Portland

Rain-streaked, misty river town, city of damage, of hilltop corporate tower, of COVID shuttering and Antifa protests, city with its parks fenced off. The middle-aged conference center Hilton bartender tells me his furlough lasted 18 months. Downtown remains boarded up and graffitied from the night battles of 2020 summer when the Federal Police and Antifa marauded, interlocked, and mini-jousted. The homeless appear outside the corporate zone of shops and restaurants. On a walk, I find tents dotting the interstate, sitting that canyon-like highway rim through the modest city center.

See the conference. Participants younger, expressionless, they are all masked this fall 2022. Dress: business causal, semi-hipster, dark shades, gender ambiguous pants and jackets. Regard the book tables for the University Presses. Yale, Cambridge, Harvard, Johns Hopkins have some few versos out. Titles suggest familiar considerations of modernism. Ecology, disability, race, body, background multitudes, with the poetics of the 1920s overrun by latter-day anti-capitalist Theory. 

I’m at a first panel called Matter and Memory. The crowd is sparse for a talk on monuments as “signifying practice,” from Hurston to the Unite the Right rally greets me. Bold claims are made. Monuments change history. “Mermaids on monuments outnumber congresswomen.” More reversals: “monuments” are ephemeral, permanently evasive; a stone urinates in Hurston’s book on Haiti. The struggle is everywhere. Representing “resistance,” anticolonial struggle, “the terror of racial capitalism,” monuments are linked to Fred Moten on the “incalculable rhythm” in the life of things.

A second talk takes on the US–Mexico border. Border as open wound in Anzaldúa. Landforms, like mountains or rivers, are forms of violence. We witness human remains with a writer, Cristina Rivera Garza, then an artist, Jason de León, who “curates” migrant “material culture” of toothbrushes, wallets, combs. Our speaker suggests we write out deets on people who died crossing the border. Take and create “a powerful space.” Poet Susan Briante shows that “data stories us.” The State operationalizes “necro violence.” Human remains present incomplete history, rather than defeat or failure. Border as site of ultra-precarity, with just making it as heroic.

Navigating mask wearers at the elevator, I move on. Upstairs there’s a traditional sounding “Teaching Joyce” panel. Critical students, the first scholar notes, are everywhere. “They have no respect for Joyce.” Our “white working-class” scholar embraces Joyce in an NPR-style discussion of family, from Boston to Dublin. Joyce teaches students to “confront Catholicism,” “transforms” their white Bostonian selves. The manifest destiny of “poor communities.” DEI pedagogy creates an awakening: decolonized Ireland, the “interrogation of whiteness.” Leaning on bell hooks, CRT “practitioners” and gender, she finds a lot of “performativity” in the Nausicaa passage of Ulysses.

Next a scholar-editor scrolls down a Joyce “short videos” website. These films “center” the Joycean manuscript page. “Short videos and podcasts draw people into books. We should appeal to students’ device use,” says editor of the new centenary Cambridge edition of Ulysses. Her next slide lands on the Ulysses use of “niggerlips,” with the word on a big screen. She uses it for a CRT discussion in students about word choice diction. Did the lips grin or grimace? Pair and share.

A high school teacher completing graduate course work says Portrait’s Stephen deconstructs language. High schoolers relate to him but question the text. They learn that Joyce inserts “post-colonialism” into Irish history. 

Next day I attend the Activist Modernism panel. An English scholar criticizes Jameson’s lack of interest in activist literature. His formalism speaks to a retreat from politics with the advent of Reagan/Thatcher. He lacks an “exuberant Bolshevik futurism.” Jameson “privileges” formal complexity of modernist poetry, fiction, music, and philosophical-discursive system building. Political writings cannot be formally complex, it seems. In Jameson politics is unconscious, whereas politics should be instrumental. Instead of formalism, we need materialism: materialism here is “matter working on matter.” Jameson’s formalism “disallows” space for a recuperation of a more activist modernism. 

Now a talk on Raymond Williams and Leavis. Tragedy is a “paradoxical universalism” because the hero’s loss of privilege is what we “relate to.” From suffering and Williams, the talk detours to allergies, the “body,” and hypersensitivity. All these things are related to Leavis’s fetishism of Englishness. Williams tried to “derange” English superiority but was color blind. Gesturing to CRT, she claims neither Williams nor Leavis can “see” race. Scholar challenges an imperialist canon and the persistence of 1920s national propaganda in a university still teaching Englishness. Solution? A reconstructed practice of the lecture as an institutional “insurgency.” 

A third talk presents Lola Ridge’s poem “The Ghetto.” Anarchist New Zealander Ridge practices sexual freedom and writes “about” the Lower East Side Yiddish speakers. Her lyric conveys solidaristic collective life and “the carceral state.” A collective poetry is a poetry of historical transformation. How? Poetry changes how we relate to others. In a poem that starts with a street scene, the genre lyric is “slumming,” like women rejecting work and child rearing. “Ignorant” Pound is counterposed to Ridge’s awareness of forms of knowledge and “resistance.” She stanzas victims of political killings and lynchings, summoning “lyric commonality.” Scholar Sarah Ehlers is dropped in along with Silvia Federici’s Social Reproduction Theory. 

Today’s modernist scholars want to refer to the poem, text, or figure en passant, while it was previously held that reading Pound, for example, required unwavering attention. Instead of close reading we have critique as snitching. A known snitch scholar presents the one use of “niggerlips” in all of Ulysses. For the snitch scholar Jameson’s aesthetic dialectics of the 20th century lack “commitment.” A gossipy “undercommons” university, with spoken word lectures reminiscent of sermons. 

I conclude my survey of panels with Comparative Perspectives on Pacific Rim. The one noteworthy paper reads “the leper” through Frankfurt School and disability studies. Seo Jeong-ju Korean poet’s “The Leper” is an allegory of form: this is lyric as stasis. Did lepers, like one in the poem, really eat children? WHO-created leper colonies in Korea are read through Marxist disability studies: lepers are workers and reclaim island. 

Criticism of the avant-garde slides into denunciation here at MSA. Antinomian, parodically negative rhetoric—precarity, insurgency, blackness, necropolitics—reveals the sad passions of today’s scholar theory. At the bar one night, a hip graduate student had never heard of Lukács. A warning should be placed over the door to the Hilton conference rooms: you are entering a realm of ontological blackness. 

Seattle

The Associated Writing Programs, or AWP, conference is held in solider Seattle. During the 2020 protests, Antifa riots in Seattle developed into the notorious CHOP, which occupied a police building. Like Occupy, it devolved into a homeless squatter scene. Killings followed the drug use. All this seems remote, mere memory. In Seattle, I aim to see the latest model creative writing ideology. I cross the freeways from Capitol Hill rental.

See this conference. It dwarfs MSA. Participants occupy the new conference center in Downtown Seattle, all black beams and glass plus cathedral ceilings. Young writers here are fuel for social media fires. They skew post-gender, semi-POC here, with fashion accents and events for Ukraine. The modernists imagine themselves superior to creative writing scenesters but you can’t really tell them apart. In declining humanities academia, what’s called creative writing is booming, so they strut a bit.

Too large for an overview, I offer AWP to moments, the social whole conveyed through an onsite panel of Asian-American writers and an offsite reading. I make a comment on the book tables.

Race talk dominates the creative writing world. But we’re not just Asians—we’re more complicated than that. Witness the panel Containing Multitudes: Asian American Writers Not Writing about Race. “In this panel, we discuss anti-Asian hate,” the conference website reads. Big question: Has the popularity of Cathy Park Hong provoked a reaction against reductionism? 

A woman novelist begins with our “intersectional identities.” She advances, a sentence later, to “trauma.” Race “is not our only subject,” even if it is undeniably pertinent. At AWP, no slides, no corporate PowerPoint of the modernism conference. Speech verifies words on a page. Another novelist reads from his queer novel. A talent show scene. In the scene someone yells “fag.” He says his audience “confronts” homophobia. The author breaks out into song.

Now an Indian woman poet remarks that grief, not race, is the “center” of her work. She writes about her mother’s death. Suffused with grief, sex, distance, her poetry is, well, sad. No, now mother’s voice wittily discourses on a sari shop in Mumbai; then another witty mom voice poem about the partition of India and Pakistan. 

Several more readers and their texts. A Korean American novel, where mom is jailed in a white collar-crime lock up. A story about an 18th century Chinese woman pirate giving birth, told in third person Eastern wisdom idiom. Another story is inspired by a picture of Mao. This novel depicts Mao as a thigh-rubbing playboy. Dancer storyteller, she has sex with him, then he’s asleep. She notices his room full of books. “I alone had the Chairman tonight,” she intones. 

Questions about “background” give way to mini autobiographies. Achievers, yes, but self-consciously downwardly mobile compared to the doctor, lawyer, and CEO Asians. None of us are Andrew Yang-type hedge fund quants. One author offers Filipino characters, whose “existence is resistance.” “I explore class divisions,” another remarks. “I’m big on intersectionality,” chimes a third. “Intersectionality is now super, super important,” says the fourth. We’re “critiquing” racial essentialism with intersectionalism. We are daring to write about something other than race but—hey—still we should stay close to Asia and our families. Suspicions of whites. Humor, history, lyric, and non-racial content mellow the vibe.

And now I’m at the publishers’ tables on the convention floor. Amidst the legions, Nightboat Books and Fence Books are here. They both publish poetry collections with through lines, concept albums of the hybrid “insurgency.” I wonder—is it possible to publish a book without a marketable through line today? Harmony Holiday or Caroline Bergvall pseudo epics read more quicksand of social media idioms, blog post mic drop, than they read Aeneid. 

Evening I attend the group poetry reading at Seattle public library. An early poem starts with Ukraine, provides a trans women moment, moves onto Hannah Arendt, ends with “against atrocity”—wait, was that anti trans? Or trans skeptical? Another writer comes up to the mic. Now a Pakistani American author. The market predicted a post-9/11 novel, grandma storyteller. Now another poet’s “reclaiming witches and monstrous women.” “That’s the maid” she reveals. “I’m going to skip a little bit.” Reality intrudes when a homeless guy rolls in and rolls out. 

Now another poet conveys “feral eroticism.” Surrealist translations and a beautiful disorder of Joyce Mansour. “Venice, I’m ready to protect you.” These hallucinations to be heard are eros-drenched, weakened, feminine, beautiful like petals. The next poem is dedicated to “the women of Ukraine.” Bombs through the faces of the crowd. War rains down over breakers and beaches. Now a funny poet with a Jason movie slasher poem.

Filipino gay poet writes an interrogative, discursive poem. He gives off a I’m a real New Yorker vibe. He writes the “intersection of sexuality and race.” “Heterosexual life is sick and boring,” says pink hair poetry lady with her anti-Trump calamity poem. After preachy doomsday verse from Poetry, with nuclear weapons worker parent and radiation sickness, coyotes took over the street. No, nothing that interesting or natural happened. 

A lady from Buffalo presents “erasures” of little red riding hood. She’s tentative: “I’m just gonna read one more.” A woman of color reads about mother’s death. She will “work her way through this drama.” Now more anti-Trump poetry with Rupaul and Molotov cocktails. Suburban elegy for her mother and about Hillary Clinton. “You could save us from catastrophe.” How are we to go on?

Poems about Kanye include Ebonics. “Don’t you know white folks are crazy,” she lyricizes. Now divine sorrow and revolutionary art Filipinos, but the subject again is Black Lives Matter. “I dedicate this reading to queer and trans family and ancestors.” The subsequent poems are like transmitter signals for a young brown feminist: dear this and that in a “low key” Derek Walcott rip off manner. 

Ok, enough. I obviously don’t like the contemporary literary critical and creative writing scene. But go ahead and think what you want to.

Adorno Huxley Fusion

When confronted with the pseudo-politics of radical philistines I always used to reach for my Adorno. But these days, I’ve come around to thinking that I was missing something.

Some jottings on Theodor Adorno’s Huxley. Was Adorno right in his criticism of Huxley’s valorization of the bourgeois individual as a last ditch against global American plebianization? I have my doubts now. 

A brief survey of the Adornian criticism of Brave New World and to a lesser extent Ape and Essence follows below. 

Adorno begins with the European intellectual experience of exile in two distinct phases. In the 19th century, a flight or visit to America raised few questions, with a young nation still enticing and novel. Overpowered by a world capitalist dynamo, émigrés were cast into the hustle, but it was homegrown American intellectuals (Poe, Emerson, Thoreau) who pioneered early criticisms of Yankee mores, not refugees. 

In the 20th century, the entire émigré intellectual community of Europe took root in America, with flight first from war, then later interwar escalation, and Nazism. In Adorno’s account, the émigrés encountered not infant industries, but a full-scale cartelization of human existence. This intelligentsia had fled Europe not to seek fortune but simply to survive. But they ended up leaping from the pan into the fire, culturally speaking. 

No longer wild, nor youthful, the new America has no room for “European laxness,” that unregimented sensibility one encountered in the interstices of the profit system. For Adorno, Huxley is a “non-conformist” bourgeois rebel, a contrarian we would say. Shocked by blows of Fordist social compulsions, he rationalizes his satirical utopia of disenchantment, taking Schopenhauer literally: manufactured nature herds twins together with mass communications. A simulacrum of spontaneous experience rages in the stifling ubiquity of the undifferentiated whole. Huxley senses the depths of a barely concealed discontent with civilization that more “progress” just won’t iron out.

Anti-Americanism drinks up the page in Huxley. America’s productive forces conquer nature, but in the grip of state capitalism mankind reaps the biotechnological whirlwind. As the opposition of man and society as well as society and nature dissolves, a society emerges that is neither properly dystopian or utopian. For Adorno, in this new condition of total social mediation, class has already lost its “natural” character and becomes a manifest artifact of social engineering. Anything is possible in this dsytopia, even utopia.

Purged of myths, these American manufactured subject-objects are governed by their fetishistic love of gadgets. With neither sexual taboos nor sexual liberation, individual feeling withers away. The liberation of sex and its debasement are here intertwined. 

Adorno asks if satire in Huxley merely disguises the traumatic collapse of bourgeois inwardness. Huxley, the foe of false happiness, turns into the enemy of the true one as well. The material degradation of capitalist man is less concerning to Huxley than the decline of higher, spiritual values. In clinging to the doomed form of the individual as an absolute value, Huxley remains captive to the material basis of the collectivization he denounces.

Recent experience leads me to the conclusion that Huxley’s defense of the naturalness of the individual in Brave New World survives Adorno’s attacks. Adorno sees liberating dialectical possibilities from total social mediation, but if it’s history that judges, Huxley’s prophecy of behaviorist medicalization seems to have been borne out, while the dialectic of the negative languishes.

The mind-nature opposition represented the peak of bourgeois philosophy. As the bearer of this opposition, the individual was never so hopelessly reified as radical social criticism made him out to be. There is nothing wrong with aretreat into the garden of the subjective when the prospects of collective emancipation remain so remote. 

If the capitalist system is riven with internal contradictions, then Adorno was right. But as of today, here anyway, a universal homogenization engulfs us nowhere more clearly than in the realm of ideas. I wish there was another country to go to, like there sometimes was in the past. But American humanitiesacademia is going international, as DEI central committees deepen their grip on public and private sector alike. Revolutionaries used to ask “What is to be done?” I’m more like, where can I go? 

I never saw it this civilizational way before but I’m coming to the conclusion that modernism was, if not the final chapter of the West, culturally speaking, then a high water. While poets Charles Olson, or the early John Ashbery, or certain poets like Andrès Ajens or Vivek Narayanan maintain or maintained the standards of the modernist sublime, the fading away of modernism, which really distressed me once, doesn’t seem quite so bad today. I guess all this talk of the non-West has encouraged me to look to China, to India, and to Africa. My knowledge of the poetics of these places, though limited, leads me to see real mythic potential in them all. It was the modernists who first had a presentiment of this situation, as they donned foreign masks of evil and alternate values.

A thousand years from now, the Oriental and the African will have swallowed up the Occident, unleashing a new ancient-modern dialectic, possibly. In this non-West of the mind, a tough-minded book review will stir the spirit; the young will still be reading Plato and Pound; the bookstores there will be full of the most unique and rewarding productions, delightful writing, conversations, and bitter, explosive disputations.