lust for life -- (as seen in the 4/12/2010 copy of the new yorker p.39)
the elephants ate each other then they dreamed
of eating elephants till their captors came
to feed them. then they died. my meth lab
tends to explode. i move to a new one
like a hermit crab. i give the gift of gab.
the truth gets me hard. song selection
is key. the idiot swedes do a number on me.
they invent refrigeration and sleep in shifts.
i'm tired of being compared to britney spears.
she's so pretty. i'm covered in petroglyphs.
that sorcerer bewitched my penis!
i'm speed and space, an aztec princess.
the truth makes me hurl, the truth's a mistake.
john milton jumps out of my birthday cake.
the psyched mohican oils the beaver.
fruit stripe gum soon loses flavor.
everything's flammable. everything's flash.
postmen like doctors and doctors like cash.
***
"lust for life" reminds me, first of all, of the results of a program my dad wrote as an undergrad called 'the random story generator'. after inputting a variety of words and phrases and setting up potential grammatical structures into which these words might fall, the program generates some marginally comprehensible combination of words that sounds a little like a story. one such story reads as follows:
"A raisin said, father will have robbed plasticly by the time the maximum penalties have switched on near a bush. Unfortunately for the father, the clock caressed a dinner. A comet fell into the earth and killed the windy food. A comet fell into the earth and killed the eastern bed. Bronko said, I think we are all goin...g to have to see about our own maximum penalties! The room fell to the couch but it was too much and they all laughed purely.
"Buddha you! You gogon," said the sister phallicly.
Because of the motorcycle to a readout the only daughter will not have sons.
A sister said, "Lunch will have punched famously by the time the rooms have turned on the container"
"Qqquaq you! You prosrustean," said the woman phallicly.
Then the couch blew up and everyone died."
end digression.
now, i don't mean to imply that robbins' poem is of the narrative variety. there really isn't much of a 'narrative' to a randomly generated story in the first place. rather i think that the poem's aleatoric combos of unpredictable-predictable rhymes and common slogans feels like the sort of babble me and my roommate let loose when we've had one (or two) too many tequila shots... and really only a computer that creates an amalgamation of neurological hiccups could possibly recreate such inanity. am i saying this poem in computer generated? perhaps... what i really think is that michael robbins is a robot.
to be more precise, i think michael robbins' speaker is a robot: a spam filtering, lyric regurgitating, culture diarrheaing bot of obnoxiousness.
the only indication the reader gets that this psycho-bot has a non-random-culture-commenting agenda is the fact that it repeatedly speaks of the truth, which he says, "gets me hard," "makes me hurl," and "is a mistake." he goes on to elucidate a number of 'truisms' about gum, doctors, and combustible materials... none of which seem particularly true to yours truly. going off the title 'lust for life,' along with references to getting hard and an enchanted penis, the reader senses a sort of frantic and uprooted sexual urgency. roland barthes describes the seminar as a place of erotic contact. if he gets to jump to such touchy conclusions, then so do i. i say that the polyphony of popular culture and literature, particularly among my group of friends (well-read stanford students), lives as a body of promiscuous knowledge, so cheap and dirty that even good ol' john milton can jump out of a birthday cake, scantily clad and ready to sing about fruit of disobedience.
the 'truth' or 'knowledge' robbins represents in his poem is a self-destructive, fleeting sort of thing that no one can keep up with because of the vast quantity and minimal quality of the information involved (i.e. the bizarre quote from p!nk's "don't let me get me" "i'm tired of being compared to britney spears"). the speaker 'covered in petroglyphs' is intentionally indecipherable because the body of knowledge gained from any internet search yields endless and often contradictory 'facts' of life.
let's be serious though, if some robot were required to churn out a poem written in warped approximations of pentameter and this robot were fed data from the mind, inbox, or blog of the average English grad student (particularly one from stanford's first year cohort & their m.a. counterparts), michael robbins' "lust for life" would be one of millions^millions of combinations of possible results. living inside the mind of an English grad student is a sexy, indefinite-reference-inducing experience (i would know) which may or may not frequently approximate a state of maniacal lust for the endless juxtapositions of words that make up this post-postmodern life.
then again, the speaker is probably just on meth.
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This is fantastic, Trux. I like this blog a lot. For my comment, I would like to note that this Robbins poem is reminiscent of a(ny) Pavement song. Pavement, an excellent band from the 90s, deals in what I like to call "high-quality nonsense." To hear what I mean you might want to check out their song "Stereo," and then maybe "Summer Babe (Winter Version)" and "Shady Lane." Of course, Pavement song structure is determined more by the conventions of pop music than those of poetry - but I think you'll perceive the resemblance.
ReplyDeleteAnyway, I look forward to whatever useful knowledge the two of you'll dispense next.