Review of Digital Poetries by Loss Pequeno Glazier

This is a review that I did for my class on digital literature. The book is from 2003, but it is still quite relevant. I have been trying to locate the avant-garde in poetry and it turns out is in digital lit.

****************************

Where are the newest poetic and literary avant-gardes? Where will the newest, most innovative poetries come from? You may or may not realize it from the title, but Loss Pequeno Glazier’s Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries makes it clear that some of the most avant-garde poetry to come in the foreseeable future will in fact be from online/digital poetry sources. It would seem that Glazier would know, since one of his dissertation advisers was Charles Bernstein, co-founder of the Electronic Poetry Center (EPC) at SUNY-Buffalo (with Glazier himself) and a prominent member of the LANGUAGE Poets. His other two dissertation advisers, Susan Howe and Robert Duncan, are also well-known avant-garde poets, thus solidifying Glazier’s own credentials. If you further look at the Works Cited list and the index, which I almost always do before I actually sit down to read the book, it reads like a who’s who of the past 30-40 years of experimental poetry, with a special emphasis on the LANGUAGE poets with a little Beatnik and New York School mixed in as well as some leading scholars and theorists, including Ted Berrigan, Bernstein, Christian Bok, Caroline Bergvall, Johanna Drucker, Kenneth Goldsmith, Jackson MacLow, Charles Olson, Marjorie Perloff, etc. Glazier uses epigrams and quotes from these and other poets and theorists, particularly from the late 19th century and beyond, to put them in conversation with each other as much as simply using them for references to support his own points.

Right away, in the first end note to the entire book, Glazier makes his bias known and provides the basis for why he is dealing only with “innovative poetry.”

“In general, the term ‘poetry’ is used in this volume to refer to practices of innovative poetry rather than to what might be called academic, formal, or traditional forms of poetry.” (181)

One aspect of this book that makes it recognizable as avant-garde is the language of manifestos and treatises, the former which are intimately associated with avant-gardes. In Chapter One, “Jumping to Occlusions, a Manifesto for Digital Poetics,” Glazier continues to explain why “innovative poetry” should be the basis for comparison with digital poetry. “Numerous poets working within innovative practice,” he explains, “have explored language as a procedure to reveal the working of writing” (32). Already going deep underneath the mere tricks and decorations of poetry to reveal how we think within writing, poets coming from these kinds of structuralist and even post-structuralist positions have already been looking at the architecture of poetry and thought and have already been theorizing the way that poetry is received and processed. They are the perfect writers to take poetry deep into hyperspace, responding to the ways that readers, particularly those raised with computers, can and do interact with digital text.

Later on in the text, Glazier cites digital theorist N. Kathryn Hayles and writer Robert Coover, who to refer to print as “first wave hypertext,” and “graphical” poetry as “second wave hypertext” (173), making it clear that this refers not to text-heavy webpages, but to books, referring to such writers as Gertrude Stein, Louis Zukofsky, and others as having created “hypertexts that predate the microchip” (173).

Glazier also introduces the reader to new terms, a new language, with words like grep and chmod , computer lingo, which sound like words of the futuristic cartoon world of the Jetsons or to be more literary, the past literary world of Dadaism. If you follow some links online from chapter one, you will get some of Glazier’s own poetry which will remind you of the huge debt that digital poetry owes to Dadaistic collage and to visual poetry. In this way, digital poetry, particularly “early” digital poetry, is really just built on a new platform, but may or may not be all that “new.” He reminds the reader throughout the book that there are other platforms that have drawn attention to the materiality of language and changed the way we create and write poetry, including the typewriter (which eventually led to the “mimeograph revolution” in the 1960s and 70s), the computer (which brought about the desktop publishing or “Pagemaker revolution” as he calls it), and even the original printing press itself.

Chapter four is entitled “The Intermedial: A Treatise.” Intermedia was a term coined by Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in his “Intermedia Chart,” which describes and visually represents many avant-garde artistic and literary movements and the ways in which they overlap. While Glazier’s treatise deals more with the actual ways in which media mesh “between page and code” (70), he does also give credit to Higgins and his Fluxus “cohort” in chapter seven, “E-poetries: a Lab Book of Digital Practices, 1970-2001.” He talks about Emmett Williams, who worked in concrete poetry and was himself linked with Fluxus “with its emphasis on the merging of art and life and on intermedia” which makes it a “significant predecessor to web writing, especially in its concerns with multiple media,” (Rothenberg and Joris, qtd in Glazier 127).

Glazier also establishes his credentials not only through poetry, but by using nitty gritty computer language to describe how digital poetry is created. This is not only talking the talk, but he walks the walk by having extensive sections about the basic programming language: how hypertext works, discussions of UNIX as the underlying computer language of digital poetry, and much more. In this way, the book functions as a how-to manual as well as a scholarly examination of the field. The book represents poetry, particularly digital poetry, as both a form and a doing, between a noun and a verb, between the thing written and the transmission. There are footnotes directing readers to electronic versions of certain chapters as well, such as in “Jumping to Occlusions, a Manifesto for Digital Poetics.” That webpage looks like an ordinary Wikipedia page, with pictures and hyperlinks, but it lacks any of the jumps or moving text that are so common in digital poetry.

In fact, while I appreciated the dual nature of this book, visually it is a bit uneven. There are frequently huge blocks of text that are broken up by font, to indicate that now he’s talking about poetry and now he’s talking about computers. With the intensely visual nature and promise of digital work, and with so many new forms of layout available to publishers than there were 50 years ago, it seems that this book could have done better in distinguishing the text for both—possibly having the two parts of chapters laid out vertically or horizontally, having some of the text offset in boxes and sidebars, which textbook publishers have been doing for a long time, having one text in black and the other in gray, etc. Poetry has always been a visual medium and it seems that a book about digital and avant-garde poetry could have embodied that ethos a little better. Chapters that do integrate text and image or visual layout well to some degree are “Home, Haunt, Page,” “The Intermedial,” and “Coding Writing, Reading Code.”

All in all, this is a deceptively dense book, full of poetic as well as technological information and bridging the divide that can exist between techies and poets. There is a belief that those are two ends of a spectrum that cannot meet up, technology (science) and poetry (rampant creativity). The fact that Glazier is well-versed, so to speak, in both, proving that the two can be complimentary. If, as Wittgenstein said, “the limits of my language are the limits of my world,” then it is important that our world, as poets, be expanded to include the digital.

Works Cited

Glazier, Loss Pequeno. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Print.

Same Shit, Different Decade: Heterotopia and The Disruption of “Ladylike Speech” in the SCUM Manifesto and Hothead Paisan

I will be presenting this at the SW/TX Popular Culture Association this February. I also presented it at the EGO (English Graduate Organization) at Western University this past November.



ABSTRACT

A great deal has been written about woman as the abject subject, about woman’s ability or inability to speak, to speak truth to power, etc. In this presentation, I am going to discuss Foucault’s idea of heterotopia, as a space outside of social control, offering a place that is both liminal and carnivalesque, not merely as a “safe space” for women’s speech, but for women to be truly transgressive. I will look at Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto and Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan as two sites for not only women’s unpopular speech, but moreover, for “unladylike speech,” for cursing and scatological references as well. Finally, I will use Foucault’s heterotopia to talk about the resistance of the two authors and their work by not only patriarchal culture, but also from lesbian culture, and therefore the resistance to culture norms on all sides. My research will draw not upon the “usual” feminist scholars like Julia Kristeva and Judith Butler, but upon theories of comics, cursing, and upon the notion of heterotopia and the disruptions of carnival. In this way, it fits with the panel’s theme of both “Sequential Art,” providing a history of women’s comics in particular through the highly influential Hothead Paisan, but also the tie of Hothead to feminist history through her obvious connections to Solanas.


Background

In 1968, a treatise called the SCUM Manifesto was published by a radical young feminist named Valerie Solanas, whose primarily claim to fame at that time was that she had shot the artist Andy Warhol. The shooting was in no way related to the manifesto, but her publisher jumped on her sudden “fame” in order to sell more copies of the manifesto. The manifesto was all about her belief that the male was the inferior of the human species and had projected all of their own inadequacies onto women and then convinced women, through ideology, that all of this was true about the genders.

In 1991, there appeared a comic book named Hothead Paisan. Hothead travelled through the world as an angry dyke, fed up with most men as well as what she called “spritzheads,” those women who were inimically tied to their husbands or boyfriends, who did and considered only what they wanted. She went around killing and maiming men who were considered a threat to her and her fellow women. Her main target: white men in glasses and ties. Diane DiMassa, creator of Hothead Paisan describes her avenger in the first issue like this:

Her brain just totally shit the bed one day and she starts believing everything she sees on t.v. . . . She’s going about her daily queer routine and all this t.v. crap is seeping in and she’s getting psychotic, and like she needs therapy really bad, but she doesn’t know it. I bet her boundaries would be really fuzzy. I bet she’d be a lot of fun to be around. I bet she’d be a real . . . HOTHEAD PAISAN. (1)

Thus, we are brought into the world of Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist, an avenging fantasy. Cartoonist/author DiMassa, in a way, gets to play Diana Prince to her own Wonder Dyke alter ego.

With the SCUM Manifesto, on the other hand there is some ambiguity about whether Solanas meant the manifesto as a call to action or simply a critique of patriarchy, DiMassa makes it very clear that this is a fantasy world, for herself and her readers, a place where you can vent your feelings safely and fantasize about those who hurt you, who disempower you, and who stand in the way of full personhood. Compare the opening of Hothead Paisan with the opening paragraph of the SCUM Manifesto:

Life in this society being, at best, an utter bore and no aspect of society being at all relevant to women, there reminds to civic- minded. Responsible, thrill-seeking females only to overthrow the government, eliminate the money system, institute complete automation, and destroy the male sex. (1)

This is a call for revolution in a revolutionary time. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries had seen a number of similar manifestos, including the Communist Manifesto, the Futurist Manifesto, which was ostensibly an art manifesto but also had fascist leanings and political content, and most frightening to white men in power in the 1960’s, a number of writings by the Black Panthers talking about self-defense. They had heard Malcolm X talking about the “chickens coming home to roost.” To have these kinds of writings by women and blacks at a time of social upheaval, it would have been difficult for many not to take this as a literal call to action.

In “Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure,” Dana Heller gives details of Solanas’s past that might read straight out of Hothead Paisan:

“A childhood friend recalled that she frequently played by the boardwalk where, once, she beat a boy severely for harassing a younger girl. On another occasion, she was expelled from Holy Cross Academy for striking a nun. And in high school, where she was often mocked and made fun of by other students, she once hauled off and punched a boy whom she believed had placed a tack on a chair. It turned out to be the wrong boy.” (173)

In fact, Hothead Paisan owes a huge debt to the SCUM Manifesto, for without it, there would likely not even be a Hothead Paisan, nor would there be such a large audience for Hothead. In issue #21 of Hothead, published in 1999, there is an excerpt from the SCUM Manifesto reprinted on the back inside cover along with pictures of middle fingers (22).

Heterotopia

Foucault describes the concept of a heterotopia as a “sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live” (24). They may be linked to the mode of festivals and to the Bakhtinian notion of carnival, a time that allows for inversion of social roles for a short period of time, allowing the “marginalized” a brief taste of power. Heterotopias are always separate from the usual spaces of society. One of the more uncomfortable aspects of heterotopias include not ever having the feeling of being at home. They can disrupt the history of yourself, of your identity; they may shake things up in a way that you might not be prepared for. There is also a sense of transgressing space, going where you are not allowed to go. They are often associated with the liminal state of ritual, the process of becoming, of transformation. There may at the very least, then, a stage of disorientation as you are between states of being. There are any number of women, for example, like authors Dana Heller and Diane DiMassa, who have stated that the SCUM Manifesto changed their lives. To encounter something which makes you question everything around you, however exhilarating, often comes with a state of severe disorientation that can make you “shit the bed,” as DiMassa says.

Comics as Heterotopic

Kristi Lynn Abrecht’s master’s thesis, Illustrating Identity: Feminist Resistance in Webcomics talks about heterotopic space as occurring online. But with the mimeograph “revolution” of the 1960s and the “desktop publishing revolution” in the 1990s, making mass copies of your manifesto, zine, or comic became possible for the masses and it became very feasible to make and distribute your own artwork, which meant that commerce, and hence censorship, need not be a part of getting your art and your message out to the public.

The heterotopia of a comic strip is, in my mind, more complete than that of a manifesto, or a text, which can represent in words and typography, the layout and placement on the page but does not have the added representation. Scott McCloud calls the cartoon “a vacuum, in which our identity and awareness are pulled . . . an empty shell” (36). No matter how realistic or unrealistic, just drawing a simple smiley face in a cartoon box, McCloud tells us, is enough to represent someone. It doesn’t matter how good the representation is, just that there is a more or less human figure that the reader can identify with. This is not to say that text cannot also offer a heterotopic space. In fact, anything that tells a story can involve people in a very distinct way. Thus, either normative or non-normative fiction has a great deal of potential. In the “The Science of Storytelling: How Narrative Cuts Through Distraction Like Nothing Else,” Jonathan Gottschall says that “While the brain watches a story, you’ll find something interesting—the brain doesn’t look like a spectator, it looks more like a participant in the action.

So while text can do a great deal to involve the reader, or spectator, in the action, when you combine the identification of the reader in a text with the identification of representation in a comic, you have something very powerful that can add up to a “space” where the reader becomes a participant, and actor in what is going on, and when you add a place of the unthinkable, a denaturalized space in which things like language and power are not taken for granted, then you have what Foucault describes as a heterotopic space, one where the author and the reader are free to try on other identities and to operate outside of social control.

Hothead Paisan and the SCUM Manifesto

For Valerie Solanas and Diane DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan alike, this heterotopia allows them to speak outside of the normal rules of decorum. To have a space where women can say what they want, including shit, fuck, scum, without having to care about being seen as vulgar, unladylike, particularly in 1960s America, let alone 1990s America, to be outside of social control, was a very liberating thing. Even in the 1990s, Hothead herself is still reacting against feminist and lesbian norms.

“The last thing I need is some lesbian Rambo . . .” comments a character in comic #5 (6). “I find Hothead disgustingly violent! She acts just like the men she’s bashing! We, as women, must set an example and act in a peaceful, NON-VIOLENT WAY, GODAMMIT!” She then adds that she “doesn’t like seeing male genitals and blood and gore!” (7). This allows DiMassa the chance, as cartoonist, to intervene and explain that this comic book is satire. In issue 2, Hothead gets lectured by her blind lesbian friend Roz for eating meat. Roz says “Do you know what they do to cows?” to which Hothead replies, “DON’T. I can’t bear it” (7). We see that hothead cannot deal with anyone’s ideas, men or women’s, about who she is supposed to be and how she is supposed to behave. Hothead cannot cater to this expectation of being a caring nurturing person who would not harm any living being, which was perpetuated both inside of the lesbian movement, as well as within the culture at large. She says to Roz that she should come with a warning:

Caution: Socially bizarre dyke, not quite up to political snuff; eats meat likes sex toys, has never protested in D.C., prone to raving and episodical behavior, including vicious mood-swings! Into ambushing, farting, and hanging upside down! Consider carefully before befriending! (7)

There is, here, not only a disdain for heteronormativity, but homonormativity as well. Hothead longs for a space in which she can be herself, outside of any norms at all. And in fact, like the liminal or ritual space often associated with heterotopias, she often has private spiritual moments as well where she has alternatingly affirming and let us say “curative” moments with elements of the universe, including the moon and the mother goddess, the latter of which is represented by a common lamp.

Possibly the most telling commentary on Valeria Solanas’ work comes from reviews of the film about her, I Shot Andy Warhol. Heller brings up the review in Ms. Magazine in which Jennifer Baumgardner “insist[ed] that Solanas's writings and actions were by no means the work of a committed activist but of an abused crackpot who was never a part of any legitimate feminist community” (qtd in Heller: 171). She writes of Baumgardner’s “handwringing expression of angst over Solanas's newfound celebrity status as misunderstood lesbian avenger du jour. Baumgardner” she explains, did “elaborate back flips to discount the film's closing claim that the SCUM Manifesto has become "a feminist classic.(171)" Rita Kempley, a writer for the Washington Post referred to Solanas as an “obstreperous, male-bashing, pain in the patoot” (qtd in Heller:169).

Rejecting Feminine Language

One of the ways in which both Solanas and Hothead transgress against society in general and against feminism is in their use of language. Both are completely unabashed in their use of scatological and sexual terms, which are completely taboo for women. It is one thing for women to talk about penises and vaginas in clinical ways. But to talk about dicks and pussies and shit in those very words, to refer to women as whores and sluts, is to subject yourself to censorship and censure. The SCUM Manifesto, for example, states:

“To call a man an animal is to flatter him: he’s a . . . .walking dildo. . . . he’ll swim a river of snot, wade in nostril-deep through a pile of vomit, if he thinks there’ll be a friendly pussy awaiting him.” (2)

Even an anarchist bookstore currently selling the SCUM Manifesto in 2015 says “It’s a bit of weird one. I’m not sure why we’re selling it. I find it quite offensive. But maybe you want to buy it as a horrible birthday present for some you don’t like” (http://freedompress.org.uk/store/products/scum-manifesto/). Solanas is not afraid to use the vernacular, vulgar words to get the point across and that, especially in the 1960s, could have great impact or could be incredibly shocking for readers. Or both. For Solanas, words were her weapons and these words were not chosen by accident. They were chosen exactly to shock people into awareness, even revolution. For Solanas, the written word, the space of the text, was her heterotopia.

The culture of the 1990s may have been somewhat different, but for Diane DiMassa to show severed penises, which she did routinely, or to show a “cross-section of the penile brain” as she does in issue #5 (4) and #6 (8) adds another element to women’s censored speech acts. In issue #10, we see Hothead talking Fig. 9 or thinking to herself (the balloons are not 100% clear on this) “Holee shit! It’s like eight feet long. Chicken [her cat] will never believe it!!” (8).

Shortly thereafter, in issue #10, a man says to Hothead, “I know I can make you come” (14) and after a few more choice words, she puts a stick of dynamite in his mouth saying “I’m just gonna shove this foreign object into this hole where it’s not wanted . . “ (14). Later, in issue #17, Hothead herself gets schooled by a group of crudely drawn “liddle girls” (sic), drawn as if they themselves had been drawn by little girls. Hothead says “You’re so cute, but where did you come from?” to which the girls respond “not cute! not a toy! don’t trust no one. Daddy ruined everything men are pus rockets . . . .useless pieces a shit (sic) . . .” (6). Thus, all women, young and old, need a space in which to speak and to be able to speak in language that is not sanctioned or pleasing.

The Poetics of Cursing

In “The Poetics of Cursing,” Brown and Kushner assert that “the scandal of cursing stems perhaps less from its obscenity than from the way that the obscene refutes notions of linguistic and bodily self-possession,” two things that have been traditionally required of women in “polite society,” ie, regulated space. Remember that the space of heterotopia also includes the space of rituals and of carnival. In “The Derelict Playground: A Bakhtinian Analysis of the Graphic Novel Medium,” Rick Hudson says that “The carnival revels and delights in ‘the language of the marketplace’: oaths, curses, and obscenities; their appeal lies in the fact that they are ‘forbidden’ and themselves highlight the grotesque body – referring to defecation of sexual acts – or the willfully profane” (36). This is particularly applicable to women, who are not supposed to have grotesque bodies, let alone talk about them, which makes it all the funnier when in issue #8, Hothead, in “spritzhead disguise,” takes aim (literally) at the “feminine hygiene” aisle of the grocery store, shooting at products like “Yeast Garde,” “Borne Blonde,” “Daisy Razors,” and , “I Live to Scrub” (4). Hothead is eliminating all products that do not allow women to be themselves, but impose patriarchal ideas of how women should look and smell. Think about the continued proliferation of these products and you will see that this is as much an issue now as it was in 1994 or in 1968, when both Diane DiMassa and Valerie Solanas were creating. Regulating the “grotesque body” of women never goes out of style, it seems. The ability of women to talk about such things, particularly in “mixed company” is also regulated. If you don’t believe me, walk into a room full of men and talk about “that not so fresh feeling.”

Conclusion

Much scholarship exists on women’s speech, but it is useful to think of writing, comics, and the self-publishing revolutions of the past 40 years as helping to create not merely “safe space,” but an alternative space, sometimes liminal and ritualistic, and at other times, carnivalesque, a heterotopia where women are not only able to talk about difficult subjects, but also to transgress normative functions of all kinds and to talk about bodies in vernacular, vulgar, and grotesque ways, as both Valerie Solanas and Diane DiMassa have done, each transgressing social values in their own ways.


Works Cited

Abrect, Kristi Lynn. Illustrating Identity: Feminist Resistance in Webcomics. Thesis. San Diego State University, 2012. Web. 3 September 2015.

Brown, Kate E. and Howard I. Kushner. “Eruptive Voices: Coprolalia, Malediction, and the Poetics of Cursing.” New Literary History. 32. (2001): 537–562. Web. 24 Mar. 2009.

Cross Yr. Stitches. Blog. 30 July 2008. Web. 19 September 2015.

DiMassa, Diane. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 1, 1991, 1992, 1993. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 2, 1991. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 5, 1992. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 6, 1992. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 8, 1992. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 10, 1993. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 15, 1994. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 17, 1995. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 18, 1995. Print.

-----. Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist. New Haven: Giant Ass Publishing. Issue 21, 1998. Print.

Foucault, Michel and Jay Miskowiec. “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics. 16:1 (Spring 1986): 22-27. JSTOR. Web. 29 Nov. 2005.

Gottschall, Jonathan. “The Science of Storytelling: How Narrative Cuts Through Distraction Like Nothing Else.” Fast Company. 16 October 2013. Web. 9 Sept. 2014.

Heller, Dana. “Shooting Solanas: Radical Feminist History and the Technology of Failure.” Feminist Studies, 27: 1 (Spring, 2001): 167-189. Web. 5 Sept. 2015.

Hudson, Rick. “The Derelict Playground: A Bakhtinian Analysis of the Graphic Novel Medium.” The CEA Critic.72:3. (Spring-Summer 2010): 35-49. Western Online. Web. 3 September 2015.

“Karaj: Feminist Leisure Series.” Tumblr. 8 Apr. Web. 19 September 2015.

LesPress. “Wonderful World of Lesbian Pop Culture: Fe MUH- NIST & Vampires- lesbians in the US Independent Comic: Hothead Paisan, Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist.” Popkultr. Bonn. 2002. Web. 21 Sept. 2105

McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins. 1994.

Pinterest. Web. Date and original source no longer available. 20 September 2015

“SCUM Manifesto.” Freedom Anarchist Media Publishing and Bookshop. Adam Lawrence Bar, ed. Web. 19 Sept. 2015.

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. London: Phoenix Press. 1983. Print.

Solanas, Valerie. SCUM Manifesto. Pat Earl, Reprint from the Matriarchy Study Group, UK and Phoenix Press. 1983. Print.

The Unknown History of MISANDRY. Blog. 20 July 2011. Web. 20 September 2015.

On Goldsmith, Perloff and Race

I am hopelessly behind on many things. I teach and am currently attending yet another graduate school, this time to get my second Master’s degree – in English. This means that I am working or in class 14 hours some days and the days I do not spend in that way I spend my time grading or writing papers. So apparently there has been a whirlwind blowing up about Marjorie Perloff, Kenneth Goldsmith, and race that I am behind on. Having been out of the loop on this, I nonetheless had a few thoughts as I read Jen Hofer’s account as well as the portion of the transcript that she had published. I don't know that I have anything shockingly new to add to the conversation, but since when did that stop anyone, especially me, from commenting?

*************************

I just read Marjorie Perloff’s statements about Michael Brown, made at an art festival ¬¬in Demark At that festival, in a Q&A, she talked about Michael Brown as “scary” and she started saying that we shouldn’t always equate victimhood with innocence. According to a transcript from Hofer and published in this online article, Perloff then went on to talk about victims of the holocaust as not so innocent and if you look into their backgrounds, many were (probably) really terrible people.

All this would be fine if the Michael Brown incident were isolated and not a product of persistent racism stemming not just from a history of slavery, or segregation and discrimination that were all part of our past, now that we are “post-racial,” and not part of persistent racism that occurs on a daily basis in the 1990s and 2000s in America. If there were not a report released on 14 US cities where only black Americans were killed by the police this year. The comments would be fine if what happened in WWII Germany had not been the result of persistent anti-Semitism for centuries and had reared its ugly head again in the recent decade(s) leading up to WWII. If these things were not a part of an ongoing pattern and were simply things that happened to a few morally ambiguous individuals.

****************************************

In both of these comments, Perloff comes off as sounding like Kenneth Goldsmith himself, being intentionally provocative while maintaining an Alfred E. Neuman-like “What, Me?” stance. While I admire much about Goldsmith’s work, I can also see the flaws in his approach and the “radical artifice” in his attitudes. I find much of Goldsmith’s work to be said with a wink designed to get people’s hackles up and there really are no limits, as he has shown by his use of “found materials,” repurposing non-poetic materials to his non-poetic (wink wink, nudge nudge) ends.

I think the thing that unites all of this work, Perloff’s statements that many perceive as racist, her continued advocacy of “white male” poets and a while male avant-garde, and Goldsmith’s appropriation of Michael Brown’s autopsy report is not necessarily an inherent racism, but moreover, the belief that the “canon” of literature can and should somehow be a-historical. That somehow it shouldn’t comment on our times, but should rise above the specific historical context is something that only a privileged few – mostly white men and some privileged white women – have the luxury to do. The rest of us are struggling with our historical moment as women and non-white males.

For many of us, we do not have the luxury of being a-historical, and frankly, neither did many of the best previous avant-gardists of any era. Andre Breton and Louis Aragon were deeply embroiled in the politics of their era. Tristan Tzara worked for the French Resistance and Robert Desnos died in a concentration camp. Breton was in Haiti as the Haitian revolution broke out and it has been suggested that his presence hastened that revolution. Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera were involved in revolutionary politics and harbored Trotsky. Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece brought unapologetic attention to the politics around women’s bodies. There are countless examples of artists and poets in the avant-garde who did not hide behind their art, even if they were white males, but used their art, their free speech, to push their politics and the art was enriched by their politics, rather than being impoverished by it.

****************************************************

Does being a victim of an atrocity erase any previous misdeeds? Does being a respected and at times revered literary theorist or poet insulate you from social criticism of your work and your comments? It seems to be that these two situations may be equivocal.

In Hofer's transcript, Perloff gives us the usual critique of the younger generation: “Back in my day, we didn’t do that.” Abe Simpson’s voice rings clearly in my head.

“When I went to school I was taught you say “Ah, this is good, but might he have not done this, or there could be more of that,” or you know, you attacked politely” when I went to school I was taught you say “Ah, this is good, but might he have not done this, or there could be more of that,” or you know, you attacked politely (Perloff qtd in Hofer). Perloff blames this on internet culture and incivility. And certainly there are uncivil things being said on the internet. But this emphasis on “being attacked politely” is also part of the assumption that academia should be a nice place where people don’t discuss things that they feel strongly about or that involve strong passions? Where does the line between outrage and incivility get drawn?

*******************************************************

I have not seen Kenneth Goldsmith’s piece, but I do know a lot about his work and his detached persona. That is not an inherent part of the avant-garde. He could have used the autopsy to bring attention to the injustice that is being done to African-Americans throughout the country. Baltimore, Ferguson, New York, Minneapolis, etc. etc. Perhaps that is what he intended to do in his “objective” hipster way. I tend to give him the benefit of the doubt on some of this. But Perloff is on dangerous ground not only with her comments about Michael Brown and of victimhood vs. innocence, but in her insistence that the work of anyone that is not white, privileged, and male is not worthy of her notice.

Art and writing: box logic

This is my video blog for my teaching class on the use of visual art in teaching composition.

Thoughts on teaching: my first video blog

Ok, so I am in the MA program at Western Illinois University and this is my first video blog on teaching with some metacommentary on how the process is going. I will post some of these, as well as a little bit of my coursework here, which is being done on Tumblr, as you can see if you follow the link.

I am currently working at Scott Community College, Brown Mackie College, and also doing some test scoring for Pearson while I am taking this class at WIU. You would think I would be wealthy, but a) adjunct instructors don't make shit for money and b) money, like matter, expands to fill the space it occupies. As soon as you start making money, bill collectors appear from out of nowhere!

Enjoy. This and the next one are pretty funny.

Review of Carole Maso's Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo

For the new year, let's revisit a great writer and a great painter:



Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo
by Carole Maso
2002, Counterpoint Press
hardcover
170 pp.


Whenever I read Carole Maso, I start writing like her. And so it’s the words and impressions that linger, hovering above the page, insistent, repeating: Broken. Fragment. Meditation. Accident. Votive.

Composed in Maso’s unique poetic and fragmentary style, Beauty is Convulsive: The Passion of Frida Kahlo is many different things at once: a highly condensed biography of Kahlo’s life, a voice for her words, and Maso’s artistic “conversation” with Kahlo.

Beauty is Convulsive samples freely from biographies of Kahlo among Maso’s own writing and impressions. We’ve become used to this style from filmmakers and rap artists, but it is still unusual in books, where we’re accustomed to more singularity of voice, clear quotes and citations with footnotes and page numbers. Maso’s rendering of Frida Kahlo requires a certain suspension of disbelief, a willingness to experience Kahlo’s life as we abandon our usual literary constraints.

The book focuses on three defining elements of Frida Kahlo’s life. The first is a serious bus accident in her adolescence which had repercussions throughout her entire life, including chronic pain in her back, legs and feet, and an inability to have children. Her subsequent miscarriages make up another recurring theme. And the third is her marriage to fellow painter Diego Rivera.

Maso’s sometimes halting, disjointed writing style suggests a life lived in fits and starts, as in Votive: Child:

“Its birth certificate filled out in elegant scroll His mother was
Frieda [sic] Kahlo

take this sorrow: child

I would give you fistfuls of color
if only
alegria

I would have given you.

Because I wanted you come to me

the cupped butterfly, painted black.” (19)

One of the hallmarks of Carole Maso’s writing is repetition of words and phrases, and Votive features in the title, as well as in the text, of many of the pieces in this book. Votive: Vision, Votive: Courage, and Votive: Sorrow, are among the pieces that lead the reader on a meditation, a wish, a prayer on elements of Frida Kahlo’s life, almost as if you are walking the stations of the cross. In between the Votives and other pieces are short epigrammatic quotes from Frida herself, each entitled “Accident”, which serve as interludes:

“I am not sick. I am broken.
But I am happy as long as I can paint.” (65)

“Nevertheless I have the will to do many things
and I have never felt “disappointed by life”
as in Russian novels. (75)

In her choice and placement of text from her journals, Maso not only gives voice to Frida Kahlo, but also highlights Kahlo the poet, particularly when writing about Diego:

“From you to my hands I go all over your body, and I am with you a minute and I am with you a moment, and my blood is the miracle that travels in the veins of the air from my heart to yours. . . Diego, nothing is comparable to your hands and nothing is equal to the gold-green of your eyes. . . .”(34-35)

Lest you start to believe that Maso is merely a collage artist, arranging the words that Frida has written and what others have written about her, Maso intertwines her own meditations on the artist’s life and her work:

“She remembers when her mouth -- pressed to the ear -- to the
hum of the paint the blood:
don’t kiss anyone else
magenta, dark green, yellow
And she watches him.” (91)

Add to this quotes from others who knew Frida Kahlo, including Diego himself, Alejandro, who was involved in the accident with Frida, and notes from her doctors, and gradually, contemplatively, you get a picture of the woman and the artist, and the effect she has on those who wish to enter her world.

Review of An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers

An Open Entrance to the Shut Palace of Wrong Numbers
Franklin Rosemont
Chicago: Surrealist Editions

Just as misspelling is the least appreciated genre of creative writing, the Wrong Number is the most despised form of oral poetry and storytelling (75).

Surrealism is generally thought of as a thing of the past: Andre Breton holding court in pre-war Paris Cafes discussing Freud and Marx and writing poetry.

Franklin Rosemont, editor of Chicago’s Black Swan Press and (one of) the leading (contemporary) (American) Surrealists has taken his longstanding fascination with misdialed phone numbers as an occasion to write a contemporary surrealist manifesto of sorts, a reaffirmation of the presence of Surrealism as a force in our daily lives.

The wrong number: an exquisite corpse shared by strangers; a visit from the subconscious; a political opportunity; a symbol of sexual repression; an indicator of xenophobia. Rosemont’s often fanciful, sometimes exaggerated meanderings offer up the misdialed number as a seemingly comprehensive and insidious marker of our current social condition.

As an unconscious attempt to speak to . . . an Other, a stranger, every wrong number corresponds to the latent but unmistakable desire . . . for . . . radically non-alienated way of life (131).

The book begins as a treatise on modern society and on the Surrealist liberation of desire and imagination as the antidote to the “miserabilist world order.” Rosemont then lays out for us his “methodology” for researching wrong numbers. He shows how wrong numbers have been basically ignored, gone unstudied, despite their ubiquity in our culture. The wrong number soon moves from being the object of study itself to becoming the framework through which life can be explained.

In the second chapter Rosemont uses the conceit of wrong numbers to frame autobiographical anecdotes ranging from his family in Chicago and California to his meetings with Breton and several Surrealists in Paris in the 1960s. The stories in these chapters are charming and almost unbelievable in their chance encounters and fortuitous accidents.

From there, we move to a meandering mix of philosophy, psychoanalysis, gnosticism, linguistics and politics, all understood vis-à-vis the experience and analysis of wrong numbers. The result in these later chapters can be somewhat uneven. Like Surrealism itself, the book is at its best when it forgets itself, gets lost, and stumbles onto fragments of unexpected poetry. Some of the best moments are when Rosemont veers off into the performative, invocational language of manifestos.

The text becomes weighted down in places when Rosemont begins protesting too much. What can be fanciful at first starts to feel forced. One notable example is the discussion of sexuality, which starts off as an interesting and amusing contemplation. Rosemont goes to great lengths to compare the wrong number to every possible Freudian permutation of sexual dysfunction, ultimately stretching credulity. Attempting to keep the metaphor of the wrong number on task, the book often retreads, repeating itself--a worthy poetic device in a shorter piece that here creates a sense of redundancy and sometimes impatience. And in his desire to undertake a kind of serious and comprehensive “study” of the wrong number, the text, particularly in the later chapters, becomes dry and begins to read more like an academic paper than a paean to Surrealism.

Wrong Numbers also features drawings by Artur de Cruzeiro Seixas. The artwork is classical or “old school” surrealist, the cover art featuring a human body rising out of a telephone with images and figures that immediately place the book within that artistic framework.

Ultimately, the work is not only a call to openness (to chance, to strangers, to joy) but also a worthy contemporary analysis of our culture that, in its more playful moments, offers surprise and insight. It serves as a reminder that Surrealism is a force that remains afoot in the universe. We come to appreciate the smallest irritant as an opportunity for delight.

The struggle for a ‘poetic politics’ takes place on many levels . . . outburst of hilarity, generous gestures, impossible chance encounters, creams that haunt one for weeks on end, fits of delirium . . . inspired slips of the tongue, stunning coincidences that irrevocably alter the whole course of one’s life. . . . Immune to the forces of repression, they are themselves forces of poetry and therefore of freedom (137).

Composition Experiments List

In the spirit of Charles Bernstein and Bernadette Mayer and their poetic experiments list, this is the beginning of my Composition Experiments List. Feel free to borrow from and add to this list and tell me about it!

*Do an exquisite corpse on the theme of “your experience with college” or another nonfiction topic. Since this is nonfiction, a topic should be chosen to direct the paper.

*If Conceptualist Artists could just write about the art object they intended to make without having to actually make it, what it would mean for them to "not write" a paper.

*Do a research/brainstorming exquisite corpse – write a topic on a piece of paper and pass it around the room, with everyone contributing an idea for that topic.

*Chance operations – bring in a previous paper they have written or a draft of one. Use a chance operation such as a roll of the dice, to determine the order of the paragraphs. How does that change the paper? Does it make a difference what order it is written in? (Encourages rewriting and revisiting a paper.)

*Write with your eyes closed. (Forces you to keep writing and not stop in brainstorming.)

*Spontaneous research: choose a book or an article. Close your eyes and point to a passage. Write that down. Do this repeatedly five or more additional times. String those together to see what you get.

*Pick a short passage from a book or research article and do a 3-5 minute freewrite about it.

*Do an example of the most pretentious writing you can

*Try writing a piece with as many clichés as you can.

*Try writing with predominantly figurative language.

*Try writing straightforward with no figurative language, metaphors, or similes.

*Try writing a thesis sentence or an opening paragraph using text language. (This is good for helping students to see that there are all kinds of grammars that are good in many different settings.)

Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas

I have done book reviewing for Rain Taxi for over ten years. I have decided to repost some of my older reviews here. I am fortunate in that Rain Taxi gives me books that I request or in areas that I request, so these are all books that I have really liked. I hope you will check some out after reading these.

Surreal Eden: Edward James and Las Pozas
Margaret Hooks
Princeton Architectural Press


As a long time devotee and student of Surrealism, it came as something of a shock to be handed a book on an artist and patron central to the careers of several prominent surrealists that I had never heard of before, Edward James. How was it possible that I had never read his name in any other biography or group history of Surrealism, had seen him in no exhibitions, no bibliographies I had ever encountered? What kind of Surrealist “pedigree” could this person possibly have?

A writer and artist, James’ first novel, The Gardener Who Saw God, received critical acclaim and even went into multiple publications. Despite consistently solid reviews for his work, one negative review, accusing him of attempting to “also buy himself a reputation as a poet” caused James to become discouraged and cease publishing under his own name. “I could have had anything I wanted,” James laments, but because I was rich, no one accepted me or thought of me as a poet.” (36) James focused his energies for a time on other artists. Behind the scenes, he was one among many key players in the production and distribution of Surrealism, underwriting the Surrealist journal Minotaur as well as the Surrealist Pavilion at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. He supported Salvador Dali financially and by helping materially to coordinate exhibitions for Dali as well as for Rene Magritte (whose Le Reproduction Interdite is said to be one of two portraits that Magritte did of James, showing him from the back). Despite James’ involvement with many prominent Surrealists throughout his life, Hooks points out that James never claimed the label for himself, understandably so, given the legendary infighting over the purity of the name Surrealism, held tightly by Andre Breton, and his tendency to “excommunicate” artists, along with James’ own sense of exclusion from the literary world.

From his break with Dali, Hooks takes us briefly through what might be described literally and figuratively as James’ years “in the desert.” He travels through the American southwest, through Taos, New Mexico and Mabel Dodge’s artistic community therein, and ultimately landing in California, where he continued to circulate among artists and intellectuals including Aldous Huxley and Gerald Heard, who introduced James to the Vedantic movement, of which he became a follower. In this time, James also began to travel back and forth to Mexico, and it was during these travels that he found what would become not only his home, but the site of his greatest artistic creation of all, his legacy of a surrealist environment and estate, among the hills, waterfalls, and lush vegetation outside of the small town of Xilitla. From here, the book diverges from the standard artist biography to give us the blow-by-blow history of the creation of Las Pozas.

If Surrealism represents a way of looking at, thinking about, and moving through the world, Las Pozas, James’ Surreal Eden, is a surrealistic world in itself to be lived in. Hooks articulates in detail James’ vision as well as his challenges and triumphs in realizing his works of art. He finds a kindred spirit and lifelong friend in Plutarco Gastelem Esquer, a man who is able to translate James’ ideas and sometimes seemingly impractical sketches into actual objects. James employs many of the people of Xilitla in the building of Las Pozas, not only providing patronage to artists this time, but bringing an economic infusion to the entire town. It is in the project of Las Pozas itself, as well as his friendship with Plutarco, that James finds the society and artistic acceptance the eluded James in his younger days.

If there is one shortcoming to the book, it is possibly not even a problem of the text at all, but with the difficulty in capturing visual and visceral artistic experiences that are so central to this story. Hooks provides photos of and also describes in detail many elaborate and fascinating pieces created by James throughout his life, many of which would be considered installations or even performance art pieces today, from Monkton House in England, with its purple façade and self-designed wallpaper and carpeting to the structures, sculptures, and edifices of Las Pozas. It’s a daunting, if not impossible task, to fully appreciate these pieces without being able to experience them. And perhaps this daunting task also explains, in part, James’ low visibility in the narratives of contemporary art history.

The book’s extensive photographs helps a great deal in this regard, but cannot fully ameliorate the situation. The photos include detailed photos and close ups of many of the pieces from Las Pozas, which hint at the scope of the project. This scope includes not only the size of the pieces and structures themselves, such as the Bamboo Palace the Stairway to the Sky, which completely dwarfs the cabin it stands behind, but also includes the space occupied by Las Pozas itself. Hooks does provide a map that shows the layout and area of Las Pozas, but it is difficult to appreciate on a visual level without being able to see the pieces in relationship to each other or to the larger landscape. Likewise, the book opens with a description of the current city of Xilitla, but we see only one photo of the town, taken in 1940, just before James’ arrival. I found it difficult to not only hold in my mind the building of these amazing works of art, but also to visualize the context in which is was built and now stands, a context and often contrast, which Hooks tries very hard to describe for us.

That said, Surreal Eden does what many good art biographies and histories do: remind us of what gets forgotten and left out of “official” canons. Hers is not the first biography of James, but adds to a body of work that includes two previous biographies as well as James’ own writings. Through these, and through the potential to renew interest in Las Pozas, which still stands today outside of Xilitla, James has the chance he always desired to be taken seriously as an artist in his own right.

Teaching English Composition with Surrealism

This is a paper that I did while at the University of Minnesota. I have been using many of these techniques in my own composition classes with some success and I am also presenting some of this at the SW/TX PCA Conference in Albuquerque this February (2015).


Surrealist Applications for Composition-Related Activities


These are just a few potential applications of Surrealism to composition. These are some that I have produced and practiced myself and some that are classic Surrealist techniques. There are many more.

I. Exquisite Corpse, Group Processes and Brainstorming

The most famous of Surrealist writing techniques is the exquisite corpse, which got its name from a line of poetry. “The exquisite corpse shall drink the new wine.” In the exquisite corpse, a sheet of paper is passed around. Every person contributes to it one line at a time and sees only the line written right before theirs. I have also seen artists contribute to an artistic exquisite corpse, adding to a drawing bit by bit. There are several ways that this could be put to work as a method for brainstorming.
As a brainstorming session or a free write, everyone passes around a sheet of paper, folded or unfolded, writing suggestions on it. Alternatively, each person can take turns putting his or her potential topic in the center of a group and everyone in the group writes down suggestions on that particular topic, and then move on to the next student’s idea. Group work in that case would take on the valence of shared knowledge. Often we tell students during a brainstorming session to write down everything they know about a topic. What if they could be inspired by what their classmates also know about a topic? In this way, brainstorming becomes not a solitary act, but an act of shared knowledge, in which student remind one another of what they already know or help to point one another in various fruitful directions for their research.

II. Chance Operations as a Form of Organization


Is there only one way to organize a paper? Chance operations, most notably rolling dice or drawing cards that relate to certain sections or paragraphs, have been used by a number of writers like William S. Burroughs, musicians like John Cage, and choreographers such as Merce Cunningham. This technique can also work for students of composition, in this case to determine paragraph topic order in their papers. In doing so, it can teach students that there are any number of ways to organize their texts that can produce different results for the reader. Sometimes students organize their papers in the way that is most obvious – such as chronological – but may not be the most effective or even the most interesting. At other times, students may be writing about a series of three subtopics (the most common number in composition) in such a way that it does not matter which one goes first. By playing with the order of their subtopics and paragraphs, they become accustomed to doing rewriting and see it as a form of experimenting with their texts. It also adds an element of play, and therefore of fun, that might encourage more rewriting from students.

III. The Many Uses of Collage Techniques in Writing


A. Collage as Brainstorming and Research

The technique of collage, which the Surrealists borrowed (stole) from the Dadaists, lends itself very well to “spontaneous research.” Having chosen a book or an article to cite, students can close their eyes and point to a passage. Have the student free write on what that passage may mean. Have them do that several times throughout the article or book. Then, to make it a true collage, students may string together what they have written to create a whole, spontaneous text from the day’s class, to see how it all of their writing fits together. This exercise will stimulate their thinking and may also make them more enthusiastic to go back and read the whole article. At the same time, it will help students to generate thoughts and ideas to react to small parts of the text before they respond to the text as a whole. It often helps students if they can jump into a text in the middle, where they might find something that catches their attention, and then go back and read it from the beginning. rather than seeing a book or article as something they have to get through from beginning to end, which may or may not hold any interest for them. In this age of Internet, Twitter, etc., in which most people have very divided attention, it also corresponds to the way that many people actually do read. At the same time, once they respond to a portion of the article, students are encouraged to go back through and see how their understanding of the excerpt that they wrote about corresponds to the overall text, which can also teach them about the pitfalls of quoting part of a text out of context.
B. A Variation on Collage Techniques as a Way to Respond to Texts

This technique can also be used during in-class writings as a way to respond to texts. When a text has been assigned, have everyone point to a passage quickly (don’t think about it) and write for five minutes about that passage. They can do a free association or write directly on the passage. Again the point is for the students to be engaging with what they have read, and also be able to engage with any part of a text.
C. Collage as a Form of Sentence Combining

Many instructors still advocate sentence combining to teach style or to eliminate wordiness. A different form of collage is one where the student/writer literally cuts up a passage and then puts different parts or different sheets of papers together. Beat writer William S. Burroughs is best known for developing this technique as a way to (re)generate texts, but it originated with the Surrealists. This exercise is fun and may give students some energy to do more “traditional” and straightforward sentence-combining to achieve sentence variety. It can also be done with a little more direction, taking a small section of the paper for example, or even cutting apart sentences and then combining them.
A more literal form of artistic collage can also be used, such as cutting apart sentences and then gluing them onto a sheet of paper either in a different order or with sentences overlapping. Theoretically students can do this with a computer, but takes on a different feel and function when it’s done using paper and glue and can shake students out of their usual way of writing and editing. As with a number of other exercises, these can be done as individual or group projects.

The Manifesto as a Form of Argumentation and Group Work

A. The Manifesto Form

In some of my class assignments, I have students work up to writing a research paper by writing a complaint letter, a letter to the editor of a paper, and writing to a the company. This scaffolds learning and teaches the students about writing they do in their everyday life. The manifesto is another form of persuasive writing, a bombastic form of expressing opinions and can be done as a group or individual activity. Mary Ann Caws, in the introduction to Manifesto: A Century of Isms, says that the manifesto “generally proclaims what it wants to oppose to leave, to defend, to change” (xxii). Many students have a strong sense of injustice or at least indignation for what they consider to be unfair. The manifesto, as a form, allows them to express their own opinions, with no need to defend that opinion with research. “Generally the manifesto stands alone, does not need to lean on anything else, demands no other text than itself. Its rules are self-contained, included in its own body” (Caws xxv). As both a text to respond to as well as a text to be produced, it is particularly fruitful in helping students to write their initial ideas out and present them to one another. In addition, the manifesto has a sense of flair unlike any other form of writing and is fun for students to write.

B. The Manifesto as a Step Toward Argumentation

Writing a manifesto can be a good intermediate step, where students think about and state explicitly what their position is on a given subject. Students can then start thinking about social context that this issue fits into. Was this situation merely a one-time slight or oversight, or does it point to a more general problem within society? Having written out their complaint with society or their idea on how things ought to work, students can begin to think about what kind of support they will need down the line for their arguments. Their peers will be able to comment upon their manifestos and argue with them, thereby showing the holes in their arguments through friendly discussion and debate.
C. The Manifesto and Group Work

Generally speaking, manifestos are the expression of a group, although examples can be found of individually-written manifestos, such as those written by the Unabomber or the Discovery Channel Gunman. This can work, then, as either an individual project or as a group project. As a group project, I would recommend small groups of three students, which is a little better than just a pair, but not so big and unwieldy as to create insurmountable problems or disagreements. Ask the students to present potential paper topics to their group and have the group decide on which project they will write a manifesto. If they are really fortunate (or crafty) it might be possible for students to combine their topics of concern into one manifesto. Other techniques described above, like an exquisite corpse or collage techniques, can be used to generate the initial text. D. The Manifesto and Critical Reading

For those who want to teach an aspect of critical reading in their classroom and to introduce alternative texts to students, the manifesto is an outstanding form. Whereas many people think of manifestos in terms of artistic movements, they were also employed extensively by AIDS activists in the 1980s and 1990s as well as those in the environmental movement, the women’s movement, etc. Allowing students to read such texts, to examine the claims made in the texts and the way those claims are embedded and expressed, and to agree or disagree with them encourages them to read critically. Because the manifesto’s style is so “in your face,” manifestos can be good beginning texts to help students begin to examine and test the claims made.