Daniel Morris
(In)decisive Moments:
On Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters
I. The (In)Decisive Moment
Some avant-garde scholars and poets are turning to the World Wide Web itself as a post-modern resource for a peculiar kind of self-expression. “While traditional notions of writing are primarily focused on ‘originality’ and ‘creativity,’ the digital environment fosters new skill sets that include ‘manipulation’ and ‘management’ of the heaps of already existent and ever-increasing language,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (15). Lyric poetry, especially in the age of new media, which even supporters such as Goldsmith acknowledge may transform a writer into something resembling “a programmer” (1), gives ordinary people the opportunity to gain or reclaim their voice or voices. In Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), Goldsmith, who has been at the forefront of the “uncreative writing” movement in our digital era, turns his attention away from his primarily (and ironically) lyric emphasis on recurrent, quotidian, and domestic experiences typical for a contemporary U.S. urbanite – weather reports, traffic patterns, New York Yankees and The New York Times transcripts, minute descriptions of body movements (blinks, lifts a coffee cup, blinks, tugs at the back of his pants), and transcriptions of only his half of conversations, sometimes concerning the quality of the paneer at a new Indian joint, sometimes concerning his relationship to players in New York’s art world. His “new” (I put the word “new” in scare quotation marks because, of course, Goldsmith’s career is based on challenging the association of literary merit with the recently made) book’s focus is on contemporary American history, but in a decidedly uncreative, Goldsmithian manner.[1] As in his other books, Goldsmith in Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013) challenges typical notions of authorship, imagination, and creativity. At the same time, by noting how the radio personalities who originally broadcast upsetting news reports were already referencing prior tropes and narratives based in earlier American crises, Goldsmith teaches us that even “eyewitness” and “on the spot” journalism is already framed (and thus contained) through discursive conventions that deflect attention from the disorienting occurrences happening in front of the reporter’s eyes. Discussing Charles Bernstein’s aversion to “frame lock,” the scholar of avant-garde poetics Alan Golding writes: "The digital medium provides Bernstein with a much wider palette with which to counter ‘the deadly boring fetishization…of expository ordering”[….] Play with color and layout allow further possibilities for interrupting the tonal seriousness and structural predictability of normative academic writing – what Bernstein calls elsewhere ‘frame lock’ and ‘its cousin tone jam’ (1999b, 90)” (Golding, 269).[2] Sensitive to how on-the-spot broadcasters have “frame locked” and “tone jammed” a half-century of key American events to avoid disrupting the national imaginary, Goldsmith’s eccentric play with media frames – radio, internet, small press poetry publication – follows Bernstein in destabilizing predictable responses to bad news.
In an interview with The Believer (2011), Goldsmith interprets his projects as philosophical investigations: "My books are better thought about than read. They’re insanely dull and unreadable; I mean, do you really want to sit down and read a year’s worth of weather reports or a transcription of the 1010 WINS traffic reports 'on the ones' (every ten minutes) over the course of a twenty-four-hour period? I don’t. But they’re wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf. In fact, I say that I don’t have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called “conceptual writing.” The idea is much more important than the product."
Goldsmith is considering the place of poetry today as a peculiar form of creative expression in a New Media environment that, he argues in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, is more about “reconstruct[ing language] that already exist[s]” than it is about “the creation of new texts” (3).[3] Trained in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1980s – before his shift to conceptual writing and online archival work via UbuWeb, he designed sculptures of poetry books that emphasized the materiality of language, such as by e.e. cummings -- Goldsmith’s comments link appropriative writing based in reframing what he calls “nude media” -- transcribed broadcasts he located on the World Wide Web -- to avant-garde visual art by Dadaists such as Duchamp, Pop Artists such as Warhol, whose interviews Goldsmith has edited, and conceptualists such as Sol Lewitt.[4] Like Duchamp, Warhol and Lewitt, he emphasizes an intellectual -- “thinkership” – response to an artifact. In “conceptual writing,” he states, ”the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts.” Goldsmith’s comments may reflect how many readers have responded to earlier Goldsmith “junk” texts – weather reports, traffic information, baseball transcripts, and Goldsmith’s side of mundane conversations -- that the poet himself describes as “boring” and “unreadable.”[5] I suspect Katherine Hayles would describe his work as “post human” because it produces subjectivity through an interface of human activity with intelligent machines (in Goldsmith’s case the use of the web).[6] At the same time, Goldsmith himself notices in The Believer interview that his works create sites for interpersonal communication: “they’re wonderful to talk about.” Implicit in Goldsmith’s comment about how the transcripts serve as prompts for reflection and subsequent conversation are Charles Bernstein’s understanding in his online essay “An Mosaic for Convergence” (1997) of the potential for the internet to foster “interactions and interconnections among many sites of production” that enable us to better understand the “social” and “interpersonal” dimensions of poetry.[7] Goldsmith’s comment that his work is “wonderful to talk about” also echoes Emerson’s understanding in “The American Scholar” of interpretation as creative endeavor: "One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, ‘He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.’ There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world." (Quoted in Edmundson p. 4)[8]
As Emerson would suppose, my disposition as reader of the transcribed “sentences [already made] doubly significant” by Goldsmith’s recontextualizing them in Seven American Deaths and Disasters transforms unsung source material into an “imaginative goad.” By coming to terms with re-presentation of hackneyed radio and television broadcasts concerning the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, John Lennon and Michael Jackson, as well as the Space Shuttle Challenger and World Trade Tower disasters in the Wordsworthian situation of memory recollected in the tranquility of appraising a narrative repetition of the broadcasts, I experience an uncannily fresh response to “boring” and often slipshod reportage. My reaction to Seven American Deaths and Disasters thus differs from Goldsmith’s theoretical assessment of his project as interesting to readers primarily on a detached, intellectual level.
My strange enjoyment in reading Seven American Deaths and Disasters – as well as what makes the volume a displaced reflection of Goldsmith’s lived experience in line with prior “uncreative” works more obviously connected to his personal life as a New York City resident -- derives from the psychological conception of the Repetition Compulsion.[9] As Gerard Bonnet has noted, "Jacques Lacan (1978), who saw repetition compulsion as one of the four major concepts of psychoanalysis, along with the unconscious, transference, and the instincts. He used it as the basis for his distinction between jouissance (enjoyment) and pleasure, with jouissance being situated 'beyond the pleasure principle' as the desired result of repetition of the worst carried to its extreme.”[10]
In form and content, Goldsmith’s transcriptions are “repetition[s] of the worst carried to its extreme.” His book concerns prominent disasters that have befallen U.S. culture since 1963. In terms of form, Goldsmith has selected some of the stylistically “worst” broadcasts of eyewitness accounts of tragic events. What I will be calling (with a nod to Henri Cartier-Bresson) “indecisive moments” – the journalistic stammering inability to remain legible, denials of the trauma after such disavowals become unfeasible, informational missteps, and embarrassing outbursts that reveal unconscious racist, violent, and xenophobic impulses in the reporters – in short the “worstness” of the transcripts –- once reframed in the context of a Goldsmithian transcript -- become for me deeply moving and unsettling reflections on the limits of language to contain traumatic experience.
Given Goldsmith’s statement that with “conceptual writing, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts,” I found myself wondering: why is Goldsmith bent on theorizing his writings as avant-garde experiments in banality when, as Freud and Lacan have noted, the urge to repeat is such a psychologically telling gesture? What might be the underlying impulse for Goldsmith to repeat disasters? Why the guilt? Here I think his experience of 9/11 matters. He notes that he was in Greenwich Village when the World Trade Center collapsed: "As I stood silently on corner of Bleeker Street and Sixth Avenue watching the towers fall, a parked car with a loudspeaker system blasted an AM radio station that was narrating the very events I was witnessing. There was a strange disconnect – a feeling of simulacra and spectacle – as if this show had been planned and presented the way that, say reality television had recently begun to permeate our lives(171)….Over the years, that radio broadcast stuck with me. I thought about the newscasters themselves: how did they even find the words to describe that which they certainly thought they’d never have to witness? And what were the exact words they used?" (171-72)
Himself a “DJ for the alternative radio station WFMU” in New York, Goldsmith describes his uncanny relation to an event, happening near him, but already mediated on TV and radio (Norton, 700). He sensed that he was witness to a staged event in a reality TV program. The perception that mediation becomes part of the event is evident in many of the Seven American Deaths and Disasters accounts. In the RFK section, for example, the police literally turn off power in the ballroom where RFK was shot in Los Angeles to force media outlets to evacuate the premises so it could be cordoned off as a crime scene. In the section on the World Trade Center, TV transmission is blocked because the satellite antennas, which stood atop the towers, were destroyed. Is Seven American Deaths and Disasters Goldsmith’s way of working through his traumatic experience on 9/11 – including the way it was imagined, often misrepresented, and labeled from the start as “America under Attack” with all the suspiciousness, scapegoating, and finger pointing that title entailed?
Goldsmith displays an ironic distance from the broadcast tapes that are the sources for his book, but we also notice his emotional investment in the material.[11] I am suggesting Goldsmith’s 9/11 experiences might relate to his new book, but let me also take Goldsmith on his own terms as a conceptual poet. Just how provocative is the conception for the latest book? Transcripts of seven American “deaths and disasters” from 1963 (death of JFK) to 2009 (death of Michael Jackson) – a concept indebted to Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series as well (Goldsmith tells us) to “Kota Ezawa’s chilling animated renderings of American media events” (176)?[12] Another Goldsmithian example of what he calls his “archival impulse” (169) to do “nothing other than what I had done with Day: I was simply transcribing what lay before me” (171), Seven American Deaths and Disasters differs somewhat from Goldsmith’s prior uncreative writing efforts. Earlier works focused on “rendering the mundane in language” (169) whereas Seven Deaths concerns dramatic (if incoherent and clichéd) renderings of events of national and even international consequence. Goldsmith has written that, “Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts” (quoted in Perloff 200). Given the rehashing of American calamities by visual conceptualists such as Warhol and Ezawa, as well as simulations of many of these events in other media (one thinks of Oliver Stone’s film JFK [1991] and Don DeLillo’s novel Libra [1988]) as well as Goldsmith’s appropriative transcriptions in ten books that in themselves recall a century of avant-garde experimentation with reframing “found” materials in the new context of what George Dickie called “the art world,” I don’t find Goldsmith’s repetition of the conceptual model for the new book especially thought-provoking even though he tweaks the project by working with digital media and (unusual for him) topics that are not routine.
So why read (or think) it? Only the most uninformed would read for historical information. There are factoids some might have forgotten: an assassination attempt had been made on Harry Truman by Puerto Rican nationalists in 1950: James Garfield is the other assassinated 20th century president; another Johnson (Andrew) was Vice President when another President was assassinated; although it is commonly known as the Texas Book Depository, the official name of the building from which Oswald fired his rifle is the Sexton Building; Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died on the same day; “local screwball” Mark David Chapman was from Hawaii and had gotten Lennon’s autograph days before he shot him. Not exactly earth shattering info worth wading through almost 200 pages of transcripts to learn. Goldsmith states that “quantity” not “quality” drives his project (“language more concerned with quantity than quality”), but my enjoyment, oddly enough, turned less on pondering the overall conception than with what the modernist French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson termed “The Decisive Moment.”
My nod to Cartier-Bresson is, of course, an ironic, tongue-in cheek reference. Perhaps “indecisive moment” is the more apt term. Contra the quintessential street photographer, Goldsmith follows Dadaists, Popists and Conceptualists in deemphasizing romantic notions of genius, originality, skill, or mimesis. By contrast, iconic black and white photographs of a man jumping over a puddle behind La Gare Saint Lazare in Paris in 1932, a blurred bicyclist darting down a curving stone street as seen from atop a spiral staircase, a round-faced French boy in shorts carrying two large bottles of dark wine, a fully clothed couple supine on a rocky shoreline, their heads concealed by a black umbrella, dancers at Queen Charlotte’s Ball, or of a couple kissing, Cartier-Bresson favore dimmediacy. Cartier-Bresson sought inspiration as disciplined by precise craftsmanship and an eye towards intriguing geometrical compositional patterns.
Goldsmith is the master of repetition. Plato would critique him as an imitator or imitations, thus triply removing us from reality, for transcribing an amalgamation of previously ignored audio clips archived on the Internet. Cartier-Bresson, by contrast, captures a fleeting moment of someone else’s lived experience with his small Leica (painted black for concealment) and the 50 mm lens that he likened to his eyes. For Cartier-Bresson, such experience would otherwise be lost to posterity if the photographer were not present on the scene and poised to snap the shutter at the precise second to rescue a poignant moment or beautiful gesture from oblivion. The broadcasts Goldsmith transcribed for Deaths and Disasters were available for years to be lifted out of the Internet’s shadows. They did not require Cartier-Bresson’s aesthetic gifts to “trap” a fleeting moment. And yet who before Goldsmith cared to resurrect the broadcasts from having already fallen into the void of an overloaded cultural storage system? Both Cartier-Bresson and Goldsmith thus call attention to moments that would have been deemed insignificant if the artist or poet had not re-presented them. We would pay scant attention had not the photographer framed the image of the man jumping the puddle. The same is true had not Goldsmith framed portions of the Dallas radio station KLIF on November 22, 1963 by juxtaposing news bulletins of a possible shooting at the presidential motorcade, advertisements for Hamm’s beer and Armour meat products, and Sandra Dee song lyrics. There is, however, a difference between how Cartier-Bresson and Goldsmith conserve unheralded moments. The former saves the decisive moment from oblivion by capturing its image prior to its disappearance from lived experience. The latter saves the decisive moment from oblivion through re-presentation of an artifact after it had been discredited as possessing momentousness in the first place, and thus had been relegated to the netherworld of always available but never consulted internet archive.
II. Bad Conceptual Art (is the new good)
Goldsmith’s transcribed broadcasts (I almost wrote bored-casts) are far away from the precise renderings of nuanced experiences as framed by a modern photographer who bought into the conception of artist as intuitive genius such as Cartier-Bresson. Goldsmith’s transcripts of American deaths and disasters may be “Bad Conceptual Art.” Perhaps not so ludicrous as the excerpt from Pavlov’s “Video Chicken I” as performed by the late Gilda Radner from Saturday Night Live in 1978 as introduced by the fey Leonard Pinth-Garnell as performed by Dan Aykroyd, neck draped in silk scarf and upper lip hidden by pencil-thin moustache. Nor are they framed with such humorous pretension as Aykroyd’s conceptualization of “bad” art recast on a hip late night art show masquerading as a dull late night art show. At the same time, in Conceptual Art such as Goldsmith’s the compulsion to repeat the worst of the Bad is the new Good. The badness of the transcripts Goldsmith represents Seven American Deaths and Disasters, I am suggesting, are best when they are at their worst because that is when their tellingly (in)decisive moments emerge.
Historian of “Bad Films” Lance Duerfahrd writes: "The bad films I revere do artlessly what every art film seeks consciously to do: refuse our entry into it. Their poor craftsmanship – a sudden cut, the mysterious displacement or appearance of a prop, an unintended response in the audience – won’t let the spectator disappear into the film. The well made Hollywood film is like successful taxidermy: the dissimulation is so good that for a brief moment you forget that the thing is dead…. We suffer the bad film and need an imagination to relate to it because it refuses us all the pre-fabricated paths (for our interest, our attention, our wanting to believe)." (Prism 17)
What Duerfhard notices in his appreciation of classic Bad Films such as Plan 9 From Outer Space by Ed Wood – a pillow in a graveyard scene, he comments, “help us toward a sense of beauty that includes these small acts of disorder, or make room in our sense of what belongs and what doesn’t” (18) – pertain to my admiration for Goldsmith’s transcriptions. As with Duerfahrd’s attention to details in an Ed Wood scene (such as a cut of pants) that the critic does not think he would notice in a conventional Hollywood movie, I am fascinated when discursive incoherence in the Goldsmith transcripts calls attention to the materiality of an art form that resists seamless mimesis. Disjointedness in the transcripts, like Ed Wood’s pillow in the graveyard, brings us closer to a confrontation with an unruly quality of reality that resists containment through social fictions of order.
III. “Oop”
There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an
expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment
the photographer is creative,' he said. 'Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.
--Cartier-Bresson in the Washington Post in 1957 (10)
(In)decisive Moments occur when things, in Goldsmith’s terms, go “spinning out of control” in the seven sections of Goldsmith’s text.[13] They manifest themselves when what Cartier-Bresson calls the “Oop” emerges or when what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the symbolic” is punctured by blundering, rhetorical missteps, shoddy repetitions of misunderstood information or misinformation, and discursive incoherence. (In)Decisive moments in Goldsmith suggest what Lacan referred to as “the real,”[14] which in Goldsmith transcripts occur when language breaks down, as in the following extensive segment from chapter six, on the World Trade Center disaster:
We have lost…Again, our transmitter is on top of the World Trade Center. So we, apparently, have lost contact…(131)
Now this, uh, Ed. Was the World Trade Center Two. Oh my gosh! This is…this is absolutely…
Uh, Joe, we can’t…I can’t tell from my perspective, eh…exactly what’s…what’s happened here…how much of the building is still standing.
But…but…but…but…but…Ed…but Ed it looks like the side portion of that has totally fallen and there is just a huge cloud of dust that is encompassing several city blocks. Oh God…eh…eh… what…this…this…would…this would fall into the area of Lower Manhattan toward, uh, the eastern portion of the World Trade Center. It looks…now…uh…eh…is that? I’m trying to look…Can you see? Is that building still there?
I…I can’t tell.
I don’t see it. (138)
Let’s just think about this logically./There is no logic. /Oh my God!/…uh…uh…a hijacked air…air…airliner. (139)
This morning of this day…the 11th of September, 2001…will live in infamy. There’s almost no textbook for any of us here on the radio to figure out just
what to say. There are no words at all to express this. (141)
We’re in the worst place we can be. We can’t see a thing!/It’s gone! Are you saying it’s gone?/It’s gone It’s gone! We can’t see anything! All this smoke is moving and there’s no towers standing there anymore. We do have confirmation, that the, the north tower…has collapsed./Oh, yes, it’s not there!/It is not there./It is not there. (142)
And, um, it’s…it’s… it is a situation beyond description. (144)
The passages above are not exemplary “in-decisive moments” because, as in Cartier-Bresson’s privileging of artistic grace under pressure, the broadcaster’s wording is precise, his style elegant, the quality of “content” informative of fact, or even of Goldsmith’s belated skill and cheeky wit in reframing the original local radio broadcasts from WABC, WOR, WFAN, and WNYC as pieces of conceptually-driven appropriative “uncreative writing.” Rather, the “indecisive moments” are compelling because they encourage us to forget about aesthetic merits or philosophical questions of authorial originality while readers uncannily repeat (as if for the first time) exposure to the raw terror facing the broadcaster. We identify with how the broadcaster’s dread overwhelms his attempt to compose a legible account of the disaster. Uninterested in locating cool, calm, and collected representations of a crisis of the Anderson Cooper variety via the World Wide Web archive, Goldsmith re-presents an inscription of disaster, “a situation beyond description.” Writing on Laura Riding’s 1925 “A Prophecy or a Plea,” which describes the “shock of impact” of modern existence, Barrett Watten notes that Riding’s poetic manifesto leads: "to a poetry that, as a darkened interiority or an ‘evocation of the shadows,’ foregrounds our insufficiency rather than regulates it. Later in Riding’s work, the demands of the unrepresentable intensify to the point at which poetry can only imitate the traumatic shock of existence in its immediacy. “What is a poem? A poem is nothing….It cannot be looked at, heard, touched, or read because it is a vacuum….If it were possible to reproduce it in an audience the result would be the destruction of the audience.” (Watten, 340)
Like Watten’s version of Riding as a poet of linguistic “insufficiency” when confronted with the “unrepresentable,” Goldsmith calls attention to rhetorical disability as registered through stammering phrases – “It looks…now…uh…eh…is that?” – as well as expressions of a crisis of visibility. As in classic 20th Century American poems such as “Home Burial” by Robert Frost and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop, we sense the unstable relation between “looking” and “seeing.” Can we look at something and not see it? Can this discrepancy be so because that something has vanished, or is it because we lack the understanding to truly see it, to recognize it as a new fact? Are we suffering from a physiological blindness or is there, in fact, nothing to see except for the Stevensian “nothing that is”? Is the condition of disappearance permanent or will the scales lift from our eyes? Will the smoke settle on the streets and visibility be restored? If visibility is restored, can we tolerate what we will see? Is blindness the new normal? How does one witness an absence? The 9/11 broadcaster’s voicing of anxiety and stress, which one associates with modernism (Eliot’s “I cannot say just what I mean”; the evacuated landscapes of Beckettian dramas), are revitalized through Goldsmith’s appropriation of obscure broadcasters, out of their depth, trying to cope with a disappearing world as they say the unsayable on New York City radio stations including WABC, WOR, WFAN, and WNYC.
The disc jockeys are tongue-tied, but we notice a characteristic of disaster testimony that carries through in other American disasters Goldsmith records: however awkward the reports, however disoriented the reporters, the tendency is to withdraw from the indecisive moment to remember a piece of language – a heartening phrase from a related “decisive moment” in the American imaginary -- to frame -- and thus attempt to contain -- the disappearance of an iconic sign (in this case the Twin Towers) of the continuous existence of that imaginary space. And so there is, amidst the muttering, the emergence of the echo of the reassuring Brahmin voice of FDR: "This morning of this day…the 11th of September, 2001…will live in infamy. There’s almost no textbook for any of us here on the radio to figure out just what to say. There are no words at all to express this." (141)
There is “almost no textbook for any of us here,” but the announcer’s instinct – his invocation of what Jameson would term a political unconscious -- is to create a textbook by linking Pearl Harbor to the Twin Towers and by concentrating on a notorious date -- December 7th 1941 -- to facilitate the mnemonic process of installing September 11 2001 as a contemporaneous repetition of chronological memorialization. Untrained radio personalities intuitively tap into the national imaginary to channel Roosevelt. They translate an absence – a crisis they cannot speak in their own words -- as available to history.
Goldsmith detaches poetry from obvious signs of originality, but he also teaches us that eyewitness testimony is already a witness to second hand smoke, or what Bernstein calls “frame lock.” Goldsmith thus puts us in a position to read history. Not history as filtered through a textbook, but an indication of the on site process in which raw terror becomes reframed as decisive historical events. Goldsmith also allows history to read us, by which I mean how in reading the transcripts we recall our own process of synthesizing personal traumas and national disasters into stories that conform to how we wish to imagine ourselves (as, for example, “survivors” with courageous qualities of endurance and flexibility).
IV. Wake up and Smile
I experienced an uncanny (dare I say jouissance) sensation when reading how radio commentators try to contain through narrative, description, and fact-oriented historicizing unruly moments of terror. Reporters frame disruptions of the status quo by placing shocking events in historical contexts. They fixate on ascertaining inconsequential “facts” such as noting the precise minute when a victim has been pronounced “officially” dead or learning the birthplace of the assassin. (Comically, even the insignificant facts, which announcers grasp onto to avoid facing devastation that facts cannot conceal, go awry. Moments after RFK’s official death time is given at one forty-four a.m., for example, a reporter states: “John…er, Robert Francis Kennedy died this morning at one forty” [69]. In the John Lennon chapter, a persistent observation that Mark David Chapman had a “smirk” on his face when taken into custody is eventually repeated as a “smear” [79]). Even when mangled, as in the RFK and John Lennon examples, we notice how verbal acts meant to contain eruptions of a “real” that defies language, betray symptoms of anxiety about the failure to control upsetting experience. It is in the report’s badness that the slippery nature of terror, the way it defies composure, interpretation, meaning, emerges.
Earlier I referenced a late 1970s Saturday Night Live series on “Bad Conceptual Art.” Here I found myself recalling the outrageous “Wake Up and Smile! (12/09/99) SNL sketch, written by Adam McKay, in which a local version of a “Today” type morning news, weather, and entertainment program experiences technical difficulties when a teleprompter goes awry on the 20th Anniversary special episode of their program:
[a stagehand taps on the teleprompter, which keeps spitting out the same phrase Oliver keeps repeating] Diane: [panicking ] Um.. ih.. it looks like we're having some problems with the prompter here!..[ Oliver and Diane are silent with stage fright ] Oliver: [fumbling for something to say] The teleprompter on which everything we say appears on.. is broken.. Diane: [trying to laugh ] Please! Let's get that teleprompter fixed! Oliver: Uh.. we're having what's known in the business as.. technical times.. right now.. Diane: Uh.. well.. let's go to.. Tom.. Bulcher.. with the weather.. [cut to the weatherman on the side of the set, stunned by the broken teleprompter] Tim Baker: Blank screen.. no words on it.. got to think.. must think.. [pause] Back to you.. [cut back to Oliver and Diane, who are forced to "make something up"] Oliver: Uh.. you know, Diane, I had a notion the other day.. Diane: Uh.. well.. uh.. notions make.. uh.. this country happen.. Oliver: I.. I.. I was thinking someone should get a group together.. uh.. with guns to sweep out those ghettos.. [the show cuts to quick commercial, then comes right back to its frightened hosts] Diane: I..drive a red car.. Oliver: Make sure those poor people stay away from it..
they've got sores..
Co-hosts Oliver, as played by Will Farrell, and Diane, as played by Nancy Walls, freak out and go into panic mode (sweating, feeling hungry, cold, hot) when their teleprompter malfunctions. Twenty-year veteran co-hosts of “Wake Up and Smile,” the pair, lacking imagination or improvisational skills, experience stage fright as they confront what is for them exposure to Lacan’s “the real.” (As Dino Felluga remarks, “the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real.”) As is the case in several of Goldsmith’s transcripts – the Robert F. Kennedy and World Trade Center chapters chief among them – a discursive breakdown precedes an unveiling of a return to language and actions that display the violently primordial underpinnings of “civil” society. Oliver asserts the need to form a group to defend the country against gangs: “I was thinking someone should get a group together.. uh.. with guns to sweep out those ghettos.” Lacking words on the teleprompter, Oliver goes Neanderthal. He creates a cave-like bunker out of the set couches, and then transforms himself into a dominant tribal male leader of a savage cult with a hand symbol painted onto his naked chest. Eventually, he tears off the African-American weathermen’s head, which he cannibalizes before order is restored when the teleprompter is fixed. In Goldsmith’s second chapter, on Robert F. Kennedy, a reporter notes:
And there are fistfights around as various people just plain get too emotional and attack each other. (52)
Kennedy fans and Kennedy supporters literally tried to beat the suspect to death – they were really giving him quite a pummeling on the ground. (64)
As with Oliver’s barbaric instinct to create an enemy scapegoat, first through his comments about cleaning out the ghetto, then through his decapitation of the African-American weatherman, whom he perceives as a threat to his dominance of the studio qua bunker, a radio commentator on the World Trade Center disaster, who immediately jumps to the conclusion that the airplane crash is a terrorist act, proclaims the American people will demand a violent reprisal: "So Lawrence Eagleburger said that George Bush needs to respond quickly and go after terrorism wherever terrorism exists, indicating that even if we don’t know for sure that they were the people directly responsible, we must go after those who support Osama bin Laden and who have done so in the past." (150)
The transcriptions, as Goldsmith suggests in his “Afterword,” are compelling when what Charles Bernstein calls the linguistic “veil” of an ordered society that abides by the rule of law, justice, and fair play comes apart and an anarchistic political unconscious, one raw, vengeance based, often racist, and filled with bloodlust, comes to the foreground.[15] Put another way, Goldsmith reveals what American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin referred to as the nation’s tendency to regenerate through violence and maybe even what Freud would consider to be a national death drive.[16]
V. The Meat the Butcher Brings Home
In his introduction to The Believer interview, Dave Mandl states: "Goldsmith’s work forces a drastic rethinking of what a book or text can be. Incorporating elements of surrealism, concretism, and sound poetry, his writing takes pleasure in words as things of beauty (or manipulable items of data) in and of themselves. His texts—filtered and itemized—go well beyond traditional “list poems,” betraying an almost Asperger’s-like attraction to organization and categorization on a grand scale. His enthusiastic use of the advanced copy-and-paste techniques of the internet age pushes the limits of the postmodern remix or Situationist-style détournement. At the same time, his work is a comment on (and an undisguised cheering-on of) the obsolescence of authorship and originality."
Mandl reads Goldsmith as an aesthetic purist, an art for art’s saker. His focus is not on semantics or mimesis: “his writing takes pleasure in words as things of beauty (or manipulable items of data) in and of themselves.” And yet I am struck by how much emotion Goldsmith wrings out of the second-rate material he appropriates.[17] In chapter one, for example, I re-entered, as if for the first time, the drama unfolding in the Big D through the Dallas radio station KLIF’s broadcast of the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963. The transcript includes advertisements for Thanksgiving turkeys, Armour cold cuts, Hamm’s beer, as well as hokey pop songs by Sandra Dee. Like a message in a bottle, the transcript encapsulates a period before CNN and Sirius satellite radio contributed to the homogenization of news and entertainment resources, as well as before the Internet and Social Media, when local disc jockeys, ma and pa grocery stores, and regional musical stylings were predominant. There is an amateurish, rough-hewn quality to the broadcast, and this is so not only because of the colossal task the ill-equipped radio crew faced of narrating a traumatic event. It is also because the reporters are not professional crisis managers in the mode of Anderson Cooper, whose hair remains (like Warren Zevon’s Werewolf) perfect even during thunderstorms and whose CNN-signature rain jacket creates the aura of a L.L Bean catalogue section for Disaster Wear. Goldsmith could have selected a transcript of CBS anchor Walter Cronkite – the “most trusted man in America” -- as he calmly reports in his signature baritone, first, of Dallas TV station KRLD’s “unconfirmed rumor” that the President is dead, then a few minutes later still calmly informs viewers that CBS reporter Dan Rather confirmed the death rumor, and then, in the most iconic portion of the broadcast, reads a paper that has been placed on his desk, “the flash apparently official,” that the President is dead.[18] But Cronkite would have been the far less imaginative choice than transcribing amateurish KLIF’s coarse stylings.
I want to claim, however outrageously, Goldsmith as an auteur (albeit closer to Godard or Kieslowski than to Hitchcock or Spielberg) in that he reframes a new type of realism by selecting and shaping the transcripts (without altering their wording) that possess aesthetic dimensions such as rhythm, pacing, juxtaposition, and implied ironic meanings. In the JFK chapter, Goldsmith need not adjust the KLIF broadcast for readers to notice tensions, ironies, and resonances between and among the advertisements, pop music lyrics, and the flash news bulletins suggesting an emergent crisis in downtown Dallas. Still rendered on a local scale, we notice how the nascent branded consumerism, which will determine American culture over the next half century, informs us of the socioeconomics and habits of the station’s lower to lower middle class target audience: “Armour, the meat the butchers bring home”(12) and the Armour lunch meat that “sticks to your ribs” (13); the Hamm’s beer (“someone is opening and enjoying a Hamm’s beer every three seconds”(14); the Robert Hall “holiday dresses priced as low as $7.97” (12). Turkey, lunchmeat, obsessive beer drinking, all take on grim connotations when read in relation to the anticipated slaughter of JFK. How can we not read (and not think Goldsmith wants us to read?) of lunchmeat that sticks to your bones as a kind of slang foreshadowing to the impending murder?
Goldsmith's transcripts trouble notions of "common knowledge" in ways that, weirdly, create suspense where one could not have imagined anticipation – enjoyable tension – concerning the outcome to a drama that occurred fifty years ago. In an uncanny way, history is suspended. The drama’s conclusion remains uncomposed, even as, simultaneously, we already know the outcome is never in doubt. Do we know? Amidst the beer and pre-Thanksgiving turkey ads and the torch songs of loneliness, break downs, and tears as sung by Sandra Dee and Tommy Rowe, the first sketchy and “unconfirmed” reports from the “KLIF Mobile Unit No. 4 in downtown Dallas” (14) of “confused as this moment” (14) hearsay about random shots fired at the “presidential motorcade as it passed through downtown Dallas” (15). Hints of a crisis. Through the first pages of the transcript, however, KLIF does not consider the information sufficient to suspend discussion of “Sandra Dee and her troubles” and previews of her latest movie at the “Interstate Palace Theater” (15). As in W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” in which “everything turns away /Quite leisurely from the disaster,” we sense a cognitive distortion in the broadcaster’s urge to minimize the possibility of a serious crisis so as to return to normalcy, which is to say, to fantasy, to “Sandra Dee and her troubles,” even as rumors of a puncture in the national symbolic begin to intrude on the radio waves. What is it about the human psyche, Goldsmith implicitly asks, that we can read a transcript concerning an event already known, and yet we, like the first listeners to the Dallas broadcast that resists the reality that something extraordinary has happened, continue to read the transcripts as if it were a chronicle of real time events, rather than synchronic recitation?:
“He has been wounded, but he is alive (28); “It is now being reported to us by Parkland that president Kennedy is receiving blood transfusions” (29). “A special carton of blood, apparently for transfusion purposes, has been rushed into the emergency ward. Two Dallas police officers carried that carton. The president’s body was limp as he was carried into the hospital, cradled in the arms of his wife” (31). “Two Catholic priests who were summoned to the scene – one has administered the last sacrament of the Church to the president, but at last report, he apparently is still alive and how critical his injuries may be we have not yet been able to determine” (35).
What is the trick of mind that can simultaneously suspend (repress) knowledge of knowledge of how an archetypal American historical narrative will end? How can I emotionally go through the developing narrative as reported by KLIF as if hope remains that – this time, this telling --the worst fear will not occur? (Do we not live in a period of hypertextual multiple endings?). Can we not choose the happy ending version?
Goldsmith’s transcripts teach us that the broadcasters initial response is to deny the event’s significance, and to return to fantasy, and then to defer acknowledgement of the trauma. After the deferral strategy fails, the transcripts reveal the third strategy to avoid shock is to tie the crisis to a myth, in this case one that displaces the bullet riddled bodies into a tale of spiritual transformation. Consciously or unconsciously KLIF broadcasters transform JFK into the martyred Jesus and Jackie O into Mother Mary. “Mrs. Kennedy reportedly had cradled her husband’s head in her lap during the speedy trip to Parkland Hospital” (24). In connecting JFK to Jesus I am thinking of the blood, especially that description of the “special carton of blood, apparently for transfusion purposes,” which has a sacramental quality that connects medical work as a form of modern shamanism to the priestly last rites that follow. Even the earlier comment that “He has been wounded, but he is alive” takes on Christographic resonance. Camelot has become Calvary. It is as if confronting that state Keats described as “negative capability”: “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” -- is intolerable to the reporters. They must divert attention from the immediate crisis by displacing the upsetting event and reframing it within preexisting paradigms of commonly known symbols, histories, and myth.
After experimenting with strategies of denial, deferral, and transformation of a story about a ripped apart human being into a religious ritual involving a spiritual ascent via a sacramental transition from body to spirit, the last part of the JFK chapter revealed the comically bizarre, and yet traumatically poignant, way the reporters frame JFK’s death by "historicizing” it. Reporters repeat the fact that a second Johnson (Lyndon) will become president after an assassination -- at one point the reporter stumbles on who and when ("post civil war era") -- and there is perfunctory reference to McKinley as the only other 20th century example. We also hear of then-prominent (now nearly forgotten) news of Truman's assassination attempt from 1950. As much as the reporters deny, defer, mythologize, and historicize (one could say trivialize) to contain damage to the national imaginary, we notice how the radio commentary reveals information that opens, rather than closes, an event that remains unresolved fifty years later: “And, incidentally, on the fifth floor of the downtown building from which the president and the governor were shot, they have now discovered empty rifle hulls and there is also indication that more than one man is involved in the attack, Joe?//We have had descriptions of three men, actually – two white men and one colored man – as being possible suspects in this shooting, but at present, a twenty-five-year-old white man has been taken into custody” (38).
Announcers try to contain the tragedy within a mythic template, but they open up the still pressing issue of whether there was a single gunman or if a conspiracy took place. There is also a peculiar denial of any conspiracy motive even though no one has put forward accusations of governmental involvement in the murder: “There was absolutely no warning that this would take place. Of course these things always come so spontaneously. Should there be any warning, then the president would be better protected an alternate route could have been prepared” (32).
In the John F. Kennedy chapter, Goldsmith’s conceptual aesthetics differs from Cartier-Bresson’s poetics of immediacy, but in ways less obvious the chapter’s form also differs from Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series, which Goldsmith self-consciously emulates. In Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors on Modern Art (2002), I argued that Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series, as with his representations of Marilyn Monroe’s face as a series of transparent images that trial off like smoke rings, uses techniques that disentangle him from identifying with victims of plane crashes, car wrecks, or a man who jumps from the window ledge of a mental hospital. Warhol distances himself and his audience from other citizens who have suffered bodily disfiguration by representing trauma through the grid, repetition, and colorful makeovers of images he discovered in the tabloid press.
Warhol’s establishment of an impregnable boundary between the image of the human body in pain and the “the thing itself” – the actual lived experience of persons in trouble – links his art to a consumerist ideology and connects his art to the politics of abjection that defines the “stranger” and the “unclean other” in Kristeva. Advertisers construct a sanitized realm of “elsewhere” by associating personal contentment and safety with hygienic products. Like commercials for detergents and cleaning products such as Brillo scouring pads, Warhol’s art style promises to remove spectators from evidence that human existence resides within the vulnerable body.
Goldsmith is, in subject matter, repeating Warhol’s (already repetitive) process of appropriating news media accounts of American Deaths and Disasters for a concept-driven fine arts poetry project. And yet, as I have stated throughout this essay, my reading experience of the Goldsmith transcripts does not enable me to feel removed from the existential qualities of vulnerability, uncertainty, and semantic rupture that I have associated with Lacan’s “The Real” and with the concept of a traumatic discourse, rather than a detached and contained discourse about trauma. Although Goldsmith, especially in the JFK chapter, like Warhol in his Brillo Pads and Soup Cans, emphasizes the relationship between consumerism and the body, I am suggesting Goldsmith associates, rather than detaches, the radio station’s advertising for lunch meats, Sandra Dee movies, Hamm’s beer, and turkey dinners with the “bulletins” regarding news of a shooting at the presidential motorcade in downtown Dallas. By contrast to Warhol, Goldsmith thus encourages readers to mix, often ironically, the realms of commercial slogans (the Armour lunch meat that sticks to your bones) and the embodied tragedy. It is Goldsmith’s resistance to formality, his refusal to edit out what I have called the “indecisive moments,” that distinguishes his appropriations from Warhol’s more aesthetically sophisticated renderings of Life magazine photos through lithographic techniques.
VI. Is there some way to close these doors?
A history buff (that is, someone who peruses the History Channel when nothing else is on), I have seen the color footage from June 6, 1968 of Robert F. Kennedy’s drained white face draped in a towel to stanch the blood as the stricken candidate for the 1968 Democratic nomination for the presidency, who had just made an acceptance speech (“On to Chicago!”) after winning the California Primary, and thus setting up a titanic floor fight to decide the head of the ticket in Chicago at the upcoming convention, lay supine on the ballroom floor with the phrase “Rafer get the gun” echoing in the background. Given my vivid acquaintance with the material, how is it that I felt a chill when reading the “eyewitness account from Andrew West of Mutual News in Los Angeles” (175) as Goldsmith transcribes it in chapter two?
Part of my response was driven by Goldsmith’s juxtaposition of the intensely vivid RFK broadcast with the comparatively detached JFK transmission that preceded it. I was struck by the different tone and relationship of reporter to spectacle in the JFK and the RFK transcripts, as well as by how the RFK tape references the JFK narrative as a template for representing a tragic public death. Like the transcript “of a 911 call made by Patti Nielson, an injured substitute teacher, from the school’s library during the shooting” (175) in chapter five’s “Columbine” school shooting, the RFK tape registers a traumatic testimony of on-site reporter Andrew West of Mutual News’s own near death experience.[19] Relationships between participant and witness, terror and testimony, the language of disaster and the disaster itself, are thus indelibly blurred in West’s discourse, as will be the case when Patti in the Columbine library frantically tells a 911 dispatcher “[whispering] He’s yelling everybody get up right now. [More shots] He’s in the library. He’s shooting at everybody” (124-125). Here is West on RFK:
It could…Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen? It is possible he has…not only Senator Kennedy…Oh my God! Senator Kennedy has been shot. And another man, a Kennedy campaign manager. And possibly shot in the head. I am right here. Rafer Johnson has a hold of a man who apparently has fired the shot. He has fired the shot. He still has the gun. The gun is pointed at me right at this moment. I hope they can get the gun out of his hand. Bevery careful. Get that gun! Get the gun! Get the gun! Stay away from the gun!//Get the gun!//Stay away from the gun! His hand is frozen. Get his thumb! Get his thumb! Get his thumb! Take a hold of his thumb and break it if you have to! Get his thumb! Get away from the barrel! Get away from the barrel, man!//Watch it with the gun. Watch it with the gun!//Look out for the gun! Okay. Alright. That’s it, Rafer! Get it! Get the gun, Rafer!//Get the gun! Get the gun!//Okay now hold onto the guy!//Get the gun! Get the gun!//Hold on to him! Hold on to him! Ladies and gentlemen, they have the gun away from the man. They’ve got the gun. I can’t see…I can’t see the man. I can’t see who it is. Senator Kennedy, right now, is on the ground. He has been shot. This is a…this is…What is he? Wait a minute. Hold him! Hold him! Hold him! We don’t want another Oswald! Hold him Rafer, we don’t want another Oswald! (43-44)
The passage is extraordinary. If there is heroism to be found in the ugly event, some must be assigned to how Andrew West performs a verbal high wire act. Like a 911 dispatcher instructing a terror victim, he coaches former Olympian (and Kennedy aid) Rafer Johnson on how to handle the gun frozen in Sirhan Sirhan’s hand. He maintains a degree of journalistic etiquette (addressing the radio audience as “Ladies and Gentleman”) while reporting his own danger – “The gun is pointed at me right at this moment.” West then historicizes the event in relation to the JFK assassination of five years earlier (another Oswald). At points, West thus maintains an extraordinary degree of rhetorical clarity, but the passage also illustrates how discursive breakdowns create in(decisive) moments in which the uncertainty of experience and the inadequacy of language intrude upon even West’s stoic reportage: “I can’t see…I can’t see the man….This is a…this is…What is he?" (44). And a bit later, as West contemplates Senator Kennedy’s level of consciousness, we sense he is also reflecting on his clouded state of mind: "Right at this moment…the senator apparently…we can’t see if he is still conscious or not. Can you see if he is conscious?//What?//Can you see if he is conscious?//I don’t know. He is half-conscious.//He is half-conscious. And ladies…we can’t see, ladies and gentlemen….C’mon. Out! Out! Out! Is there some way to close these doors? Is there any doors here?//Get out! Get out!//Out through the…out through the exit. Let’s go. Out we go.//Out….//Repetition in my speech. I have no alternative. The shock is so great. My mouth is dry” (45).
In the 2011 interview with The Believer, Goldsmith states: "The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something 'meaningful,' we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which, as you say, could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning."
Contra Goldsmith, I do not, primarily, regard passages such as the Andrew West report or the 911 call by Patti in Columbine in terms of sonic or visual features of the words. Nor do I open up a structural account of the discourse involving “sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways.” When I read the West report or Patti’s 911 call from Columbine I forget theoretical issues of appropriation, conceptual art, questions of what is an author in a digital era, or that I am reading a 1968 transcript in a small press art book by a provocative “uncreative writer” published in 2013 from material Goldsmith discovered in the web netherworld. I am moved…aesthetically moved…emotionally moved…existentially stung…by West’s self-consciousness about his unconsciousness, about his blindness. His language is not merely disaster reportage, but the language of disaster. Just as I am moved when the 911 dispatcher asks Patti for her name, and she, quietly, tenderly, like a frightened child, tells it, I am captivated by how West's disorientation is rendered with bracing clarity. He testifies to a situation in which space, time, and identity -- what is inside and what is outside, where is here and there, who am I and who are you -- the fundamental differences that make the world visible and legible, have come unglued: “Is there some way to close these doors? Is there any doors here?//Get out! Get out!//Out through the…out through the exit. Let’s go. Out we go.//Out….//” Doors – of awareness of the “real,” that divide interior and exterior -- have, in Whitman’s terms, been removed from their jambs. There is no structure to close the wound. It is a language of disaster.
VII. Conclusion: Let Us Return to the Tonight Show
The seventh and final chapter is devoted to Michael Jackson. What compelled Goldsmith to conclude his series with Jackson’s death? By deciding to end with Jackson, is Goldsmith’s point that by June 25, 2009, more than 40 years after the JFK Ur-tragedy and twenty-years after the death of John Lennon, the other singer to whom Goldsmith devotes a chapter, we have traveled so far down the postmodern road of pseudo-events that our fascination with celebrity and fame outstrips more serious concerns with political leaders such as the Kennedy brothers or with working class heroes such as Lennon?
A common thread in the reportage on the seven events is that commentators, in their desire to bring coherence, order, control, and meaning to violent incidents that puncture the imaginary realm of tranquility, tend to search for patterns -- precedents, chance coincidences -- that would reframe what is happening into a historical narrative. As mentioned, the JFK assassination is almost immediately cast in relation to Lincoln and James Garfield. RFK is, of course, placed, again immediately, in the context of Dallas: "As happened in the aftermath of President Kennedy, the scene of shock and turmoil here was nationally advertised and televised, just as it was when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald." (64)
John Lennon’s murder is, unintentionally comically, linked to JFK and MLK through the miniscule factoid that Mark David Chapman had three names, just like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray. The Space Challenger explosion is in chapter four linked (and distinguished from) the Gemini disaster in which three U.S. astronauts were killed in a fire during a training session and, in a Cold War swipe, to a Russian cosmonaut accident that was not widely reported (because of Soviet secrecy); 9/11 is (again almost immediately) framed in terms of Pearl Harbor with repetition of FDR’s phrase “a day that will in infamy” quickly evoked as precedent for an attack on the “homeland.” Suggesting a ludicrous diminishment of what counts as an arrangement of related “disasters” of national or international import, Jackson’s death is understood as part of a triad of celebrity passings that include Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.[20] (The McMahon death resonates back to the news of John Lennon’s death because it was reported as an interruption to The Tonight Show. In the context of McMahon’s death, the phrase from early in the Lennon section, “We now return to the Tonight Show,” takes on enhanced resonance.)
Ed McMahon and Farah Fawcett fall into the category of celebrities with little or no discernible talent. They are famous for being famous. And yet a commentator in the Michael Jackson section does suggest how ordinary people in a culture obsessed with entertainment, and that associates television appearance with the validation of real presence, measure time and change via celebrity news: "It seems like yesterday we were watching Farrah Fawcett in her youth and beauty – and sixty-two years old to me is still young – you don’t think of Farrah Fawcett being sixty-two years old. You don’t think of Michael Jackson as being fifty. It’s…it’s just strange." (158)
Few would argue that Ed McMahon (with the possible exception of his extraordinary ability to laugh deeply at Johnny’s hackneyed bits, his description of martini drinking as “sipping a cloud,” and telethon support of Jerry’s Kids) or Farah Fawcett contributed to American culture in major ways (with the possible exception of the famous poster of Fawcett in a skimpy red bathing suit that provided a site for masturbatory fantasy for countless adolescent boys from the 1970s), and yet the commentator has a point. There is something unsettling about thinking of Farah’s iconic frosted haired, Texas-sized smile, and those perky nipples evident beneath the bathing suit as cancer ridden and dead at 62. Similarly, as the commentator mentions, the image of Michael Jackson, unconscious and not breathing at age 50 in an emergency vehicle on his way to the UCLA hospital contrasts with iconic images of Jackson as a round faced child with a big Afro as lead singer for the Jackson Five and of his performance of the “moonwalk” during his Thriller phase. The contradiction between celebrated images such as the Fawcett poster or of Michael Jackson performing on MTV, which seem immortal, and the reality that the flesh and blood human beings associated with the images continue to age, face disease, and eventually disappear becomes an uncanny aspect of their histories that may explain why their deaths seem so compelling to us.
I wondered about Goldsmith’s decision to select Michael Jackson as the subject of his final chapter, but more generally I pondered his selection of the seven deaths and disasters over the last fifty years. Certainly, selectivity is part of creativity, revealing through what is concealed.[21] Few would argue with his decision to begin with JFK. As his book reveals, the JFK event was certainly a paradigmatic tragedy – in part because so much of it was captured on film or else unfolded in real time on the relatively new medium of television. It was also, as Goldsmith notes, a template, or master narrative structure, through which many of the other six deaths and disasters would be discussed and represented. But did Michael Jackson’s death really change “a nation, forever”? Even as the transcribed reporters struggle to separate fact from fiction, I wondered about how the focus on these seven events serves the national imaginary in concealing, rather than (only) revealing details about American disasters. Has our intense media focus on terrible things that happen to celebrated public figures – politicians, singers, space explorers – or to iconic symbols of American power – the Challenger, the Twin Towers -- erased, ignored or displaced attention from larger, structural disasters that occur every day to anonymous people in America (or internationally to serve American interests)? Could one argue that media obsession with high profile deaths concentrates a population’s attention on the realm of fantasy? With the possible exception of Columbine, do all of Goldsmith’s selections illustrate events that distract attention from problems such as structural poverty, racism, disparities in education, and the culture of violence that may underwrite the more sensational terrors?
Works Cited
Anderson, John M. “Review of Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 by Richard Slotkin.” Amazon.Com. Accessed online June 3, 2013. http://www.amazon.com/Regeneration-Through-Violence-Mythology-1600-1860/dp/0806132299.com
Bernstein, Charles. “An Mosaic for Convergence.” electronic book review 6 (Winter 1997)
http:/www.altx.comebr/ebr6/ebr6.htm (accessed September 1, 2013).
Bonnet, Gerard. “Repetition Compulsion.” Gale Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. http://www.answers.com/topic/repetition-compulsion. Accessed online June 16 2013.
Duerfahrd, Lance. “The Pillow in the Cemetery: The Bad Film Experience and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.” Prism. 16-18.
Edmundson, Mark. Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Lacan: On the Structure of the Psyche. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 2012. Accessed online June 17, 2013. Purdue U. http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.htmle.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Brooklyn: powerhouse Books, 2013.
_____. “The Bride Stripped Bare: Nude Media and the Dematerialization of Tony Curtis.” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. P. 49-64.
_____ . Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
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http://www.believermag.com/issues/201110/?read=interview_goldsmith.
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Morris, Adalaide. “New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write. In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. 1-47.
Morris, Daniel. Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors on Modern Art. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Conceptual Bridges/Digital Tunnels: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic.” Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2010.
_____. “Screening the Page/ Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and The Differential Model.” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. 143-164.
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Notes
[1] In a manifesto, Goldsmith has stated, conceptual “writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom . . . as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus. . . . entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. (Perloff 200)
[2] Susan Schultz writes that Bernstein, “defines ‘frame lock’ as ‘an insistence on a univocal surface, minimal shifts of mood either within paragraphs or between paragraphs, exclusion of extraneous or contradictory material, and tone restricted to the narrow affective envelope of sobriety, neutrality, objectivity, authoritativeness, or deanimated abstraction’” (3).
[3] Goldsmith argues in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age that “context is the new content” (3). Goldsmith continues, "The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist."
[4] Goldsmith describes “nude media” in relation to his work with UbuWeb: “In thinking about the way that UbuWeb (and many other types of file sharing systems) distribute their wares, I’ve come up with a term: ‘nude media.’ What I mean by this is that once, say, an MP3 file is downloaded from the context of a site such as UbuWeb, it’s free and naked, stripped bare of the normative external signifiers that tend to give as much meaning to an artwork as the contents of the artwork itself. Unadorned with branding or scholarly liner notes, emanating from no authoritative source, these objects are nude, not clothed. Thrown into open peer-to-peer distribution systems, nude media files often lose even their historical significance and blur into free-floating sound works, traveling in circles that they would not normally reach if clad in their conventional clothing” (52).
[5] Prior to Seven American Deaths and Disasters, as Marjorie Perloff reports, Goldsmith published “Soliloquy (2001)--the transcription of every word Goldsmith spoke for a one-week period in New York City, recording only the poet’s own words, not those of the many people he spoke to “ (Perloff). Perloff continues: “Traffic is the second volume of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Trilogy: the first, Weather (2005) transcribes a year’s worth of daily weather reports for the Tri-State Area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) from the New York radio station WINS (1010 AM); the second, (2007), records a twenty-four hour period of WINS “Panasonic Jam Cam [Camera]” New York traffic reports at ten-minute intervals on the first day of a holiday weekend; the third, Sports (2008), contains a complete broadcast transcription of an entire (five-hour) baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox in August 2006, as reported by the well-known Yankees commentators John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman.”
[6] Adelaide Morris defines the term “posthuman”: “Although the term ‘posthuman’ has been defined in various ways, the common element in its use is a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. [T]his synergy has profound implications for the category ‘literature’ and its subset ‘poetry’ as they enter into combinations with networked and programmable machines to emerge in such amalgams as ‘electronic literature’ or ‘e-poetries’” (4).
[7] In “An Mosaic for Convergence,” Bernstein addresses the interpersonal dimension of web-based poetry: “Poems exist much more crucially in a social, in the sense of interpersonal, space than is often acknowledged. We have less single lyric poems than interactions and interconnections among many poetic sites of production. The meaning of the work is in the interconnectivity and not in any single site. The Internet suggests many remarkable opportunities for collaboration, discussion, exchange, distribution. “
[8] As Mark Edmundson has written in Why Read?: "For Emerson, the reader can do more than discover the language of herself in great writing. Emerson’s reader uses a book as an imaginative goad. He can begin compounding visions of experience that pass beyond what’s manifest in the book at hand. This presumably, is what happened when Shakespeare read Holinshed’s Chronicles or even Plutarch’s Lives. These are major sources for the plays, yes, but in reading them Shakespeare made their sentences doubly significant, and the sense of their authors as broad as the world (4-5).
[9] In her discussion of Soliloquy, Perloff underscores the deeply urban texture of a work, which offers “a network of references that gives us a very particular portrait of the artist as young hustler: a New York artist, dependent on New York, running around the city, talking on his cell phone, making contacts, networking, eating out, trying different foods, meeting people for coffee, running into old acquaintances at all sorts of art galleries and events.” (159). Another Goldsmith text, Day (2003), also emphasizes Goldsmith’s focus on New York City culture – it is a “nude” typescript of “every word of the Friday, September 1, 2000 issue of The New York Times” (Norton 700).
[10] Returning to Freud, Bonnet continues, “Repetition compulsion is an inherent, primordial tendency in the unconscious that impels the individual to repeat certain actions, in particular, the most painful or destructive ones” (Gale answers online). Freud believed the repetition compulsion was related to the Death Drive, hence making the topic of Goldsmith’s volume an especially prescient one for him to explore the primal pull to repeat traumatic episodes. Fundamentally conservative in nature, and, in his initial understanding of it a productive mechanism related to the process of therapeutic transference, Freud in his later work understood the compulsion to repeat as a destructive principle. He associated the urge to repeat with oddly satisfying experiences of guilt and self-hatred: "Freud associated it with primary masochism, in which the subject turns violence against himself and subjugates his libido to it, endlessly repeating certain damaging patterns based on experiences rooted at the deepest levels within the self. He theorized that this is a way of tolerating feelings of guilt. The individual manifests a tendency to destroy and suffer, which brings with it feelings of overwhelming satisfaction, all of which are vestiges of a time when the individual did not yet have a sense of reality." (Bonnet)
[11] Goldsmith writes, “ I limited my choices to the American post-Kennedy era partly for autobiographical reasons: all seven events depicted here were ones that I lived through which changed me, and a nation, forever. “ (Goldsmith, 173) Hyperbole – a form of cognitive distortion -- seems to be a signature aspect of disaster discourse.
[12] The “Warhol website” informs us: “Drawing on iconic film and photographic imagery, Kota Ezawa creates vividly colored, stylized animations that speak to the role of mass media in shaping collective memory. The artist represents emotionally charged events through abstract renderings that are shown as light boxes, film, and video projections. With The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ezawa investigates how film contributes to American mythologies surrounding celebrity and violence. The work depicts the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Ezawa recreated two film segments: the fictional account of Lincoln's assassination in Fords Theater, as portrayed in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Abraham Zapruder's amateur 8mm reel of the Kennedy assassination. Both films have had a controversial history as contested accounts: one as a racist fictional reenactment, the other an evidentiary document. Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/123366#ixzz2V6nIXKtr, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
[13] Himself a perceptive reader of such (in)decisive moments of linguistic rupture, Goldsmith comments on the excruciating pleasure of bad reportage: "Unhinged from their media personalities, these DJs became ordinary citizens, more like guys in a bar than representations of purported rationality and truth." (172) The slick curtain of media was torn, revealing acrobatic linguistic improvisations. There was a sense of things spinning out of control: facts blurred with speculation as the broadcasters attempted to furiously weave convincing narratives from shards of half-truths.
[14] Dino Felluga writes: “As far as humans are concerned, however, ‘the real is impossible,’ as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very "reality"), although it also drives Lacan's sense of jouissance.“
[15] Alan Golding reports: “The veil suggests to Bernstein the materiality of language: ‘Our language is our veil, but one that too often is made invisible. Yet, hiding the veil of language, its wordness, its textures, its obstinate physicality, only makes matters worse” (1999b, 32). (Golding, 273).
[16] A John M. Anderson review of Slotkin’s study of regeneration through violence reports: "On the basis of his sweeping 1975 survey of American Colonial and early Republican literature, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, Richard Slotkin has approached the pop guru status of archetypal excavators such as Joseph Campbell, despite the fact that his work emphasizes the dark undercurrents of American culture. His argument in Regeneration is that, as the British colonists established their own societies in the wilderness, they expressed their regional desires for territorial expansion and self-rule by reinventing their history. Their narratives, according to Slotkin, revolved around frontiersmen who internalized, then disciplined, the "savagery" of their new environments, using their newfound mastery of nature to transform the wilderness into a revitalized civilization. Slotkin begins by examining how narratives of King Philip's War transformed New England from a demon-haunted Puritan enclave to a region where Indian killing represented progress and prosperity. Daniel Boone's paradoxical backwoods mixture of aggression and reflection serves as an icon for the rest of Regeneration, which emphasizes sectional variations of the Indian hunter myth, while analyzing the more "serious" literary endeavors of Cooper, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville. Regeneration reads at times like a noir-ish variation on Frederick Jackson Turner's influential The Frontier in American History, a vision in which genocide, white supremacy, and environmental exploitation are the real engines driving the nation's expansion.” (Amazon.Com website)
[17] Closer to my own response are Goldsmith’s comments from the July/August 2009 issue of Poetry, which features a little anthology of “Flarf and Conceptual Writing,” edited by Goldsmith. In the Introduction, he declares: “Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry” (quoted in Perloff, 26)
[18] The Cronkite report remains almost unbearably gripping to watch because of his impeccably measured response to the rumors, his continued ability to report the facts – that a prayer vigil is taking place in the hall where Kennedy was to have spoken, that 400 extra off duty law officers were put in place because diplomat Adlai Stevenson had been attacked in October, that a priest was administering the last rites to JFK, so that when Cronkite, taking off his black plastic glasses to wipe away a tear in the moments after he reports the confirmation of the death of JFK to a national television audience, it is like the embodiment of the national symbolic – the baritone voice orator with the neutral (Midwestern) pronunciation – has been stunned, even as he recovers his balance to announce that Vice President Johnson will be sworn into office. Interesting how in my mind I think of the IMAGE of Cronkite, that faded white gray static, more than the sound of his voice or words. Do I see Goldsmith’s broadcasts in terms of material visual image in the same way?
[19] In chapter five on Columbine, Patti communicates her terror with the 911 dispatcher: “Um, kids are screaming, the teachers, um, are, y’know, trying to take control of things. We need police here” (121). “He’s outside? /He’s outside of this hall./Outside of the hall or inside…/He’s in the hall. I’m sorry. There are alarms and things going off” (122)….” I said what’s going on out there? Well it’s probably a cap gun. Probably a video production, you know, they do these videos….Right. And the kids…Well, I said, that’s not, you know, a play gun, a real gun, I was goin’ out there to say no, and I went…[Another shot, very loud] Oh, my God! That was really close!.... I think he’s in the library. What’s your name, ma’am? [whispering] My name is Patti. Patti ? [whispering] He’s yelling everybody get up right now. [More shots] He’s in the library. He’s shooting at everybody. Okay. I have him in the library shooting at students and…the lady in the library, I have on the phone…Okay. Try to keep as many people down as you can” (124-125).
[20] In an email to the author, Goldsmith addressed my skepticism about his selection of Jackson as an iconic “death”: “Students, I find, are usually more moved by Michael Jackson than by the Kennedys, who are cold, distant, historical figures. Conversely, people of a certain age, tend to dismiss my inclusion of Jackson as cynical.”
[21] Goldsmith mentions he didn’t transcribe the assassinations of MLK or Malcolm X because there were no recordings of immediate reports or witnesses available and so recordings of those events merely offered the normal controlled reportage we hear in typical news accounts of disasters. Goldsmith notices that the recordings he does transcribe reveal a disturbing, if not terribly surprising, dose of racism and xenophobia, and so his points about choosing not to account for the deaths of Malcolm and MLK may speak to his own self-consciousness about this issue.
(In)decisive Moments:
On Kenneth Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters
I. The (In)Decisive Moment
Some avant-garde scholars and poets are turning to the World Wide Web itself as a post-modern resource for a peculiar kind of self-expression. “While traditional notions of writing are primarily focused on ‘originality’ and ‘creativity,’ the digital environment fosters new skill sets that include ‘manipulation’ and ‘management’ of the heaps of already existent and ever-increasing language,” writes Kenneth Goldsmith in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age (15). Lyric poetry, especially in the age of new media, which even supporters such as Goldsmith acknowledge may transform a writer into something resembling “a programmer” (1), gives ordinary people the opportunity to gain or reclaim their voice or voices. In Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013), Goldsmith, who has been at the forefront of the “uncreative writing” movement in our digital era, turns his attention away from his primarily (and ironically) lyric emphasis on recurrent, quotidian, and domestic experiences typical for a contemporary U.S. urbanite – weather reports, traffic patterns, New York Yankees and The New York Times transcripts, minute descriptions of body movements (blinks, lifts a coffee cup, blinks, tugs at the back of his pants), and transcriptions of only his half of conversations, sometimes concerning the quality of the paneer at a new Indian joint, sometimes concerning his relationship to players in New York’s art world. His “new” (I put the word “new” in scare quotation marks because, of course, Goldsmith’s career is based on challenging the association of literary merit with the recently made) book’s focus is on contemporary American history, but in a decidedly uncreative, Goldsmithian manner.[1] As in his other books, Goldsmith in Seven American Deaths and Disasters (2013) challenges typical notions of authorship, imagination, and creativity. At the same time, by noting how the radio personalities who originally broadcast upsetting news reports were already referencing prior tropes and narratives based in earlier American crises, Goldsmith teaches us that even “eyewitness” and “on the spot” journalism is already framed (and thus contained) through discursive conventions that deflect attention from the disorienting occurrences happening in front of the reporter’s eyes. Discussing Charles Bernstein’s aversion to “frame lock,” the scholar of avant-garde poetics Alan Golding writes: "The digital medium provides Bernstein with a much wider palette with which to counter ‘the deadly boring fetishization…of expository ordering”[….] Play with color and layout allow further possibilities for interrupting the tonal seriousness and structural predictability of normative academic writing – what Bernstein calls elsewhere ‘frame lock’ and ‘its cousin tone jam’ (1999b, 90)” (Golding, 269).[2] Sensitive to how on-the-spot broadcasters have “frame locked” and “tone jammed” a half-century of key American events to avoid disrupting the national imaginary, Goldsmith’s eccentric play with media frames – radio, internet, small press poetry publication – follows Bernstein in destabilizing predictable responses to bad news.
In an interview with The Believer (2011), Goldsmith interprets his projects as philosophical investigations: "My books are better thought about than read. They’re insanely dull and unreadable; I mean, do you really want to sit down and read a year’s worth of weather reports or a transcription of the 1010 WINS traffic reports 'on the ones' (every ten minutes) over the course of a twenty-four-hour period? I don’t. But they’re wonderful to talk about and think about, to dip in and out of, to hold, to have on your shelf. In fact, I say that I don’t have a readership, I have a thinkership. I guess this is why what I do is called “conceptual writing.” The idea is much more important than the product."
Goldsmith is considering the place of poetry today as a peculiar form of creative expression in a New Media environment that, he argues in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age, is more about “reconstruct[ing language] that already exist[s]” than it is about “the creation of new texts” (3).[3] Trained in sculpture at the Rhode Island School of Design in the 1980s – before his shift to conceptual writing and online archival work via UbuWeb, he designed sculptures of poetry books that emphasized the materiality of language, such as by e.e. cummings -- Goldsmith’s comments link appropriative writing based in reframing what he calls “nude media” -- transcribed broadcasts he located on the World Wide Web -- to avant-garde visual art by Dadaists such as Duchamp, Pop Artists such as Warhol, whose interviews Goldsmith has edited, and conceptualists such as Sol Lewitt.[4] Like Duchamp, Warhol and Lewitt, he emphasizes an intellectual -- “thinkership” – response to an artifact. In “conceptual writing,” he states, ”the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts.” Goldsmith’s comments may reflect how many readers have responded to earlier Goldsmith “junk” texts – weather reports, traffic information, baseball transcripts, and Goldsmith’s side of mundane conversations -- that the poet himself describes as “boring” and “unreadable.”[5] I suspect Katherine Hayles would describe his work as “post human” because it produces subjectivity through an interface of human activity with intelligent machines (in Goldsmith’s case the use of the web).[6] At the same time, Goldsmith himself notices in The Believer interview that his works create sites for interpersonal communication: “they’re wonderful to talk about.” Implicit in Goldsmith’s comment about how the transcripts serve as prompts for reflection and subsequent conversation are Charles Bernstein’s understanding in his online essay “An Mosaic for Convergence” (1997) of the potential for the internet to foster “interactions and interconnections among many sites of production” that enable us to better understand the “social” and “interpersonal” dimensions of poetry.[7] Goldsmith’s comment that his work is “wonderful to talk about” also echoes Emerson’s understanding in “The American Scholar” of interpretation as creative endeavor: "One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, ‘He that would bring home the wealth of the Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies.’ There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world." (Quoted in Edmundson p. 4)[8]
As Emerson would suppose, my disposition as reader of the transcribed “sentences [already made] doubly significant” by Goldsmith’s recontextualizing them in Seven American Deaths and Disasters transforms unsung source material into an “imaginative goad.” By coming to terms with re-presentation of hackneyed radio and television broadcasts concerning the deaths of John and Robert Kennedy, John Lennon and Michael Jackson, as well as the Space Shuttle Challenger and World Trade Tower disasters in the Wordsworthian situation of memory recollected in the tranquility of appraising a narrative repetition of the broadcasts, I experience an uncannily fresh response to “boring” and often slipshod reportage. My reaction to Seven American Deaths and Disasters thus differs from Goldsmith’s theoretical assessment of his project as interesting to readers primarily on a detached, intellectual level.
My strange enjoyment in reading Seven American Deaths and Disasters – as well as what makes the volume a displaced reflection of Goldsmith’s lived experience in line with prior “uncreative” works more obviously connected to his personal life as a New York City resident -- derives from the psychological conception of the Repetition Compulsion.[9] As Gerard Bonnet has noted, "Jacques Lacan (1978), who saw repetition compulsion as one of the four major concepts of psychoanalysis, along with the unconscious, transference, and the instincts. He used it as the basis for his distinction between jouissance (enjoyment) and pleasure, with jouissance being situated 'beyond the pleasure principle' as the desired result of repetition of the worst carried to its extreme.”[10]
In form and content, Goldsmith’s transcriptions are “repetition[s] of the worst carried to its extreme.” His book concerns prominent disasters that have befallen U.S. culture since 1963. In terms of form, Goldsmith has selected some of the stylistically “worst” broadcasts of eyewitness accounts of tragic events. What I will be calling (with a nod to Henri Cartier-Bresson) “indecisive moments” – the journalistic stammering inability to remain legible, denials of the trauma after such disavowals become unfeasible, informational missteps, and embarrassing outbursts that reveal unconscious racist, violent, and xenophobic impulses in the reporters – in short the “worstness” of the transcripts –- once reframed in the context of a Goldsmithian transcript -- become for me deeply moving and unsettling reflections on the limits of language to contain traumatic experience.
Given Goldsmith’s statement that with “conceptual writing, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts,” I found myself wondering: why is Goldsmith bent on theorizing his writings as avant-garde experiments in banality when, as Freud and Lacan have noted, the urge to repeat is such a psychologically telling gesture? What might be the underlying impulse for Goldsmith to repeat disasters? Why the guilt? Here I think his experience of 9/11 matters. He notes that he was in Greenwich Village when the World Trade Center collapsed: "As I stood silently on corner of Bleeker Street and Sixth Avenue watching the towers fall, a parked car with a loudspeaker system blasted an AM radio station that was narrating the very events I was witnessing. There was a strange disconnect – a feeling of simulacra and spectacle – as if this show had been planned and presented the way that, say reality television had recently begun to permeate our lives(171)….Over the years, that radio broadcast stuck with me. I thought about the newscasters themselves: how did they even find the words to describe that which they certainly thought they’d never have to witness? And what were the exact words they used?" (171-72)
Himself a “DJ for the alternative radio station WFMU” in New York, Goldsmith describes his uncanny relation to an event, happening near him, but already mediated on TV and radio (Norton, 700). He sensed that he was witness to a staged event in a reality TV program. The perception that mediation becomes part of the event is evident in many of the Seven American Deaths and Disasters accounts. In the RFK section, for example, the police literally turn off power in the ballroom where RFK was shot in Los Angeles to force media outlets to evacuate the premises so it could be cordoned off as a crime scene. In the section on the World Trade Center, TV transmission is blocked because the satellite antennas, which stood atop the towers, were destroyed. Is Seven American Deaths and Disasters Goldsmith’s way of working through his traumatic experience on 9/11 – including the way it was imagined, often misrepresented, and labeled from the start as “America under Attack” with all the suspiciousness, scapegoating, and finger pointing that title entailed?
Goldsmith displays an ironic distance from the broadcast tapes that are the sources for his book, but we also notice his emotional investment in the material.[11] I am suggesting Goldsmith’s 9/11 experiences might relate to his new book, but let me also take Goldsmith on his own terms as a conceptual poet. Just how provocative is the conception for the latest book? Transcripts of seven American “deaths and disasters” from 1963 (death of JFK) to 2009 (death of Michael Jackson) – a concept indebted to Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series as well (Goldsmith tells us) to “Kota Ezawa’s chilling animated renderings of American media events” (176)?[12] Another Goldsmithian example of what he calls his “archival impulse” (169) to do “nothing other than what I had done with Day: I was simply transcribing what lay before me” (171), Seven American Deaths and Disasters differs somewhat from Goldsmith’s prior uncreative writing efforts. Earlier works focused on “rendering the mundane in language” (169) whereas Seven Deaths concerns dramatic (if incoherent and clichéd) renderings of events of national and even international consequence. Goldsmith has written that, “Conceptual writing is good only when the idea is good; often, the idea is much more interesting than the resultant texts” (quoted in Perloff 200). Given the rehashing of American calamities by visual conceptualists such as Warhol and Ezawa, as well as simulations of many of these events in other media (one thinks of Oliver Stone’s film JFK [1991] and Don DeLillo’s novel Libra [1988]) as well as Goldsmith’s appropriative transcriptions in ten books that in themselves recall a century of avant-garde experimentation with reframing “found” materials in the new context of what George Dickie called “the art world,” I don’t find Goldsmith’s repetition of the conceptual model for the new book especially thought-provoking even though he tweaks the project by working with digital media and (unusual for him) topics that are not routine.
So why read (or think) it? Only the most uninformed would read for historical information. There are factoids some might have forgotten: an assassination attempt had been made on Harry Truman by Puerto Rican nationalists in 1950: James Garfield is the other assassinated 20th century president; another Johnson (Andrew) was Vice President when another President was assassinated; although it is commonly known as the Texas Book Depository, the official name of the building from which Oswald fired his rifle is the Sexton Building; Farah Fawcett and Michael Jackson died on the same day; “local screwball” Mark David Chapman was from Hawaii and had gotten Lennon’s autograph days before he shot him. Not exactly earth shattering info worth wading through almost 200 pages of transcripts to learn. Goldsmith states that “quantity” not “quality” drives his project (“language more concerned with quantity than quality”), but my enjoyment, oddly enough, turned less on pondering the overall conception than with what the modernist French street photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson termed “The Decisive Moment.”
My nod to Cartier-Bresson is, of course, an ironic, tongue-in cheek reference. Perhaps “indecisive moment” is the more apt term. Contra the quintessential street photographer, Goldsmith follows Dadaists, Popists and Conceptualists in deemphasizing romantic notions of genius, originality, skill, or mimesis. By contrast, iconic black and white photographs of a man jumping over a puddle behind La Gare Saint Lazare in Paris in 1932, a blurred bicyclist darting down a curving stone street as seen from atop a spiral staircase, a round-faced French boy in shorts carrying two large bottles of dark wine, a fully clothed couple supine on a rocky shoreline, their heads concealed by a black umbrella, dancers at Queen Charlotte’s Ball, or of a couple kissing, Cartier-Bresson favore dimmediacy. Cartier-Bresson sought inspiration as disciplined by precise craftsmanship and an eye towards intriguing geometrical compositional patterns.
Goldsmith is the master of repetition. Plato would critique him as an imitator or imitations, thus triply removing us from reality, for transcribing an amalgamation of previously ignored audio clips archived on the Internet. Cartier-Bresson, by contrast, captures a fleeting moment of someone else’s lived experience with his small Leica (painted black for concealment) and the 50 mm lens that he likened to his eyes. For Cartier-Bresson, such experience would otherwise be lost to posterity if the photographer were not present on the scene and poised to snap the shutter at the precise second to rescue a poignant moment or beautiful gesture from oblivion. The broadcasts Goldsmith transcribed for Deaths and Disasters were available for years to be lifted out of the Internet’s shadows. They did not require Cartier-Bresson’s aesthetic gifts to “trap” a fleeting moment. And yet who before Goldsmith cared to resurrect the broadcasts from having already fallen into the void of an overloaded cultural storage system? Both Cartier-Bresson and Goldsmith thus call attention to moments that would have been deemed insignificant if the artist or poet had not re-presented them. We would pay scant attention had not the photographer framed the image of the man jumping the puddle. The same is true had not Goldsmith framed portions of the Dallas radio station KLIF on November 22, 1963 by juxtaposing news bulletins of a possible shooting at the presidential motorcade, advertisements for Hamm’s beer and Armour meat products, and Sandra Dee song lyrics. There is, however, a difference between how Cartier-Bresson and Goldsmith conserve unheralded moments. The former saves the decisive moment from oblivion by capturing its image prior to its disappearance from lived experience. The latter saves the decisive moment from oblivion through re-presentation of an artifact after it had been discredited as possessing momentousness in the first place, and thus had been relegated to the netherworld of always available but never consulted internet archive.
II. Bad Conceptual Art (is the new good)
Goldsmith’s transcribed broadcasts (I almost wrote bored-casts) are far away from the precise renderings of nuanced experiences as framed by a modern photographer who bought into the conception of artist as intuitive genius such as Cartier-Bresson. Goldsmith’s transcripts of American deaths and disasters may be “Bad Conceptual Art.” Perhaps not so ludicrous as the excerpt from Pavlov’s “Video Chicken I” as performed by the late Gilda Radner from Saturday Night Live in 1978 as introduced by the fey Leonard Pinth-Garnell as performed by Dan Aykroyd, neck draped in silk scarf and upper lip hidden by pencil-thin moustache. Nor are they framed with such humorous pretension as Aykroyd’s conceptualization of “bad” art recast on a hip late night art show masquerading as a dull late night art show. At the same time, in Conceptual Art such as Goldsmith’s the compulsion to repeat the worst of the Bad is the new Good. The badness of the transcripts Goldsmith represents Seven American Deaths and Disasters, I am suggesting, are best when they are at their worst because that is when their tellingly (in)decisive moments emerge.
Historian of “Bad Films” Lance Duerfahrd writes: "The bad films I revere do artlessly what every art film seeks consciously to do: refuse our entry into it. Their poor craftsmanship – a sudden cut, the mysterious displacement or appearance of a prop, an unintended response in the audience – won’t let the spectator disappear into the film. The well made Hollywood film is like successful taxidermy: the dissimulation is so good that for a brief moment you forget that the thing is dead…. We suffer the bad film and need an imagination to relate to it because it refuses us all the pre-fabricated paths (for our interest, our attention, our wanting to believe)." (Prism 17)
What Duerfhard notices in his appreciation of classic Bad Films such as Plan 9 From Outer Space by Ed Wood – a pillow in a graveyard scene, he comments, “help us toward a sense of beauty that includes these small acts of disorder, or make room in our sense of what belongs and what doesn’t” (18) – pertain to my admiration for Goldsmith’s transcriptions. As with Duerfahrd’s attention to details in an Ed Wood scene (such as a cut of pants) that the critic does not think he would notice in a conventional Hollywood movie, I am fascinated when discursive incoherence in the Goldsmith transcripts calls attention to the materiality of an art form that resists seamless mimesis. Disjointedness in the transcripts, like Ed Wood’s pillow in the graveyard, brings us closer to a confrontation with an unruly quality of reality that resists containment through social fictions of order.
III. “Oop”
There is a creative fraction of a second when you are taking a picture. Your eye must see a composition or an
expression that life itself offers you, and you must know with intuition when to click the camera. That is the moment
the photographer is creative,' he said. 'Oop! The Moment! Once you miss it, it is gone forever.
--Cartier-Bresson in the Washington Post in 1957 (10)
(In)decisive Moments occur when things, in Goldsmith’s terms, go “spinning out of control” in the seven sections of Goldsmith’s text.[13] They manifest themselves when what Cartier-Bresson calls the “Oop” emerges or when what French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan called “the symbolic” is punctured by blundering, rhetorical missteps, shoddy repetitions of misunderstood information or misinformation, and discursive incoherence. (In)Decisive moments in Goldsmith suggest what Lacan referred to as “the real,”[14] which in Goldsmith transcripts occur when language breaks down, as in the following extensive segment from chapter six, on the World Trade Center disaster:
We have lost…Again, our transmitter is on top of the World Trade Center. So we, apparently, have lost contact…(131)
Now this, uh, Ed. Was the World Trade Center Two. Oh my gosh! This is…this is absolutely…
Uh, Joe, we can’t…I can’t tell from my perspective, eh…exactly what’s…what’s happened here…how much of the building is still standing.
But…but…but…but…but…Ed…but Ed it looks like the side portion of that has totally fallen and there is just a huge cloud of dust that is encompassing several city blocks. Oh God…eh…eh… what…this…this…would…this would fall into the area of Lower Manhattan toward, uh, the eastern portion of the World Trade Center. It looks…now…uh…eh…is that? I’m trying to look…Can you see? Is that building still there?
I…I can’t tell.
I don’t see it. (138)
Let’s just think about this logically./There is no logic. /Oh my God!/…uh…uh…a hijacked air…air…airliner. (139)
This morning of this day…the 11th of September, 2001…will live in infamy. There’s almost no textbook for any of us here on the radio to figure out just
what to say. There are no words at all to express this. (141)
We’re in the worst place we can be. We can’t see a thing!/It’s gone! Are you saying it’s gone?/It’s gone It’s gone! We can’t see anything! All this smoke is moving and there’s no towers standing there anymore. We do have confirmation, that the, the north tower…has collapsed./Oh, yes, it’s not there!/It is not there./It is not there. (142)
And, um, it’s…it’s… it is a situation beyond description. (144)
The passages above are not exemplary “in-decisive moments” because, as in Cartier-Bresson’s privileging of artistic grace under pressure, the broadcaster’s wording is precise, his style elegant, the quality of “content” informative of fact, or even of Goldsmith’s belated skill and cheeky wit in reframing the original local radio broadcasts from WABC, WOR, WFAN, and WNYC as pieces of conceptually-driven appropriative “uncreative writing.” Rather, the “indecisive moments” are compelling because they encourage us to forget about aesthetic merits or philosophical questions of authorial originality while readers uncannily repeat (as if for the first time) exposure to the raw terror facing the broadcaster. We identify with how the broadcaster’s dread overwhelms his attempt to compose a legible account of the disaster. Uninterested in locating cool, calm, and collected representations of a crisis of the Anderson Cooper variety via the World Wide Web archive, Goldsmith re-presents an inscription of disaster, “a situation beyond description.” Writing on Laura Riding’s 1925 “A Prophecy or a Plea,” which describes the “shock of impact” of modern existence, Barrett Watten notes that Riding’s poetic manifesto leads: "to a poetry that, as a darkened interiority or an ‘evocation of the shadows,’ foregrounds our insufficiency rather than regulates it. Later in Riding’s work, the demands of the unrepresentable intensify to the point at which poetry can only imitate the traumatic shock of existence in its immediacy. “What is a poem? A poem is nothing….It cannot be looked at, heard, touched, or read because it is a vacuum….If it were possible to reproduce it in an audience the result would be the destruction of the audience.” (Watten, 340)
Like Watten’s version of Riding as a poet of linguistic “insufficiency” when confronted with the “unrepresentable,” Goldsmith calls attention to rhetorical disability as registered through stammering phrases – “It looks…now…uh…eh…is that?” – as well as expressions of a crisis of visibility. As in classic 20th Century American poems such as “Home Burial” by Robert Frost and “The Fish” by Elizabeth Bishop, we sense the unstable relation between “looking” and “seeing.” Can we look at something and not see it? Can this discrepancy be so because that something has vanished, or is it because we lack the understanding to truly see it, to recognize it as a new fact? Are we suffering from a physiological blindness or is there, in fact, nothing to see except for the Stevensian “nothing that is”? Is the condition of disappearance permanent or will the scales lift from our eyes? Will the smoke settle on the streets and visibility be restored? If visibility is restored, can we tolerate what we will see? Is blindness the new normal? How does one witness an absence? The 9/11 broadcaster’s voicing of anxiety and stress, which one associates with modernism (Eliot’s “I cannot say just what I mean”; the evacuated landscapes of Beckettian dramas), are revitalized through Goldsmith’s appropriation of obscure broadcasters, out of their depth, trying to cope with a disappearing world as they say the unsayable on New York City radio stations including WABC, WOR, WFAN, and WNYC.
The disc jockeys are tongue-tied, but we notice a characteristic of disaster testimony that carries through in other American disasters Goldsmith records: however awkward the reports, however disoriented the reporters, the tendency is to withdraw from the indecisive moment to remember a piece of language – a heartening phrase from a related “decisive moment” in the American imaginary -- to frame -- and thus attempt to contain -- the disappearance of an iconic sign (in this case the Twin Towers) of the continuous existence of that imaginary space. And so there is, amidst the muttering, the emergence of the echo of the reassuring Brahmin voice of FDR: "This morning of this day…the 11th of September, 2001…will live in infamy. There’s almost no textbook for any of us here on the radio to figure out just what to say. There are no words at all to express this." (141)
There is “almost no textbook for any of us here,” but the announcer’s instinct – his invocation of what Jameson would term a political unconscious -- is to create a textbook by linking Pearl Harbor to the Twin Towers and by concentrating on a notorious date -- December 7th 1941 -- to facilitate the mnemonic process of installing September 11 2001 as a contemporaneous repetition of chronological memorialization. Untrained radio personalities intuitively tap into the national imaginary to channel Roosevelt. They translate an absence – a crisis they cannot speak in their own words -- as available to history.
Goldsmith detaches poetry from obvious signs of originality, but he also teaches us that eyewitness testimony is already a witness to second hand smoke, or what Bernstein calls “frame lock.” Goldsmith thus puts us in a position to read history. Not history as filtered through a textbook, but an indication of the on site process in which raw terror becomes reframed as decisive historical events. Goldsmith also allows history to read us, by which I mean how in reading the transcripts we recall our own process of synthesizing personal traumas and national disasters into stories that conform to how we wish to imagine ourselves (as, for example, “survivors” with courageous qualities of endurance and flexibility).
IV. Wake up and Smile
I experienced an uncanny (dare I say jouissance) sensation when reading how radio commentators try to contain through narrative, description, and fact-oriented historicizing unruly moments of terror. Reporters frame disruptions of the status quo by placing shocking events in historical contexts. They fixate on ascertaining inconsequential “facts” such as noting the precise minute when a victim has been pronounced “officially” dead or learning the birthplace of the assassin. (Comically, even the insignificant facts, which announcers grasp onto to avoid facing devastation that facts cannot conceal, go awry. Moments after RFK’s official death time is given at one forty-four a.m., for example, a reporter states: “John…er, Robert Francis Kennedy died this morning at one forty” [69]. In the John Lennon chapter, a persistent observation that Mark David Chapman had a “smirk” on his face when taken into custody is eventually repeated as a “smear” [79]). Even when mangled, as in the RFK and John Lennon examples, we notice how verbal acts meant to contain eruptions of a “real” that defies language, betray symptoms of anxiety about the failure to control upsetting experience. It is in the report’s badness that the slippery nature of terror, the way it defies composure, interpretation, meaning, emerges.
Earlier I referenced a late 1970s Saturday Night Live series on “Bad Conceptual Art.” Here I found myself recalling the outrageous “Wake Up and Smile! (12/09/99) SNL sketch, written by Adam McKay, in which a local version of a “Today” type morning news, weather, and entertainment program experiences technical difficulties when a teleprompter goes awry on the 20th Anniversary special episode of their program:
[a stagehand taps on the teleprompter, which keeps spitting out the same phrase Oliver keeps repeating] Diane: [panicking ] Um.. ih.. it looks like we're having some problems with the prompter here!..[ Oliver and Diane are silent with stage fright ] Oliver: [fumbling for something to say] The teleprompter on which everything we say appears on.. is broken.. Diane: [trying to laugh ] Please! Let's get that teleprompter fixed! Oliver: Uh.. we're having what's known in the business as.. technical times.. right now.. Diane: Uh.. well.. let's go to.. Tom.. Bulcher.. with the weather.. [cut to the weatherman on the side of the set, stunned by the broken teleprompter] Tim Baker: Blank screen.. no words on it.. got to think.. must think.. [pause] Back to you.. [cut back to Oliver and Diane, who are forced to "make something up"] Oliver: Uh.. you know, Diane, I had a notion the other day.. Diane: Uh.. well.. uh.. notions make.. uh.. this country happen.. Oliver: I.. I.. I was thinking someone should get a group together.. uh.. with guns to sweep out those ghettos.. [the show cuts to quick commercial, then comes right back to its frightened hosts] Diane: I..drive a red car.. Oliver: Make sure those poor people stay away from it..
they've got sores..
Co-hosts Oliver, as played by Will Farrell, and Diane, as played by Nancy Walls, freak out and go into panic mode (sweating, feeling hungry, cold, hot) when their teleprompter malfunctions. Twenty-year veteran co-hosts of “Wake Up and Smile,” the pair, lacking imagination or improvisational skills, experience stage fright as they confront what is for them exposure to Lacan’s “the real.” (As Dino Felluga remarks, “the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real.”) As is the case in several of Goldsmith’s transcripts – the Robert F. Kennedy and World Trade Center chapters chief among them – a discursive breakdown precedes an unveiling of a return to language and actions that display the violently primordial underpinnings of “civil” society. Oliver asserts the need to form a group to defend the country against gangs: “I was thinking someone should get a group together.. uh.. with guns to sweep out those ghettos.” Lacking words on the teleprompter, Oliver goes Neanderthal. He creates a cave-like bunker out of the set couches, and then transforms himself into a dominant tribal male leader of a savage cult with a hand symbol painted onto his naked chest. Eventually, he tears off the African-American weathermen’s head, which he cannibalizes before order is restored when the teleprompter is fixed. In Goldsmith’s second chapter, on Robert F. Kennedy, a reporter notes:
And there are fistfights around as various people just plain get too emotional and attack each other. (52)
Kennedy fans and Kennedy supporters literally tried to beat the suspect to death – they were really giving him quite a pummeling on the ground. (64)
As with Oliver’s barbaric instinct to create an enemy scapegoat, first through his comments about cleaning out the ghetto, then through his decapitation of the African-American weatherman, whom he perceives as a threat to his dominance of the studio qua bunker, a radio commentator on the World Trade Center disaster, who immediately jumps to the conclusion that the airplane crash is a terrorist act, proclaims the American people will demand a violent reprisal: "So Lawrence Eagleburger said that George Bush needs to respond quickly and go after terrorism wherever terrorism exists, indicating that even if we don’t know for sure that they were the people directly responsible, we must go after those who support Osama bin Laden and who have done so in the past." (150)
The transcriptions, as Goldsmith suggests in his “Afterword,” are compelling when what Charles Bernstein calls the linguistic “veil” of an ordered society that abides by the rule of law, justice, and fair play comes apart and an anarchistic political unconscious, one raw, vengeance based, often racist, and filled with bloodlust, comes to the foreground.[15] Put another way, Goldsmith reveals what American Studies scholar Richard Slotkin referred to as the nation’s tendency to regenerate through violence and maybe even what Freud would consider to be a national death drive.[16]
V. The Meat the Butcher Brings Home
In his introduction to The Believer interview, Dave Mandl states: "Goldsmith’s work forces a drastic rethinking of what a book or text can be. Incorporating elements of surrealism, concretism, and sound poetry, his writing takes pleasure in words as things of beauty (or manipulable items of data) in and of themselves. His texts—filtered and itemized—go well beyond traditional “list poems,” betraying an almost Asperger’s-like attraction to organization and categorization on a grand scale. His enthusiastic use of the advanced copy-and-paste techniques of the internet age pushes the limits of the postmodern remix or Situationist-style détournement. At the same time, his work is a comment on (and an undisguised cheering-on of) the obsolescence of authorship and originality."
Mandl reads Goldsmith as an aesthetic purist, an art for art’s saker. His focus is not on semantics or mimesis: “his writing takes pleasure in words as things of beauty (or manipulable items of data) in and of themselves.” And yet I am struck by how much emotion Goldsmith wrings out of the second-rate material he appropriates.[17] In chapter one, for example, I re-entered, as if for the first time, the drama unfolding in the Big D through the Dallas radio station KLIF’s broadcast of the JFK assassination on November 22, 1963. The transcript includes advertisements for Thanksgiving turkeys, Armour cold cuts, Hamm’s beer, as well as hokey pop songs by Sandra Dee. Like a message in a bottle, the transcript encapsulates a period before CNN and Sirius satellite radio contributed to the homogenization of news and entertainment resources, as well as before the Internet and Social Media, when local disc jockeys, ma and pa grocery stores, and regional musical stylings were predominant. There is an amateurish, rough-hewn quality to the broadcast, and this is so not only because of the colossal task the ill-equipped radio crew faced of narrating a traumatic event. It is also because the reporters are not professional crisis managers in the mode of Anderson Cooper, whose hair remains (like Warren Zevon’s Werewolf) perfect even during thunderstorms and whose CNN-signature rain jacket creates the aura of a L.L Bean catalogue section for Disaster Wear. Goldsmith could have selected a transcript of CBS anchor Walter Cronkite – the “most trusted man in America” -- as he calmly reports in his signature baritone, first, of Dallas TV station KRLD’s “unconfirmed rumor” that the President is dead, then a few minutes later still calmly informs viewers that CBS reporter Dan Rather confirmed the death rumor, and then, in the most iconic portion of the broadcast, reads a paper that has been placed on his desk, “the flash apparently official,” that the President is dead.[18] But Cronkite would have been the far less imaginative choice than transcribing amateurish KLIF’s coarse stylings.
I want to claim, however outrageously, Goldsmith as an auteur (albeit closer to Godard or Kieslowski than to Hitchcock or Spielberg) in that he reframes a new type of realism by selecting and shaping the transcripts (without altering their wording) that possess aesthetic dimensions such as rhythm, pacing, juxtaposition, and implied ironic meanings. In the JFK chapter, Goldsmith need not adjust the KLIF broadcast for readers to notice tensions, ironies, and resonances between and among the advertisements, pop music lyrics, and the flash news bulletins suggesting an emergent crisis in downtown Dallas. Still rendered on a local scale, we notice how the nascent branded consumerism, which will determine American culture over the next half century, informs us of the socioeconomics and habits of the station’s lower to lower middle class target audience: “Armour, the meat the butchers bring home”(12) and the Armour lunch meat that “sticks to your ribs” (13); the Hamm’s beer (“someone is opening and enjoying a Hamm’s beer every three seconds”(14); the Robert Hall “holiday dresses priced as low as $7.97” (12). Turkey, lunchmeat, obsessive beer drinking, all take on grim connotations when read in relation to the anticipated slaughter of JFK. How can we not read (and not think Goldsmith wants us to read?) of lunchmeat that sticks to your bones as a kind of slang foreshadowing to the impending murder?
Goldsmith's transcripts trouble notions of "common knowledge" in ways that, weirdly, create suspense where one could not have imagined anticipation – enjoyable tension – concerning the outcome to a drama that occurred fifty years ago. In an uncanny way, history is suspended. The drama’s conclusion remains uncomposed, even as, simultaneously, we already know the outcome is never in doubt. Do we know? Amidst the beer and pre-Thanksgiving turkey ads and the torch songs of loneliness, break downs, and tears as sung by Sandra Dee and Tommy Rowe, the first sketchy and “unconfirmed” reports from the “KLIF Mobile Unit No. 4 in downtown Dallas” (14) of “confused as this moment” (14) hearsay about random shots fired at the “presidential motorcade as it passed through downtown Dallas” (15). Hints of a crisis. Through the first pages of the transcript, however, KLIF does not consider the information sufficient to suspend discussion of “Sandra Dee and her troubles” and previews of her latest movie at the “Interstate Palace Theater” (15). As in W.H. Auden’s “Musee des Beaux Arts” in which “everything turns away /Quite leisurely from the disaster,” we sense a cognitive distortion in the broadcaster’s urge to minimize the possibility of a serious crisis so as to return to normalcy, which is to say, to fantasy, to “Sandra Dee and her troubles,” even as rumors of a puncture in the national symbolic begin to intrude on the radio waves. What is it about the human psyche, Goldsmith implicitly asks, that we can read a transcript concerning an event already known, and yet we, like the first listeners to the Dallas broadcast that resists the reality that something extraordinary has happened, continue to read the transcripts as if it were a chronicle of real time events, rather than synchronic recitation?:
“He has been wounded, but he is alive (28); “It is now being reported to us by Parkland that president Kennedy is receiving blood transfusions” (29). “A special carton of blood, apparently for transfusion purposes, has been rushed into the emergency ward. Two Dallas police officers carried that carton. The president’s body was limp as he was carried into the hospital, cradled in the arms of his wife” (31). “Two Catholic priests who were summoned to the scene – one has administered the last sacrament of the Church to the president, but at last report, he apparently is still alive and how critical his injuries may be we have not yet been able to determine” (35).
What is the trick of mind that can simultaneously suspend (repress) knowledge of knowledge of how an archetypal American historical narrative will end? How can I emotionally go through the developing narrative as reported by KLIF as if hope remains that – this time, this telling --the worst fear will not occur? (Do we not live in a period of hypertextual multiple endings?). Can we not choose the happy ending version?
Goldsmith’s transcripts teach us that the broadcasters initial response is to deny the event’s significance, and to return to fantasy, and then to defer acknowledgement of the trauma. After the deferral strategy fails, the transcripts reveal the third strategy to avoid shock is to tie the crisis to a myth, in this case one that displaces the bullet riddled bodies into a tale of spiritual transformation. Consciously or unconsciously KLIF broadcasters transform JFK into the martyred Jesus and Jackie O into Mother Mary. “Mrs. Kennedy reportedly had cradled her husband’s head in her lap during the speedy trip to Parkland Hospital” (24). In connecting JFK to Jesus I am thinking of the blood, especially that description of the “special carton of blood, apparently for transfusion purposes,” which has a sacramental quality that connects medical work as a form of modern shamanism to the priestly last rites that follow. Even the earlier comment that “He has been wounded, but he is alive” takes on Christographic resonance. Camelot has become Calvary. It is as if confronting that state Keats described as “negative capability”: “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” -- is intolerable to the reporters. They must divert attention from the immediate crisis by displacing the upsetting event and reframing it within preexisting paradigms of commonly known symbols, histories, and myth.
After experimenting with strategies of denial, deferral, and transformation of a story about a ripped apart human being into a religious ritual involving a spiritual ascent via a sacramental transition from body to spirit, the last part of the JFK chapter revealed the comically bizarre, and yet traumatically poignant, way the reporters frame JFK’s death by "historicizing” it. Reporters repeat the fact that a second Johnson (Lyndon) will become president after an assassination -- at one point the reporter stumbles on who and when ("post civil war era") -- and there is perfunctory reference to McKinley as the only other 20th century example. We also hear of then-prominent (now nearly forgotten) news of Truman's assassination attempt from 1950. As much as the reporters deny, defer, mythologize, and historicize (one could say trivialize) to contain damage to the national imaginary, we notice how the radio commentary reveals information that opens, rather than closes, an event that remains unresolved fifty years later: “And, incidentally, on the fifth floor of the downtown building from which the president and the governor were shot, they have now discovered empty rifle hulls and there is also indication that more than one man is involved in the attack, Joe?//We have had descriptions of three men, actually – two white men and one colored man – as being possible suspects in this shooting, but at present, a twenty-five-year-old white man has been taken into custody” (38).
Announcers try to contain the tragedy within a mythic template, but they open up the still pressing issue of whether there was a single gunman or if a conspiracy took place. There is also a peculiar denial of any conspiracy motive even though no one has put forward accusations of governmental involvement in the murder: “There was absolutely no warning that this would take place. Of course these things always come so spontaneously. Should there be any warning, then the president would be better protected an alternate route could have been prepared” (32).
In the John F. Kennedy chapter, Goldsmith’s conceptual aesthetics differs from Cartier-Bresson’s poetics of immediacy, but in ways less obvious the chapter’s form also differs from Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series, which Goldsmith self-consciously emulates. In Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors on Modern Art (2002), I argued that Warhol’s “Death and Disaster” series, as with his representations of Marilyn Monroe’s face as a series of transparent images that trial off like smoke rings, uses techniques that disentangle him from identifying with victims of plane crashes, car wrecks, or a man who jumps from the window ledge of a mental hospital. Warhol distances himself and his audience from other citizens who have suffered bodily disfiguration by representing trauma through the grid, repetition, and colorful makeovers of images he discovered in the tabloid press.
Warhol’s establishment of an impregnable boundary between the image of the human body in pain and the “the thing itself” – the actual lived experience of persons in trouble – links his art to a consumerist ideology and connects his art to the politics of abjection that defines the “stranger” and the “unclean other” in Kristeva. Advertisers construct a sanitized realm of “elsewhere” by associating personal contentment and safety with hygienic products. Like commercials for detergents and cleaning products such as Brillo scouring pads, Warhol’s art style promises to remove spectators from evidence that human existence resides within the vulnerable body.
Goldsmith is, in subject matter, repeating Warhol’s (already repetitive) process of appropriating news media accounts of American Deaths and Disasters for a concept-driven fine arts poetry project. And yet, as I have stated throughout this essay, my reading experience of the Goldsmith transcripts does not enable me to feel removed from the existential qualities of vulnerability, uncertainty, and semantic rupture that I have associated with Lacan’s “The Real” and with the concept of a traumatic discourse, rather than a detached and contained discourse about trauma. Although Goldsmith, especially in the JFK chapter, like Warhol in his Brillo Pads and Soup Cans, emphasizes the relationship between consumerism and the body, I am suggesting Goldsmith associates, rather than detaches, the radio station’s advertising for lunch meats, Sandra Dee movies, Hamm’s beer, and turkey dinners with the “bulletins” regarding news of a shooting at the presidential motorcade in downtown Dallas. By contrast to Warhol, Goldsmith thus encourages readers to mix, often ironically, the realms of commercial slogans (the Armour lunch meat that sticks to your bones) and the embodied tragedy. It is Goldsmith’s resistance to formality, his refusal to edit out what I have called the “indecisive moments,” that distinguishes his appropriations from Warhol’s more aesthetically sophisticated renderings of Life magazine photos through lithographic techniques.
VI. Is there some way to close these doors?
A history buff (that is, someone who peruses the History Channel when nothing else is on), I have seen the color footage from June 6, 1968 of Robert F. Kennedy’s drained white face draped in a towel to stanch the blood as the stricken candidate for the 1968 Democratic nomination for the presidency, who had just made an acceptance speech (“On to Chicago!”) after winning the California Primary, and thus setting up a titanic floor fight to decide the head of the ticket in Chicago at the upcoming convention, lay supine on the ballroom floor with the phrase “Rafer get the gun” echoing in the background. Given my vivid acquaintance with the material, how is it that I felt a chill when reading the “eyewitness account from Andrew West of Mutual News in Los Angeles” (175) as Goldsmith transcribes it in chapter two?
Part of my response was driven by Goldsmith’s juxtaposition of the intensely vivid RFK broadcast with the comparatively detached JFK transmission that preceded it. I was struck by the different tone and relationship of reporter to spectacle in the JFK and the RFK transcripts, as well as by how the RFK tape references the JFK narrative as a template for representing a tragic public death. Like the transcript “of a 911 call made by Patti Nielson, an injured substitute teacher, from the school’s library during the shooting” (175) in chapter five’s “Columbine” school shooting, the RFK tape registers a traumatic testimony of on-site reporter Andrew West of Mutual News’s own near death experience.[19] Relationships between participant and witness, terror and testimony, the language of disaster and the disaster itself, are thus indelibly blurred in West’s discourse, as will be the case when Patti in the Columbine library frantically tells a 911 dispatcher “[whispering] He’s yelling everybody get up right now. [More shots] He’s in the library. He’s shooting at everybody” (124-125). Here is West on RFK:
It could…Is it possible, ladies and gentlemen? It is possible he has…not only Senator Kennedy…Oh my God! Senator Kennedy has been shot. And another man, a Kennedy campaign manager. And possibly shot in the head. I am right here. Rafer Johnson has a hold of a man who apparently has fired the shot. He has fired the shot. He still has the gun. The gun is pointed at me right at this moment. I hope they can get the gun out of his hand. Bevery careful. Get that gun! Get the gun! Get the gun! Stay away from the gun!//Get the gun!//Stay away from the gun! His hand is frozen. Get his thumb! Get his thumb! Get his thumb! Take a hold of his thumb and break it if you have to! Get his thumb! Get away from the barrel! Get away from the barrel, man!//Watch it with the gun. Watch it with the gun!//Look out for the gun! Okay. Alright. That’s it, Rafer! Get it! Get the gun, Rafer!//Get the gun! Get the gun!//Okay now hold onto the guy!//Get the gun! Get the gun!//Hold on to him! Hold on to him! Ladies and gentlemen, they have the gun away from the man. They’ve got the gun. I can’t see…I can’t see the man. I can’t see who it is. Senator Kennedy, right now, is on the ground. He has been shot. This is a…this is…What is he? Wait a minute. Hold him! Hold him! Hold him! We don’t want another Oswald! Hold him Rafer, we don’t want another Oswald! (43-44)
The passage is extraordinary. If there is heroism to be found in the ugly event, some must be assigned to how Andrew West performs a verbal high wire act. Like a 911 dispatcher instructing a terror victim, he coaches former Olympian (and Kennedy aid) Rafer Johnson on how to handle the gun frozen in Sirhan Sirhan’s hand. He maintains a degree of journalistic etiquette (addressing the radio audience as “Ladies and Gentleman”) while reporting his own danger – “The gun is pointed at me right at this moment.” West then historicizes the event in relation to the JFK assassination of five years earlier (another Oswald). At points, West thus maintains an extraordinary degree of rhetorical clarity, but the passage also illustrates how discursive breakdowns create in(decisive) moments in which the uncertainty of experience and the inadequacy of language intrude upon even West’s stoic reportage: “I can’t see…I can’t see the man….This is a…this is…What is he?" (44). And a bit later, as West contemplates Senator Kennedy’s level of consciousness, we sense he is also reflecting on his clouded state of mind: "Right at this moment…the senator apparently…we can’t see if he is still conscious or not. Can you see if he is conscious?//What?//Can you see if he is conscious?//I don’t know. He is half-conscious.//He is half-conscious. And ladies…we can’t see, ladies and gentlemen….C’mon. Out! Out! Out! Is there some way to close these doors? Is there any doors here?//Get out! Get out!//Out through the…out through the exit. Let’s go. Out we go.//Out….//Repetition in my speech. I have no alternative. The shock is so great. My mouth is dry” (45).
In the 2011 interview with The Believer, Goldsmith states: "The moment we shake our addiction to narrative and give up our strong-headed intent that language must say something 'meaningful,' we open ourselves up to different types of linguistic experience, which, as you say, could include sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways: by constraint, by sound, by the way words look, and so forth, rather than always feeling the need to coerce them toward meaning."
Contra Goldsmith, I do not, primarily, regard passages such as the Andrew West report or the 911 call by Patti in Columbine in terms of sonic or visual features of the words. Nor do I open up a structural account of the discourse involving “sorting and structuring words in unconventional ways.” When I read the West report or Patti’s 911 call from Columbine I forget theoretical issues of appropriation, conceptual art, questions of what is an author in a digital era, or that I am reading a 1968 transcript in a small press art book by a provocative “uncreative writer” published in 2013 from material Goldsmith discovered in the web netherworld. I am moved…aesthetically moved…emotionally moved…existentially stung…by West’s self-consciousness about his unconsciousness, about his blindness. His language is not merely disaster reportage, but the language of disaster. Just as I am moved when the 911 dispatcher asks Patti for her name, and she, quietly, tenderly, like a frightened child, tells it, I am captivated by how West's disorientation is rendered with bracing clarity. He testifies to a situation in which space, time, and identity -- what is inside and what is outside, where is here and there, who am I and who are you -- the fundamental differences that make the world visible and legible, have come unglued: “Is there some way to close these doors? Is there any doors here?//Get out! Get out!//Out through the…out through the exit. Let’s go. Out we go.//Out….//” Doors – of awareness of the “real,” that divide interior and exterior -- have, in Whitman’s terms, been removed from their jambs. There is no structure to close the wound. It is a language of disaster.
VII. Conclusion: Let Us Return to the Tonight Show
The seventh and final chapter is devoted to Michael Jackson. What compelled Goldsmith to conclude his series with Jackson’s death? By deciding to end with Jackson, is Goldsmith’s point that by June 25, 2009, more than 40 years after the JFK Ur-tragedy and twenty-years after the death of John Lennon, the other singer to whom Goldsmith devotes a chapter, we have traveled so far down the postmodern road of pseudo-events that our fascination with celebrity and fame outstrips more serious concerns with political leaders such as the Kennedy brothers or with working class heroes such as Lennon?
A common thread in the reportage on the seven events is that commentators, in their desire to bring coherence, order, control, and meaning to violent incidents that puncture the imaginary realm of tranquility, tend to search for patterns -- precedents, chance coincidences -- that would reframe what is happening into a historical narrative. As mentioned, the JFK assassination is almost immediately cast in relation to Lincoln and James Garfield. RFK is, of course, placed, again immediately, in the context of Dallas: "As happened in the aftermath of President Kennedy, the scene of shock and turmoil here was nationally advertised and televised, just as it was when Jack Ruby shot Lee Harvey Oswald." (64)
John Lennon’s murder is, unintentionally comically, linked to JFK and MLK through the miniscule factoid that Mark David Chapman had three names, just like Lee Harvey Oswald and James Earl Ray. The Space Challenger explosion is in chapter four linked (and distinguished from) the Gemini disaster in which three U.S. astronauts were killed in a fire during a training session and, in a Cold War swipe, to a Russian cosmonaut accident that was not widely reported (because of Soviet secrecy); 9/11 is (again almost immediately) framed in terms of Pearl Harbor with repetition of FDR’s phrase “a day that will in infamy” quickly evoked as precedent for an attack on the “homeland.” Suggesting a ludicrous diminishment of what counts as an arrangement of related “disasters” of national or international import, Jackson’s death is understood as part of a triad of celebrity passings that include Farrah Fawcett and Ed McMahon.[20] (The McMahon death resonates back to the news of John Lennon’s death because it was reported as an interruption to The Tonight Show. In the context of McMahon’s death, the phrase from early in the Lennon section, “We now return to the Tonight Show,” takes on enhanced resonance.)
Ed McMahon and Farah Fawcett fall into the category of celebrities with little or no discernible talent. They are famous for being famous. And yet a commentator in the Michael Jackson section does suggest how ordinary people in a culture obsessed with entertainment, and that associates television appearance with the validation of real presence, measure time and change via celebrity news: "It seems like yesterday we were watching Farrah Fawcett in her youth and beauty – and sixty-two years old to me is still young – you don’t think of Farrah Fawcett being sixty-two years old. You don’t think of Michael Jackson as being fifty. It’s…it’s just strange." (158)
Few would argue that Ed McMahon (with the possible exception of his extraordinary ability to laugh deeply at Johnny’s hackneyed bits, his description of martini drinking as “sipping a cloud,” and telethon support of Jerry’s Kids) or Farah Fawcett contributed to American culture in major ways (with the possible exception of the famous poster of Fawcett in a skimpy red bathing suit that provided a site for masturbatory fantasy for countless adolescent boys from the 1970s), and yet the commentator has a point. There is something unsettling about thinking of Farah’s iconic frosted haired, Texas-sized smile, and those perky nipples evident beneath the bathing suit as cancer ridden and dead at 62. Similarly, as the commentator mentions, the image of Michael Jackson, unconscious and not breathing at age 50 in an emergency vehicle on his way to the UCLA hospital contrasts with iconic images of Jackson as a round faced child with a big Afro as lead singer for the Jackson Five and of his performance of the “moonwalk” during his Thriller phase. The contradiction between celebrated images such as the Fawcett poster or of Michael Jackson performing on MTV, which seem immortal, and the reality that the flesh and blood human beings associated with the images continue to age, face disease, and eventually disappear becomes an uncanny aspect of their histories that may explain why their deaths seem so compelling to us.
I wondered about Goldsmith’s decision to select Michael Jackson as the subject of his final chapter, but more generally I pondered his selection of the seven deaths and disasters over the last fifty years. Certainly, selectivity is part of creativity, revealing through what is concealed.[21] Few would argue with his decision to begin with JFK. As his book reveals, the JFK event was certainly a paradigmatic tragedy – in part because so much of it was captured on film or else unfolded in real time on the relatively new medium of television. It was also, as Goldsmith notes, a template, or master narrative structure, through which many of the other six deaths and disasters would be discussed and represented. But did Michael Jackson’s death really change “a nation, forever”? Even as the transcribed reporters struggle to separate fact from fiction, I wondered about how the focus on these seven events serves the national imaginary in concealing, rather than (only) revealing details about American disasters. Has our intense media focus on terrible things that happen to celebrated public figures – politicians, singers, space explorers – or to iconic symbols of American power – the Challenger, the Twin Towers -- erased, ignored or displaced attention from larger, structural disasters that occur every day to anonymous people in America (or internationally to serve American interests)? Could one argue that media obsession with high profile deaths concentrates a population’s attention on the realm of fantasy? With the possible exception of Columbine, do all of Goldsmith’s selections illustrate events that distract attention from problems such as structural poverty, racism, disparities in education, and the culture of violence that may underwrite the more sensational terrors?
Works Cited
Anderson, John M. “Review of Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 by Richard Slotkin.” Amazon.Com. Accessed online June 3, 2013. http://www.amazon.com/Regeneration-Through-Violence-Mythology-1600-1860/dp/0806132299.com
Bernstein, Charles. “An Mosaic for Convergence.” electronic book review 6 (Winter 1997)
http:/www.altx.comebr/ebr6/ebr6.htm (accessed September 1, 2013).
Bonnet, Gerard. “Repetition Compulsion.” Gale Dictionary of Psychoanalysis. http://www.answers.com/topic/repetition-compulsion. Accessed online June 16 2013.
Duerfahrd, Lance. “The Pillow in the Cemetery: The Bad Film Experience and Ed Wood’s Plan 9 from Outer Space.” Prism. 16-18.
Edmundson, Mark. Why Read? New York: Bloomsbury, 2004.
Felluga, Dino. “Modules on Lacan: On the Structure of the Psyche. Introductory Guide to Critical Theory. 2012. Accessed online June 17, 2013. Purdue U. http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/psychoanalysis/lacanstructure.htmle.
Goldsmith, Kenneth. Seven American Deaths and Disasters. Brooklyn: powerhouse Books, 2013.
_____. “The Bride Stripped Bare: Nude Media and the Dematerialization of Tony Curtis.” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. P. 49-64.
_____ . Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.
Hoover, Paul, editor. Postmodern American Poetry: A Norton Anthology. New York, Norton, 2013.
Mandl, Dave. “An Interview with Kenneth Goldsmith.” The Believer. October 2011. Accessed June 15 2013
http://www.believermag.com/issues/201110/?read=interview_goldsmith.
McKay, Adam. SNL Transcripts: David Alan Grier: 12/09/95: Wake Up and Smile! Accessed online June 18, 2013. http://snltranscripts.jt.org/95/95hsmile.phtml
Morris, Adalaide. “New Media Poetics: As We May Think/How to Write. In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. 1-47.
Morris, Daniel. Remarkable Modernisms: Contemporary American Authors on Modern Art. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2002.
Perloff, Marjorie. “Conceptual Bridges/Digital Tunnels: Kenneth Goldsmith’s Traffic.” Unoriginal Genius: Poetry by Other Means in the New Century. Chicago: U of Chicago Press, 2010.
_____. “Screening the Page/ Paging the Screen: Digital Poetics and The Differential Model.” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. Pp. 143-164.
Schultz, Susan. “Of Time and Charles Bernstein’s Lines: A Poetics of Fashion Statements.” Jacket 14. July 2001.
Watten, Barrett. “Poetics in the Expanded Field: Textual, Visual, Digital…” In Morris, Adalaide and Swiss, Thomas, editors. New Media Poetics: Contexts, Technotexts, and Theories. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006. P. 335-370.
“Artists Past & Present: Kota Ezawa.” The Warhol. http://edu.warhol.org/pdf/ezawa_handout.pdf. Accessed online June 5, 2013.
“Henri Cartier-Bresson.” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henri_Cartier-Bresson. Accessed online June 10, 2013.
“Kenneth Goldsmith.” The Poetry Foundation. http://www.poetryfoundation.org/bio/kenneth-goldsmith. Accessed online June.
Notes
[1] In a manifesto, Goldsmith has stated, conceptual “writing obstinately makes no claims on originality. On the contrary, it employs intentionally self and ego effacing tactics using uncreativity, unoriginality, illegibility, appropriation, plagiarism, fraud, theft, and falsification as its precepts; information management, word processing, databasing, and extreme process as its methodologies; and boredom . . . as its ethos. Language as junk, language as detritus. . . . entartete sprache, everyday speech, illegibility, unreadability, machinistic repetition. (Perloff 200)
[2] Susan Schultz writes that Bernstein, “defines ‘frame lock’ as ‘an insistence on a univocal surface, minimal shifts of mood either within paragraphs or between paragraphs, exclusion of extraneous or contradictory material, and tone restricted to the narrow affective envelope of sobriety, neutrality, objectivity, authoritativeness, or deanimated abstraction’” (3).
[3] Goldsmith argues in Uncreative Writing: Managing Language in the Digital Age that “context is the new content” (3). Goldsmith continues, "The Internet and the digital environment present writers with new challenges and opportunities to reconceive creativity, authorship, and their relationship to language. Confronted with an unprecedented amount of texts and language, writers have the opportunity to move beyond the creation of new texts and manage, parse, appropriate, and reconstruct those that already exist."
[4] Goldsmith describes “nude media” in relation to his work with UbuWeb: “In thinking about the way that UbuWeb (and many other types of file sharing systems) distribute their wares, I’ve come up with a term: ‘nude media.’ What I mean by this is that once, say, an MP3 file is downloaded from the context of a site such as UbuWeb, it’s free and naked, stripped bare of the normative external signifiers that tend to give as much meaning to an artwork as the contents of the artwork itself. Unadorned with branding or scholarly liner notes, emanating from no authoritative source, these objects are nude, not clothed. Thrown into open peer-to-peer distribution systems, nude media files often lose even their historical significance and blur into free-floating sound works, traveling in circles that they would not normally reach if clad in their conventional clothing” (52).
[5] Prior to Seven American Deaths and Disasters, as Marjorie Perloff reports, Goldsmith published “Soliloquy (2001)--the transcription of every word Goldsmith spoke for a one-week period in New York City, recording only the poet’s own words, not those of the many people he spoke to “ (Perloff). Perloff continues: “Traffic is the second volume of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Trilogy: the first, Weather (2005) transcribes a year’s worth of daily weather reports for the Tri-State Area (New York, New Jersey, Connecticut) from the New York radio station WINS (1010 AM); the second, (2007), records a twenty-four hour period of WINS “Panasonic Jam Cam [Camera]” New York traffic reports at ten-minute intervals on the first day of a holiday weekend; the third, Sports (2008), contains a complete broadcast transcription of an entire (five-hour) baseball game between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox in August 2006, as reported by the well-known Yankees commentators John Sterling and Suzyn Waldman.”
[6] Adelaide Morris defines the term “posthuman”: “Although the term ‘posthuman’ has been defined in various ways, the common element in its use is a synergy between human beings and intelligent machines. [T]his synergy has profound implications for the category ‘literature’ and its subset ‘poetry’ as they enter into combinations with networked and programmable machines to emerge in such amalgams as ‘electronic literature’ or ‘e-poetries’” (4).
[7] In “An Mosaic for Convergence,” Bernstein addresses the interpersonal dimension of web-based poetry: “Poems exist much more crucially in a social, in the sense of interpersonal, space than is often acknowledged. We have less single lyric poems than interactions and interconnections among many poetic sites of production. The meaning of the work is in the interconnectivity and not in any single site. The Internet suggests many remarkable opportunities for collaboration, discussion, exchange, distribution. “
[8] As Mark Edmundson has written in Why Read?: "For Emerson, the reader can do more than discover the language of herself in great writing. Emerson’s reader uses a book as an imaginative goad. He can begin compounding visions of experience that pass beyond what’s manifest in the book at hand. This presumably, is what happened when Shakespeare read Holinshed’s Chronicles or even Plutarch’s Lives. These are major sources for the plays, yes, but in reading them Shakespeare made their sentences doubly significant, and the sense of their authors as broad as the world (4-5).
[9] In her discussion of Soliloquy, Perloff underscores the deeply urban texture of a work, which offers “a network of references that gives us a very particular portrait of the artist as young hustler: a New York artist, dependent on New York, running around the city, talking on his cell phone, making contacts, networking, eating out, trying different foods, meeting people for coffee, running into old acquaintances at all sorts of art galleries and events.” (159). Another Goldsmith text, Day (2003), also emphasizes Goldsmith’s focus on New York City culture – it is a “nude” typescript of “every word of the Friday, September 1, 2000 issue of The New York Times” (Norton 700).
[10] Returning to Freud, Bonnet continues, “Repetition compulsion is an inherent, primordial tendency in the unconscious that impels the individual to repeat certain actions, in particular, the most painful or destructive ones” (Gale answers online). Freud believed the repetition compulsion was related to the Death Drive, hence making the topic of Goldsmith’s volume an especially prescient one for him to explore the primal pull to repeat traumatic episodes. Fundamentally conservative in nature, and, in his initial understanding of it a productive mechanism related to the process of therapeutic transference, Freud in his later work understood the compulsion to repeat as a destructive principle. He associated the urge to repeat with oddly satisfying experiences of guilt and self-hatred: "Freud associated it with primary masochism, in which the subject turns violence against himself and subjugates his libido to it, endlessly repeating certain damaging patterns based on experiences rooted at the deepest levels within the self. He theorized that this is a way of tolerating feelings of guilt. The individual manifests a tendency to destroy and suffer, which brings with it feelings of overwhelming satisfaction, all of which are vestiges of a time when the individual did not yet have a sense of reality." (Bonnet)
[11] Goldsmith writes, “ I limited my choices to the American post-Kennedy era partly for autobiographical reasons: all seven events depicted here were ones that I lived through which changed me, and a nation, forever. “ (Goldsmith, 173) Hyperbole – a form of cognitive distortion -- seems to be a signature aspect of disaster discourse.
[12] The “Warhol website” informs us: “Drawing on iconic film and photographic imagery, Kota Ezawa creates vividly colored, stylized animations that speak to the role of mass media in shaping collective memory. The artist represents emotionally charged events through abstract renderings that are shown as light boxes, film, and video projections. With The Unbearable Lightness of Being Ezawa investigates how film contributes to American mythologies surrounding celebrity and violence. The work depicts the assassinations of U.S. Presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F. Kennedy. Ezawa recreated two film segments: the fictional account of Lincoln's assassination in Fords Theater, as portrayed in D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation (1915), and Abraham Zapruder's amateur 8mm reel of the Kennedy assassination. Both films have had a controversial history as contested accounts: one as a racist fictional reenactment, the other an evidentiary document. Source: http://www.sfmoma.org/explore/collection/artwork/123366#ixzz2V6nIXKtr, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art
[13] Himself a perceptive reader of such (in)decisive moments of linguistic rupture, Goldsmith comments on the excruciating pleasure of bad reportage: "Unhinged from their media personalities, these DJs became ordinary citizens, more like guys in a bar than representations of purported rationality and truth." (172) The slick curtain of media was torn, revealing acrobatic linguistic improvisations. There was a sense of things spinning out of control: facts blurred with speculation as the broadcasters attempted to furiously weave convincing narratives from shards of half-truths.
[14] Dino Felluga writes: “As far as humans are concerned, however, ‘the real is impossible,’ as Lacan was fond of saying. It is impossible in so far as we cannot express it in language because the very entrance into language marks our irrevocable separation from the real. Still, the real continues to exert its influence throughout our adult lives since it is the rock against which all our fantasies and linguistic structures ultimately fail. The real for example continues to erupt whenever we are made to acknowledge the materiality of our existence, an acknowledgement that is usually perceived as traumatic (since it threatens our very "reality"), although it also drives Lacan's sense of jouissance.“
[15] Alan Golding reports: “The veil suggests to Bernstein the materiality of language: ‘Our language is our veil, but one that too often is made invisible. Yet, hiding the veil of language, its wordness, its textures, its obstinate physicality, only makes matters worse” (1999b, 32). (Golding, 273).
[16] A John M. Anderson review of Slotkin’s study of regeneration through violence reports: "On the basis of his sweeping 1975 survey of American Colonial and early Republican literature, Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860, Richard Slotkin has approached the pop guru status of archetypal excavators such as Joseph Campbell, despite the fact that his work emphasizes the dark undercurrents of American culture. His argument in Regeneration is that, as the British colonists established their own societies in the wilderness, they expressed their regional desires for territorial expansion and self-rule by reinventing their history. Their narratives, according to Slotkin, revolved around frontiersmen who internalized, then disciplined, the "savagery" of their new environments, using their newfound mastery of nature to transform the wilderness into a revitalized civilization. Slotkin begins by examining how narratives of King Philip's War transformed New England from a demon-haunted Puritan enclave to a region where Indian killing represented progress and prosperity. Daniel Boone's paradoxical backwoods mixture of aggression and reflection serves as an icon for the rest of Regeneration, which emphasizes sectional variations of the Indian hunter myth, while analyzing the more "serious" literary endeavors of Cooper, Hawthorne, Thoreau, and Melville. Regeneration reads at times like a noir-ish variation on Frederick Jackson Turner's influential The Frontier in American History, a vision in which genocide, white supremacy, and environmental exploitation are the real engines driving the nation's expansion.” (Amazon.Com website)
[17] Closer to my own response are Goldsmith’s comments from the July/August 2009 issue of Poetry, which features a little anthology of “Flarf and Conceptual Writing,” edited by Goldsmith. In the Introduction, he declares: “Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry” (quoted in Perloff, 26)
[18] The Cronkite report remains almost unbearably gripping to watch because of his impeccably measured response to the rumors, his continued ability to report the facts – that a prayer vigil is taking place in the hall where Kennedy was to have spoken, that 400 extra off duty law officers were put in place because diplomat Adlai Stevenson had been attacked in October, that a priest was administering the last rites to JFK, so that when Cronkite, taking off his black plastic glasses to wipe away a tear in the moments after he reports the confirmation of the death of JFK to a national television audience, it is like the embodiment of the national symbolic – the baritone voice orator with the neutral (Midwestern) pronunciation – has been stunned, even as he recovers his balance to announce that Vice President Johnson will be sworn into office. Interesting how in my mind I think of the IMAGE of Cronkite, that faded white gray static, more than the sound of his voice or words. Do I see Goldsmith’s broadcasts in terms of material visual image in the same way?
[19] In chapter five on Columbine, Patti communicates her terror with the 911 dispatcher: “Um, kids are screaming, the teachers, um, are, y’know, trying to take control of things. We need police here” (121). “He’s outside? /He’s outside of this hall./Outside of the hall or inside…/He’s in the hall. I’m sorry. There are alarms and things going off” (122)….” I said what’s going on out there? Well it’s probably a cap gun. Probably a video production, you know, they do these videos….Right. And the kids…Well, I said, that’s not, you know, a play gun, a real gun, I was goin’ out there to say no, and I went…[Another shot, very loud] Oh, my God! That was really close!.... I think he’s in the library. What’s your name, ma’am? [whispering] My name is Patti. Patti ? [whispering] He’s yelling everybody get up right now. [More shots] He’s in the library. He’s shooting at everybody. Okay. I have him in the library shooting at students and…the lady in the library, I have on the phone…Okay. Try to keep as many people down as you can” (124-125).
[20] In an email to the author, Goldsmith addressed my skepticism about his selection of Jackson as an iconic “death”: “Students, I find, are usually more moved by Michael Jackson than by the Kennedys, who are cold, distant, historical figures. Conversely, people of a certain age, tend to dismiss my inclusion of Jackson as cynical.”
[21] Goldsmith mentions he didn’t transcribe the assassinations of MLK or Malcolm X because there were no recordings of immediate reports or witnesses available and so recordings of those events merely offered the normal controlled reportage we hear in typical news accounts of disasters. Goldsmith notices that the recordings he does transcribe reveal a disturbing, if not terribly surprising, dose of racism and xenophobia, and so his points about choosing not to account for the deaths of Malcolm and MLK may speak to his own self-consciousness about this issue.