Rob Halpern: 'Music for Porn' // 2012

On Saturday, July 24, 2010, Rob Halpern read alongside David Wolach at Life Long Dream Come True in south Berkeley. This reading series, only named toward the end of its run, was held in a house on Ellis and Prince that our friends called “The Compound.” Sara Larsen and I were renting it from a friend-turned-landlord who’d moved to London in pursuit of love and expected to be gone for the foreseeable future. I felt comfortable enough in that place to close out the storage unit I’d kept in Ithaca, New York, for the past five years and finally ship my books and records to California (at ruinous expense). Sara and I took advantage of our tenancy to host poetry readings, parties, and poetry readings that turned into parties. Thanks to David Wolach’s defunct blog, I can record that this particular evening was attended by (among others) Bruce Boone, Chris Daniels, Brandon Brown, Carrie Hunter, Jocelyn Saidenberg, Lindsey Boldt, Kate Robinson, Ted Rees, Brian Ang, Alli Warren, Dana Ward, Lauren Shufran, and Syd Staiti. David read from his book Occultations, and Rob read a story called “Trolley’s Kind,” after opening with poems about sex and soldiers that would later be published in Music For Porn.

In fact, Nightboat wouldn’t publish Music for Porn for another two years — an indication of the very deliberate cultivation of this body of work over a long period. Many writers in my Bay Area world (and beyond) had already had their minds and work altered by Rob’s investigations into selfhood, shame, and the situation of our sexuality in commodified spaces of war long before this poetry appeared in book form. Rob’s work summons a whole world. The finished book is an accrual of nine sections, each formally distinct, and together forming a constellation something like the convolutes of Walter Benjamin’s Arcades Project — a formal inspiration that also governed Rob’s George Oppen Memorial Lecture. (The section entitled Imaginary Politics was published as a lovely, tall, pale-blue chapbook by Taproot Editions, and I’ve never seen a copy other than the one Rob gave me — there are none for sale online.) Music for Porn, written out of a season of national life defined by economic exploitation and war, bears the trace of that time by dint of what the text calls “patiency” — agency’s obverse. “Under current conditions, common sense itself becomes a kind of pornography (expropriation of my most intimate relations) just as pornography becomes a kind of common sense (everything bearing visible value, everything erasing the relations that produce it).” Rob’s poetry, so often voluptuously beautiful, always bears the temporal mark of diligent, and often excruciating, labor.

Like Robert Duncan, one of Rob’s masters is Baudelaire, the quintessential poet of modern life (this wreckage). The great lyricist of urban squalor, who reflected the devastations of nineteenth-century capitalism in his verse and served as the principal muse of Walter Benjamin, is the prime interlocutor of Rob’s doctoral dissertation — or at least that’s what I’m given to understand, since the only copy is in the UC Santa Cruz library, and Rob told me he’d often thought of absconding with that unique exemplar and destroying it. The influence of Baudelaire isn’t just in the fusion of elegant classical form and Bataille-type “base matter,” but as much in the development, interplay, and contrast of lyric verse with prose poetry (the famous “miracle of a poetic prose”). Rob’s first book, Rumored Place, was primarily preoccupied with prose experiments, and the follow-up, Disaster Suites, with enjambed stanzas. Music for Porn is all about the oscillation between the two.

And Baudelaire is not the only tutelary angel — far from it. Whitman and the battlefield poems of Drum-Taps, George Oppen’s “Parousia,” as well as contemporaries like Bruce Boone and Bob Gluck (the protagonists of the seminal New Narrative text My Walk with Bob, a clear intertext for the opening “Envoi”) underpin a text whose ground-bass is the language of “militarized common sense” (as well as its Marxist antiphon). One interlocutor who seems foremost to me is Jean Genet, whose autobiographical novel of occupied Paris, Funeral Rites, is footnoted in two sections in which the book reflexively theorizes itself: “Notes on Affection and War,” and “Whither Porn?, or the Soldier as Allegory.” I had forgotten, though, until this rereading, that Rob discusses Genet’s first lover (a partisan fighting the Germans) but omits mention of his second lover, an SS officer. Genet hates his politics but loves his uniform. This fact, and its omission, feels to me like one crystal of Music for Porn.

In searching around online I couldn’t find the interview I half-remembered where Rob talked about the title of the book and the syntactic tension between “music with porn” (the cheesy music we learn to mock in high school) and the prospect of “music-in-exchange-for-porn” — that we might replace the pornography of commodified life and extimate desire with, well, music. So you’ll have to take my word for it.

David Wolach records that the reading and the party on July 24, 2010, boiled down to about nine of us sitting on the floor in the living room into the wee hours of the night. It might as well have been a wake — this was the last hurrah of Lifelong Dream Come True. My father had died about two weeks before, our landlord called to inform us that he was moving back from London, and we had to vacate the premises, and in less than a month we were carting all the books and records I’d hoped not to move again any time soon to our new place on Alcatraz Avenue. I looked through my email and the internet but could not find a single photo to share with you of the house on Ellis and Prince. We published “Trolley’s Kind” in Try!