Northwest Lit. Schtick

April 1998
T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

`Pacific Northwest Urban Writing`

THE THREAD: Northwest Lit. Schtick

Jim Andrews:
JimA@TechWave.com
11/26/97

I'm confused. Is Nico lysergic or lethargic or lythargic or what? And has Robson street been renamed since I last visited Vancouver, renamed as in Robinson Crusoe?

And who is getting (stars and) striped down? Is this a genuinely northwest American gesture or simply the result of trickle down?

I'm an immigrant from Victoria, not so far away on the Clipper. They say it's 2 hours away, but after you make the translation from the language of advertising it's like 4. So, further away than advertised and a different country, but the weather is exactly the same and I've heard these arguments before in a different context, re Canadian identity, literary and otherwise.

In Canada these sorts of arguments and searches for regional or national identity were supported with grants, etc., because the notion that there is a national identity had some value to the politicians who would have it so. Canada is strung out like a necklace along the American border so we seem to need all the fictions we can muster to keep the necklace together. Rather than tossing the pearls south, etc.

Hey I'm glad to be here. I like the intellectual atmosphere. Geeks and poets, entertainers and astrophysicists, many of whom are very intense in their approach. High tech to the nines yet folksy. Personal but Urish email and restructuring the world from Redmond to Pioneer Square. Adobe email huts, etc. Fewer remnants of the British class system here. A capitalist class system, an American class system. The highest management of the company I work for is black. Pleasant introduction to race relations in America. Not exactly Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin territory. At work, anyway. The walk home across the street (8th and Olive) is closer to that earth. People living on the street in cardboard boxes. But they aren't necessarily black or male, etc.

You know I've had this funny sense of poetry for many years, strange how it speaks of and makes the future speaking from the gutter or just muck of now. And then the more obvious makings here via high tech refashioning the world and the future. Seems like this is the city of imagination blue and green, a fine American tradition as per Mr. Stevens.

Regards, Jim

Nico Vassilakis:
subrosa@speakeasy.org
11/26/97 12:51 PM

Okay Matt relax don't get exorcised about my style and response, that is what you wanted, eh? A response. Of course, there are regional attributes that indicate the flavor of a place, but I retort with - is there a Northwest poetics working here? Now? I think not, but would like to hear otherwise...

Matt Briggs:
mbriggs@fhcrc.org
11/26/97

My understanding of your argument is that any style that is here is superficially related to the details of the area, rather than an actual approach to creating original work, and so, hardly constitutes a style.

I'd agree that for a regional writing to concentrate solely on regional details would hardly be considered a poetics/style.

My contention is that there is a regional poetics/style at work, and it is pretty specific, when you finally get down to it.

2) A dumb sense of humor, as in, how about I write a story about a man who wants to beat his wife and he beats his typewriter instead, shooting at his typewriter as he pummels the keys - gash - and throws it out the window. This works with language as well. How about I take my poem, drop it into a blender, and see what comes out.

3) Mundane surrealism - instead of writing fascinated by the workings of the subconscious being expressed with the fantastic imagery and irrational juxtapositions of subject matter - it's more like writing fascinated by junk and the working of the subconscious being expressed with mundane imagery like shopping carts, shears, and burls. This works with language as well. How about I take my blender and drop it into a poem and see what comes out.

I don't mean for regional to be regionalism or a limiting idea but rather an understanding of what are the shared lit. values and approaches to the area's writing. It is valuable to establish this on a sort of taxonomic level to understand what's going on here and what has gone on here. Writers here are not inventing anything, whole-cloth. And neither are they importing everything they know from the national culture. It's my contention that they are heavily influenced by their peers, mimic them, steal from them, and thus a certain approach/aesthetic sense develops.

Writers like Mark Svenvold, Richard Hugo, Jesse Bernstein, Jana Harris, Belle Randall, and so on - it's a pretty big list - are working in a vein deeper that just local flavor. For instance, the depth of meaning Mark Svenvold coaxes out of old Seattle buildings seems similar to many of Richard Hugo's West Marginal Way poems. I'm more comfortable with fiction, and in this area, most of the fiction seems to have an odd sense of humor, as in "American Bullfrog" by Charles D' Ambrosio or Gregory Hischak's Farm Pulp. A sort of surreal distortion of reality, that isn't completely divorced from the realm of realistic or natural fiction as in Housekeeping, Oedipus Cadet by Willie Smith, Geek Love by Kathryn Dunn. These are broad strokes, but they definitely point the way to a poetics, working here, and now.

Clark Humphrey:
clark@speakeasy.org
11/26/97

Gosh, how'd ya know I care about this? OK, what would a Northwest Urban literary schtick be like (other than that of formula murder mysteries with fill-in-the-blanks local color)? First, it would not be obsessed with "hipness" as in the oh-so-old NY/Cal notion of "hot" marketability. I firmly believe the one thing the NW is different from is Manhattan-Frisco hipster arrogance. We're not about Making The Scene, Being The Next Big Thing, or other such name-branding. Instead, I suggest we're more about being, as they used to call it, 'real.' Cut the hype, show what you can actually do. Examples? Raymond Carver's (or Stacey Levine's) tales of quiet despair, Jesse Bernstein's unslick loud despair, Gus Van Sant's sagas of gritty survival, Portland historian Stuart Holbrook's rustic whimsy, Lynda Barry's (and Beverly Cleary's) affirmations of non-angelic childishness, and cartoonist Peter Bagge's droll exhumations of the limits of youth 'rebellion.' If the examples mentioned above don't add up to a Literary Sensibility, they at least can form the foundations of one. It's about being where you are now, seeing what's around you, and responding with all the insight you can muster. People who are more interested in becoming literary celebrities than becoming writers will not become part of this and will, instead, continue to seek trends from NY/Cal to follow, chastising the rest of us for being so behind the times.

Linda Clifton
lclifton@halcyon.com
Fri, 28 Nov 1997

> NICO:
And for a young country and younger state and yet younger city there's no real time for a personality to settle in. People bring culture here, I'm not sure the reverse is true (certainly not to the same extent). Because someone moves to the Northwest doesn't automatically mean they take on a shared set of regional values - Matt, could you explain what you intended by that. From here sans coffee.

Some off-the-cuff "lythargic" thoughts: One regional value now being overwhelmed by these changes is a value in being quietly unpretentious--maybe starting with such images as Betty McDonald among the chickens, continued in the cliche' "Seattle tuxedo"�a parka from REI . It's the kind of values that obey traffic lights as a matter of courtesy while raising holy hell for social justice. (We could use more of both right now.) It chooses a car that uses less gas mileage, and it waves other traffic in ahead of it to allow for a smooth merge. It finds places to hide refugees from El Salvador, and turns out 30,000 marchers to protest the Gulf War. It STOPS THE GULF WAR PARADE by organizing so many phone calls to the military commander that he decides not to participate. Quiet effectiveness, at least sometimes.

It strikes me as interesting, too, that Gary Snyder, the boy from "little old Lake City 20 minutes away (from Seattle)", morphed into Japhy Ryder (sp?), teaches Kerouac how to find meaning on a mountain in the North Cascades. We don't think of Kerouac as NW , but at the center of what he's doing we find the NW as guru�and then we associate the discovery with California and NY because of Kerouac's own connections.

But that's values, ambiance, style. What about poetics? Have to examine the language. In 13 years of editing, I found I had a predilection for a quieter, more crafted poetics that often came from NW poets, and found myself rejecting the jazzier rhythms and brighter, hotter imagery of California and Florida writers. There's a swing and a tang to southern US writing that doesn't show up here, and it's based purely in the local accent. I'm talking impressions here, not a careful study. And the NW poem wants to get to the top of the mountain--watch it climb to its end. So it isn't just dripping ferns and cold sand. But it has something to do with knowing the mountain is there even when you can't see it for days and days together.

Stephen Thomas:
stevent@u.washington.edu
11/30/97

As everyone knows or else should know, "real" is a word that makes no sense without the quotes. Sincerity is a manner. Cut the crap is a manner. Feelings not being words, all literature is posturing. Facts not being words, all literature is fake. As Flip Wilson used to say, "Live it or live with it."

Felicitations, S.T.

Matt Briggs:
Mbriggs@fhcrc.org
12/2/97

Reality without quotes

I think one of the things that interests me about the discussion of writing being done in the Pacific Northwest, is that local writing is a way of deflating postmodernism. I don't see regionalism as a way of charting categories or building a closed-mindedness or building a closed circle of audience (well, not completely because there is that aspect of navel gazing and saying listen to us, listen to the people you live with), but more a way of building a community with a thin wall like the membrane of an amoebae that protects ideas, allows them to ferment, and also allows stuff in and out. The Northwest has always suffered from an influx of new people and the loss of old people, so much so, I think that its artistic community turns over like the staff of a Red Robin. It's not to say this prohibits the transmission of regional values, because they are there regardless of this roll-over just like Red Robin staff tend to hunker down when they take your order (and this is not something the managers encourage because I was a hunkerer when I worked at that dread establishment). Turning away from regional values and ignoring them, prohibits them from maturing and being put to good use.

The thread received a note from Stephen Thomas yesterday, a cryptic reference, I think to Clark Humphrey's sort of heartfelt response about "real" as in "hey folks, let's get real." I'm not sure if Stephen Thomas is talking about the problem postmodernists have with the idea of reality and the fascination they have for the model of language as a closed system. The old Modernists seem to relish the artifice of reality - I think like the romantics - they didn't question that a person actually existed as a subconscious/conscious Being whose Character or Nature had some control over their actions. A text, I think, for them was a way of mapping what this sense of self consisted of. I think a postmodernist is more nihilistic; they contend that nothing is real (because the idea of reality only exists in language) and thus everything is being manipulated by language and spin doctors and advertisers. (A 7-11 can be experienced by the five senses yet how real is a 7-11?) But maybe Stephen Thomas is not talking about this argument and he's out there somewhere else. I wish he'd make it a little clearer for people like me who persist on asking question with obvious answers.

I do like the sort of head scratching, base-line, "I don't know. But I know what I know," attitude of Clark Humprey (and everyone else who carries the flag of Lester Bang's critical style, a speed-induced, reader response look at what language or music does; rather than theoretical musing in abstract language theory about meaning or how stylish a language artifact is. They talk about a piece of art as an experience and how it effects them).

Postmodernism to me feels like a sort of Rococo dead-end, a big, elaborate stylization of a few old observations. Artists need to say " OK - the mass media corrupts this old Modernist idea of Reality" and move on. People still experience the world in terms of the five senses, in terms of a subconscious (that no one really understands and hopefully never will), and in language. Artists need to turn back to the well of observation, and draw-out prolonged and meticulous observations of where they live, who they live with, and so on, instead of the endless turning around the same tired ideas of Postmodernism and its insistent that language is a closed system. Sure it has that aspect, but language depends on context. A noun is a noun is a noun; and is a reference to a concrete object. I'm influenced by the life I'm leading and a large portion of that life is lived walking on streets, breathing air, drinking water, hiking in mountains, listening to duct fans. And certainly duct fans, streets, and even what I see in the mountains, is influenced by media but the mass media doesn't make me BLIND . And a die-hard Postmodernist would declare it does make me blind because I'm seeing Postmodern objects through mass-media goggles. I would say one of the roles of a regional art would be to wake people up to the place where they now live, clearly and accurately.

Phoebe Bosche:
bosche@u.washington.edu
12/3/97

Matt, I think you may have a problem with simplicity of ideas. All Stephen Thomas was saying, to my mind, was that all art (small a or large A) is A RTIFICIAL . If you write a poem, paint a picture, create music - that is not "REAL " - as in real life - it is a creation of your mind/imagination/rage, whatever. What has Real got to do with it? Got to do with it?

Stephen Thomas:
stevent@u.washington.edu
12/4/97

The point is there is no reality without quotes. Here's regionalism:

I placed a jar in Tennessee,
And round it was, upon a hill.
It made the slovenly wilderness
Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,
And sprawl around, no longer wild.
the jar was round upon the ground
And tall and of a poet in air.

It took dominion everywhere.
the jar was gray and bare.
It did not give of bird or bush,
Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Uncle Wally

"sincerely" S.T.

Matt Briggs:
Mbriggs@fhcrc.org
12/5/97

Hi Stephen, I understand the no-point.

And the point of divorcing a noun from the thing it denotes, to say language is language and not a rose is a rose is a rose, is a jaded cul-de-sac, inhabited now by professional academics, toeing the 1950's ad-man party line that nothing is real and it is all manufactured. If you really believe that, than you are divorcing yourself from any pretense of honesty and saying that because language is an illusion - everything and especially "reality" is an illusion.

(When I say the word "stone" it is a noun empowered by its reference to a concrete object that exists in the real world. I do not need to put quotes around the word stone, yet, like reality, the word "stone" explodes with properties given to it by language that only works in the realm of language. But the base line here is that a stone exists in a physical world regardless of human existence. This is reality and it does not need quotes; the observation of this world is the rich source of language - not speculation in the meta-structures of connotation and symbolism and association above it.)

If you believe that everything is language and language is an illusion - why write poetry? The true poetry of this line of thought is manufactured by Coca-Cola, short sweet memes like "Coke is It." - the true mantra of our times, right, but I'd love to rip that kind of language into shreds. It's made imbeciles out of every writer in the English language. And victims out of the rest of us.

Your quote about regionalism, I agree with, but it doesn't expand or address anything I was talking about. Seattle and the US is/are a victim of provincialism. Although the jar on the hill in the US is growing all of the time, and including and stifling the world more and more every year. It uses this perfect fakeness of language, "Coke Is It."

Phoebe Bosche:
bosche@u.washington.edu
12/5/97

Matt, are you potty? How many imbeciles have you read lately? How many films made by imbeciles have you seen lately? Well, maybe, something is/has happened to mass media-based language to turn the harried masses into mass consumers, but really I'm neither victim nor imbecile. I don't have a swoop on my hat, and no logos on my underwear. How many cups of coffee have you had this morning?

Stephen. Thomas:
stevent@u.washington.edu
12/5/97

M.Briggs, you miss the point. It has impaled you and you still miss it. We exist for one another in this buzz of electrons. Speculating about reality and regionalism on the Internet is like looking for Ptolemy's solar system with the Hubble telescope. Reality is a construct. And poems point nowhere. S.T.

Matt Briggs:
mbriggs@fhcrc.org
12/7/97

One Renton Boy to One Auburn Boy:

I'm sorry I haven't been clear. The didacticness of your responses makes me feel like I'm really muddling around trying to get to my point - which I do get, I do understand, and I think anyone who believes that is a victim of this culture and should participate in money making, the true poetry and celebration of that line of thought.

> M.Briggs, (you can call me Matt.)
you miss the point. It has impaled you and you still miss it.

I feel it every time I go to Renton. I feel it every time I drive down I-5. I feel it crossing the top of the Cedar River Water shed, south on the Pacific Crest Trail - passing signs on stumps that read - do not cross into the water shed, restricted access - and see that the water shed has been clear-cut as far as I can see. This is the lie that language doesn't impact the physical world.

> We exist for one another in this buzz of electrons.

I've never run across you on the Internet, but I run into you all the time in the physical realm.

> Speculating about reality and regionalism on the Internet is like looking for Ptolemy's solar system with the Hubble telescope. Reality is a construct. And poems point nowhere. S.T.

Egads.

Pretty strange. If poems point no-where, then a poet is writing nothing. Get off it. You don't believe that because why would anyone dedicate themselves to writing work with no substance, and to helping others write work with no substance?

And your little aphorisms still don't address what I'm taking about.

Language, and poetry, and the Internet do not exist like Ptolemy's solar system to the Hubble telescope. They exist like the telephone to the human voice and the human voice exists like the word stone to an actual rock lying in the ground. Marshal McLuhan may have said, "The medium is the message. (And the medium is the massage.)" but he didn't mean that it consumed its content. He tongue-in-cheek overstated his case to stress the importance of the media and its impact on the language. This would be the telephone to the human voice. But when someone uses a telephone they aren't saying "telephone." Noam Chomsky claims that the semantic, structural side to assembling meaning with language is a genetic given BUT it depends on the context of the real world to get its bearings. When I say real world, I mean a world impacting the five senses - one of light and heat, the old one called reality. Thus this relationship of the five senses to language is important and slides down the entire scale of media-to-language relationships. To say that "poems point nowhere" or that language is not rooted in the physical world means you as an individual are giving up power to the Mass Media - and are not exploring and checking the actual world yourself. It's like a shell trick, where the corporate world (who has never pretended that they weren't interested in the real world) is flashing this "fake fake fake" in your eyes while they clear-cut the land, dam the rivers, move labor overseas to places without any human rights by sheer dint of overpopulation and poverty, where strip malls are erected with dizzying speed over the Green River Valley, one of the most fertile spots on the planet.

The Internet is a tool. It generates community by the force of its ability to include all forms of communication and the ease and cheapness of getting the information out there. But it doesn't erode existing community. Rather it enforces it. Here in Seattle, those who are writing or pretending to write, and the few people who are willing to facility these folks' delusions and maybe even get some honest to god audience members in there, are a community. The Internet enforces that community. That's what it does.

A good book, written by the guy who founded the Seattle Community Network, called "Building Community Networks", discusses how this works. Web sites that aren't nailed down to hard/real world locations drift off into oblivion. Who cares about them? Web sites that are populated by people who can see and talk to one another in the real world blossom and get work done. I would contend that this work, that needs to get done, is to re-attach language to the physical world, so that people can stop being victimized by corporate America's exploitation of the Mass Media; this lie that language doesn't point at reality. Because it does. You have a physical body that eats food that comes from somewhere. And that food has a name and that somewhere has a name. So I'd learn what those are.

Matt.

© The Raven Chronicles 1998

	April 1998		T H E RaVEN C H R O N I C L E S

	`Pacific Northwest Urban Writing`		THE THREAD: Northwest Lit. Schtick Jim Andrews: JimA@TechWave.com 11/26/97 I'm confused. Is Nico lysergic or lethargic or lythargic or what? And has Robson street been renamed since I last visited Vancouver, renamed as in Robinson Crusoe? And who is getting (stars and) striped down? Is this a genuinely northwest American gesture or simply the result of trickle down? I'm an immigrant from Victoria, not so far away on the Clipper. They say it's 2 hours away, but after you make the translation from the language of advertising it's like 4. So, further away than advertised and a different country, but the weather is exactly the same and I've heard these arguments before in a different context, re Canadian identity, literary and otherwise. In Canada these sorts of arguments and searches for regional or national identity were supported with grants, etc., because the notion that there is a national identity had some value to the politicians who would have it so. Canada is strung out like a necklace along the American border so we seem to need all the fictions we can muster to keep the necklace together. Rather than tossing the pearls south, etc. Hey I'm glad to be here. I like the intellectual atmosphere. Geeks and poets, entertainers and astrophysicists, many of whom are very intense in their approach. High tech to the nines yet folksy. Personal but Urish email and restructuring the world from Redmond to Pioneer Square. Adobe email huts, etc. Fewer remnants of the British class system here. A capitalist class system, an American class system. The highest management of the company I work for is black. Pleasant introduction to race relations in America. Not exactly Ralph Ellison or James Baldwin territory. At work, anyway. The walk home across the street (8th and Olive) is closer to that earth. People living on the street in cardboard boxes. But they aren't necessarily black or male, etc. You know I've had this funny sense of poetry for many years, strange how it speaks of and makes the future speaking from the gutter or just muck of now. And then the more obvious makings here via high tech refashioning the world and the future. Seems like this is the city of imagination blue and green, a fine American tradition as per Mr. Stevens. Regards, Jim Nico Vassilakis: subrosa@speakeasy.org 11/26/97 12:51 PM Okay Matt relax don't get exorcised about my style and response, that is what you wanted, eh? A response. Of course, there are regional attributes that indicate the flavor of a place, but I retort with - is there a Northwest poetics working here? Now? I think not, but would like to hear otherwise... Matt Briggs: mbriggs@fhcrc.org 11/26/97 My understanding of your argument is that any style that is here is superficially related to the details of the area, rather than an actual approach to creating original work, and so, hardly constitutes a style. I'd agree that for a regional writing to concentrate solely on regional details would hardly be considered a poetics/style. My contention is that there is a regional poetics/style at work, and it is pretty specific, when you finally get down to it. 2) A dumb sense of humor, as in, how about I write a story about a man who wants to beat his wife and he beats his typewriter instead, shooting at his typewriter as he pummels the keys - gash - and throws it out the window. This works with language as well. How about I take my poem, drop it into a blender, and see what comes out. 3) Mundane surrealism - instead of writing fascinated by the workings of the subconscious being expressed with the fantastic imagery and irrational juxtapositions of subject matter - it's more like writing fascinated by junk and the working of the subconscious being expressed with mundane imagery like shopping carts, shears, and burls. This works with language as well. How about I take my blender and drop it into a poem and see what comes out. I don't mean for regional to be regionalism or a limiting idea but rather an understanding of what are the shared lit. values and approaches to the area's writing. It is valuable to establish this on a sort of taxonomic level to understand what's going on here and what has gone on here. Writers here are not inventing anything, whole-cloth. And neither are they importing everything they know from the national culture. It's my contention that they are heavily influenced by their peers, mimic them, steal from them, and thus a certain approach/aesthetic sense develops. Writers like Mark Svenvold, Richard Hugo, Jesse Bernstein, Jana Harris, Belle Randall, and so on - it's a pretty big list - are working in a vein deeper that just local flavor. For instance, the depth of meaning Mark Svenvold coaxes out of old Seattle buildings seems similar to many of Richard Hugo's West Marginal Way poems. I'm more comfortable with fiction, and in this area, most of the fiction seems to have an odd sense of humor, as in "American Bullfrog" by Charles D' Ambrosio or Gregory Hischak's Farm Pulp. A sort of surreal distortion of reality, that isn't completely divorced from the realm of realistic or natural fiction as in Housekeeping, Oedipus Cadet by Willie Smith, Geek Love by Kathryn Dunn. These are broad strokes, but they definitely point the way to a poetics, working here, and now. Clark Humphrey: clark@speakeasy.org 11/26/97 Gosh, how'd ya know I care about this? OK, what would a Northwest Urban literary schtick be like (other than that of formula murder mysteries with fill-in-the-blanks local color)? First, it would not be obsessed with "hipness" as in the oh-so-old NY/Cal notion of "hot" marketability. I firmly believe the one thing the NW is different from is Manhattan-Frisco hipster arrogance. We're not about Making The Scene, Being The Next Big Thing, or other such name-branding. Instead, I suggest we're more about being, as they used to call it, 'real.' Cut the hype, show what you can actually do. Examples? Raymond Carver's (or Stacey Levine's) tales of quiet despair, Jesse Bernstein's unslick loud despair, Gus Van Sant's sagas of gritty survival, Portland historian Stuart Holbrook's rustic whimsy, Lynda Barry's (and Beverly Cleary's) affirmations of non-angelic childishness, and cartoonist Peter Bagge's droll exhumations of the limits of youth 'rebellion.' If the examples mentioned above don't add up to a Literary Sensibility, they at least can form the foundations of one. It's about being where you are now, seeing what's around you, and responding with all the insight you can muster. People who are more interested in becoming literary celebrities than becoming writers will not become part of this and will, instead, continue to seek trends from NY/Cal to follow, chastising the rest of us for being so behind the times. Linda Clifton lclifton@halcyon.com Fri, 28 Nov 1997 > NICO: And for a young country and younger state and yet younger city there's no real time for a personality to settle in. People bring culture here, I'm not sure the reverse is true (certainly not to the same extent). Because someone moves to the Northwest doesn't automatically mean they take on a shared set of regional values - Matt, could you explain what you intended by that. From here sans coffee. Some off-the-cuff "lythargic" thoughts: One regional value now being overwhelmed by these changes is a value in being quietly unpretentious--maybe starting with such images as Betty McDonald among the chickens, continued in the cliche' "Seattle tuxedo"�a parka from REI . It's the kind of values that obey traffic lights as a matter of courtesy while raising holy hell for social justice. (We could use more of both right now.) It chooses a car that uses less gas mileage, and it waves other traffic in ahead of it to allow for a smooth merge. It finds places to hide refugees from El Salvador, and turns out 30,000 marchers to protest the Gulf War. It STOPS THE GULF WAR PARADE by organizing so many phone calls to the military commander that he decides not to participate. Quiet effectiveness, at least sometimes. It strikes me as interesting, too, that Gary Snyder, the boy from "little old Lake City 20 minutes away (from Seattle)", morphed into Japhy Ryder (sp?), teaches Kerouac how to find meaning on a mountain in the North Cascades. We don't think of Kerouac as NW , but at the center of what he's doing we find the NW as guru�and then we associate the discovery with California and NY because of Kerouac's own connections. But that's values, ambiance, style. What about poetics? Have to examine the language. In 13 years of editing, I found I had a predilection for a quieter, more crafted poetics that often came from NW poets, and found myself rejecting the jazzier rhythms and brighter, hotter imagery of California and Florida writers. There's a swing and a tang to southern US writing that doesn't show up here, and it's based purely in the local accent. I'm talking impressions here, not a careful study. And the NW poem wants to get to the top of the mountain--watch it climb to its end. So it isn't just dripping ferns and cold sand. But it has something to do with knowing the mountain is there even when you can't see it for days and days together. Stephen Thomas: stevent@u.washington.edu 11/30/97 As everyone knows or else should know, "real" is a word that makes no sense without the quotes. Sincerity is a manner. Cut the crap is a manner. Feelings not being words, all literature is posturing. Facts not being words, all literature is fake. As Flip Wilson used to say, "Live it or live with it." Felicitations, S.T. Matt Briggs: Mbriggs@fhcrc.org 12/2/97 Reality without quotes I think one of the things that interests me about the discussion of writing being done in the Pacific Northwest, is that local writing is a way of deflating postmodernism. I don't see regionalism as a way of charting categories or building a closed-mindedness or building a closed circle of audience (well, not completely because there is that aspect of navel gazing and saying listen to us, listen to the people you live with), but more a way of building a community with a thin wall like the membrane of an amoebae that protects ideas, allows them to ferment, and also allows stuff in and out. The Northwest has always suffered from an influx of new people and the loss of old people, so much so, I think that its artistic community turns over like the staff of a Red Robin. It's not to say this prohibits the transmission of regional values, because they are there regardless of this roll-over just like Red Robin staff tend to hunker down when they take your order (and this is not something the managers encourage because I was a hunkerer when I worked at that dread establishment). Turning away from regional values and ignoring them, prohibits them from maturing and being put to good use. The thread received a note from Stephen Thomas yesterday, a cryptic reference, I think to Clark Humphrey's sort of heartfelt response about "real" as in "hey folks, let's get real." I'm not sure if Stephen Thomas is talking about the problem postmodernists have with the idea of reality and the fascination they have for the model of language as a closed system. The old Modernists seem to relish the artifice of reality - I think like the romantics - they didn't question that a person actually existed as a subconscious/conscious Being whose Character or Nature had some control over their actions. A text, I think, for them was a way of mapping what this sense of self consisted of. I think a postmodernist is more nihilistic; they contend that nothing is real (because the idea of reality only exists in language) and thus everything is being manipulated by language and spin doctors and advertisers. (A 7-11 can be experienced by the five senses yet how real is a 7-11?) But maybe Stephen Thomas is not talking about this argument and he's out there somewhere else. I wish he'd make it a little clearer for people like me who persist on asking question with obvious answers. I do like the sort of head scratching, base-line, "I don't know. But I know what I know," attitude of Clark Humprey (and everyone else who carries the flag of Lester Bang's critical style, a speed-induced, reader response look at what language or music does; rather than theoretical musing in abstract language theory about meaning or how stylish a language artifact is. They talk about a piece of art as an experience and how it effects them). Postmodernism to me feels like a sort of Rococo dead-end, a big, elaborate stylization of a few old observations. Artists need to say " OK - the mass media corrupts this old Modernist idea of Reality" and move on. People still experience the world in terms of the five senses, in terms of a subconscious (that no one really understands and hopefully never will), and in language. Artists need to turn back to the well of observation, and draw-out prolonged and meticulous observations of where they live, who they live with, and so on, instead of the endless turning around the same tired ideas of Postmodernism and its insistent that language is a closed system. Sure it has that aspect, but language depends on context. A noun is a noun is a noun; and is a reference to a concrete object. I'm influenced by the life I'm leading and a large portion of that life is lived walking on streets, breathing air, drinking water, hiking in mountains, listening to duct fans. And certainly duct fans, streets, and even what I see in the mountains, is influenced by media but the mass media doesn't make me BLIND . And a die-hard Postmodernist would declare it does make me blind because I'm seeing Postmodern objects through mass-media goggles. I would say one of the roles of a regional art would be to wake people up to the place where they now live, clearly and accurately. Phoebe Bosche: bosche@u.washington.edu 12/3/97 Matt, I think you may have a problem with simplicity of ideas. All Stephen Thomas was saying, to my mind, was that all art (small a or large A) is A RTIFICIAL . If you write a poem, paint a picture, create music - that is not "REAL " - as in real life - it is a creation of your mind/imagination/rage, whatever. What has Real got to do with it? Got to do with it? Stephen Thomas: stevent@u.washington.edu 12/4/97 The point is there is no reality without quotes. Here's regionalism: I placed a jar in Tennessee, And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround that hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawl around, no longer wild. the jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a poet in air. It took dominion everywhere. the jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. Uncle Wally "sincerely" S.T. Matt Briggs: Mbriggs@fhcrc.org 12/5/97 Hi Stephen, I understand the no-point. And the point of divorcing a noun from the thing it denotes, to say language is language and not a rose is a rose is a rose, is a jaded cul-de-sac, inhabited now by professional academics, toeing the 1950's ad-man party line that nothing is real and it is all manufactured. If you really believe that, than you are divorcing yourself from any pretense of honesty and saying that because language is an illusion - everything and especially "reality" is an illusion. (When I say the word "stone" it is a noun empowered by its reference to a concrete object that exists in the real world. I do not need to put quotes around the word stone, yet, like reality, the word "stone" explodes with properties given to it by language that only works in the realm of language. But the base line here is that a stone exists in a physical world regardless of human existence. This is reality and it does not need quotes; the observation of this world is the rich source of language - not speculation in the meta-structures of connotation and symbolism and association above it.) If you believe that everything is language and language is an illusion - why write poetry? The true poetry of this line of thought is manufactured by Coca-Cola, short sweet memes like "Coke is It." - the true mantra of our times, right, but I'd love to rip that kind of language into shreds. It's made imbeciles out of every writer in the English language. And victims out of the rest of us. Your quote about regionalism, I agree with, but it doesn't expand or address anything I was talking about. Seattle and the US is/are a victim of provincialism. Although the jar on the hill in the US is growing all of the time, and including and stifling the world more and more every year. It uses this perfect fakeness of language, "Coke Is It." Phoebe Bosche: bosche@u.washington.edu 12/5/97 Matt, are you potty? How many imbeciles have you read lately? How many films made by imbeciles have you seen lately? Well, maybe, something is/has happened to mass media-based language to turn the harried masses into mass consumers, but really I'm neither victim nor imbecile. I don't have a swoop on my hat, and no logos on my underwear. How many cups of coffee have you had this morning? Stephen. Thomas: stevent@u.washington.edu 12/5/97 M.Briggs, you miss the point. It has impaled you and you still miss it. We exist for one another in this buzz of electrons. Speculating about reality and regionalism on the Internet is like looking for Ptolemy's solar system with the Hubble telescope. Reality is a construct. And poems point nowhere. S.T. Matt Briggs: mbriggs@fhcrc.org 12/7/97 One Renton Boy to One Auburn Boy: I'm sorry I haven't been clear. The didacticness of your responses makes me feel like I'm really muddling around trying to get to my point - which I do get, I do understand, and I think anyone who believes that is a victim of this culture and should participate in money making, the true poetry and celebration of that line of thought. > M.Briggs, (you can call me Matt.) you miss the point. It has impaled you and you still miss it. I feel it every time I go to Renton. I feel it every time I drive down I-5. I feel it crossing the top of the Cedar River Water shed, south on the Pacific Crest Trail - passing signs on stumps that read - do not cross into the water shed, restricted access - and see that the water shed has been clear-cut as far as I can see. This is the lie that language doesn't impact the physical world. > We exist for one another in this buzz of electrons. I've never run across you on the Internet, but I run into you all the time in the physical realm. > Speculating about reality and regionalism on the Internet is like looking for Ptolemy's solar system with the Hubble telescope. Reality is a construct. And poems point nowhere. S.T. Egads. Pretty strange. If poems point no-where, then a poet is writing nothing. Get off it. You don't believe that because why would anyone dedicate themselves to writing work with no substance, and to helping others write work with no substance? And your little aphorisms still don't address what I'm taking about. Language, and poetry, and the Internet do not exist like Ptolemy's solar system to the Hubble telescope. They exist like the telephone to the human voice and the human voice exists like the word stone to an actual rock lying in the ground. Marshal McLuhan may have said, "The medium is the message. (And the medium is the massage.)" but he didn't mean that it consumed its content. He tongue-in-cheek overstated his case to stress the importance of the media and its impact on the language. This would be the telephone to the human voice. But when someone uses a telephone they aren't saying "telephone." Noam Chomsky claims that the semantic, structural side to assembling meaning with language is a genetic given BUT it depends on the context of the real world to get its bearings. When I say real world, I mean a world impacting the five senses - one of light and heat, the old one called reality. Thus this relationship of the five senses to language is important and slides down the entire scale of media-to-language relationships. To say that "poems point nowhere" or that language is not rooted in the physical world means you as an individual are giving up power to the Mass Media - and are not exploring and checking the actual world yourself. It's like a shell trick, where the corporate world (who has never pretended that they weren't interested in the real world) is flashing this "fake fake fake" in your eyes while they clear-cut the land, dam the rivers, move labor overseas to places without any human rights by sheer dint of overpopulation and poverty, where strip malls are erected with dizzying speed over the Green River Valley, one of the most fertile spots on the planet. The Internet is a tool. It generates community by the force of its ability to include all forms of communication and the ease and cheapness of getting the information out there. But it doesn't erode existing community. Rather it enforces it. Here in Seattle, those who are writing or pretending to write, and the few people who are willing to facility these folks' delusions and maybe even get some honest to god audience members in there, are a community. The Internet enforces that community. That's what it does. A good book, written by the guy who founded the Seattle Community Network, called "Building Community Networks", discusses how this works. Web sites that aren't nailed down to hard/real world locations drift off into oblivion. Who cares about them? Web sites that are populated by people who can see and talk to one another in the real world blossom and get work done. I would contend that this work, that needs to get done, is to re-attach language to the physical world, so that people can stop being victimized by corporate America's exploitation of the Mass Media; this lie that language doesn't point at reality. Because it does. You have a physical body that eats food that comes from somewhere. And that food has a name and that somewhere has a name. So I'd learn what those are. Matt.
			© The Raven Chronicles 1998