Shiny Collisions: Editing as Serious Humor in dodgems

Abstract

Imagine the sensory chaos of the bumper car rink: the thumps and screeches, the laughter and shouts, the vibrations of the floor. In the little magazine dodgems, two issues of which were published in 1977 and ’79, editor Eileen Myles sought to create a space where poems from different scenes metaphorically slam against each other like bumper cars. Myles says, “It was my favorite ride in the amusement park in Revere Beach, Mass. I loved riding in those cars, deliberately smashing other kids. It was a total vehicle for tomboy rage” (“About dodgems”). The accident-on-purpose, bumper cars are a sanctioned way to unleash aggression, as when children deliberately do something and claim it was an accident, not sure themselves of their own impulses. That this subliminal energy, on the knife’s edge between play and fight, should then get aestheticized in dodgems reveals how modes of aggression – competitiveness, coercion, insult – are present in artistic circles, and how they are often conveyed through humor: as a game, bumper cars are not only fun but also can be funny, depending on who is driving, who is observing, and who is getting hit. The humor in Myles’s writing, especially the prose, is often stylistic: it involves a conversational, straightforward syntax that sometimes shades into deadpan and plays with our expectations regarding the differences between speaking and writing. This essay argues that their editing of dodgems is shaped by a serious consideration of how humor functions in group dynamics, including how it indicates who is included and who is excluded, how it reinforces aesthetic expectations, and how it shapes even the imagined reader. It is perhaps intuitive to think about artistic circles as places of creative foment, often collaborative, and further, to think about an editor’s role in shaping and guiding that foment. But as we also know, little magazines provide more than a showcase; their pages reveal gossip – itself a complex and constitutive force, as Reva Wolf argues – and skirmishes, and slights. Myles’s editorial practices emphasize humor and its lack as a strategy to both draw attention to and defuse the dynamics of group formation in the late seventies, in the context of burgeoning contemporaneous scholarship about the so-called firstand secondgeneration New York Schools. Furthermore, their use of editorial humor