Michael E. O'Reilly

Early philosophy of animal consciousness Rene Descartes (1596-1650) was a French mathematician and scientist widely regarded as the father of modern philosophy, and perhaps best known for his observation, “cogito ergo sum,” or, “I think, therefore I am.” What may have seemed like an obvious statement actually had a major effect on the way we view subject/object relationships, including our own relationship to wild and domestic animals. When Descartes confidently asserted that all animals besides humans were void of the capacity to feel pain or emotion, we were still a ways off from formal behavioral studies of animals or humans. Yet many still wondered about the mental capacities of animals, and whether or not they truly lacked “thinking souls,” as he had suggested.   In trying to determine whether or not animals had souls, or capacity to reason, Descartes settled on a term for wildlife and domestic creatures, calling them “animalia automata,” which basically means mindless robot....

Aristotle and Plato had different views on mimesis If Aristotle’s view on art and mimesis makes him look like your undergrad Shakespeare professor who drove the VW bus, Plato’s view on art and mimesis makes him look like your uncle who designed tanks in the Army and said “I just don’t see the practical use of poems or art.”      Plato took a strict and rational approach to the definitions and implications of mimesis.  Aristotle also felt his own opinion on mimesis was rational.  In discussing poetry, for example, he used the parameters of “probability and necessity,” in defining good narrative form.      In the plainest sense, Plato understood mimesis to be an imitation or reproduction of something else.  His entire argument was based on the principle of reason, and he believed the end result of a man’s tinkering with his own sense of reason was an inferior man.      While Plato believed mimesis was imitation, Ar...

Ron Silliman is a wild rebel of the signifier  "Language is material and primary and what's experienced is the tension and relationship of letters and lettristic clusters, simultaneously struggling towards, yet refusing to become, significations."  Steve McCaffery        I want to talk about Ron Silliman’s Book, Tjanting, as well as his views on how politics and class fit into poetry. How does Silliman think poetry can help the lower class, or promote political change in America?  What is so political about writing poetry that people might like but that nobody understands? Why does he call them paragraphs when there is no unifying subject matter?  If language is a commodity, whose meaning has become transparent, how does that effect real-life oppression and hegemony among humans?                Tjanting is a book that exemplifies Silliman’s idea of “The New Sentence.”  ...

I have read Ashbery in anthologies, and decided I like him, but The Tennis Court Oath is the first complete collection of his I have read.  It doesn’t seem like he takes on the subject of popular culture in this book, the way he does in some of his later stuff.  A couple of my favorites in other books include “Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape,” and “Daffy Duck in Hollywood.”                                                         This book is full of quickly changing moods, tones and settings which provide a rather bone-jarring ride through each poem.  It didn’t, however, seem so dislocate me to the point that I no longer care about the poem, which happens when I read Susan Howe or Gertrude Stein.        As disjointed as the lines of this book are, they stand alone as good lines, so t...

David Melnick adopts a chaotic sort of anti-grammar to comment on the lives of the men in Aida, in his poetry book of the same name (1983).  His use of language as something outside the normal rules of English usage has a direct, symbolic link to the gay lifestyle, which exists on the outside of a post-Roman, and very Christian cultural grammar.  Melnick positions his writing within a frame of Greek mythological figures, presumably for the purpose of establishing a paradigm of acceptance and normalcy, regarding homosexuality in ancient Greek and Roman times. The abandonment of traditional English grammar in conjunction with the subject matter of homosexuality illustrates the modern, western world’s lack of accommodation and understanding of homosexuality.  In other words, Melnick had chosen to take something “outside” the system, and talk about it using a grammar that operates outside the same system.  In doing so he says:  Homosexuality is outside the system, ...

It’s a shame that Clark Coolidge wasn’t a teacher, because he coherently puts together this thoughts regarding a kind of poetry that gives most people trouble.  In his 1977 address to the Naropa Institute, he is able to explain his syntax-challenged poetry in a way that makes sense.  His interest in geology is helpful, because he is able to use crystal growth as a way to begin accessing his work.  Other geological phenomena such as fault lines and sedimentation are employed, as well.  In his essay, At Clark Coolidge:  Allegory and the Early Works, Michael Golston illuminates Coolidge’s work with the torch of structuralism, using Roman Jakobsen to back him up.  Quoting from Coolidge’s Smithsonian Deposition, Golston takes note of the innate structuralism found there.  “. . . The dictionary seems a vastly supersaturated solution of languages, roots entangled along sunken axes.”  These “sunken axes” he refers to are the horizontal axes of language,...

Flaubert and the Sentence     I was hard-pressed to find a way to counter Barthes’ general observation that Flaubert was obsessed with obstructing himself as a writer, for the sake of getting it right.  Flaubert was probably the anguished writer he claimed to be, yet it was Barthes who assigned the various scholarly labels to the methods Flaubert employed ie. substitutive, diminutive, and augmentative.  So, even though I didn’t feel there was much of a thesis to argue against, I was able to move in like a parasite to peck at small flaws in the argument.  For example, he says at the beginning that “Proust retires from the world because he has a great deal to say and because he is pressed by death, Flaubert because he has a great correction to perform.”  So Flaubert can’t retire from the world at all, because he so feels the need to change it, and perfect it.  Like that.  I am barely qualified to comment on any of this, but Barthes goes into a ...