Get Know!

Know: “No Know” is here --- The Corresponding Society’s premiere line of poetry chapbooks --- representing the following exciting verse collections contained in finely-wrought limited editions: “Elegies for A.R. Ammons” by David Swensen; “This Pose Can Be Held for Only So Long” by Caroline Gormley; “Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land?” by Lonely Christopher. Read more and see withal:



When, Why, How, Who, Know

The Corresponding Society was founded to publish our journal Correspondence, third issue arriving almost-presently, and for some time the moral, mental, and monetary expense of that undertaking alone distracted us from thoughts of multiple directions. Also, at an early meeting, somebody chanced to scream, “There is no way we are doing chapbooks!” and it took a while to schedule a review of that declaration. Around the time we went so far as to release the online chapbook The Gates Salon (Thursday) by (issue three cover artist and contributor) Ray-Ray Mitrano, readable here, the project of a series of single-author poetry chapbooks was being proposed by (one of the founding editors) Robert Snyderman. The chapbook, a sexily intimate object as far as vehicles for poetry go, presents quite a different form than the anthologizing hulk of a literary journal. The latter’s crowded gloriously with a noisy gymfull of different writers, voices rubbing around the pages in discursive concert (the order of the work has to be arranged carefully, like an arty mix-tape); the former’s singular and allows breathing room for a particular voice to stretch --- a single-source poetry architected to have space with itself between the folded cover pages. Also, whereas Correspondence releases in a perfect-bound, professionally printed version, the craft of the chapbook is intensely personal and susceptible to cultish attention. A finely-made chapbook is a fetish object in some literary circles. There was a tremendous argument for embarking on the adventure of a chapbook line and Mr. Snyderman initiated the effort by curating a triad of titles from poets he admired and wanted new published projects from. Almost immediately, Robert fled the country and became an illegal alien roaming Quebec and environs, working as a migrant farmhand and traveling/ditch-sleeping with a French-Canadian painter he met on a beach. Fortunately, Sonia Farmer and Caroline Gormley had accepted duties as the artistic directors of what Robert had named the “No Know” series; thus work was able to continue through the summer. Actually, the two art directors also fled the region presently --- on a protracted homeland visitation to the Bahamas and a relocation to Austin, TX respectively --- but not before covers were produced by letter press process, which makes for fucking handsome chapbook covers. The books came individually from terrifically disparate poetic sensibilities, yet from writers who had been working very closely as peers for many years. When presented all three at readings, the texts play strangely off each other, inciting formal resonances through elegiac examination, across the pages of modernist literature sweeping some words onto new surfaces, and around a legion of social voices stolen into new rhetorical contexts. The pitches of these poems range from conceptually personal, personally textual, and textually sociopolitical. The innocent editors, who volunteered the man-hours required to stitch and otherwise prepare these limited editions, were nearly destroyed by the fairly simple task of sewing paper, but everyone involved argues the sacrifice --- for what “No Know” offers, if the dear reader cares to discover, are important introductions to the writerly projects of three distinct young directions.

Know More No

The three titles are available at select NYC book merchants and, conveniently, here for purchase through our online store. For a limited time, orders placed online will enjoy free shipping.

Each title is published in a limited edition of 50 copies, is pamphlet stitched, and features a letterpress printed cover. Learn about them:

Elegies for A.R. Ammons by David Swensen

These are poems for the late Ammons written as the true elegy must be. They do not lament the lost poet, but attempt to wade into and harvest from his work. They integrate the landscapes of Swensen’s North Carolinian childhood with scenes from his more recent life in Scotland and New York, commemorating Ammons by constantly pressing at his colloquial --- at times ribald --- style, keeping alive Ammons’ work as it is pressed into new and vital forms.

This Pose Can Be Held for Only So Long by Caroline Gormley

A personal geography and map of the Texan Gulf Coast viewed through the eyes of youth. The poem strives to recreate that lost landscape by whatever means available --- at once using traditional poetic forms as well as combining the dissolving documents of childhood, with selected erasures of major 20th century American novels.


Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land? by Lonely Christopher

With the utmost precision and economy, Lonely Christopher addresses in Wow, Where Do You Come from, Upside-Down Land? the contemporary queer political sphere through questions of linguistics, conducting his subjects into a terse, wry, and ultimately operatic chorus of commentary.

"By eloquently rearranging the detritus of our national debate about gay rights, Lonely Christopher’s biting, anti-poetic poetry shows us the heights of pathos and the depths of foolishness around the issue, while delightfully mixing sexuality with textuality."
--- James Hannaham (author of God Says No)

Also know: the entire series is purchasable for fifteen dollars together. Get know.

The Epistemology of Emo

Mae Saslaw was last month's guest editor. She has just gotten to writing her second post.

Her pieces have appeared in Correspondence 1 & 2, and more of her work is available at maesaslaw.wordpress.com.

Some months ago, The Correspondence Society and friends wrote a series of essays on the nature of the hipster and what constitutes hipster culture, if there is such a thing. We overwhelmingly concluded that there is no unified hipster culture, that they produce no unique or identifiable cultural artifacts, and this is one of the primary reasons for their failure—or, since perhaps they weren’t trying in the first place—to form a distinct movement of any kind. I’ve heard arguments along the same lines applied to emo: that there is no identifiable emo music, literature, or art; that emo kids themselves disagree on what aesthetics define emo; that “real” emo was over long before the word/concept ever really took off, and so nothing after maybe 1998 (the year is highly debatable) counts as emo; etc. I have no better working definition of emo than the next emo kid, but I will argue that—unlike hipsters, though the difference between the two is not especially what I mean to emphasize—there are coherent ideas and thought processes running through the whole of the emo movement/scene/what have you, that the lifestyle or, really, epistemology, emerged in the wake of punk rock and still persists in some form. I do not pretend that the authenticity and quality of what is popularly considered emo music has maintained the high standard it once had (you can laugh here), and the degradation and hence bad reputation emo music has endured is in no small part due to the inevitable effects of commercialization. The point I mean to make is one about shared experience: whether your canonical emo band is Sunny Day Real Estate, or Brand New, or Bright Eyes, or Dashboard Confessional, etc., your general worldview has a great deal in common with that of another emo kid from a different time or place, etc. along the emo continuum.

The condition of the emo kid is easy to write off as unfettered vanity and self-indulgence, the case for this view being that emo kids are, in the main, relatively privileged and unaffected by what most people consider to be real traumas of contemporary life, ie, they are situated (usually) well above the poverty line, and have never been exposed to or threatened with extreme violence. We find it hard to sympathize with adolescents and young adults who have grown up sheltered at a time when millions of children have real problems. And, during my own stint as a self-described emo kid, the guilt I felt around feeling dissatisfied with my life (guilt from the knowledge that others had it way worse and yet I found so much about which to complain, or, more accurately, to almost deliberately make myself miserable) was a significant part of the system of malaise I wove in my head.

That said, it’s as hard to convincingly argue that emo kids do have at least a few actual problems, and that these problems are the common threads between different versions or incarnations of emo. And I’ll concede that, even in hindsight, I can’t say that they even were real problems, but it sure as fuck felt like it: the certainty and gravity of the conclusions I drew about myself and other people trumped any remaining capacity I had for objectivity. Everyone really was unendurably vapid and insensitive, and I really was going to maintain my destructive habits unto lifelong loneliness. That’s how it seemed. Part of ceasing to be emo—rather, as emo—was my growing need to apologize for how absurd I sounded in pretty much every communicative act I made, how absurdly I behaved for several solid years. The other part was discovering better art, better music, and most importantly better literature, and realizing that there were far more comprehensive and sustainable ways to deal with the world than the thought processes I mired myself in. And, as has become apparent in this essay, I still continually apologize for emo—to anyone who has been emo, and to anyone who has had any sort of relationship with an emo kid.

With the apology must come the explanation of what it is I am apologizing for. The epistemology of emo, I have decided centers around the following emotional ideology: The emo kid sees in herself some pattern of self-destructive behavior and finds herself both unable to stop and unwilling to continue, but because she is unable to stop, she must continually question whether or not she really is unwilling to continue, and if she is not, she must question what intrinsic flaw makes her weak-minded or truly self-destructive or both. The self-destructive behavior might be a desire for romantic relationships characterized by severe dependence and/or “trust issues,” a desire for meaningless sexual encounters, eating disorders, cutting, repeated alienation of friends, drug and alcohol problems of a fairly minor order, etc. Her ability to question whether or not she wants to stop in the first place leads her to conclude that she is not truly, hopelessly addicted to anything, and indeed she usually is not, but draws her conclusion from an assumption that truly, hopelessly addicted people have already lost the ability to question want vs. need vs. un- or subconscious drive. But, at the same time, the fact that she continues whatever destructive behavior she likely knows she has chosen leads her to further question why she hasn’t totally destroyed herself—ie. she is not dead, or incarcerated, or in rehab, or pregnant. She has never reached and maybe never been close to total destruction, and she sees this as evidence that she is still in control of her actions, and therefore fully capable of “fixing” herself without outside help. Her ultimate self-analysis, and this usually takes at least a year to arrive at, is that she enjoys being somewhat—but, obviously, not entirely—self-destructive, enjoys the level to which she can predict what causes her pain. There’s no real way to tally how many emo kids slowly pulled themselves out of the emo condition vs. how many did go to rehab or join a religious organization or otherwise make some drastic life change that shocked them out of their particular self-destructive behavior more or less overnight. And I am fairly certain that members of the latter category are harsher critics of emo, and those most willing to argue that the emo mentality has no redeeming qualities for anyone. I don’t blame them. I only want to describe, as clearly as possible, the strategies common in every emo kid’s approach to thought and life in general. I call the totality of my conclusions the epistemology of emo because the emo movement, for all its fragmentation, describes a condition of the individual that is all-encompassing. The reason, I think, why former emo kids are so easy to spot, and why they tend to stick together, is that the whole tempest of skewed logic leaves its etchings on the walls of the mind. It’s why someone ten years older than me uses the same word to describe incredibly different artistic periods: ever since punk rock gave us permission to question our role and agency as adolescents, and grunge gave us permission to rage inwardly at whatever we happen to hate about ourselves, emo kids have been inventing and perfecting the cultural artifacts that feed the attitude and vice versa.

No Wave

What Is Not Post-Feminism?
Some Questions and Problems
by Lonely Christopher

Feminism is a problem of the discursive relationship between theory and praxis. Feminism is simultaneously an academic/theoretical grammar and a sociopolitically applicable ideology. There’s much confusion about what being a feminist means right now; the concept oft languishes as an empty signifier mouthed weirdly by women stuck between third wave and post-feminist perspectives --- those of no wave. Where does the deconstruction of essentialisms become the eschewing or even denial of an affirmative and required praxis of and for contemporary women? Feminism: is institutionalized (theory divorced from praxis in academia), becomes a museum piece (in Brooklyn, where the feminist wing of the museum was founded a year or so back), gets erased by poststructural pluralism, (and/or) just sounds dirty because it can’t cohere as a system sufficiently balancing the pragmatic and existential. What does it mean for a male to identify as feminist or to write about feminism (the latter happening here)? How much room has been made for minority perspectives or is the problem of petit-bourgeois feminism, of a possible feminist hegemony, a bad framing device? Has second wave activism been too eschewed or is it poststructural subjectivities that have been overly ignored? Does a multiplicity of feminisms strengthen feminist thought/praxis conceptually or obliterate all efficacies? How much feminist discourse is today still articulated using the vocabulary of the second wave and does that make such discourse outmoded? bell hooks, decades ago: “Feminism is a struggle to end sexist oppression.” Where does Butler’s subsequent gender confusion and performative play fit in an oppositional/corrective conception of praxis-based feminism? Where fits art and thought designed to critique and explore rather than directly promote change? What is feminism without the concept of change, without being synonymous with the transformative influence of praxis? Is continued social change resulting in the promotion of women “more feminist” than Judy Chicago’s “The Dinner Party,” or isn’t the distinction between activism and art so clear? If, according to the “post” model, feminism is no longer relevant as a contemporary rubric, what now? There probably isn’t more feminism after post-feminism. The problem with post-feminism, its failure, is that is not so contemporary as premature. As a theoretical and socially inapplicable model, post-feminism reads okay as a subset of another post-positioned idiom (postmodernism?), but maybe it negatively closes discourses that should stay available so as to acknowledge the work remaining for change-oriented praxis. Perhaps it’s similar to pushing a post-gay perspective in a sociopolitical context of widespread inequality and subjugation (today, still). When somebody playfully says, “You’re here, you’re queer, get over it!” one wants to tersely respond, “You get over it!” The argument against oppression is declared falsely efficacious, allowing the problem to go on underhandedly. Is this the case with feminism? to what extent? These problems, arising decades ago and remaining unresolved, are some qualities of the no wave that troubles the idea of feminism as a coherent logic. Is this really all just about power or, if not, what else (and how much else)? Christine Wertheim recently writes: “The Subject of History may be dead, but all of the […] others⎯the women, blacks, the queer, and the poor⎯in whom power never resided, still don’t have their share of discursive space.” When does anti-essentialism end up privileging the sneaky normative that refuses being argued out of domination of power relations and ideological discourse? This is nothing more than a recital of problems and questions; unknown is how many questions are rhetorical and how many pertinent but unanswerable. The only likely conclusion in this context is that what and how feminism is represent problems to be addressed, positively, as points of centrifugal departure.

This Is Going To Be Fun

Here is an announcement about an exciting event coming soon to Brooklyn’s Unnameable Books (one of the city’s best literature merchants, which, incidentally, stocks all three titles of the Corresponding Society’s “No Know” chapbook series, fyi):

Gay Play 3
a new play by Lonely Christopher
presented in a dramatic reading at Unnameable Books
25 September, that is Friday, 8pm, free and one night only!
600 Vanderbilt (at St Marks), Brooklyn

This is going to be fun. Lonely Christopher presents a dramatic reading of the third installment in his internationally produced Gay Play trilogy. Gay Play 3 is something like a closet opera about queer history, shortly before Stonewall, made into a soupy meal using leftovers of Beckett, “The Boys in the Band,” a textbook on structuralism, and Greek tragedy. One day it will be staged entirely in an inflatable pool. Each entry in the trilogy is a standalone piece; familiarity with the previous installments is not required for enjoyment. Gay Play 1 was first staged last summer at the Bowery Poetry Club, Gay Play 2 premiered in dual Mandarin/English productions this August in ChengDu, China, and this event marks the first ever presentation of Gay Play 3.

a dramatic reading featuring:
Jake Abrams
Taylor Derwin
Sam Kline
& Lonely Christopher

Queer Kids!

Fun:



Glittery! Only slightly misspelled! The event of the season!

A year without David Foster Wallace, a summer with Infinite Jest

Mae Saslaw is this month's guest editor. Her pieces have appeared in Correspondence 1 & 2, and more of her work is available at maesaslaw.wordpress.com. Her next post will be considerably more organized than what follows, and may contain a cogent argument. In the mean time, she will abuse this forum for reasons unapparent.

One year ago tonight, Lonely Christopher called me up to say that David Foster Wallace had committed suicide. I did what any friend would do and started to feed Lonely Christopher alcohol. About twenty minutes after he arrived, he got a call from Greg, whose appendix was near bursting. It was a weird night. But that’s not what this post is about.

I was one of the people who hadn’t actually read any of Wallace’s work—outside of an essay or two for class—prior to his death. I’ve spent the last twelve months catching up, and to date I’ve read Oblivion, Brief Interviews with Hideous Men, Girl with Curious Hair, and most recently, Infinite Jest. I started Infinite Jest intending to follow along with the Infinite Summer people and go to their meetings on Thursdays in the Village. That didn’t happen, but I did finish the book. What was extraordinary was the amount of attention I got just for carrying the thing around. One girl approached me on a subway platform and asked if I’d read an essay of Wallace’s that had appeared in the New Yorker at some point, because if I hadn’t, she was going to give me her copy.

Ordinarily, I have a pretty limited amount of patience for the general public and carry an admittedly larger-than-justifiable sense of superiority when it comes to my tastes in fiction. Example: I once saw a boy my age reading Thomas Bernhard’s The Loser on a subway car filled with screaming preteens. I wanted to lean over and tell him, “Don’t even try reading that book now; you won’t understand a damn thing.” I ultimately didn’t say anything, but only because I didn’t want him to think I was coming onto him. I am an asshole. To be fair, I also had the reverse happen to me: Last summer, when I was trying to read Gravity’s Rainbow, a heavily-tattooed gentleman (carrying a copy of The Confessions of St Augustine) interrupted me and asked, first of all, if I could possibly read on a sweltering train with headphones on, and second, if I was trying to read the book without a companion volume. I said something like, “I’m reading it for the sentences,” and then bitched about the heat and how I wanted a cigarette. I must have come off looking pretty fucking cool. That’s not what this post is about, either.

I have a hard time being direct about this, about what reading Infinite Jest this particular summer and finishing up last week was really like. I guess it was something like this:

It’s of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It’s maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it’s the fact that most of the arts here are produced by people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip — and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It’s more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we’ve hit this age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it’s stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naïveté…Hal, who’s empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naïve and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool.

So we—myself, plus the people who approached me in the subway or in stores to say that they were reading or had read or had given up reading Infinite Jest—have this passage in common, this pretty profound slap in the face. I could read this as Wallace’s argument against reading his novel, since the act of reading is this same consumption of art that pulls us into anhedonic emptiness, maybe. Or it’s the interruption, the little piece of metafiction that jars us, alerts us to the fact that we’ve been reading for these instructions, and we’re getting what we asked for, and maybe we shouldn’t have asked for it, or maybe we definitely should have because being cultured and hip is the only way out of utter loneliness, unless it isn’t. In any case, he’s called my own personal bluff. Am I cool yet? Because I’m pretty fucking jaded. The point is that I don’t get to discount my fellow readers after this—we all just had our insecurities nailed down. Hard.

And I can’t ignore the shade that Wallace’s suicide paints over the experience of reading Infinite Jest. Wallace becomes even more like J.O. Incandenza, the figure whose ghost haunts the book and all its characters. If you’ve read the book, you know about all the parallels between the novel and Incandenza’s final film, also titled Infinite Jest, so I won’t go into those except to say that everything Wallace tells us about the film is true of the novel. There’s no literary or historical evidence to suggest that Incandenza’s suicide at all prefigures Wallace’s death any more than the deaths of any other of his characters. But still. The similarities are hard to ignore, and I wonder what it might have felt like to read Infinite Jest before Wallace died. One would have had the sense, for instance, that it might be possible to ask him what he meant, if passages like the one above were meant to destroy us in quite the way they did. Or, perhaps, if the side effect of uniting the unbearably cool U.S. youth was the point all along. Or, if we were supposed to realize that anhedonia and inhumanity are too closely linked. I can’t imagine that, if I’d read the book last year, I would have taken any particular solace in knowing that Wallace was, if nothing else, still alive—Infinite Jest leaves so little room for solace. But it hurt (maybe hurt is the wrong word: stung? cut?) more to know that he killed himself, that he couldn’t think or write his way out of a place where, according to him, we all are. (“By AA’s own professed logic, everyone ought to be in AA. If you have some sort of Substance-problem, then you belong in AA. But if you say you do not have a Substance-problem, in other words if you deny that you have a Substance-problem, why then you’re by definition in Denial, and thus you apparently need the Denial-busting Fellowship of AA even more than someone who can admit his problem.”)

One last anecdote: Last week, on one of the last days I spent reading Infinite Jest, I stopped at a bodega on my way to work. It was 8am, I was hungover, and I had to wait a couple of minutes for my bagel. A woman and her young daughter were waiting for their sandwiches as well, and after glaring at me for a couple of minutes, the woman noticed I was carrying Infinite Jest. What exactly we said to each other isn’t all that important, but I got the distinct sense that she hadn’t really considered Wallace’s death and what it had done to his readers. As far as she was concerned, he might as well have been dead for decades or more—the conditions of his life had nothing to do with the work. And I guess that’s a certain school of reading, to ignore as much about the author as you can. I disagree in any case, but I don’t see how anyone can exclude an author’s suicide from complete analysis of a work, or from the experience of reading it.

I think more discussion is called for. I think I failed in making a lot of points, partly because I need to spend more time considering exactly what happens in the thousand pages I spent the summer reading. But in the spirit of the commemorative blog post, here is another of my favorite (if I may express preference for something that leaves me devastated) passages from Infinite Jest. It happens around the middle of a list of things one learns at a halfway house.

That you do not have to like a person in order to learn from him/her/it. That loneliness is not a function of solitude. That it is possible to get so angry you really do see everything red. What a ‘Texas Catheter’ is. That some people really do steal—will steal things that are yours. That a lot of U.S. adults truly cannot read, not even a ROM hypertext phonics thing with HELP functions for every word. That cliquey alliance and exclusion and gossip can be forms of escape. That logical validity is not a guarantee of truth. That evil people never believe they are evil, but rather that everyone else is evil. That it is possible to learn valuable things from a stupid person. That it takes effort to pay attention to any one stimulus for more than a few seconds. That you can all of a sudden out of nowhere want to get high with your Substance so bad that you think you will surely die if you don’t, and but can just sit there with your hands writhing in your lap and face wet with craving, can want to get high but instead just sit there, wanting to but not, if that makes sense, and if you can gut it out and not hit the Substance during the craving the craving will eventually pass, it will go away—at least for a while. That it is statistically easier for low-IQ people to kick an addiction than it is for high-IQ people. That the metro Boston street term for panhandling is: stemming, and that it is regarded by some as a craft or art; and that professional stem-artists actually have like little professional colloquia sometimes, little conventions, in parks or public-transport hubs, at night, where they get together and network and exchange feedback on trends and techniques and public relations, etc. That it is possible to abuse OTC cold- and allergy remedies in an addictive manner. That Nyquil is 50 proof. That boring activities become, perversely, much less boring if you concentrate intently on them. That if enough people in a silent room are drinking coffee it is possible to make out the sound of steam coming off the coffee. That sometimes human beings have to just sit in one place and, like, hurt. That you will become way less concerned with what other people think of you when you realize how seldom they do. That there is such a thing as raw, unalloyed, agendaless kindness. That it is possible to fall asleep during an anxiety attack.

Fresh Evidence

We had a fun time at our celebratory chapbook reading at Brooklyn’s Outpost Lounge last week; thanks to Mae Saslaw (who, it is rumored, has agreed to be the blog’s guest editor this month), we also have some fun documentation. If you happened to miss this event, there’s some new pictorial evidence available on our website. Withal, below please find a video sample of the reading in the form of Lonely Christopher reciting his poem “His Lips Were on that Glass”:

his lips were on that glass from mae saslaw on Vimeo.