Writing after drying out

I used to insist that poems that didn't have "dirt under the fingernails" were without value, insisting that live as it's lived by working men and women in America were more interesting , more complex and more important than the dense, academic poems one was made to read in contemporary poetry anthologies. In full disclosure, I was an undergraduate at the time, in the mid to late seventies, an earnest poet trying to be relevant who, incidentally, was having problems in literature courses requiring same said anthologies. There might have been a worthwhile insight somewhere in my whining for a polemic I could write if I cared to take the time, but it suffices to say that I was lazy, too lazy to read the poems, too stoned to go to class, far, far too stoned to read the secondary sources to be prepared for class discussions or for the papers I had to write. I did what anyone genuine undergraduate poet/radical/alkie would do; I blamed the system. So there.

It took a bit of doing--sobering up, bad grades, failed relationships--for me to get wise(r) and actually read the work I thought unworthy, and the remarks of critics who've done their own work considering the aesthetics at length, and I've since backed away from trying to shoe horn all poetry into a tight fitting tuxedo. What was learned was relatively small, a revelation for the truly dense; poetry works in many ways, and the task of the critical reader cannot be merely to attack and opine but to make an effort to weigh a poem's elements on their own merits , studying how effects are accomplished, and then, finally, lastly, to offer a judgement whether the poem works . Not that I adhere to this prolix method--I shoot from the hip and often miss the whole darn target--but I try. Now the issue is whether a poem can work if it lacks the glorious thing called "heart".

Anyone seriously maintaining that a work of art, be it poem, novel or painting is doomed to failure because it lacks this vague quality called "heart" has rocks in their head. Artists are creative people, on that most of us can agree, and by definition artists of narrative arts make stuff up from the resources at hand. Whether the source is actual experience, anecdotal bits from friends or family, novels, biographies, sciences, all these are mere furniture that go into the creation of the poem. The poet's purpose in writing is to produce a text according to some loosely arranged guide lines that distinguish the form from the more discursive prose form and create a poem that arouses any number of responses, IE feelings, from the reader. "Heart", I suppose , would be one of them, but it's ill defined and too vaguely accounted for to be useful in discussing aesthetics. Confessional poetry and the use of poetry books and poetry readings as dump sites for a writer's unresolved issues with their life doesn't impress me generally, as in the ones who do the confessing never seem to acquire the healing they seek and instead stay sick and miserable and keep on confessing the same sins and complains over and over. Journaling would be one practice I would banish from a poetry workshop I might teach. We are writing poems, not an autobiography .

I would say, actually, that one should suspect that poet who claims that every word of their verse is true, based on facts of their lives. I cannot trust the poet who hasn't the willingness to fictionalize or otherwise objectify their subject matter in the service of making their poems more provocative, worth the extra digging and interpreting. Poems and poets come in all shapes and sounds, with varied rationales as to why each of them write the way they do, and it's absurd and not to say dishonest that "heart", by which I mean unfiltered emotionalism, is the determining element as to whether a poem works or not. My goal in reading poems isn't to just feel the full brunt of some one's soggy bag of grief or splendid basket of joy, but to also to think about things differently.

The best relationship between practice and theory , as regards the arts (and poetry in particular) is when one blends with the other in a seamless fashion. It's a process that begins with the work itself, a reading and rereading of the poem, let us say, and then , after some routine reflection, referencing any number of critical schemes I think might work in bringing what's contained in the stanzas out from under the subterfuge. Seamless is the word I'd like to use, and it applies here although the handy term has diminished impact with overuse;all the same, theories of criticism , for me,are a way of extending the poem into general discourse. Poetry works in many ways, but so does criticism, and a pragmatics of interpretation is the most useful way for me to make a poet's work something other than another useless art object whose maker adhered to someone else's rules. My gripe is a constant one, that each succeeding school of thought on what poets should be doing are too often reductionist and dismissive of what has been done prior. This isn't criticism, it's polemics, contrary to my notion that what really matters in close readings is the attempt to determine whether and why poems work succesfully as a way of quantifying experience and perception in a resonating style.

Arise and Write

Lew Welch is credited with having remarked that one doesn't write unless they're not good at anything else, a sentiment describing writing more as process rather than discovery. The myth of writing, that of determining truths, set in place, that will not diminish, change, or expand upon our writerly consideration of a set amount of data, can frustrate one who wants to nail their reality into neatly arranged contexts, like suits in a closet.

This poem under here, is what we do after we've survived our hubris and accept existence as something that is in flux, changeable, subjective in localized meanings, a phenomenon that will always vanquish expectations, and how we re-define our reasons for taking pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard).
It's similiar to shrugging off the disspointments and disgust with the failure of oneself to conquer the world and continuing with what one has been doing, which is to say that one returns to living ,but with an increased degree of involvement; less of figuring out the world and more of figuring out how to live in it.For all the benefits we claim for poetry--spiritual uplift, blunt truth telling, political anaysis, reconfiguring the language--I tend to think that poetry, above all, is a practice that keeps us focused on what's in front of us, what's actually in front of us.

All the qualities are there--irony, wit, enlarged emotion--but what's pertinent in the matter is that is a form that helps us admit that we may not know what life is all about, but we can at least know it's changing shape and appreciate the bends and turns of each odd nuance.

Arise and Write


Every which way but
into the sleeve of the jacket
now too long and longing
as the arm
drops toward the dressing room floor,
one leg longer than the other
and pants a size too small,
it seems you were invaded
and raided and all the faded
jeans and things that are
what you require for work, lunch,

all the points between appointments of
blue pencil marks, remarks in red pen


displaced, asea in unknown pockets
in a pile of pants and shirts
unwashed like mythical masses
arriving at the docks
after passing under
the grey lady’s armpit
and the light she carries, home fires for everyone,



Nothing makes sense
but that doesn’t matter
when work is the word of the day
and the word is first
when you thirst for a drink
and think you have no dimes
nor quarters for the soda in a can
or water in a plastic bottle,

you just hit the throttle and
plunge ahead into the brand new day
full of traps and fortunes
and the terror
an angry typist can bring you

or an empty page
taunts you with,
you rise, you shave, you
put on your cleanest dirty shirt,
you move on,
the streetlights are still on,

the bus is late
and deadlines are all
you have to live on.

A statement about poetry

The validity of any theory of poetry rests in how well it works in actual poems, not in how well turned the theoretical phrasing is.
There should be an absolute minimum of poems about poetry; poets, regardless of politics or aesthetic preference , really need to turn their language skills to the world and not onto themselves or their craft. Poems about poems , for me, is analogous to building cars from the spare parts of old cars--the enterprise will just collapse under it's own conceited laziness unless something fresh, alien and external , from outside the poet's subjective being and his or her ingrained habits of rhetoric, that would challenge the given assumptions a habit of phrasing would other wise lead a poet to rest upon. The poem is a vehicle to engage reality, not to wish it away with an obsession with it's own form.

Difficult poems are not to be discounted merely because they're difficult. There are poets who layer their works in ways that reward the effort to understand them on their own terms. There are things that cannot really be written about simply, and require genius to have the language extended to the point that a carnivalization of our paradigm can be contained with the word systems we were born with--Louis Zukofsky, Charles Olson come to mind.

Clear, concise, "objectively" coherent poems are not to be discounted merely because they make sense to the reader in more conventional ways. There's quite a bit of complaining about the "School of Quietude" that dominates poetry awards, and for the most part I share the disdain--faux confessional bits of inconsequential meditation that does not arise above a listing of wistfully arranged images and an implied, defeated sign, all in the moment. It's off putting and it's a cheat on the craft. But there poets who can compose the lyric that can bring a number of ideas , images, bits of memory to a single moment, a synthesis perfectly realized, truthfully told, without verbal padding. I think of Thomas Lux, my friend Peter Dragin, Paul Dresman, Kate Watson. This is not to say that these smaller poems are the only things these writers compose, far from it. But the smaller ones, about smaller things, should be respected when the near perfections are created

An absolute minimum of literary language and reference; excessive reference to other writers , philosophers, and the like makes me think that someone is hiding their college syllabi and hasn't yet learned to write honestly about their experience. Other writers should be the models, not the frameworks of what a younger poet writes.

Slippery Literature

There was one of those rowdy discussions about literature at a corner cafe habitats for under employed bohemians where the topic of fiction took a hard left turn, when an aesthetic difference became warfare, a conflict of moral philosophies. I was defending postmodern novelists like Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace for the way they were helping blur and otherwise erode the 

barriers that separated fiction-making and reportage, and a woman who'd been in talk suddenly clenched her fist, gritted her teeth, and gave a stare worth of a mackerel facing you down from a cutting board. To paraphrase crudely, her point was that the antics of postmodern writers gave her a loathing sensation she couldn't stand to have; her world was shaken, disturbed. She said she couldn't have the barriers between reason and emotion so disturbed and suggestively destroyed. She went about her business and left the table, and the cafe. I never saw her again, and side step having conversations about half-grasped literary theories with people I've met only that night. It takes so few assertions to undermine a pleasant evening.The convolution of reason and emotion is exactly the kind of writing literature ought to be engaged in however severe the psychic toll adds up to. If there is no risk to the reading or a dull edge to the narrative, the story is a waste of time. Literature is provocative in the best situations, where style and innovation match and afford the author a means to dwell over the lives of characters who have ambiguous notions of what path to take; heroic, or self-preserving, brave, or cowardly, virtuous, or slippery in ethical and moral principal. It's a tour of the grey areas of existence. Being neither philosophy nor a science of any stripe, fiction is perfectly suited for writers to mix and match their tones, their attitudes, their angles of attack on a narrative schema in order to pursue as broad, or as narrow, as maximal or minimal a story they think a rendering requires.

The attack on modernism's' arrogance that it was the light to the "real" beneath the fabrications that compose our cosmology, is grossly over stated, it seems, vastly over regarded: Pound, Eliot, Joyce, and Stein, arguably literary modernism's Gang-Of-Four, did not, I think, tell us in any specified terms exactly what that true reality was, or what it was supposed to be, but only that the by dicing up, challenging, making it strange and making it new could we challenge ourselves, as artists, and as readers that new perceptions, and new ideas about the nature of the world could be had.Individually , each writer had a different idea of heaven that they wanted the world to become--Pound was ultimately a befuddled, albeit fascist sympathizer, and Eliot became a conservative Royalist (and their anti-Semitism is problematic for anyone looking for real-time heroes)-- but so far as the principle thrust of their work, which was away from the straight jacket of accumulated literary history and toward something new and different that renewed the possibility of art to engage the times in an aesthetically relevant manner, is scarcely diminished in power merely because it came before. I agree with Fred Jameson on the point that Post Modernism , in effect, is a restating of the modernist project which is, in a cramped nutshell, a set of overlapping trends in cultural thinking and expression that countered the conceit that there is a contiguous and coherent way of interpreting the world. After two world wars , discontinuity was the rule, and the ground was set for constructing new ways of seeing the world, as was the cataclysmic optimism that something final and perfect could be made from the ashes. Postmodernism's particular twist was there was no end to historical development and that history was merely a processing of events through convenient fictions. Beyond that, the style of the literary expression hasn't much altered. The key difference seems to be that brand name have replaced place names.

Writing is an argument so far that the central impulse to write at all is to make a series of statements about oneself and one's experiences in the world , and reach a satisfying conclusion, some "meaning" at the end of the discourse.As Barthes noted, the effort to achieve fixed meaning is doomed, as experience is not an static event, but a fluid movement through time that a writer's perception of changes moment to moment, text to text. The argument is thus not one sided, but multi-vocal, complex, interwoven within perceptions that argue amongst themselves within in the writer and onto their pages, in the extension of characters, plot, instances, local, active bits of imagining where the goal, is finally to attempt to resolve contradiction, arrive at something absolute in a universe that seems to permanently with hold its Absolute Meanings during this lifetime, and to achieve, somehow, some peace, some satisfaction. But no: the argument persists, the imagination soars, the old certainties cannot contain either the unset of new perceptions, nor can sooth a writer's innate restlessness. In literature, the conflation continues, reason and emotion color each other, the eyes shut, hoping for vision, a clear path, but the writing continues, the sorting through of experience continues, the unease continues, the world changes radically and not at all. That post modernism's over all mission is to notify us of the limitations of our tropes, our schemes, and our rhetoricized absolutes seems redundant to what literature already does.

The Deeper Soil

Poet Tom Sleigh’s on going fascination with mortality in his work produces mixed results, to be sure, but the focus on death and the dwelling on what is different in later years and who is no longer in your company isn’t a sure sign of morbid obsession and down scale verse. Sleigh’s task is a difficult one, to give an honest voice that takes the longer view of what a life, one’s own or the lives of friends and family, has amounted to. The results of such an inquiry vary wildly, irrationally, madly between sorrow , giddiness and all the small rills and valleys in between. The process of remember ignites any number of emotional cues quite against one’s expectation of seeming in control of their responses.

The death of a loved one is not something that one just "gets over", as if there was expiration date on grief. Yes, one moves on with their life and tries to have new experiences and adventures, but poets, like anyone else, get older, and the longer view on their life and relations comes to the for. Poetry will tend to cease being the bright and chatty record of one's impulses, leavened with fast wit and snappy references, and will become more meditative, slower, a more considered rumination on those who've are gone yet whose presence remains felt and which influences the tone and direction of the living. It's hardly a matter of getting mileage from a tragedy as it is a species of thinking-out-loud. We speak ourselves into being with others around us to confirm our life in the physical world as well to confront the inescapable knowledge of our end, and poets are the ones writing their testaments that they were here once and that they lived and mattered in a world that is soon enough over run with another generation impatient to destroy or ignore what was here only scant years before so they may erect their premature monuments to themselves and their cuteness.

We survived our foolishness and quick readings, a poet writes, we lived here and mattered to a community of friends and enemies in ways that no novel or epic production can capture, and we wish you the same luck, the chance to live long enough in this world you seek to fashion after your own image so you may write about your regrets, your failures, the things you didn't get around to doing.

Let me remark that despair isn't the default position for poets to take as they get older; as I think is plain here, poets will in general treat their subject matter with more consideration, more nuance, more acuity as they age. The host of emotions, whether despair, elation, sadness, celebration, aren't likely to alter, but the treatments are bound to be richer, deeper, darker. One has aged and one has experienced many more things since they were in their twenties, and convincingly casting off the same flippant riffs one did in their fifties as they had while a college freshman is a hard act to pull off, emphasis on "act". One grows up, if they're lucky, and acts their age. Acting one's age doesn't necessarily mean one becomes a crotchety old geezer yelling at kids to get off his (or her) lawn; those character traits are formed long before the onset of old age. But what I think is a given is that an aging poet would be inclined to be more thoughtful as he or she writes. And why shouldn't they be. They have more experience to write about and to make sense of.

On the Road: A trip through America Unscathed by Thought

On the Road is a book one ought to read , I think, in order to know something of a part of a generation responded to the post- WWll experience, and with any luck one does not stop there, thinking they've read the definitive book of the time. Other Beat writings are more crucial, especially Howl by Allen Ginsberg, one of the great American poems of the 20th century; in line, rhythm, imagery, and the contrasting and clashing elements of rage, despair and eureka! quality laughs, Ginsberg's poem supersedes the best of Kerouac's prose and and is a fully convincing evocation of the deadened conformity of 50s culture that agitated and motivated he and his fellow writers Kerouac had some intuitive notion of spontaneous community when it came to he and his friends bumming around the roads in a variety of heisted cars, trying to live on the kind of wits that fire up only in the face of near disaster. It's the community of the foxhole, a world with a bond that's intimate, understood instantly, without words, a bond that's held onto due to the members' sense that their lives depend on it. Lives do depend on the bond, in literal foxholes, but this mindset was something Paradise and his boys carried around with them, wherever they went, a thinking that innoculated the travelers from whatever elements, textures, values the local scene might have on them.

They were always passing through, resisting change, impulsively impervious to nuance, being themselves wherever on the map they stopped for a period; these were the same personalities in Denver that started in New York, and fairly much the same assortment of tics and tells by novel's end. On the Road might be considered the first post modern novel, in that America is seen as merely stops along the way, with the final destination being the edge of the earth the characters seemed to be looking for, that blankness beyond the road signs and small town bars where the silence and serenity they sought can absorb them and quiet the chattering noise in there heads. It is post modern in the sense that for whatever adventures these guys have, no seems touched by anything except the brief satisfaction of their own drunkeness, rant or sexual release; nothing effects them, nothing changes them, they are , like all unhinged signifiers, unmoved.

It did turn into a worthwhile project for later writers to examine the surface presentation of American culture and reveal it in conflict with the collective desire for a metaphysics of presence, but Kerouac only gives a brief hint to the uglier and more comic possibilities of the terrain he happened upon.His short fall was in making Sal Paradise such a flitty motormouth, a man who notices everything about him and yet cannot describe what he notes in memorable language. This is a book about a man trying to outrun himself.

Since writers are in the habit of making up stories as a matter of habit and profession, each of them, not just the beats, "faked" everything. That shouldn't be surprising from a class of folks we look to for tales, fables, metaphors and such that we might use , in some loose way, in making our own lives fit our skins better. The question is how well ,uhhhh, how artful one is in manipulating language towards the creation of fiction or a poetry where the world as its spoken resounds with suggestion and portents of secret knowledge. Some Beat writers I like, and consider brilliant, like William S. Burroughs. He was the one stone-cold genius in the bunch, was the most interesting and successful destroyer and re-creator of literary form, and maintained what Mailer called a "gallows humor" that allowed him to explore the gamier side of human personality without mythologizing the journey. Ginsberg's early poems , as well, were filled with the bulls-eye hitting jeremiads that were such an exact fit for the condition he described that it still comes off as a fresh and blistering criticism of a culture that seems interested in no more than conformity. Fakery is what one expects and demands from creative writers. Beat enthusiasts might blanch at the notion, but comes down to the skill of the writer to get away with the imaginative tall tales he's putting forth. It's about how well controls their technique in the construction of the lie we might want to invest in for a period.

The Story always wins

Showing John Wayne films to Viet Nam GIs in an effort to shore up their patriotic zeal and to remind them what their fight is all about is straight out of Heller, Pynchon, and Baudrillard. Viet Nam will always be a horrible fact of history, but you have to find this instance perversely comic: telling real life soldiers that they have to live up to a living military heritage by illustrating the point with fictional renderings with oversized heroics is the perfect post-modern conundrum. The instruction of history, with names, dates, battles, and analysis of particular conditions, is no longer sufficient to make the past useable in the current moment, so... LET'S SHOW THEM MOVIES!

Did WWII soldiers who saw Ronald Reagan movies think that they were really swell?
The audience the Reagan war movies were intended for, the American population still at home thought they were the living end. There was an accurate assessment that the home front needed reassurances that the unexplainable events in Europe were part of some Great and Good Cause, and that our involvement was part of an effort to save everything that is decent and worthy in human history: what better way to make this argument than in an endless series of film reels, where complex historical forces are reduced to simple-yet-compelling story arcs that outlined current events as a matter of good-guys vs. bad guys? It's not as if this was a wrong thing to do, it's just that the idea of soldiers watching films insisting that the battles they're actually in are worth winning produces a wild sense of disconnection: anyone would imagine that the soldiers were already aware of the worthiness of winning the war: their lives depended on it, period.

I don't think the GI's in either the Pacific or European Theatres had the time, or the desire to watch Hollywood movies that were marked for the domestic market, but it is my guess that had the soldiers the option of watching their idealized counterparts, the reaction would be no less derisive, hooting, sarcastic. The irony of the initial post about the Viet Nam showing of Wayne films was the bone-headed notion that old, dated, and thinly valorized characters, rickety as stage props and plainly intended for an civilian audience that needed convincing that life must go on --that is, capitalism must go on-- during a good and just war might in some insane way spark a blaze of militant patriotism in actual soldiers involved, daily in actual carnage, death, destruction. In either case, real or supposed, the effect is perversely comic, and I can only imagine the laughter is a species of gallows humor: it's evidence of a knowledge that language, or its abstracted uses in narrative mediums, can come close to conveying.

Did Derrida and Barthes actually "define", or address at all the rather slippery notion of "post modernism"? Seems more appropriate to say that they, in their respective inquiries, high lighted some real conceptual issues in Continental philosophy, and created another layer of jargon that made an industry out of what, in retrospect, seems a small addition to our ways of thinking about writing. Both were inspirations to a generation of literary critics who wanted some Gallic gravitas in their corner so they may speak philosophically with out actually philosophers--or so they may extend their embedded existentialism with into the world with a bright and shiny new paint job--but my reading of them didn't come across the word "post modern".

Writing and literature is all veils, I would think: if anyone could get "IT" with a piece of work, we would have to assume the writer, and his audience are satisfied, sated, and are disinclined to hear the story again. But there is always another wrinkle to relate, another nuance to discover, another veil to be taken away.

This echoes Roland Barthes idea of writing being an erotic function, that the end that one gets to at the end of the tale is not the point of the quest, but the quest itself, the unveiling of the language, the constant re-assimilation that names for things are made to under go as the nature of the material world defies literary form; it is the imagination that needs to work within the waking sphere, not the world that needs to fit within it's contours.

We find, with reading, that writers we care about themselves could care less about what kind they are supposed to be, according to literary archivists; thus, they will have stylistics extremes that venture into another camp, away from what common knowledge dictates is their "native" style, manner. Is Gravity's Rainbow any less a work of "Magical Realism" than what we've seen in Garcia Marquez or Borges? Is Nabokov's work Pale Fire less post modern than, say, Mulligan Stew? It becomes the definitively moot point, irresolvable and subjects to an unending detour the circles around the precise meaning of finally inconsequential terms. Imagination is trait that will use anything manner or style that is suitable to a writer's project at hand and it ought not be surprising, or upsetting that many writers, assigned to roles by career-making PhD candidates, simply do what they need to do in order to get the work done.

This gives us fascinating paradoxes: Norman Mailer, by temperament a romantic existentialist who might have been in the late 19th century, is one who took to post-modern strategies to render is work: the range of his assumed styles and experimentation creates specific problems with literary historians who might be eager to be done with his books and his name.

Jargonized Murk

Some nuggets regarding the subject of postmodernism and writing, surely a blast from the distant nineties when anyone could sound like a language philosopher around the time clock . It's my vanity to think that this is writing of some heft other than the volume of words; honestly, what I like was learning the art of conversation drift, that is, starting at one point with one idea, maybe two, and then letting the words drive through whatever neighborhood they felt like. It's my vanity here, but then again, it's my blog. Sometimes I just like to "hear myself write", as Duncan Shepard has remarked of Quintin Tarentino's dialogue.
_________________________________________________________________

"Isn’t ‘deconstruction’ an attempt to apply scientific principles to the analysis of language and what it implies? There is a lot of science-envy among the critics in the arts and humanities, and they’ve seemed to have latched on to the extrapolated language of anthropology and linguistics in order to keep their jobs. There is an effort, in the mission of literature departments, to continue to prove that there is stuff of quantifiable worth to be extracted from the study of novels and poems, and that they are in some way adding to the body of knowledge. Post-modernism, as a style, as an artistic impulse, as a habit of mind and gesture inevitable in an image-saturated time has cut-up, bricolage, pastiche, parody, and other sorts of archival hooliganism at its heart, and that the artist (writer) should use the images at hand, whatever their source, and give them free play and transgress boundaries, the notion remains that the impulse is, in fact, pre-modern, about ritual and mystery. The universe shrunk down to symbolic particulars that have a power to establish order in things that ultimately are not quantifiable by science or argument. Writing and literature are all veils, I would think: if anyone could get ‘IT’ with a piece of work, we would have to assume the writer and his audience are satisfied, sated, and are disinclined to hear the story again. But there is always another wrinkle to relate, another nuance to discover, another veil to be taken away.

This echoes Barthes’ idea of writing/writing as being an erotic function; that the end that one gets to at the end of the tale is not the point of the quest but the quest itself. The unveiling of language; the constant reassimilation that names for things are made to undergo as the nature of the material world defies literary form; it is the imagination that needs to work within the waking sphere, not the world that needs to fit within its contours. We find with reading that writers we care about themselves could care less about what kind they are supposed to be according to literary archivists; thus they will have stylistic extremes that venture into another camp away from what common knowledge dictates is their ‘native’ style or manner. Is Gravity’s Rainbow any less a work of ‘Magical Realism’ than what we’ve seen in Garcia Marquez or Borges? Is Nabokov’s work Pale Fire less postmodern than say Mulligan Stew?

It becomes a definitively moot point; irresolvable and subject to an unending detour that circles around the precise meaning of finally inconsequential terms. Imagination is a trait that will use any manner or style suitable for a writer’s project at hand and it ought not be surprising or upsetting that many writers assigned roles by career-making PhD candidates simply do what they need to do in order to get their work done. This gives us fascinating paradoxes: Norman Mailer by temperament a romantic existentialist who might have been in the late 19th century is one who took postmodern strategies to render his work. The range of his assumed styles and experimentation creates specific problems with literary historians who might be eager to be done with his books and his name. Somewhere so far as criticism has gone in the last half-century, a link was made with other discourses which made much of literary study something of a gawky laughing stock: not historians not scientists not psychologists not philosophers. The gamiest of theory wonks could prate on and onward on fields not their own keeping tenuous connections between their specialty fictional accounts of experience and real-time bathos and tragedy obscured with an ever-deepening reservoir of jargonized murk.