Berfrois

Intellectual Jousting in the Republic of Letters
There is a well-known division between two camps of academic philosophy, often called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’, with each side more or less convinced that what the other side is doing is not really philosophy at all. This is a provincial and mandarin dispute, and I do not wish to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider those expressions of interest in fundamental questions that one might find in monasteries, madrasas, tea houses, yurts, around campfires, late at night as the seal blubber burns. Can such interest count, I want to know, as philosophy? Once I took part in a conference in a mid-sized provincial city in Transylvania. As part of the opening ceremony, the local Orthodox bishop was invited to hold forth on the value of philosophy. He seized the opportunity to denounce Marxism, existentialism, and even rap music, and praised all in attendance for guarding the flame of spirituality in a corrupt and materialistic world. His éloge dragged on. The most distinguished member of our delegation could be heard snoring. I passed the time looking over the paper I was going to present, which as it happens was on 18th-century materialism. The bishop had heard there were some philosophers coming to town, and he assumed he shared a common language with us. I can only guess as to his exact background, but I imagine this man had spent time in a seminary, and that he read there at least some of the authors academic philosophers would recognize as constituting the Western philosophical tradition: Origen, Clement of Alexandria, probably Augustine, maybe even the pagan Plato. This man had probably incorporated what he learned about these authors into his understanding of questions such as, What is the fate of a person after death? Am I essentially or only contingently associated with a physical body? What is infinity? “A Plea for Folk-Philosophy”, Justin E. H. Smith

There is a well-known division between two camps of academic philosophy, often called ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’, with each side more or less convinced that what the other side is doing is not really philosophy at all. This is a provincial and mandarin dispute, and I do not wish to discuss it here. Instead, I want to consider those expressions of interest in fundamental questions that one might find in monasteries, madrasas, tea houses, yurts, around campfires, late at night as the seal blubber burns. Can such interest count, I want to know, as philosophy?

Once I took part in a conference in a mid-sized provincial city in Transylvania. As part of the opening ceremony, the local Orthodox bishop was invited to hold forth on the value of philosophy. He seized the opportunity to denounce Marxism, existentialism, and even rap music, and praised all in attendance for guarding the flame of spirituality in a corrupt and materialistic world. His éloge dragged on. The most distinguished member of our delegation could be heard snoring. I passed the time looking over the paper I was going to present, which as it happens was on 18th-century materialism.

The bishop had heard there were some philosophers coming to town, and he assumed he shared a common language with us. I can only guess as to his exact background, but I imagine this man had spent time in a seminary, and that he read there at least some of the authors academic philosophers would recognize as constituting the Western philosophical tradition: Origen, Clement of Alexandria, probably Augustine, maybe even the pagan Plato. This man had probably incorporated what he learned about these authors into his understanding of questions such as, What is the fate of a person after death? Am I essentially or only contingently associated with a physical body? What is infinity?

“A Plea for Folk-Philosophy”, Justin E. H. Smith

“Kate did not think of herself as lost she did not think of herself at all. She just was. She just wanted. Kate’s Kate. Come for Kate.” from “Katherine Restored” by X

“Kate did not think of herself as lost
she did not think of herself at all.
She just was. She just wanted.
Kate’s Kate. Come for Kate.”

from “Katherine Restored” by X

In advertising, our craving for novelty and interruption, and our drive to find patterns and make sense of it all, are lassoed together in the Costco corral. Billboards interrupt our landscapes, exhortations interrupt our songs, short videos interrupt longer videos. Shopping even interrupts shopping, as your activity is tracked through your credit cards, and targeted ads appear on your Facebook page. Phrases, fonts, songs, colors, memes — all these and more have been copyrighted, trademarked, branded, stamped with association. Soon claims will not even need to be staked, as we discover and deploy the exact frequency of yellow that makes you buy. Everywhere these signals invert their surroundings into noise, and capture our attention, even if only for a moment. But those moments accumulate, and we sequence the chaos into patterns and narratives. But why leave the outfield to the ads? Advertising only moved into these edgelands because they were what was available; they were peripheral to the existing narratives, the ones about you, me, others, our lives, history, nature, the future, imagination. Ads were necessarily fragmentary, intermittent. But here is where the paradox of fragments comes into play. Out of edges we have constructed a new master narrative; the outfield has become not the outlier, but the frame. The metaphors of the marketplace permeate all our societal institutions, all our speech, all our interactions. You may try to resist but they are still there, persistent, relentless. We have invented own personal Moriarty. “Short Attention Span Theater”, Peggy Nelson

In advertising, our craving for novelty and interruption, and our drive to find patterns and make sense of it all, are lassoed together in the Costco corral. Billboards interrupt our landscapes, exhortations interrupt our songs, short videos interrupt longer videos. Shopping even interrupts shopping, as your activity is tracked through your credit cards, and targeted ads appear on your Facebook page. Phrases, fonts, songs, colors, memes — all these and more have been copyrighted, trademarked, branded, stamped with association. Soon claims will not even need to be staked, as we discover and deploy the exact frequency of yellow that makes you buy. Everywhere these signals invert their surroundings into noise, and capture our attention, even if only for a moment. But those moments accumulate, and we sequence the chaos into patterns and narratives.

But why leave the outfield to the ads?

Advertising only moved into these edgelands because they were what was available; they were peripheral to the existing narratives, the ones about you, me, others, our lives, history, nature, the future, imagination. Ads were necessarily fragmentary, intermittent. But here is where the paradox of fragments comes into play. Out of edges we have constructed a new master narrative; the outfield has become not the outlier, but the frame. The metaphors of the marketplace permeate all our societal institutions, all our speech, all our interactions. You may try to resist but they are still there, persistent, relentless. We have invented own personal Moriarty.

“Short Attention Span Theater”, Peggy Nelson

Jouet, who became a member of the Oulipo in 1983, shortly after Perec’s death, has a serious face and a measured, attentive bearing. He sits up straight and often stands or walks with his hands clasped behind his back, looking more trial lawyer than contemplative poet. He seems eternally alert, not just observing but also working, at every moment taking in something that will eventually find its way, with minimal alteration, into a piece of literature. He generates and publishes work in enormous quantity: poems, stories, plays, essays, reviews, and, every few years, a new novel of imposing size and thoughtfulness. Still, more remarkable is the degree to which he seems both committed to and successful at erasing any vestigial distinctions between being alive and making literature. “He writes to pass the time, surely,” Warren Motte, the most accomplished of a handful of American Oulipo scholars, has remarked, “but also to feel time passing.” To that end, Jouet has written at least a poem a day since 1992, the first four years’ worth of which are collected in a 938-page volume called Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux (turnip, napkin, old-man’s-eye). Many of these are addressed poems, which he wrote and mailed to someone, allowing the content of the poem to be determined in part by what he knew or did not know about its intended recipient. (He once said, at least partly in jest, that instead of aspiring to have many people read a few of his poems, he preferred to write many poems and have each one read, if only at first, by a single person.) This is not the only testament to his willed conflation of poetic composition and everyday life; he has also invented the chronopoem, designed to take exactly as much time to recite as a non-poetic task does to execute, and helped to popularize the gestomètre, which inventories and examines the tics and motions of a given routine or period of daily time (taking a walk, peeling an orange, skinning a rabbit, composing a gestomètre). Many authors write poems that come from the everyday world, but Jouet’s usually return there as well, and seem to travel a very short total distance. Perhaps as a consequence of this, Jouet is sometimes pegged as the most political author in the Oulipo. His longer prose work, such as the Mek-Ouyes series and the larger, cyclical “Republic novel” to which it belongs, deals with concepts of governance and citizenship in a civically existential way. Ditto for early poetic works like 107 âmes (107 souls), a sort of nationwide micro-census filtered through a subtle structural and rhyming system. In both cases, though, it’s important to note that the political is literary, not the other way around. His social critique is “principally ironic and interrogative in character, rather than prescriptive,” Motte writes. “Jouet’s example argues that even the bleakest of our daily landscapes—a supermarket, a traffic jam, a dentist’s waiting room, for heaven’s sake—can be traversed poetically.” And when your daily landscape becomes poetic, how do you go about writing poetry if not… daily? “Little Demons of Subtlety: On the Oulipian Constraint”, by Daniel Levin Becker

Jouet, who became a member of the Oulipo in 1983, shortly after Perec’s death, has a serious face and a measured, attentive bearing. He sits up straight and often stands or walks with his hands clasped behind his back, looking more trial lawyer than contemplative poet. He seems eternally alert, not just observing but also working, at every moment taking in something that will eventually find its way, with minimal alteration, into a piece of literature. He generates and publishes work in enormous quantity: poems, stories, plays, essays, reviews, and, every few years, a new novel of imposing size and thoughtfulness. Still, more remarkable is the degree to which he seems both committed to and successful at erasing any vestigial distinctions between being alive and making literature. “He writes to pass the time, surely,” Warren Motte, the most accomplished of a handful of American Oulipo scholars, has remarked, “but also to feel time passing.”

To that end, Jouet has written at least a poem a day since 1992, the first four years’ worth of which are collected in a 938-page volume called Navet, linge, oeil-de-vieux (turnip, napkin, old-man’s-eye). Many of these are addressed poems, which he wrote and mailed to someone, allowing the content of the poem to be determined in part by what he knew or did not know about its intended recipient. (He once said, at least partly in jest, that instead of aspiring to have many people read a few of his poems, he preferred to write many poems and have each one read, if only at first, by a single person.) This is not the only testament to his willed conflation of poetic composition and everyday life; he has also invented the chronopoem, designed to take exactly as much time to recite as a non-poetic task does to execute, and helped to popularize the gestomètre, which inventories and examines the tics and motions of a given routine or period of daily time (taking a walk, peeling an orange, skinning a rabbit, composing a gestomètre). Many authors write poems that come from the everyday world, but Jouet’s usually return there as well, and seem to travel a very short total distance.

Perhaps as a consequence of this, Jouet is sometimes pegged as the most political author in the Oulipo. His longer prose work, such as the Mek-Ouyes series and the larger, cyclical “Republic novel” to which it belongs, deals with concepts of governance and citizenship in a civically existential way. Ditto for early poetic works like 107 âmes (107 souls), a sort of nationwide micro-census filtered through a subtle structural and rhyming system. In both cases, though, it’s important to note that the political is literary, not the other way around. His social critique is “principally ironic and interrogative in character, rather than prescriptive,” Motte writes. “Jouet’s example argues that even the bleakest of our daily landscapes—a supermarket, a traffic jam, a dentist’s waiting room, for heaven’s sake—can be traversed poetically.” And when your daily landscape becomes poetic, how do you go about writing poetry if not… daily?

“Little Demons of Subtlety: On the Oulipian Constraint”, by Daniel Levin Becker

I see no reason for calling my work poetry except that there is no other category in which to put it.

— Marianne Moore

I came to this city in love and with everything I owned stuffed into three bags — it was San Francisco, so six people in a three-bedroom apartment seemed like something that could work. But when a week turned into a month she said maybe I should try Craigslist; then she told me sure, no problem, McCoppin Street wasn’t that bad, see, your room even has a window. I never finished painting that room. Halfway across the wall opposite the bed I ran out of money and then I ran out of paint, or I ran out of time, or I ran out of energy. And she was leaving anyway, and then she was gone, and what I had left was an unheated room, a kitchen with mice so bold they ran along the countertops while you ate cereal at the table, and a window overlooking a concrete stoop covered in dog shit. And my journals. As our relationship devolved, I’d written more and more, and when she left I had a stack of dreary journals about heartbreak. But they were also filled with memories of the places where I loved to be in love all over this city that I thought had turned its back on me. The Wave Organ, like San Francisco herself, is gorgeous and hard and weird. We walked out on the dirt path past the fancy yacht club to listen to the acoustics of the tides bounce off the sculpture’s concrete pipes and into our ears. After the bottles of wine were empty, we stripped down to our underwear and jumped into the bay, Alcatraz at eye level as our teeth chattered and we held each others goosebumped bodies. Her black hair was wet and matted to her forehead when we kissed, our mouths filled with the Pacific. “In Love in San Francisco”, Isaac Fitzgerald

I came to this city in love and with everything I owned stuffed into three bags — it was San Francisco, so six people in a three-bedroom apartment seemed like something that could work. But when a week turned into a month she said maybe I should try Craigslist; then she told me sure, no problem, McCoppin Street wasn’t that bad, see, your room even has a window.

I never finished painting that room. Halfway across the wall opposite the bed I ran out of money and then I ran out of paint, or I ran out of time, or I ran out of energy. And she was leaving anyway, and then she was gone, and what I had left was an unheated room, a kitchen with mice so bold they ran along the countertops while you ate cereal at the table, and a window overlooking a concrete stoop covered in dog shit. And my journals. As our relationship devolved, I’d written more and more, and when she left I had a stack of dreary journals about heartbreak. But they were also filled with memories of the places where I loved to be in love all over this city that I thought had turned its back on me.

The Wave Organ, like San Francisco herself, is gorgeous and hard and weird. We walked out on the dirt path past the fancy yacht club to listen to the acoustics of the tides bounce off the sculpture’s concrete pipes and into our ears. After the bottles of wine were empty, we stripped down to our underwear and jumped into the bay, Alcatraz at eye level as our teeth chattered and we held each others goosebumped bodies. Her black hair was wet and matted to her forehead when we kissed, our mouths filled with the Pacific.

“In Love in San Francisco”, Isaac Fitzgerald