28.03.2011
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Butler/Perez Part 3: Scorch Atlas

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The diseased gloppy lava of Blake Butler’s prose in Scorch Atlas may seem like a strange companion to the sharply honed fragments of from Un/Incorporated Territory, but there are compelling links between the two. Where Un/Incorporated explores the rigid forms a ‘peripheral’ colonial space have been subject to by a vast central colonial power, Scorch Atlas envisions the total disarticulation of center in the form of the suburban American household in a landlocked district. Significant is the almost fetishistic and always commensurate decay of the house and the body of those anchored in these homes in an apocalyptic landscape of hungry dogs and rains of unfamiliar fluids.

Lawnmower rusted. Pain the Chevy hailed obscene. Hardwoods in the den and guest room warped, already rotting. Plumbing pushed up through the floor. Rocking chair run off with. Mildewed carpet….

My brain is soggy. Mostly I just shed….feel my skin go older quicker, the wet running up my old folds. The smell of mold drawn in the water.

The Chevy connotes an American landscape. The lawn and mower, den and guestroom give us the typical suburban house. This is an “All American” story.  And it is significant that the thread of the interlocked stories subtly moves to more interior spaces of the American continent. One of the climactic stories of the collection takes place in Oklahoma. The narrator is a hard working male in a large, enterprising family of 14 struggling to keep their family home out of the muddy jelly of Butler’s grievously wounded earth. There is a strange inversion of the pioneer narrative of hard working, sensible people working for survival on the open, barren American plains. Not Little House on the Prairie—instead, a zombie Grapes of Wrath. The frontier house succumbing to decay, family relations dissolve, and a narrator gradually drifting into hallucinatory visions and nihilistic action at the brink of death.
What is most significant to this discussion is that while Un/Incorporated dramatizes conflicting kinds of topography, the replacement of the indigenous with the alien (but definite) way of being in space, Scorch Atlas gives us a previously mapped and gridded United States interior, its sane infrastructure in utter disarray and, more importantly, an utterly askew sense of space and spatiality in his characters. Place names are generally absent. The characters often distrust the world beyond the sightline of the windows of their houses. Often their awareness struggles to move past the diseased walls and doors of their own bodies. When they do move, they wonder without a map or sense of route. They simply enter a denuded landscape and go, arriving often nowhere or simply stopping because they can no longer go.

This may be the first novel that through an (often) first person narration tries to collapse 3-dimensional space, center and margin, seer and seen, in favor of what Marshall McLuhan would call an audio-tactile understanding of the world—a mapping, a knowing via textures:

I crack the crust open with my forehead. The water slaps my chest, succumbs me under. Sludge slick through my hair. Grit gummed up in my nostrils. Cold metal in my brain. (149)

And eventually the suburb and those who move within it are sprung from the x axis as this narrator who understands through tactility swims down into the suburban world that was and which is now embalmed in fluid.

Scorch Atlas performs a massive clearing of ground and realignment of space. On the literal level, it liquefies the house, body, and landscape, eventually blinding its readers and leading them on equally by sound and texture, insisting on a synesthesiac understanding of this borderless new world. Viewed through the lens of contemporary fiction, it damns its peers and the traditions that have led to them that have given us picturesque worlds and narratives drawn by sightedness, those that forget that they are telling stories about people with bodies that have weight and perceive through the skin. Like an Ozark meth-cooking James Joyce, he delivers this through a sentence that also rejects recent tradition in embracing clumps of guttural consonants and anglo-saxon, onomatopoeiac diction whenever possible and manipulating syntax to deliver the reader into strings of strong stresses. His sentences are dense sonic thickets. To read Blake Butler out loud is to have airy vowels overwhelmed by glottal stops, the tongue striking teeth, and the lips pressing together. All of which helps to shatter cohesive visual perspective as the seat from which sense is made.

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19.03.2011
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Post 2: Scorch Atlas & from Un/Incorporated Territory

<—–See here for Post 1.

<More notes on CSP’s & BB’s books below. I would like to fill in holes, elaborate, rethink  at a later date>

Craig Santos Perez’s work is poly-vocal, bringing into mutual resonance several distinct, divergent voices: that of interior experience and reflection (I), that of the sales person finding language to entice consumers to come to Guam, that of the surveyor and historian, the voice of family members, and the meta-poetic voice. The layering of these voices could appear as a stock post-modern structural gesture, but on further examination the subject dictates this method of composition via disparate fragments. It is a hybrid gesture, a dual acceptance and rejection of poetic conventions, a method of communicating the post-colonial subject’s psyche on its own terms.

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The alphabet is an aggressive and militant absorber and transformer of cultures.

The alphabet cannot be assimilated; it can only liquidate or reduce (50).

That is, left justified narrative-lyric cannot be deployed in the name of decolonialization. Instead, Craig Santos Perez’ composition by field that gives each voice its own shape on the page restores the tactile and pictorial qualities to the experience of language that the bulldozer of print normally effaces.

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The poem can also be seen in these terms: Elaine Scarry speaks of the body clenched in the agonies of physical torture as without “ground.” The agonized body is unable to perceive beyond itself—the pain is a total occlusion. One constricts under pain, twists into a fetal position and loses orientation—the horizontal and vertical awareness collapses into the sensation it is producing. Craig Santos Perez’ voice in sections such as Stations of the Cross is this agonized and, importantly, groundless voice. Between gestures that point beyond source texts to colonial and later Imperial depredations, ritual animal slaughter, and even the passage of Jesus through Jerusalem to crucifixion, we have “the horizon become walled,” an encircling that diminishes perception and agency. In near proximity to this we find “buried / fields of burnt soil” and “slain / ground” culminating in “press the knife” and ultimately one of the costs of pain, the loss of articulate language, the “wail” (68). It is no wonder that here the earth itself is removed from the subject, consumed, and in the viscosity of this welter of overlapping subjects we see the heaviest fragmentations of source texts and familiar syntax (check), an erosion of the typical ground of the reader.

Ground is also lost in a larger sense when a colonial or imperial power asserts hegemony over a people and a system of ownership based on radically different topographical understandings. That is, it is a matter of not who owns or can access what in the new power structure but enforced realignments of what can be owned or accessed—what, in a sense, constitutes the purview of a people.  Early in From Incorporated Territory Guam is referred to as “the first province of the great ocean” and later we are given “to prove the ocean / was once a flag.” Both of these quotes are assertions of an expansive sense of identity for the Chamoru people, one that understands one’s ground as the currents between nodes—channels of exchange. This is a radical inversion of Western understandings of one’s land, fixed as it is one that which can be circumscribed—a yard, a city, a landmass—not that which can circumscribe—a current, an ocean. This is suggested most evocatively in the epigram which quotes Aimé Césaire,“Islands scars of the waters” (53) and emphasized in the naming of the ocean as a “field”—an earth of its own and a source of fecundity. In light of these assertions, the knowledge of the Spanish’s denial of the Chamorus the ocean and the people’s subsequent loss of ocean going technology is devastating. A cleavage of houses, homes, grounds in two and a blow to whole category of topographic knowledge, a knowledge that can read the surface of the water (33), making a ghetto of the island. Colonial occupation also attempts to position the island as an extension, a forward base of a continental United States and striking a blow against a consciousness of Guam as part of constellation of pacific islands that form “Oceana.”

Much of this is dully obvious and doesn’t deviate much form the script the book itself provides for itself (which isn’t shy to annotate, footnote, explain). Nor is this an attempt to delve into the larger juxtapositional strategies of the book and the larger sequence that each book his epic in progress forms. But one runs the chance of missing it in the vivid language, the edges, and the stridency of the composition—how it turns toward action, outrage and sometimes prettiness—that when held to the light at a certain angle—this book charts the total, relentless dispossession of a people. A physical domination of bodies and land and also a metaphysical domination—a changing of the meaning of land, of space in the production of colonial and military spaces. A double dispossession that in certain moments of crisis results in a total lack of orientation in the voice of the dispossessed (much as the body in pain) and at others a hard clarity.

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14.03.2011
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Announcing Perversity March 17th – Bagato, Downs, Klassnik, The Sweater Set

Thursday March 17th 2011 – 8PM

Big Bear Café
1st & R Streets NW
(now serving beer & wine (but don’t take it outside past 9, ok?)
Buck Downs is an American poet, publisher, and editor. He moved to Washington, DC in 1988. Literary journals that have featured Downs’ poetical writings include Puppyflowers, Brooklyn Rail, and Columbia Poetry Review. He is the author of Marijuana Soft Drink, Ladies love outlaws, and several other books of poems.
Rauan Klassnik’s “Holy Land” released from Black Ocean in 2008. “Ringing,” chapbook from Kitchen Press, and “The Sea,” a chapbook from Mud Luscious, followed.

A writer, musician, and artist living near Washington, DC, Jeff Bagato recently finished a surreal science fiction novel, Kill Claus!, and a photo book about local outsider environment Johnston’s Garage. He has contributed stories about unusual DC tourist attractions to local NPR affiliate WAMU-FM, based on his book Mondo DC.
The Sweater Set play every instrument in the American Folk lexicon. At the same time. While singing. Quad lasers. www.thesweaterset.com. I think they should play a show some time with Stripmall Ballads. I’d be so happy. Maybe they have? But this will be awesome too.