Tenney Nathanson.
[APPLAUSE]
I didn't do anything.
I'm delighted to welcome Leslie Scalapino back to Tucson.
It's been a few years now since she's read here.
She's a wonderful writer.
Her work is widely admired.
Poets of very different stripes follow it avidly.
Her titles offer at least a hint of her sensibility.
These include, among others, "Instead
of an Animal," "Considering How Exaggerated Music Is,"
"That They Were At The Beach," and my own favorite as a title,
"This Eating and Walking Around at the Same Time
is Associated All Right," the more recent
"Crowd and Not Evening or Light,"
"Way," "The Return of Painting, The Pearl, and Orion,"
which is a trilogy, and "Defoe."
And the plays "Goya's L.A.," this one
has a picture of a samurai on the cover,
"Stone Marmalade," co-authored with Kevin Killian,
and "The Weatherman Turns Himself In."
You can hear it tomorrow night at 7:00 PM at Dinnerware.
If recollection isn't betraying me,
Leslie has been called a sort of anthropologist
without portfolio.
Anyway, if she hasn't already been, she has now.
Her object of study is her own tribe.
The tribe which believed it wasn't one.
And one of her subjects is that eclipse of relation,
which Baudrillard, maybe a little too
avid to put the next nail in the coffin,
calls "the death of the social."
Leslie's work, I think, asks us to consider
both the force and the self-defeating
and maybe self-serving limitation of such
a description.
Apparently laconic, her work is deeply engaged,
and it registers the writer's own urgent entanglement
in the world she scans.
That scanning is capacious and complex.
The present terrain it reveals includes,
I think, to go for just a shortlist, digitalization,
database operations and modular production,
post-Fordist outsourcing, globalization, displacement,
and misery, modern ennui and alienation,
as named, say, by Baudelaire and oddly
levered by Walter Benjamin, into the hope
of apocalyptic transfiguration.
And perhaps Zen Buddhist non-attachment,
which isn't the same as detachment.
In Leslie's work, these morph into one another
in surprising ways, all duly registered as part
of the tale of the tribe.
The poet Charles Bernstein in his Artifice of Absorption
offers a fine take on Leslie's work, which
I'm going to read here.
"The repetitions in the poetry of Leslie Scalapino
create a kind of disabsorptive charm.
The slight accented shifts and similar statements
operate as gradually shifting scans
of the field of perception, where
this perceptual reiteration gradually, processually
discloses more and more, so that the outer shell
of any momentarily fixed perception
gives way to a depth fulfilled of actuality.
Scalapino correlates shifts in syntactic patterns
with shifts in attentional focus.
Using a language sometimes bordering
on sociological observation, the details that Scalapino reveals
have the intensity of the obviously factual,
while continually showing themselves
within the echo chamber that is each work to be hidden truths--
clues to how a life is understood
to the unfolding of specific details,
obscured or repressed, brought to light
by the probing of memory, perception, and invention.
Yet, finally, it is the rhythm created
by permuting the attentional beams,
the chordal patterns created by her serial scannings,
that create the musical coherence that
takes the work beyond any distancing or dislocating
devices that serve to build it.
The refusal to be absorbed in any single focus on a situation
gives way to a multi-focused absorption
that eerily shifts as an ambiguous figure,
from anxious to erotic, to diffident, to hypnotic."
And here are a couple of more quick scans,
indirect takes this time, possible asymptotes, from here
on in the spirit of Benjamin, whom
Leslie herself quotes in the trilogy "Nothing But Quotation."
Benjamin himself from the "Theses on History."
"A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking
as though he is about to move away from something
he is fixedly contemplating.
His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread.
This is how one pictures the angel of history.
His face is turned toward the past.
Where we perceive a chain of events,
he sees one single catastrophe which
keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage
and hurls it in front of his feet.
The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead,
and make whole what has been smashed.
But a storm is blowing from Paradise,
it has got caught in his wings with such violence
that the angel can no longer close them.
This storm irresistibly propels him
into the future, to which his back is turned,
while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.
This storm is what we call progress."
And this, the essay's end--
"The soothsayers who found out from time what it had in store
certainly did not experience time as either homogeneous
or empty.
Anyone who keeps this in mind will perhaps
get an idea of how past times were experienced in remembrance,
namely in just the same way.
We know that the Jews were prohibited
from investigating the future.
The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance,
however.
This stripped the future of its magic,
to which all those succumb who turned to the soothsayers
for enlightenment.
This does not imply, however, that for the Jews,
the future turned into homogeneous, empty time.
For every second of time was the straight gate through which
the Messiah might enter."
And finally this, from the Diamond Sutra--
"All composite things are like a dream, a phantasm, a bubble,
and a shadow, or like a dewdrop and a flash of lightning.
They are thus to be regarded."
Leslie Scalapino.
[APPLAUSE]
Thank you very much, Tenney.