[Atompunk] [Fwd: Atompunk: substance or surface?]

[Nathan at Twofish]

Re. the below...

Lowell is an 'American' poet -- from a historic Boston family -- so his 
weariness is telling, I think. (That said, I don't believe in poetry is 
biography! I think it's important to appreciate Lowell's American-ness 
for the point I'm trying to make, nevertheless...)

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Atompunk: substance or surface?
Date: 	Mon, 08 Dec 2008 23:33:52 +0100
From: 	Nathan at Twofish <nathan at twofish.nl>
To: 	atompunk at antenna.nl



Chaps,

There are undoubtedly a lot of aesthetic influences to draw from in this 
period, a period we've labeled 'Atompunk' (is it capitalised or not??). 
This is what we appear to have concentrated on so far. (Is that fair to 
say?)

Here is my real interest, though: what do you guys think of, what I 
guess we could call, the 'paranoia/confidence' complex of the era? A 
division that arguably characterised the Cold War East/West split of our 
chosen era: but a division that was fluid (each side slipping from hope 
to fear, and then back again, all the time).

How does this inform the 'cultural production' of the era -- as horrible 
a phrase as that is -- and how much does that impact on our 
reconsideration of this stuff?

This is what I'm thinking: between the futurism of Sputnik, and the 
telling over-confidence of the US car design industry, sits someone like 
Robert Lowell -- his American poems of 'figures of bravado ossified 
young'...

How do we react to the writers of the era? I'd love to hear your 
thoughts on the piece below. I'm thinking out loud here, but while it 
should arguably be an aesthetically loose thing, if we are interested in 
anchoring 'Atompunk' somewhere -- this seems like a good starting point. 
(What's the legacy, etc.?) *I guess my question is: is this just an 
aesthetic we're dealing with (interested in); or is it not only that, 
but also something more...?* This propels else to somewhere new, 
personally speaking.

For the Union Dead     
by Robert Lowell

"Relinquunt Omnia Servare Rem Publicam."

The old South Boston Aquarium stands
in a Sahara of snow now.  Its broken windows are boarded.
The bronze weathervane cod has lost half its scales.
The airy tanks are dry.

Once my nose crawled like a snail on the glass;
my hand tingled
to burst the bubbles
drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.

My hand draws back.  I often sigh still
for the dark downward and vegetating kingdom
of the fish and reptile.  One morning last March,
I pressed against the new barbed and galvanized

fence on the Boston Common.  Behind their cage,
yellow dinosaur steamshovels were grunting
as they cropped up tons of mush and grass
to gouge their underworld garage.

Parking spaces luxuriate like civic
sandpiles in the heart of Boston.
A girdle of orange, Puritan-pumpkin colored girders
braces the tingling Statehouse,

shaking over the excavations, as it faces Colonel Shaw
and his bell-cheeked Negro infantry
on St. Gaudens' shaking Civil War relief,
propped by a plank splint against the garage's earthquake.

Two months after marching through Boston,
half the regiment was dead;
at the dedication,
William James could almost hear the bronze Negroes breathe.

Their monument sticks like a fishbone
in the city's throat.
Its Colonel is as lean
as a compass-needle.

He has an angry wrenlike vigilance,
a greyhound's gentle tautness;
he seems to wince at pleasure,
and suffocate for privacy.

He is out of bounds now.  He rejoices in man's lovely,
peculiar power to choose life and die--
when he leads his black soldiers to death,
he cannot bend his back.

On a thousand small town New England greens,
the old white churches hold their air
of sparse, sincere rebellion; frayed flags
quilt the graveyards of the Grand Army of the Republic.

The stone statues of the abstract Union Soldier
grow slimmer and younger each year--
wasp-waisted, they doze over muskets
and muse through their sideburns . . .

Shaw's father wanted no monument
except the ditch,
where his son's body was thrown
and lost with his "niggers."

The ditch is nearer.
There are no statues for the last war here;
on Boylston Street, a commercial photograph
shows Hiroshima boiling

over a Mosler Safe, the "Rock of Ages"
that survived the blast.  Space is nearer.
When I crouch to my television set,
the drained faces of Negro school-children rise like balloons.

Colonel Shaw
is riding on his bubble,
he waits
for the blessèd break.

The Aquarium is gone.  Everywhere,
giant finned cars nose forward like fish;
a savage servility
slides by on grease.

-- 
Twofish
Passeerdersgracht 22
1016 XH Amsterdam
The Netherlands

T: +31 (0) 20 5219 910
M:+31 (0) 611 392 309


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