David Matthews

Canadian poet Christian Bök’s Xenotext project is an intriguing intellectual exercise, and the use of DNA as a medium makes for a nifty marketing gimmick. Bök describes the project as his

nine-year long attempt to create an example of “living poetry.” . . . to write a short verse about language and genetics, whereupon [he uses] a “chemical alphabet” to translate this poem into a sequence of DNA for subsequent implantation into the genome of a bacterium (in this case, a microbe called Deinococcus radiodurans—an extremophile, capable of surviving, without mutation, in even the most hostile milieus, including the vacuum of outer space). (Bök, The Xenotext Works)

Killian Fox, writing in The Observer, describes the Xenotext in terms of an attempt to achieve immortality through art:

Many artists seek to attain immortality through their art, but few would expect their work to outlast the human race and live on for billions of years. As Canadian poet Christian has realised, it all comes down to the durability of your materials. Bök has written a poem, “The Xenotext”, which he is inserting into the DNA of a particularly resilient form of bacteria, Deinococcus radiodurans. This extremophile bacterium can survive exposure to cold, dehydration, acid and vacuums, meaning it could live on in outer space should the Earth cease to exist. (Killian Fox, How does a poet ensure his work lives forever?, The Observer, 24 April 2011)

Bök speaks of “making something that’s intelligible and interesting and probably deserves to last for a few million years.” (Christian Bök: Experimental Poet, Utne Reader, November-December 2009).

There is something misguided about this kind of thinking. Mere duration of a work of art through an extended period of time is not what we have in mind when we speak of artistic immortality. The Iliad and Hamlet are immortal because they continue to be meaningful to us as living humans, to move and touch us in a profound sense, long after Homer and Shakespeare turned to dust. Survival of a work of art, in whatever material or virtual form, is trivial apart from a connection to a human consciousness.

Bök’s earlier work Eunoia (2001) pays tribute to a French tradition that can be traced back to Baudelaire and Rimbaud and runs through Alfred Jarry, Dada, Surrealism, and le nouveau roman, and is

directly inspired by the exploits of Oulipo (l’Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle) — the avant-garde coterie renowned for its literary experimentation with extreme formalistic constraints. The text makes a Sisyphean spectacle of its labour, wilfully crippling its language in order to show that, even under such improbable conditions of duress, language can express an uncanny, if not sublime, thought. (Bök, Eunoia).

Each chapter consists of a brief prose poem that restricts itself to the use of a single vowel. For example, Chapter A begins “Awkward grammar appals a craftsman. A Dada bard as daft as Tzara damns stagnant art….” The composition is also governed by a number of subsidiary rules, spelled out by the author in a kind of postscript chapter titled “The New Ennui,” all of which makes for an entertaining exercise.

Readers of a certain bent may find Bök fascinating. At one time, when I was much taken with Surrealist automatic writing, the cut-ups of William S. Burroughs, and postmodern experimentalism generally, I might have greeted Eunoia and Xenotext with enthusiasm. Today I find this sort of thing moderately interesting but not compelling. The form is not the poem. Not that form is irrelevant. Form shapes and generates content, and a strong poem may be rendered trivial by paraphrase into prose; but form is a subsidiary aspect.

My initial response on first reading of Bök and his Xenotext project was to wonder whether he is immortalizing art or trivializing it. Perhaps the Xenotext is a great work of art, but if so, it is not because it is translated into bacteria DNA. It is the poem that matters. Is it moving, provocative, insightful, or any of the many other things a poem may be in a way that matters to us? The bacterium’s DNA is just a medium, albeit an exotic one. Is a mediocre poem translated into DNA of greater merit or interest than a collection of doggerel printed in an elaborate font on nice paper, attractively illustrated, with a beautiful binding? As a technical exercise, perhaps, yes; but as poem, work of art, no.

David :: Apr.30.2011 :: House Red: Literary and Intellectual :: No Comments »

Criticism of Democrats for caving to the Republicans in round after round of budget wrangling may not be altogether justified, however dismaying it is to watch the Republicans get the best of things time after time at the expense of the general welfare and common good.

The Democrats enter the arena at an inherent disadvantage because even the bluest of those Democratic dogs believes there is some legitimate sphere for government. Thus they give ground, compromise, yield, to keep government functioning and programs going to protect the environment, safeguard the workplace, provide for transportation and other infrastructure, educate the people, make available at least minimal access to health care, and a host of other things, albeit too often too feebly funded and too much undermined by the opposition to be nearly as effective as we need them to be.

Conversely, many Republicans in Congress believe they have been sent to Washington to shut down substantial portions of the federal government. That is what the spending cuts are all about. Why would these people compromise anything to keep the government running? They want to shut it down. So Democrats are compelled to yield to keep the foundering ship of state afloat.

The Democrats are rightly castigated for their failure to pass a budget last year when they held tenuous majorities in both houses of Congress. The president has failed or not had it in him to effectively counter the pernicious Republican message. I am sympathetic with those who feel that it is time, or as some of my friends would have it, long past time, to break with Barack Obama. Yet I am hard–pressed to say what Obama could have done in the months just past or might do in the months to come to effectuate more desirable outcomes given Republican numbers and intransigence. To break with Obama now would be to abandon the field to the likes of Paul Ryan and Rand Paul, an awful prospect.

David :: Apr.13.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »

The latest report I have seen (Waukesha Clerk Announces Votes For Prosser: ‘I’m Thankful That This Error Was Caught Early,’ Talking Points Memo, earlier this evening) states that incumbent Justice David Prosser has picked up 7,582 votes to wipe out liberal challenger JoAnne Kloppenburg’s razor-thin lead. There is nothing in the report to indicate this was due to anything but human error that was caught and corrected.

A Prosser victory will be disappointing for those who hold to my general view of things, but some of my persuasion may have read too much into the slender lead Kloppenburg previously held when they termed it a repudiation of Gov. Scott Walker. Assuming for the sake of argument that Kloppenburg’s lead had held, any repudiation of Walker would have been by an exceedingly small margin at a time when Wisconsin voters of a liberal bent are highly motivated and mobilized.

The closely contested race is testament to the unpopularity of Walker’s policies and the ham-fisted manner in which he tried to implement them; however, no matter the winner, the closeness of the outcome suggests less a repudiation of Walker than that the state, and by extension the country, is fairly evenly split on the issues that divide us must deeply, raising the specter of a continuation of the vicious electoral cycle whereby one side gains ascendency by a narrow margin, only to be cast out in the next election, the other side coming to power in similar manner, neither with the numbers to govern effectively, both sides wavering between true believers on the extremes, more so the Republicans, and chasing after some spurious center, more descriptive of the Democrats at present, while the country stagnates and flounders, the social safety net rots away, unless Paul Ryan gets his way and rips it asunder, the excesses of the rich and powerful go unchecked in the absence of a balancing power to act for the general welfare and common good, and so on. So whacha gon’ do?

David :: Apr.07.2011 :: House Red: Politics & Current Affairs :: No Comments »