----- Original Message -----
From: "Max Richards" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, September 27, 2010 4:32 AM
Subject: Re: "Of Mrs. Carrasco"
I have only now caught up with this, Fred.
I hope others will read, enjoy and respond.
Mrs Carrasco strikes me as huge, ie, the poem takes the bad-enough monstrous
confusions of the newspaper report's Mrs C and seems to me to develop her
and her environment with great satirical energy.
Max in Melbourne
(All my life I have been hearing grumbles about the difficulty of doing
writing in America, along the lines of 'American reality is so awful, how
can a writer cope...?' but maybe the complaint is to be heard nowadays from
other countries as well.)
(Maybe yr last few lines aren't so telling, Fred.)
Glad you liked this, Max. Re last lines - I don't know if you know that
"grey goo" is a technical term: it is what many scientists fear would become
of some or all matter if a self-replicating nanotechnology got out of
control.
I tried for a week after seeing that news item to imagine do a realistic,
though of course critical, narrative about Mrs. C. It proved impossible.
Ideologues like her are two-dimensional because they repudiate a third
dimension, in themselves and others; religion is their subsitute for it.
They offer no hook for the imagination. I found I had to exaggerate,
surrealize, make a Blakean "Giant Form" out of her. My two betes noirs, the
Trivs and the Mings - mainstream bores and the floating-signifier types -
avoid this problem. Novelists often stylize, surrealize, exaggerate to deal
with American reality; they produce a few successes (like *Gravity's Rainbow
and *White Noise or *The Names) and then degenerate, repeat themselves. Or
they produce big, earnest, journalistically comprehensive yawns.
|