Hope you’re having a good weekend. After a bazillion years, here’s the Kanye piece, so sorry for the delay getting the link over to you!
The poet Ed Luker who wrote it also has a Substack called Below deck, check it out. As I said outside the Dove all those weeks ago, i love the idea that celebrity has perversely become an upstanding — even christlike? — service. Ed writes:
celebrity culture is partly the sphere of producing mass resentment. And in the body of Christ, or the ego of Kanye, all the hatred that is directed toward it reflects back the disingenuousness of the terrible community, the hypocrisy, the narcissism of moral certainty, and the necessity of social climbing. If Kanye says he is Yeezus, it’s not because he is the son of God, but because we are the Romans.
In the political world, too, i feel like mass resentment nowadays is raw material, to be manipulated. I’m thinking about Trump obvs, but also this profile THE MINISTER OF CHAOS: Boris Johnson knows exactly what he’s doing is a really interesting read. The people who have the most influence are able to create and then ride the wave of controversy. (Godot wrote about Julia fox last time, who’s a pretty brilliant surfer herself.)
In any case, good old Ben Lerner (btw I remember you telling me there was a part of 10:04 that this newsletter is ripping off? probably! but I can’t find the page, let me know if you find it — in my head I was stealing from Tom Raworth’s Letters from Yaddo) — Lerner harkens back to his high school debating days for a metaphor to describe the current climate of disorientation — he calls it “the spread”
corporate persons deployed a version of the spread all the time: for they heard the spoken warnings at the end of the increasingly common television commercials for prescription drugs, when risk information was disclosed at a speed designed to make it difficult to comprehend;
It’s no excuse that you didn’t have the time. Even before the twenty-four-hour news cycle, Twitter storms, algorithmic trading, spreadsheets, the DDoS attack, Americans were getting ‘spread’ in their daily lives; meanwhile, their politicians went on speaking slowly, slowly about values utterly disconnected from their policies.
While Lerner calls it ‘the spread’, for the past year I’ve also been returning to this short blog post from the sci fi writer M. John Harrison. ‘“Great” Britain was never a place’, he writes
It was psycho-economic architecture for the Firm. What we hear from it now is the sound of vibration fatigue in the structure. When the Tories bet on covid, Brexit & the bonanza of disaster capitalism, they may also have brought about the collapse of one of the most stable little earners in the world after the Catholic Church.
But but but Phil, I can’t believe we’ve never talked about this! You’d probably be able to tell me what ‘vibration fatigue’ actually means. My friend Jack and I even have a song about it that we might release later this year or next — don’t think I’ve shown you my side project fffirst time? Annabel’s actually a five-star subscriber. She’s given it quite a favourable review, saying: ‘Your poems live up my very straightforward week’. They live up mine too!
But for real would you mind sometime please teaching me, finally, what vibration fatigue actually means? partly because I’ve got a pitch, right: I’m thinking poet-in-residence? Boring. 2022’s all about the poet irresident. Instead of spending time with a particular organisation, the poet stands just outside it attempting to “describe material fatigue, caused by forced vibration of random nature.” In my head, she stands outside the building reading, quite aggressively, her printed out poems shaking in her hands, poems designed to spread, produce mass resentment for — or otherwise wobble — the organisation. I suggest starting with the Gherkin. See if the old cucumber can stand the heat.
Needs some finesse, but that’s the elevator pitch. Let’s grab a coffee soon and work on it?
In the meantime, hope you enjoy the Ye piece — let me know what you reckon.
Aaand me and Jack Bartrop are releasing 22 poem x music tracks in as many weeks and you can subscribe to get each one delivered straight to your inbox:
