Review of "we dance the ghost, Emma" by Aad de Gids

Huge thanks to Aad de Gids for this awesome review. The book is on sale here, at this link & for some reason is selling pretty well.Very pleased by this review. 

This thing obviously did not work out as a relationship, but the books turned out fine which is the main thing.

REVIEW OF DAVID C. MCLEAN'S 'WE DANCE THE GHOST EMMA'

David C McLean has made a big U-turn in his poetry and text. the above mentined book is an aubade to love, unmistakably, gloriously, unapologetic. yet as I suspected the old McLean hasn't disappeared, this all then not to denunciate the truly love that is exposed and splattered, troubadoured and medievalized, made spikey and modern in this also, relentless book. to not double the extravagant joyous and overt sex scenes (it felt as if I was fucking Emma) I searched not for the more scenic, pastoral, but the eversomuch vile and knifing [(n)ontology] (philosophical theory, accreditation on 'being', 'existing' and its grounds or groundlessness). and I found it. this doesn't mean David didn't made a huge U-haul. for him being now is absolved in loving Emma and I can clearly remember writing such texts to my beloved Linwood. but I never also left my bleak and sharp, toothed in the night, exposés, also, like David, in the love texts. 'here this eternal burns 'here this eternal our fire, Emma, my wild love savage & answers, it kindles here, this flame you gave me; i need you beauty & hands to hold me innocent your fingers, they are love enough, they are perfect your drug, their addictive existing'(1)

if this is 'ontology', the philosophical theory of that we are there, it is in fire and love. there is tight connectedness, addictive and quasitoxic. but such is love. I used to say: 'shoot me, love me'. the ground is trembling. 'terra motata'. the fire of the earth is the visceral fire of fever. we see with druggy eyes all glowing. there is the other person whom to love so intensely redefines us. could David first be called a nihilist, an agnost (there is nothing to get worked up on; one can not feel any deity or god). a solipsist (the world radiates from this person, me, and I witness her in my writings). then now there is definitely the David who cares, loves, seeks his loved woman. that this is the primal element that informs his philosophic and poetic work is splendid. and then I discovered the 'old David' in the words. 'your eyes are an intensity, a madness, they put fever in me, they glow a meaning deep into gut & throbbing cock, where dreams grow heaven erect here, we touch, memory & flesh, sex a bright light night[,]'(2) this is still the celebrative tone which demands quite the acclimatization for those who still vividly remember the David of 'another five', 'still three', all vitriolic poems as ultraprecise as denouncing and tearing down the statues. 'here is nothing lacking, the intent content alive at night, resurrection of the sexed flesh - it is defiance its rebellion sex, it defies entropy, time, & death, straddling me you your magnificent freedom, the burning spark at the lustful heart of [being]'(2)

we read here loads of words Davidian: 'entropy, time, death, rebellion, defiance'. we shall see Davids new style drives on two tracks. there is no such thing as to "extrahate" the old David from this new book, this happy life-event, this real time great experience. if you're a writer you're subject to scrutinization (David could perfectly handle that), micro-editing, other wrongdoings. with such glorious radiant book the criticasters are somewhat shun away. you're stupid with critique at what really happens and really is magnificent to be happening on a writer, nurse, hooker, vice-president, transitoperator. love has the power to break in in real life: 'here it seems forever, today is thaw boring & you are in our heart always, Emma, whatever the weather is, you crawl into my breast & your eyes burning through me their radiance is love,['](3) David sometimes seems to reminisce on the 'older times' and clearly sees a division.

this book really makes the 180° and there ain't not many able to do that. but when writing your book is driven. love is a powerful 'motor'. and yet staying is a 'deadpan narrator' who takes care of this continuity of events far away from 'Barbieland' and argumentative incongruencies (there also far away from): 'it was nightmare then, i lived a dead world where monsters moved, it was gray rubble & smoke over a battlefield, there would be no love for centuries, the deadpan narrator said, the land itself was the very devil,(4) the world perhaps is lesser armored, but we have learned that that isn't the case. when in love you have your pink glasses on. then may be the land is unchanged, there is an interventionism afflicting all. we're Liberace eeeeh liberated, we're invited to share. sometimes we see tighter correlations between the grim and crass and the lovehaze spurring us to be invisible and invincible. there are two people feeling safe and one within and without each other. there is a mutual reciprocity. mental distortions and fears, problems with the poise and presence, these will melt as 'love' is also a mental fluidization. 'your name my sad song, my mantra, my madness, we shall fuck the death out of us, lover, because i was yours & you were mine before words came their arrogance'(6) just this connection is more than two.

there is a cozy theory of metalinguistics. 'before words came their arrogance'. I like it. there is a world without words. words disfigure the world. if you're feeling in Love then especially words seem obsolete and at once, accurate to describe these haute haute feelings. both solidify their evidence, existence and immaterial essence. 'we shall touch like ghosts thrown back in the flesh their heaven then, reflecting us evident. // brutal is your beauty, dreams to believe freedom happens. it is madness that answers us, love'(7) this is simply beautiful: ''we shall touch like ghosts thrown back // in the flesh their heaven then, // reflecting us evident. " 'in the flesh', incorporation, embodiment, the old knowing of the body. veda. we're ourselves swarms and nanoparticles connected with the other. the Higgs Boson rests, lays dormant in her bust. these are feminine prerogatives. the immaterial connects with the material: ''we shall touch like ghosts thrown back // in the flesh their heaven then,", as we're now in a spiritual world as spiritual in the rate as it is material. material like birch bark and lichens. Lyotard, Virilio, John Cage and Merce Cunningham always knew dance embodied movement, energy, love, theatricalics, disappearing or [swilling] music. even Cage's vanished music '3:22' where the pianist/e sits for so long just behind the piano or Nam June Paik walks through Tokyo with the violin behind him on a rope. 'To understand, to be intelligent, is not our overriding passion. We hope rather to be set in motion. Consequently our passion would sooner be the dance, as Nietzsche wanted and as Cage and Cunningham want. (Lyotard)'(5) it is also remarkable the logicist David has luckily discovered the poststructuralists. there is a Hauch also of postneoDadaism. they speak towards such mental states. the avant garde music of Eno Ono Fripp Robert Wyatt Soft Machine Nina Simone perhaps the dance of Ohno: Butoh, expresses these domains of erraticism, disdirectional dissipation, short: Love's paths. 'Climate, climate is not southern, a little glass, a bright winter, a strange supper an elastic tumbler, all this shows that the back is furnished and red which is red is a dark color. An example of this is fifteen years and a separation of regret.' (Gertrude Stein)(9)

Gertrude has always spoken in more registries than one. if we now seek, not trying to ambush, Davids two tracks, we see love suffusing the text while we have the deadpan narrator to produce continuity (which is always artificial) for great reading. now there are still bone yards but they're not so much the final bus stops of an Endworld but just part of a world not devoid of love. 'our bones shall dance together their longing, their tolerant intolerance, mad their passion they are waiting, waiting, Emma, the red we paint them with, our hopeful bones await their friends, their playmates'(11) what I loved here was 'their playmates' in the Hugh Hefner sense of the word (what a prick). it is the vaudeville of dance, it are the freak shows down the road, and the bones are real, structuralist human architectonics. so we see the two tracks intermingle, the one derivative of the other, this staunch twosome making a stylistic and clear point. 'so dance the ghost for me, Emma, & make this flesh live in me again, my sacrifice to you, this spoiled meat that even devils rejected, dance the ghost with me, Emma, love us & set us free'(107) here we have the testimony one is able to change towards the love of another and once' own love, reciprocal a 'building' that changes both. David culls these mechanistics, fluidizations, even more: 'there is only one of us this is the intense, Emma, animal instinctual, but love enough, there is only one of us, only this one you'(27) so substantial is this change that there is growth inwards, there is love, there is communal approach, here each solipsism is removed. we're not alone anymore and even microembodied in the other. far from his old poetry and yet the tone has remained the same: ruthless, following this thread ad infinitum. perhaps we can say there is a lot of intensity in David and hey, we share the same profiling with the 'borderline personality' (disorder).

that is actually an overflow on emotions. then this also has to be the similarity in this book of love and his preceding publications. think a cooking cauldron with lava and the expression of it. sometimes you see those people who are poor in senses, feelings, emotions. they are hyperrational. as how David outreaches to his beloved, we're far from this reason- and causality-intoxicated universe. 'there is eternity, Emma, my goddess, & when we touch i shall enact for you exactly what you recite to me, ordered through your eyes, whatever you ask of me, of my body that lives for you, & we can enact a submission that never happens, as if that really mattered,'(108) this domain of logicist-argumentative-causalistic beings does indeed demand 'submission'. it is science porn. the French poststructuralists and earlier, the Frankfurter Schule or Critical Theory, knew how to deal with that. and 'Love' also spills over the boundaries of 'reasonable thinking'. if it is a kind of madness then that is an exhaustive definition. '& you have always understood this love, my madness burning in the snow, i have needed you eternity, Emma, & have you always known this, never told?'(12) in a timeless domain it is if we fly. we're really inside a new parameter. a new fluidum instead of linear listing of 'White Man's Achievements'. we're so over that. look, what I am doing here is talk David's citations towards each other. but it isn't so an artificial addendum. David has gone through a life altering event. illustrated also with restless traveling between persons and continents. we can be happy to have experienced that and, especially, love. in such a Möbius spiral of events and tiredness and fulfilledness, the time disappears. 'The question is this, is it possible to suggest more to replace that thing. This question and this perfect denial does make the time change all the time. (Gertrude Stein)'(14) love = being. an ontology, if one wants. we're human and human is beast. it is an honor to be animal. animalistic reflexes has proven to be resistant and submissive to aeons of fire, violence, complacent mountain valleys, etc. 'our animal freedom. here we bear blood enough to love us, Emma, here we become the beast that becomes its burden, its love, touch us eternal where love is enough for being, demons & beast & love a meaning, you, Emma my beast i believe in'(106)

in the following cited passus we find 'the old McLean' back, as seamlessly as we would like. but this is the bias of analysis: one could with the same validity say the opposite: now there is a new McLean, shards of his tongue appear but the topic has shifted radically. but let me have the joy of, still present, this poemlet as if out of a series of 'another five' and 'the next two'. 'dead children wait their eternity outside the ruins of intolerant hospitals & the priest sleeps shameless his arrogant, an incoherent answer'(15) we can conclude this luxe review of David McLean's book 'We dance the ghost Emma' with these at once deftly and discryptic expressed haul of love towards Emma with 'the dance' as regulative mode: 'dance me sanity drowning in this happy madness with everything living in us, love & touching us like memory heaven was & all the dead men dancing,'(17) 'poems are miserable cunts & they can fuck off. soon baby girl lies close to me & dull discourse stops 'words is black happy water, & all we wanted was one future you'(30).


 

How MMA Writes, a section from certain observations by Aad de Gids

A post by Aad de Gids, HOW MMA WRITES. LEE KWO, AAD GID, DAVID MCLEAN, of which I share here the section about me, having been obliged to correct Facebook's challenging formatting. I would only observe that I have adopted a new and more positive point of view recently.

Here is CODE #4 TEXTS, a collaboration by Aad & Michael Mc Aloran

Acryl Lacquer Lost in the Forest by Aad de Gids is here at Bone Orchard Poetry.

 

poetry of disdelusion DAVID C. MCLEAN

all vignettes of classicism,and then a new one. the derivational poetry of what it all not is, leaves us piquant poems unveiling dead centers. often a bit fucked up as plazas. David Mclean's poetry spurs toward such comments. his poems are concentrated lemmata in which a certain, or two, "truisms" "get's it", can get it. and it gets it. all confessionalism, thought of an afterlife, heaven or hell, the thought or idea of a god, even of spirituality, of solidity, are all heavily under fire or yet, refinedly attacked with arsenic and mould. hell rather is the here and now. only however when the heavily ecclesiastically burdened notion is bereft of all that: what belief and faith and confession have made of the world. the poetry of david is certainly post-Inquisitional,if this means all the fucking christian notions and lexicological or exegetical acribic bullshit is cut out of it. perhaps there is even a new inquisitional impulse here. it is the never ceasing curiosity about which moronic actions the society has entangled itself into now,again. if belieflessness acquires contours of zealousness it is also thrown into the dustbin of no return.

perhaps this could be an idiosyncratic feature of the poetry of david mclean. at first sight, also after having read more poems of david,one could be tempted to place the topology of his poetry within the ideological-postideological-nonideological cloud of nihilism, ascetism, logicism, antitheology, agnosticism, fatalism, hermetism, antipoetry, postpostmodernism, postironicism, neoclassicism, flarf, antiflarf, anhedonism, deathpoetry, poetry of the endworld, antihumanist poetry, posthumane poetry, poetry of the dead socius, poetry of the psychotic socius. i think it is all of this and more,yet to name but one of the above monikers as the exhaustive declarative clausule would be excreted by the poetry itself, and, asap. and this abjective reflex seems an idiosyncratic impulse in the poetry of david. an abhorrence of the mundanest things of the world where they show their mediatic poise: as "élan vital", as a vitalistic yet presumptuous assertion of what is often or and generally thought to be the regulative of the conventional and correctional societal mechanisms as eversomuch "motors" keeping our fucking economy together thereby ruining our fucking ecology as these in accumulative measurements is antropofected detrimental to all other livelihoods on the planet. this, would never be entamised as such in davids poetry yet can be easily derived as one of the major factors driving his poetry. then now we shall leave it at this abhorrence.

the poetry itself is written in an impeccable style of often mere global assertions, or, lighter, hunches, with which the poems softly begin,and weaving further on these introductive sketches, we are launched along almost atmospheric trajectories, whereby the following assertions each time annihilate the latest one, so that we perhaps hover within a certain nihilist realm, yet if this was said to be the solid regulative of these poems, david would minutiously make clear that perhaps in our perception may lie a nihilism dormant, but that he preferably shuns any "isms", and leave us with these consecutive derivative denunciations of overly happy-merry-systemy-styley-schooly pinpoints yet that his, this poetry rather resorts under, well, under nothing really, this not a devaluation of any sorts and if it is paradoxical that such poetry with that haughty of onset in any which way shall keep puking on whatever system or unsystem, then that is o.k.

the dead travel insanity

safely, this distorted world
is twisted faces
and no sense of location;

it is flux and nipples,
death and the living waiting
we are: memory and empty
falling too far,

it is remarkable that we could take almost any quote out of david mcleans poetry and we then have a prism, representative, immediately,of the lucidity and at once (david put the plugs in your ears) a kind of mysticism, of, "what there is", and it is kind of an endgame, hilarious more than tragic even if it is tragic, this, all so masterly written is nothing more than a wonder. yet nothing divine!

 

 

 

of desire & the lesion that is the ego

Next comes this one, my third from Oneiros Books, based on a reading of Anti-Oedipus. Now, I am more inclined to write in terms of libidinal energy & its folds of perverse intensity than the philosophies of desire per se, but I like this idea too, anyway. These poems were actually better than I remembered them.

This book, of desire & the lesion that is the ego is here at Lulu.

We find it here at Amazon too. Och, som utlovad, här får vi köpa den på Bokus, i vanliga fall, fast den står nu som slutsåld. Återigen, ska detta åtgärdas så fort jag kan. Och då kommer den stå som tillgänglig på AdLibris med. EDIT: Nu finns boken tillbaka på Amazon

Blurb follows

Here are words to somewhat deconstruct your daily lives. McLean delivers sermons of a beautiful nothing(s) enriched by perceptions that pervasively cover the very lives you follow inanely day in, day out. He dissects the mundane and the superfluity of existence (if any) with a hacksaw and without much anaesthetic. His language is cutting, divisive, insightful, deploring, archaic but strong with a fleshy boldness that should and will be revered. David McLean seeks out the plastic and then tends to look underneath the plasticity of what man has made; the absurdity of god, the hilarity of societal values and the hypocritical agenda of righteous folk. The lesion of what McLean explores in this collection is indeed the nonsense that dominates us all whether aware or unaware however, after you read this blistering book, you’ll be sure to be angry at something in this dying world.
Craig Podmore (Author of The Origin of Manias, Oneiros Books)

 

Again, thanks to Michael Mc Aloran for the cover.

Here's some free samples, chosen at random.

indeterminate date of ever present death

it is indeterminate
so only a wicked old man with sharp swords
has all the answers,

cold as his fingers
he never touched with yet,
not with this flesh

straw and meaningless

You're a ghost on the highway
you're trash and meaningless
(The Gun Club)

and the honest rock we are
their words never moved an inch -
it remains this dreadful empty

skin shaking under sexual suns
and bowing down before nothing
their stupid forgiveness

is the inessential remembered -
not the decent murderer
and her dismembering:

this means nothing and no time
is left us, just one second
and it is heaven

stepping out

the ghosts have fallen outside where skin is
leaving the children we have never been
naked within us, a strange beast made of distances
and the insubstantial

staggering off to some scuzzy Bethlehem
to be ambitiously aborted, manky
matrix where little lives; and here is
meretricious potentiality, acne

and masturbation so dead god
is not even insane, just perverted
priests picking the flesh of children
from their dreamless teeth,

the ghosts are stepping out today
we are pretending not to live;
there is sufficient sin to simulate
and nothing to forgive

EDIT: Very grateful to Aad de Gids for the following review

of desire and the lesion that is the ego

review by Aad de Gids

the best yet rather difficult notion derived from:
Capitalisme et Schizophrenie I: L' Anti-Oedipe
Capitalisme et SchizophrenieII: Mille Plateaux,

by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari is, that there wasn't an ontology displayed here. here we found not a theory of being,a philosoohy of being,an art-text of being, rather a toolbox with elements of "what there is" (as such they summarized it), that left pretty much out all of the fucking theoremas about psychoanalyse, psychology, (conventional) sociology, (conventional) psychiatry, conclusivist Nietzscheanism. they said they were dead now, "we ourselves are already old", fuck them all and look at how all is suffused with machines of desire. dichotomy of sexuality is bullshit, there is a "microscopic transsexuality". instead of the "ego" (which is always Freud's ego,or Marx's,or Nietzsche's), we have a "pack of wolves". to system theoreticians they said: "there isn't a system that doesn't leak on all sides". with "corps sans organes", body without organs, they meant, avant la lettre, for instance Fukushima, Soudan, the machinations around (and from) Iran,this "multitude" of disinformation and profitist background politics of the elite countries (US, France, England, Germany, perhaps Japan, Russia and China) who fuck up the so called "news" (like the American conservatives do) and make it a sleek glacis upon which all falters and stumbles and get disdirectional and wrongly proportioned. this, in short about d-g.

David McLean is deeply informed by these insights, and has written a "hybrid" book filled with "postpostmodern" and "postpostpositivist" poems and longer text to again break the codes in the sense of really breaking all conventionalist and societal and poetic-theoretical, codes, even the poetic codes, to nevertheless come up with a formidable and fun and challenging book.

_______________________________________________

enfolded

we are enfolded in the broken wings of time
stretched sad pinions holding birth and nothing

together, resolute and useless we are this inutile
futility – raging and permanence imagined
like bizarre statues insane on a shore
where inadequate birds swim a sickness
over us

we are enfolded in the nothing the soul sweats
instead of love, nothing is as nothing does

_______________________________________________

i think the poems of David also do not found or postulate an ontology rather they point at "what there is" as i notably still remember in a poem of his an old computer standing in the surf. "meaning" somehow erodes here, while the artefacts do still hold contingent resemblances with objects that "define" our world now, or at least we assume they are defining us. i think David's poetry kind of sits in between this post-Adornean and post-Wittgensteinian position where they said, respectively: "um zu sagen, was sie nicht sagen kann, während es doch nur von der Kunst gesagt werden kann, indem sie es nicht sagt" and "wovon man nicht sprechen kann darüber soll man schweigen". i have always believed the ensharpened differences between these two adages in fact were overrated and one could detect a common ground here. there is definitely an affirmation of "world" in both and they wanted to make sure its expression wasn't fucked up. i think the poets of our generation do just that. we're not so much indebted anymore either to the old whores Freud-Nietzsche-Marx, nor to the somewhat newer theoreticians of the Frankfurter Schule, French post-structuralism or even Rorty-Apel-Searle-Habermas-Dennett-Žižek.

_____________________________________________

all the mad grannies

and it was all the mad grannies, dozing depressive at home and sewing psychosis, little mittens to cover the fingers that are not so very innocent today, and a strange fern smelling occidental and time travelers, the Victorian answer, guns and butter.

the houses are made of gray and tomorrow foreclosed by the nightmare wait of history. all the mad grannies chasing wicked cats that come through angles and corners, the homeless evil that needs bodies to be in it, essential freedom and all the generations hopeless psychosis needs to grow healthy enough to upset a doctor or some other moron, all the deep fried suicides and god in every little wooden box a granny's granny once forget when a more serious sort of history was, and the contracts are missing and absence. all the dead men and Christ in a sweaty sidecar riding sexy and erect beside them; all the mad grannies have Valium to believe in – they do not need men or gods or the superfluity that is feeling, they have overdosed on the weight of Being; they have drugs but they do not really seem to need them – anything is better than freedom

_____________________________________________

now, after David's sublime writing, it is obvious a lot of things became superfluous.
exactly this could be of weightless liberation,to have dumped all lexicological offal: "and the contracts are missing and absence. all the dead men and Christ in a sweaty sidecar riding sexy".