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The Fallujiad

anon_mwvi said in #5412 2d ago: received

I've been thinking alot recently about the future of literature and poetry. I've landed on the idea that literature in of itself is not dead as a form despite what anyone says about post-literate society yadah yadah yadah but just the result of no relevant literature being produced for our own era. Every MFA-written acclaimed novel is basically the same stuff written up to the 1960s with just cellphones added to make it clear that it is 'present day'. Great writers of the past (like Balzac, Stendhal, Dostoevsky) captured their own period intimately and had unmatched understanding of the psychologies of their own period.

So I'm always on the lookup for works that confirm this thesis. Literature that treats our time period with the same seriousness as great writers of the past treated theirs. Wanted to share this epic poem project I came across. Many here will find it compelling. I think the technical aspects of the work are strong and there is clear commitment to producing good poetry. It's pretty exciting stuff. Give it a read.

https://fallujiad.substack.com/

> The Fallujiad is an attempt to wake the form of the sincere Western epic poem. It spans the period from the initial American invasion of Iraq in 2003 to the ultimate near-total destruction of the city in November of 2004.

>Like the post-Alexandrian versions of the Iliad, it consists of twenty-four books. Like Dante’s Divine Comedy, it consists of one hundred cantos. The highest level of organization in the Fallujiad is the cantica. The Fallujiad consists of two of these cantiche. Each cantica contains twelve books and fifty cantos.

> The Fallujiad is the story of two sides of the fight for Fallujah. The closest thing it has to a protagonist is an Iraqi man. Still, it is an American story. I am an American. I write from the land of the invaders in the invader language alone, just as Homer wrote his Trojans speaking Greek just like his Achaeans. There is no literal language barrier in the myth-world of the Fallujiad. There is a barrier of customs, values, information, and ideals, and that alone is more than enough to send things to Hell.

Here are some particularly good Stanzas:

> A thousand years on balmy, sun-baked edge
> Of gentle and replete Euphrates shore
> Saw metropolitan high order spring
> Near-boundless from the keepers of the place,
> So much that when Herodotus arrived
> As cataloger of the ancient world
> To gawk and with an honest heart inqui’r
> As to the ways of law-sure Babylon
> He saw a place as engineered and carved
> As any that existed on the Earth.
> Euphrates, goddess that she was, had been
> Domesticated with the great canals
> And waterworks to nourish teeming crops
> To feed the artists, scholars, priests, and king.

>“Before that fort was built,” came bellowed words
> From high imam and jurist, old Nazzal,
> With finger outstretched to Turkish site,
> “There was Allah, and so there will be hence
> When these Americans have been repelled.
> This Bush the Younger, infidel he is,
> Believes that he is Hulagu reborn.
> He thinks Islam is weak, and that our wealth
> Of oil, which, in wisdom, God provides,
> Can be sucked dry by his great war machine,
> But Bush does not know what Allah will grant
> In strength and cleverness to any man,
> No matter how imperious his foe,
> If he avows to follow the Quran.
> I tell you now, Fallujah is the key
> And bulwark for the freedom of Islam
> Because we are a noble Sunni town
> With knowledge of the ways of modern war.
> So, if the Shiite rascals in the South
> Defect from us and shamefully abet
> The efforts of the infidel campaign
> As legend says they did in Mongol times,
> And if old, greedy, fat Baghdad submits
> To occupier terror once again,
> Fallujah will remain a source of light,
> Alone, if need be, taking on the oath
> To keep Islam alive in these dark days.”

referenced by: >>5413 >>5415

I've been thinking a received

anon_dadi said in #5413 2d ago: received

>>5412
The telling thing will be execution quality and whether it turns out to be a compelling or at least relevant work. But it's in interesting idea at least. I'll check it ou!

The telling thing wi received

jewishman said in #5414 1d ago: received

It's ambitious. That's probably enough. Is there anywhere I can hear the author read it? I might like that.

My sniffy critique is as follows. I don't think it gets the spirit of the thing it's mimicking quite right. No mythos. No fate. There's something disagreeably postmodern in writing about barbarians fighting "multinational brigades" made up of equally common men. It reads like it's based on Frontline documentaries. The language is never thrilling. The author says he balked at academics' suggestions to read Persian epics; I wish they had suggested excavating American tradition.

It's ambitious. That received

phaedrus said in #5415 22h ago: received

>>5412
I read the last canto posted and found the prose to be lively and fast-moving... it was quite enjoyable to read. I bet it'll be a fun book, all in all, when it's finally completed and published.

That said, I don't see any indication that this will be a great work. When reading through the canto I selected, there was a strange kind of bloodlessness... like I was watching a Hollywood movie of the Iraq War, rather than actually being there in the flesh. This is in part due to the cinematic framing and the way in which imagery is painted in "shots" that make up "scenes," but more than that I think the poem is fatally flawed by the fact that Cairo Smith was simply not present at Fallujah. The lifeworld of fighting and killing as an American on foreign soil is obviously totally alien to him, and while he does seem to have done impressive research, this is an insuperable deficit.

What gives greatness to the Iliad is not just Homer's prose, but the way in which Homer refracts through a war story an entire way of life and system of meaning — that of the late Bronze Age Aegean. Homer probably didn't fight himself, but his Iliad contains the oral memory of the expedition to Ilium, and the cultural perfusion of a warlike society. That doesn't come through in the Fallujiad. I think about the stories I've heard from vets in Iraq... a kind of brashness and irreverence mixed with a brutality and seriousness... I can't describe it but I'm sure you know the attitude I'm talking about. Cairo would probably have done better to speak with vets for a few hundred (thousand?) hours about Fallujah and the war before he tried to channel it in verse.

>Every MFA-written acclaimed novel is basically the same stuff written up to the 1960s with just cellphones added to make it clear that it is 'present day'.

Idk... perhaps the issue is that writers these days live shallow, boring lives, where they flit about the great coastal cities and drink at parties in the "scene" and fuck (e)girls instead of living a life in the manner of our pre-1945 forebearers. I'm not one to judge... it's a nice time. But Cairo is a young kid who worked in media — what does he know of life? Has writing a substack and getting BPD tail equipped him with the depth needed to stand against Homer or Milton? Melville had to kill whales to write Moby Dick.

All modern rightoids know is LARP, and all they can really do is LARP... it's a shitty situation but it's not one that we can LARP our way out of.

I read the last cant received

anon_mwvi said in #5417 20h ago: received

> No mythos. No fate. There's something disagreeably postmodern in writing about barbarians fighting "multinational brigades" made up of equally common men.

I think this is what makes it a good subject for an epic poem. GWOT is old enough and irrelevant enough that we can look on it with some distance but close enough that it's lived history. From the first few cantos, the author seems to try to do what is done in the Iliad which is to create heroes on both sides. This is distinctly new treatment since it doesn't reduce the other side to 'ragheads' and 'goatfuckers' nor to 'poor oppressed brown people' which were how we talked about GWOT when it was happening.

9/11 is arguably a founding moment for our new age, so it plays a similar role at least psychologically, as the Iliad did for people studying western civilisation seriously starting in the 19th century.

> I wish they had suggested excavating American tradition.

What would you reference? I'm not very well versed in American letters so I'm always curious about these things.

> Idk... perhaps the issue is that writers these days live shallow, boring lives, where they flit about the great coastal cities and drink at parties in the "scene" and fuck (e)girls instead of living a life in the manner of our pre-1945 forebearers.

I've met very many interesting and colourful people in my own life that would make hilarious, memorable characters if they were put into a novel. I think it goes back to the skill of the writer to correctly observe and absorb the world he lives in and capture its most fascinating aspects in writing.

> what does he know of life? Has writing a substack and getting BPD tail equipped him with the depth needed to stand against Homer or Milton? Melville had to kill whales to write Moby Dick.

This is a fair point. Literature became more relevant to me as I progressed through life. It gives you the vocabulary to make out your reality.

referenced by: >>5419

I think this is what received

anon_hiry said in #5418 18h ago: received

>> I've landed on the idea that literature in of itself is not dead as a form despite what anyone says about post-literate society yadah yadah yadah but just the result of no relevant literature being produced for our own era.

Somewhat of an adjacent thought but this has been my reaction to going to the opera and the ballet. A ballet that is a re-telling of the flirting and partying of a Russian aristocrat isn't as compelling to us, as it was to the Russian aristocracy. Likewise, an opera sung in Italian didn't require surtitles for the Italian audiences.

The closest to contemporary opera is probably John Adams' work (from the people's republic of Berkeley), this clip: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0mtMI_huRtY from Nixon in China is so so good.

Somewhat of an adjac received

jewishman said in #5419 3h ago: received

>>5417
> What would you reference? I'm not very well versed in American letters so I'm always curious about these things.

I don't know if I would suggest referencing them, exactly. I suppose what I mean is that it's worthwhile to grapple with two-hundred-plus years of attempts at writing the American epic. There is something in how early American writers used the classics to talk about their nation. How do you handle American, Christian political ethos in a form that seems to require classical mythos? I'm not saying it's great poetry, but The Columbiad is a good place to begin. And it's good to read American translations of the Greek classics to see how they handled the epic in idiomatic American English.

I think part of the problem with the poem is that although the author is clearly fond of the classics and Milton, the style—common men replacing heroes, the smashing up of cod-classical language with 2003 New York Times war-report verbiage, the repurposing of classical forms to narrate contemporary history—he has unintentionally produced something incredibly modern—but he is unwilling or unable to draw on Hart Crane and Walt Whitman, or Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams, who in various ways tried to figure out writing the modern American epic.

But I'm sure he's reasonably well-read and would say I'm full of baloney and completely misreading his intentions.

I don't know if I wo received

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