Scott McFarland - Occupy Wall Street says / yes to spectacle./ Yes to virtuosity. / Yes to transformations / And magic and make-believe

Scott McFarland, O Human Microphone. 1913 Press, 2014.

Scott McFarland's O HUMAN MICROPHONE was selected by Rae Armantrout as winner of the 1913 Prize for 1st Books!  

 

Scott McFarland's book O Human Microphone asks what became (or what will become) of the Occupy movement. It uses the movement's 'human microphone' repetition technique to make us do a double take on the things empire is saying now and has been saying through the long American century. To do this he enlists (or co-opts) some of our country's most expansive and vatic texts. Allen Ginsberg's line, "America, I'm sick of your insane demands" becomes, "You'll never get sick of our insane demands." This is funny, infuriating, provoking. As McFarland continues (many pages later) "America, why aren't your libraries full of tears?" How do we actually exhort now (or do we?) after decades of broadcast ideology? "O Occupy Wall Street/say maybe to spectacle/maybe to glamour." McFarland lets the hard questions ring. -Rae Armantrout

 

 

Markets predate capitalism. Capitalism is better understood as designating a society that subordinates all processes — notably the metabolism between humanity and nature, the production and distribution of goods and services, the function and composition of government, and of course, market exchange — to the private accumulation of capital.   – Benjamin Kunkel

 

Occupy Wall Street says / yes to spectacle./ Yes to virtuosity. / Yes to transformations / And magic and make-believe.  – Scott McFarland

I’m a big fan of David Foster Wallace — I tend to think of him as probably the best American fiction writer of his generation — and yet there has always been one aspect of his work I’ve disagreed with: the theme of irony versus sincerity. We see it in some his interviews, and it’s a shaping force in many of the stories in Hideous Men. Irony, here, seems incompatible with sincerity, with an expression from the truer aspects of the self. As Wallace said in one interview, irony becomes the bird in love with its own cage. In some of the stories in Hideous Men, there is a constant attempt to undo irony, to take off the multiple masks, to approach the reader as a naked self (fully aware that this self might be a mask too, and not free of manipulative impulses).

But I don’t think there has to be a divide between irony and sincerity. As the Narrator says in Dostoyevsky’s Notes from Underground, sometimes we are at our most sincere when being at our most ironic, even mocking. For example, the scene where the Underground Man is waxing sentimentally about family life to Liza, the prostitute he has just slept with. Though the Narrator is performing, and deliberately trying to make Liza uncomfortable with his sentimental visions, he also realizes, as he goes on with his speech, that he is moved by it: he is performing, and yet caught up in his own performance (“I was so carried away by my pathos that I began to feel a lump forming in my throat…”).

And what could be more sincere than Swift’s Modest Proposal? Or Voltaire’s Candide? Works dripping with acidic irony. Godard is one of the great ironists in film, and yet it would be strange to argue he doesn’t have deep-seated political beliefs, or a “sincere” vision of a better world.

Again, I’m saying this as a fan of Wallace’s work. It could well be the case that the associations Wallace thought of regarding “irony” are very different from my own. In some interviews, he seems to relate irony to a kind of disaffected hipster stance, someone too cool to be bothered with beliefs, passions, and interests. Not Warhol, I guess, but all those people who try (and fail) to be the new Warhol. (After all, Warhol might have wanted to be disaffected and boring, but he was never able to do so — Warhol was fascinating, despite himself.) If Wallace meant “irony” in this light, sure, I agree with him. What could be more inane, in 2014, than someone trying to assume the disaffection and boredom Warhol desired but never achieved?

But why should irony be regulated to such a narrow, negative space? And any take on irony that doesn’t have space for ironists like Swift and Voltaire seems to stack the deck against the notion that irony can be as intense, or even electrifying, as sincerity.

(Of course, all of this is wildly subjective. I find Godard’s films from the 60s to be very intense, Art at its highest intellectual and emotional register, but I know plenty of people who find those same movies to be cold, dry, and overly cerebral. So much depends upon how the brain is hardwired.)

It could also be argued this anxiety over irony and persona underlines those aspects of the poetry scene that tend to distrust metaphor, the first person, the image, etc., as if by jettisoning such techniques and approaches we come closer to a grander, more objective, more structural truth. Something borderline scientific. A poetry immune to criticism since it would have removed all those false, theatrical idols. This is doubtlessly another manifestation of a drive for sincerity and foundation (even if this drive wears the mask of the social scientist, the linguist). But as Foucault argued, why are we so obsessed by “truth”? Why are we so unaware of the history of “truth” itself?

Which brings me to Scott McFarland’s odd, bold, inventive, loopy, biting, and joyous book O Human Microphone (1913 Press). In the last decade or so there has been a renaissance in American political poetry — a renaissance whose high-water marks, I would argue, have been books such as Reines’ Mercury, Göransson’s Haute Surveillance, and Wilson’s Poems of the Black Object. McFarland’s work belongs with those. Like those texts, his Microphone is more interested in questions, paradoxes, and contradictions than anything singularly doctrinaire, either aesthetically or politically. He uses elements of Conceptualism, but in such a freewheeling manner it would be impossible to label him a Conceptualist. Also, like those other books, McFarland’s work is one of performance and persona, ghosts and echoes.

Even the premise of the book relates to performance: each line is printed in pale print, and then repeated in darker print, as if to suggest that what we are reading if being repeated via the Occupy human megaphone. Which automatically brings up the question of how to read the book. Should we actually read each line twice? Or is the paler print meant to be a visualization of an echo effect (and therefore not meant to be actually read)? When I first started reading it, I did read each line twice, but I soon started to read only the darker lines. Yet the pale print remains in view, in the corner of your eye, creating a continual alienation effect that reminds us every line is being spoken again, and again, and again, through this human microphone. It adds a spectral quality to each utterance, as if we were already hearing/seeing the line vanish through a vague, numberless crowd even as we glance over the words.

At AWP, I overheard a few people ask McFarland how he planned to read the poems at his readings. Would he read each line twice? It was a good question, and though he read each line once, it is easy to imagine a performance (if only in the mind’s eyes) of an actual Occupy-style microphone relating each line further and further into the crowd.

The poems themselves become even stranger when we imagine them being performed in such a way. While the tone tends toward speech-making (“O proletarian television producers. / I see your carpeted stages / your worn chairs / your fake plants…), the things being expressed are not usual concerns for public addresses (as seen in the lines just quoted). These aren’t confident proclamations of some political vision, or polished political rhetoric. In one poem, McFarland writes, “ O democracy. / You keep being this and not that. / I don’t know what I want from you. / You keep refusing to let me look at you, talk to you.” Imagine such lines being directed through an actual human megaphone, and you begin to sense the radical weirdness of this book.

And its brilliance too: because in such moments the public/private becomes truly entangled, enmeshed. Is this the crowd thinking itself (something akin to Aristotle’s notion of the prime mover being “thought thinking itself”)? Is this a single entity with multiple voices, a Deleuzian rendering of Rimbaud’s “I is another”? I contain multitudes becomes We are many becomes Not-I. At times, the book seems to address this tension directly, as when the Voice says, “O megaphone. / O stupid device. / Why do you disobey? / Why am I waiting / for the trumpet and the thunders? / I am your owner. / Function! / This is your command. / You have been abundantly furnished / with powers and means to serve me.” Is this the Voice disappointed that it has not fused with the crowd, with the “human” megaphone”? Is this some sort of political disenchantment? A moment of utopian fatigue? And yet, if we also see these lines as winding its way through a multitude, a crowd, it takes on a new aspect: it is as if the crowd itself is turning against its own “megaphone,” the very thing that makes the lines in this book possible. The “owner” is everyone; they want themselves, in a sense, to “function.” And the “you” of the megaphone (“You have been abundantly furnished…”) becomes the I/we of the crowd.

Another element of this book that I find exhilarating its appetite for source material. Like the endless quotations in Godard and, to a lesser extent, early Don DeLillo, McFarland incorporates (as stated in the back of the book) lines from figures as diverse as Oscar Wilde, Karl Rove, Charles Baudelaire, Muhammad Ali, and Sir Walter Scott. Some of the lines I recognize in the book — others not at all. And the quotes are often tweaked, changed, so that the syntax and rhythm remains the same, but the actual expression is different. One of the motifs, for example, is from Ginsberg’s Howl, where something is noticed (in one instance a Scottish Terrier instead of “the best minds of my generation”) and then seen/witnessed (“I see / your bundle of thirteen arrows in one hand…I see / the arc of thirteen cloud puffs”).

There’s nothing new about appropriation and quotation — blues singers were doing it a century ago, and to much greater effect than most Conceptual writing does — but McFarland’s sheer giddiness about it, the wide rage of his source material, gives the reader a sense of a writer actively engaged in the oceanic slip-stream of past, present, and future.

Lastly, there’s the language itself, which often has the other-worldly simplicity of advertisements and slogans. Or, for that matter, Yoko Ono’s early books. In one passage we read, “It seems Congress is sitting on its hands. / The governing elite doesn’t give a damn. / Many experts have a sick feeling about America’s future prospects.” And this is where the element of irony I mentioned at the start of this review comes in most directly. This passage, and many others like it, is an ironic take on public-speak, a voice both located and anonymous. Yet, it speaks of Occupy, of the 2008 crash; it picks up on the registers of our moment and reflects it back to us. The very simplicity of the language makes it strange, alien, and yet uncannily familiar. This public-speak can also turn personal, existential: “How do I know what change is possible? / How it will or won’t come about? / Who am I to say how society should be organized?”

One of DeLillo’s continual themes, going all the way back to Americana, is the notion that we can never get past the images and representations that create who we are. It’s why his characters so often seem impersonal and detached even in crisis, seeing themselves, in their most private moments, as figures from a film, a commercial, or some highly imagined history. (This is also why DeLillo is a genius at metaphor: every instant becomes an echo.)

So to in McFarland’s world. In O Human Microphone, “personal” moments are mixed in with phrases from Olive Garden commercials, cubicles give rise to such thoughts as, “Am I ready to sound the deeps of my nature? / The parts of my nature that are deeper than me / that go back to the very dawn of man?”

This book has a great design, by Ben Doller. It is red, compact, with a vaguely Soviet-style cover.  You can put it in your back pocket as you ride the train to work, or as you walk down the street, taking it out at odd moments of the day to read. This really is political poetry at its best: not a work of sackcloth and ash and moral self-congratulation, but of engagement, humor, delight. - James Pate

  

Scott McFarland:

A Basic Requirement of Modern Life

It seems Congress is “sitting on its hands.” The governing elite “doesn’t give a damn.” Many experts have a “sick feeling” about America’s future prospects.

The New York Times, you are indispensable to our factories and homes and commercial establishments. You facilitate our lives considerably.

You have the ability to send news without any difficulty over the entire world through electric waves. You can utilize the power of the First Amendment to relieve Americans from “all tiring muscular work.”

You can ask how often public opinion rises up with a singular message. You can ask experts to account for this phenomenon. You can wonder whether this might become even more common in the future. And you can generalize. Don’t we all love to generalize? Isn’t science itself a quest for generalizations?

It’s certainly true that “most Americans were raised by mass media.” Kids are in fact “demonstrating, protesting, espousing sexual freedom, and experimenting with drugs.” Generational conflict is universal. The following factors may indeed cause actual outcomes to be materially different from those projected: 1) access to capital; 2) changes in market demand; 3) stranded costs from deregulation; 4) failure to exceed customers’ minimal standards of satisfaction; 5) refinancing of existing debt; 6) terrorism 7) war; 8) unforeseen natural disasters; 9) unresolved litigation. You can ask: “How real are these costs? How many are unseen? How will we recoup?”

Sure, the intelligence and character of the masses is incomparably lower than the intelligence and character of the few who read The New York Times. Americans do live in fear of being eliminated from the economic cycle. The production and distribution of commodities does remain “unorganized.” People from different countries do suffer for “the want of food.” People from different countries are indeed killing each other “on a regular basis.”

I know things are getting so “regular, normal, and comprehensible” that pretty soon we’re not going to know what to do with ourselves, that we’re approaching a “Copernican moment.”

I’m certainly aware that we’re about to “learn something new about our place in the universe.”

 

Train Station

The zoo cream cork has cooled that the devilment plant stand
logistical blending by correlations interjections. Train station:
The Supreme Court has ruled that the government can’t ban
political spending by corporations in elections.

Lacrosse the gum tree, logistical arachnids are being highpantsed
by unsown loners. Train station: Across the country,
political attack ads are being financed by unknown donors.

True, honey and logistics have been bubblegum espressos
at least senseless crime of freezer, but ice rink weak-kneed
champagne high-pants registration two-fourths correlations
to dispose cow radar blending honey in logistical champagnes.

 

Boiardi

In 1914, a sixteen-year-old Italian boy arrived at Ellis Island. He soon found a job in the kitchen
at the Ritz Carlton, where he eventually worked his way up to Head Chef. During the first years
of the Napoleonic Wars, the French government offered a hefty cash award to any inventor who
could devise a cheap and effective method of preserving large amounts of food. Sixteen ounces
of hamburger meat can contain meat and fat from 200-400 cattle from multiple states and two to
four countries. Your daily mealtime tasks may seem unimportant, but when you serve foods that
build strength and endurance and courage, you’re helping to build victory.

Ettore Boiardi’s likeness appears on ConAgra’s Chef Boyardee canned pastas. Boiardi’s last TV
commercial aired in 1979. In 2000 BC, people in what is now China ate noodles made of millet.
ConAgra’s products are available in supermarkets, as well as restaurants and food service
establishments. In 1809, a French confectioner and brewer observed that food cooked inside a
jar did not spoil unless the seals leaked. A 4000-year-old bowl of millet noodles was discovered
in Qinghai province, near Xi’ning Prison. Qinghai, which lies outside of China proper, has been
an ethnic melting pot for centuries, mixing Tibetan, Han Chinese, Mongol, and Turkish
influences. In 1917, the Italian Army experimented with tinned ravioli and spaghetti bolognese.

The original Chef Boyardee dinner for four cost 60 cents. It included uncooked spaghetti, sauce,
and Parmesan cheese. In the late 1980s, Parma, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland, suffered major
financial problems. Durum wheat pasta was introduced to Italy by Arabs during their conquest of
Sicily in the late 7th century.

In 1971, Consolidated Mills changed its name to ConAgra, a combination of con for
consolidated and agra for from the earth in Latin. ConAgra is headquartered in Omaha,
Nebraska. For thousands of years, bison moved in expansive herds across what is now
Cleveland and Omaha, eating the grasses down as they traveled to new grazing areas, leaving
natural fertilizer—bodily waste and plant litter—in their wake. This natural process helped to
build the rich and fertile soils of the Midwest. Every soldier of food shares responsibility for
supplying bodily ammunition to the unsung heroes who produce America’s war weapons.

In 1919, Boiardi moved to Cleveland to become Head Chef at the Hotel Winton. In 2009,
ConAgra brands could be found in 97% percent of U.S. households. Marco Polo did not import
pasta from China. Durum wheat was not known in China until later times. In the 1840s, tinned
food became a status symbol amongst middle-class households in Europe. Parma, Ohio, was
once home to major industries, such as General Motors, Modern Tool & Die, the Union Carbide
Research Center, and Cox Cable Television. Its tremendous growth came after World War II.
The Food Front serves the fighting front and the home front. From farmer to food worker to
grocer to homemaker stretches the food front—the army behind the armies.

In 1924, Boiardi opened his first restaurant, Giardino d’ Italia, in Cleveland. A special kitchen on
the second floor filled takeout orders. Large-scale wars in the nineteenth century provided
canning companies with many opportunities for expansion. Demand for canned food skyrocketed during World War I. A great deal of what used to be Central American rainforest is now land cleared for raising cattle. Urban populations demanded ever-increasing quantities of cheap, quality food that they could keep at home without having to go shopping daily. During World War II, Boiardi developed field rations for the armed services, providing millions of rations for American and Allied troops. In the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, Consolidated Mills expanded its
livestock feed business. Napoleon put it this way: An army marches on its stomach.

In 1945, Boiardi sold his business to American Home Foods for six million dollars. In 1985, Chef
Boyardee brands grossed $500 million. Durum wheat semolina with high gluten content is what
makes pasta dough malleable. Well-managed cattle can greatly enhance the growth and
propagation of grasses. These grasses can sequester huge amounts of carbon annually. In the
1970s, as commodity speculation wiped out its margins on raw foods, ConAgra moved into the
frozen food and packaged meat industries. In 1946, Boiardi invested in steel mills—these steel
mills helped produce goods needed for the Korean War.

In 1985, Boiardi died in Parma, Ohio. He used good pure beef, the kind you’d ask for at the
butcher’s yourself. Beefaroni was delicious and nutritious, because the quick pep of macaroni
was made more lasting by all the beefy protein. Children loved it, and company did too. It’s hard
to believe it cost only fourteen cents a serving. Canned goods sell especially well in times of
recession due to cocooning, a term used by retail analysts to describe the phenomenon in
which people actively avoid straying from their houses. When victory comes it will not be the
result of great battles alone. It will be a victory that began months or even years before, on
farms, in food plants, and in your own kitchen.

 

Hollywood

Where have I been? I have been hunting at the hollywood. Now make my bed soon, for I am wearied from The Opening Image, and fain would lie down.

And what met me there? Oh, I met with my true love. Now make my bed soon, for I am wearied from The Inciting Incident, and fain would lie down.

And what did my true love give me? Eels fried in a pan. Now make my bed soon, for I am wearied from The First Plot Point, and fain would lie down.

And what got my leavings? My hawks and my hounds. Now make my bed soon, for I am wearied from The First Pinch, and fain would lie down.

And what became of them? They stretched their legs out and died. Now make my bed soon, for I am sick at heart from The Midpoint, and fain would lie down.

You fear I am poisoned? Oh, yes, I am poisoned. Now make my bed soon, for I am sick at heart from The Second Pinch, and fain would lie down.

What do I leave to you? Four and twenty milk cows. Now make my bed soon, for I am sick at heart from The Second Plot Point, and fain would lie down.

And what do I leave to my sister? My gold and my silver. Now make my bed soon, for I am sick at heart from The Showdown, and fain would lie down.

And what do I leave to my brother? My houses and my lands. Now make my bed soon, for I am sick at heart from The Resolution, and fain would lie down.

And what do I leave to my true love? To my true love I leave hell and fire. Now make my bed quick—The Denouement has made me sick. I’m sick, and fain would lie down.

 

 

COP ABOUT TO GIVE HIMSELF A TICKET

To give a ticket, to be somebody who will give a ticket.
The recognition, the knowing. The giving of tickets for parking,                         
jaywalking, rolling stops. Giving such tickets to oneself.

The need to generate tickets. To give, to distribute, to deal out.
To be able, to be permitted, to be allowed. To not be.

To be somebody who needs to give something. Something that
needs to be given. The need to punish oneself. The act of it.
The need to act, to do, to give.

The possibility, the ability, the potency. To be potent. To be
somebody remembering, bearing something in mind: The Law. 

To be somebody who remembers The Law. To be a ticketer.
Somebody who tickets. Who will continue to the very end.
Who will continue till the end is reached.

TEENAGERS WITH GLOCKS

Teenagers with Glocks—they're real cool. They've got the clothes,
the dope rides, the dollar bills. They left school. They lurk late.

But there's a lot you don't know about teenagers with Glocks.

60 Minutes: What are you rebelling against?

Teenagers with Glocks: What do you got?

You want them working in a warehouse, bagging your groceries,
putting new tires on your car, taking your drive-thru order (Grand
Slam Breakfast Sandwich and a coffee with two creams). That's
how you roll.

But all of the law enforcement officials and public policy experts
we've talked to have reached the same conclusion: confronting
teenagers with Glocks almost never works.

Teenagers with Glocks strike straight. No hesitation. No thinking
about anything. Dead inside. But they're together. Safe. These
teenagers are trying to find their place in the world. They're
making their own decisions—learning from their own mistakes.

     

EMILY DICKINSON TERM PAPER

The famous American lyrical poetess retired from social life at
twenty-five and devoted herself to poetic creation in unconceivable
solitude and it was believed that for some reason or another she
had been seeking an outlet for what she had been feeling deep in
her heart to achieve a psychological balance in her mind.

When reading her poems a sense of subtle depression and
beautiful sadness leads us to a strong desire for a deeper
understanding and a profound analysis of what she tried to
express.

She started early took her dog and visited the sea and mermaids
in the basement came out to look at her and frigates in the upper
floor extended hempen hands presuming her to be a mouse
aground upon the sands but no man moved her till the tide went
past her simple shoe and past her apron and her belt and past her
bodice too and made as he would eat her up as wholly as a dew
upon a dandelion's sleeve and then she started too.

The wonderful but dangerous love of a man had come closer and
closer past her shoe and apron and bodice and instead of the
expected tenderness and sweetness Emily Dickinson experienced
something else.

 

) ) ) )) ) )))) ) ) )) )

The CFO is the only executive who’s been modified
The CFO is the only executive who’s been modified
by the direct influence of the external world.
by the direct influence of the external world.
He represents what may be called reason and common sense.
He represents what may be called reason and common sense.
The CFO is like a man on horseback
The CFO is like a man on horseback
who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse.
who has to hold in check the superior strength of the horse.
The CEO in contrast is the dark and inaccessible
The CEO in contrast is the dark and inaccessible
part of the corporation.
part of the corporation.
What little is known of CEOs has been learnt
What little is known of CEOs has been learnt
from the study of dreams.
from the study of dreams.
Most of this understanding is negative in nature.
Most of this understanding is negative in nature.
The CEO can be described only in contrast to the CFO.
The CEO can be described only in contrast to the CFO.
Regulators must approach the CEO with analogies
Regulators must approach the CEO with analogies
describing her as chaos, or cauldrons full of seething excitations.
describing her as chaos, or cauldrons full of seething excitations.
For the CEO has no organization, produces no collective will
For the CEO has no organization, produces no collective will
but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the corporation’s instinctual needs
but only a striving to bring about the satisfaction of the corporation’s instinctual needs
subject to nothing except the observance of the pleasure principle.
subject to nothing except the observance of the pleasure principle.