Publicly Complex Reading Series

@ Ada Books, Providence RI

March 25 – 26 2010

“The Autonomic System”

All In the Family? An Interdisciplinary Conference on Kinship & Community

@ The Graduate Center, CUNY

April 1 – 10 2010

“Strike Anywere”

@ The Images Festival, Toronto

April 7 2010

Uneven Contours: Teaching Asian American Studies in a “Fragmented” Classroom (with Sonjia Hyon)

@ Conference for the Association of Asian American Studies (UT Austin)

April 16 2010

Moderator: “The Asian American Avant-Garde,” with John Yau & Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge

@ NYU Creative Writing MFA Program

April 12 2010

As Is: On Radical Pedagogy and Mixed Race Memoirs (with Ianna Hawkins Owen)

@ Southern Connecticut State University Women’s Studies Conference

April 26 2010

“Strike Anywhere”

Never Very Far Apart

@ Redcat Gallery, Los Angeles CA

May 3 2010

AAARI Faculty Seminar on Asian American Poetics, with Ken Chen, Author of Juvenilia (Yale University Press, 2010)

@ AAARI: CUNY Asian American/Asian Research Institute

November 5 – 8, 2009

Room of the Sun (2009)

by Benj Gerdes & Jennifer Hayashida

16mm film installation

A looped 16mm film installation that takes as its point of departure Swedish “Match King” Ivar Kreuger, whose privatization of financial crisis management strategies bears a direct relation to late-twentieth century policies implemented by the IMF and WTO. Between 1917 and 1932, Kreuger capitalized on shifts in global financial markets to control over 200 companies and establish matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries. The project takes its name from Kreuger’s winter garden in the Park Avenue penthouse he occupied at the height of his wealth; the title both metaphorizes the effect of matchstick illumination and refers to Kreuger’s Promethean self-mythologizing as a monopoly capitalist able to transcend nature.

Note: during certain phases of our working process this title also applied to our single-channel video essay on Kreuger. For information on that piece, please see the page for No More Strike Anywhere.

Strike Anywhere (2009)

by Jennifer Hayashida & Benj Gerdes

HD video, 32:00, 2009

“Strike Anywhere” is a video essay that takes as its point of departure Swedish “Match King” Ivar Kreuger, whose privatization of financial crisis management strategies bears a direct relation to late-twentieth century policies implemented by the IMF and WTO. Between 1917 and 1932, Kreuger capitalized on shifts in global financial markets to control over 200 companies and establish matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries.  At the height of his success, Ivar Kreuger was worth approximately 30 million Swedish kronor (the equivalent of 100 billion USD today) and had matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries.  The project is both a prehistory of neoliberal economics and an allegory about social relations and desire in the wake of global capitalist expansion and excess.

Visually, “Strike Anywhere” incorporates previously unseen archival photographs, corporate charts and documents, and documentary sequences staged for the camera or observed during research and everyday life.  The sequence of the piece is organized loosely as a passage between different spaces and the conflictual meanings these spaces produce––including the Swedish National Archives, the former company headquarters(still known today as the “Match Palace), and two match factories continuously in operation since the early 1900s. The project juxtaposes footage of these factories with interviews with two Kreuger researchers.  Both men espouse views, accumulated over years of unrecognized research, that differ from the popular histories of Kreuger in Sweden or the United States.  Through a juxtaposition of these interviews with the present-day match manufacturing process, the film depicts the extant factories as carryovers from an older form of industrial capitalism.  The factories have persisted while the world around them has shifted, in part due to financiers similar to Kreuger.

Conceptually, “Strike Anywhere” is a spatio-temporal diagram where visual and linguistic articulations of power point to the instability between archival document and event, iconography and cultural memory, present tense and historical remove. These structures of depicting and interpreting the world – charts, testimonies, and photographs alike – stand as subjective, deliberate, and equally susceptible to attempts at ideological revision. In realizing the layered structure of “Strike Anywhere,” we are interested in provoking a counter-historical dialogue about collective rethinking of economic and political possibilities in the present.

Strike Anywhere from Benj Gerdes on Vimeo.

Salt Hill : 22 (Spring 2009)

Softcover, bound in thick, textured watercolor paper. A special section features the work of Stefanie Posavec, which analyzes the structures of Kerouac’s On the Road, from the sentence to the chapter, via visual illustration. One of Richard Jackson’s poems from this issue was selected for Poetry Daily.

POETRY

Dan Beachy-Quick, Shane Book, George Clark, Jennifer Hayashida, Mark Irwin, Richard Jackson, Dorianne Laux, Matthew Lippman, Philip Memmer, K. Silem Mohammad, Alan Michael Parker, Adam Peterson, Patricia Smith

Read Richard Jackson’s“AFTER ALL THIS”
Read K. Silem Mohammad’s“YOU WHITE WHITE TEATIME TEEN”

FICTION

Bryan Hurt, Phil LaMarche, George Looney, Alexander Waxman

Read Bryan Hurts “Some Zombies”

NON-FICTION

Interview with Lynne Tillman
Interview with Etgar Keret. READ
Essays by Roy Kesey.

SPECIAL PROJECT

Stefanie Posavec
View excerpts of Posavec’s“Writing Without Words”

Editors: Brett Finlayson, Alex Yates

PURCHASE COPY

CapGun 3 (2009)

Fredrik Nyberg :: Zachary Schomburg :: Rachel B. Glaser :: Melissa Ginsburg :: Laura Solomon :: Matthew Rohrer :: Andrew Richmond :: Jen Tynes :: Cate Peebles

CapGun is so beautiful, and the translation is in such outstanding company.

CapGun 3 was designed by Will Hubbard, and printed and bound in an edition of 250 at CapGun Press in Brooklyn, NY.

Support Capgun!

Calque No. 3 (2008)

Calque Three was published in November, 2008 with 300 copies printed. Calque Three featured work by Dante Alighieri, Jean-Marie Damais, Aline Desentis, Ly Doi, Bui Chat, Takashi Hiraide, Gert Jonke, Birhan Keskin, Velimir Khlebnikov, Adrien Le Bihan, Fredrik Nyberg, Alejandra Pizarnik, Christian Popescu, Ernesto Sabato and Severo Sarduy, translated respectively by Stanley Lombardo, Fabienne Pizot-Haymore, Rebecca Crocker, Linh Dinh, Sawako Nakayasu, Vincent Kling, George Messo, Sandra Newman, Jeff Edmunds, Jennifer Hayashida, Madeleine Stratford, Adam J. Sorkin, Bogdan Stefanescu, Carl Toews, and Suzanne Jill Levine. Calque Three also featured an Interview with Stanley Lombardo, an Essay by Stephen Kessler, and a Review of Severo Sarduy’s Beach Birds (Otis Books, Los Angeles, 2007, Tr. Suzanne Jill Levine and Carol Maier) by Philip Barnard. The images below are brief excerpts from the selections published in that issue. In addition to the print matter, Calque Three also featured online content, including a Reviews of Dominique Fabre’s The Waitress Was New (Archipelago Books, New York, 2008, Tr. Jordan Stump), and David Kirby’s Review of Autonauts of the Cosmoroute (Archipelago Books, New York, 2007, Tr. Anne McLean) by Brandon Holmquest, an Interview with Jennifer Hayashida, and one with Aline Desentis Otálora, an Essay by Brandon Holmquest in Two Parts about the AWP Conference, Part 1: The Bookfair, and Part 2: The Bowery, and the Translator’s Introduction to 3 Poems by Alejandra Pizarnik.

Thank you to Steve Dolph and Brandon Holmquest for running such a rigorous – and rigorously funny – journal featuring literature in translation. They are a rare breed.

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Chicago Review (2008)

POEMS by Fredrik Nyberg (translated by Jennifer Hayashida), Eleni Sikelianos, Ed Roberson, Dan Beachy-Quick, Robyn Schiff, María Baranda, John Wilkinson, P.K. Page, and Kent Johnson.

STORIES by Bret Sparling and Craig Foltz.

An ESSAY on Geoffrey Hill by Brett Bourbon.

REVIEWS:

Peter Manson on Hannah Weiner
Dustin Simpson on Keith Waldrop’s translation of Baudelaire
Joshua Baldwin on Andrezj Stasiuk
V. Joshua Adams on Amanda Nadelberg
Rusty Morrison on Dan Machlin
Leila Wilson on Eileen Myles
Charles Altieri on Jennifer Moxley
Kristin Prevellet on Ron Silliman
Courtney MacNeil on Kamau Braithwaite
Kent Johnson on Tim Atkins

A COMMENTARY by C.D. Wright on her long poem “Rising, Falling, Hovering” whose first half appeared in CR 51:3 and whose second half appeared in CR 53:2/3.

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No More Strike Anywhere (2008)

by Jennifer Hayashida & Benj Gerdes

Essay with rephotographed archival images, 21 pages.

Our initial research and thinking on the Swedish “Match King,” Ivar Kreuger, is distilled into working notes – a drawing for what a film, video, and installation project could be. Kreuger is the subject of the larger projects Strike Anywhere (2009) and Room of the Sun (ongoing). This essay was published in the April 2008 issue of Rethinking Marxism. Unlike October the RM website has non-journal content and many articles available free without subscription.

Download as pdf

Notes on “No More Strike Anywhere”

“Tänd en Solsticka och sprid glädje bland barn och gamla.”

Light a Sunstick and spread joy amongst children and the elderly.

(Solstickan Foundation slogan, circa 1936)

This is an essay about neoliberalism’s prehistory, about the trajectory of Swedish social democracy, glimpsed here in the context of its beginnings in the early 1930s. This is also an essay about a man who portrayed himself as a modern-day Prometheus, the Greek god who stole fire from Zeus and brought this gift to mortals: the once-notorious Swedish entrepreneur, financier, and industrialist Ivar Kreuger (1880-1932).

In 1917, Kreuger founded Svenska Tändsticksaktiebolaget (The Swedish Matchstick Corporation). By 1931, he controlled an estimated 200 companies, both in Sweden and internationally. During the first third of the 20th century – and during the interwar years in particular – Kreuger capitalized on economic shifts in the global market, including the dawn of what we now term junk bonds and investment banking. At the height of his success, Ivar Kreuger was worth approximately 30 million Swedish kronor (the equivalent of 100 billion USD today) and had matchstick monopolies in at least 34 countries. He loaned money borrowed on the U.S. bond market at preferential rates to other nations in exchange for the aforementioned monopolies (actually long-term lease agreements on publicly-held trusts). We follow other scholars who argue that this type of privatized crisis management was a precursor to the formation of the International Monetary Fund. Consequently, we hold that Kreuger’s international loan and monopoly leases of publicly held trusts are more brutishly contemporary than they are quaint.

“No More Strike Anywhere” is based on research we initiated in the summer of 2007, and is a component of Room of the Sun, a larger project dealing with Kreuger’s empire of matches. When we began, we were interested in learning more about the development and implementation of neoliberal economics outside the United States: could we trace a kind of play between capitalist expansion and nation-state which might confuse prevailing wisdom about our “globalized” present? Kreuger’s combination of megalomania, financial creativity, benevolent philanthropy, and historical obscurity made him a compelling figure through which to pursue these questions. The context of Swedish social democracy and the international impression of that country as a cradle-to-grave welfare state quickly generated a variety of questions concerning the relationship between national ideology and the idea of a national economic hero/scoundrel. From a story-telling standpoint, Kreuger’s narrative lends itself to alternately tragic and scandalous interpretations: in 1932, following the U.S. stock market crash and the subsequent discovery that stocks issued by Kreuger were in fact without value, the Match King committed suicide in his Paris apartment. The circumstances surrounding his death remain disputed and this posthumous debate illustrates his continuing and contradictory significance as national traitor and/or saint.

Throughout our interviews and archival visits, we repeatedly returned to the question of what people saw in Ivar Kreuger that caused them to believe in his economic fictions, to — literally — buy into his stories. Consequently, we came to look more closely at not only the “facts” of his matchstick empire (banking statements, documentation of police investigations, courtroom testimonies) but also at its narrative texture and contradictions. In particular, what role did the media of the time play in promoting Kreuger’s agenda, and how do photographs from that same period reveal cracks in a narrative of economic and national stability? How does postcolonial hindsight and a “global” context challenge us to reinterpret interwar-era images of workers — in this instance, in Sweden and in India — as representations of an economic past, present, and future?

The visual vocabulary of “No More Strike Anywhere” is taken from archival materials that include newspaper clippings, 70-something shelf meters of documentation from criminal bankruptcy proceedings, visits to the matchstick museum in Jönköping, a book of photographs supposedly given to Kreuger by his Indian workers as a gesture of their gratitude on his 50th birthday, as well as interviews with a variety of Kreuger scholars and conspiracy theorists. We do not intend to tell a full story or answer questions regarding Kreuger’s persona or legacy: rather, the intention behind this project is to read the dialogue between images; to explore how our place in an U.S.-inflected economic and political present affects our understanding of another country’s economic history, and how that history in turn foreshadows contemporary narratives concerning economic successes and failures. A flowchart such as the one that begins this essay comprises the type of necessary fiction that economists and historians deal in, inherent with its implied relationships between facts, figures, dates, and events. “No More Strike Anywhere” is a flowchart of sorts, where images that bear a relationship to the subjective rearticulations of power hopefully point to the awkwardness and volatility of the relationship between image and story, as well as how identification with images has real economic and social consequences in the present.

In dialogue with each other, these structures of depicting and interpreting the world — charts, testimonies, and photographs alike — should be revealed as subjective, deliberate, and equally susceptible to attempts at ideological revision. Our utilization of a mode of documentary reference, where images might imply but also destabilize their historical contingency, offers an opportunity for complexity and confusion to have direct implications for our understanding (or confusion) in relation to the present. The idea is not to familiarize a reader with Ivar Kreuger the man, but rather to distance the reader from her/his relationship to abstract possibilities (or impossibilities) in the present, and in so doing to place the reader closer to questions having to do with national fiction-making and how we collectively can work to re-frame and re-articulate the present as we here seek to re-frame and re-articulate the past.

A Different Practice (2007)

I try to not keep them entirely still
just get them (the words) to crowd around something
special (a theme) an idea that has such
weight that it
at least partially
can replace a person’s (your) glance
when it turns away (and from me)

—Fredrik Nyberg, from “Rotor Blades: Movements 1-5″

“…Jennifer Hayashida’s translation is remarkably dexterous and accurate. It is clear that Nyberg has put himself to school with the works of difficult American poets like John Ashbery and Susan Howe, as well as experimental French poets like Jacques Roubaud. It is a good canon for a poet who wants to examine the limits of language, but the combination of influences could not have made Hayashida’s task an easy one. Nyberg is fortunate to have her, and we should look forward to her forthcoming translation of his Clockwork of Flowers.”

—Robert Archambeau, “Double Gesture,” The Boston Review, July/August 2009

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