New Year's Resolutions

2009 is still in its shell but I can hear it chirping. So, some New Year’s Resolutions.

First: I didn’t read much poetry this year, thank God, and I’m resolving to read even less next year. The favorite thing I read all year was a Folk Tale from Finland where a fox procures for his simple woodsman master a castle and a princess. Below is the fox with a dragon called “The Worm.” (the Fox burns him up in a linen closet)




Second: In this morning’s paper there was a picture of a man arrested for masturbating in front of a child. He’s in jail and I’m watching cars and pedestrians cross the bridge beneath the trees. Three hanging bridges cross this river. I’m going to cross them more. (ie, walk more).

Third: I’m resolving not to die this year. In Merwin’s “The Lice” there’s a poem about how each year you pass over the day of the year you’re going to die on. (The Anniversary of my Death). When I first read this poem I thought it was a very cool idea.

Fourth: I’m going to abstain from “Whale Wars.”

Fifth: In the center of the earth there is a stone. In the center of the stone a star. In the center of the star a drop of water. I’m thirsty.

Sixth: My Love Birds won’t have a nest. They kill their babies.

Seventh: I’ll be in Italy in the middle of January and I’m resolving to eat as many pizzas as possible. I want to be a fat, lumbering ox.

Eighth: I’m going to use the words “cunt” and “fuck” less often

Ninth: I’m going to join Gold’s Gym. My wife goes there five days a week. Seven days a week I sit on my ass. Last week I picked her up. All the creatures hopping around and strutting to Madonna and Kylie Minogue songs made me sick. But, I need to turn my life around—

Tenth: I will not get too worked up about Cricket. When South Africa beat Australia in Perth and then Melbourne (these past two weeks) I acted as though my life depended on it. Harold Pinter was a big fan of cricket. The current Australian Captain, Ricky Ponting, goes by the nickname “Punter.” Punter’s a short Tasmanian who’s scored many centuries but he was just out for 99. Howzat!!

Eleventh: I’ve never “believed” (as in a God, etc) but I still used to think someone or something was going to save me. I want to feel that way again.

Twelfth: I’m going to visit the Fish Market more often. The shrimp lady’s a siren. I like to watch her selling. Last time we spent 300 pesos with her: and it was well worth it.

Thirteenth: I’m going to eat more tacos al pastor. The ones down by the Café de Olla. Their agua de jamaica’s really weak. But, O, their tacos al pastor. “Three please, no onions.”

Fourteenth: I’m going to hang that picture I bought in Chiapas.

Fifteenth: I’m going to go back to Chiapas, damnit.

Sixteenth: I will improve my Spanish.

Seventeenth: I am resolving, finally, to not gain weight.

Our Local Jail

Here's why I try to keep out of trouble when down in Mexico... The article says that 94 men are "housed" in the "facility" designed for 44.

Lucha Libre

Last night was my first taste of Lucha Libre. My wife's son, David (20), said it's much more interesting in Guadalajara, but, nonetheless, I was quite entertained.

This was my first experience of any type of live Wrestling, but I’m guessing it’s quite similar to smaller-town shows in the U.S.

Quite different from watching Felix Trinidad and Oscar De LaHoya in Vegas what seems like a million fcking years ago.

The event was held at “La Paloma”—Our Bullring, where every Wednesday a few of our very own prancing amateur-butchers dispense of a few bulls in front of a crowd of mainly Gringos (many off Cruise Ships which dock just across the highway)

Also, I’m thinking I will post a larger selection of pictures up on to my Facebook page.

Lucha Libre Photos

La Parkita (The Little Skeleton) finds himself in a bad position...




Many of the Wrestler "characters" are effeminate... and the crowd loves to howl out things like "Joto" (fag), "Puto" (bitch), Maricon (fag, again), etc, etc,...




a lucky female member of the audience gets a table dance in the ring

Johannes Göransson Interview: Ecstasy of Dismemberment

The following posts contain an email interview I recently conducted with Johannes Göransson regarding his translation of Aase Berg's "With Deer" which releases from Black Ocean in the Spring of 2009. (possibly available at AWP).

"With Deer" is violent, persistent--and it is beautiful.

Here's a relatively mild sentence from one of its early poems ("In the Guinea Pig Cave"):

There lay the guinea pigs and they ached all over and their legs stuck straight up like beetles and they looked depraved and were blue under their eyes as from months of debauchery.


Here are Bios that Johannes supplied me.

Johannes Goransson is the author of three books - Dear Ra, Pilot and A New Quarantine Will Take My Place - and the translator of five books - "With Deer" by Aase Berg (forthcoming shortly), "Collobert Orbital" by Johan Jonsson(coming soon), "Gingerbread Monuments" by Victor Johansson (poems) and Klara Kallstrom (photographs), "Remainland: Selected Poems of Aase Berg", "Ideals Clearance" by Henry Parland. He is also the co-editor of Action Books (www.actionbooks.org) and the online journal Action, Yes www.actionyes.org).


Swedish poet Aase Berg's first book, With Deer, was published in 1996. Since then she has published Dark Matter, Transfer Fat, Uppland and Loss. She is considered one of the most influential and unique poets in Sweden, and her poetry has been translated into English and various European languages. She also works as a translator and has translated several young adult books into Swedish.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 1

RK: For those not familiar with Aase Berg's work: why Aase Berg?

JG: In her first two books you get a powerful, cinematic experience (in the second book, Dark Matter, this is really pushed to the limit). It's an experience of what Steven Shaviro, writing about the movies in his brilliant, Deleuzian book *The Cinematic Body*, has called "visual fascination": "Visual fascination is a passive, irresistible compulsion, and not an assertion of the active mastery of the gaze." And elswewhere: "visual fascination as a restless, shattering mobility." It's a poetry that explodes the control, the mastery, that rational gaze that is idealized in much of art (especially poetry); it's the antithesis of the pervasive idea that if our art should provide us with enough distance so that we can somehow approach it logically, an approach which comes out of the naive fallacy that art is part of an illusion we must free ourselves from.

That pervasive insistence on freeing ourselves from the illusions is ultimately based on a utopian idea of a kind of primeval communism, in which we are not alienated and interact honestly. A load of crap. And always xenophobic: the foreign, foreignizing, strange is suspect. Another thing that is great about Berg's work is the way the Swedish language is seemingly constantly breaking down and being reshaped into a kind of foreign language. It is both Swedish and foreign. (What Deleuze and Guattari would call "minor literature.") Strange neologisms and permutations proliferate.

Also, I should say that my cinematic analogy is not arbitrary. Aase started out as a member of the wild and unruly Surrealist Group of Stockholm, and one of the major original influences on Surrealism was Andre Breton and Jacques Vache sneaking in and out of movies, an experience that left Breton "charged." Further, film – especially B-movies, horror movies, zombie flicks - are a big influence on Berg. In her second book, Dark Matter, she is more explicit about this (she addresses her lover as "leatherface" from Texas Chainsaw Massacre). I think more than the violence and hallucination, what she gets from these B-movies is the powerful combination of estranging cheapness and visceral power, confusion and bodily reaction.

It is related to the quote from Dodie Bellamy that I posted on my blog a while back: about the influence on gay pornography on her work. I think it's a similar dynamic of alienation and viscerality. The body is central in both poets, but it's not the body as "the authentic" or "true" but the body as both alienated and visceral. To provide another American point of comparison: We can say that Plath's (and Plath was of course a huge movie buff) speaker in "Lady Lazarus" subjects herself to the gaze of the peanut-crunching crowd, dreaming of destroying the gaze; Aase's poems fulfills the dream (eating men like air), blowing up the gaze, opening the bee box. We are enswarmed.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 2

RK: In the Action Books catalog description of Remainland (a selection of Aase Berg's first 4 book, translated by you also) "With Deer" is described as a "wrecked fairy-tale-scape." I don't think Black Ocean has come up with a book description for their website and/or a Press Release yet, so in order to give us a bit more sense of the book, its nature and scope, could you in a brief paragraph or two tell us a bit more than "wrecked fairy-tale-scape" (which by the way is a very good 2 word characterization)?

JG: I think the reason we put "fairy-tale-scape" into the description was because a lot of this book take place in a kind of "scape" of fairytales and folktales: in the woods, with animals etc. In his introduction to Remainland, Swedish critic Daniel Sjolin argues that the book detourns the motif of the lost girl in the woods (here the girl gets rabies). Of course in an American context of cleaned-up Disney versions of fairytales, that might not make any sense. But in Sweden the fairytales tend to be very violent and grotesque. The gnome slaughters the barn, the naked woman is made of tree bark, young people always drown or get lost in the woods.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 3

RK: "With Deer" is, to put it mildly, strong. How was the book received in the author's native Sweden when it released there 11 years ago? What did people, poets and critics have to say about it--good, bad and indifferent (and by indifferent I have in mind the sort of critics who early-on dismissed Neruda's rich and dense language, imagery and play of tropes by labeling it "tomato sauce")?

JG: Throughout her public career, Berg has received a lot of praise as well as a lot of critique. Many people love the powerful, dynamic poetry, but a lot of people find it decadent. I should say that decadence and left-wing politics make up a kind of axis around which a lot of Swedish culture rotates. To my mind, almost all of the interesting Swedish art is decadent, and most of the boring stuff is earnest, responsible and left-wing (see my previous answer for people yearning to reach beyond the alienation of language). "With Deer" was her first book and my impression is that it was popular but considered a kind of oddity. Her second book, Dark Matter, was more popular still, somethign of a cult classic. And then her third book, Transfer Fat, suddenly seems to have made her into one of the absolutely most important poets in Sweden. Her most recent book, Loss, probably received the best reception of any of her work. It was reviewed in pretty much all the daily papers and a lot of critics argued that her motherhood trilogy (Transfer Fat, Uppland and Loss) is a major work in the history of Swedish literature. So over the past 11 years she has gone from weirdo to an important writer in literary history. I think a lot of that has to do with a shift in generations among the critics. I know that Bengt Emil Johnson, the old concretist poet from the 60s, has long been her supporter, but I've noticed that a lot of the other reviewers are younger writers now, writers who started writing in the 1990s. And her influence on younger poets is very evident. I should also note that poetry is much more popular in Sweden than it is in the US. Berg's books sell out their printings of a couple thousand copies even though she's writing in a country of 8-9 million people.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 4

RK: A few places on line, including Action Books' website, have excerpts from Berg's essay "It's not acceptable to be a fatso" (first published in the journal 90Tal, number 3, 1999). Here she writes that she values the "aggressive, baroque and esoteric" and that she laments that "the fleshy, screamy and overdone...are so taboo in our culture." I remember, also, you using (in an email to me a long way back) the term "fat surrealism." Berg's surrealism seems to me to be the "fat" sort. Care to talk about Berg's particular sort of surrealism and surrealism in general? Where she stands, in this regard, to her contemporaries and predecessors? I wouldn't mind hearing you comparing her "fat" surrealism to Simic's "soft" (Silliman's term), but as you wish.

JG: To begin with, Aase joined the Surrealist Group of Stockholm when she was around 20, and she kind of grew up with that group as her major artistic influence. She was 30 when With Deer was published, so she spent many years engaged in activities with this group before publishing, or even writing, the book. The group is a quite notorious group in Surrealist circles: very extreme, very motivated, very dynamic at times. This isn't Surrealism as a few literary devices- the way someone like Simic has used it (if you ask Simic he'll tell you that he doesn't like Surrealism, though it was an important influence on his work) - and not avant-garde as a literary or artistic or
academic mode, but a group for whom art is not autonomous objects but a process of oppositionality. So Berg's artistic learning took the shape of vandalisms, trances, protest, happenings and the like. It's a really interesting group; not a mere re-creation of Breton's ideas from the 1920s, but also influenced by Situationism, Foucault and contemporary thinking. However, Berg left the group in the mid-90s at the time she started publishing her poems, in part I think because she didn't subscribe to their increasingly militant views.

In Berg's manifestos and essays there's a very interesting emphasis on the body - what Masson called "physical idea of the revolution" or what Bataille called "the bloody farce". There is more focus on the administered body than the unconscious/ego dynamic. In part it's important to view this in the context of the Swedish welfare state, which is a culture based in large part on an obsession with the healthy body. One of the first things the Social Democrats did when they were voted into charge was to make sure everybody got healthy -that everyone knew how to exercise, how to practice healthy sex, how to take virile camping trips etc. How to make them "hard" bodies – not surreal, strange, foreign, leaky, repulsive etc - in other words. But
it should also be seen as part of the obsession of our global capitalism culture - ideal body images, Vogue Magazine articles on the best sexual positions, dieting etc. These two often join in Aase's work: sex ed and tanning beds are on the same page in a lot of ways.

With your "Soft Surrealism" comment, you may be referring to Joyelle's and my manifesto "Find Us With the Lemurs," in which we espouse a "soft surrealism" in opposition to Ron Silliman's rationalist/macho "hardness". We took the central motto from a manifesto Aase wrote with Matthias Forshage (still one of the driving forces of the Surrealist Group) in the 1990s, a manifesto in which they suggested that they were not advocating the old heroic revolution that takes over the city, a revolution which will never come (and would be terrible if it did!), but a revolution of infestation, of submitting oneself to attacks by lemurs. I like that I idea of the artistic experience.

I think part of the statement "soft surrealism" that I don't like is the assumption that there is a true, "hard" surrealism. Surrealismstarted out as Dadaism, started out as shell-shocked soldiers babbling to Breton during WWI, started out in movie theaters, started out with trances and mediumistic exercises, started out with a fascination withcrime and pulp fiction, started out before it started out with Rimbaud, de Sade, Lautremont. A few years in, we might argue that Surrealism became "harder," as it sought to align itself with more traditional leftism. But even during the era of the second manifesto and WWII, I think Surrealism was rather soft, splitting off into other groups (such as the Documents group with Bataille) and translating into many languages and cultures.

Joyelle and I used the term "soft Surrealism" rather as a response to the macho rationalism of Ron's statements. And this goes back to my earlier statement about the naivete of the anti-alienation ideas. Ron is very much a rationalist. Distrusts the visceral and the confusing. His way of dealing with this is to split the world into hardness and softeness, the serious and the frivolous, the illusory and the true. A very binary, reductive worldview. And I would add, that this is no separate from his pervasive distrust of the foreign, the translated (even the British poetry!). I am in favor of the strange, the stranger, the foreigner, the homosexual, the wimp etc.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)

Johannes Göransson Interview: Question 5

RK: Translation's always a difficult, tricky and delicate matter. A piece of any language of any complexity simply can't be "brought across" exactly as it is in the original. Since you've translated other writers as well as later-career Aase Berg can you tell us what was particularly and uniquely difficult about translating "With Deer?" What sorts of tough decisions did you encounter and what sorts of compromises did you have to make? And because of such compromises what hasn't come across in the English as much and/or as well as you'd like?

JG: On translation: A lot of people in the US have problems with translations. They're scared that they're not getting the original. But you're never getting the original. No ultimate reading is available. A lot of folks have trouble with translated poems because they sound strange. Of course they do, they are foreign. This foreigness is key I think, because it reveals the artificiality of all language and literature.

Part of what makes Aase's poetry great is the way she makes the Swedish seems foreign, she "minoritizes" it to use Deleuze and Guattari's terminology. The most obvious example she does this is by doing strange neologisms which make the reader aware of how weird the regular compounds words are: marsvin = guinea pigs = (night)mare pigs; nackrosen = water lily but also nude rose (with all of its fetal associations).

People in Sweden always say: Oh, how could you possibly translate Aase Berg, it's impossible. The reason for this is all the intense wordplay and such, but that's precisely what I love about translating Aase Berg. It asks me to rethink English entirely. It refuses to be merely transferred from one language to the next but insists on transforming the English in the process. It is very demanding and very rewarding.

(to see the rest of the interview look in archives--dec 2008-- or, more easily, click on one of the labels, like Johannes Goransson, at the bottom of this post)