1) I’ll admit to having an overwhelming fondness for books on finance, and one of the big reasons for that is almost certainly because I read Lewis Hyde’s The Gift at an impressionable age and the thing’s shaped my thinking in the years that’ve passed. If you’ve not read The Gift, you need to—it was rereleased in a 25th anniversary edition a few years back, but please know it didn’t used to have such a terrible, treacly cover (I’m absolutely a judge-a-book-by-its-cover guy, as are, not all that deep down, most of us, even if we’d like not to admit it)(it also used to have a better subtitle: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property).
Hyde’s book, in the briefest of summaries, considers gift economies—economies built and based on notions of value other than those that derive from market and/or transactional valuations (Hyde’s grace in presenting these ideas is one of the key reasons to read his book—nobody else comes close)—and he’s especially interested in how we should consider and value art, given financial worth is rarely the best metric for creative stuff (Van Gogh dying without sales or $, J. K. O’Toole’s suicide and posthumous Pulitzer, etc.). That’s maybe all you need to know at the outset about The Gift and Hyde.
2) There’ve recently been a spate of interesting articles acknowledging one of the creepingly crappy aspects of how much info we’ve presently got to choose from, and that aspect is that we can self-select into echo chambers. It’s not enough to acknowledge that Fox News viewers are less informed than other news watchers (Bill Clinton, in the latest Esquire, notes that MSNBC is essentially a liberalized Fox News)—what’s newly scary is that Fox News watchers can create a total news reality which only supports what they already believe. The opportunity to create and live in a world in which all incoming info is basically vetted to be aligned with the news-consumer’s bias—where no info which could disrupt one’s conception of reality is consumed—is both hugely compelling (for some) and nightmarish (also maybe only for some). This doesn’t have to add up to any great shakes or anything, it’s just worth acknowledging that we live, at present, in a world in which folks are 100% able to create and live within info echo chambers. I’d imagine how you feel about this fact has lots to do with how sure you are of your own worldview.
3) Monoculture, by F. S. Michaels, was released last year by the phenomenal Red Clover Press and the book is a thin, enrapturing gem. It’s accessible, sensible—exactly the sort of book that should have (and still could + should!) take off and create a tiny little dent in books in the exact same way On Bullshit did not too long ago. Subtitled How One Story is Changing Everything, the critical thing to realize is that Michaels is interested in both the specific story that is at present changing everything (the increasingly economic way in which we view everything—art, friendships, one’s relationship to work, etc.) and also the more generalized danger of how a single story, any single story, fundamentally threatens things.
You can, of course, anticipate some of the things Michaels has written—or you can at least, without much work, get into the mindset. For instance: if you think about your work exclusively as a transactional activity in which you give time and energy in exchange for money, and if you work for a company which has been tasked to maximize profit above all other concerns, you’re going to have a very, very dicey time with questions of deep-down satisfaction in terms of your work life (because, for instance, could you ever be satisfied if the company lost any money, at all, anywhere? And doesn’t satisfy fundamentally go against notions of getting avaristically ahead?). I’d imagine someone, somewhere, has said something about being a shareholder in some organization which, until recently, it would’ve been considered obscene to claim had shares (a family, or a group of friends). Given the venue, it seems unlikely I’ve got to go to great lengths to point out the massive significance of even small changes in language—poetry, if nowhere else, is where the significance of a single word, the placement of the merest bit of punctuation, is paramount.
4) What I’ve ended up curious about in the wake of Monoculture (and especially with consideration given to the book I’ll next be looking at here, Borrow by Louis Hyman) is, real simply: is there, at present, a monoculture in literary arts, fiction or poetry (or, increasingly, literary nonfiction), and what is that monoculture? Lest this just seem like some good old navel-gazing what-if-ery, I’ll admit that part of this question regarding any monoculture in contemporary letters comes from being a big fan of John Gallaher’s casual musings on contemporary poetics (I don’t necessarily see a lot of folks doing the same job for literary fiction, nor does, by my readerly estimates, contemporary literary fiction alight along the same sort of aesthetic path or form equivalent sorts of schools the way poetry does. Are there tendencies? Sure. But there seem fewer and less strict or clear-cut schools to which fiction folks all ascribe to [though it’s at least worth acknowledging that the big aesthetic we’re at present living through/with is the confluence of the NOON/Captain Fiction folks meeting the McSweeney’s folks with everybody under the banner of Wallace or DeLillo; show me the serious literary writer at present trying to tread a Rothian or Updikean path]).
But so: poetry. Is there any monoculture at present? It’s been awhile since Burt pegged the ellipticals, then tried to name and articulate the New Thing, but is there another, other, dominant (or even not dominant but recognizable) poetic story at work? I talked with John Gallaher awhile back about what he’s calling the New Sincerity crowd, which I think makes some modicum of sense. What I’m ultimately curious about, though, is less what we call whatever’s happening right now in poetry and more if we can discern regular traits that tie together the poetry that’s happening now.
Aside from, seemingly, a giant dismissal of narrative (am I the only one who feels just bereft as hell at the lack of narrative in lots of contemporary poetry?), and an overused fondness for slippery associative buzziness, I can’t find a lot that I think unites contemporary poetry. I’d love to be wrong about this, but basically, in most of the contemporary poetry I read, there’s
1) little/no narrative,
2) associative energy/buzziness, and, at best,
3) a dim regard for seriousness.
I’ll admit this last one’s maybe just me, and hopefully I’m wrong. Maybe it’s because (channeling Ben Folds Five now) I was never cool in school, but that #3 above seems to have lots to do with coolness. Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe I got suckered too hard and seriously by Jorie Graham and for a long, long time now I’ve been carrying around her phrase, uttered on noting what she believes most poets at present lack: “Big hunger.” I don’t know. I do know I’d love to know if anybody who reads and thinks about this stuff has ideas on if there’s at present a monoculture in poetry, and what that story tells us.
5) For real, too: get Monoculture. It’ll blow your mind. Next week: Borrow by Hyman, and some noodling about how American attitudes regarding debt in the last century has to certainly say something about Ams’ changing attitudes regarding art as well.