Books I took with me to Reno:

 

Ø       Lyn Hejinian, My Life in the Nineties

Ø       Stephen Ratcliffe, SOUND / (system)

Ø       Leslie Scalapino, Zither & Autobiography

Ø       Aloysius Bertrand, Flemish School, Old Paris, & Night & its Spells

Ø       Daniel Davidson, Culture

Ø       Bruce Sterling, The Artificial Kid

 

But I didn't realize until I read it today that two of these six writers attended the same elementary school: John Muir in Berkeley. This being Lyn Hejinian & Leslie Scalapino. Hejinian may have finished there by the time Scalapino arrived or possibly simply never crossed paths in the way that, say, fourth graders are typically kept apart from the kindergartners even now.

 

I've noted before how moving I find Scalapino's Autobiography & reading it on the plane just deepened my sense of awe. Perhaps it is in the nature of the project — it is not that this is the first work of Scalapino's to deal explicitly with memory, but rather that she is very carefully attempting to unpack those memories almost one detail at a time without, in the same act, violating their spirit. So that the larger structure, and even the structure of individual sentences, proceed with a high degree of parataxis & torque, without ever losing sight of her argument.

 

The result is a breathtaking work — be patient & I'll demonstrate this with a quote — but one that it is worth noting was rejected actually by Gale Research, which had originally commissioned it for their series of autobiographic essays by authors. They publish these in a series of extremely pricey anthologies aimed literally at high school libraries. As a rule, their autobiographies are as varied as their authors. Rae Armantrout's True started out as such a project, as did Robert Creeley's Autobiography, and I've read others of considerable interest by Anselm Hollo, Larry Eigner (completed by Jack Foley & others after Larry's death) & Crag Hill. Gale doesn't have an aesthetic bias to push — they are literally after quantity: they can't sell another volume unless they have enough pages of material to include. So it's ironic, in the extreme, that one of the most amazing works to have come out of this dubious documentary project should have been thus rejected.

 

Virtually everything Scalapino has to say here is of considerable interest. And it doesn't hurt from the reader's perspective that she's had a unique & fascinating life. Her father, Robert Scalapino, is one of the great polarizing figures in Asian American history & political relations — I've never met another Asian historian who couldn't immediately go into some passionate harangue about the man. (When I was a student at Berkeley in the 1960s, anti-Scalapino placards were not uncommon in antiwar demonstrations there &, years later, in the early 1980s, I attended a lecture of his at the World Affairs Council in San Francisco in which he argued that the then-greatest threat to world peace was New Zealand . . . since it would not let U.S. nuclear subs come into its ports.) A cold war liberal who became a Vietnam hawk, he was also the sort of man who would take his entire family along on incredible world jaunts, as in Let's get a car & drive from Johannesburg to Cairo (and in the 1950s, no less, that trip shortened only by the fact that his anti-apartheid views caused him to become persona non grata in South Africa). His three daughters thus had a view of the planet unlike almost anyone else's, in terms of its exposure to different peoples, cultures, histories, conflicts. Every detail of which his daughter Leslie seems to have absorbed & to continues to absorb to this day. (& she notes, understandably, her displeasure at people, men specifically, who make assumptions about her predicated on her relationship to her father.)

 

Yet it is her mother that Leslie points to in what I take to be perhaps the clearest statements of her relationship to the issues of form & genre she has given us:

 

My mother, while not needing to 'know the answer' —ever — only the act itself occurring, at the same time had intricate rules (for cleaning house, for the 'right way to do things,' or right order) which while one starting as a tiny child scrutinized her, the source of the trajectories of rules, these were undecipherable, seemed to have no application or basis.

          Only the rules 'having no basis' in fact — 'at all' — jived with beggars running alongside the train car, with men pulling rickshas or men lifting very heavy loads manually destitute otherwise, i.e., frightening close to dying per se.

          She would, for example, have me vacuum the same room over again automatically (so that I knew I would have to do it over again, no matter how well I did it), to vacuum dust that wasn't there — I learned from this 'there are no rules' — no rules govern anything, at all. This was the only relief. My response at the same time as my freaking out was, "whoopi" (in regard to having no rules).

 

This statement occurs as a rhetorical parenthesis in an account of her first two boyfriends & how the intensity of college relationships raised issues of power, authority & self.

 

Genre's relationship to rules is different from, say, that of a sonnet as such. When I was in college, the joking definition of a novel was "a long prose fiction with a flaw," something I must have heard from half a dozen different professors. In a similar mode, Gertrude Stein's concept of a play is very different from Eugene O'Neill's or Christopher Smart's. Thus Scalapino's insistence on defining so many of her works through genre, as genre, strikes me as exploring (rather than, say, pinning down) this sense of "rules 'having no basis' fact — at all," the dash for emphatic pause.

 

It is in this sense that Autobiography is just as advertised, an intense account of life as remembered & of memory as immanence, keeping present at all points just how associational & partial memory always is. That Gale Research manages not to "get it" — this use of quotation mark is definitely infectious — demonstrates all too clearly what happens when the rules that are set up have nothing to do with their content.