ENGL 7453: Modernism In/And the Archive

One point of overlap between the texts for this week is the image of the black body presented on screen. On pg. 32 in Close Up two screen stills are presented from Samba der Held des Utwalds: one picture of two African lovers and the other a fight scene between rivals (fighting over a woman?). Borderline (1930) features Paul Robeson as Pete, a regular guy who frequents a brothel and is in love with Adah. There is a similar focus in this film on black intimacy and competition between rivals (I would use the word double for Borderline.

The shots from Samba offer primitivist stereotypes for what blackness is—from the African attire (or lack of attire) to the aggressive, violent black male. The captions for the photos want us to understand this movie as “realism”: by using “native actors” the film illustrates “Pudowkin’s theory that realism is best achieved with persons who have never played before.” There is a claim to authenticity made for this film, whether through the race of the actors (“native”) or through their inexperience. The suggestion is that this film gets to the heart of something—the life of Africans and black people? In the context of primitivism, the unmitigated, pre-modern nature of humanity?

As I’m writing this, I’m wondering if I should contrast or compare this page in Close Up to Borderline. Both imagine black intimacy, but the contest/conflict in Borderline is interracial. Both, as well, display imagines of the black body and violence in the struggle for power. Samba seems to lean into the violence. The film still shows Samba with his hands around the throat of his rival, both awkwardly positioned to be open and visible to the camera. Borderline, on the other hand, is more subtle with images of violence and the black body—Adah is first pictured on the floor, suggesting that she is the victim of domestic/sexual violence at the hands of Thorne. The audience doesn’t see the preceding violence, however, only its aftermath. There is also the scene where Pete physical protects/stakes claim over Adah’s body in a confrontation with Thorne. This suggests that Pete is capable and willing to resort to violence, but it doesn’t come to that. Pete, however, is shown in one violent scene as he punches the Joyce-looking guy after he insults Adah (?) (this is happening after the fallout from Thorne killing his wife and it’s not entirely clear how the narratives are connected). Two things fuel the conflict of the film: Paul’s physical and emotional intimacy with Adah and his violence toward the Joyce-looking guy.

Considering the whole of Borderline, Pete’s character is controlled and even-keel throughout. Boring almost, though he is given quite a bit of interiority and emotional depth (the love between him and Adah is convincing, I’d say). This contrasts with the excessive, chaotic violence between Thorne and his wife. And the emotional swings of the white characters, often fueled by racism or sexism. The movie is sympathetic toward Pete, and I think it accurately captures the racial injustice at the time: a white man could be acquitted for murder while a black banished from a town for punching another (the letter from the mayor, as well, speaks to the attitude of the town’s people, suggesting racial violence if he doesn’t comply).  I suppose that Paul Robeson’s image in Borderline counters more typically racist, stereotypical, and primitive images of blackness (such as those in Close Up). But there are lingering questions about a lack of emotional depth and interiority, and agency. Pete contrasts with other characters (Thorne and his wife, for instance) in this way.

I’m struck by how assertive Macpherson is that Borderline, and by extension, the technology of its medium is life (237). He says it in “As Is,” and H.D. in her paean to Macpherson says something similar as well (218). I’m compelled to associate the idea that “Borderline is life” with a platitude like “art imitates life imitates art” and gloss over this clearly-emphasized and highly particular claim. But he’s not saying that art in general is life. And narrative surely isn’t life, considering how he describes Borderline here.  I read the literary materials first, and although I saw Borderline a few years ago in Dr. Drouin’s Modernism & Fascism class, it has more of a traditional plot than I remember it having. A big part of that is due to me reading the text first and then watching the film, but I also want to emphasize how Borderline is constructed by audience members as they do the work of associating sometimes disparate frames. Macpherson describes the film as chaotic, which is a term and concept often juxtaposed with order. If I had some more time I’d want to read about some of Eisenstein’s concepts of the intellectual montage in detail (218) because he seems like the Stirner of videography and photography. Macpherson writes, “I was going to take my film into the minds of the people in it, making it not so much a film of 'mental processes' as to insist on a mental condition” (236). Watching the film, then, is a condition that the audience member creates or is thrown into. In saying his film is life, I feel like Macpherson is speaking just as much to the mechanics and technologies of film production as to the associative patterns of thought that make up human life. It’s in the relation of—the splicing together of—images, events, people, experiences where MacPherson suggests life takes place. But the above quote that antagonizes “processes” in favor of “condition” seems to resist my gut reaction that the relation between frames matters much to Macpherson here.

 

Throughout the semester, my understanding of editorship has been influenced by how I understand the role of a film director, so this week’s texts—with MacPherson as both the editor of Close Up and director of Borderline (among other films)—prove especially captivating. In orchestrating a bunch of different national, racial, philosophical, sexual, critical, etc., viewpoints, whether through film strips or through the organization of print materials in a magazine, the director/editor has to be especially attuned to—an expert at—the ways in which (sometimes vastly) different points of view, images, concepts, etc. affect an individual when placed in a particular order on a page or screen. People in both roles have to intuit how an audience member might narrate the associations between (whether in editorial print matter or film shots) a starfish, followed by a daisy, followed by the night sky. They have to pre-narrate, almost. It's a preface/hypothesis of the way that the "live" narrative will take place in the psyches of audience members.

There is much to think about when it comes to Kenneth MacPherson's Borderline, a silent film about an affair and interracial relationships. The most informal and delineated of these thoughts is the obvious: what was even happening? Perhaps it was the nature of movies and film today; I've never seen a silent film, and this was a weird silent film to start with. It took nearly an hour of me puzzling my thoughts together until I came to something of a conclusion--and even then, I'm still not entirely sure. However, this brings me to my next point: surrealism. Since we're still talking about surrealism this week, I thought about how surrealism worked within the movie to make it several things that perhaps did not belong in conjunction but worked to make some kind of whole. The flashing scenes between body parts--as Lily's post points out, the hands particularly, though also shots that focused on more intimate body parts as well--and people in different rooms was particularly off-putting. Almost so much so that the story of an interracial couple in a 1930 silent film is almost forgotten--at least until characters make racial slurs that remind the audience what the focus of the film is. In fact, the film's use of the body and use of racial tension really isn't all the disconnected as it might seem. The threat of violence seems to underline several scenes, followed by a clenched fist or actual violence between characters (such as with the White married couple, who are violent with each other throughout the film). Interestingly enough, the murder of the white woman is the clearest moment the movie has, if only because the woman's husband is not as unwelcomed in the hotel as Pete, the Black husband who has been cheated on. In this scene, it becomes clear how skewed the movie views society, that a White murderer seems less threatening than a Black man. 

Other than that, I'm curious as to how surrealists viewed women in context with their movement. The sources we had read for surrealism mentioned little of the women artists of that time period, and in the two surrealist films we have watched, women seem to be the "causation" behind psychological breaks from reality. And if my own thoughts seem a little scattered tonight, then perhaps it is only in reaction to surrealism itself: the things that probably shouldn't go together making some sort of cohesive whole.

In Borderline (1930), the camera often lingers on certain resounding images, but prolonged eye contact and hand gestures/motions seem to be doing the most work. While it was necessary sometimes to hold onto these images longer than usual, since audiences could not hear characters express themselves, there is something overtly violent, emotional, and even sensual about the utilization of hands in Borderline. 

I asked myself, and am still asking myself, why hands? Is it because they could be seen as a separate member acting on their own accord before the conscious mind can take control? Is it because hands create and erase? Give and take away life? Perhaps it boils down to simple anatomical expressiveness and the multitudes contained therein. Hands pull, press, shove, punch, pinch, slap, feel. Life flows through them, evident in the veins that swell to the surface.

The vast capabilities of hands are unsettling, to tell the truth. What can caress at one moment can kill the next, and Borderline puts this duality on display. At 21:23, the old woman is pointing her lanky finger while expressing a troubling sentiment: "If I had my way, not one ***** would be allowed in the country!" Seconds later, the barmaid outstretches her hand and firmly tells the old woman to cut it out. Things get awkward, and the barmaid bites her forefinger, almost as if it was her feeble attempt to hold her tongue.

Another example of the characterization of hands comes not long after the bar scene when Pete comes home to Adah and lights the furnace for her with a smile on his face. When Adah presumably tells him about her affair (and I say presumably because this scene and the following confrontation scene were a bit ambiguous and hard to discern to me in terms of the sequence of events), we see his hands change before we see it on his face (25:17). For a moment, Pete's hand goes from relaxed to slightly clenched, from helpful to hurt. Mere seconds later, Pete's hands ball into a fist. Anger accompanies hurt. Or perhaps, it was a sign of garnering strength to oversee Adah's adultery. 

Another example occurs roughly around 38:00 when Thorne adoringly pets a cat. Exactly 10 minutes later, Thorne wields the knife that takes Astrid's life, and in between, there's so much being portrayed by the use and placement of hands.

There's more before, after, and in between the few examples I listed above, but that's all I got in me for now. I thought it was a cool technique, and I wondered how often and whether or not this dichotomy was implemented in other silent surrealist films. 

What a scary time to be alive! The writer/journalist of this article was a very brave woman. Bryher was warning people of the turmoil in Germany long before it started invading other countries. The beginnings of the Nazis and the Brown Shirts were under way, with any political dissention being met with beatings or murder. The imagery she invokes is chilling, from oblivious tourists unaware of a bloody end from a dissident a few streets away, to the rising tension in the cities. While there were those who took advantage of Jews during this time and stole their property or sold them out to Nazis, I will always give thanks for those who tried to save them at the cost of their own lives. I have heard of the term ‘Jew lover’ before, and at that time it stained the reputation of any who tried to help or have sympathy for their plight. Hitler did his best to fan the flames of hatred and jealousy of Jews, other minorities, and the disabled.

Thankfully, there were people like Bryher who saw through this and tried to fight back in their own way by denouncing fascism. To appreciate and preserve all cultures, rather than burning and destroying books and other facets of religions, beliefs, etc. would be the exact opposite of what the Nazis wanted. Any ideology that must destroy others to prop themselves up is fundamentally flawed and needs to be shunned. Bryher was one of the people at ground zero of the beginning of the tragedy and bloody mess that would herald World War II. While massacres of Jews had taken place before, no one could have guessed where it would lead to even when concentration camps were being built. I found that Bryher helped over a hundred Jews escape from Nazi occupied Germany, and hope she will always be remembered for her contributions in the fight against this horrible ideology. 

“In Company (Surrealist text)” is like some dreamed hero’s journey. It begins from deep despair for which mourning is insufficient, and it ends after the beheading (but not killing?) of all of “this” that lives: “this patient insect body, this loving bird body, this loyal mammiferous body, and this lean and vain body of the beast of my childhood” (113). Then again, it is unclear to me whether “all this [that] lives” has to have its head die, or if Eluard intends to refer only to who I assume, thanks to Freud, to be the head of his father. The list-like organization of these different animal kingdoms acts as a vehicle to survey various natural virtues/morals—patience, love, loyalty—ultimately to culminate in the vanity and beastliness of childhood, the father figure. The shift from moral wording to immoral wording in this passage comes when human concepts like childhood are introduced. The speaker travels from the despair and the pangs of individuality to the isolating yet communicatory aspects of language and thought, up toward the hope of virtue in nature.

That said, nature gets a good rap in these few lines, while the individual, identity, and culture are disillusioned: “My face understands me no longer. And there are no others.” I wonder how (if at all) Eluard’s indication that nature is patient, loving, loyal connects to the art that was in vogue with the Prussian aristocracy—the residual romanticism of the German establishment that more avant-garde movements antagonized. By contrast to propagandized, national romanticism, Eluard’s romantic undertones in 1927 appear to address individuals regardless of nationality. It feels like Eluard wants to suggest that we each dream up illusions that set us up to disillusion ourselves. This a-nationality also mirrors the pluralistic aims of dada.

While surrealism is one of my favorite art movements due to the bold techniques used and expressions/meanings conveyed, I cannot say the same about the surrealist literary movement though I do concede that it was an important movement within literature. I think the main reason that I enjoy the art movement more is due to the fact that I can see what the artist has done and draw semi-accurate interpretations of the meaning from looking at it, whereas I find surrealist literature to be difficult to follow or find meaning in and perhaps that is the entire purpose of surrealist literature. Moffat, Cramer, and Grant all three discuss Freud’s impact on surrealism but seem to focus more on the art that came of the period rather than the literature. It is only in Breton’s “Manifesto of Surrealism” that a clearer idea of how this translates into literature is presented with his definition of surrealism:

               Psychic automatism in its pure state, by which one proposes to express – verbally, by means of the written word, or in any other manner – the actual functioning of thought. Dictated by the thought, in the absence of any control exercised by reason, exempt from any aesthetic or moral concern. … Surrealism is based on the belief in the superior reality of certain forms of previously neglected associations, in the omnipotence of dream, in the disinterested play of thought. It tends to ruin once and for all all other psychic mechanisms and to substitute itself for them in solving all the principle problems of life.

This definition/encyclopedia entry tells the readers of the manifesto that surrealism, in any form of communication, is the expression of thought without reason and is exempt from aesthetic and moral concerns. The lack of aesthetic purpose is noticeable in “Continuation of a Work in Progress” by James Joyce (later titled Finnigan’s Wake). The chapter of the work within “transition” no. 2 shows what Joyce was doing throughout the entire piece – playing with the spelling, grammar, and meanings of words to see if his work would then have discernable meaning behind it without those guidelines. I have not read the full work, so I am unable to say if that is the case, however I can appreciate that he what he was trying to do even if I personally do not enjoy the piece.

Similar to Jamie’s post on surrealist eyes, I noticed the recurring imagery of the sky in surrealist poetry and art. In In Transition no. 2, the sky takes up space both physically in the paintings and metaphysically in the mind. The sky is hard (142), pink (129), and water-like (126). The sky is predictable, but also autonomous: “Across the world the clouds go riding, / green through the forests / flows their light” (9-11.145)  vs. “All the bridges are hewn down, the sky will pass there no more” (15.114). It’s mystifying, it grants “physical liberty” to its subjects. It is expansive, and for all we know, it contains limitless possibilities, and while we cannot reach it, we can draw it, paint it, capture it in a moment, and use it to describe the vastness of something we do not fully understand (“the sky of love”)(11.116). 

The treatment of the sky in surrealist poetry is reminiscent of the treatment of nature in pastoral poetry. Pastoral poems, plays, and literature all resisted the constraints of modern life and work and reached beyond for a more tranquil mode of existence. These types of poems could deal with all kinds of issues ranging from love to mourning, to politics, to longing, and critique society through a green world lens. I think that the surrealist poems do something similar. Beyond the fixation on the sky, the poets are fixated on constellations, seasons, the sea, trees, wind, meadows, and gardens. 

The poems are very introspective at times, like the way “From Phantasus” contemplates a past life from long ago or “Evening Song” takes its subject through the subconscious of falling asleep. All this to say is I wonder how influenced, if at all, by the pastoral movement surrealist poets were. Perhaps it has less to do with pastoralism in Renaissance or Victorian England and more to do with the grim effects of industrialism and post-war rebuilding. In surrealist poetry, the sky is a portal, the meadows are an escape, but the brokenness and the staggering juxtaposition of reality still loom large.

For this week, I’m trying to piece together the argument between Lewis in "The Diabolical Principle" and the writers featured in transition (mainly Paul and Jolas). As first, I thought I was seeing infighting between two different, yet very related art movements: Surrealism and Vorticism. The more I read Lewis, though, the more I realized how diametrically opposed Lewis was to the concepts of Surrealism.

In many ways, his opposition was an argument about origins. The first way this appears in when Lewis challenges the assumption Paul makes about a humanistic lineage of thought/art. Paul cites several Russian writers who exhibit humanist tendencies; Lewis responds by suggesting that nihilism was the overriding idea for those writers (or, at least, that it was central to their work) (63). Since Darwin, Lewis argues, “men have doubted the Christian premises and tended to regard themselves as animals rather than ‘humanists,’ and ever since the French Revolution they have dreamed spasmodically of universal armed proletarian revolt to put back a bit of the jungle where it was badly needed in the centre of the artifices of very imperfectly humane life” (63). The nihilistic, aggressive, contradictory posture Lewis assumes is, by his logic, more in line with those thinkers, more natural perhaps and thus closer to our origins as humans which is as animals (?). Paul, Eluard, and Breton desire the lost humanism that modern life has corrupted or repressed—captured by Breton’s assertion: “Childhood that comes closest to one’s ‘real life’… childhood where everything nevertheless conspires to bring about the effective, risk-free possession of oneself.” Lewis, on the other hand, embraces a more cynical understanding of man’s natural state.

According to Lewis, what modern life has done is make people into child, infants, dulled and “idiotic” products of modernity. The disagreement between Lewis and the authors in transition can be captured in the valuing of childhood and child-like states of being. The surrealists want to return to a child-like state of understanding the world (this is the super-reality blending of dream and the real world [I think]). Lewis takes issue with this for two reasons: 1. Such a mindset reduces the status of art to the mundane, profane, since everyone can produce art because everyone has an automated state of thought, everyone can free associate and 2. There isn’t a clear distinction between Surrealist, child-like art and art that is complex and worthy of serious consideration. In this slippery space, art can be coopted by corporate and political interests (and is currently being coopted by Communists, according to Lewis). And as art is coopted, it loses its meaning and its ability to inspire revolutionary thought. It becomes an opiate that reduces the masses to an infantile, child-like state. Or, perhaps more accurately, it deigns to the level of the masses to be comprehensible, accessible. It is thus sullied, “rendered ineffective” in its potential. The image of the child is the image of the masses for Lewis, something that is a dangerous threat to the art world.

Oswald Spengler's definition of Nihilism as "the desouling of the human being" (31, The Enemy no. 3 1929), caused me to see new and possibly abstract connections to the imagery of Surrealism. "Before reading The Enemy for this week, I had associated Surrealism only with dream-like psychoanalytic associations of the mind that are made legible through art. These are major aspects and inspiration for the Surrealism art movement, (Moffat and MacNevin, "The Origins of Surrealism)", but I was not aware that violence was an underlying component of Surrealism. From my reading of Wyndham Lewis's article "The New Romanticism'= New Nihilism'' (30), there seems to be a connection between Nihilism to the creation of Surrealist art that connects to violence that is based on the state of the world at the time of Surrealism's creation in the 1920s in Europe with its nucleus in Paris ("The Origins of Surrealism"), to the justified creation of an artistic violence. Charles Moffat and Suzanne MacNevin define Surrealism as "Psychic automatism in its pure state by which we propose to express- verbally, in writing, or in any other manner- the real process of thought" ("The Origins of Surrealism"). The violence the world was experiencing seemed to justify the creation of artistic violence that spurred the proliferation of an uber-violent spirit according to Lewis's take on Spengler. Surrealist art created the mood of the world at the time, one that was plunging towards "the strictly inhuman or rather anti-human vindictiveness that makes possible the massacres the various contemporary Revolutions, is a "nihilism": it has to credit a holocaust. But substantially it is the same as the demented doctrine of universal destruction which Dostoieffski despairingly observed, and put on record with such clairvoyance" (The Enemy (2) Paul's own account of his "new nihilism", 32).  I still don't see the violence within Surrealism in its traditional forms as I did in Vorticism, Futurism, and Dadaism. But, I do notice elements of violence in the dreamscape nature of the art itself. There is something violent about the way that fish heads replace human heads and the placing of animal heads on human bodies; the contradiction of the two objects produces a disturbing incongruence of objects that is violent to me. Also, the space left in the surrealist images in relation to the objects/ people in the images seemed violent to me. The overall disorder and dis conjunction of opposing objects, and the placement of objects, created a feeling of uneasiness. 

Dada both as a word and as an art movement consists of building blocks of fragmented parts (elements specifically speaking to art) to create a new, and different reality. This process of building is similar to the process of learning language that at its elemental stage, involves putting sounds and words together that don't necessarily make sense, but somehow they fit together. This linguistic process is the overarching metaphor surrounding the creation of Dada. Dada emerged amid the brutality of World War 1 (1914-1918). The war confirmed the degradation of social structures that led to the horrific violence that the war produced. Dada essentially represents the chaos of the post-World War 1 world, and the breakdown of human nature. This movement, like many of the art movements we have studied this semester, imitate the conditions of life they are created in. The past notions of a universal rationality or truth had been blown away by the mechanization of the war. As a result, a new, different, ambiguous, and fragmented world had emerged, and it had to be approached differently. Dada challenged its followers to think about art in a different way. In the same way that the world was forced by dire circumstances, to think not only about the world but, also their lives in a different way. Dada is is the channeling of all the nonsensical, unexplainable, existences, situations, etc. that make up our everyday lives into a movement that instead of trying to change (to clean up) this chaos, embraces it, even celebrates it as the only normal. If any kind of normal exists. 

Modernist writing, by design or by subconscious impulse, includes the body as a frequent feature. In previous journals, there was a focus on hands, usually referred to by their color and size (here in this issue, actually, one instance refers to “broad hands, palms black with pitch and hairy backs” (24)). In transition 1927, the surrealist literary journal, it is not hands as much (although they are mentioned 31 times) but eyes that feature—or rather doesn’t feature. In this one issue, eyes are brought up 57 times. Eyes reveal interiority. For instance, eyes “round and black…they had realized the true character of this mild demagogue” (37); eyes that “filled with tears and highlights, and waves of strange emotion had rocked her and transported her from one to another” (40); “their eyes pierce the night, greedily and restlessly” (46); “eyes lie at a distance, and the pupil is misty, immovably grey” (70). In these examples, eyes themselves drive the perception of character, which, in turn, drives the action out of reaction. Art, too, betrays itself of the subconscious anxiety about eyes in avoiding them. Take, for example, the pieces on page 111 and 112. On 111, Jeunes Filles en des Belles Poses, or young girls in beautiful poses, what we see are the backs of two young girls, their legs, butts, and backs, but we do not see their faces. One of them doesn’t even have a head. The man, who appears either to be praising them or soon to slap an ass with an upraised hand, is drawn in a different form—a skeleton sketch rather than a true likeness—has a jawline, a left arm upright like the girls, and a mouth, but his eyes fade into nothingness. In “Painting,” on page 112, the woman in the painting, other than a somewhat oddly-shaped hand, could almost be described as normal, other than the giant fish covering her face. The animals on the triangle beside her are also eyeless, except for one lion who faces away and has one black void for an eye. Although surrealism is an attempt at the subconscious mind, the sides of the brain still function within their roles. Language and writing process through the left side of the brain, whereas painting would process through the creative right side of the brain. What this suggests is that the left side of the brain that can write about eyes and describe them carefully enough to communicate, while the right side of the mind may be avoidant of eyes and, in that avoidance, communicate similar ideas that the left does with words. Does not a woman with a fish over her suggest a woman whose “eyes lie at a distance” (112; 46).  

One of the things that I really enjoy about DADA is how out there the art movements of the time were. The image used for "DADA: The Art History Archive - Art Movements" page shows how DADA did not fit just a single (if any) art style. In fact, as long as the you made something that tied into what was going on around the world at the time, but in an almost absurd way, it could be considered DADA. This is all seen in the fact that "DADA" was picked at random, a French word meaning "hobbyhorse" (The Art History Archive) and Russian for "yes, yes" (MOMA). 

Due to this, I found it really interesting to look at the differences between "Dada" (July 1917) and "Entretiens" (August 1893). "Entretiens" was published before the DADA movement ever became a blip on anyone's radar, and as such there is a higher focus on the text itself. In fact, in this particular issue there is not a single photo or piece of artwork, and instead reads more like a short novel (even though the texts are from different authors and on different subjects). "Entretiens" was a magazine that was meant to get people to think about the information being presented solely through text. In comparision, the first issue of "Dada" is twenty-two pages long (including the cover pages) with  eight images throughout, an one on the very front cover. The visual artwork of the DADA period held as much importance to what was being discussed as the written or performed artwork. I would also like to point out that even though Wyndham Lewis was making artwork during the Vorticism movement, there are moments when I can see the Vorticism influence on DADA, which makes sense as Vorticism was active during 1914 and 1915. The images on pages five, eleven, and thirteen of "Dada" especially remind me of Vorticism. 

A few years back I had a piece of mine accepted into a neo-dadaist magazine called Maintenant published by a New York Press called Three Rooms Press. It was one of the first poems I wrote during my MFA, and I wanted to offload it on whatever magazine would have it. The poem, pasted below, was a Pynchonian mess: the kind of poem someone would write out of general protest after moving to the only MFA program that would take them: a small liberal arts school in Milledgeville, GA (where Flannery O’Connor wrote her stories of apocalypse, violence, and greed). I’m not sure if it’s Dada. I’m not sure if the editors at Three Rooms did either. There’s a touch of cosmopolitan anxiety, a threat of violence, maybe. Maybe that’s the Dada element they saw. The poem was, to me, about all the humiliating ways people try to be different. The poem’s nightmarish apartment building is a kind of thought experiment about what walking away from neo-liberalism might look like: a guy fussing with his toilet lid.

There was a Zoom reading for all the contributors. Thurston Moore of Sonic Youth was published in the same issue, but he didn’t come. Dressed up in their little digital square, the editors looked ridiculous. They had put streamers in their hair, and they blew on kazoos from time to time. They made little jokes after each reader. They asked me what my favorite Italian food was, when they pronounced my last name. One old man sang his poem. One reader read ten minutes over time. The editors blew their kazoos and told him it was over. He went to long. It was time for someone else. Their face turned read, and they left. Another reader enlisted all his friends to dance his poem. It was embarrassing. The editors knew it. That’s why they dressed funny, as if to tell you they had no part in any of this. Everyone else was embarrassing. They only dressed so.  They asked me what my favorite Italian food was, when they pronounced my last name. I read my poem and hung up.

I’m not sure who was more Dada. The contributors for their withering irony, Thurston Moore for just not showing up, or the old man singing his bad poem a capella. The Dada manifesto is like any other modernist manifesto. The art is in the telling; not the doing. Most of the actual Dada is cuter than it is subversive—a silly joke played at the expense of the believers—a very sad grad student writing poems to a few kazoo playing editors who just don’t give a shit.

 

NOISE

There’s something wrong with Mr. Bradddworth,

the new gray tenant.

He’s freakishly tall and skinny

and frayed at both ends,

like a ribbon unwoven

deliberately over time.

It’s not just me.

We tenants heard from up there

these big bangs followed by

these littler bangs,

like a super-ball bouncing

against our teeth,

and we’ve spilt beer

over this all night

in agony.

He showed up last month

with a bag

(one bag)

and hasn’t left his room—

401A, building C.

And the landlord,

born without legs

enough to climb his own stairs,

is spilt beer.

So we go up there,

all of us tenants,

and knock on Bradddworth’s door.

And Miss Silverstein

(with a 5 for both S’s)

brought her spider,

in a glass jar.

Mi55 5ilver5tein smartly

punched holes in the lid.

Mi55e5 5pider’s beer is spilt.

And ‘Ugly’ Derrick ‘Jimmy’ Malloy,

whose pimple scars

look like tattoos in the right light,

is jimmying the lock,

which makes, itself, quiet little bangs.

My brain is a drum,

or a piece of tight cloth.

With the door unlocked,

we rush in,

spilling beer,

and there’s no furniture

save the GOOD VIBES!

poster in the corner of the room,

latticed by the sun, which is

caught in the novelty animal print blinds,

and a TV, blue between inputs.

There’s something wrong with Mr. Bradddworth,

standing at his spotlessly

clean toilet,

lifting

and dropping

the lid,

over and          over and          over and.

It’s the sound of a can opening—

its gas shooting out of the red ears

of Bradddworth’s

big, empty head, which

Mi55 5ilver5tein says

we ought to split

under the lid.