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).


 

of desire & the desert

Here is of desire & the desert at Lulu, this one, like the earlier one "of desire ..." one from Oneiros, is inspired by Deleuze & Guattari, this time Mille Plateaux. Instead of posting samples, I instead include a review by Dom Gabrielli, which I happen to like. It occurs to me now to post other reviews of other  books, and I am sure that i shall, at the moment it seems a lot of fucking work, however, I still have to list one chapbook and my two shitty novels, & these will appear in the next post, i imagine. 

Anyway, here the fucker is at Amazon, just $12 för 148 pages.

Och här har vi samma bok på AdLibris för blott 112 kr, och med hela 148 sidor.

At any rate, huge thanks to Dom Gabrielli for this:

 

Deleuze and McLean, unlikely bed partners, A Thousand Plateaux and of desire and the desert.

it is not tools but the horrid state of masturbatory technology & intellectual impotence that makes us such scum//

The ‘Deleuzian’ century closed and its successor brought a dramatic return of the repressed as the scared masses took fright and clamoured not ‘with’ the tremors of Being but rather ‘for’ the One and its demonized Opposites, all the dreaded identities. Because as all of us know, closet Deleuzians or not, we are never one nor another, but certainly many, a mass, a crowd, a bunch and no one is supposed to win this life-game which only despots take seriously. With this return of Identity came necessarily the society of control. Deleuze had correctly predicted whose model was the motorway where freedom becomes solely an illusion, where everything one does is visioned, catalogued and potential to be used against us at any time. All that ensues is clockwork orange, and we as citizens are all decidedly lemons!

A Thousand Plateaux written with Guattari was probably the most overwhelming non-poetic reading experience I had as a student and many evenings were spent reading it aloud with my fellow students at NYU in my ground floor flat in the East Village, 3rd and 7th to be precise. Certain plateaux were read with a fine tooth comb, others were ignored and returned to at a later date. Deleuze and Guattari had after all encouraged artist-readers, non-philosophers, to take what they could when they could, to create their own machines, their own assemblages with whatever was at hand because after all the question was always: how to get out, how to let fresh air in, how to evacuate the suffocation of despotic institutions like universities which already back then (1990) were fabricating professor-business men-vendors with theories for sale and ideologies in suitcases to spread over willing student minds for pricey diplomas.

Deleuze and Guattari were unteachable in those days and any mention of them provoked chaos in the lecture rooms. Frequent adjectives were ‘unreadable,’ ‘incomprehensible,’ ‘dangerous’… That is when you could have real fun with concepts such as ‘deterritorialization.’ Much laughter was had at the expense of the advocates of the fashionable doxas of Lacarne, Derridar and Barrethes…

McLean I imagine had many a roar of laughter reading A Thousand Plateaux and as good poets will, his readings and impressions made their ways into notebooks and pads. Lucky are those today who can read these immensely enjoyable vignettes which not only play freely with the spirits of the glorious nomad thinkers but place their concepts firmly in the society of control, 2016.

It is the destiny of thinker poets to be overlooked and ignored because they fall between categories, foul of classifications and ideologies. Are they really poets, these folk who cite Hegel and Heidegger? Can thoughts be expressed into poetic form anyway? Let’s face it, the same arguments have been raised against many an illustrious predecessor. No need to mention names. But today, I am told, we are all poets. We all have little secrets to share. We have emotions to dress in romantic script. We can take up poetry, like a gardener picks up his spade to dig his first vegetable patch. Deleuze himself hated French literature for its psycho-analytical bent, for its obsessions and perversions. The superiority of Anglo-American (and he forgot to mention Irish) literature being its lines of flight…. its becomings…. But language is a recalcitrant field. The act of writing reminiscent of Sisyphus, push a frosty boulder upward, ever upward, to the unattainable star. He probably won't enjoy me saying this, but in this regard McLean is a traditional poet, as much as any today. He perfects his craft in solitude. Book by book, the idiom improves, singing, laughing, thinking. “One must have chaos in one to give birth to a dancing star.”

McLean's diagnosis is spot on.

we have become the creature that both eats & is eaten, a night
forever completely devoid of ideas worth having or any
conceivable meaning/ / gormless Godot is drink again &
snoozing somewhere in the worthless heart of being
(temple destroyed)

here there echoes the cretinous giggle of the pornographer
priest with his active camera, his hymns to null & the absent…
there are no honest warriors left today
(face of the despot)

What perhaps even Deleuze in his aristocratic brilliance could not presage was the rise of the pornopticon which from priest to bureaucrat, from the Kremlin to the Pharmahouse, enable the States of the world, all together and without exception, to re-territorialize desires and ‘pervertize’ the young, tying their memories and developments to a morbid technology which handicaps sexuality and puts resistance to sleep in a nihilistic heaven where even the worst fanatics with furious machetes cannot escape their immediate return as cartoons. ‘the men who police thought are not actual policemen who/would hesitate to think, were this so much as possible in their/ debilitated condition, preferring to the lick the sweaty nipples of/ evil & devote themselves to a smarmy fascism//‘

In his most recent tome, McLean comes to terms with Deleuzian concepts in a 21st century world. The parabola of the boomerang of perversion is minutely plotted by McLean using the concepts and assemblages of Deleuze and Guattari as tool boxes. This is no mean feat and we must applaud vociferously, just as often laughing at the flippant tangles which the poet inextricably ties the reader into.

let’s axiomatize indeterminism
to make the crazies go away
& keep the right white faces in mental
heaven; there are shapes to show
maybe, we do not want to know them
mostly, forever sounds so lonely
you know, like nightmares
with nowhere to go
(of axioms & other monsters)

If Outside is Desire. If the Open is constantly recaptured by ‘answers provoked’ and twisted into a ‘smarmy fascism,’ leaving poetry the only right to destroy the ideology of the Inside and resist against the grotesque State machine, folding onto imbecility a simulacrum of a poem which can be read as both flippant self-indulgence and fulgurance and illumination, because both low and high culture, pornography and art, co-exist like the evil and the good sister in Bluebeard’s cave. The simulacrum so good, you tire to distinguish one from the other.

If all of the above, the desert? If Desire is the adolescence of thought, its necessary madness, its rites of possession, its myriad becomings, then the Desert is wisdom, becoming imperceptible, the right to breathe in words. Finally amid the One which is everything. Here is the Desert.

& it is the futile Peyote Dance resurrected again for all the
madmen hanging like bats from the rafters in some
disingenuous midnight temple. they have torn the scabs from
their arms to wall up the seven devils dead & eternally
protected accordingly, they are losing all their memories to be;
they are forgetting memory & learning to be // they want to be
everything but no body wants to be free

Rarely has such lucidity pinpointed the hypocrisies of Self and glorified selves in Collectives clamouring for Freedom and needing corpses and morals, when they haven’t been mad enough yet to see the futility in their madness, when they haven’t collected enough matter to find the Desert in themselves, in the cold North, where ingenuous temples grow for the night amid dunes of Nothing.

Who speaks desert speaks Nomad. But who knows society knows that ‘eyes are for spying with not seeing’ and that collective hope is an alias for suffering and ‘they are watching the children the prisoners the madmen in the distorting mirrors of this disgusting cunting panopticon’ and we are probably not ready to be nomad and we are probably not ready for Deleuze or Guattari or any of his one thousand distorted plateaux. Society is not worthy. It is just killing and destruction because the State ensure ‘they are born crippled,’ and ‘death is better than labour.’

Who reads this book knows hope is extraneous to matter. The physics of poetry, the immanence of the dissecting pen, imply the end of all forms of transcendence and a mockery of all their avatars. Difference and repetition of the whole history of poetry. ‘Structure is for vermin.’

I looked in vain for the Desert. I saw some animals passing the dunes. I spotted Artaud. I will keep an eye out for the nomads as i keep reading, backwards, inside out, dancing and laughing. There really is no need to be sad in this hell, because ‘the outsider comes undone.’

I heard some echoes.
I saw some footsteps.
I know the desert will burn again one day.