Alexander Dickow Interviews Toby Altman at Queen Mob's Tea House

Appetites, language, and desire: oh my! In conversation with Alexander Dickow, Toby Altman asks "What are some of your poetic appetites these days? What are you reading that makes you hungry?" More: 

What are the virtues of thinking of aesthetics in terms of desire, demands—and what are the pitfalls? Pick and choose whichever question seems most congenial to you.

Alexander Dickow: Interesting that you should frame things in terms of aesthetics as such. Kant draws a pretty clear line between our appetitive desires – to drink or eat, to smooch people, etc. – and the supposedly disinterested relationship established in aesthetic contemplation, and I have to say this distinction feels a bit too cut and dried for me. Creation and consumption of the work of art (and creation especially) seem to me quite tightly linked to our animal desires, and not quite so cleanly disinterested. Sexual tension can be readily channeled into writing. Disinterestedness in part appears to me as a marker of class – the aloof connoisseur as bourgeois art-consumer, as opposed to the more “immediate” pleasures of so-called popular art (or rather, nowadays, what Adorno called mass culture). I think there’s a lot of denial (of the inevitable economic considerations of art production, for example) and desire for social distinction mixed up in these categories of disinterested contemplation and the animal impulse to consume, which is why the snob pretends to value the detached and critical (read: “boring”) film over the latest Marvel production designed for the unwashed masses. I don’t much care about class markers in art appreciation, and I’m just as happy watching Spider-Man as I am discovering an Eric Rohmer film. I read comics and science fiction novels along with literary theory, philosophy and journalism, and I have a particular appreciation for production that gives the lie to expectations about what audiences want, like SF writers who make high demands on their supposedly unsophisticated readership (hint: they’re not unsophisticated, and perfectly able to appreciate experiment).

Hopefully we can circle back to what I’ve been reading lately, which is another question: for the time being, I’ll just mention Henri Droguet, a close friend and poet I’ve read for many years, whose language is delicious: I’ve often described his work as crunchy or chewy; he uses sound in an eminently edible way. Since my translation of his chapbook Clatters in 2015, I’ve been translating more work by Henri.

Pick up from there at Queen Mob's Tea House.