The crass inevitability of any kind of book review is delineating a way to categorize what we (the reviewer) believe (correctly or incorrectly) that a work is doing. It can be a stupefying, valueless process, and, in fact, often leeches value from the originality of the work. (Look no further than the ubiquitous hatred of the critic throughout history.) While we’d love to assure you, dear reader, that no such delineations will take place in this review, we must unfortunately confess that what follows will consist entirely of such crass and stupid suppositions. While reading Christian Schlegel’s newest book, The Blackbird, we were continuously struck with sticky, ontological questions about what the writing is, how it sits in a larger discourse of genre, whether it’s poeming the essay or essaying the poem, etc. The intention and ambition of our readership was subverted over and over by Schlegel’s twists, digressions, and vernacular legerdemain. The Blackbird had a paradoxical effect. On one hand, we couldn’t put it down. On the other hand, we couldn’t bring ourselves to finish it; or, rather, we languored in the space of incompletion longer than we are used to. The collection, which the helpful editors at Beautiful Days Press summarize as “talk poems” and sell under the “Essay” category of their webstore, is broken up into five colloquia ranging from the work of Jason Molina, Rumsfeld’s infamous “known unknowns”, the concept of parenthyros, skateboarding, the 2016 Maren Ade film Toni Erdman, fantasy football, conceptual artist Lee Lozano, and Robert Musil’s novella from which the title of the book was lifted. And so, with the admission that we have no idea where to begin, we will begin.
The nature of categorical questioning is essential to Schlegel’s work. In fact, one could suggest, it is the adhesive of this academic process that binds the diverse and disparate subjects of The Blackbird. Schlegel is interested in surprising, rhizomatic intersections of worlds that couldn’t seem further apart. However, this is not a forced or performative take appealing to an academic vogue, but seems to arise naturally and discursively from the writer’s own personal interests. Take the book’s second colloquium “is this skateboarding?” wherein Schlegel meanders mostly on the forms and failure of the sublime. First, before we continue, you may have noticed that we have landed on this academic categorization of “colloquium” to categorize Schlegel’s form. This is because Schlegel’s writing addresses an audience, is aware of being perceived, and is incorporating the digressive movements and interests of a lecture. While Schlegel, like many young academics, clearly displays his antipathy for the institution of academia, he is indisputably built by those very institutions. One cannot receive the highest terminal degree from the ivoriest tower and then act as if a baser countercultural subjectivity effectively transgresses that foundation. Schlegel has clearly been molded by the very institutions he resents and the form of his writing cannot fully molt that influence. Thus, we’ll call these chapters “colloquia”.
The best part of “is this skateboarding?” is, obviously, the skateboarding. It takes him about twenty pages to get there and we’ll let you decide whether or not that process is necessary, but when he gets there the threads begin to tauten. Schlegel is relatable in this moment, stoned with his friend watching a silly skateboard video from the Boston collective Fancy Lad. Schlegel gives a scrupulous breakdown of the video––how it differs and defies other conventional modes of what we call “skateboarding”. He further interrogates the ontological framework evoked by the very title of the film. “watching this film,” he says, “i was like i wonder if this actually is skateboarding i took the question seriously like de man’s question of knowing the dancer from the dance.” Schlegel’s colloquial voice is often juxtaposed by a more elevated, academic reference point; however, we are toiling in the mire of deconstruction here so the usual suspects are likely to appear. What is incredibly rich about this piece is how seamless all of this is for Schlegel. After his brief invocation of Paul de Man, Schlegel immediately turns to the YouTube comments of the video, theoretically positioning the commenter and de Man in a dialectical inquiry about the relationship between the performer and performance. This all happens at the speed of thought. Schlegel arrives at this beautiful conclusion:
and it’s clear that’s
what’s happening here whatever “it” is comes after skateboarding
comes as a rebuttal to or reformulation of the art an art
that has exhausted itself in its canonical sense and has passed through its silver age
of “crank-turning” and professionalization and is now either nihilistically
evacuated or too full of its own history but really neither
it’s productively and constructively that is positively exhausted
For those who have not watched the fifty-two minute video from Fancy Lad that has sent Schlegel into this ontological spiral trying to locate the radial subject of the “it” inside this larger question about how an exhausted art form can be radically reclaimed (and if it can be without a complete deconstruction of the form itself), it may be a welcome contrapuntal levity to the headier digressions of the colloquium. The video is deeply creative and entertaining, but is, most of all, a group of friends laughing, playing, failing, and fucking around with the fundamental components of what constitutes a “trick”. You do not even have to know much about skateboarding to notice immediately how the forms these skaters have taken are a little off, a little uncanny. Most of all, it’s just good for your spirit.
The sly work of The Blackbird is how enveloped a lot of these questions are. Schlegel may be ostensibly examining the components of what skateboarding is and when it occurs, but he is also asking interrelated questions concerning genre simultaneously––of topos. If the skateboarder can do away with the “metal doohickey” that once served as an indispensable, constituent facet of his art’s “functionality,” and thereby liberate a new formulation of the art in and of itself, then of course the poet can do this, the novelist, the dancer, the sculptor, etc. In a way, this is old news, but Schlegel’s approach makes it feel fresh. The chosen form of The Blackbird mirrors these interrogations in the writer’s deliberate choices to eschew punctuation, capitalization, to expand the prose of the colloquium into a voluminous poetic form, which furthers the effect of one subject blending seamlessly into the other. When we confess that we struggle with categorization, we only do so because it is germane to the questions of Schlegel’s text.
In the book’s fourth colloquium, “reality”, Schlegel, following the inspiration of Patricia Lockwood, asks, “what is at stake between the aesthetic and the real.” The ambition of this distinction is so historically bloated that it is liable to make the reader seize up mid-eye-roll. However, Schlegel is an impressively adaptable speaker, first engaging the canonical positionality at the center of this question––namely, that what we call “reality” is merely a utile set of agreed upon common experiences that assist the art’s production. Before this dialectic can digress into the prosaic form of watching paint dry, Schlegel swiftly shifts the colloquium to the subject of fantasy football. It is clear that he is interested in extrapolating the symbolic relationship between the aesthetic and the real into a substantive category of “games,” a la Wittgentstein, to ostensibly demonstrate how the function of the game simulates the terms of the Real back to us. The use of fantasy football for this demonstration, perhaps like skateboarding before it, subverts our expectation a little since its cultural connotations are not immediately linked to the kinds of questions, or the time period, or the presumably solemn attitudes of philosophical inquiry that Wittgenstein was considering in his Philosophical Investigations. However, it is the strength of a good writer to demonstrate that the fountain of youth and the Taco Bell soda machine are subterraneously linked through the same aquifer.
Schlegel draws out the manifold fantasies that occur within the subject of fantasy football, since football on its own is already a fantasy of military engagement. There are apparently orders to these fantasies (first, second, third), but they all work to demonstrate collective agreements about our reality back to us through a gamified spectacle. Enter Schlegel:
this hooks back into the central unresolved problem of games are
they decorations atop reality or constitutive of reality? and maybe one thing i’m
saying in trying to assemble this definition of the real is a differently articulated
version of wittgenstein’s as i take it argument that the intersection of all the
continuously played games in space and time is reality but i don’t know how
invested i am in the language game versus the game game so all the ways
people are threading themselves together in a though-space at once that’s
set of games they’re playing and that’s what makes their reality
It’s not a very rigorous conclusion, in fact, it may even be purposefully lazy, but that’s why we write poems and not treatises. Still, Schlegel fully engages the Kantian concepts of phenomena and noumena within this demonstration––the phenomena being the systems of perception (games) that we collectively utilize to express the noumena (reality). This subject, of course, doesn’t reach a satisfying point of containment, but continues to explode: the conceptual art practices of Lee Lozano, aliens, and, finally, poetry (or, more importantly, what it is to paraphrase or “talk around” a poem). This is all to draw a wider frame around the larger narrative delineations of how and what we classify and quantify as constitutive measurements of a baser Reality, which, according to Lacan, is inexpressible. But what the fuck are any of us doing if not risking our own disorientation for a glimpse outside of the spectacle? Schlegel’s work gives ample material for considering the simultaneity of these worlds (phenomenal and noumenal) and temporarily constructs a secret third world wherein the whole order of operations can be more objectively observed. We are neither chained to the wall of Plato’s cave, nor are we outside of the cave running around naked in the light of pure experience, but we are positioned such that we are privy to the mechanism of the spectacle. We can see that there is an outside and that the resources of the outside are being manipulated to manufacture a reality, but we cannot see beyond that.
The Blackbird is rocked by a wild, interpersonal denouement in its fifth and final colloquium, which we must, for the sake of preserving its effect, not speak about. Honestly, we regret having said anything definitively about this book, since it leads us in different directions each time we revisit it. We open and close with the same problem. A book, after all, is a key cultural component in how we structure, organize, and collectivize our contemporary experience of reality. Schlegel’s work, if nothing else, mirrors the difficulty in totalization. In fact, many of the larger philosophical questions that expand throughout The Blackbird are aporia, and as such, they resist containment. Schlegel’s meandering, colloquial form embraces this openness. His more declarative statements are not meant to conclude a thought, but to nudge it towards its next discursive transformation. Perhaps our initial hesitancy to finish the book was an unconscious mimesis of The Blackbird’s resistance––not wanting to close a work that repeatedly asks to be opened. And so, like Schlegel’s poetics, let this not be review not be a conclusion, but a nudge.