Century of Clouds
Bruce Boone
Nightboat Books, 2009
Review by Dana Ward

Century of Clouds attends a fundamental thing. What happens to us is profound. In using that word I don’t want to obligate our minds to something ponderous, stone faced, or even, more mildly, wise. I mean then what happens to us if full of content, so full in fact that very little can be known in full measure. That’s a problem right? An opening. What do we see through that occluded keyhole, & what structures the ground on which we stand to look? Positions that collapse; structure & event, capital & love life, choose the figures as you wish. How do our dreams of a life lived otherwise than this one appear in how we represent ourselves, to one another in our social interactions, & again, to one another in our writing (a social interaction to be sure, although mediated here a little differently, & there, not so much. The distinction has value through enlivened specificity. Yet, let me mark my belief. The whole gambit is social — life that is,  & understand going forward if I mention a distinction I mean only to convey a modal variety of, well, conveyance!)?

What happens to us is profound because our feelings are endeared to our politics by way of lived relations. The dampers of authority circulate through us, as do its correctives, glimpsed or bursting through. Every second contains both as intermixed swarms, atomized & kinetic, forming into an arrow like a cartoon mass of bees, pointing always-already, “no way out but through,” & then suddenly reforming in the shape of the whip, the iPhone, the lover’s calf & thigh.  This fullness of content begs a correlative mode of attention. Bruce Boone points us to the story. For Boone, the story is a promise to the body — that the body’s existence on several simultaneous social planes will apprehend a living register of jouissance & dissent, wherein the terms of the latter will make, with the former, bedfellows which, after some habituation, will reveal their activist vibrancies as effect in everyday life.

And yet & so it goes that more than a few clouds have passed since this book first made its way into the world. Originally published by Hoddypoll Press, 1980, Boone’s book hand’t until now seen another printing. In his marvelous foreword to this new edition, Rob Halpern calls it “one of the great fugitive works of prose from the late twentieth century” & he speaks to the fact that its reappearance in late 2009 has the feeling of a lovely correlation, as if happening upon an old acquaintance one day you discovered your sympathies far from having waned had been enriched by the intervening years, despite often bracingly different situations. These things are true in every sense.

Indeed, our estrangement from a “thinkable future,” marked as it has been by the rise of reactionary neo-liberality & the totalization of life under the sign of the spectacular market, has kept time with the absence of this text. So there’s a tempo, a caesura, an interruption & resumption of this book as present fact limned by our lives in two separate centuries. Those clouds in the title have a disarming provenance: they’re from Apollonaire, one of the great tribunes of Modernity, who wrote them at the start of the century just passed. & guess who should show up in Bruce’s book among the many other Marxist intellectuals at the study camp convened in St. Cloud, MN, where much of the action takes? Fred Jameson, great theorist of all things post-modern, whose thinking brought insight to the cultural workings of that century’s end! Minding the book’s pre-occupation with scale it’s only right that these big, interrelated parts (futures, centuries, philosophers, clouds) should find some coalescence in their drift through this work, as well as winning testimony in the prosody of its re-entry into print.

Ok. So. That’s a lot of just like. . .stuff that I  like to think about & am happy to have this opportunity to say. But if you’re not familiar with Bruce’s writing you might not be too sure what to make of all of this. As such, a little background — Bruce Boone, along with Robert Glück & Steve Abbott, soon to be followed Dodie Bellamy, Camille Roy, Kevin Killian, Mike Amnasan & others, formed the core of New Narrative writing in San Francisco in the 70s.  A movement of hard-won affinities, these writers conjoined the vitality of movement writing then nascent in communities gathered in solidarity around oppressed minorities, theoretical vocabularies attentive to concepts of subject construction, the revealing social compacts of gossip, the laden surfaces of porn, the spiritual expenditures of Bataille — conjoined all of this (& more!) to a surpassing interest in narrative & it’s relation to a politics of queer liberation. The narrative-as-such behaved as a figure twinned to that of “the present” — situations loaded with intensities delimited by structures of hierarchical power & its remanufacture in formal illusions of coherence. So deformations, queerings, were the order of the day, & were undertaken via numerous strategies. Often, a breakdown in genre convention made visible structures of artifice, thus clearing space for critique, deconstruction & polemic within stories which prized affectivity for its ability to amplify decisive mutuality. Such a spirit begat many innovative techniques, which, to this day, have not been exhausted & are in fact now finding ever more purchase. Boone’s somewhat well-known method to this end has been described by him as “text/meta-text,” in which the anecdotes & stories presented undergo an immediate analysis grounded in what Boone describes in his afterword as “a somewhat dated Marxism.” (More on this datedness later.)

Intimacy, scale & intervention, compressed or attenuated throughout the stories in the book, form the engine through which the work derives its ecstatic, digressive momentum. To think through scale & how it operated as a figure for Boone, there may be no more exemplary Modernist text than Walter Benjamin’s “The Storyteller,” which Halpern points usefully toward in his foreword. Benjamin writes: “It is as if something that seemed inalienable to us, the securest among our possessions, were taken from us: the ability to exchange experiences.” Boone’s book then is a full-on remediation of this break, taking the symptoms of such loss as ground, & implicating the “exchange of experiences” in an exhibition of communal futures manifested through the telling of stories. The stories Bruce tells draw from everyday life, the very zone in which this alienation has been indexed as “the way things must be,” & proceeds, by analysis, fantasy & critique, to the “way things may become.” Do you remember years ago on Saturday Night Live, the skit called “Tiny Elvis,” where a shrunken Nicholas Cage doing his best impersonation of “the King” would remark with trepidatious wonder over the size of a salt shaker? “Boy that salt shaker is huge,” he would say. Hegemons here are like shakers of salt, as are the equally large & yet unrealized derivatives of friendship, a cherishing whose repertoire finds structural flower, a daydream so inflated it bursts into calcified relations & changes their terms. As such, the everyday life of Bruce’s book takes place in two actually-existing communities which vivify features of potential & stultification; that of the Marxist Summer Study group, thinking through theory & practice, & that of the religious order he belonged to at the end of his adolescence.

As I said earlier, Boone speaks of his analytic frame as being that of a “somewhat dated Marxism.” As some of the incidents Boone relates in his tales from the study group demonstrate, this is partially true. Still concerned to varying degrees by the interior workings of European vanguard parties & the implications of Stalinism, facets of the politics here are sedimentary in their moment. Too, as Halpern notes in his intro, gay politics was charged by a set of energies soon to be repurposed by the AIDS epidemic & the struggle for survival it occasioned. Yet for all of that, there is an urgent resonance in Boone’s textural politics for our moment subsumed in the circulation, crises & abattoirs of global capital, related directly to this thinking-through of affectivity & scale. In Brian Holmes’ essay, “The Affectivist Manifesto” (from November 2008), he writes that for us, in the early 21st Century, “existence in world society is experienced, or becomes aesthetic, as an interplay of scales,” He names these nesting-doll frames as the global, the regional or continental, the national, the territorial, & the intimate — the very zones across which Century of Clouds opens out. Here’s Holmes on the smallest scale, the intimate —

And so finally we reach the scale of intimacy, of skin, of shared heartbeats and feelings, the scale that goes from families and lovers to people together on a street corner, in a sauna, a living room or a café. It would seem that intimacy is irretrievably weighted down in our time, burdened with data and surveillance and seduction, crushed with the determining influence of all the other scales. But intimacy is still an unpredictable force, a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture, the biological spring from which affect drinks. Only we can traverse all the scales, becoming other along the way. From the lovers’ bed to the wild embrace of the crowd to the alien touch of networks, it may be that intimacy and its artistic expressions are what will astonish the twenty-first century.

Boone’s book examines intimacy exactly as “a space of gestation and therefore a wellspring of gesture.” The ‘unpredictable force’ of intimacy is ever present in Century of Clouds. It informs the book’s every movement & stance. Here’s Boone, from early in the book —

Yet for me the problem was, and is, a more intimate one — it involves accounting for a large sense of loss in life. I can’t burden myself with its duty to sadness without first conjuring it and recounting it in anecdote after anecdote, accumulating kindnesses to match its own and wrapping it in language with the layers that decency demands. Wrapped so tight, won’t that loss rebuke its bonds and leap out to new life, transformed? In my view anyone’s piety in writing their stories rests on this. Without need, who would write? Or do politics? Or believe in the power of names?

I’ve just included a tiny little bit, but from there you might kind of get a sense of what the voice telling these stories sounds like, a sense of who is speaking to you. It is for sure “a you,” & thus “a we,” that is being addressed. This voice is constructed with a disposition set on enabling the aspects of intimacy & scale I’ve described, & embodying them too. Halpern again, this time on Bruce’s voice, writes that it is “informed, on the one had, by the poetry of Frank O’Hara, Jack Spicer and John Wieners; and, on the other, by the radical gay critiques of Guy Hocquenghem and Mario Mieli.” Let me seize for a moment on the figure of O’Hara as an aspectual predicate for some of the tonalities Boone’s voice exemplifies.

Boone’s voice here, like O’Hara’s, is immensely likable. It’s a voice that is ruminous, sweet, & knowledgeable, activated by a splendid vocabulary & restive in  its self-examinations, with an eye always turned toward collusion with the reader, outward bound. Alice Notley, writing on O’Hara’s poetry, says that his writing is grounded in part on something like the following notion: ”You don’t try to say something without being worth knowing, & you aren’t worth knowing unless you come off it so the person who wants to know you can be present too. Thus ‘my heart your heart’ for that statement certainly spreads to the reader of the poem.” With that in mind, let’s listen to Boone think through a sort of extrapolation of this quality in O’Hara —

Being a good writer is making people like or love you! But the question is, how do you do that? Well, one way of course — and a rather obvious way — is to make people feel you that you are a really good person. Kind, generous, loyal to your friends and so on. Then is a more sophisticate tack — you appeal to their better natures. You point out the wonderfully charming sides of their own potential virtues. Here is where you bring in politics. You suggest they will be far better and more developed and happy with themselves in life if they will start to be a little political now and then. And then you hope that if they do start getting political, they will thank you for it. They will want to attribute wisdom to you, and esteem you. Yet in the long run, neither of these two tacks goes far enough, I decided, because basically, people are egoists. The truth is, people really want to hear about themselves. And they want pictures of themselves they can recognize. I decided to think of this as a personality “effect” — a feeling of recognizing people. I would make images of people in my stories so they would have the pleasure of seeing themselves. With every person named, life would be tangled in the text. I wanted people to feel they had a stake in this writing and credit and affirm it… Your text could not begin until people were able to start loving and hating you on account of it.

Hilarious in its recognition of our vanity — & practical about it! — Boone’s elaboration yields an ingratiating program, a sort of Personism stenciled with activist will. “With every person named, life would be tangled in the text.” Boone sees clearly here how O’Hara’s practice of embedding the names of friends in his poems was an act not only of memorialization, but also a wager on the delights of presumed familiarity & its consequent purchase on the reader. This familiarity is vexed by the way power-relations are embedded in almost any discourse — “Writers get their hands dirty, they’re culpable. Isn’t it pointless to claim innocent intentions?” writes Boone. As in O’Hara’s famous “Song,” where dirt is simply what one thinks of in the city, so power, complicity & desire are elemental to writing. In O’Hara’s city you don’t stop breathing just because there’s dirt in the air, & in Boone’s art you turn these pollutants against themselves by creating an aesthetic that animates such dynamics in the name of wishes that grow ever more dear as they blister up along the path of most resistance.

There’s an essay of Boone’s  called “Gay Language as Political Praxis: The Poetry of Frank O’Hara.” It appeared in the first issue of Social Text.  Sadly, I haven’t read the essay, but I’ve read about it a little recently in a great piece by Kaplan Harris entitled “New Narrative & the Making of Language Poetry.” As Kaplan reports, Boone’s essay revised the existing critical reception of O’Hara, calling attention to the poet’s situation within a gay milieu at a time of relentless oppression, & thinking through the strategies of O’Hara’s art as a response to the contours of just such a social situation. As such, Boone reads camp in O’Hara as a mode of political intervention, a textural irruption of codes intent on conjuring a gay consciousness, making it present, a political fact.  This confronts then prevailing notion of camp as depoliticized, countering the claims of Susan Sontag. Boone sees in camp not only exuberance, but “somber overtones” freighted with the cargo of lived oppression. So O’Hara then provided a model voice for an art that looked to wed intimacy & intervention without sacrificing a single bit of pleasure & charm.

Have you ever thought that the phrase “life’s not fair” is kind of the capitalist’s credo par excellence? The bludgeon of negligent authority, everywhere it finds its rejoinder in Marx’s “the point, however, is to change it.” Of course, for us the word “change” has of late been heralded to a kind of semiotic afterlife, stripped by ill use of its charge, it drifts around seeking new bodies to inhabit. Reading this book, we sense that, as Halpern writes, “it’s as if a whole register of emotional life that was emergent in the late 1970’s has since become vestigial within our own structure of feeling, haunting us like a spectral presence.” These are the ghosts of nascence, & the atmosphere of potential it nurtured. Boone’s calibrating stories here are tales in which power is confronted. Tempered as the results of such confrontations may be, our relation to them is colored by designs of emotion that arrange their intensities along a doubled axis of political desire & radical conviviality that feels like the most refreshing & wondrous arc one could pursue, even now. Tracking it, from the pages of this book into the air above my desk it glows, it takes my breath, it makes me unspeakably happy. Bruce writes in his new afterword that, “to construct an invisible mechanism that succeeds in prodding readers into the fabrication of their own ecstatic destiny, is, paradoxically, to make them genuinely feel.” Oh Bruce, this invisible mechanism, even if thrown in bright relief, it works. Oh my god it really really works!

Century of Clouds ends with a synthesis of all of this ecstasy — a night of sociability, a night out with friends, at the bar.  This takes place during a Marxist summer camp as well, but one the year after the session that occupies Bruce for the majority of the book. So in one sense it takes place in “a future.” Pop songs play, & their redemptive erotics are curative, healing up wounds & divisions in a community working together through the nettles of conviction & politics & sex. Everyone’s there, all the characters we’ve met along the way, like the end of the Wizard of Oz. This is better though than a dream or a night terror’s end. It feels like the intimate longing that so enervates this book has traversed, & enveloped those vertiginous scales, escaped along a barely glimpsed path, gotten out by having gone through. In this instant of tenuous collective euphoria, the book, the writing, seems to strobe & fluoresce with the auratic radiance of new relationality. Just as you, dear reader, may strobe & fluoresce all anew reading Century of Clouds. It is among the most astonishing books of its time, of any time really, of ours.

Let me end with a bit from the beginning, to see pretty plainly where, & with what care, we might go so as to meet one another —

In the years of friendship I see those I love in mosaic-like patterns, and me along with them. Who will ever know our names in a hundred years! We’re like the catalogs of flora, and moving toward a brilliant future. Wave upon wave of collective life displaying ever new patterns. Like the stripes of the sea bass; like the desert cactus in bloom after years of waiting. It’s spring, and the acacias are beginning to carpet the streets with their yellow pollen fuzz. Patterns, designs, excesses I love. At night I look up to emptiness, and the Milky Way is a ribbon of distant faces turned outward, still asleep. Will they wake?

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