Books from Scott MacLeod
engaged by Jim Leftwich
November 2023 - January 2024
Last November, around Thanksgiving, Scott sent me 16 of his books, self-published by Serious Projects and available from Lulu. I have been reading in and around them ever since. Here are some of my responses.
... "trying to construct neither sense nor nonsense"...
----David Stent
on the Dispatx online version of Betaville, by Scott Macleod
That statement is not all of it, but is exactly it, for the areas under attention.
Words in sequence, punctuated or not, will emit meanings, will give off meanings like a fire gives off smoke, though those meanings will not necessarily make sense -- and, perhaps more importantly, the words while being sequenced are not necessarily chosen based on their relationship to the possibilities of sense and nonsense.
I am reminded of John M. Bennett's description of some of his poems as "swarming with meanings."
And, I am also reminded of Scott Macleod's concept of "Realaesthetic."
A system of aesthetics based on practical applications rather than on moral or ideological consideration.
Therefore:
An author's chosen method of producing a text should be judged on whether or not it is successful in the production of a text.
The text itself, I suppose it could go without saying, can and should and will be judged based on a wide range of other criteria.
A brief note on a pile of your books:
Appropriated prose, in which the stitchings and unstitchings are decidedly displayed, sequence, for example, "violations of sequence," from the dysraphic to the raphesemic. Grammar as well is fundamentally dishonest, structurally and productivity, generative, as in the acceptable spectrum of political discourse in contemporary America. I don't know how much longer I can submit to the body of the book. Omission is their favorite style of lying. I want to begin on page 23, and move in any direction, in quantities of 5 -- words, sentences, pages, The New Vision (ever since Columbia, early fifties, one straight unbroken line from that dorm room to this sentence), Ginsberg singing Blake to professors at SUNY-Buffalo. Never happened, he said. But I was there! We can find out the truth if we want to (but watch out for those sentences, they're slippery & tricky by definition).
Dearest Cliff, nota bene,
From page 9 I have extracted the following confessions. ...
finally arrived here via bars late at night, a stranger to my own mind that hides in odors of sweat, my constructed activity simply lacks a narrative squall.
I have tried to be good. Even a good nihilist is good for nothing, and I am not a good nihilist.
Cliff, (I am on page 18) should this be regarded as authentic?
Page 27 is all endings, ends of nights, cigarette butts. Shit you hear at parties.
On mistakes, the the explode scary?
These find often and the again.
Page 44, named after a famous old blues:
Most words do not become reality, nor ought to.
Cliff, the social status is everything. I can't carry it.
...yours in authenticity,
Retorico
There are no snakes on the astral plane.
A monody is an ode offered by a single actor in a Greek tragedy. Tragedy, not comedy (also not irony and not romanticism). Remember that as you make your way from "I am purely decorative, abstract" to "Straight Out of Sadr City." The Unholy Union of the title is the union of religion and politics, of spirit and slaughter, of faith and war, of mind and language, of eros and thanatos, of the tender minded and the tough minded, of love and death. It does us no good to assert that the varieties of religious experience include all of the above. The first paragraph of Glassy Knoll (no, not "grassy" -- but it is impossible not to think "grassy" while reading "Glassy") (which I published in Xtant 4 in 2004) reads as follows:
Oswald said: I will not hurt you, I want something for myself and horses, I want to make a rise, Oswald said don't you tell me any lies or it will be worse for yourselves if you do (the rhyme scheme is: A - you; B - horses; C - rise; C - lies; B - worse; A - do ---- a b c c b a).
A snug and salient rhyme pattern to find embedded in a paragraph of prose!
Somewhat later in our journey through this unpaginated and unholy union neither beyond nor of good and evil, we come to a section entitled Migratory Birds, the first paragraph of which reads as follows:
Rumsfeld says: I will not hurt you, I just want something for myself and horses, I want to make a rise. Rumsfeld says: don't tell me any lies or it will be all the worse for yourselves if you do.
Rumsfeld is quoting Oswald. He adds the word "just" and he replaces a comma with a period and he adds the word "all."
Paragraphs are not fungible. Rumsfeld makes reality, and we take notes.
Several pages into the section entitled Treatment we find the following meditation:
How much language can the Earth support? No one knows.
We remember being told, somewhat indirectly, that we are reading a tragedy. We dream of clarity, certainty, correctness, connectivity, continuity, and coherence. We reflect on an image of the Earth, bursting with language, overflowing, like a billboard for Sherwin Williams.
Near the end of the book we find a section entitled Steel Torsos. It begins as follows:
A new dark age will begin with the fall of nihilism.
I believe it. It may happen even sooner than that.
On the last page of Belief in Ghosts is a collage entitled "Au Revoir," until we see each other again in English, and we have in fact seen this same collage not too long ago, on page 3 of this very book, where it is called "The Interior Life." What are we to think? What if a belief in ghosts is a belief in metaphor, in correspondences, in nonlocal connectivities, in improbable relations of cause and effect? In short, what if a belief in ghosts is the foundation upon which the practice of collage is constructed? Would you like a dusty answer? How about a flying carrot? A carrot with one wing, appropriated from an angel? Not enough information? Do you suffer from electronic memory? Of course. So many of us do. Live young, die fast, shuffle your cliches and truisms. All ingredients are eligible for collage. And, all collages are legible, as collections of smaller components, and as components of larger collections. Remember: if work was so great, the rich would have stolen it. Collage is a kind of play. Belief in Ghosts is #34 in Scott Macleod's series of Serious Publications.
No quantity or quality of study, or of studious deprogramming, will prepare us for a moment of experiential monosemy. Emptiness, even after years of sitting and gazing through one's navel into the void, is only monosemous if also posthumous. Quieting the mind is relative, aspirational, measured in gradations, or shades of grey. Better to surrender to the noise of Being, from which non-site emerges and exits a countless and endless array, arranged in concentric circles around a concept of a self, of routes and tangents towards, always and only towards, opportunities for arbitrary endings, which are in fact only temporal markers for provisional new beginnings. This is, in brief, the lesson of the book, the physical book, held in the hands, experienced two pages at a time, and in that enormous context, one word at a time, oceanic, yes, of course, one drop at a time. I am compelled, and/or allowed, to think these thoughts, which are only in part my own, as I think of an appropriate thank you to Scott for his gift of seventeen books. As a beginning, one writing leads to another. I expect to be in that beginning for some time.
Our Lady In Art is infinite, if not eternal. Nothing can stand in the way of its existence. A bloated red fish floats like a zeppelin above a mutated version of the mysterium conjunctionis. It agitates and it soothes. Art from the bleak commonplace can be removed painlessly by working. On the one hand there is religion as psychology, on the other hand there is the political as history, and in the middle there is a stream of blood, dried onto an image of a canvas.
If memory serves me well, and on this count I think it does, you gave me a copy of your chapbook, abendland, when it was published in 1986. I read it more than once, then and a few years later. I thought it was good back then, in the lethal wasteland that was the 80s, and rereading it now, as a section in your Lift You, I see that it still is good, actually better than I knew nearly forty years ago. For one thing, I know a little bit now about the history of the word. It seems relevant, potentially at least, as tendencies in the western world towards fascism and nationalism are on the increase -- once again. When I first encountered the poems in abendland, I had only the foggiest of ideas about Language Poetry, postmodernism, and the key concepts of post-structuralism in general. Your book was one of the beginnings of a long process of introductions. I didn't know what I was getting into when I was reading your little booklet, in my basement apartment on Baker Street. It is with an oddly complex kind of pleasure that I am rereading it today.
The real thanks-giving Feast
I am only so far smelling the light leaking from one large box. It tastes like a very old light, with the unfolding dangers of an ancient nutrition. I opened Happy As Larry, and paged all the way through it. Improvised extractions. Of course I appreciate the theory, and the results of its application. Then to Der Heidenlarmer, from easily a hundred years ago. Before our nine eleven, mostly in an earlier millennium. The very loud one. Pandemonium. Dreadful racket. Unholy din. Only you are allowed to say so. I am only allowed to recognize and acknowledge a certain style of accuracy. I dedicated The Textasifsuch, my collection of Institute writings, to you, a little less than 20 years ago. Thank you for Happy As Larry.
No Comment
I wonder what kind of book is this, this book called No Comment, which is a book made of nothing but comments. It is a kind of history book, a book of a microhistory, that much I am willing to assert, if only to see how long I am able to accept it as a meaningful assessment. It is also a kind of parallel history, beginning roughly 45 years ago, when Jimmy Carter was president and Scott Macleod was 22 years old, though the earliest date included in it is from the end of Reagan's first term. No Comment gives us 38 years of approving responses to performances, poems, paintings, plays and several varieties of prose. The overall effect is to remind us of an injunction from Philippe Sollers: write or be written. This book is documentary evidence of how that can play out: write, and be written about. I'm still not sure what kind of book this is, unless it's a kind of training manual, one designed to let us consider how psychology can become part of history without agreeing to fight in someone else's war. Art as engagement and awareness, not necessarily celebration, evinces praise as a valid response, and reminds us of Robert Duncan's axiom: responsibility is the ability to respond. A book like No Comment assists us in cultivating that responsibility.
No Comment Pt. 2
I'm glad you made No Comment. You didn't have to take the time, but I think it's important that you did. Years ago, decades ago, I was at a used book sale fundraiser at a public library in Charlottesville and I bought a stack of old New Directions magazines. One of them contained a selection of poems by the French poet, Guillevic. He said: the center of the universe is everywhere / and I am in it. It's a useful way of looking at things. It's a nice counter to the accusation that we are living in our own little worlds. So, in No Comment, there you are, living in your own little world, which also happens to be the center of the universe, and, while we're thinking about it, you are surrounded, in space and time, by a good sized group of others, who are also living in their own little worlds, each one at the center of the universe. No Comment turns out to be barely about you at all, except that it exists from your perspective on the center of the universe. I say, good job. Thanks for a useful solution to a nagging problem.
Anne Frank
For some reason, a reason I seem reluctant to seek, I have found myself somewhat unsettled at the prospect of rereading Anne Frank in Jerusalem. But I have just now read the fine review by Greta Snider in No Comment, and will give myself no further excuse to avoid it. I begin of course with the front matter and am very happily reminded of those days -- 24, 25, 26 years ago -- working back and forth a bit while Scott was putting the manuscript together. Those were difficult times for me in many ways, and I don't tend to dwell on them very much, but holding this book in my hands does revive those memories. I'm not real happy with the way I was living as the last millennium came to a close. At the same time, I have another set of memories, of Scott visiting in 1998, and inviting me to participate in his Kohoutenberg project. The Anne Frank book was already in progress. I remember telling people that my world was made much larger simply by knowing Scott. And I remember telling people, in more recent years, that I must have done some things right in my life, else I wouldn't be friends with him. So, as for personal matters 25 years ago, let's just call it a fairly typical midlife crisis. One thing that was very much atypical was reading the Anne Frank material, in manuscript and in progress. It was a way out, of whatever I was in. And now I am getting started reading it again, in a different world, a different life. I have to expect that it will be a different book.
Another OOdt
All else is ended now. All else begins.
And so we prepare to fight in exchange for this earth.
Thus destroyed, I, no victory, no kingdom of the family endeared with its compatriot.
My skin is burnt to make the lamp-shade.
Who mean the political with observance thereupon?
None but within legal age to them speedboat.
They single Warrior come along, forward battlement the comma; until the expansion, like hunger clings to the alive tree, as if dust thou must.
OOdt Two
Another Improvised Extraction
All else is ended now. All else begins.
Lie, if you like, motionless, breathless, and unaware of a heartfall from within the inner dream of adorns to control.
Up to my neck much avalent to sleep by the serious center, simple enough, to have that, against the relative elbow, if you from what to believe believe my marvellous antinode.
Time is lost in the turning Ootd, the load under the sea and early morning unmindful, emitted in high Peace.
Half awake, all upside down, here is a great space turned around inside by fire.
However angry a man may be, you will not take anything by him, although all of the sky of Ootd were nothing in the silence.
OOdt Too
All this is ended now. All else begins.
I will be stopped, fled into all directions, and the white horse, which is paragraph iron -- will put at fire duration from the god of invulnerable wars each imperfection he speaks to working in the measurable waehlton of the lambs.
Mind fruit once, rereading the ordinerary.
I will tell you how writing derived one letter from the truth.
The making winds mountains cold and heat, when the crisis embedded heroes in "bookish" disorder, take up weapons to defeat the face, to divide the life span of the body, gap slab 349 dried beans of direction.
I will not storm more in the flotsam of loneliness.
Disobeying the rider finds the push.
The Fire Goes Out And The Sun Comes Up
(backwards from the middle of Ghost Dance)
This is an old town sunken in erotic wandering. Four hundred on the windowsill, under a finite supply of lunches.
What persists is a betrayal of the dead.
What is it about freedom that seems to make it so important?
What I am about to do.
What great misery!
What really happened?
What are you writing for and on what bias are you thinking?
What am I doing out here?
What kind of sorrow is this that lifts the curtain and returns, in wonder, to be downtown at dawn.
Success measurement = How the content supports the goal.
A pizza deliveryman French which gambles here staring cigarette, years.
Somewhere down with smokers, bio Saturday: put it down on Tape.
The radio's playing some forgotten song. I'm kind of on fashion god this long.
This town is full of holes, swimming tight. I read the US vote, entering a plea, how are you on the highway at school?
While it is manipulate some of the no less every tree. Ominous Waffle House experience, with questions.
Lined up magnetics four hundred story. The skies open up, bullied by the influence of themselves.
Defacing the Preface to Happy As Larry
An improvised extraction doesn't know what "successful" means, other than the fact of one text having been made from another text or group of texts.
Writing spontaneously, in the sense of what happens in the weather.
An improvised extraction can be a kind of writing against itself, but it doesn't have to be.
It can be an embrace, or a secret liaison down at the dark end of the street.
Hiding in shadows
where we don't belong
I find while marble becomes soap in the wind, that refers to improvisation, many changes, windy, windy, I mean a way of reading, quickly and experimental, in order to seem cornered by success or not.
This kind of fun is always a serious project.
THE INCOMPLETB
In and by eradicating this solution, powerful under collected patterns, ants and mysteries we call axioms, we call the study of weather.
Not deities or cheerios, both.
From therein the fallow dangers produce, in lieu of progress, an easily ceremonial accompaniment. Lies are traditions in which scripture is better left undescribed.
Malt off. Training is always ruined by swamps.
The pasts traced in identically endless limits.
I have been a few keys of ground imagination, fire and meat, celestial narratives, worms behind the ravens.
Furious saliva in their copper retinas.
Chaotic youth stolen from my mind's gripping postcard.
Where when and fear opening falling, singing, why and because. The sky is nostalgic for the fundamental money of spirituality.
Here comes the sun letter noise beetle. I am not answered, he threw.
Traffic Loves A Rattlesnake
Not quite
Melodies anarcho-demon
Not quite
Venus mumbling the virus
Not quite
The future of safe orbits
Not quite
A literature of roosters
Leftwich after Macleod
After Leftwich
Detain Cleft
the flailing dippers
of July
in the middle
of July
taste of yard fish
reading yard fish
your harp
on a light volcano
Leftwich after Macleod
after Leftwich
Shikataganai
... when I am the cold air with no hat, and you are the reason for winter...
I long have not written solar typhoon and wind cactus. Four days of rain, in the middle of a rather hot Reality.
I had a lot of notebooks, also a coat, and a helicopter. Now I am a horse. The nouns are haggard. Everything is of no use to the others.
Yesterday
it is
it has
it was
it was
At last
It is the cold wind of I
Yesterday I practiced the hat
It is raining feathers and knives
My autonomy friends have writing, martinis, life in a bag of family. 39 boxes is 10% of their dairy.
Yesterday the milk was in the way and the fire went out. I went out remembering. The reasons for snow. Why the sea is still on fire.
Tomorrow it was working for I could not write.
Preface to Hopping on Larry
I find while marble becomes soaked in wind that it refers to improvisation. Many changes dotted with wind wind in the eyes are just a way of reading. I have been quickly experimental in order to seep from the corners of these knots.
Ripples
The words "Lift You," on the front cover, do not make us do anything, but they do allow us to consider, however briefly, however precariously, the possibility that here is a book of poems, published in 2022, and intended to assist in lifting the spirits of its readers, no matter the all but unbearable incessant drumbeat of the simultaneously collapsing and exploding anthropocene.
We open the book and look at the credits page. Lift You, the book, is actually five chapbooks compiled into one full-sized book. One of the chapbooks was first published in 1986, another one is published for the first time in this book, 38 years later. That sort of persistence is in itself encouraging and uplifting.
The first poem in the book is entitled Sensations of Loss. The title alone makes me think of another of MacLeod's books, Metpo, specifically of the short text on the back cover of that book.
That text was written by Marcy Freedman and appeared in the Nov 4 - 10, 1998 edition of the SF Weekly. She wrote:
In one small piece on a shelf in the lab, MacLeod places a magnifying glass in front of an insect. Its stunning forest green, brown and golden-tinged wings are radiantly enlarged. But the artist doesn't let us get away with a pretty moment -- when our eyes tire of this spectacle, they continue downward to the fecal matter the insect is resting on. As it dawns on us we've been taken, we realize we've fallen for the tricks of a clever conjuror.
As we read the Sensations of Loss poem, we find the following lines:
what do you say to someone who comes back
to you the same way they left?
One possibility would be that we express our disappointment and recommend paying more attention. Another possibility might be that we admire their persistence.
The poem ends with these lines:
have you ever wanted to just keep going
just keep doing what you're doing
without ever stopping?
Well. It isn't easy to simply say yes. Yes is the answer, but it isn't easy or simple to say it.
By the time you get to the last section of the book, which is the chapbook entitled Lift You, you might be forgiven if you think nothing is easy or simple -- is not now, and if it ever was, it will surely never be again.
The chapbook entitled Lift You is either one long poem, or several pages of short untitled poems. Let's say both/and rather than either/or.
The last page of the chapbook entitled Lift You reads, in its entirety, as follows:
then everybody kisses you and that's a sacrament
but you are dead and it takes
six people to lift
lift you
----But those are not the last words in the book entitled Lift You. The last words in the book are what passes for a short bio:
Scott MacLeod is trying to leave ripples as he ebbs.
The book as a whole should, and will, lift you, but this lifting is no simple matter.
