Welcome. Out of Its Wooden Brain is newsletter that includes original poetry as well as essays thinking about literature, music, and film under capitalism. It is written by me, RM Haines, a poet and essayist who runs a small chapbook press, Dead Mall Press. By subscribing, you will regularly receive poems, essays, and translations on a schedule of (at least) two posts per month. I have the first several months fully scheduled with material, and below you can read a more detailed description of what’s in store. I hope you’ll sign up and stick around. For now, all posts are free.
What’s in store.
One priority for me here is that I aim to write more widely about my interests than I have previously. On my previous blog — which I’m now devoting exclusively to my press — I tended to focus primarily on issues around poetry and publishing. However, my notebooks have been filling up with essays on music, fiction, and film, and I also have some autobiographical writing I’d like to share somewhere. So I want to use this newsletter as a place to develop and share these things alongside poetry, and even some translations. Tying much of this together will be a focus on history and material conditions of life under capitalism.
Some already complete, or near-complete, works that you will definitely be seeing here include:
New and unpublished poems of mine. I’m be sharing new stuff as well as older pieces I’ve never found a home for. I will also maybe share some oddities I have no memory of writing.
Essays on John Cassavetes’ film The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. This is one of my favorite films, and I approach it from a couple different angles in two separate essays. I also intend to write about other Cassavetes films.
A translation of Tristan Tzara’s The Approximate Man (L’Homme approximatif, 1931). Tzara is largely known as “the father of Dada,” but this surrealist epic poem shows him in a different mode and deserves a wider readership. I’ll be releasing this in installments, as it is still in progress.
A three part essay on Frank Zappa’s 200 Motels. If you’re a Zappa fan, you’ll love it. If not, at least stay for the thoughts on art under capitalism, the poetics of media technology, and the virtues of a dense and sprawling discography.
A series of essays on astrology in Gravity’s Rainbow, exploring the ephemeris — astrological data — of 1944/5, which Pynchon consulted, and especially the significance of Venus and Pluto. I have been sitting on this essay for a couple years, and as this is the 50th anniversary of GR’s publication in 1973, it seems like as good a time as any to release it. It may not be for everyone, but if the subject sounds at all intriguing to you, I think you’ll love it.
Additionally, I am taking notes and drafting essays on the Coen Brothers’ Barton Fink, Sonic Youth, Philip K. Dick, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, billy woods, Guided by Voices, Surrealism, Walter Benjamin, Parliament Funkadelic, The Cleaners from Venus, SST & Dischord Records, Ariel Pink’s Haunted Graffiti, and more.
For this first month, I will be releasing one new post per week. Additionally, week one will feature not only this introductory post but a separate poem as well. After this first month, I plan stick to a schedule of two posts per month, with occasional bonuses here and there.
The name.
Some of you may be wondering, “What is up with the name?”. “Out of Its Wooden Brain” is a phrase appearing in volume one of Marx’s CAPITAL. There, in writing about the bizarre, transformative effect that commodification has on material objects, he states:
[As a wooden table] emerges as a commodity, it changes into a thing which transcends sensuousness. It not only stands with its feet on the ground, but, in relation to all other commodities, it stands on its head, and evolves out of its wooden brain grotesque ideas, far more wonderful than if it were to begin dancing on its own free will.
This convergence of psyche and matter, especially when effected via commodity form, has become an essential idea for me. And as plenty of what is written here will discuss imagination, psychic distortions, capitalism, and the materiality and commodification of art, it seems to be as good a way as any of orienting this project.
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So that sums it up, folks. If all this sounds like something you want to keep an eyes on, please subscribe! It costs nothing.
Thanks for reading,
RM