Lost in the West Edmonton Mall
Charles Bernstein
“You Never Looked So Simulating,” a poem presented at the In(ter)ventions conference in Banff, February 2010, and first published in West Coast LINE.
The next stop was Edmonton
where I got lost in the Fantasyland
Mall on the way to one of the demi-
keynotes at the International Association
for Philosophy and Literature
"Thinking Between Poetry &
Philosophy" convention & so missed
most of the lecture on "The Ineluctable
Split of Poetry's Unsayable Name: Reading
Derrida through Nietzsche's Unknowable
Answer to Celan's Joyce (A Response to
Benjamin)." Many of the conventioneers
noted that the "Bourbon Street" food
mall was a perfect example of "simulation"--
a view I have trouble understanding
(not unusual for me)
since the patrons of the food court
seem to enjoy the fact that
"Bourbon STreet" is ineluctably in
the West Edmonton Mall & the designers
of the street seemed to go
out of their way to emphasize this fact,
making it look like a plaster cast
sketch of a picture of a New Orleans street
& not like the "real thing" at
all; the only ones fooled were
we conventioneers having our
dinner as we chatted about the
break down of reality and simulacra
(or simusoy for the lactose
intolerant). & talk about authentically
local as you might, the Buffalo
wings on Bourbon Street
in the West Edmonton Mall
never tasted so real
or would have. I had trout.
Charles Bernstein is a poet, theorist, editor and literary scholar, and he teaches at the University of Pennsylvania. His most recent collection of poetry is All the Whiskey in Heaven, published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux in 2010 . Read his previous work in Geist at geist.com
