Quarter in Review: On Embarrassment, Lyric Mortality, and Voight-Kampff Testing
I’d like to begin by saying it would be ideal if nobody read this. Call me lawful good, but I’m just a little hesitant when editors write for the publications they edit. This isn’t a comment on anyone else’s actions and I don’t mean to suggest it can’t be done well; it’s just a personal feeling I can’t shake, even as I do it now. It seems like an ethical necessity to maintain some professional distance (professional being a word, a state, an idea I also struggle with ongoingly, forever in pursuit of work that will never become a career). And chiefly so if one is editor in chief (really, we haven’t found a better title for this “position”? Legibility is tyranny). Best to keep individual priorities, opinions, and allegiances out of the editorial projection in favor of the collective mix coming through. Play the bass. Be a prick in a greater tapestry. Like democracy could work, someone said.
And yet the self remains the most and perhaps only suitable instrument available. Hello mind. Hello body. Hello author and art, critic and culture. Hello essay. Hello autofiction. Hello ideas we’ll remember new words for and future ones we’ll forget. Hello language. What is the world? Nothing to do but beat on. Like boats or whatever, someone said.
I often hesitate to name the things I like in private, never mind suggest them in public venues, and I believe this is not a bad thing. It was in January, while walking around to some bookstores on my first visit to NYC as EIC, just after our Vol. 00 launch party at McNally Jackson, and after I’d spent a morning strolling down streets I didn’t know and speculating about what exactly it would be like to walk here regularly or get coffee there and own such an expensive dog as that one or that other smaller one and rent such an even more expensive apartment as that one up there, in a place like Brooklyn, here, because how did people live here, not just financially but actually, that my friend and fellow Cleveland Review of Books editor Robert Gittings prescribed me Elizabeth Bishop’s idea (I was struggling just then to articulate some highly ungracious complaint about a poem (what else?) and locate precisely what it was about the poet who had written it and the well-reputed and -funded outlet that had published it that week that was so very deserving of my adding to this innocent city’s air and Rob’s poor ears in such a pollutionary manner) that being a poet is embarrassing, and, in a conversational extension peculiar to this moment, that poets should always be a little embarrassed by themselves and their work. This became my mantra for the year. Finally, hesitation, not just about a poem or a poet or writing or editing or a culture or any particular thing but work, art, creativity, thinking, life, in general, was (Write it!) vital. Shame is a practice. Guilt a craft. Embarrassment the only trustworthy pursuit and indicator of being able to be trusted. Of having sufficiently dealt. With one’s subject. Brushed the unsayable parts of one’s being in language: the poem.
It became clear what had gotten me so riled up was precisely the absence of any kind of embarrassment in this poem and about this poem, on the part of the poet who wrote it or the people who edited and published it or the people who were saying they liked reading it—had they read it?—on the internet. To be so unembarrassed, and moreover to not even permit oneself to be embarrassed, to be so unwilling, seemed like scientific evidence that whatever was causing my stumbling and stuttering reaction down this perfectly good public sidewalk on a clear day was part of the same family of allergens. I began to see embarrassment as the pinnacle of creative clarity and critical insight, a marker of quality and ethicality, a social orientation toward the world and a political aesthetic. There are many analogs to this. Wisdoms abound attesting to the grace potential in transference of states of being or feeling from maker to viewer, folk aphorisms about craft espousing the virtue and even necessity of surprising or scaring oneself in the process of making art, specifically writing. But why not the virtue or necessity of embarrassment?
Maybe because embarrassment—not the charming, self-effacing kind; not the clown kind but the regular human kind—is really difficult. To be embarrassed is to be in a witnessed state of pure compromise and compostability, revealing oneself as fundamentally assailable, mortal, knowable, doomed. It is considered unprofessional. It feels bad. It is a bad look. How is writing supposed to feel, supposed to look?
As we finish another quarter-lap around everyone’s favorite yellow dwarf, making the cosmic leap from one terrestrial season to the next, bud to bloom, we can only hope to have sustained an essential commitment to running a journal of writing and making that continually surprises, scares, and embarrasses. I think of Ellena Basada’s interview with Vi Khi Nao, in which the author remarks while reflecting on the practicalities of being queer and a writer, building a metaphor that is more than literal: “I just love fruits because they are so pure to eat. And, because I would need five or ten or twenty books to fully capture the depth of this desire, I will say that a fruit is more of an innate writer than me.” It took most of our willpower to not pull-quote the end of this interview when we published it and shared it. Not because we were embarrassed (we were, delightfully), but because to do so would have been to ruin the taste, the surprise, the fear. It would have been a lapse in our (or maybe just my) faith that some degree of uncertainty in one’s own project is, much like embarrassment, indicative of some deep and true power, even when that power lies in failure or refusal. Cary Stough’s review of Michael Palmer’s doomed poetics-memoir The Danish Notebook graphs this area, characterized by a suspended state of “intentions, or anti-intentions,” where Palmer’s book’s actual project lies in its failure to answer the call to its own production, extending, however intentionally or un, a reactionary and anti-/non-authoritative circuit in American poetics that runs wires through Oulipo, Language, and Objectivist movements and continues to produce conductivity today.
Embarrassment is fundamentally anti-authoritarian. Dictators cannot survive it, and one mark of a tyrant is the willingness to resort to violence to preserve one’s own unassailable credibility. Perhaps an effective Voight-Kampff test for detecting a fascist is to simply gauge the subject’s embarrassment-tolerance quotient. The lower the score, the higher the potential for authoritarian tendencies. What’s a tortoise? Is this the test now?
One of the questions on the test could be “what happens when the search for love is over?” which Grace Byron asks in “The Erotics of Yogurt,” her review of Look at the Lights, My Love, Annie Ernaux’s meditation on the grocery store. We open with Byron wandering the aisles of a Kroger in Indiana, examining diet culture by applying a socio-nutritional theory that foods are either “MILFy” or “not MILFy” and contemplating how “the big box store is a little errand to ward off the fraying edges of existentialism.” For Byron, even at their most mundane, most troubled, most embarrassing, “the elements of life, such as possession, organization, and food, are suffused with the erotic.” And when is the erotic not a space of incredible potential embarrassment, if not in the present then definitely in the future? Why else choose salmon over pizza, dark chocolate over ice cream, Diet Coke over Coke Heavy?
Another question for the test: “Popularly obscure yet critically worshipped author’s name printed in black metal font on a $30 article of clothing, ironically?” No shade. We too traffic in merch. Besides, it’s the manner of answering that reveals just as much as, if not more than, the answer itself. None of us are burning down churches in Norway. Form is content. Style ethics. Someone said.
The test could also ask “what do you really have when it seems like you have nothing?” as Philip Harris does in “Children of the Atom,” his essay on Cormac McCarthy’s last two novels—which we, at the time, could not have known would also be the author’s final. Harris’ consideration of the end, not just in the textual details of narrative nuclear horror or shades of the extended shadow of a post-apocalyptic vogue that McCarthy and other Modernist fiction writers helped cast over our present-day lettered field but in a lyric sense, as a lyric state, what the end is, what the end means and how to be in it, locates aesthetic qualities which mirror a capacity and perhaps necessity for extreme mutability and embarrassment. Harris’ end-thinking is focused on McCarthy but strikes one of the richest prevailing ore veins in contemporary literature, its markets and its discourses: the seemingly endless (often professed, rarely enacted) appetite for works and pursuit of projects “about the world we actually live in, where bad things happen but only some clocks stop. They are messy and frustrating, the fractured chronology coming off as both interesting and ineffective.”
If literature reflects anything about us in the end it’s this. Our appetite. Our interest in effect. Interesting and ineffective. It’s this. In the end.
It’s erotic and lyric embarrassment. It’s quantum double fudge superposition. It’s the way “our ability to maintain our way of living relies on our ability to ignore information and tell lies to one another, and especially to ourselves.” (Erin Margaret Day on Hilary Plum’s Hole Studies). It’s our powers of dis- and reappearance, to come from nowhere “because the regional borders are porous, not just in those liminal zones that separate the South from Appalachia and Appalachia from the Midwest, but in our national self-conception as well.” (Benjamin J. Wilson on Race, Region, and the National Imaginary). It’s our impossible dual need for narrative precision and endless health, for ourselves and others, as explored by Caren Beilin, Rachel Bracken, Jason Harris, Zach Savich, and Valentino Zullo in a series of essays on Wellness. And how once we find we can’t have either of those it’s our pursuit of pleasure, so “it’s fitting that ecstasy’s Greek root means to literally ‘be beside oneself,’ as in the soul exiting the body… death, near-death is a preemptive condition of the ecstatic.” (Kameryn Carter on Gentileschi’s Mary Magdelenes). It’s the expression of craft and “taste [as] an advocacy vehicle for the Good, if hardly for the same Good.” (Yishai Jusidman on the entrenchment of taste in the art world). It’s literature at all. It’s art at all. It’s wasting time because time’s a waste. It’s “a practice of excess, of the unjustifiable and the unnecessary: the costuming, the tanning, the crafting of a distinct style in service of a vision of what becomes necessary in order to get through the day or death.” (Guillermo Rebollo Gil on Pro Wrestling and Poetry). “How we rebuild imaginary palaces, vast and tenuous estates of maybe.” (Xiao Yue Shan on Hélène Cixous’ Well-Kept Ruins). That we continue. When “none of this is for us. Really: None of this is for anything at all.” (Sarah Khatry on Meghan O’Gieblyn’s God Human Animal Machine).
To be embarrassed is to be mortified. To get mortal. To not just be alive but to live. What for? Hell if I know. I hesitate to trust anyone who does.
So watch your head, reader. The days get shorter from here. And remember, the most reliable indicator of whether you’re dealing with a person or a replicant, a human or a fascist, will always be the least becoming. Everyone’s the CEO of their own personal Enron but no one worth their cubic carbon footprint escapes biodegradation, UV rays, afternoon traffic, or the totem to time, gravity, and liver function that is last season’s bathing suit. Skip the bylines and go straight to the CV of failures and flaws. Some things can’t be deepfaked.
See you again at the equinox. Until then, you have everything to be embarrassed about.