you-will-go-to-the-mall-----------to-the-home------

I wanted to write about the tough, wiry but straight stems of Herb Bennet, aka Wood Avens, aka Geum urbanum, a garden weed that's quite difficult to get rid of unless you're some sort of Bayer-head. Best to appreciate the pale green leaves, pretty yellow flowers and the spiked heads of seeds poking out from among other plants, and to put up with working on them every summer. It's a master of disguise and very good at being lost among other plants, only the hooked seedhead revealing its presence. With the ground being so dry,  it's sometimes possible to twist or rip out the whole root, but that's unusual. In normal conditions the stem just snaps, so we are talking about containment at best. The root is a magenta-flushed knobble, a bit like a miniature Pink Fir Apple potato.  I was thirsty but glad to be out in nature. Feeling below the canopy, my fingers easily distinguished the tough stems of Herb Bennet from e.g. geranium, loosestrife, bedstraw and marjoram.  From other gardens came the sound of shrieks and splashes from paddling pools. I laboured on, at the back of the bed beneath the bullace, getting ripped in my turn by slender bramble stems. Herb Bennet, on the other hand doesn't fight back. I've been immersed in it for hours and never even got a rash.


But and however, this post is about Johan Jönson.




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-------------the-home------------------you-will-go-to-Paris-------










I wake up.  The walls and windows are exposed to background
radiation. From a merciless and self-consuming sun. I know where
I am. in an artaud state. A müller bunker. A fanon field. I have just
woken up. May-




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be with memories from a memory collage of abstract bodies.
Of temporary vectors.  Of movement.  Of rest.  Of duration.
I lie down. I lie on my back. I find myself in a larger movement. It
is an uninterrupted movement








---Paris------you-will-go-to-the-worldfactory----------------------










away.  A pattern on the beach.  I move through colonized
territories. In segmented zones. In naming map-drawings.
It is an immense larger movement. It is a soft metabolic
transformation machine. It is an uninter-










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ruptibility. It is a force that wants to bring friction to an absolute
zero. That wants immobility. That reveals a desire to die. I move
continually in also this form of death. I myself participate in the
annihilation and recon








-worldfactory---you-will-go-to-the-mall------to-the-home------










struction.  Nobody is innocent.  Striated snake-spirals in the
desert are more complex than the mole's underground system.
I have to get away. I have to get away from the immobility of
writing. Away. Away. Constant uninter-














[from Collobert Orbital (2006). Translation by Johannes Göransson, Displaced Press, 2009.]










*


Antonin Artaud, French dramatist.
Heiner Müller, German dramatist.
Frantz Fanon, Martinican philosopher and revolutionary.


The names are not unconnected. For example, Müller's Die Hamletmaschine and Artaud-fragment quotes from Sartre's preface to Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth: "under the sun of torture".




Danielle Collobert, French author, took her own life in 1978. The poem is loosely based on her journals.  "An experimental writer, Collobert wrote prose poems in a haunting, pessimistic, tense and stark style. Her work showed an obsession with death as the destination of humankind, the ambiguity of gender, travel and madness" (Wikipedia). Like Fanon, she was involved with the FLN (Algerian National Liberation Front).




*






March

     Such a strange night -- on the Quai des Fleurs -- I've been living here for a
few days -- very nice apartment -- They're sleeping -- the table faces the
window where I write -- the Seine -- the lights -- water -- calm came back --
like glancing crystal in the water -- rising and falling -- as real as my hand
-- my face in the pane -- the Seine's reflections disrupting the lamplight's
opacity -- like crossing dream with reality -- and then a car passes -- from
light to opacity -- disappearance --
     tranquility -- very rare peacefulness - after days of emptiness -- empty
enough to put off getting up -- because of the emptiness itself -- and after
-- completely futile efforts to fill in --
     why despite appearances I go to such lengths to achieve this feeling
emptiness -- of discomfort -- as though every gesture --every movement were
bringing me nearer to death --
     the sensation of emptiness disappeared in that orgasmic moment --

---

     I have possibly never been so far into that solitude as these last months --
it still might not be enough -- there is a vague form of stability left here
-- of security -- some doubt about what I can stand --
     more wandering -- add leaving the country -- breaking all bonds -- or
whatever -- being broke in a country I don't know -- maybe --
     probably an illusion -- equating being alone in a room for days -- and going
off somewhere --


April

     Departure -- tomorrow -- real escape -- I'm going to Tunisia -- calm --

---

     Tunis 1
     here with no break -- already the same life -- I go to cafés -- I make love
-- I go to films -- I talk to people -- no distance -- I've already been here
since forever --
     but still it's the East -- the light -- the colors -- the beauty -- at least
this: I have new eyes -- senses beginning to function again as though after a
long illness -- this morning very early -- in the village -- scarcely daybreak
-- through the grillwork on the window -- some noises in the covered streets
-- after making love all night -- body heavy and hot -- impression of
tiredness -- of well-being -- H. motionless -- head on my belly -- almost cool
-- a smell I couldn't place -- almonds and oranges -- old food -- and then
suddenly in the silence -- a very long sound -- very low -- the slow
modulation of the muezzin -- extraordinary beauty --
    now here -- in the café -- seated on matting -- they're playing cards --the
patron sitting on a chair by the stove closes his eyes -- head thrown back a
little -- he is tall and lean -- looks high as a kite -- they aren't paying
any attention to me -- I'm fine here -- it's raining out -- sound of rain on
the steps --








[Extracts from Danielle Collobert´s Journal for 1960, trans. Norma Cole, found here: https://www.asu.edu/pipercwcenter/how2journal/archive/online_archive/v1_1_1999/ncdanielle.html]




*


Looking for a link with some good information about Johan Jönson, I came across this excellent post by Johannes Göransson:


http://montevidayo.com/2013/08/swallowed-repulsion-johan-jonsons-soiled-conceptualism/#more-3890


Reading further, I discovered my own name and that I had even asked a question in the comments stream: why might you consider Jönson a conceptualist poet?  I'd completely forgotten about this. So after a five-year gap,  I finally saw Johannes' very informative response.

Dryas octopetala and Geum urbanum from C. A. M. Lindman's Nordens Flora

[From C.A.M. Lindman's Nordens Flora. The Swedish name "Nejlikrot" arises, apparently, from the root having a slight scent of cloves ("Kryddnejlika"). I must try this on the next of my (rare) smelling days. The original meaning of "Nejlika" is the Pinks, i.e. various wild flowers in  the Dianthus family, some of whom (notably the Clove Pink or Carnation, from the Mediterranean) are quite strongly clove-scented. Lindman's fine illustrations, from 1901-1905, are widely available online, e.g. http://caliban.mpiz-koeln.mpg.de/lindman/]

specimens of the literature of sweden - Johan Jönson

128. I'll tell you.  The slaughter-van came every Thursday morning at ten o'clock.

129. She listens.

130.  The first muck-out was at six. There were kind of chutes behind the stalls. You sweated. The dust-mask itched.

131. The first feed was at seven. You went with a large feed wagon in the corridors between the stalls and dispensed some sort of pig feed into the feed-chutes. It was mixed with vitamins and antibiotics. Your throat became dry from the dust that whirled up. You sweated. The dust-mask itched. Pigs who were going to be slaughtered that day weren’t fed. Their stalls were marked with a green symbol.

132. Around eight, a couple of hours before the slaughter-van came, all the pigs started screaming. They had worked out when it was coming. You needed ear protection. It was a different cry from when the sows gave birth. Then the boars roared continuously with aggressive voices. They stood with their front legs on the top rail of their pens as if inciting the sows to bite to death the newborn piglets that were not immediately sucking on teats.



133.  You use a special electrified rod to paralyze the sow and prevent this wastage of the farrow. Then you put the runts in piglet pens, under heat-lamps.

134. Piglets that weren’t going to be be fed on-site or sold to other breeders were gassed in gas chambers. Then the carcasses were sold, mainly to cat- and dog-food producers.

135. I think that all newborn pigs should be kept alive.

136. After the slaughter-van came, you needed both ear-plugs and ear-muffs. Mostly, the pigs went into the pens like they were meant to. Any who were stubborn you held their hind legs and shoved them, like heavy, heavy wheelbarrows, up the gangplank and into the slaughter-van. You sweated. When the door had closed, the holding pens had been put away and the slaughter-van had gone, then the pigs that remained in the stalls would shut up. You could then take off the ear-muffs.

137.  During the lunch-hour we slept on feed-sacks inside the warehouse.

138.  Before the visit of an animal-welfare inspector or a major buyer, if it was in spring or summer, the pigs were released into outdoor paddocks. They ran around and jumped and poked in the mud. In the sunlight they shifted colour from beige gray, dust gray, to brilliant pink, for a few minutes. When the signal for feeding sounded, the pigs rushed back into the stalls, and the doors closed.

139. The second feed was at one. You went with a large feed wagon in the corridors between the stalls and dispensed pig feed, mixed with antibiotics and vitamins, into the feed-chutes. Your mouth and throat went dry from the dust that whirled up. It stuck a little in the eyes. You sweated. The dust-mask itched. Through the protectors you heard pigs’ noises when they ate and drank.

140. She says: What did it sound like?

141.  I say: Like beings. Like animals. That crawl about. That emit sounds: gurgling, swallowing.

142. She says: Are they so helpless?

143. Well, they're looking forward.

144. No way back!

145. Not that there's any way forward, either...

146. I laugh.

 (from Johan Jönson's Restaktivitet (2007)).

NOTES

Nearly all of the extracted passage uses impersonal passives and the neutral preposition “man”, which is here mainly rendered as “you”.

Jönson’s account of intensive pig farming is intentionally impressionistic and elemental. (It forms part of a much larger sequence on work, automatism and despair. Restaktivitet means "Residual activity".)

So he does not e.g. distinguish between batch pens, gestation crates*, and farrowing crates.  He uses the single word “stia” which means “sty”, but in the UK this always refers to outdoor housing. 

I may have missed the point of the joke at the end. (Thanks to Irene and Sam for help with this translation.)  

You can read a lot more about Johan Jönson in various Montevidayo pieces by Johannes Göransson, e.g. this one from a couple of days ago:

http://www.montevidayo.com/?p=2806

*Gestation crates, aka sow stalls, are banned in Sweden (1994), the UK (1999), and some US states, and by McDonalds. These are the confined cages in which, under this system, breeding sows spend most of their adult lives, more or less like bottles in a wine-rack.

The EU is imposing a restriction from 1/1/2013 meaning that sows can only be confined in the crates for the first 4 weeks of each 16-week gestation. (It has been reported that many EU member states won't be compliant in time).  UK readers please note: unless you buy the more expensive products clearly labelled as "British Pork", then it's probably from a farm somewhere in Europe that uses gestation crates.

playground

Blogs are dead, everyone's moving on! This vigorous meme continues to circulate in literary circles, Chris Goode (on closing down Thomson's) noting with something like surprise that Dennis Cooper's DCs is still so vigorous. (Great and alarming blog, but not necessarily one to browse in the workplace, as I found out to my cost yesterday.) And today Todd Swift is taking a break from his long-running Eyewear, using very similar rhetoric about there being more elegant and quicker ways to reach people. (Chris and Todd might not agree about a lot else, I'm thinking.) Perhaps I'd better wait. Todd tends to shoot from the hip, and many's the time that I've spotted the first few lines of one of his tastier posts on "Blogs I Follow", only to find that by the time I get there the post has already been pulled.

Mark Scroggins, it must be a couple of years ago now, also lauded the potential of Facebook and Twitter - but Mark still maintains his blog, and even writes good things on it, though never enough. But I just don't think Facebook has the potential that's claimed for it. (I subscribe to the now equally vigorous meme "What a waste of time and evergy is Facebook, I'm moving on".) I think it's quite good for vaguely staying in touch with the more shadowy outer circles of your acquaintance, and that's it.

But surely blogs themseves move pretty fast? Last autumn's targeted attack on Todd and Eyewear by the Barque crew Sean B, Frances K et al was so Swiftly tidied up that most people missed it, even if they were watching. Like a tussle in a disco, its 10 blurry seconds revealed a lot more about all the participants than anything that clear-minded literary historians compose.

It would be better to celebrate the democratization of literature, The Blog's gifting of an expressive outlet to such a various and surprising crowd of lay people - admittedly, not a representative bunch in global terms - but a large number of people, nevertheless, who might otherwise never have found writerly expression in any form. If many of the resultant blogs are quite generic, though in ways that might not have been predicted - e.g. the workplace blog - yet The Blog is also a container that can be used in many ways, most of them not discovered yet.

I am resisting the impulse to yet again list my favourite blogs. Most of them are in the list of links to your right, but it does need a spring clean.

*

The collaborative blog Montevidayo definitely needs to be on there, and it might be another demonstration of The Blog's developing vigour. Johannes Göransson is one of the people I listen to most attentively, and the way he's writing on recent posts about the Plague Ground (Playground) - e.g. this one, tracing implications of Joyelle McSweeney's original idea :

Welcome to the plague ground: There is still "too much" American poetry

- is typically beautiful with the beauty of clarity and pragmatic as a toolbox. Along certain lines the Montevidayo way converges with my own relativistic views of literature and artefacts generally. I'm not really talking about the detail, I mean the submersion in processes of decay and rebirth; artefacture as waste.

It so happens I'm reading Göransson's translation of Johan Jönson's Collobert Orbital at the moment. A fantastic book I will certainly write about some time.

*

CAMBRIDGE-POETRY-RELATED DREAM (dreamed last night).

I am reading the editor's preamble to a poetry magazine associated with the Cambridge School. The Editor tells us that this time he has, for pressing reasons that I forget, included a number of poems by both men AND women. He is well aware that, contrary to his usual practice, this flouts the principle of "NIcarnation" (in the dream I specifically noticed that this was an anagram of INcarnation). He then rather helpfully explains that NIcarnation means, of course, the separation of the sexes in poetry. His magazine usually prints either poems that are all by women or poems that are all by men. The heart of NIcarnational practice, as cultivated e.g. by Simon "Dionysus Crucified" Jarvis, is that a poem written by a male author should never refer in any way whatever to women, likewise a poem written by a woman should never refer in any way to men.

I'll resist interpreting this dream, at any rate publically, but I ought to say that as of today I haven't ever read anything by Simon Jarvis. (Maybe I will now, if only because I'm curious to find out whether his work does in any respect aspire to NIcarnation.)

*

"I made a suggestion once, but I didn't get any response, so I re-submitted it. Then I did get a response. It said, Shut up, we heard you the first time."

"Oh, that was the old suggestion scheme."

"The old suggestion scheme??"

"Yes, there was a suggestion scheme in Bob's time, but it got chocker with ideas so they killed it off."

*

AUTOMAGIC - Expression used by the UNIX community to explain things that happen on a computer that are clearly the result of some piece of automated stuff but no-one can remember exactly what it was.

*

YOUNG LENNIE'S KNOWLEDGE OF MALE SINGER-SONGWRITERS.

(L Sings a line or two of "The One I Love.")

L: "I expect that's part of your set-list, isn't it Mike?"

M: "To be honest I'm SO old that I really think of REM as newcomers. I was never that into them. Because I'd been around for Neil Young and The Band, that was 15 years earlier, I thought I'd heard it all before."

L: "Neil Young. Yes, don't tell me, he went to sixth-form college in Ipswich."

M: "Toronto."

L: "I'm sure it was Ipswich."

M: "We're talking about two different Neil Youngs. I'm talking about the internationally famous one, and you're talking about your mate down the pub."

L: "I do get mixed up. Was he the one who sang Rhinestone Cowboy?"

M: "No... - who was that ... can't remember"

Terry: "Glen Campbell."

L: "Well, I'm sure he wore rhinestones. Oh yeah, (illumination) I'm thinking of Neil DIAMOND."

M: (Illumination) "Hot August Night! Yes, he was a bit like Glen Campbell."

L: "Maybe it was PAUL Young."

M: "who -"

L: "- who went to Sixth-Form college in Ipswich."

M: "Wherever I lay my hat."

L: "That's it."

M: (hoping to sow more confusion) "And then there's Paul Simon."

L: "My God yes. But I do know that one. He's the one with the recording studio in Box."

Terry: "..No, that's Peter Gabriel! Remember he did "Solsbury Hill", that's a hill just outside of Bath."

M: "The one they ran the by-pass down after it was a hit."

M: (later, reluctant to miss an opportunity) "Talking of towns that end in -wich, did you know that it means a Roman salt extraction site..?"

lit ephem

What I didn't warn you about, is that apart from the lack of hyperlinks and italics, some of my facts might be pretty dodgy, too. I said that Mina Loy or whatever it's called, that youthful story by Charlotte Bronte, was written as an unserious game with her sisters. Gross untruth, it was Branwell with whom she wrote the Angria booklets, and anyway this was a comparatively late one, when Charlotte's head must have been already bursting with the big new forms that were swimming around restlessly in there. Anyway...

Well, I'm writing elsewhere about Leevi Lehto, so I leave his book on one side for the moment.

I read Allen Fisher's Birds again - I need more of this. I read a strange poetry book in Bath, 300 pages of walking round London, remarkably like Goldsmith's Fidget - I didn't take in the poet's name, but it must have been in the 90s. I wish I'd bought this now. There was also a big Thomas Merton, that Trappist west-coaster who died in 1968 - who can bear any book of poetry that big? I read about XenApp 5.0, (Syngress), written by a host of bods. Sometimes lucid (like, a real human being is talking) and sometimes shoddy - whole paragraphs that don't make any sense - obviously thrown together against the clock (like, we WILL be the first on our block to write a CCA guide for Xenapp 5) one grows to almost like this after a time. I'm reading A.S Byatt's Possession - see remarks on XenApp 5 - no, I'm kidding. "Hugely enjoyable." But you know what I mean - one page you're lost in admiration and the next page you're gasping in a different way, you know, at "broad" characterization (on the analogy with broad comedy). - But I'd better finish it.

A new Proust first vol, seen in Waterstones. They've managed to mangle the title into "The Way by Swann's". Written by a tag-team of translators. The second one apparently thought that "A rose-garden of young girls" was a good idea, but was over-ridden by the series editor, who nevertheless published this embarrassment . Not reassuring. All this is me showing my age. I was never going to feel anything other than a kneejerk spasm of contempt at any new translation (like - you REALLY think you could do it better than Moncrieff/Kilmartin?). But when I opened it up and read some, it just seemed like good old Anglo-Proust again. I fancy that Anglo-Proust seems a bit different from Franco-Proust, because class prejudice runs along slightly different fault-lines. But whichever language you read it in, Proust vies with Jane Austen as the apex of classist literature. Upper-middle-class, naturally. So why is there a stack of "The Way by Swann's" in a thoroughly working town like Trowbridge? (Not that it will sell very well, though doubtless ten times better than any of the later volumes.) Why is Radio 4 so invested in preserving the genteel classes? And hey, Radio 1 listeners, don't you get all morally superior: Why do people who listen to Chris Moyles only ever have names like Kev and Mark and Karen and Lindsay and why is so much of the comedy on this show about foreign words and accents? And actually, why am I writing about Proust? Literature is a paltry thing, isn't it?

I read about kopparslageriet (Gammal Koppar), but I haven't had time to translate it for you.

I ordered Johan Jönson's Restakitivitet. The title means something like surplus-activity or leftover-aktivity. I have no idea if this is in any way representative of Jönson's other writings. It is 274 pages long and consists of three bits: "O", which looks like a sequence of lyric poems, "RESTAKTVTT", which consists of 1031 numbered paragraphs of which about 200 appear twice - I mean the numbering, but the paragraphs are completely different. And "MOLOK ORALIAAPPENDIX", which is all in capital letters and uses "|" as its only punctuation. That's it really, until I get the dictionary out and start to read. The point of the purchase was really to try out Bokus.se, which will deliver to the UK (and lots of other countries too, including Australia and NZ, though not Canada or the US). This will get very expensive if I start collecting the x-hundred volumes of "Nationalnyckeln till Sveriges flora och fauna" as they come out, an extraordinary enterprise - unique, I suppose - I guess they owe it to Linnaeus. Well anyway it won't get expensive, because unless I am unexpectedly made a millionaire this just isn't going to happen. But I can dream.

But wouldn't it be better still to have an INTERnational key to the flora and fauna of planet Earth? An impossible book, but you might do it electronically. The text could be automatically translateable into any other language - after all, the vocabulary of botany/zoology is extremely translateable. I suppose someone's grand plan is that the Swedish work should be the start-off point (since there's no point in redescribing the species). Cultural world domination has always appealed to some Swedes - velvet colonialism. I'm not immune to that compulsion. Oh, I was reading the Wikipedia entry on Swedish literature - which is a rubbish article, btw, but what an idiot you'd have to be to read Wikipedia on a wide general topic like that! -
anyway, I was that idiot, and there you can read Sweden's catalogue of shame, literature-wise - not Henning Mankell, but those absurd Nobel Prizewinners, Karlfeldt, Eyvind Johnson, Heidenstam, - decent-ish local writers disfigured by gross over-decoration. But then, the Nobel Prize for Literature is absurd whatever. Yet it still has to be conducted, there's a bequest.

What else? Cobbett's Rural Rides. Sometimes these are great, but sometimes they aren't. Cobbett bangs on for ever about the black locust (tree), which he thinks is a massively superior timber tree. He thought for himself, with all that that implies, i.e. originality, force, freedom, quackery and crankery. And as UK readers may have noticed, our woods are conspicuously not full of Robinia pseudoacacia, though Cobbett made plenty of money selling the seeds. His seeds were unselected, and the trees didn't grow straight. Besides, it's not that great with wet soil. The timber does have fantastic properties, as Cobbett claims, but especially if it's grown on poor soil (and therefore, slowly). Grown on good soil, timber-production is superfast but the wood is nothing like so close-grained. Finally plantations are difficult to thin because any sapling that is cut down immediately springs a thicket of vigorous root suckers which the thin canopy of the selected trees does not suppress (this is from Alan Mitchell's Trees of Britain). In the US, its own native land, it's been even less successful as a forestry tree because of the depredations of a locust borer that ruins the timber. But Cobbett wasn't all wrong. The locust is widely grown for timber in E. Europe, e.g. Hungary. And it is a recommended species for agroforestry, i.e. the intercultivation of crops or pasture with lines of trees, said to be a highly productive use of land in the long term.