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I get dirty, you get clean: on Teresa Pepi’s L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o

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WORDS BY ANDY MARTRICH

“Le temps et le monde et la personne ne rencontrent qu’une seule fois.”

– Hélène Cixous, Dedans

 

In the 1996 novel Pussy, King of the Pirates, which is a rendering of Treasure Island, Kathy Acker documents the exploits of a timeless Antigone as a surrogate of Stevenson’s protagonist Jim Hawkins. Through a mesh of narrative voices, Acker disputes the validity of time as a categorical imperative, suggesting that its necessity in the adventure of “buccaneers and buried gold” is coupled with its role in sustaining a patriarchal dogma that inflicts trauma indefinitely:

 

Out into the future, what will be time. In this arena between timelessness and time, the most dangerous thing or being that can come into being is time. (68)

 

The present, as the embodiment of a certain perniciousness, contains traces of its assemblage alongside the implication of its intactness. Although this appears intrinsic to its archival disposition (i.e., as a palimpsestic record), this symbiosis likewise connotes its fragility, since that which appears dynamic (as the result of things having happened) only does so by both succumbing to and imposing limitations that are otherwise transitory. Acker presents this idea in a narrative continuum, where things documented aren’t necessarily taking place within a chronology. Compliance to time refracts as the indulgent rationality and morality of a particular (male) sympathy. As an impetus filtered through privilege, it adheres to deep-seated preoccupations with rules that have the semblance of coming from nowhere, yet are blindly reiterated by cryptic authority.

Teresa Pepi’s L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o (Gauss PDF, 2015) confronts time as a similar snare, albeit with born-digital connotation. Contextually, Pepi makes use of Gauss PDF’s blog format (i.e., Tumblr) and publishing structure, which enables one to present files in lieu of normative art/poetry productions, allowing for the construction of new models and the supplementing of older ones. L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o is a zip file containing three Microsoft Word documents and forty-six jpegs. Most of the files are labeled by page number (although some pages are missing) and a succinct, generic title. The blog post itself contains a preface/personal note, which cites grim indicators. Even before opening the zip file, time is characterized in a reductive sense as the brutality of entropic order that portends an interior agony. It simultaneously coerces interiority while encompassing it, granting it an exploitative creative omnipotence. Yet, in lieu of its sinister, violent, and powerful character, time is susceptible to its own deterioration; it’s in disassociation from time (perhaps in its complete decay) where we might slip its terror.

The initial document in the zip file contains a poem titled “Drive.” There’s a loose employability, as it (along with the other two Word documents) is left to the possibility of editing, changing, and even redistribution. It also provides anatomical continuity to ideas expressed in the preface by reflecting the implied malleability of an “inbetween”—an undecidability that churns within an association of certain dualities (e.g., clean/dirty, health/disease, identity/anonymity, etc.). The poem is rant-like, while at the same time incurring a detached lucidity:

 

What do I look like, I don’t look like anything

 

the vehicle is the window, time is the window

 

drive to become clean, but you need to change

 

I am the window, I get dirty, you get clean

I enter the crowd

 

the bacteria entered the window pretending to be clean, the new space is diseased

 

locate the disease, find the source

 

trace the trail

 

but now yourself is diseased

 

you yourself must go through a window

to get clean

 

[…]

 

the window through the window to be clean, time through time to undo it

 

“Driving” expresses an active energy—a propulsion through time and space within a place of confinement (i.e., the fragile interior of a vehicle). In general, it connotes inadequate escape, as it can only reframe the complications at the core of locality; one inherently brings one’s own time and space into the time and space of others. There’s mutual exchange of contamination (the worst things have already infiltrated), yet Pepi must get through the window, identified as both the self and time, in order to avoid all corruption. Pepi must access the intermediacy of contrasting conditions.

“Driving” is followed by an unsettling jpeg titled “Multiple Revisions (1),” an image of text scrawled on a wall in a dark room. Here, Pepi refers to time as “an absence,” which suggests that withdrawal from it can’t be as linear as a process of driving:

In lieu, unhinging from time requires a kind of presence. The revision of Pepi’s “motives” rescinds the proclamation that one must propel into the “inbetween,” but rather dive beneath it. This idea is bolstered by three “Lint Paintings,” minimal portraits of a small gradient immersed in a vacant landscape. The lint paintings impress contemporaneous releasing/compressing—as if floating in a vacuum, or drifting into a kind of microcosmic, isolated realm. They appear to be topographical, delineating the locality of time as it occurs in hypothetical blankness as a speck of dust. Time (as lint) is small, gray, and spectral—yet connotes a portal out of scale, a puncture leading to material abyss. Eyes are drawn to it; one follows and resides in it.

Sure enough, we next encounter Pepi on the inside, or rather in the “Inbetween Space,” the first of three jpegs depicting a process of self-burial. “Inbetween Space 1” is an image of Pepi half-buried in the ground, reaching out to a nearby wall with dirt-caked fingers. Pepi appears trance-like, as if in communion or contact with something otherworldly. There is heavily contrasted golden light and deep shadow, with the latter descending through Pepi to the wall. Again, we come upon muddling dualities (e.g., light/dark, hidden/exposed, etc.), represented here by Pepi’s body. This is followed by “Inbetween Space 2,” an extreme close-up of the unoccupied hole, suggesting the reversal or disorienting of time, perhaps the effect of Pepi’s transfer, as self-burial takes place out of sequence (“Inbetween Space 3,” which shows a blurry figure (likely Pepi) digging the hole, is found at the end of the zip file).

With Pepi wedged in the gateway, L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o flickers in and out of time’s sadism, where technological authorities—including language—start deteriorating. Duration is in a process of annulment, affecting any kind of historic regulation. In a note to J. Gordon Faylor (publisher of Gauss PDF), Pepi comments:

There’s this thing in which one’s own personal life is allowed to make sense only through addressing the past without an image of it. You can’t have legal documents in other words. So I had to make them up.

One refracts former and prospective selves, experiences, relationships, and traumas into an imageless void. Indeed, Pepi constructs legal documents from this space—fabricated legalese composed of garbled text and symbols, perhaps reminiscent of spam, code, or found language. Legal documents are situated around the jpeg of the hole, connoting an extraterrestrial (non)communication via mystical expression or an arcane symbology (although rendered through a familiar filetype) from the “Inbetween Space” itself:

With the thread of authoritative evidence in peril, the delusion of the rule-based self-as-result is confounded by the breakdown of time. The legal documents are the last “texts” we see. There’s no longer a language, or any device for that matter, through which to recognize time’s jurisdiction. Pepi articulates its absence in a hiccuping continuum of digital photographs. Easily the most extensive part of L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o, thirty-nine of its forty-six jpegs are dedicated to a nearly identical shot—what Pepi refers to as “Overhead Light,” a ceiling fan and lamp framed from the same angle in varying light and shadow. The images are for the most part labeled in order (i.e., “Overhead Light 1,” “Overhead Light 2,” etc.), aside from a few missing numbers in the sequence. Yet like the “Inbetween Space” photos, they don’t seem to follow any particular duration beyond how they appear arranged in the zip file.

Many of the images include ghostly backscatter, implying spectral presences. One gets the sense of claustrophobic domesticity—that of being trapped or hiding in a room. The repetition and eeriness of a common household object suggests something conspiratorial at play, drawing parallels to Lynch/Frost’s use of the ceiling fan at the Palmer house in Twin Peaks, which is cryptic enough for fans of the show to speculate numberless roles, although most certainly embodying an essential function regarding the on-going violence, trauma, and ghoulishness of the series’ narrative. Pepi’s “Overhead Light,” on the other hand, appears to be more deliberate regarding its apparent inertia, although, once again, blurring the boundaries of chronology. But given the monotony of imagery and implicit paranoia (as to what is happening off camera), what are the effects of Pepi’s transfer to the “inbetween”—is Pepi liberated, captured, or none of the above? And where does that put the reader?

In L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o, time is a cliché that produces, compartmentalizes, and enacts cruelty within a solipsistic fantasy that ensnares us all. Amid the oscillation of extraneous conditions (e.g., as articulated in gradual disjunction out of time), Pepi appears rhizomatic (as per Deuleuze/Guattari’s conception of it)—planted within the intermediary, rooting and shooting into unknown perpetuity. There’s boundless interconnection in the presence of indefinite possibility beyond time’s snare. Perhaps, then, L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o suggests a peripatetic literature, contingent on activism against a foundational curse. On the other hand, the preface concludes that “this project is about nurturing,” asserting that Pepi found comfort, healing, and solace in the exploits of a self metamorphosed into a timeless Antigone. But with the terrible sadness of Pepi’s passing in 2015 at the age of twenty-one, L|in|P;L|in|D;L-o is not only more painful to revisit but also leads one to wonder if it isn’t an explicit gesture.

 

Self destruction is what it is

it’s a collective wish that

what is exists

—

Andy Martrich is the author of Ethical Probe on Mixed Martial Arts Enthusiasts in the USA (Counterpath Press), A manifest detection of death-lot in banking games (Gauss PDF Editions), and Iona (BlazeVOX Books), among others. Some essays have appeared at Jacket2, The Volta Blog, and ON Contemporary Practice. Andy works on Hiding Press with Mark Johnson and Jonathan Gorman, and lives in France.

[REVIEW] musk (musca\muscus\mus) by s. maynard

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(Gauss PDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

“[Elon] Musk holds a substantial monopoly on the contemporary gaze.” s. maynard, musk (musca\muscus\mus)

Stella Maynard is a writer in their early 20s living in Australia, “interested in attending to things that sit at the intersection of gender, queerness, technology, the law and desire.” Their pamphlet, musk (musca\muscus\mus), a  semi- “found,” appropriated, collaged, and annotated document (difficult to classify within literary categories or genres), was longlisted for The Lifted Brow‘s 2018 Prize for Experimental Non-Fiction. As the title indicates, the text addresses various philological roots of the word, “musk,” as if they were derived from the person [and, persona], Elon Musk [the subject], the billionaire “techno-capitalist.”

Though unpaginated, the verso-recto format of musk is integral to the pamphlet’s symbolism, significance, and validity as an example of “experimental” and Flarf-like composition since left-hand pages present copies of internet-based material related to Elon Musk—tweets, Google and Facebook entries, photographs—that, in most cases, echo topics addressed on the opposite page. Right-hand (recto) pages present Maynard’s running essay or, perhaps, their long-form prose poem that, because of copious footnotes on virtually every page, reinforces the importance of “found” and appropriated images and text, bringing to mind a comment by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet, Susan Howe, “I love the play of footnotes.” By relying upon “found” and appropriated material, Maynard places their work in the company of female writers, such as, Katie Degentesh, Sharon Mesmer, C.D. Wright, and Juliana Spahr.

For purposes of discussion, musk can be divided into five parts—an introductory section, a section on each of the three sub-topics [musca, muscus, mus] and their metaphorical relationship to Elon Musk, as well as, a final, brief conclusion. In the first section, the subject is introduced as “a Man of textual superabundance” due to his constant exposure via social media, the press, advertising, and the like. Maynard goes on to say, “Fundamentally, Musk is infrastructural: a man of tunnels, cars, batteries, energy grids, high-speed trains, giga-factories, wires, and inter-planetary transport.” These associations highlight, not only, the protagonist’s masculinity and phallic display, but they, also, imply his access to power as a symbol of patriarchy. Just as significant, Musk is a powerful figure with whom many men identify and through whom many live vicariously, leading me to consider the manner in which Musk’s attraction may be viewed as a kind of homoeroticism.

The next section expands Maynard’s discussion of Musk “as a trace or index of masculinity” by highlighting the relationship between the subject’s defining characteristics and “musk” (musca), technically defined as testicle, scrotum, as well as, a male sexual hormone. Iterations of the subject on the internet are, in Maynard’s words, “instructive in illustrating the ways in which Musk and his vernaculars of techno-masculinity are habitually taken up, reproduced, and updated, eventually becoming naturalised forms of embodied subjectivity.” This techno-male, then, is a mytho-poetic construct—part real, part fake, part object, part copy, part fantasy—“ready-made” (Marcel Duchamp) for an ubiquitous “neoliberalism.” Throughout their text, Maynard extends their analysis to the roles played by Musk and other techno-masculine figures in perpetuating the destructive, mediating, and dehumanizing effects of Capitalism.

In the third section, Maynard employs the idea of a moss plant (muscus) as an interface between “the plant, animal, and human worlds.” They transfer this fundamental, and powerful, function to the subject, stating that, “Attending to our ‘mossy’ networks necessitates an engagement with the ways in which Elon Musk’s infrastructural developments are changing the present and future organization of life.” Maynard introduces Naomi Klein’s term, “philanthrocapitalism,” referring to “a billionaire class who posit themselves as the problem-solver of crises that have been historically (un)settled through collective action, dismantling or the public sector”…representing “a form of corporate environmental paternalism whereby the ultra-rich ‘generously’ tackle some of our greatest crises using their loose change.” Though it is easy to sympathize with Maynard’s concerns and to validate their analysis, the statements may be problematic for some readers since, from a purely artistic and formalist perspective, their didactic, literal nature potentially detracts from the otherwise seamless flow of the text (which should be read at one sitting for maximum effect) and since the overwhelming scale of current global crises, such as climate change, ecosystem collapse, and poverty, all but require solutions produced by concentrated wealth. Nonetheless, in musk, Maynard presents themselves as a political poet concerned, as Adrienne Rich was, with using the “oppressor’s language” [Rich] in revolutionary ways.

The fourth section addresses “the index of ‘musk’: mouse” [mus]. Again, the philanthrocapitalist is presented as a mytho-poetic symbol of power. Maynard writes, “In August, 2017, SpaceX delivered 20 mice to the International Space Station. In fact, Musk’s desire to make human life multi-planetary began with the dream to send mice to Mars; his intention was that the mice would procreate in space, and return to Earth with interplanetary offspring.” Maynard advances Nathan Eisenberg’s notion of a gendered subjectivity, “discursively infused with a system of values that would reinvigorate the men of the nation to deliver salvation.” Invoking the Futurists as representatives of “the Modern fascist man” (e.g., Ezra Pound), Maynard does not mention the paradox that the Futurist movement, though short-lived (~1909-1920), was noteworthy as an artistic project and was the source of some of the creative techniques Maynard, herself, employs (e.g., verbal collage, “found” material: see Marjorie Perloff, 2003, University of Chicago Press). Nonetheless, philanthrocapitalists are empowered by unregulated markets and [masculine] competition, and, as Maynard puts it, “The quest to make humans multi-planetary represents a kind of pseudo-colonial environmental-fatalism whereby men of the capitalist elite give up hope on their environmental survival, and quite literally abandon the planet they have all but destroyed.” Related to this, the author suggests that these men are having unfettered fun at the world’s expense by way of “a pervasive youthful playfulness.” Power play, then, is a gendered game.

Maynard ends their text (each page paired with one or more found images referencing the subject) implicating “white masculinist possession,” calling, instead, for Jordy Rosenberg’s plea to “summon the counterforce of our own desire.” Presumably, this is a statement concerning the power of feminist principles to forge solutions via a “collective state of lived resistance…founded in scenes of ambivalent desire and intimate attachment…beyond (and against) the pheromonal energies of Elon Musk, directed towards new discursive formulations.” In the final analysis, then, Musk is not a fantasy, or an abstract case, but a real threat, and Maynard focuses their creative abilities upon using art in the service of feminism and politics—nationally and internationally. This debut pamphlet marks this young author as a writer to watch as their artistic talents and political sensibilities expand and mature. I recommend this volume to anyone interested in a creative activist, feminist, and civic voice deserving a wide audience. musk (musca\muscus\mus) provides its readers with a unique visual, symbolic, and literary experience, a worthy example of avant garde collage, conceptual, and appropriated composition, and I look forward to reading Maynard’s future work.

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal, published by Gauss PDF in 2019

[REVIEW] Operating Manuals in the Dark by O.B. Bassler

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(Gauss PDF, 2019)

REVIEW BY CLARA B. JONES

—

Speaker 1 : Taylor, hi! I haven’t seen you in ages! What are you up to?

Speaker 2: Dylan! What a surprise! I’m off to a new bookstore on 57th Street. I’ve heard they have a great selection of Postmodern poetry. How about you?

Speaker 1: I’m going to a poetry reading by the philosopher, O.B. Bassler—a new discovery. His debut collection is a hybrid book—poems in a variety of forms on recto pages only. I am writing a paper about the relationship between poetry and philosophy for my Innovative Literature class. Do you have a minute to talk?

Speaker 2: Ummm, sure, I’m curious! I’d like to know more about Bassler. Maybe I could borrow his book when you’re done with it? I am reading the Romantics, now, but am almost ready for something different.

Speaker 1: Bassler’s favorite poet is a German Romantic, Friedrich Hoelderlin; but, he progresses from beautiful lyric poetry to experimental writing—all displayed on recto pages. I think you would find his work interesting. Here’s another passage:

 

“one life is enough

and sometimes it is more than enough

sometimes it is more than enough

to make it through the day or hour or minute

and that is why what is painful

demanding excruciating even torturous

is so close to what is beautiful

that I can easily mistake the intensity of flight

for the intensity of any pleasure real or unreal

and hang onto it for dear life

unto the cleaving from life itself

if such is necessary”

 

Speaker 2: Definitely, lyrical, but with Modernist overtones, too—especially, repetition, like Stein.

Speaker 1: Yes, and Bassler uses other Modernist techniques—no titles, no punctuation, no capital letters. But, experimental methods, also—lots of white spaces define those particular poems. But, more than that. Some of his devices remind me of the ones often used by James Joyce—flow of thought and feeling, metaphor, symbolism, ambiguity, subtle overtones evoking history, myth, and the complexities of life. These conventions, appearing throughout the collection, bind the book together, as they do in Ulysses.

Speaker 2: I am curious to take a look at the book! My boyfriend is studying concrete poetry and visual experimentation this semester. He read an essay by Joe Bray who said that white space can be sites of humor, gravity, play, and reflection. I think of white spaces as erasures or ways to disrupt reading. Does Bassler use white space in those ways?

Speaker 1: Well, yes, in some ways, but there is not much humor or play—much reflection, though. The poems have lots of “interpretive power,” as Helen Vendler would say. Bassler is writing about the human condition over time—Time in the sense of Physics…

Speaker 2: …what does he mean by that?

Speaker 1: I can’t say, exactly, what Bassler intends to say, but I conducted a bit of research when I was reading, Operating Manuals in the Dark, and I learned that, just as Time is an indefinite process of events as a whole, Reality can be viewed in a holistic way. Listen to this:

 

“…the ultimate coincidence of the metaphysical and the physical is the greatest madness of all

now that the metaphysical clock keeps perfect time I should go back and read a number of books

starting with the ones that move forward and returning to the ones that move back

I’ll make a list of one hundred metaphysical books and one hundred physical books

and the two lists will be the same list”

 

Speaker 2: I never studied Physics. Do you think I’ll understand Bassler’s work?

Speaker 1: Oh, definitely! Music, image, rhythm, form, and language outweigh any particular message; and, you will see that Bassler’s poems include many iambs and that they become increasingly minimalist. In fact, if I have an opportunity to ask him a question tonight, I want to know whether his black cover and blank verso pages are references to Kazimir Malevich’s paintings and to his theory, Suprematism—Bassler may be trying to move as far as possible from objects—maybe, even, from objective reality and reductionism! Analyzing metaphysics seems to be his ultimate concern. Let me read one more quote: “the metaphysical clock/the metaphysical clock is not dead it is dying one second at a time/the metaphysical clock runs fast it must be corrected to match real time/not the same backwards and forwards and not the same as metaphysical time.”

Speaker 2: Ummm, I’ll have to think about that when I have the text in front of me. It’s 4 o’clock, and the bookstore closes at 6. I need to catch a bus. I’m so glad that I ran into you! When can we get together for lunch?

Speaker 1: I’ll e-mail you. You can borrow Bassler’s book, and we can discuss his reading. I hope he publishes another collection!

—

Clara B. Jones is a Knowledge Worker practicing in Silver Spring, MD, USA. Among other works, she is author of Poems for Rachel Dolezal, published by Gauss PDF in 2019