Being Krushed
Hal Duncan’s power-screed on Infernokrushing is a must read, even if you’re not down with (metaphysical) hot-pink monster trucks:
With a swaggering disregard for both the extrapolative thought-experiments of rationalists and the escapist world-building of romantics, this approach to fiction is often, it seems, one that dissects pre-existing realms, drives an idea right through the heart of them, smashing them down to their constituent parts and then crushing those parts against each other to see what gives. To me, that’s as much a method of writing as a genre…
It also does an amazing job of recontextualizing Sterling’s original slipstream essay, making it vital again (not that it was ever not vital, but I think a lot of critical baggage had barnacled around it.) Contrasting this with the Dark Cabal is illuminating, as Mr. Duncan’s essay vaults beyond institutional structures of genre as arbiters of methods of writing.
Break the methods down, reconstitute. What is power in a story and how does it have a conversation with the powers outside of the story (the powers of SFWA et al are only narrowcast, and virtual at that)? What scares and enthralls us the most, and how do we speculate about why that is the case?
Bringing verse-thought into the realm of prose-thought…this post from Dagzine has some compelling stuff; in particular, the idea of writing with instead of writing for:
What is good poetry? Who cares? This is why few people read poetry anymore: they feel unqualified. Whether it is good or not, that poem you wrote is a poem. And whether your poetry is good or not, you are a poet when you’re writing poems. …
What does poetry do? We all better care. I might add that if it were possible to write a poem that had no meaning whatsoever, even the meaningless poem would do something. And I do believe that the complaints about difficulty are often made by readers who have no interest to examine meaning beyond the pragmatic and immediately relevant explicatures and implicatures in and around a line.
Maybe it is good enough to say that poetry should leave something behind to return to. This is its mark: a point of return, a place to begin: in this way a thing to develop, to maintain, to influence, to construct, and to renovate. The innovation is to assert my in-my-own-manner with you, or as Waldman claims, to go against the grain.
What does a story do? (And if a Sawyer wins a Hugo, does it make a sound?) To put it in Infernokrusher parlance, vulnerability is HOTT. Anonymous tenebrae that poke? Not so hott.
(And, again, none of this is meant as vitriol against the said Cabal. No worries, honest.)
an oppositional poetics grounded in a renovative verse function sounds like physics envy to me, but yeah. poets should own the burden of poetic work is good.
Although… so, if it isn’t clear, I hopped two links over to this Dagzine post and I’m writing as I read… Mr. Dagzine starts by calling for a significant poetics that can cut into and shape American discourse and drifts into a weird and dubious discussion of poet-celebrity. Starts by pointing out, quite rightly, that the poetic function of language must be a vital and accessible part of everyday language and drifts into talking as though this was something we’d lost and the way to get it back was for poets to, well, po harder. Starts by calling for poing with instead of poing for and drifts into calling for just poetry that is doing poetry.
I am confused.
I too am confused. I think that the main thing where people keep talking about these new ideas such as slipstream or infokrushing or whatnot is the fact that people value originality. And in genres like mainstream or sf or whatever, there seems to finally be an end to all ideas. Everythings been done. Or rather everythings been limited. You sit down and write an sf story or a mainstream or whatever story. That’s a straightjacket. So there’s a movement to get out of that and just to sit down and write. But a word helps, I guess. I don’t know what the point is really. Like I said, I’m confused with all this. I can’t keep up, really.
I’m reading Oblomov right now which is the funniest Russian translation I have ever read. I guess I would call this genre Russian comedy, but it reads so much like Jeeves and Wooster…
I think part of what Gary is talking about (although I could be wrong) has to be read through the lens of contemporary poetry and its readership, or lack thereof. The discourse in the last ten years or so in terms of experimental poetry in particular is like a star’s mass collapsing (did I get that right?). Because there is not a huge readership for poetry of any stripe, a lot of talk of poetic audience supercollides into the aesthetics discussion. The value systems of the poetic academy are given a looming force, something to be rejected in terms of (I think what Gary is going with) monetary values whatsoever.
Also, the world of experimental poetry has been exploring “post-avant” realms (although some hate that term). Language poetry from the 70s-early 80s posited a zero-limit in terms of the value of poetic expression in the first place. The last five or so years there’s been a concerted effort by some to step back from that void. But from what you read, Language poetry just might be the elephant in the room, er, the blog. (I can provide some links to Language poetry essays, but they’re not always the funnest things in the world.)
Hmm. It’s probably only ’cause it’s a cloudy morning and I haven’t had enough coffee yet, but what this makes me think of is all the folks who like to claim that the SF digests would get their readers back if only they printed more right-wing adventure stories about spaceships.