Okay, so Ron Silliman wrote BART. What's the setup? What happened? What did he do? >> It's Labor Day, 1976. >> Labor Day. What time of year is Labor Day? >> Early September. >> Yeah. I think we have a date at the end of this. >> First Monday in September. 76. >> Yep. September 6, 1976. Okay. And so what's the idea here? Why Labor Day? >> It's his day off. >> Okay, for one thing it's his day off. >> Everybody's day off, for that matter. >> It's everybody's day off, okay. And is there another reason? >> It's a time that he could, it's a time that people wouldn't be riding the barge just at rush hour. People would be riding it at all hours of the day, they're coming in and out of the city, they're going to games, they're going to- >> Going on outings. >> Restaurants. >> People from outside the city are coming in. People who are in the middle of the city are going out. >> Constant flux of people all day, not like a work day. >> So it's a good day for doing what he does. And he has this kind of almost conceptual, conceptualist project here. What's the project? >> He's going to write everything that he sees while he rides the train the entire line and back. >> It's got to be everything he sees and feels. >> Yeah. >> Sees or, you know, everything in quotes. I mean he does as much as he can. And how is it set up? Is this a series of new sentences with periods after each sentence? What is it, Amerese? >> It seems to be just one huge run-on sentence. >> It is. It doesn't just seem to be, it is. >> It is. >> One sentence. >> Yeah. >> So it's a sentence of many pages that is the result of his work done in the course of hours. What does he write on? Has he got a little laptop with him? 1976? No. >> [LAUGH] >> Does he have a little iPad? >> No, I thought that. [CROSSTALK] >> He has a notebook and a pen. Okay? This is a notebook poet. We were talking before about that big old book back there. The alphabet, the epic of everyday life written with a pen. Do we know anything about the notebook? >> We know that he bought it months ago. >> He says in the poem that he bought it months before. What does that imply? >> That he stockpiles notebooks. Or he was planning this project for a long time and he had just the right notebook for it. >> I think the latter. I think he bought this notebook for this project. He's a very planful and almost obsessive poet about his work. So it's not just a conceptual poem in the sense that it's an instruction. He's actually going to do it and he does it. What happens to him as he gets along through the course of the thing? >> He starts to feel the physical toll of this six-hour writing project. >> Writing poetry is physically taxing? I mean can you hunt for some examples of phrases that depict his physical strain? >> Well, right on the first page he says I feel the motion of. >> What is the page number? Because we're all in the same text. >> It's 300. At the bottom of 300. I feel the motion first in the small of my back. >> So I don't know if that's even so much the pain first. It's just like the awareness of the fact that he's like riding a train, he's in motion. And it's no longer about just who he sees, it's about like, he like gets this awareness of like how he's feeling. And that eventually translates into, definitely some discomfort. >> So there's a physical self awareness. Is there a writerly self awareness eventually? >> Yeah, especially at the end. When like, he starts to realize that people are kind of looking at him, like what is this guy doing. >> So physical self-awareness and writerly self-awareness eventually coincide. Okay, other examples of the body, the writing body? >> From 308 to 309. On 308 he says, I flex my writing hand to ease the pain, and on 309 he actually refers to handwriting as an act of endurance. >> Endurance, good. Any others? >> 305, my whole body's feeling the motion of put to stress of pull on every organ, wobble a bit or stagger, sit cross legged in a platform, realize I haven't had a cigarette today. Trying to quit again. Camels left on my desk at home. >> See he's really, it's the diary of a writer who set himself a project that he must finish. Because he really must finish, he's one of those kind of writers. I'm going to start this and I have to finish it. But he's not even sure at some point. He has to take breaks, right? Does he have a soda? >> He has to drink his Fresca. >> Fresca. >> Yes, his Fresca. >> [LAUGH] >> [LAUGH] >> He has a Fresca. >> He does take a Fresca break. >> So you can see this is a pretty serious situation, yeah. Any other body references? >> Page 304. >> 304. >> He says, my left hand rests on the case of the art disk, holds the notebook. Red cover, white pages, my wrist beginning to ache from the controlled act of writing. >> So what does this tell us? What can we, so far, we're going to say a little more about this poem, but what do we know so far about it? He picks Labor Day, he's physically taxed. >> Well, he's a working class guy, and I think this very physically taxing endurance poem is really significant to him, like he likes That he gets to get down and get his hands dirty and- >> He wants writing to be work. I'm imposing a sentiment on him, and I don't really need to do that but maybe I do. He wants his sense of himself as a working class kid. He wants that, somehow, to be part of his writing project. He doesn't want to get separated from that. What does San Francisco, the Bay Area, have to do with any of this for him? >> It's where he grew up, in Albany. >> It's his place. He grew up in Albany, he was briefly at Berkeley, San Francisco State College, he's had jobs, he was working in the prison movement. For a while, he was a political activist, he was very involved with the emergence of the writing scene, and eventually became a language poetry group in San Fransisco. So what does it mean to ride around your town all day in a rapid transit system? >> Well, I mean for one thing, we see this, kind of towards the end, yeah I think on, 310 and 311 now. He starts, he goes past Albany where he grew up. And he sees like, his high school, and then he has memories of some of his family members, and he, you have these associations with a place that trigger memories that sort of, on one sense, they interrupt the flow of what he's actually doing, which is supposed to be writing everything that he sees. But you can't suppress that once you see it. You have these associations- >> Associations. >> With certain places that- >> It's his town. It's his place. What is it that, what can you learn by riding rapid transit all day? What can you learn about your own town that you kind of thought you knew but didn't? Molly? >> Well usually when you're commuting, you're on autopilot, and you're in your own little world, whatever you're doing or thinking about, and this is deliberately trying to notice things, and notice people. How the demographics change as you go through different areas of the city. >> Mm-hm. >> And the type of people who ride public transit. >> Absolutely. So he's committed to social observation here. So this is Avant-Garde poetry doing social observation. And what is it about trains, public transit, that is a good place for that? >> Well we saw this in October, in Railroad Earth. There's Kerouac standing on the platform looking at all the crush of people on the platform between people who are unemployed and the people, the suits who were commuting. You know? >> Yeah. >> We have this mix of classes on public transportation that maybe you don't have in other places. >> Yeah Yeah, and Jack, the mania inside of Jack is to embrace all of that, really regardless of class. And of course, there was no BART at that point, this was the commuter railroad, but this was essentially the same thing. Except the difference is that Jack was hanging around with the bums and watching the commuters, and in this case soon, and that was a weekday evening. And Solomon's taking a holiday, but Jack gets, there's an homage to Jack here. Does anybody want to find it? Jack Herrowix gets mentioned here. >> I think it's 309. >> Yeah. >> 309. >> An homage to Jack Umoloom. >> So, yeah right, an homage to you Jack Umoloom. One word after another. He's acknowledging the way in which this project looks a little bit at meat because of its San Francisco origins in particular. A little bit about October and the railroad, Earth, and the Kerouacian just write it. It also looks a little bit forward to the conceptualist movement. So you get someone like Kenneth Goldsmith, whose soliloquy we're going to look at next in the final week of the course, Chapter 9, Week 10. But there's another piece by Kenneth Goldsmith this reminds us of which one would that be? >> Fidget. >> Fidget, which is? >> Where here transcribes every emotion of his body. >> For a period of hours on bloomsday so you know it's a perfect day for that. [LAUGH] In honor of James Joyce, I mean this is a literary one, that's more literary than this but this is a kind of got the symbolism of labor day, which we'll talk about again in a second. So it looks back to Jack, but it looks forward to Kenny in the sense of, it is kind of conceptualist project, trying to write everything. Neither of them succeeds, because it's kind of impossible for Kenny Goldsmith to write the movement of every body because it rapidly becomes recursive. You know, my hand is writing, writing, writing, I'm writing this thing, now I'm still writing, you just can't stop describing what you're doing so it becomes completely impossible, so what about the train and classes, social classes? I don't think we talked about that. >> Well we did a little bit. >> Yeah, so what is it about, you know, why? What does he see? >> There are the touristy types who are going out of town on like a fancier holiday. >> And all the children are wearing matching maroon turtlenecks? >> Chartreuse turtlenecks. >> WIth their names on them. >> Chartreuse. Did I say maroon? >> Yeah. >> Where was this? 1976, of course. >> But you have workers, you have a lot of different ethnic varieties. [LAUGH] And it also changes. There's one point where it says I'm the only white left on this car. Tourism is different to different peoples. [INAUDIBLE] >> Right, he understands that as you move through parts of San Francisco, you move through class. Right, I mean, I think one of the kind of unsaid phrases that's crucial in this book, in this piece is social mobility. Social mobility. Class mobility. I think that's an important concept for Ron Silverman. And I think that the mobility, it becomes a pun, kind of an operational, aesthetic pun, class mobility. Because the train, that and the baseball stadium all though even though there's a baseball game referred to here, a game at Candle Stick Park, that's another place that at least once upon a time before the tickets became very expensive. Classes don't mix in America at that many places but the racket transit, the public transportation is one of those places, yeah. So can you give me some instances of social observation, of classes and maybe even class mobility? >> We were just talking about the turtlenecks, that's on 310. Couple in front of me is just starting their trip. They decide to go to Concord. She take a Dramamine. A family gets on. All the kids have chartreuse turtlenecks with their names on them. We go by an old trailer park, another lumber yard, new condos on the west slope of Albany hill. >> Okay. >> There's a lot of that. >> On 304 he says, for a state college type jock, sit down on a nearby bench. Woman walks by with three children, one in her arms says of the car she passes, it looks pretty full. And then so often I've noticed that people who grew up in the country, work in the suburbs, service the people who work each day in the city. >> Yeah. >> So people are coming from the country to work in the suburbs to work for the people who are coming into the city. >> And Labor Day changes that. >> Right, >> Yeah. >> because people go out to the country to vacation. >> Right, kind of reverse it a little bit. >> Yeah. >> Labor Day's kind of an important day even though it's got its labor symbolism, it really doesn't have anything to do with that, alas. Other social observations? >> In the middle of three by three, there's this great critique of social mobility and physical mobility, or social mobility being physical mobility in some ways. More parking lots, more condos, why didn't someone just shoot old Henry Ford? Is housing contingent on transportation or vice versa? Only in our time have people begun to live away from their work. And that says a lot about this post-war modernity of people leaving the city. And then there's the necessity for things like freeways and. And once people have left the city and they have their cars now, they have their detached homes and everything. Their condos. >> What it does to the psyche, how large is your turf? >> That's a great one. >> A power mower for every home. >> A power mower for every home. It's almost like the Death of a Toad all over again. [LAUGH] >> So, let me perform. I've just set my bar up here. I'm going to read the last part of this poem. It's not been recorded by Ron Silliman, that we know of. I hope we can get him to record it, although it would take a while to read it. I want to read the last part of it, just because partly because I just love reading it, and partly because I think it might be a good chance for us to wrap up with a quasi close reading of this last. And I think the poem accelerates at the end. The pain becomes more acute. He passes by his own home, that is to say, his boyhood home, which we learned about in Albany. He gains a perspective of the sort that John Ashbury gains in his imagination when he climbs up the church tower in Guadalajara and gets to see the scene that he's just seen. In a way, Ron achieves these perspectives. Retrospectives, it turns out to be, because his life has been San Francisco at various times. And then as we rush toward the end, he's got to finish this thing, he really thinks a lot about what he's done. So here we go, I'm going to go from 310 to 311. I try to figure how many stations I'll go by today. 71 couple in front of me is just starting their trip they decide to go to Concord. She takes a Dramamine, a family gets on, all the kids have chartreuse turtlenecks with their names on it. We go by an old trailer park, another lumberyard, new condos on the west slope of Albany Hill. On my left, my old high school, through a thin haze, barely see the outline of the city, no Golden Gate, a dozen kids dark down the car, others follow, cooler now. They got off, daddy a kid says to another. Kids now running in opposite directions, still fine. Tourists in Berkeley. The car. Crowd's in a hurry. I'm feeling weary now. I wish my ears would pop. A small woman with a thick accent beside me. Two sits besides me. Two young people, a couple are with her. They seem to really like her. She wears a yellow dress, a copper bracelet. There's a motorcycle parked on the freeway. The city, more visible from Oakland, but not very. I got off at McArthur to transfer. My hand hurts, I wobble walking. A woman comes up, asks me what I'm doing. We discuss writing. She wants to try it sometime. Asks me, am I writing things? I shrug. I don't ask her name. The daily city train comes. I get on. It's so crowded I have to stand. I keep writing. I'm much more conspicuous now. People are staring. I can't hold on and write at the same time. I nearly fall. I'm going to have to stand all the way back. We'll be back under the bay in a second. 80 miles per hour, a man watches me write this. I remember what Einstein said when asked to explain the theory of relativity in 25 words or less. What time does the station get to the train? It's coming. And Barckadero, my writing is a scrawl, an act of death, it's a description. I'm describing these people who watch me, shirt, curly gray hair. Here's the station. I get up, sit down. I can still feel the pulling forces. I'm about to board the slow, upward path of the escalators through the ticket gate with the wrong ticket, then back up to the street, where I will Earth surface, then home, 451, 9676. What do you see in that? Emily, you're smiling. You like that. >> Yeah, it's, it's comical, it's just so frantic, because no one is forcing him to do it, no one is making him. >> It's Labor Day, he should take a day off. >> It's this kind of purposeful, intentional craziness, a controlled craziness, which is really entertaining. >> It's also great because the whole time, he's been trying to take everything in, and now he gets to the end where not only has this been physically taxing, but it's also alienated him completely from the people he's tried to observe. The people are starting to look at him, they're wondering what he's doing, why he's so writing frantically. Why he won't tell them what he's doing, and won't speak to them. He just seems like this crazed man. [CROSSTALK] >> It's an ethic graphic encounter. For awhile he was passing as a San Francisco guy, a working class guy on his day off. And now he seems to be the ethnographer trying to understand them and there's this kind of nervousness that his writerly self might separate himself from them. >> Or he starts to seem like the poet. >> Especially, yeah exactly, especially as he's passing by his old high school, the origins of his working class identity. All his anxieties about his social place, and here he is, seemingly different, right at the site where he passes his old place. So there's a lot of desperation and it's extremely charming. What else would you say about this? Dave? >> The thing that strikes me the most is how he starts off with all these descriptions of things and it seems like a distant but subjective view. But then all of a sudden, I'm feeling weary now or my hand is cramping up. So these physical things creep in. So the distance of the voice switches back and forth constantly, and it just creates a fun chaos. And I comment on how objective can anybody be. At the same time, he's on a train going in one direction. >> I love the sigh of relief at the end. When you get down to 451, or you get Earth's surface, then home. 451 1976, you want to just like exhale. because it's all been one sentence. And so, you know, there is so much going on, like David was saying, there are all these competing voices and physical, and emotional, memories all this stuff is in his head and now it needs to be written down. I'm sure his hand was like a claw at this point. >> There's something very emotional about exposing his body to the pain, to the labor of writing on Labor Day. Molly? >> Going off what Anna said, I think that's why it works so well to have this all in one sentence, because the motion of the train and that sort of incest of on and off and fresh people coming on and giving him fresh things to write about, but it never really stops, the project. >> Amarese? >> And it seems paradoxical, like Max was saying. The, writing itself creates the conditions for this attentiveness. But, he's so distant from everything that he's describing, that he even starts questioning the success possible there. He says, how can you describe people when you can only see surface features? And we've seen in this description he's entered memory and all these other associations. I like that part of it. >> When we talked about the Dickinson poem, House of Possibility, it ended with the word, near the end was the word occupation, which we've talked about a lot. Actually, in this course we've talked about the word this. For occupation this. When we talk about occupation, we had several connotations that we spun off. One was the idea was the idea of residing, and residence. The other was the job. And the third was obsessiveness, dwelling, occupation. And I think that the second and third are the key connotations here. First of all, his occupation is this, this hand painfully recording the act of descriptions on describing these people watch me, who watch me. I'm describing my people, I'm describing San Franciscans. I'm describing Oaklandians or whatever they're called, Albanians. [LAUGH] And Albanians or whatever. This is my occupation. My occupation is to say who I am by describing the people that are in my polus. But occupation is also obsession, this is obsessive. On Labor Day, his job is to be obsessive. His occupation is occupation on Labor Day. This is the job of a working class kid who decides to embrace an alternative, radical way of representing life as it's being lived. I almost want to say as it's really being lived. The obsession is get it right, get it down, gotta do it, gotta describe. Must do. It's bearing witness. He's bearing witness to the way people live everyday. Where people go, who they go with, how they interact with each other in this public space. If it were July 4th, I would say that it was kind of allegiant that it was really celebration in 1976 our bicentennial. >> If it was Memorial Day, yeah. >> Celebration or Memorial Day. Celebration of these spaces that we have. Not the car, not Henry Ford, but these public spaces where people really do come together. Where social observation means you're describing all kinds of people. >> But it's Labor Day, it's the day where someone who works hard every day gets to not take off, but to occupy oneself not in a job sense but in an obsession sense. He's obsessed with being a poet. He's obsessed with, as as is in my life with describing in a way that makes us work even on Labor Day, to think about how America is constructed, how it's constructed socially and linguistically. That's the triumph of something like this. We should all want. I don't know about you, but this concept makes me want to do it. Isn't that right? It makes you want to do it, it makes you want to be a writer who records in a, in the right way. And who just, who's just going to keep working at it, even if it's painful.
