's title later disappeared, becoming one of Homo Sentimentalis's numbered  sections, but I reprint it here in its first version (only recently refound the other day):

nero (and other colours) or why aren't we as clever as the ancients ? 

admitting * your faults
were those of the white lilies
or Timon of Athens—
so the city crumbled
perished *
a bit
what city hasn't ?
either you go to the war
or the war comes to etc
yes * there were riots
and the stars dipped and fell and
would not obey the * August
motions * premonitory
but blame the Vestals ! * who
after all
told you to follow Tiresias
into the badlands
and to read exile blankly
in a clutch * of crows ?
yes * I know they were circling
but isn't that * in August
when the dry winds are up
the sort of thing * forgive me
that crows do ?

It was a strange beginning. And now it's here. Now it lives.


Many thanks are due. Too many to list. To Mark Young, the most simultaneously generous and pragmatic editor and poet one could ever be lucky enough to have. To Harry Stammer, for doing and redoing the book's cover in the face of my irritating: "Harry, could the subtitle be slightly smaller? ... Now, slightly bigger?"


To Dutch photographer Mark Van Laere for his extraordinary, voluptuous, conventional, excessive, tropological, sexual, metaphysical rose which adorns the bouquet's wrapping. It's not always the case that photographers understand the very special economy of poetry production (as in the virtual absence of all economy, or the three n's rule : Nothing Nichts Nada). Mark giving us permission to use his beautiful image free of charge is thus generous and kind and a little gift. For more information about Mark and his photography, go to www.markvanlaere.nl, and photographs may be seen here : http://www.hersenspinsels.nl. 


And of course, the absolute dedication - to Céline. 


Homo Sentimentalis is now available from Otoliths Books.

Lex-Icon

I'll be presenting The Continental Review next week at what looks to be an extroardinary conference and event, namely: Lex-ICON at the Université de Haute-Alsace, Mulhouse, from June 7th to 10th.

It's rare to have such a wide range of practictioners and theorists across many disciplines, and such a harmonious assemblage of visual artists, plasticiens, critics, theorists, art-historians, and new tech gurus, all to interrogate the image-text dynamic.

Nico Vassilakis at The Continental Review

I'll be presenting on the notion of the sacralisation of text in video poetics ; the summary of the presentation may be found (in French) here.

It will be a fine thing to present works by Nick Piombino and Toni Simon, Bianca Stone, Dara Wier, and Nico Vassilakis to a French audience.

If you're around or straddling or crossing-over the French-German border next week, do come.

Toni Simon and Nick Piombino at The Continental Review

The first of four extraordinary pieces from Toni Simon and Nick Piombino has just gone live at The Continental Review. Stay tuned over the coming weeks and months for the further installments of this magnificent series.

Hollande and Copé: Defusing Rhetorical Agression

For those following our French elections, there is an excellent rhetorical analysis today in the Nouvel Observateur by Bruno Roger-Petit, with ample comparative examples of rhetors faced with similar agressive tactics as Copé employed last night against Hollande, with video proof from Mitterand to Chirac.

The most pragmatic and useful point of Roger-Petit's Obs piece is its outlining of several ways to counter these harassing, Mr Interruptor techniques. These defusing devices actually work extraordinarily well in professional contexts as well (try them).

Roger-Petit is right too in his analysis of Copé's agression last night. But more on that in a moment. To begin, a historical example of this agression being magnificently defused by the mere use of gestures and appropriate posture. The example I wanted to briefly look at reminds us of how impressive Chirac could be in these contexts - of course but a sad memory today, given the old man's current state - in spite of his well-known coleric disposition.

Even if you don't get the French, Fabius's gestures and actio here, beginning at 0:40 in the clip below, are just rhetorical suicide: the diagonal position with one arm posed on the back of his chair, the truly disastrous hand motions - waving away of the hand as in dismissal of a subordinate at 1:14, the single index finger arrogantly raised... Waving away combined with a raised index... This is almost in itself enough to make any viewer perceive you as an at once arrogant and - interestingly - insecure agressor. 

In comparison, Chirac's gestures are precise and studied: the well-known "thumb meeting conjoined fingers in a pyramid" which simultaneously conveys precision and strength, or the right arm straight out and firmly set on the desk... 

Chirac rhetorically owned Fabius here. Hollande held well last night against Copé. At one point I was concerned: Copé was almost succeeding, with the infuriating consistency of his interruptions, in making Hollande look weak and indecisive. It's a very delicate discursive see-saw, and Hollande looked at the beginning to be succombing to the weaker, downward end of the plank.

But then Hollande threw in some good stuff. A few authoritative "I have not finished speaking" and "Let me finish", as well as a few pointed indexes well deployed...  

In the clip below, Copé's "one hand across the lips" listening position is very bad. It's bad for a few reasons. Along with his little glances to one side, it conveys that he is trying not to speak, or does not want to speak. Everyone should avoid this gesture when "listening". Then, when his interruptions don't work, all we hear is "but" or "Monsieur Hollande". 

Electorates can of course respond in two ways to Copé's agressive techniques. They are an immense gamble. If they work, they can be extraordinarily destructive, effectively crippling an opposing candidate, colouring all subsequent announcements with the memory of an indecise, weak ethos . If they don't work, the air of statemanship conveyed to the electorate by the defender, combined with the "sympathy vote", can be crippling to the agressor. 

The Obs' conclusion is thus right: no knock-out for either camp here, but I'm calling a slight advantage to Hollande's air of solidity among the electorate. This, however, means little: Hollande will have to face these same techniques deployed with 10 times the skill when he faces Sarkozy. Copé was simply a little training session, a clumsier sparring partner. If Hollande is to see it through, he will have to be stronger still against a man who masters such pragmatic belligerance to a far greater extent than Copé. 

Sarkozy can be utterly brutal in his intuitive mastery of these take-downs. If Hollande can keep the statesmanlike calm going through the 1st voting round, he will be in good stead. But at the debate with Sarkozy before the 2nd round, he needs to leave the statesmanship behind - he needs to treat his reputation for solidity as an acquired gain - and respond to Sarkozy with equal force. 

The rule is thus: 1st round, statesman, 2nd round, solid refusal to back down, with a burst of surprising agression right towards the end.  

For, unlike Royale, Hollande looks solid when leaning towards agression. But there is, of course, a great deal of sexism at play in this distinction: the techniques for defusing rhetorical agression are sadly completely different concerning women and men. The extract below, from 2:00 onwards, when Sarkozy explicitly said to Royale "Calm down! Calm down! Don't point your finger at me!", shows his awareness of how this gesture would be perceived in the context of a male-female rhetorical interaction. 

The nightmare of Royale's debate with Sarkozy is thus fresh in everyone's mind. Sarkozy will not be able to say to Hollande "To be President, one must be calm!" or "Calm down, Madame!"

To put it differently: Mohammad Ali didn't try to just hit George Foreman in the head. Hollande needs to dance first, then sting.

Nobody doubts the dancing ability, but he needs to practice his stinging. If I was in the Hollande HQ, I'd be making him memorise at least twenty stinging take-downs, which he can simply reiterate over and over again during the final week. Hollande has the advantage of being able to be very aggressive in the last stages of the campaign, using his prior calm as capital.

Rhetorical Trope No. 473: Rush Limbaugh Illustrating the Absurd With Absurdity

Rush Limbaugh: illustrating "the absurd with absurdity" since 1992...

It's an intriguing justification of inane and revoltingly agressive rhetorical babble, couching as it does enunciative violence in the cloaks of imitative satire.

What better way to attack nonsense than with even greater, more incoherent nonsense?

Though the bloated one no doubt does not realise it, the semiotic ramifications of the claim are vast. He basically frames his political abuse of language in the guillemets of an anarchical discourse, whose only response to the breakdown of signification is an ever greater chaos of the signifier...

Rush Limbaugh: Derridean after his time.

This is a surprisingly lucid summary of what the man and others like him do, though surprising that he is able to proffer this as the basis of his political raison d'être.

The fact that conservative commentators, like the one linked to above, are also liberally dousing their takes on the apology with the term "absurd" and "absurdity", is also revelatory. For, if the term recurs again in the text of Limbaugh's slippery mea culpa, it points to a tacit, and surprising, admission, that it is not upon inventio or the logic of proofs that their arguments now rest, but upon their anger that the only response to a world of such "absurdity" is a self-defeating mirror: absurd absurdity itself.