Speed freaks 'r' us ...

Donato Mancini, Buffet World (New Star Books, 2011) 119 pp.— Like the asemic-semiotic procedures that drove Mancini’s 2007 book, Æthel, Buffet World, for different reasons, is  utterly readable but almost impossible to read. Lurid as the rainbow-brushed, cartoonish,  photographs and illustrations of meats, vegetables, and fruits, appetizers, snacks (cookies, potato chips, etc.) and “main” entrees that function like exclamation points, these hypostatized poems on the commodification and industrialism of food deliver devastating, mocking and irreverent right-left (as in boxing) combinations. However, the book opens with what Mancini regards as the “source” of all mechanized and computational industries, our all too human obsession with counting and accounting without being/feeling accountable. Mancini demonstrates that this “modern” need/desire to engage the numerical is not that distant from religious/mystical obsessions with numerology. Fittingly,  “Zero” is the first poem, that invented cipher which, along with one, is the foundation of computation (Alan Turing doesn’t escape Mancini’s wrath): “one/ ten/ hundred/ thousand/ million/ billion.” This ‘simple’ algorithm is an abstraction of the drive toward faster, more efficient modes of commodification (most obvious in entertainment, communication, and transportation). Buffet World is one of those books that is “funny” but also utterly “serious.” That’s because the sublime and ridiculous, the outlandish and quotidian, are, in the world Mancini describes, two sides of the same gilded coin. Certainly the two “major” poems here, “If Violence (Hey You)” and the heartbreaking autobiographical “On Behalf of the Potato Chips Industry I Would Like To Wish You A Happy Birthday,” may be read as exhibits A and B in the trial to which Mancini submits capital. In the former, popular music serves as simply another mode of interpellation, commodifying pleasure as politics and memory as history (see, for baby boomers, “The Big Chill,”). Every generation gets to have “the soundtrack of our lives”: “turn around/bright eyes/hello it’s me.” Every soundtrack accompanies and facilitates the reduction of differences to the shrug of indifference posing as solidarity: “hey buddy, comrade, avenue/chum, would your people like a parade//you people/would you//and you people/like to apply/for a permit/to riot…” In the latter poem, Mancini recounts his malnutritioned, gluttonous childhood as a microcosm of primitive accumulation: “I always thought of Pringles/as a luxury food.// One leaf iceberg/lettuce on white discount// Baloney melts./ Options accrue.” Ballooning to an unhealthy weight, Mancini becomes, as all advertisers desire, another Pavlovian dog: “...How many//jingles make my mouth water.” Formally, Mancini is a bricoleur; he draws on and deploys “old” and New Narrative, flarf, Conceptual Writing, neo-surrealism (“Air Raid Over Fields of Bacon” may be one of the most hilarious and brutal poems in recent years) and magic realism. A crazy quilt of found poems (much of the book relies on public documents and records) and manipulated sources, Buffet World rattles down its monomaniacal tracks to the horizon of the “final frontier” (see “Tang Dynasty”). This book is “King Corn” for the literati, a searing send-up of what and how “we” (by which I mean the privileged) in the West eat without thinking and, perhaps, vice versa.