#but this is a post about not forcing ourselves into arbitrary literary conventions so I think it doesn’t detract from the reblog chain

[doctor-peggy]

Once my high school has a famous author speak to students and other people (probably parents) while he was on a book tour. I attended because my English teacher let me and I got to skip part of class (if she ever reads this: I’m sorry. I know you’re on tumblr. Please don’t be mad at me.)

Anyway I didn’t particularly like his writing to start with, so my expectations were low… but I really would have skipped the talk for my actual English class if I had known that I would come out of it with nothing useful.

Specifically, the part that drove me absolutely nuts is that when someone asked about how to get better at writing or get published or something, he said nothing of how to explore your own writing and gain useful skills that help you express yourself better. Nor did he say anything about the nature of the publishing industry. He pretty much says “if you can’t get it right on your first try, give up while you’re ahead. telling stories is not for everyone, and writing skill is innate and immutable. you either have it or you don’t.”

I really should have walked out then to prove a point.

Typically I don’t end up engaging with communities who place disproportionate value in a specific style of written expression, and who claim that other forms of writing are less important or valid. It’s not that I avoid it, but more just that I don’t end up in those kinds of spaces one way or another.

I still think studying writing is useful and important. I learned a lot about how I can use language to my advantage when trying to express what’s in my brain exactly the way I wanted it to come across. I can and have used literary techniques I learned about in my silly little fluff/humour fanfics because many of them, beyond the stuffy technical terms, are just ways to direct a reader’s attention to evoke certain feelings or ideas.

But it’s important to remember that there is a point where studying writing ends and gatekeeping writing starts. And it’s not necessarily a point that’s hard to notice. I know that I will be studying some limited amount of writing in the near future and it will be entirely the result of privilege. And when I inevitably analyse writing, I would like to not forget that the writing I am studying is not more valuable than the 100k+ word slowburn texting au fanfic that I once read. Which I am specifically referencing because I didn’t bookmark it on ao3 and now I’m looking for it. Which is somewhat unrelated. Anyway.

It sucks that we even choose to assign social value to a certain type of writing over other types of writing. And it’s incredibly frustrating to me that this has distanced people from writing. I hardly know how to work through that kind of disillusionment… but I do sincerely hope that writing doesn’t have to keep being hard and painful for you forever. A form of self-expression that imposes arbitrary rules about its usage is no longer a form self-expression.

Also to that one author who spoke at my high school… fuck you.

I've been able to neither read nor write stories in a long time. Poetry too, for the most part. I guess what I mean is that the art of the written word has become a stranger to me.

I hate what poetry classes did to my writing. Yes, the Wikipedia poems, but they are easier because they're not my own words, and I have gotten so many comments on those saying they are powerful pieces of art, but for me personally they're a way of hiding from the awfulness of trying to assemble my own words into poetry.

I hate the poems I wrote in poetry classes. I hate the version of me I showed others in those classes. I hate the way poetry classes taught me to draw from my own experiences and thoughts for poetry. I hate everything I learned about how to interpret poetry, the eye with which I learned to read poetry, and the vocabulary I learned to talk about poetry, and ultimately, I hate "literary" poetry.

"Literary," by the way, is the category of art that has more meaning, value and legitimacy than the "other" category, which is not "literary." A "literary" poem is published in special, fancy "literary" magazines and almost invariably written by a person with a MFA or PhD in poetry.

You could say that the distinguishing feature of "literary" art is its overwhelming sense of legitimacy. A "literary" poem is a poem in the same way that a nonprofit organization is charitable, that a CEO is rich, or that an SAT score demonstrates your academic prowess. It is a poem completely immune to the possibility that someone will think it sucks. It expects to be absorbed, analyzed, studied, and discoursed upon because something feels "official" about whatever designates it as Good Art.

Literary poems are not only written by and for a special subset of people that have been formally taught to read and interpret poetry, they are written exclusively for audiences that will automatically assume they are Good Art; beautiful, meaningful, and worth interpreting. Because of this, most literary poems are literal incomprehensible nonsense.

Just take this one:

Say I climb the ladder of wheat/and at the top there is a faucet dripping beads of water/but the water takes a year to turn into an eagle/and the sky's forty-three shades of gray pierce/the first inflection of my heart, the point where the signals/throw grass into the river. Say the river sags/and the horizon sucks the lance out of the ghost's hands/like the moment of being born, the point where a shadow's/tongue slides through the faultline./Grace. Sunlight, cherries.

(it continues like this)

And conceptually, I love art as collaboration between the creator and viewer, where abstract, indeterminate and murky things are forced to take shape through the participation of the viewer as they interpret and associate things that stand out to them in the work! The "aliveness" of art in the abyss between what the artist attempts to communicate and what the viewer feels is the coolest thing to me!

But this philosophy of art is incompatible with the idea that there is an elite category of art that is worthy of interpretation, analysis, and reverence. I can fuck around with this random word generator and get something that is roughly as meaningful as the above. I don't mean that as demeaning to the poem, I mean that I feel demeaned by the poem, because its linguistic play and experimentation is something that everybody can do, that everyone should try doing, but this poem has been designated as something exceptionally meaningful and worthy and its writer teaches writing at the University of Chicago. You can click through that website for hours and not find a single soul without a MFA or above in poetry or creative writing.

For me, the world of "literary" writing was like a room with a splatter of vomit across the floor that no one else would acknowledge. The ability to formally study poetry in college was a privilege, but I was constantly aware of privilege, and the thing about privilege is the more you have, the less you think about it. What of the ability to pursue a PhD in poetry? What small fraction of people could expend so much time and money on something that didn't really have a career associated with it? And of that fraction, which fraction would be seen as "good enough" to publish poetry books and to teach? With poetry this indeterminate, how were the "good" poets selected at all?

Literary writing excludes poor people, and the existence of published literary poets who are immigrants or minorities doesn't negate this. Increasingly, published writing in general excludes poor people. A LOT of popular authors graduated from very elite schools!

But literary poetry I hate especially, because it puffs itself up on unlocking the universe and human experience and pain, as if insight into those things is a seldom-appearing gift instead of something many people have, except they don't have the time and money to train themselves into expressing it in a way that appears Literary.

The "literary" vs. "non-literary" paradigm had an inescapable rottenness to it. I couldn't stop thinking about the luminous conversations I'd had with people who lacked the formal training to express ideas in a "literary" manner, but still showed me something vital about the universe.

I've been bitching about literary poetry for like two years now, and really, I just hate what studying all that shit has done to my own writing style. It's so frustrating that the joy and playfulness won't come back.

[bruceeves]

“Work # 950: From Birth to (Near) Death and Back Again -- In Four Parts”

The fluidity of power – the idea that authority can be both effectively enforced from afar as well as allowed to fester quietly within – is a proposition that has been explored in much of my work over the course of my career. While the task at hand is to address the issue of “risk”, I’ve chosen to tackle this question by greatly expanding upon an artist’s statement accompanying four works that were presented together at the Robert Kananaj Gallery during the summer of 2015 to celebrate its fourth anniversary. These works were created over the past five years – from the birth of a culture-defining method of social control with centuries-long ramifications, to the acceptance over a brief period of time the tyranny of aging (along with tangents about the death of the avant-garde and the trouble with selfies) this further elaboration and close reading of the four works at the centre of this discussion both explore and expose the political, psychological, and emotional implications of power dynamics from the macro (on a societal level) to the micro (on a cellular level). This closer examination reveals a continuity of spirit and an intellectual engagement supplemented by real-world (as opposed to art-world) experience firmly grounded in art history.

1

As a work of literary fiction, the first five books of the Old Testament (Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, Deuteronomy) may provide a gripping narrative, but in 1604 when James I commissioned a translation from Hebrew and Aramaic to consolidate regal authority his intent was never to lay out the blueprint for an equitable society, but was to produce an officially sanctioned standardized document to regulate daily life as well as act as a blunt force weapon entitling the sovereign the power to supersede the rule of law. By allegedly relying on the services of the leading literary lions of the day (Shakespeare et al) to gussy up an otherwise dry narrative, the King’s political mission reached fruition. “Work # 808: Leviticus (Updated)” is the first in a series of large scale conceptually-driven photo-based works begun in 2010 after suffering a crisis of faith that the future viability of art was something other than that of a diversionary caprice for the so-called one percent. A crisis actualized by the seemingly near-universal desire to kowtow to the limitless demands for the familiar and the safe and the conventional; a crisis triggered by the despair of witnessing in the late 1970s what little remained of the historical avant-garde devolve into a morass of triviality and disposable mass entertainment. To swipe a couple of lines from Michel Houellebecq  “at this stage we don’t give a damn about the reviews. It’s no longer there that the real decisions are made, [and] we’re at the point where success in market terms justifies and validates anything, replacing all the theories.”  (I have my own theory about the late ‘70s collapse – having been a part of it – but that is fodder for a separate discussion.) We’ve reached a point in which an increasingly public debate (Bürger, Danto, Foster, Vargas Llosa et al) questions whether art even continues to exist. From Manet forward to the beginning of the Reagan/Thatcher/Mulroney era artists willfully maintained an antagonistic relationship with their patrons. And while every art student makes an unspoken pact with the notion of capitalist consumption, any engagement with or against the marketplace is a situation fraught with peril. I can think of no significant time during that century and a half before the late ‘70s when artists were willing and eager to service the slumming diversions of the well-heeled as today. The death of innovation that followed the avant-garde’s collapse saw the advent of post-this and neo-that. It’s not for nothing that “In the Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century” (MIT Press, 1996) Hal Foster dismissed the “neo-s” as the “necro-s”.

  With “Work # 808: Leviticus (Updated)” the idea was to hit the reset button and return to the beginning. Relying upon David Plotz’s exceedingly witty and acerbic “Good Book” (HarperCollins, 2009) as my guide, my “Bible for Dummies”, my “Coles Notes for Scripture”, allowed me to approach the inherent foreignness of these foundational texts as raw material and to respond to and contemporize a work introduced to the world by King James by reducing the words he authorized to their visual essence.

   “Work # 808: Leviticus (Updated)” is enormous. It consists of a 228.6x304.8 cm (90”x120”) photograph of a drought-stricken riverbed chopped up into a framed grid of nine 76.2x101.6 cm (30”x40”) panels randomly covered with the word ‘no’ repeated twenty-four times. The source material’s narrative was intended as an instrument of rigid social control through behaviour modification and took the form of an exhaustive litany of prohibitions combining the ludicrous and the lethal (from the sumptuary to the sexual). My visual rendition of the document takes it’s laundry list of diktats and offers them up as a series of tiny but emphatic, foot-stamping no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no’s sprinkled like seeds across a desiccated landscape that will never allow anything ever to grow. Leviticus was the book that fun forgot; it’s only value has been to allow generations of sanctimonious hypocrites the free rein to pick and choose their weapons of mass bullying. And like the book, the artwork that dares to speak its name is heavy and dour and negative, hung so low to the floor that it becomes an all-powerful, all-enveloping vehicle of oppression.

2

Accepting as its personal saviour the guiding spirit of “Salò: 120 Nights of Sodom” – Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 enumeration of abuse of power, corruption, sadism, sexual perversity, and fascism – “Work # 864: The Nature of God” (2013) is one work from a series that explores the outer limits of masculine behaviour – a behaviour that is traditionally still expected from the boy before he is considered to be fully a man. While I have long delved into the question of the "gay sensibility", this is neither a trip down memory lane nor a retreat into the stereotyped suck-and-fuck paradigm. I'm positioning myself as an ironic spectator of this world of men ripped from the daily headlines where the 19th century notion of a romantic friendship is kicked into the gutter. With titles like “Trailer Trash Terrorism”, “Behave Work Obey”, “Yes I Will Yes”, “Cell Block Bitch”, “Ash(And)Tray”, and “Shhh . . . (How to Conduct a Successful Interrogation – Lessons 1-20)” this is not a series of works intended for the faint of heart.

  Cherry-picking at will from mutually exclusive sources - the morning headlines, the official record of 20th century art, the signs and signifiers of the gay male underground – has allowed me to explore the spaces between these charged relationships. What I do with this series is the opposite of aestheticize the gleaming muscleboy or explore the romanticism of male bonding. It is old news that the male body continues to be a provocation; ironically, a critique of masculinity has gone largely unexplored. Herein lies the challenge: it furthers the proposition examined in much of my work that it should be possible to be simultaneously hot and sweaty and critical and detached. It is desirable – even exhilarating – to question the givens of our cultural baggage while at the same time allowing ourselves to be wrapped in its brawny arms.

  Work # 864: The Nature of God” allows that the rigour of discipline often morphs into the disciplinarian running amok. Notwithstanding the fact that this work has been described as ‘the water-boarding piece’(which is an interpretation that I don’t dismiss), it is a multi-image cum-soaked force-feeding enacting either the predetermined choreography of an arcane sexual ritual or the resolution of cold-blooded revenge. That’s up for you to decide; it’s September and (reform) school is now in session.  

3

The seven rows of deceptively random, densely packed, brightly coloured and seemingly arbitrary numbers that completely fill the 76.2x101.6 cm (30”x40”) picture elude easy interpretation. The clue to unlocking the meaning of this secret code is somewhat revealed by the presence of “Untitled Self-Portrait #49 (Nine Readings)” along the bottom edge of the image. With study the apparent randomness resolves into a series of dates and medical readouts, and carnival-coloured though it may be and written in the language of numbers that only cardiologists would love at first sight, it is a work perhaps at its most personal and exposed because it addresses my own mortality.

  As a darkly witty attempt at wresting control away from the terrors of aging, “Work # 842: Untitled Self-Portrait # 49 (Nine Blood Pressure Readings) Old/Sick #01” (2012) is a work that grudgingly acknowledges my being granted a visa to enter the Republic of Oldmanland. After being diagnosed with a heart condition that required a surgically-implanted stent to open a dangerously blocked artery close to my heart, and thus narrowly avoiding a probable fatal cardiac event, a six-month stint in cardio rehab was mandated. It’s not without a sense of irony that the author of this self-portrait fails to appear in any recognizable form. (A target blood-pressure reading should be anything below 140/90. During the period when this piece was being put together the high point, so to speak, was 181/114. This was moving into stroke territory.) At the most recent annual meeting with my cardiologist there was no mention of me as a person but the evaluation was based entirely on my numbers. All of my numbers were below the desired targets. My electrocardiogram numbers looking good; my blood pressure numbers look good; my heart rate numbers look good; my cholesterol numbers looked good . . . With only having to rely upon minimal medications and lots of walking and a decent diet I’ve been given a clean (if slightly diminished) bill of health; so there.

  There’s obviously a difference between quiet introspection and narcissistic self-admiration, between mindfulness and histrionics, between documenting an experience after the fact and being the experience itself. There’s something charming about the humbled expressions on the faces of tourists posed in front of a wonder of the natural or built world that moved them to such a degree that total strangers were asked to document the memory of what they just witnessed compared with the more than too many sensitivity-challenged grinning idiots in front of a death camp episodes. Every moment, every experience, is reduced to having the same value as every other moment and experience. There’s something desperate and needy, something deeply anti-intellectual about not understanding the importance of an insightful experience because it’s been clouded by auto-infatuation. Karl Ove Knausgaard states that “only a poet would see the difference between poetry and poetry that resembles poetry [and] you were constantly on the verge of the insight that what you were doing actually had no value.” A quick search of Google for answers to “why I hate selfies” produced 6,090,000 results. This makes plausible the fictional encounter of a selfie taken in the Sistine Chapel where photos and video are forbidden: “God is right next to ME and he’s sticking his finger in my ear LMFAO!”

4

As a piece of conceptual art about the state of art as art “Work # 937: April 5, 2015 (My Bedroom)” a 101.6x76.2 cm (40”x30”) is a mound of trash made up of dirt, and dust, and dog hair, and dead leaves swept up from my bedroom floor. Aside from everything else, it is perhaps a rather too gentle commentary full of Duchampian disdain for two unfortunate trends – the sentimental pining over disaster and decay and the hauling-piles-of-rubbish-into-gallery-spaces-and-calling-it-baroque practice among those armed with freshly-minted but pointless MFAs. (As an aside, does it need to be pointed out the Baroque was a reactionary response that arose at the behest of the Vatican in its counter-assault against the Protestant reformation? Then as now, reactionary times foster reactionary art.) Even though it’s tangential to the fact that if you go all squinty-eyed over this pointedly ugly pile of crap it begins to resemble the face of some hominid-like thing, it is a self-portrait in all but name. Notwithstanding a nod to Quentin Crisp’s brilliant fib that after five years the dust doesn’t get any deeper, the work operates against a backdrop of darker cultural significance as one that confront ageism – the last acceptable form of bigotry allowed to be voiced openly across all sectors of society, but most pointedly and shamefully within the art world itself. (Given that one of the edits from the Kapsula writing workshop hosted by Gina Badger made reference to grumpy old men merely reinforces my contention in this regard.) The allusion to everything else that had been set aside resides in the visually whispered text “My Bedroom”, embedded in the centre of the photograph; grounding itself as a self-deprecating auto-assault and a psychological marker of loneliness and depression and its power to destroy.

  It’s not for the lack of an alternative that I’ve expropriated control over a formal studio portrait from my boyhood and claimed it as my first self-portrait, repurposing it as my profile pic on various social media sites. It’s assumed the photograph was specifically chosen by my parents from an extended session; they saw something in my pose – The slight sneer? The slight arch of my brow? The ramrod straight haughtiness? – that foretold that this little boy from the late 1950s was never destined to be the archetypal man in the grey flannel suit.

  Over the course of the past number of decades I was the little boy in the iron lung who survived most of the ravages of polio; made it through years of vicious and violent teenaged bullying almost unscathed; escaped the genocide of AIDS by sheer dumb luck when living in New York City throughout the 1980s and ‘90s while thousands of my peers were dropping like flies; watching helplessly as my partner of twenty-five years went from robust, burly masculinity on our wedding day to a shriveled corpse after six months of being eaten alive by cancers so ravenous he didn’t stand a chance; but was finally nearly taken out by a silent genetic predisposition beyond my control. It’s the missing pieces implied by ‘surviving most of’, ‘made it through’, ‘escaped’, ‘watched helplessly’ and ‘nearly taken out’ that are the seeds from which my art has be able to sprout.                                                             BRUCE EVES September, 2015

As a visual artist, Eves has been influenced by the theoretical issues raised by performance and conceptual art. This has been supplemented by experience as art director of the New York Native, chief archivist for the International Gay History Archive (now part of the Rare Books and Manuscript collection of the New York Public Library, and assistance programming director of the Centre for Experimental Art and Communication (CEAC).

Work # 950: From Birth to (Near) Death and Back Again – In Four Parts was published in the November 2015 issue of Kapsula.