Mount Everest Deaths (Poem)

I have been reading about the death-toll on Mount Everest, and seen the photograph (in The Guardian, here and here) of the current human traffic jam at the summit, trying to push upward, sometimes stepping over the bodies of other dead climbers. This piece, this poem, emerged for me as a commentary on the news, and of thinking about the inhuman and about certain forms of eco-tourism and terrible sublimity emerging in the accelerated epoch now named the Anthropocene. A hybrid sonnet came out, in fives and sixes. I want to put it up on this blog because of the immediacy and the temporality of its subject matter. It was composed and edited over about three days.

Tourist Climbers, Mount Everest, Nepal Side, Late May 2019 

(See the Photograph by Nirmal Purja)

Triumphantly inadequate: out of ten-plus

amateurs, permits intact, who’d expire 

in a crammed mass ascent through the kill zone this week, 

most, chuffed with so much third-hand hubris, got 

sucker-punched by the hypoxic sublime. Sure, sure,

a blue-balling few summited, but only

to crumple along the first leg of the slog down.

         (People stepped over them, stiffened. A line 

of down-filled anoraks snaked its impacted track

         up the crown ridge, strewn with used O₂ tanks,

marking a slow-witted hokey-pokey topward.

You choose to bend and help, you don’t make it.)

No cliff jockey returns from this fierce place unscarred,

having clomped past the air’s inhuman edge.

Summaries and Overviews for UBC English 111, "Displaced Persons"

A few of the students in my first-year undergraduate course at UBC requested what amount to executive summaries of the six principal texts on the course syllabus (which can be found here: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/kmcneill/111_2019.htm). Lecture audio (also posted on my SoundCloud page, Kind of Kevin) on each text can be accessed through the syllabus. The course is an introduction to the study of prose non-fiction that I teach under the title “Displaced Persons.” 

English 111, Section 005—Displaced Persons: Approaches to Prose Non-Fiction

Summaries and Overviews, by Prof. Kevin McNeilly

As requested, I have drawn up a set of paragraph-long takes on key themes and talking points in the six main texts on our course syllabus. These paragraphs only suggest possible critical and interpretative trajectories through this material; use them, if you wish, as starting points for your own readings of these texts.

David Chariandy’s I’ve Been Meaning to Tell You(2018) tries, as the title suggests, to find the means both to disclose and to discuss unacknowledged or suppressed antagonisms around his experience of racism in Canada. It’s important to recognize that this extended letter addressed to his daughter – the book is an extended essay in epistolary form – builds on the concept of the essay (or essai, in Michel de Montaigne’s sixteenth-century French) as an attempt, as an open-ended experiment in how to put his complex and fraught encounters with racial interpellation (being “hailed” or identified) into words, how to frame his thinking around race and to communicate those experiences to (and with) his family. He develops a pluralistic concept of heritage, community and ethnicity based on a respect for difference and diversity and a resistance to seeing the human “mix” in terms of sameness; he admires what he calls the “luminous specificity” of human experience. By the close of the book, he argues for an open-minded and attentive practice of “listening.”

Lawrence Hill’s op-ed in the June 1, 2018 issue of The Globe and Mail, “Act of Love: The Life and Death of Donna Mae Hill,” makes an argument for a compassionate approach to physician-assisted death or assisted suicide by narrating the final days of his mother’s life, as he accompanies her to a clinic in Switzerland. The extended essay braids together three time-lines—anecdotes from his mother’s life, a narrative of her last days and assisted suicide, and a brief account of the present time of writing the essay at his desk—to reflect on what we called intersubjectivity, the ways in which lives and voices are enmeshed in each other. His prose describes and enacts diegetic practices—ways of telling—that, as speech-acts and “acts of love,” create necessary human connection.

As an extended series of interlaced, page-long fragments, Diamond Grill forms what Fred Wah calls a “biotext,” an assemblage of life-stories that weave in and out of each other. Wah is particularly concerned with questions of racial identity and mixing: one of the most significant dishes served at the family restaurant run by his father (who also shares his name) is “mixed grill,” a jumble of European and Chinese foods. The swinging door in the Diamond Grill between the public space and the kitchen is also a crucial figure for Wah of the hyphen, as in the ligature between “Chinese” and “Canadian” in Chinese-Canadian. Wah works to find the means to inhabit that in-between “contact zone,” where he engages with what he calls “the dissonance of encounter, the resonance of clashing tongues.” Through the recombinant, DNA-like form (according to him) that his writing takes, Wah seeks to negotiate with difference and to reconcile himself to that on-going, hyphenated clash.

Each of the chapters of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir, Persepolis, translates crucial moments in her personal history—as a teenage girl in Tehran, growing up through the Iranian revolution—for a contemporary French audience. Her episodic depiction of her adolescence, mapping a trajectory of personal transition and developing self-awareness, wants also to offer a corrective to misperceptions about both “life in Iran” and Iranian national history, as an “old and great civilization”; the text is a memoir, for her, not merely as a narrative of memories of her youth but also, significantly, as a memorial to her fellow Iranians 

who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland . . . . (“Introduction,” [vi]).

Her drawings both represent and enact a visual engagement with the strictures of authoritarian control, as Marji tests the boundaries, and bears witness to the limits, of who she is allowed to be, and to become. When in the opening chapter of the text, Marji declares at school that she wants to be a prophet when she “grow[s] up,” a declaration that her teacher regards with cynical horror but that her “puzzled” parents affirm is a child’s imaginative prerogative, she also activates a tension around visuality—between the visual and the visionary, between the witness and the seer, between looking and insight—that informs the set of antitheses and contradictions, especially between the traditional and the modern, that inform her fraught sense of belonging, of being a  young Persian woman.

In Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine confronts the pervasive micro-aggressions that she faces in her everyday life as a Black American woman. Her text is a multi-modal assemblage, an instance of intermedia, combining printed text (designed in stark black and white by her collaborator, John Lucas) with photographs of visual media by other artists, scripts for internet videos (also realized in collaboration with John Lucas), audio, sports television excerpts (especially around Serena Williams), and more. Rankine addresses the ways in which black bodies are presented, interpreted and contained against “a sharp white background” (a line she takes from Zora Neale Hurston, via artwork by Glenn Ligon). She composes a number of elegies for young Black men (“my brothers . . .”), and creates fading typographical monuments that both acknowledge and enact their disappearance from public view. She is interested in the ways in which works of art, through shifting focus and points-of-view, can become politically charged and provocative.

In Findings(2005), Kathleen Jamie’s essays revolve around four main themes or trajectories: the archeological (involving visits to Paleolithic digs), the ecological (involving encounters with the non-human), the bio-medical (involving visits to hospitals, museums and medical institutions), and the ornithological (involving encounters with birds). She positions herself as a tourist, a visiting outsider,  something of a stranger in her own familiar Scottish context. Her writing engages with issues around what we now call the Anthropocene, the epoch of human impact on the climate and on the planet itself. She focuses in on different, conflicted senses of time: the present, human history, natural history, deep time. Each essay is typically framed by encounters with edges, margins, shorelines and contact zones. She concerns herself with her “findings” in each of these moments of discovery and encounter not to advocate for the power of human, anthropocentric knowledge-gathering, but rather to test and acknowledge the limits of human dominion and understanding; these are essays that lean in to unknowing, and think lyrically through the ethics and implications of human technology, of the craft of human expression.

Answering Back in David Chariandy's I've Been Meaning to Tell You (Video)

This video was made as an addendum to my four lectures on David Chariandy's I've Been Meaning to Tell You (2018), for my first-year undergraduate course at UBC on approaches to non-fiction, "Displaced Persons." I discuss key themes in the book, and offer an array of descriptive registers of race, particular around the figuration of blackness. The course website is here: http://faculty.arts.ubc.ca/kmcneill/111_2019.htm

Sleeve Notes for Other Worlds, by Maggie Nicols and Peter Urpeth

Here are the sleeve notes I was invited to write for Other Worlds, a duet recording by pianist Peter Urpeth and vocalist Maggie Nicols, issued on compact disc in 2017 on the FMR label, although from the look of the website it appears to be out of print—copies are still available from Squidco and other distributors, I think. The music deserves wider circulation, and it was an honour to write this brief piece.

Other Worlds

These duo improvisations were originally made for the development of the soundtrack for Seán Martin and Louise Milne’s 2011 documentary, A Boat Retold. A few short sequences made the final cut. Fortunately, we can hear on this album something close to its initial and fully realized form: a pair of aqueous, intimate and mesmerizing extemporaneous suites. Maggie Nicols, I’m told, came to the title—or the title came to her—after re-listening to the recordings. The music she and Peter Urpeth share combines the exploratory and the attentive, shifting between moments of assertion and accommodation, of provocation and conversation, of sounding out and listening in. The phrase Other Worlds suggests not only a combination of allure and unknowing, of the worldly and the strange, but also a search by the duo for its own nascent, unfolding narrative, sound-tracking their mutual reach toward each other’s sound-worlds and outward, together: an opening up to the textures and audible flows of the living worlds around them. There are moments, at the beginning of the second piece, when the vocalist veers on her own into what seems like a kind of ur-Gaelic patter, syllables contingently and playfully feeling their way into what might be meaning, but never quite arriving, never quite coming to ground.

At least that’s what I hear, since I don’t speak Gaelic. She offers us something just the other side of words, distilling a ludic alterity that’s sonically palpable in the edgy grain and in the throat-singing overtones that come and go along her sometimes fierce, sometimes yielding melodic fractals. The piano functions as resonant accompaniment, drawing out and layering harmonics, supporting and deepening their exchange. But as each improvisation unfolds Urpeth quickly becomes co-creative collaborator; piano and voice variously merge and diverge, unknitting temporary concord into contrapuntal banter, then stitching threads and coaxing excursuses into newly discovered intersections and emergent, evanescent alignments. What I pick up on, as I listen, is the pianist’s decisive, responsive and protean touch, the haptic give-and-take of a genuine reciprocity—the point being, I think, to attend on their itinerant and vitally otherwise communion, a collision of quickened but separate attentions, and to follow where they go.

The sound of this particular recording is capacious, yet close. I overhear their shared and mutually shaped space, as notes seem to bounce and scatter along the walls of The Vortex on an empty afternoon. I find myself proximately immersed in their interchange, amid stream, virtually part of it. The music of Peter Urpeth and Maggie Nicols remains warmly open and consistently welcoming: an invitation. The poignant release that the closing minutes of the second piece enacts, as they let go of each other and as their lines come apart and dissolve into ambient sound—the voices of children playing outside the club, an outer world that has been present throughout the recording—offers a deeply moving enactment of what their music accomplishes, here: a lyricism of possibility, an open-hearted grace.

Song for Song For (Elegy for Joseph Jarman, 1937-2019)

I'm a good few weeks late with this, which was written soon after Joseph Jarman's passing in early January.  I haven't been keeping up with the blogging for at least a year now; things should change soon. In any case, this is for Joseph Jarman out of deep respect for what I believe his music and his poetry have taught me. And how his work has taught me more about how to listen.

Song for Song For

(Joseph Jarman, 1937-2019)

whoever heard about a better way to dance, then did;

whoever sensed life soon enough gets over with itself;

whoever got called to call out hardline America;

whoever learned to ghost-finger an alto’s sacred glyph,

a baritone’s raw mark-up language, a tenor’s thick throat;

whoever showed righteous moxy in situations when

righteous moxy was not exactly needed; whoever 

testified to the unkempt scurf of little instruments;

whoever understood the fraught, feral imperatives

of compassion; whomever good gumption never let go;

whoever decided on fiercely striated face paint

most gigs, most nights; whoever chased “uncharted microtones”;

whoever caught nothing shy of the heft of complete light; 

whoever said, “I seek new sounds / because new sounds / seek 

                                                                                                     me.”

Leaf Meme, Nitobe Memorial Garden (Poem)

Here is my version of an Instagram poem. Or one of them. My take on Rupi Kaur, maybe. I wrote the text and took the photo yesterday in the Nitobe Memorial Garden on a lunchtime walk with my wife Christina, to whom the poem is dedicated. It was pretty quick. There was a little tweaking and polishing and editing today, but not much, as I combined them into something meme-like. And also not.

Remarks for Hovering at the Edge (IICSI Guelph Colloquium, 13 September 2018)

For Hovering at the Edge: Words, Music, Sound, and Song

IICSI colloquium at Guelph, 13 September 2018

(Panel with Sara Villa, Paul Watkins, Rob Wallace)

First Half.

I want to start by poaching a phrase from the title of Fred Moten’s hot-off-the-Duke-University-Press trilogy, which he admits to purloining from Christopher Winks’s translation of an interview of Antillean poet Édouard Glissant by the filmmaker Manthia Diawara. Here it is: “Consent not to be a single being” (xvi). The implicit network of voices caught up in that performative translation suggests, already, the layered irresolution, the refusal and the excess that Moten names, following on a reading of C. L. R. James, the “not-in-between.” For a good twenty-five years now, I have attempted fairly quietly to practice a plural and dislocated cultural pedagogy, both critical and (co)creative, that hovers in the sometimes appropriative, sometimes disjunctive interstices of the Eurological, the Afrological and the Indigenous. I lay claim to no particular belonging, although my appearance and heritage tend to do that for me, materially and obviously. My writing such as it is has striven, sometimes against its own tendencies and sometimes by embracing them, to inhabit and to enliven—and to be enlivened by—those unstable and conflicted contingencies, those dissolving and partial places where productive intersections can and do happen. “Join me down here in nowhere,” Claudia Rankine calls out in Citizen: An American Lyric. I feel like I have tried, in my teaching and in my writing, to answer (and to answer to) that fraught, rich, poetic invitation.

            The hover I often find myself attempting to describe occurs—perhaps as a temporary suture, perhaps as an undoing, as a re-opened wound—in the liquid, motile collision of words and music that happens both in and as song, particularly improvised song. It’s the attenuation, the extemporal hysteresis, in one sense, that tugs lyrics toward the lyric. Drawing on Amiri Baraka’s concept of “musicked speech,” Moten begins to map in C. L. R. James’s sentences a “phrasal disruption” that he names lyric, a noisy “poetry” interrupting (“[n]ot by opposition; by augmentation”) James’s prose—inflecting Moten’s own parenthetical and iterative style, as well as my imitation here—and an aurality that “remains to be seen and heard so to speak, and in excess of the sentence because it breaks up meaning’s conditions of production,” serving “to disrupt and trouble meaning toward content” (3).  At the same time, music asserts itself through and against the verbal “not only as a mode of organization but, more fundamentally, as phonic substance, phonic materiality irreducible to any interpretation but antithetical to any assertion of the absence of content” (31). Moten comes to offer his apologies for such theoretically and poetically dense passages as the ones I have just quoted: “I’m sorry if this is all a blur. I’m so used to my own astigmatism that maybe I can’t even talk to anybody anymore. To make matters worse, I’ve never been able to keep my glasses clean” (261). Still, he understands his own verbose blur (as the title of his book suggests) as constitutive and crucial, as inhering in the give-and-take word-music of song itself. This astigmatism, this arrhythmia, is the stuff of the improvisatory; Moten offers, as exemplary, the unsettled musicking of Charles Mingus: “He would protect the pulse, like any good bass player, while freeing himself from it,” and, I want to add, by singing, shouting, moaning, ululating, vocalizing as he plays (103). Protection, however, also articulates itself against the risk of hurt, in Moten’s terms, as both complement and antagonist, as augmentation and opposition. Moten thematizes this correspondent hurt in the transcribed/described “scream” of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester; Michel Leiris evokes the “cri,” which he hears in “les sons râpeux . . . que les jazzmen aiment àtirer de leurs instruments àvents . . .qu’ils savent aussi faire gémir, grognier, se plaindre ou ricaner sur toutes sortes de tons” [the raspy sounds. . . that jazzmen like to shoot from their wind instruments. . that they also know how to moan, grunt, complain or snicker on all kinds of tones] (37). This pained and celebratory tonality—at once, for Leiris, derisive and sanguine—offers a moment of suture, of unruly translation, between what he calls paroleand chant, speech and song: “Peut-être est-ce quand les mots, au lieu d’être en position servile de traducteurs, deviennent générateurs d’idées qu’on passé de la parole au chant? S’ils se font chant, n’est-ce pas lorsque, cessant d’obéir seulement aux injonctions du dictionnaire, ils valent par ce que leur forme et point seulement leur sens official suggèrent (en quelque sorte ‘génèrent’)?” [Perhaps it is when the words, instead of being in a servile position of translators, become generators of ideas that we pass from the word to the song? If they make themselves sing, is it not when, ceasing to obey only the injunctions of the dictionary, they are worth what their form and point only their official sense suggest (somehow 'generate')?] (112). In some sense like me, Leiris comes to this music as an attentive outsider, hoping by staging, as audition, a close proximity to its song also to catch at (that is, to translate otherwise) some of its vitality, its deep cry. Moten, by contrast, necessarily resists such “an absolute nearness [to black vitality], an absolute proximity, which a certain invocation of suture might approach, but with great imprecision. . . . There’s no remembering, no healing. There is, rather, a perpetual cutting, a constancy of expansive and enfolding rupture and wound, a rewind that tends to exhaust the metaphysics upon which the idea of redress is grounded” (ix). “Jazz,” as he puts it, “does not disappear the problem,” or dress its wound, or offer healing sesames: jazz “isthe problem and will not disappear. It is, moreover, the problem’s diffusion, which is to say that what it thereby brings into relief is the very idea of the problem” (xii, emphasis in original). While attempting to describe my own practice of study, which I understand as the interrogation and elaboration of a certain conceptual arrhythmia, I have perhaps relied overmuch on quoting Moten in these few minutes, but I am also mindful that the work of reading, with as much acuity as I can muster, is also to develop a tenuous but palpable resonance, a hapsis, a pushback and a to-and-fro with what I hear presently in Moten’s sentences. I’m going to move on to try to give a more specific example of this practice of reading and listening, of listening as reading, but before that I want to look only once more to the early pages of Moten’s book, where he delineates what he calls “black study” as the stuff of discrepant song, as audible hurt and as a “lyricism of the surplus”:

This is why, as Wadada Leo Smith has said, it hurts to play this music. The music is riotous solemnity, a terrible beauty. It hurts so much that we have to celebrate. That we have to celebrate is what hurts so much. Exhaustive celebration of and in and through our suffering, which is neither distant nor sutured, is black study. (xiii)

My own practice of study cannot unproblematically or unchallenged suture itself to that terrible beauty or find even vestigially proximity to Moten’s “we.” Nevertheless, in the fraught translation between word and sound that manifests itself in improvised song, I do find myself, following Brent Hayes Edwards and, of all people, Raymond Williams, “hovering ‘at the very edge of semantic availability’” (16) trying to explain the blur.

Part Deux. Deuxième Partie, I Should Say.

I only have a couple of minutes, so I want to give a brief example of the creative blur, the hover I’ve been trying to describe in my own creative-critical practice by ventriloquizing some of Fred Moten’s recent work. I want to begin to listen carefully to Darius Jones’s and Emilie Lesbros’s Le Bébé de Brigitte, which is both an homage to and an extension of Brigitte Fontaine’s 1969 collaboration with Areski Belkacem and the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Comme à la Radio. I want to take up two related tropes to understand how song and the improvisatory intersect in this work: the suture and, borrowing the title of the one wordless track on Darius Jones’s 2015 recording, the “universal translator.” Linking the Jones-Lesbros collaboration directly to the Brigitte Fontaine recording is from the get-go a bit misleading and an instance of mistranslation or of meaning lost in translation. If you dig a little (through the internet, for instance), you’ll discover that the “Brigitte” in Darius Jones’s title is not Fontaine (though named for her) but a maternal figure in his evolving personal cosmology (articulated in his unfolding series of “Man’ish Boy” recordings); unless you find your way to such notes, however, who Brigitte is will remain hermetic and likely miscued for listeners. The promise of universal translatability offers itself through Google or in Star Trekand Hitchhiker’s Guideutopianism (and has something to do with an Afro-Futurism here, though I have no room to engage or unpack it), but rather than transparency, the universality – the Benjaminian Reine Sprache– that Jones describes musically is an effect of contingent opacity, of difference and uncertainty, of the slipped suture: “In the process of creating this music, we often fell into moments of miscommunication because of differences in culture and language. I think this created a sense of mystery, and forced all of us to listen more deeply to each other’s nuances and subtleties, because we didn’t always have words to fall back on.” Words, despite what Jones appears to claim here, are not even a fallback for communicative or diegetic clarity, and even when they’re unsung, their tug and blur remain in play in the performance, the articulation, of these songs. Briefly put, the cosmology – the universality of an imagined universal translator – never closes or coheres, not even for its originator; instead it revises, remakes, re-writes itself, an extemporaneous diegesis. Which means, for me, that in the stitching, the verbal-acoustic suturing that happens when we sing, the lyric “problem” that Fred Moten describes tends to come into play, maybe even necessarily. Here are a few snippets from the (what I take to be) largely improvised lyrics by Brigitte Fontaine for “Comme à la Radio,” the eponymous opening track for her collaborative album: 

Ce n' sera rien

Rien que de la musique

Ce n' sera rien

Rien que des mots

Des mots

Comme à la radio

And,

                        Tout juste un peu de bruit

Pour combler le silence

As she moves through the song, we realize that with her increasing tenacity what we’re hearing both is and is not audible “like” a song “on the radio.” Her words, her noise, fills in silences, but even with what we might mistake for self-deprecation (“nothing but words,” “nothing but music”), it inclines itself, by both suturing and cutting into itself and its musical accompaniment, to the “nowhere” that Claudia Rankine says she inhabits, an excessive and unruly soundspace that both fills semantic gaps and refuses to fill us in. Emilie Lesbros’s singing on, for example, “Chanteuse in Blue,” also darts in and out of any semantic purview (one critic, while asserting that her texts are mostly “suitably poetic,” found that these words “veer into the irritating”: I’d call them edgy, working the audio nerves to the edge, the abutment, of sound and sense, of the Eurological and the Afrological, let’s say, with her Aebi-Birkin-esque accent): 

hah, wah, a-a-a-a-a, uegh

“Baby, let me tell you something.”

“Chanteuse in blue . . .”

“He said, ‘What? What are you talking about, sweetheart?’”

                        “I said, ‘I am suffering from the difference that people 

think we have.’”

What’s both thematized and enacted here, meta-diegetically and subversively, as translated verbal excess, is precisely and necessarily the irritation of the lyric: the refusal to settle in; instead Lesbros (and Darius Jones’s dialogic saxophone lines, both miming and counterpointing, intensifying and cross-cutting Lesbros’s voice) presents an embrace—a fraying and a knitting up – of the discomfiting, the discrepant, the extramusical, the blur. I will have exceeded my time. My time’s more than up.

Texts Quoted or Name-checked (in reverse alphabetical order)

Fred Moten. Black and Blur. First volume of consent not to be

a single being.  Duke UP, 2017.

Michel Leiris. À Cor et à Cri. Gallimard,1988.

Brent Hayes Edwards. Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary 

Imagination. Harvard UP, 2017.