JOE HALL

12.08.2019

To Build A Nest of Citation?

That is, to write an academic essay. For a graduate seminar six years ago I wrote a draft of an essay after reading Thomas Heyrick’s profoundly weird late 17th C ode “The Submarine Voyage” and a doing a great deal of research on old-timey diving technology. Now, after countless revisions, rejections, revisions, crashes in motivation, and more, the essay has been published by the good ppl at Eighteenth Century Fiction. In an ideal world, it would be accompanied by this drawing by Ignacio Calero and Sean Parsons:

mechdolphin For Heyrick’s poem is his fantasy of traveling the world’s seas as a man transformed into dolphin imaginatively projecting English power to the deepest depths of these seas, much as, I’m sure, dolphins dream of transforming into cyborgs, rising from the seas, and, I don’t know, smashing capitalism? Or–gentler–traveling the cosmos, joining the constellations whose pull is threaded through the fabric of our beings?

cosmodolphins

Bunk geophysics, Defoe’s terrible investments, King James’ plan to build a submarine fleet in the early 1600s–I went down a lot of rabbit holes before I started to build meaningful connections. And what I wanted to do, at first, was to continue to understand the imperial imagination and how poetry and poetics participated in empire in ways that seemed innocuous and fanciful. The idealism beneath that: understanding one of its many forms in a particular time, we can guard against it as time bends backwards to touch itself as it sometimes does. Though, really, a lot of that gets clipped away in transforming a nest of thoughts into a focused journal article and this is just an essay dutifully lodged in and perhaps already lost in an infinite Borgesian library. Long 18th C scholarship doesn’t have much purchase on anti-imperial thought now. And maybe it shouldn’t! Dolphin house:

Dolphin-Lift-481492 What was the point? I’ve been asking myself this in regard to this article and graduate school itself after I turned down a decent teaching job. One salvage: I was learning how to build an archive, to track down every last thing on a subject. To build something, patiently, over time. Though I’m deprofessionalizing as an academic, there are more contemporary subjects I want to do saturation jobs on. And the process taught me to value more and more those researchers that can pursue a subject for years, that can keep alive the fires of their obsessions while still not ignoring the rolling crises of hours and days. How do they do that? How will I?

02.08.2019

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Ghost Fishing

Thanks to terrain.org for featuring my review of Ghost Fishing: An Eco-Justice Poetry Anthology. A major work by the editor Melissa Tuckey. I try to be honest and by turns sympathetic, challenging, and accessible. It’s kind of impossible. The long-and-short of it is that I find that Tuckey has identified some great poems in this anthology for the capitalocene/plantationocene and taken seriously the job of compiling a plurality of voices. But I left questioning the value of poems staked in romantic aesthetic and ideals in the work of eco-justice.

I started the review while unemployed in early summer 2018 after a move to a new city. The poetics of eco-justice was something I wanted to think through after getting somewhat of a foundation in grad school. Unemployed, I had time. I finished it mid summer just as I was picking up a few news jobs, one of which turned my attention to class and labor. To bring these two worlds together, I’m working on an essay on garbage strikes. But I’m also aware that the eco-social world is changing by leaps and bounds and that my own archive of thinkers on this subject needs to deepen. Feedback on this review is most welcome.

22.07.2019

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reading notes: but he did not know where out was

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i’ve been down lately. flat as a floor. i hate moving and not having any money. one small joy was my friend carra giving me this treasure, which she said a lot of the ppl she knew in Berkeley carried around in the 90s. as i move from ithaca, which is where mitchell lived–a commune called lavender hill. short parables and wisdom book in language of pleasure and revolutionary care. & reminded again, to let go more of those habits that make me a man in the eyes of the worst ppl.

“To make his dreams real he lives quietly through his reactionary emotions. He experiences desires to control his environment and he experiences jealousy when his pleasures are threatened and he experiences possessiveness of property. He accepts these emotions much as he accepts depression and the men’s brutality. They have to be acknowledged and gotten through.”

“The men who hate others were false and death-inflicting and obsessed with being strangers.”

“It is categories in the mind and guns in their hands which keep us enslaved”

I melted at the short piece Tourmaline begins the preface w/:

“Heavenly Blue worried all the time. He worried about the bills and the roof that needed repairing and the strange men who always watched the house and what the neighbors might do next and about Hollyhock’s unhappiness. He worried most of all that he would go mad. His worrying got the bills paid and the roof fixed and drove the men away and calmed the neighbors down and helped Hollyhock be happier. and finally his worrying drove him mad. It was the madness of looking inward and being afraid. There had never been enough love and warmth around him and he thought he had gradually dried up inside. He wanted out but he did not know where out was.

Lilac and Pinetree and Moonbeam and Loose Tomato and Hollyhock gathered. They held Heavenly Blue in their arms for days, they let him cry and stare and slobber and scream and be silent. They paid the bills and looked after the roof and watched the street for strange men and talked to the neighbors and Hollyhock kept himself happy. Their house filled up with comfort and routine and gladness until Heavenly Blue could no longer resist and became response-able again” (80)