"a few books that were formative for" me...

These are the poetry shelves at my apartment.
They are only partially organized and at present
all the poetry criticism lives in another bookcase.

It is not that often than anyone asks me what books of poetry were particularly formative for me (for my development as a poet, I assume, rather than my fashion sense or whatever). Sometimes this question is a toss-off, but when it is sincere it seems to me that one should try to give a solid answer to it. And as it has been some years now since I heard that question, I thought, why not both answer it and get a blog post out of it at the same time?

One of the first complicated things is deciding what counts. That is, I was asked about "books that were formative" - but I have to wonder if my questioner meant books of poetry, or whether any and all books counted. & what to do about The Four Horsemen who have surely been formative in many ways but not as book-based experiences. Anyway, the list below will exclude audio stuff (though maybe a list of that stuff will be added later.)

Anyway, here my list - not everything on here is currently *crucial* to my thinking about poetry, but everything surely had an impact in its time.

David Antin
SELECTED POEMS, and all the talk poems and so TALKING, TALKING AT THE BOUNDARIES, TUNING, WHAT IT MEANS TO BE AVANT GARDE etc etc
…also worth finding are the pieces of David's from BOUNDARY2 as well as the book version of the magazine SOME/THING issues 1-3 and the 4th issue too if you can find them. I loaned my SELECTED POEMS to someone in the APG some years ago and never saw it again. Damn it. Also my various collections of talk poems are falling apart. I'd love to see some press do COLLECTED TALK POEMS someday. If it is not obvious, is was David's example - and my email exchange with him - that led me to improv (though don't let that be a black mark on his record). In the SELECTED the poem "definitions for mendy" has always been a huge favorite of mine.

Bruce Andrews
I DON'T HAVE ANY PAPER SO SHUT UP (OR SOCIAL ROMANTICISM)
Bruce has many great books. Given how I have grown up within the APG it might make more sense *now* to cite his LOVE SONGS, as it would seem to have been influential. But that is a false positive as I discovered it only later when those things which would make it seem influential on the group were already well underway. Instead it is the book listed here which blew me away (and still does). Not an easy book to find these days, it needs a reprint.

John Ashbery
THREE POEMS, THE TENNIS COURT OATH
I understand why THE TENNIS COURT OATH has such a crucial place in literary history - at least if one is into language poetry. And it was important to me. But, though I had read SELF-PORTRAIT IN A CONVEX MIRROR already, somehow it was THREE POEMS that really grabbed my attention and squeezed. Ashbery is probably always worth reading, but these two texts both suggest so many things beyond what they accomplish and yet what they accomplish is pretty amazing.

Steve Benson
BLUE BOOK
This is another great book that doesn't get talked about enough it seems to me. Benson's other books are worth a look too if you can find them. What I like about this one is the approach that SB takes to improvisation - so radically unlike what Antin does. It was helpful for me in many ways to think about where I might go, and though in my practice I tend more toward the unaided solo voice (thus more antinian) in my interest in disjunction and fragmentation and so forth much of what I produce is closer to Benson (or further toward the world of pound poetry than he).

Charles Bernstein
DARK CITY, THE SOPHIST, ROUGH TRADES
I read these three books in this order and all are fabulous. DARK CITY remains my favorite, especially for "Lives of the Toll Takers". But I have trouble separating these books from my reading of Charles' essays in CONTENT'S DREAM (and again, is there anything by Charles that is not worth reading and thinking about? I doubt it. I got ATTACK OF THE DIFFICULT POEMS for xmas). Probably a few ideas from CONTENT'S DREAM are still crucial aspects of my poetic thinking (re: Voice for instance).

Bertolt Brecht
POEMS 1913-1956
I just love this book. The "reader for those who live in cities" is incredible. The only poem that I have ever intended to memorize comes from this book

Once there was a child

That didn't like to wash.

They washed it and behold

It rubbed its face in ash.

The Kaiser came to call 

Up seven flights of stairs.

Mother looked for a towel 

To wipe its face and hair.

But the towel had been mislaid,

The whole visit was wrecked.

The Kaiser went away,

What could the child expect?

…Brecht's writings on theatre and some of his plays too have been important to me, for instance "Baal" which I read just after dropping out of high school.

John Cage
SILENCE
There are many books by Cage and a great variety of stuff to be found therein, but this one remains my favorite one. I bought it in German translation for someone as a gift but I don't know if she ever read it. (The 2 CD set "Indeterminacy" has also been a huge favorite for many years).

Clark Coolidge
SOUND AS THOUGHT, SOLUTION PASSAGE
Coolidge is often great. Maybe too consistently awesome, so much so that it's irritating for the rest of us. But these two collections form the base of my affection and inspiration for his work.

Ed Dorn
GUNSLINGER
Essential. Probably has an unrecognized role in my Johnny Minotaur  series.

Jessica Grim
LOCALE
I wonder how many readers will know this book. It was important to me as I encountered it early, just as I was beginning to get some sense of the poetic terrain and it gave me a view into a way of writing that I had not imagined. I still think its a solid read though I have not seen other book by Grim.

Lyn Hejinian
MY LIFE (any edition), WRTING AS AN AID TO MEMORY, THE CELL, THE COLD OF POETRY
Take you pick of these or anything. Lyn doesn't seem to write anything not worth dwelling within for however many hours it requires. MY LIFE was an inspiration for the decade in the making and still untitled APG Autobiography Project

Jackson Mac Low
REPRESENTATIVE WORKS
Still my favorite. The drama involved in Mac Low's leaving chance procedures aside is fascinating and had an impact on me that is hard to quantify, but I still favor the work he produced before he abandoned constraints.

Frank O'Hara
COLLECTED POEMS
This is screamingly obvious, get it and his plays and that other collection of stuff that was found after the collected came together.

Maureen Owen
UNTAPPED MAPS
This is another one that, like Grim's book above, hit me at just the right time. I reread it last year and it still stands up I think.

Leslie Scalapino
WAY
Other titles could have been chosen, but this one works very well for me and is the 1st book of hers I read.

Jack Spicer
COLLECTED BOOKS
Again, obvious if you know me (I think). & though this is the book that made me love Spicer, THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT made me love him all over again and really, you need to read everything and the bio POET, BE LIKE GOD. (Be a good host and the Martians will love you)

Ron Silliman
TONER, XING, DEMO TO INK
These are first three titles I read by Silliman, nowadays one can buy the entire Alphabet in a massive tome. I plan to but have not yet gotten around to getting it.

Gertrude Stein
TENDER BUTTONS, STANZAS IN MEDITATION, etc
It is impossible to narrow down what from Stein had an impact, but these two books are the 1st two I bought (both in beautiful Sun & Moon editions) and it was upon these rocks that I was broken and reformed. Or something like that. LIFTING BELLY is also great. There is nothing "bad." my copy of LECTURES IN AMERICA is heavily underlined.

Hannah Weiner
SPOKE
I need more books by Weiner, sadly this is the only one that I own. What I like most about it is the sense of voices contending within her. That might be to fetishize her somewhat, I hope not. But that aspect of her writing really does grab me and I have tried to allow my own work to open itself to such things too.

Philip Whalen
ON BEAR'S HEAD
There is a newer selected poems, and I have that too, but somehow this collection is still my favorite. I got this in the first month that I'd decided to turn to poetry (to help me write better song lyrics) and so it comes along just after Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman in my personal idiosyncratic chronological development but unlike much else that I read in that 6 or 7 months when I was casting around in poetry, it has stuck with me.

Louis Zukofsky
"A", COMPLETE SHORT POETRY
Some of the later sections of "A" (especially where he is using Marx) and things like "80 Flowers" in the SHORT POETRY volume are all time favorites of mine. His essays have also been important to me in many ways.

… Ok, I have probably forgotten other crucial stuff, or maybe it was repressed (like, that in the 6-7 months of poetry reading I was pretty enthused with Charles Simic, then later lost almost all interest in him.) & what this list doesn't include really is the impact of a single essay by Harry Mathews on OULIPO, the book CONVERSATIONS WITH MARCEL DUCHAMP, the works of Arakawa and Gins in WE HAVE DECIDED NOT TO DIE: REVERSIBLE DESTINY (which Madeline sent me for free because I had loved "The Mechanism of Meaning" so much!), the plays and essays of Richard Foreman, the essays of Dick Higgins (which I often disagree with but nonetheless am influenced by), and what about anthologies? I should certainly mention the Douglas Messerli edited FROM THE OTHER SIDE OF THE CENTURY (the poetry one not the drama one, though that is an interesting book as well) which served to introduce me to so many poets that I have learned since then to love. & what about books by Perloff or Altieri that shaped my thinking about matters poetic?



p.s. I couldn't fit all the labels I needed, dang it!

Russian Poet German Lukomnikov

German Lukomnikov in Moscow in 2009

TEXT CORRECTED

the fabulous discomfort and humor of this video gets me. also the weird retro look of it in spite of the obvious technical aspects, projection, etc. but that low contrast in black and white which feels like pre-color television somehow.

but what i want to attend to is the sound of this piece/recording.

there seems to be a cut (@ 1:37). & there are surely "parts" with edges more or less discernible. what i don't know is what it is called (is it "only sound" or is it somehow "Azor's Paw only sound") … hard for me to guess.

what really zaps me about this recording is the first section of wordless (and not even word-suggestive) vocal sounds and then the end. the first section has all these small vocalizations which in large part i would think could be used with words and not stand out all that much - well, maybe that crooning whine at 1:18 or the last thing before the cut this sort of yes/no feeling thing that becomes like the squeak of a spring - but many of the other sounds are not that unusual in spoken discourse, though we tend to ignore them when recounting what was said (we might call that retrospective semanticism and think of it as a bias). "here is an idea i can steal" i said to myself and i did (but will anyone be able to see where or how - the evidence is already out there). so that would be section one of this piece as i hear/parse it.

but then after the cut - in section two - things are more word-based for some time and don't have quite the same impact on me, though they begin to drift in looser and looser, more pitch-arc'd ways toward section three. in this section tho his utterances seem to echo hesitancies, uncertainties… at one point around 3 minutes this sing-songy repetition emerges - which again, i think that i at least do and suspect others do too; taking a word or phrase and chanting it somehow with however much or little melody. anyway...

… by 3:40 or so the transition seems to have been clear to a third section (this edge is much blurrier, or maybe it is a gradual build and not an edge at all). everything gets further from anything like conventional "word-space" and Lukominikov works with particles and the sounds between those of language and "mouth noises" and…

i'm always unhappy, i feel interrupted and annoyed when it ends. and yet, perhaps, relieved as well, as it takes a certain attention which i am not using when just sitting here, or having a conversation with someone, etc. and such attention is not endless, though here i feel more than able to give it.

there is also the twinned terms i opened with - humor and discomfort. the "how would i introduce this to so&so" thought experiment, where so&so is your great aunt lou or your assistant manager boss guy or whomever you picture as a tough sell for anything this self-consciously engaged in not playing the communication game while being nonetheless ludic, or maybe ruminative, or maybe something else (where ludic gets calls narcissism, and ruminative labelled pretentious and the whole non-communicative is just something that can't be fit into their universe). imagining playing that game with this video and whoever it is that i imagine gets at the discomfort somewhat. Lukomnikov seems quite comfortable with silences without a need to fill all the space tightly or to demonstrate a physical skill with language making (that is a bad way of saying this, but I am thinking of Christian Bök as a contrast, Bök clearly has amazing mouth-based chops aka skills, etc - as here in this performance at the Whitney, but let's get back to Lukomnikov

the text below the video as found on youtube
Герман Лукомников на фестивале "Лапа Азора only sound" 
  seems to say
Herman Lukomnikov at the "Azor's Paw only sound" ..but the G-translation of his name seems more common, though i did see "Guerman" to make it a bit more complex.

I got curious. There is no wikipedia page for him. There are some other videos of him reading, which I'll come back to below, but I was hoping for more info. Some googling got me a few bits.

1st I looked at this report sent to poet Maria Damon and housed at the EPC, with just a short mention of Lukomnikov, but it struck me as amusing. The author of this is Masha Zavialova, in the midst of her longer report on The Russian Poetry Festival Oct. 17-19, 1998, St. Petersburg she mentions Lukominokov;

Bonifatsii (German Lukomnikov) - a charming person and performance artist read some of his short and extremely witty (for us who live here) poems. One of them: "Why don't I fly?" (several times with different modulations of voice but very romantically) And suddenly in a matter-of-fact and slightly offended tone "Why don't I fly? I fly."

This made me more curious… and next I read this;

Potty About Poetry

25 August 2000

By Anna Arutunyan The Moscow Times

How can one characterize the poetry of German Lukomnikov, who attributes much of his poetry to his alter ego, Boniface? Similarities exist between Lukomnikov’s work and the kind of absurd children’s rhyme established by writers like Daniil Kharms and Kornei Chukovsky —poets who play with short stanzas and diminutive puns in their verse — but Lukomnikov, who often uses obscenities, is by no means a writer of children’s poems.

Lukomnikov (or Boniface) — Lukomnikov insists they are two different people — writes with an innocence and honesty that is so regularly masked among his contemporaries by cynicism and irony. He makes fun of his background and plays with words, but maintains an air of a barely discovered underground poet writing among friends in his attic.

But is there a name for the work of the virtual pair of Lukomnikov and Boniface, who write and illustrate their own works? Dirty limericks, perhaps, or childish farce? Or maybe it is something like those art-scene hooligans with a cult following, the Mitki, who create humorous illustrations with companion rhymes.

Associated with beer and hippies and enjoying a large following, the Mitki have managed to seep into the mainstream, but the same cannot be said of Lukomnikov, whose poetry is not only still marginal, but too varied to be characterized. His paintings can be childlike, with inscriptions of meaningless puns like "Kitayets kita yest" — which can mean either "the Chinaman is a whale" or "the Chinaman eats a whale" — which appears under a painting of an Asian-looking boy eating a fish.

Other works are earnest communications with an evidently strong lyrical background that reveal the vulnerability of a poet interacting with the world around him: "If only someone knew how I fear people! /How strange that worldwide neighborhood seems to me/ Of glaring monsters. I am becoming childlike/ As if in a sea of ugly swans (O kto by znal, kak ya boyus’ lyudei! / Kak diko mne vsemirnoye sosedstvo / Glazastykh chudishch. Ya vpadayu v detstvo, / Kak budto v more gadkikh lebedei.)

In this way, Lukomnikov hovers somewhere between poet, comedian and artist. The man who has characterized himself as a "poet, a human being of the male sex, and an inhabitant of Earth and the solar system," Lukomnikov plays out an exchange with his persistent alias, Boniface, on stage. If determining to what extent their poetry (and personalities) differ is of any interest to you, don’t pass up the opportunity to see their odd duet this week. 

German Lukomnikov reads his Poetry of the Season at 8 p.m. on Thursday at the Project O.G.I club, located at 8/12 Potapovsky Pereulok, Building 2 (enter through the courtyard). Metro Chistye Prudy. Tel. 927-5609. For more information, write ogi@mail.ru

i don't know enough about contemporary Russian poetry to say squat about this, though i do have a book by Daniil Kharms. i also like hearing about this group the Mitki discussed here and would be interested to know more of them, but back to the thread….

this gives me lots to think about. i cannot tell from watching or listening when Boniface is involved and when he isn't - so sadly, that whole intrigue will remain opaque, but this article generally charges up my curiosity. and this poem is surely one that would work for me;

If only someone knew how I fear people! 

How strange that worldwide neighborhood seems to me

Of glaring monsters. I am becoming childlike

As if in a sea of ugly swans

… but i should mention that i also dropped the original language text given for this poem in the article above into google translator as well and, being set to "detect language" is did not mark this as russian but Slovak and it could translate less than half of it. so is Lukomnikov not Russian at all?

There are several more videos on youtube. I'll leave their viewing up to you…

German Lukomnikov shows a younger Lukomnikov (1998) and while i am lost with the language, this one holds my attention quite well. i'll not go through why and how and so forth, but there is much humor and sound stuff here. enjoyable. also nice that he "flies" away at the end.

German Lukomnikov  rather more annoying video with noisy camera and crowd noise. Lukomnikov is doing some emphatic sound stuff at the end with what i assume are words and fragments tho.

POET GUERMAN LUKOMNIKOV is a small group setting and he is doing more sentency or phrasal stuff with odd slanted repetitions. lots of folks laugh.

Герман Лукомников в Булгаковском this is in the same venue as the previous one, and is yet more chanted and looping though using (i assume) phrases and sentences. again, a good bit of laughing.

Lukomnikov.divx  this too sounds more playfully semantic, rather than pushing hard toward sound. i'd love to hear from anyone who knows the language.

Velikiy Poet Lukomnikov is yet another venue with a big crowd (poetry standards) he is a bit hard to hear in spite of the amplification at moments and there are crowd noises and responses. Luko seems busy with these tightening and loosening patterns imposed on long string of text. big cheers at the end.

it seems that i also found his livejournal account where i stole that picture with the finger puppets. but scanning through it a bit i found some paintings as well...

Illustration of a poem (by German Lukomnikov) by Dmitry Shirokov (painter)

anyway, i like what i've found and hope to hear more of German Lukomnikov

Preliminary thoughts on the Combine Poem

In some posts about my improv practice from earlier in 2011: one on the emitter and another on sound poetry, I made certain suggestions which in retrospect seem to have pointed forward to the Combine though I had yet to imagine it myself. Looking back at those postings now I also see additional ideas that I might bring into the Combine going forward. But, that said, what served as the catalyst for the Combine was a note I made in a file called "poem ideas" which lives semi-perpetually on the desktop of my computer (while now and then being discarded or emerging again, with a new name).

Anyway, that note read simply; "repetition based thing i did a week or so back" underneath which I placed a short list of words

• piles
• trails
• feathers
• plangent
• antipodal
• huff
• forbear
• asymptotic 

… the moment a week or so before was not an APG meeting. I was thinking back to playing with words, aloud, scatting to a degree while home alone. It stayed on my mind and so I wrote the note later with this list as a record of the words that I generated. The first recording of anything in this mode is from the November 9, 2011 APG meeting & listed as "Stalactite improv" - these things, shall I just call them repeaters?

But, in any event before doing any of them again as solitary exercises (as emitters were intended initially) the idea of the Combine Poem came to me. Nothing grandly conceptual about it. & yes, in light of the current year's Poetry Resolution, the name is stolen from Rauschenberg (and that works for me in other ways too). So then a Combine Poem is what?

It can contain emitters and repeaters, could also embed what I might otherwise have called an "improv sonnet", various modalities of sound poetry might be included etc, in short - whatever. I imagined it as operating under a number of regimes or modes or procedures or tints and that I would shift between them as needed. Thus my need to work back through those earlier posts that I linked to above as both contain elaborate listings of other potential avenues which might funnel into the Combine.

So far there have been three of them.

Combine Poem No. 1 - Black radishes are just as white on the inside

Combine Poem No. 2 - Dissociative

Combine Poem No. 3 - Rip it open and eat the flesh

…which is my first ever video poem.

I'm interested in both a drift in the Combine where transitions between sub-routines are gradual and a total lack of drift, where they are cuts, abrupt, startling. But in either case I am still missing something with 1-3, as much as they are pointing generally in the direction I want to go for awhile. I think what they are missing is a lattice (as metadata) - which dims the improv aspect to a small degree, though I do not expect it will squash it totally.

Stay tuned to see if that last idea takes wings.

My Latest on Lacan...

This paper is primarily about Lacan's "Science and Truth" though it goes in other directions as well.

The text is PDF and can be downloaded at iFile, here.

Perhaps not the most tightly focused paper I have ever written, but I lost myself in it for a few days and that usually speaks of an engagement that will be of some import, if only for me.

My Reading Habit

Someone asked me some questions about my reading habits yesterday. I surely have thought about them now and then, but at the same time, I tend not to think about what I am reading and why (even as that cuts against good grad student practice). Rather, I follow my interests. 

But in order to answer the questions asked of me, I assembled every book that I am currently reading, where "currently reading" means that sometime in the last month I have been reading it and that I have not given up and consigned it to the shelves as something that I might get back to. It also means (this may be obvious) that I have not finished reading it (as with Schwartz & Begley's book that i posted about yesterday). There are eight titles here...

Richard Totman's THE THIRD SEX

This is pretty good but only if I forget about how fabulously interesting Travesti: Sex, Gender, and Culture among Brazilian Transgendered Prostitutes by Don Kulick was. I stalled when some other book looked more immediately engaging, but chances are I'll finish this one before another month goes by. 

Mark Solms' and Oliver Turnbull's THE BRAIN AND THE INNER WORLD

I just started this two days ago. This is neuroscience + psychoanalysis, or neuropsychoanalysis. I am curious to see how this plays out, but also have my skeptical glasses on.

Jean-Michel Quinodoz's READING FREUD; A CHRONOLOGICAL EXPLORATION OF FREUD'S WRITINGS

This is a handy book. I'd love to have been able to take Quinodoz's three year course on the entire Standard Edition, but he isn't at GSU and no one would let him teach that here. This is nearly a textbook and does not cover everything in the SE, but it is interesting to see what he highlights are the most important milestones and while I now and again do not entirely agree with his opinions about certain matters, the man obviously knows his stuff very well. 

Bhante Gunaratana's MINDFULNESS IN PLAIN ENGLISH

I already know Vipassana meditation, I practiced it for some time back in my 20s. But as I am trying to get back into the practice again, I thought I'd get this book as a refresher. It's a quick read and I am almost done with it now. [On a side note, the idea that I would ever utter a phrase like "I'm trying to become more mindful" makes me want to hit myself, hard, repeatedly - feel free to apply that rule to me should I ever say something so full-of-shit sounding]

Levi Bryant's THE DEMOCRACY OF OBJECTS

I read through several chapters (with one out of order, for a reason, but still, that sometimes throws me off) and will get back to it, I got sidetracked when I went to NC a few weeks back. What I read was pretty great though.

The Mount Sinai School of Medicine's TOTAL NUTRITION: THE ONLY GUIDE YOU'LL EVER NEED

At 800 pages or so, I'll likely never read this entire book. But, the opening three chapters "The Basics of Healthy Eating" was more interesting than I had expected and I read the chapter on "Dietary Fiber" which was also useful to me. Chances are I will never crack the chapters on nutrition for blood disorders or kidney disease, but it still seems like a useful book to have around. Did you know that Vitamin C tablets include only half of the balanced Vitamin C you get from an orange or grapefruit? They have only ascorbic acid and that isn't enough, ergo you piss it out later. & did you know that studies of the health of those who eat well and take no vitamins or supplements vs those who eat well and take them religiously indicates that the health impact of supplement is zero? 

Gerd Gigerenzer's GUT FEELINGS, THE INTELLIGENCE OF THE UNCONSCIOUS

This is an odd book. I am not done yet and I could imagine setting it aside and forgetting about it. Though the author uses words like "unconscious" and even "superego" there is nothing psychoanalytic about this at all. His real topic is "gut feelings" or "intuitions", particularly those which strike you quickly and those things which we know how to do but cannot explain how know how we do. 

An edited collection of poetry by René Char, FUROR AND MYSTERY & OTHER WRITINGS

Super great! I am savoring, with both a bookmark that moves steadily forward and the option to browse around and reread or look ahead. At this rate I may spend another few months on this book.

Markos Zafiropoulos' LACAN AND LÉVI-STRAUSS, OR THE RETURN TO FREUD (1951-1957)

Not sure why I started this and I may shelve it (or rather close it, as I have this electronically) but before I do my comps the chances are that I will read this just to help flesh out early Lacan's debts to Levi-Strauss and structuralist thought.

So, there you have my reading habit - if that is, I exclude stuff I read online, as news, on blogs or in magazines and journals - and I am bracketing the poetry that I read every Wednesday night at the weekly APG meet.

The Mind & The Brain; Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force

The authors of this book are Jeffrey M. Schwartz and Sharon Begley, the former an M.D. and neuropsychiatrist and the latter a science journalist. I'll refer to Schwartz as a rule just to make things easier, and as it feels like his narrative rather than hers. 

This book is about a lot of different things, but a quick listing of the primary topics of discussion would include Neuropasticity (and the associated neuroscience to explain what that is to the uninitiated), Mindfulness meditation, Obsessive Compulsive Disorder, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Quantum Mechanics. Of course it is also about a bunch of other stuff, or at least other narratives, concerning the Silver Springs Monkeys and the birth of P.E.T.A., the "Quantum Zeno Effect", V. S. Ramachandran's research on phantom limbs, morality vs determinism, causal closure (or the possible lack thereof), William James' psychology, volition, and much else still. The distinctions possible to make between Mind and Brain figure largely throughout the text.

My intension is only to bring out a few things that I found interesting, but I do endorse the book itself as worth a read, if such things interest you. Or, somewhat more strongly, give it a try and if you don't find yourself hooked after a few chapters, I'll be surprised.

Ok, enough fluff. 

Schwartz works with patients that have OCD. He chose that disorder to study and work with because its sufferers are what is called 'ego-dystonic'. What that means is that if I am the one suffering from OCD and I am stricken time and again with a powerful feeling of dread, this overwhelming feeling that something is very very wrong and that the only solution is for me to wash my hands because they're filthy, infected, germ-ridden, etc… while I am thinking that "I must wash my hands!" I am also aware, in a quiet and less panicked part of my thoughts that they cannot possibly be unclean as I washed them vigorously a mere 20 minutes ago and have not touched anything at all since then. So this split in my self-awareness is what makes this disorder 'ego-dystonic'. 

So what he does, broadly speaking, is first to educate his patients about the neuro side of things, doing brain imaging on his patients, showing them how a part of their brain is rather overactive as compared to those who do not suffer compulsions, how the motive urgency of their feelings is due to phylogenetically older parts of the brain getting in on the act, such that the compulsion to wash my hands has an impact on me that ranks up there with fight or flight, making it extremely hard to just shrug off. Armed with this reconceptualization of their illness, they are then given a 4 step CBT strategy for dealing with these compulsions. I'll not go through these steps one by one, but again, in broad stroke, the patient is taught to immediately recognize the compulsion as a compulsion and part of their illness, they develop a variety of alternative responses, such that, rather than hand-washing, I might train myself instead to do deep breathing exercises for a few minutes or waters the flowers in the yard, or whatever. The issue being that the new activity is one that is not harmful to me or my surroundings. With an intensive therapy schedule and continual practice outside of therapy, Schwartz's patients are able to strengthen the effect, or perhaps resolve, of that other voice, the one that knows there is no reason for yet another hot soapy hand-washing to take place today.

If you know much about Vipassana meditation, or what you may have only ever heard of as Mindfulness meditation, you may have a hunch already about how it could be pertinent to the therapy discussed above. In this form of meditation, the goal is not so much concentration as awareness and centering one's awareness in the present moment. The basic introductory version of it asks that you focus on your breath. Thoughts will arise, but rather than becoming the active agent of their development, one tries to simply watch them arise and then fall again, without losing the focus on the breath. It seems that it would be simple enough but of course it is actually quite difficult. 

On a side note not unrelated to the topic at hand, I've been trying to get back into meditation this very week (I was a daily meditator off and on for several years when I was an undergrad) and it is every bit as difficult as I recall it being. When I was meditating daily in college I noticed a few things being very different for me. The 1st was that I rarely had to study very hard. Sounds a bit odd perhaps, but I paid attention in class and read the assigned stuff (usually in the morning right after meditating) and I tended to remember it all without any difficulty, so that for a time I never reviewed anything or studied beyond this at all while acing al my exams. The 2nd thing was that I slept better, falling asleep almost instantly and waking up as if a switch had been flipped rather than the sense that I have so often now of drifting closer and then further away from consciousness for quite some time before waking. 

So, getting back to the OCD stuff. By combining Mindfulness meditation, with neuroscience and Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, Schwartz has developed a very successful treatment for people with OCD which uses no psychopharmacological treatment, has a high success rate and low recidivism rate (and even when suffers do fall back into old compulsions, they tend not to fall all the way back to square one again). 

Why then does this treatment work? The answer to that, per Schwartz, depends upon neuroplasticity and quantum mechanics. To begin with, neuroplasticity refers to the potential for the brain to "re-wire" or "re-zone" itself. That is to say, in a situation where a patient has had a stroke and some portion of their cortex has "gone dark" and no longer functions, for the work that this now defunct portion of cortex had heretofore had sole change of doing, might be taken over by another portion of the cortex. We have long known that the infant's brain exhibited neuroplasticity, but it has only been in the last decades that another serious burst of neuroplasticity was recognized in adolescence and that beyond this, and apparently in Schwartz's telling, much against the orthodox beliefs about the matter in the scientific community, that the brain retains the potential for neuroplasticity throughout our lives. The way that Schwartz's therapy for OCD patients taps into this is through attention, a.k.a. Mindfulness and this leads us to quantum mechanics because when one is talking about processes at the scale of neurotransmitter ions emerging from the axons of neurons, we are speaking of particles on the quantum scale and not the familiar billiard balls of classical Newtonian thought experiments. 

So, what does everyone know about quantum mechanics even if they know nothing about quantum mechanics? Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle whereby it is not until an observation is made that the wave function of a quantum particle can be pinned to any location, until that point there are only probabilities. But let's add a note about the Quantum Zeno Effect as well. This really deserves a fuller quotation, but I'm not in the mood to transcribe the book's discussion of this so here I go… So, if we start with Heisenberg's principle and recognize that our observation of a particle has an effect on it, Quantum Zeno basically shows that repeated observation has the effect of 'fixing' a particle in a particular state. Now this finding, which has been replicated many times in physics, nonetheless really fucked with some physicists' heads. They expected that observed once, the wave function would collapse and a particle would be found in a place - that they were used to already. But they assumed that when some time had passed that where it would be found next would again be up for grabs, one option out of a range of probabilities, but it wasn't. Instead the particle was exactly where the initial observation had "pinned" it. The more it is re-observed, the more is stays put and the more that violates the probabilities. 

You can probably guess how this relates to the OCD situation already. By increasing mindfulness on the part of the sufferer about their compulsions and by helping them to develop a new set of responses to the compulsion, it is in effect their very own attention (volition) which gives them a degree of control, much as the observer pins the particle to a location and via quantum Zeno repeating it "fixes" it there, Schwartz's therapy allows the patients to "rezone" a part of their own cortex in response to their repeated and mindful volition. & here again, I think of something I mentioned in a previous post - how John Cage, who had been a very heavy smoker for many years, quit somehow with an image, every time he thought of smoking he would laugh instead. 

Anyway, this is all I will say about this book, though it has a great many other things to offer and is well worth reading in my estimation.

I quit

Somewhere in Cage's many writings he talks about when he stopped smoking. He says something about how when the thought of having a cigarette would occur to him he would start laughing at the thought of smoking again. 

I am, as I post this, smoking my last cigarette. Taking long hard drags. Feeling the smoke fill my lungs, holding it a bit longer than I usually do. Thinking about how it tastes, how it makes me lips feel, my chest, me head. 

(...)    [ minutes pass ]

I ground it out at 2:20.

Dream [29 Oct 2011]

I am sitting in very last seat in a tiny jet plane. It is the only seat and the walls are on either side of it, narrowing to a point behind. I can see the back of other people's heads in front of me, and they all look the same. I can see the captain at the front as there is no intervening wall. I am confused about where I am going and a bit nervous that this tiny plane cannot make a trip from where I am (Europe someplace) to Columbia and I thought I was going somewhere else. I take out my travel documents - crumpled - from a bag at my feet and they say that I am going to Spain, but the name of the city is unclear. I can read it and then I can't and when I can again it says something else. 

Did I fall asleep? The plane is moving but not in the air, it is driving on a small highway, cars pass going the other way and I see more cars in front of us. The captain is speaking to me though I cannot see him. He says, Don't worry we will get there, it will just take a little bit longer.

I'm jogging in a dirt rut next to a road and it is covered with litter and trash. The road intersects with a wide metal bridge and I look to my right and see a river and across it many small structures on the other bank of the river amidst trees. Someone jogs passed me on the left, I look and it is Bert and as she passes me I say, Sneaking up are you? & it is meant to be funny (a partial quote of Matt K "sneaky phud sneaking up"), and though she looked over, now she is already leaving me behind.

The "lobby" of this hotel is cheap and run down, with a dark shabby carpet and dilapidated furniture crammed along the walls on which sit small groups of people sleeping. But the room is dominated by a large oddly shaped bar, as if the room had once been a saloon and is no longer, shoved up against the bar is a desk covered in papers and a tall young guy is assuring me that everything is alright and he points at my travel papers. I try again to read them and again the words seems to shift and change, looking like they are in Cyrillic at one point. But I am in Spain somewhere and I am going to some unknown city in Turkey next, but only staying for three days.

I approach the service station and there is a bus parked out front with a line of people handing baggage to a man on the roof and waiting to get on this old fashioned bus. I look through the windows into the garage and see a man who looks familiar and next to him a tarp over a car that seems to be partially disassembled. I look at the people by the bus and now the same man I saw in the garage behind me is getting on the bus. I want to talk to him to tell him that I think that somehow, though it seems impossible, that it is my old car in this garage, but I also know that I never owned a light blue Karman Ghia and cannot imagine how it could have made it from the States to wherever I am now. I look into the garage through the window in the garage doors and now I see that it is a wagon (the kind that needs a horse to pull it) under the tarp and not a car at all though I am still wondering about how my old car could have gotten across the ocean. There are piles of metal parts and other trash in the lot next to the station and the bus is still here but I do not see any people on it.

I'm back at the "hotel" sitting down and I see next to me my friend Dariush and he's holding a baby on his chest and rapping to it. The other chairs and couches are all filled with sleeping or dozing people. I think Dar's rapping is somehow funny and I say something both encouraging and ironic. A man sitting across from us looks at me, seemingly with negative judgement in his expression & I realize it is my ex-father-in-law (Mr. D.). But also somehow all these people are a family and I wonder if it is my family somehow.

Looking out window of a tourist bus now and I am Turkey somewhere. I am still confused about where I am and look yet again at my travel papers but they are no help. There are many shops along the street and they look like junk and/or antique shops and are mostly dark inside, but the street is filled with women who are dancing with long silky streamers tied at their wrists. They are all naked and it seems odd that one would find women dancing naked in the streets in Turkey to me, a false stereotype of mine? I wonder if this is a red light district or something but that doesn't seem to be the case somehow, the women all move simultaneously and are equally spaced across the street. They do not look quite real somehow, more like very good CGI.

Happy?

Earlier tonight someone asked me about being happy. 

I hate it when people do that. 

But I was challenged about it and so played along. 

Yes, I can, in the last few years remember some happy days here and there and short periods of more than one. 

There, happy now?

Habits, kicking & cultivation

No wonder I wear a hat so frequently.

Habits. I've often thought about habits. About that which is habitual, reflex-like, automatic, etc. What we do with but a bare minimum of thought. Depending on what field of repeated action we're thinking of habits are always found, I can be quite negative or positive about them. 

With regard to matters poetic, I've tended to be quite suspicious and rarely positive, but that requires some qualification. I've no aversion to a daily writing regime or anything like that. I have a file always open on my laptop where I collect lines for a long-term project that I am working on, if this is a habit. The habit of writing or improvising poetry seems neutral to me in and of itself. Billy Collins, and perhaps even moreso Richard Kostelanetz, have a bad habit, and I wish they'd get help, but that's me and at root I don't much care if they do or don't. But when habits become slurs (my terminological adoption and possibly, if purposively, a misconstrual of what Harry Mathews referred to as "systems of low-level regularity", this being the phrase he used to describe the system of any given author's "inspired" practice of writing), I get increasingly negative in my baseline response. This, again, is me; my bias, and I own it without qualm. It just seems to me more worthwhile to break language habits and reflexes if one intends to surprise oneself, or simply avoid writing the same poem again and again. 

During the time when I was in analysis, I developed a habit that now and then got me into a bit of trouble, that of hearing the things people didn't intend. When one's analyst is incessantly echoing one's slips of the tongue, after a time they start to become almost glaring. I noticed them in my own speech a great deal, and used that to poetic effect when improvising. But when you repeat the slips of others to them, a funny thing happens. Not denial, that's predictable. The funny thing is that sometimes they get really pissed off. Ha ha. After awhile I learned not to repeat them, though I still tended to think about them and what they might suggest which differed from what the person was trying to convey. But analysis is, sadly, some years behind me now and that habit has diminished with time. Recently though I was spending a bit of time with someone and noticed that she, on a number of occasions noticed my own slips of the tongue or caught the implication which I was trying to, if not conceal, then at least not to blurt out. I told her she should become an analyst, which to my mind is high praise. Admittedly though, it didn't work very well as a technique of seduction. 

I've also been at times persuaded by C. S. Peirce's position regarding habits. Basically, that they are necessary things, and that we'd be better off to choose them than to be chosen by them. I do some poetry most every week, whether it be writing, assembling, improvising. But, I doubt that I would in most instances describe my poetic activities as habits as they are usually quite volitional. I tend rather to use the word for activities like smoking, staying up too late, nose-picking, chewing at the corner of one's mustache and the like, and thus, as I wrote above, as things that we do, repeatedly, but with such a minimum of thought that it borders upon no thought at all. 

I have been reading a book called,The Mind & The Brain; Neuroplasticity and the Power of Mental Force by Schwartz and Begley. The subject matter of this text might surprise some of those who know my interests and stated biases, as the author is both a neuroscientist and a cognitive-behavioral therapist. But if you are one of my small elective family you might have heard me saying a number of things in the last year about wishing to learn more about neuroscience. My reasons for that interest are several, but the dominant one initially was undoubtedly that, as a psychoanalytic partisan prone to making arguments from that framework, the toughest counter-arguments it seems are coming from that neuroscience terrain. My intention was to read Damasio this year and I still hope to get to his work, but I ended up with Schwartz &Begley. 

I'm glad that I bought this book. The authors do make a couple of ill-informed references to Freud (ones that they are apparently so confident of that they felt no need to cite him to substantiate), but that is so commonplace in contemporary writing that I'm beginning not to notice, much. Ok, I do notice and it irks me, but I sense that I might have a better chance of dissuading Homeland Security agents from frisking anyone they think "looks muslim" than countering this trend, so I wish I didn't care (sort of). 

That pet peeve aside (& this book is nowhere near as dumb-headed than many others I could name), this is a very interesting book that combines the neuroscience with CBT and adds in some buddhist meditational material (mindfulness stuff essentially), all of which are coordinated in the treatment of OCD in Schwartz's practice. But a larger, more philosophically juicy aspect of this text's argument is that, contrary to prevailing wisdom (or at least, prevailing until recently) from the neuro camp, "mind" and even "will" are emerging as both therapeutically and empirically valid concepts. Oh yeah, there is also quantum theory on offer here and integral to the broader claims of the text. Schwartz is bucking the trend in neuroscience of refusing all discussion of "mind" in favor of "brain," and is insisting, with a great deal of citational support, that those suffering from OCD can learn to "rewire" their brains by force of will. My terms are sloppy, but they get at the claim made here, and I find that I am positively disposed toward it even as many aspects of the CBT framework still strike me as exceedingly problematic (I'll come back to that below). 

Everything hinges on neuroplasticity. Though there has been contrary evidence for some decades now, the general view in neuroscience was that, while the infant's brain exhibited great neuroplasticity, that in short order it became fixed and quite static, with this batch of neurons "hardwired" to perform these and only these tasks. But that conviction has been undermined by research which shows not only that there is a second period in adolescence when the brain, to borrow some of the metaphors that the author's use, does a great deal of "rezoning". That is to say, that parts of the brain which may have heretofore been engaged in specific actions begin to be involved with quite other actions. There are a great many studies described and explained here, as well as therapies, all of which demonstrate this. I was most impressed by the details of the work of a man named Taub and the therapeutic practice (CI Therapy) that he developed for stroke victims. Without going into the details, this type of therapy, though obviously very difficult, has been successful in allowing stroke victims who may have lost the use of an arm, to regain use of that limb by reassigning the work that the part of the brain which has gone dark since the stroke, to another area of the brain. The success rates of this approach are pretty impressive, with, in some cases, people who had not been able to use their affected limb for 15 or more years, regaining near total use of it. 

Schwartz's primary work is with people who suffer from OCD. He noted that, though those who suffer greatly from this malady, and who are compelled again and again to wash their hands such that they stay chapped and bleeding also know at the same time that their hands are not filthy and covered in dangerous germs. That is, while potent and difficult to deny compulsions are screaming an alarm about the germs and freighting that alarm with great emotional weight (described as dread, among other terms) which the sufferers often cannot resist giving in to, they also know very well that their hands are clean and that the washing is both unnecessary and harmful. It was this 'split consciousness' (referred to as 'ego-dystonic') which drew Schwartz's attention. Again, glossing a great deal of material into a few sentences here, his innovation was to recognize how this is not unlike the situation that a meditator faces when trying not to get caught up in thinking his own thoughts rather than just watching them arise and dissipate. There is no reference has made to the classic line by some venerable buddhist so and so (who I have forgotten), of the moon and the clouds in the pool, but I will as I've always like that image. If one imagines looking at the reflection of the moon on the surface of a pool as the analog of meditative awareness, then stray thoughts would be like the clouds which now and then cover the moon. The 'trick' of meditation then would be not to follow the clouds but simply to attend to them as they pass by and then return one's attention to the moon. Schwartz, through a four step method, teaches his OCD patients to listen to the voice inside them which knows that these are compulsions, that they are just their brains sending dark clouds out to cover over that awareness and distract them from their awareness that these compulsions are expression of their illness and not what they in fact know to be the case. There is of course more to the therapy that this, but that is how it starts. Subsequently they learn to substitute other actions for those which the compulsion had driven them to previously, actions which they have the chance to choose and which are not self-damaging. 

It's a very interesting book and I'd like to post a bit more about it in the future. But getting back to habits…

Some months ago my dear sister Rah read a book about stopping smoking, she'd been given it by a lifelong friend and fellow smoking buddy, L, who read it and quit. Then Rah read it and quit. Then Tony read it and didn't, though I must admit I haven't seen him smoking much at all. I'm reading it now. I had intended to wipe the book out this passed Sunday but I didn't. In part it may be because of the "threat" to my habit. & in part it may be my annoyance with the text's repetitive nature. But whatever the author advisers his readers to smoke while reading it, so I've bought a couple of packs since then. I also have some difficulties with one of the basic claims the author makes, that what keeps the smoker smoking is fear. Actually, many of his claims about what "all smokers" think and feel about smoking strike me as questionable. But whatever. I found while reading it and have noticed afterward that parts of analysis seem to be, for me at least, accurate. I'm thinking of the feelings leading up to the moment when one lights the next one. & thinking of how it is the nicotine addiction itself which produces this unease which leads to lighting up sort of pisses me off, in a similar fashion to, if less pissed off, when I notice while listening back to a series of my improvised poems that I've found a slur, a repeated word or series of sound choices. I nonetheless intend to read some of the book today and try to finish it tomorrow. Stay tuned for details. 

Amusingly, an image search for "CBT" also brings up images of
& devices for "cock and ball torture" 

Now, to return to the uneasiness that I have with CBT as a therapy. When I hear about how it is pursued I cannot help but think of The Power of Positive Thinking, a text which I think gets much too much positive regard. Look around for fuck's sake, the world has serious problems from the macro to the micro level. Deciding to just 'stay positive' feels like an ostrich strategy. I also can't help but to recall an argument I got into with a High School history teacher who was incensed that I was reading Mao's Little Red Book and was interested in Marx. I was in High School remember, and not quite the argument monster that I can be these days in classroom settings, but I tried to account for what I found convincing in Marx, the alienation of labor, exploitation of workers, etc. This teacher did something quite similar in structure to the CBT response to a patient's self-understanding of their suffering. He re-labelled and refocused and so forth. Thus it is not exploitation of labor but a free system where your work was rewarded depending on how hard you worked. It was not alienation at all, but part of the process of cultural development, etc. Capitalism was not an economic system that only emerged fully in the last few centuries which is dependent upon somebody somewhere getting exploited and which cannot exist otherwise, it was the natural outcomes of rational choices and the best way that we can have to satisfy basic human needs and wants. Here that business about how in Texas no student in public school will ever learn of any economic system other than Capitalism from birth to end of High School and whether this isn't depending upon the very strategy in play here, though applied in advance of any deviation.

Now one could obviously just reverse the process here and relabel again, so perhaps this isn't the fault of strategies like CBT. But I have to wonder as well. There are moment's in Schwartz & Begley's book when I question from who's perspective this or that behavior is deemed better. & this would lead to the larger question of whether in the situation of this or that person, feeling miserable and hopeless might not be an entirely rational assessment of the situation. But let us assume for a moment at least that there are ways in which we are, as social subjects, quite thoroughly fucked, as in disempowered. I cannot believe that re-labelling this situation in such a way as to naturalize it, or make it entirely up to the individual rather than a systemic issue, or any such thing is adequate. How many guards at the concentration camps had qualms which they quashed in this fashion? 

Google>Images "Habit" - tho obviously I chose it for looking like the Borromean Knot