Twelve Blue

Upon reading Twelve Blue by Michael Joyce, it seems a little bit more connected than Blue Hyacinth—it is difficult not to draw a comparison between the two texts because they are both, well, blue and they are both text-based. It skips around between time frames and point of view, displacing time too much to be certain of any present, as though we were sifting through memories.

I began this reading linearly, clicking each of the eight movements and then on each hyperlink that appeared alongside text until no hyperlink appeared and I assumed the movement was completed. Once I finished the whole text, I clicked on the sidebar to navigate through a few new pages and repeated most of the pages I'd already seen. Because I read linearly, I will go about this blog in a similar manner:

Movement one seems primarily occupied with Samantha, who promptly disappears from movements Two through Seven. In the beginning we are presented with some of her experiences, ranging from the hell she pays for maturing early at Catholic School, to the night where she's so hot and bothered that she flirts with a Carney, to her first confrontation with the concept of mortality.

That seems interesting, except that I’m too distracted to really follow it all. I find myself wondering, instead, how the "blueberry" cotton candy she holds is “tasteless,” or why the word ‘of’ is present in situations that call for ‘by’ or ‘from.’ Though much electronic art strives to distance itself from the conventions of grammar and syntax as much as it deviates from status quo society, the missing elements of that category within this work appear incidental. Is there something more tenuous connecting these?

I wonder, as well, why the author chooses to list "every nipple" in her First-movement list of "everything" that "can be read." Unlike sunlight through branches and "each Cloud and Knife" (which in itself is a very interesting pairing), nipples do not hold any sort of innate beauty either in their form or spelling. Nipple is a shitty word, a word that makes me cringe, do a doubletake, and then find another cliché to describe the effect it has on me when I’m trying to enjoy a segment that works like a list poem. I understand the reasoning behind list poetry: It can be the search for beauty and pleasure in the mundanity of something as simple as a grocery list, or just the ripe meat of a poem without the articles and phrases that link them together, or whatever. But this segment does only some justice to that concept, the addition of the word "nipple" being a potent detractor.

Moving on, “The doctor gazes between her liquid thighs.” Liquid thighs. That’s a beautiful phrase. Though I went on before about Joyce’s list poem, I need to comment that his writing is poetic. He knows how to put words together in both a pleasant and meaningful way. I would, at this point, describe Twelve Blue as being the work of a poet who does not edit the way I do.

The wordplay in a later section, “Doctor, Doctor,” is finely tuned, however. It leads me to wonder how intentional these certain ambiguities that arise in the text are. Is it the result of working too hard or not hard enough? Sometimes the narrative is strong—other times it lags and sags and leaves the reader with questions. I’m sure these questions are as much a part of the narrative as the text I derive them from—just not ones like, “what’s he getting at?” Or worse, “What does he mean?”

Movement two appears even less tightly bound than movement one, and so on up until movement 6. But we do witness the introduction of several more characters, though they function almost like elements of setting. There is a male (a father figure), and a few other women whose voices are too difficult to separate without some serious scrap-paper comparison. They are all, it seems, related by blood or location or events.

Movements Four and Five are just repeats, barely anything to them. Then we get some more chunky reading in the last movements, ending with what seems to be a completely unrelated segment that wants to map-out New York. Perhaps this is supposed to give us a direction in which to throw our useless questions. Beyond that, I don’t know.

With all that out of the way, I acknowledge that Joyce is working with a lot here. There are definite themes that tie the segments of these movements together, and to be abrupt I’m just going to list the most apparent of them: Romance (without the appearance of love, or at least more influenced by carnalism), Daughters (Lineage, The having of, or being), and Parallelism (of events, circumstances, or lifestyles). Also, when I first was introduced to this text, I was under the impression that the hyperlinks that take the reader between sections of the text were supposed to disappear over time. This has not happened to me, though it might be the fault of my browser. I have noticed that the links change to the color of the page background once they are clicked, so I will tentatively list another theme: The irreversible quality of time.