Hi-ho. We have to write letters to our Poetry Workshop instructor and this is what I'm giving her tomorrow. It's really dull unless you like reading about writing and not actually enacting anything. I look at it as sort of a confession about causing fear in you Clarion-ites.

Dear Jena,

A few thoughts were running around the ‘ol lizard brain tonight. Most of them concern my reactions to letters I received after my first packet. I've been working with content that seeks to revolt the reader, cause agony and in the end, exhaustion, which leads to moment of clarity. By exposing the darkly surreal, I hope to tap into a brain’s fear centers. This is definitely manipulation and I want to learn how to do it better.
Conna had a response that I've encountered when my audience reads this stuff. Conna warned that people might take my work as “instruction to the least of my audience” as if there were any real directives in my work. This fear intrigues me. In my science fiction writing workshop I wrote a piece involving graphic depictions of humans raping insects. The reactions were negative for the most part and focused on the harsh content – which was disappointing to me since the very affect of horror was the goal.
My concerns: Does the piece ‘read’ smoothly. Is there immersion in the work?

I am not very concerned with some notion of the reader having some meta-sense that s/he is reading. I accept the hierarchy between reader and writer as natural and necessary. If that is arrogance, in my opinion, then I consider all writers to be arrogant, but even more so the writer who through condescension thinks that s/he must come down to the level of the reader. As if that writer had some extra sense of empathy to be shared. It also makes me wonder if the writer is afraid of their own capabilities. If you want people to follow, you have to be willing to lead. As such, I am leading people to dark areas, to cruel areas.
Many people at Clarion were amazed at the depths my story had sunk. And these are all fair - extreme liberals. I was honored! The class felt my writing was a threat! That joy was short-lived because what I needed from the class was an honest appraisal of the writing itself. I admit to getting an obscene pleasure out of scaring people, but I know that my violence and cruelty can be gratuitous, flat. Sick, but not probable. That is why I come to workshops, to improve my language until I can be a de Sade or a Bataille and not just a pseudonym gracing the cover of a XXX stroke-book.
I want to talk about Matt’s response too because he picked up on the theme of Right Initial Conditions which was a satire of how a person can use the ambiguous language of post-structuralism to either pull a hoax (as in Sokol’s hoax on Social Text) or to use the language to seduce/enslave others. Here are some of my favorite examples. Lacan’s comparison of his erectile organ as = the square root of negative one and Julia Kristeva’s statement in Recherches pour une semanalyse,
“Having assumed that poetic language is a formal system whose
theoritization can be based on theory, we may observe, at the
same time, that the functioning of poetic meaning obeys the principles
designated by the axiom of choice.”
Their analogies make little sense because analogies take an elusive, difficult to understand point and relate it to a more well-known idea. She relates poetic language to the axiom of choice but never explains the relevance of such a theory. These are two isolated examples, but any good orator can take these lessons and baffle “the least of our audience.” By relying on authority to prove points, one loses my respect. Joan Retallack is quite guilty of this by proclaiming what is and what is not feminine writing, but does so entirely by dfining, all by herself, what constitutes feminine qualities in wirting.
I seem to have gotten off the point, but I want to thank you for your comments in class about Right Initial Conditions as pathway to stranger and odder encounters. I am planning on writing two pieces, one with your ideas and another that deals more specifically with how nefarious characters use and abuse people, and the tools they might use to achieve their ends.

That’s all for now. In my next letter, I’d like to discuss my final thesis.



OUR DESIRES DEPICT FOR US AN UNHAPPY STATE