I was unabashedly
hooked on the third season of the
Bravo reality show Vanderpump Rules,
which began its television life two years back as a spin-off of The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills. I
came across this season’s first episode late in 2014 while channel-surfing, and
found myself unable to look away. The blurb on the Slice TV website says each
week the program offers “yet another explosive wave of shocking betrayals, bold
confrontations, and petty grudges,” which sound like reason enough to keep
tuned in, but my own fascination and nascent fandom, I’m starting to realize,
has less to do with salacious voyeurism and more to do with the pop poetry of
their pervasively empty interactions. When Stassi claims she’s been betrayed by
Katie, or when Jax recounts his own largely fictional version of some gossip
that’s transpired earlier, I find myself at a loss to understand what exactly
it is that these people are in fact talking about. Frankly, I don’t think I
have ever known what any of them means, or means to say, most of the time. They’re
usually talking about talking about nothing. Nothing. But their seemingly
shallow and vacuous speech, embedded in what feels like a relentless carrier-wave
of romantic pop-culture clichés, is also often tangibly bursting with strange
verbal textures, inadvertently startling lines, weird resonances. They seem
constantly to be saying nothing, but also to be articulating some emergent
poetic language sui generis, to be
touching on some shared and common fabric of language as such.
And
so I aimed to make a sort of poetry, as a listener and as a committed viewer,
out of segments of what they’ve said about each other. The reunion show, part
one of which was broadcast this week in Canada – a week behind the States – and
part two of which is still pending, saw the actors arranged in an
amphitheatrical semi-circle in a room at SUR, as participant-spectators, both
viewers and viewed. (Several of them, notably Stassi and Kristen, made careful
note that they had “seen the show” – watched themselves on the show – in the
interim between filming last summer-fall and this reunion.) The reunion is
designed to elicit some degree of critical reflection from members of the
group, but really the intention is to aggravate the controversies and to stir
up old trouble. It struck me that, in the slippery double displacements of
subject and object being staged at this reunion – they comment on themselves
commenting on what they say and have said about each other – there were
peculiar echoes of the populist aspects of Shakespearean meta-theatre, as well
as repositioning of the agonistic choric odes of Euripides or Aeschylus, maybe
along the lines of Anne Carson’s skewed anachronies.
My
own small project also tries to mimic the Pentametron bot on Twitter: each
voice could be rendered in something like an iambic pentameter monostich, an
aphoristic reduction of what they might have said, and sort of did, or didn’t.
The resulting text would be an aggregate of linked non sequiturs, a sort of compilation. There are no subjects,
however, beyond the accretion itself: nothing but sound bytes of
fanfiction-mediated personae, their un-voices. Because the poem is assembled
from what must be public, fair-use artifacts (along with a hodge-podge of nods
to various famous sonnets, to Irving Layton, to Gilligan’s Island and to David Peoples’s Blade Runner script), I
think the piece needs to be published as a blog entry, with all the attendant
narcissism of self-publication (which, maybe, fits with the source material). And
maybe I’m being pretentious trying to explain myself like this. Because really,
who am I to talk?
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