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Louis A. Caulfield, 37 Belfort Street, Dorchester. Delivering a heavy type-writer about a half a mile. Works for Model Typewriter Inspection Co. Says he is sixteen years old and gets $6 a week. Taken on Boston Common, Boston, Massachusetts: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, January 1917 (National Child Labor Committee Collection, Library of Congress)
Wife of Pomp Hall, Negro tenant farmer, writing on typewriter. Through union activities the family has developed a desire for higher education. The typewriter is to them a symbol of that education and as such is the most prized family possession. Creek County, Oklahoma: photo by Russell Lee, February 1940 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Chimpanzee seated at a typewriter: photo by New York Zoological Society, 19 May c. 1906 (Library of Congress)
Young woman with typewriter, FSA project, Pocatello, Banning County, Idaho: photo by Russell Lee, July 1941 or 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Woman at typewriter: photo by Howard Liberman, September 1942 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
A government secretary in the U.S. Office of Emergency Management, cleaning her typewriter: photo by Marjory Collins, February 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
The Stenographer: photographer unknown, 5 March 1923 [?] (Library of Congress)
Typing address labels on a flat bed typewriter at the W. Atlee Burpee Company, seed dealers, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: photo by Arthur S. Siegel, April 1943 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
Blind children from the Maryland School for the Deaf, Dumb and Blind coaching Senator Claude Pepper, of Florida, of Senate Committee, Washington, D.C., in the art of operating a braille typewriter (left to right: Frances Wright, 8 years old, reading a braille book; Andrew Birmingham, 10 years old; Dr. John W. Studebaker, U.S. Commissioner of Education; Senator Claude Pepper): photo by Harris & Ewing, 9 April 1937 (Library of Congress)
Robert Kit[...] at typewriter made by Joseph Alsop for Hartford Courant: photo by Harris & Ewing, 15 November 1937 (Library of Congress)
Typewriting department, National Cash Register, Dayton, Ohio: photo by William Henry Jackson, c. 1902 (Library of Congress)
Irene Cornyn at a typewriter, wearing a prosthesis on her arm, possibly using a modified typewriter: photo by Bain News Service, between 1910 and 1915 (George Grantham Bain Collection, Library of Congress)
Co-op enterprise office, Manzanar Relocation Center: photo by Anselm Adams, 1943 (Library of Congress)
Rose Fukuda and Roy Takeda, Manzanar Relocation Center: photo by Anselm Adams, 1943 (Library of Congress)
Indian stenographers: photo by Harris & Ewing, c. 1919 (Library of Congress)
Fanny Howe, Washington, D.C.: photo by Tom Raworth, 2010
Charles Bernstein, Bloomsbury, London: photo by Tom Raworth, 15 May 2008
[W]ord processor ideology reinforces the idealization of "clean copy" -- a defleshed, bureaucratic and interchangeable writing.
____
To understand the work of Charles Bernstein, one needs to think hard about fashion, in clothing and in print(s). For Bernstein, unlike his self-proclaimed precursor, Laura (Riding) Jackson, even nakedness is disguise, and power is at once naked and hidden by the audience’s desire, if not under actual or metaphorical cloth. The poet, quite simply and comically, can never take off his clothes:
Should I choose to take my tie off, the one with the embossed seals that is so carefully knotted over my Adam’s apple, I do not fall into a state of undress. I remain clothed, in some fashion or other, until I am without clothes and indeed then my skin still encloses me, until I disappear. (The real moral of "The Emperor’s New Clothes" is that power is always naked and by force of that concealed by the modesty of a people who cannot bear to look at the spectacle without mediation: the Emperor is clothed, that is, by the self-protective squeamishness of the collective subconscious. (Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984)
___
As I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, Laura Riding made important arguments against professionalism, equating professional behavior with "fashion" and style of dress, and attempted to denude herself of these encumbrances and so to arrive at "truth." This sequence itself derives from the notion that spareness of voice equals authenticity, that fashion is suspect; it is, in some ways, an anti-feminist argument, hardly surprising in view of the masculine will to power in modernist circles, including her own. It is interesting that Bernstein begins from a similar place, arguing against professional poets and critics for their attending more to fashion than to thinking, which is of necessity an unfashionable activity in a consumer society. And yet Bernstein has become the most consummate of professionals; he has a chair at SUNY-Buffalo; he has edited numerous books on poetics; he has published three volumes in which his own criticism is reprinted; he has published a couple of dozen books of poems. He is, even more importantly, and as a result of these successes, the creator and propagator of a style. His work has, in recent years, become fashionable. Like many poets, he has arrived at the point where his is a recognizable style -- albeit a pluralization of styles -- associated not just with himself but with a "school."
Unlike Riding, however, and more like Gertrude Stein, from whom he takes more than from any other writer, Bernstein relishes his position and destabilizes it at every turn. Like Stein, he uses his criticism (much more standard than hers) to advertise his poetry. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent Bernstein is able to maintain his anti-fashionable status at the moment when fashion is catching up with him, or if his strategy of disavowing fashion by indulging in it succeeds in dismantling other, more ready-made styles. I will end this essay with a final paradox: Bernstein does not so much disavow authority in his work as reconceptualize it. Given a climate in which authority is a suspect term, Bernstein realizes that the only way to have it may be to disavow it.
Unlike Riding, however, and more like Gertrude Stein, from whom he takes more than from any other writer, Bernstein relishes his position and destabilizes it at every turn. Like Stein, he uses his criticism (much more standard than hers) to advertise his poetry. It remains to be seen, however, to what extent Bernstein is able to maintain his anti-fashionable status at the moment when fashion is catching up with him, or if his strategy of disavowing fashion by indulging in it succeeds in dismantling other, more ready-made styles. I will end this essay with a final paradox: Bernstein does not so much disavow authority in his work as reconceptualize it. Given a climate in which authority is a suspect term, Bernstein realizes that the only way to have it may be to disavow it.
from Susan M. Schultz: Of Time and Charles Bernstein's Lines: A Poetics of Fashion Statement, in Jacket #14, July 2001
# 657 (Brighton): photo by Tom Raworth, 2 August 2011
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