Rue Hazard

A History

2006-04-04T04:50:00.000-07:00

Defunct

Rue Hazard (August 24, 2005-February 27, 2006) replaced Hotel Point (October 2, 2003-August 11, 2005).

Rue Hazard (August 24, 2005-February 27, 2006) got its due comeuppance, replaced by Isola di Rifiuti (May 8, 2006 and continuing).

Sinister

2006-02-27T12:30:00.000-08:00

Dexter Gordon birthday.

Dexter, King of the Turf.

To suspect som Defect either in the Intellects or Integrity of those that oppose one. Found guilty of Chance-medley. Thus by opprobry unsung. My beforementioned.

Finding oneself thinking (bluely) of the third of Harry Partch’s Eleven Intrusions, the one call’d The Rose, words by the visionary Ella Young, out of Marzilian and Other Poems (Harbison & Harbison, Oceano, California, 1938):

The rose that blooms in Paradise
Burns with an ecstasy too sweet
For mortal eyes
But sometimes down the jasper walls
A petal falls
Toward earth and night
To lose it is to lose delight beyond compare
To have it is to have despair

Or, all sundry goes one’s pulse, Pallidula, rigida, nudula, as the Pound didn’t say.

Pleasers

2006-02-22T04:33:00.000-08:00

Pelican-Betty (One Off Man-Mental)

Chris Daniels: “Your typical ‘poetry blog’ imparts no enduringly useful information and neither engages in radical discussion of anything nor agitates for same. It’s all safely circumscribed. Total fucking Dullsville, USA, baby.”

Auden and MacNeice setting out, Hraensnef, 1936

Tort-paraphrase of Wystan Hugh Auden and Louis MacNeice (out of the brilliant overlook’d Letters from Iceland):

“All literature is about revenge.”

And, on music:

“Ik heb een paar grammofoonplaten met primitieve regionale muziek, waaronder een verbazende opname van een boer en twee kinderen die brullen als bij een voetbalwedstrijd.”

(Roughly: “I have a couple of recordings of a primitive regional music, including an astonishing number of a farmer and two children who roar as if at a football game.”)

Too, in quotables assembled under “Sheaves form Sagaland”:

“I heard a voice in the farm singing an Icelandic song. At a distance it resembled the humming of bees.” –Pfeiffer.

Betty Bird, 1901-1944

Pea-fowl

2006-02-15T12:02:00.000-08:00

Marcel Duchamp lighting a cigarette with a bird on his shoulder.

Out of Tallien: A Brief Romance (Frederic Tuten), probably a perfect book: “feeling invisible pushed him to wanting to hear the privileged world squeak as he twisted the rope about its neck.”

Or: “Around him buffoons, clods, idiots, vulgarians, soup slurpers, calculators to the dime of pay to housecleaners; those who bark at waiters and insult chambermaids; sycophants of no special charm, toe-steppers at cocktail parties who neglect to apologize because you are of no particular power or fame, parasites who eat your dinners and bad-mouth you at another’s evening table; idea horses, modeling the latest intellectual fashion . . .”

Out of Geraldine Monk’s terrific new Escafeld Hangings (West House Books, 2005), in a parcel titled “She Kept Birds”:

Troglodytes troglodytes

cutty stumpit
wranny wrannock
scutty skiddy
cuddy
tintie
titmeg
cracket
chitty jitty
juggy
puggie
gilliver
stag
our lady’s hen

(T. troglodytes being the common winter wren: “a loud and melodious singer . . . Its characteristic call is a single or double note sounding like large pebbles being knocked together . . . It is one of the smallest European birds at about nine centimeters . . . it appears even smaller by its habit of sticking its very short tail up in the air. It has a fairly long, thin bill, a buffy supercilium and dark bars on its wings and flanks. Its name means “cave dweller” and derives from its habit of building its nest in a crevice or hole in walls, trees or steep banks.”)

Eugene O'Neill standing next to a bird bath, Lafayette, California, July 1937.

Barricade’d

2006-02-03T06:33:00.000-08:00

Ange Mlinko: “The self-interrogation sessions demanded by one’s peers (Are you a “failed experimentalist”?) are both a useful foil and an outrage to one's autonomy, and one way to aggressively win back one's autonomy is to simply refuse to speak the argot.”

Vue générale d'un phalanstère

Walter Benjamin: “When Fourier looked for an example of travail non salarié mais passionné, he found none that was more obvious than the building of barricades.”

Nek Chand worked under cover of darkness for eighteen years, stealing away at the end of his working day as a roads inspector to his secret place—a clearing in the jungle. It was there that he created the legions of sculpted men and women, imaginary creatures, bears and monkeys, that would compose his magnificent ‘Rock Garden.’

Ishkibibble

2006-01-23T11:20:00.000-08:00

Flarf-bunny.

It is a cruel pleasure which some men take in worrying the Reputation of others much better than themselves; and this only to divert themselves and the Company. Solomon compares this sort of men to distracted persons: As a madman, saith he, who casteth fire-brands and arrows and hang down stupid heads like bulrushes, reeds bust’d, snotty.

Aragon and friends.

Out of Louis Aragon’s “Poem to Shout in the Ruins”:

Let’s spit the two of us let’s spit
On what we loved
On what we loved the two of us
Yes because this poem the two of us
Is a waltz tune and I imagine
What is dark and incomparable passing between us
Like a dialogue of mirrors abandoned
In a baggage-claim somewhere say Foligno
Or Bourboule in the Auvergne
Certain names are charged with a distant thunder
Yes let’s spit the two of us on these immense landscapes
Where little rented cars cruise by
Yes because something must still
Some thing
Reconcile us yes let’s spit
The two of us it’s a waltz
A kind of convenient sob
Let’s spit let’s spit tiny automobiles
Let’s spit that’s an order
A waltz of mirrors
A dialogue in the void
Listen to these immense landscapes where the wind
Cries over what we loved
One of them is a horse leaning its elbow on the earth
The other a dead man shaking out linen the other
The trail of your footprints I remember a deserted village
On the shoulder of a scorched mountain
I remember your shoulder
I remember your elbow your linen your footprints
I remember a town where there was no horse
I remember your look which scorched
My deserted heart a dead Mazeppa whom a horse
Carries away like that day on the mountain
Drunkenness sped my run through the martyred oaks
Which bled prophetically while day
Light fell mute over the blue trucks
I remember so many things
So many evenings rooms walks rages
So many stops in worthless places
Where in spite of everything the spirit of mystery rose up
Like the cry of a blind child in a remote train depot

Railroad tracks in Winnebijou, Wisconsin, 1928

Now, there’s a certain thing that I learned from my friend, Mouse—a fellow who always blushes. And that is that everyone must always flush out ’s house if he don’t expect to be going around housing flushes. “Open the door, Homer.” (I’ve heard it said before).

Oof!

2006-01-14T05:17:00.000-08:00

Drawing by Koba (Kiowa), prisoner in Fort Marion, “Fighting over a Bird” (ca. 1875)

Gumby

2005-12-01T06:21:00.000-08:00

Mako tries his hand at a semi-wildstyle piece with vivid fill-ins. A smiling Gumby takes the place of the O. Photograph by Ben Ostrowsky.

Another clump of Jeremy Noel-Tod’s “Definite Sentences”:

. . . in resisting the old-fashioned resistance of formal inscrutability—the shaping stanza, the free-verse line-break, not to mention larger rhetorical gestures than the disjunctive new sentence can carry—the counter-cultural irony of Silliman’s project to expand the narratives of America through alternative ticker-tape streams of ‘readable’ sentences runs the risk (like the supremely consumable canvases of Photorealism, and the ruthless satire at which America currently excels) of becoming strangely forceless, and even symbiotic with the forces it opposes.
In this, the single-mindedly progressive Silliman—prospective author of a poem called Universe—resembles D. H. Lawrence’s shrewd caricature of Walt Whitman, who drove his ‘great fierce poetic machine’ ‘along the track of a fixed idea’: ‘ALLNESS! shrieks Walt at a cross-road, going whiz over an unwary Red Indian.’ Both poets are social visionaries of half a continent of synchronous detail. But at the blind spots of Silliman’s commentaries, the ironic hymn-sheet-sharing between American poets and politicians who would roll out ‘universal’ values continues as Lawrence described it (The joining of hands around the globe between the American far left and far right may be witnessed in Under Albany’s bullish footnote to its gloss on the sentence ‘Uncritical of nationalist movements in the Third World’: ‘The creation of the European Union is itself a desperate attempt for several governments, formerly “world powers”, to reimagine themselves as relevant.’ Relevant to whom?) ‘If the function of writing is “to express the world”’, muses the opening sentence of ‘Albany’. The world expressed by Silliman’s new sentence texts and blog posts tends to be the New World (North)— . . .

Gumby on Venus. The large fault-bounded trough in the center of the image was nicknamed Gumby (after an animated cartoon figure) by Magellan scientists. Gumby measures 5 km. wide and 100-200 m. deep.

One is, one supposes, drifting toward hiatus-ry, wryly reimagining one’s relevance in an increasingly vacuous age. Whether it’ll ‘stick’ or not—‘One never knows, do one?’—as Fats Waller’d say, and, too, “Where my soul going to go when my ditch is dug?”

Gumbo

2005-11-30T04:49:00.000-08:00

Charles Bell, Gumball Fragment #1 (1976)

In PN Review, Jeremy Noel-Tod on Ron Silliman’s “Definite Sentences”:

Silliman’s new sentences tend to a kind of literary Photorealism: focused description of a fragment of the modern American city—‘Types of pipe atop rooftops’, Tjantiing—the very vividness of which calls attention to the artifice of its realism (here, through close alliteration and rhyme, and also that slightly archaic put precisely prepositional ‘atop’, one of Silliman’s trademark words). Like the American Photorealist painter Charles Bell, who spent hours arranging coloured gumballs in the dispensers he then portrayed with exaggerated Kodak, clarity, half of Silliman’s art is in the editorial composition of small, concrete pieces into larger, more enigmatic masses.

Remarks, too, amongst much else, on Silliman’s Blog’s “neglect of other poetries in English” besides “Stateside poetry.”

Water

2005-11-29T05:37:00.000-08:00

Fishing for the moon (1907)

First line: A dreamy little youngster lived beside a quiet lake
Chorus: He went fishing for the moon

Unrelenting the gaiety here. Result of Johnson’s Dictionary. The latest rubbernecker:

to fi´•shify. To turn to fish: a cant word.
Here comes Romeo
—Without his roe, like a dried herring:
O flesh, flesh, how art thou fishified!
—Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet.

African American woman, seated on ground, fishing, at the Tidal Basin, Washington, D.C. (Toni Frissell, 1957)

Mark Scroggins noted my growling scurrility, growing vasty and unrebuff’d. It’s an age of animosity and overkill. Age of high idiocy and hyperbole. I think Robert Archambeau level’d a charge of New Georgeanism, at it, the age, the period, the style. Some indications: flabby thinking, accolades unsupport’d, gnomic pronouncements, adolescent japery, goosestepping stylisticks, terminal irony terminally defer’d, the gauzy, the untemper’d (bent), th’abstract (shallow), the mildly rehash’d surrealism of the video set. I could name names. In lieu of that, a series of plausible samples (of the age):

1) stile

2) gauze

3) goosestepping

&c.

Young woman holding a fish on a fishing line, sitting in a rowboat in a body of water with two other women. (1928)

Sontag, on ‘becoming an individual’: “One way . . . is through accretion, composition, fabrication, creation. The other way . . . is through dissolution, unraveling, interment.”

“You spend so much time . . . protesting against banality. Your life is a museum of counter-banality . . . what’s so wrong with banality?”

The notion of being ‘shocked’ as “a dullard’s substitute for the pleasures of the imagination.”

Grief, death-grief: “I felt as if I had gotten loose in my skin. My armholes, the legholes, the hole for my head, eluded me.
I made a list of ways of dying . . . Death by hanging, death by guillotine, death by peas up the nose, icicles through the groin, falling down an elevator shaft, crucifixion, the parachute that doesn’t open, gangrene, jumping out of the dentist’s window, arsenic in the onion soup, being run over by a trolley car, snake bite, the hydrogen bomb, Scylla and / or Charybdis, a broken heart, the stake, Russian roulette, syphilis, being tossed out of a roller-coaster, careless surgery, drowning, an airplane crash, sleeping pills, automobile fumes, boredom, tightrope walking, hari-kiri, rape by a shark, lynching, ultimatums, hunger, flying without wings, flying with wings (without a plane)—
Oh, how frail we are.”

“You are a great comic fragment.”

“It is the possession of a role which provides the impetus to go out in the world, to act at all. The more numerous the roles, the greater the number of excursions.”

Boxer Jack Dempsey holding a fishing pole and fishing, on a narrow dock jutting out into a body of water. (1919)

Gilbert Adair, Love and Death on Long Island: “Little by little, in part because of intrinsic qualities that were great and durable enough to survive any lengthy period of neglect, in part because the passions of the two previous decades had quite cooled down, and in most part because of the subtle but indisputable nimbus of rarefaction that enhaloed my work, the cachet that will ever be attached to an artist fallen silent in his prime and whose silence fascinates as an impertinent shunning of the world and the blandishments it holds out to those it deigns to regard as gifted, I returned to fashion.”

Sub rosa

2005-11-28T04:26:00.000-08:00

Men watch a boxing match at Woods Saloon in Turret, (Chaffee County), Colorado. The referee stands between the boxers; they wear trunks and gloves and are poised to begin fighting. (1905)

Finish’d Hitchings’s Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary. Raw notes:

‘Obsession’ is explained as ‘the act of besieging’ or ‘the first attack of Satan, antecedent to possession’—

In a footnote: Ambrose Bierce defines ‘logomachy’ as ‘a war in which the weapons are words and the wounds punctures in the swim-bladder of self-esteem’—

The sonnet: ‘is not very suitable to the English language’—

And, later, in Life of Milton: ‘the fabric of a sonnet, however adapted to the Italian language, has never succeeded in ours’—

Johnson’s picayune and fragmentary natural world: the seal: ‘in make and growth not unlike a pig, ugly faced, and footed like a moldwarp’—

Mole ‘a little beast that works under-ground’

And of the tarantula: ‘an insect whose bite is only cured by music,’ quoting Locke—‘He that uses the word tarantula, without having any idea of what it stands for, means nothing at all by it.’

The verb ‘to worm’ means ‘to deprive a dog of something, nobody knows what, under his tongue, which is said to prevent him, nobody knows why, from running mad’—

So . . . an ‘amatorculist’ is ‘a little insignificant lover’—

‘Sciomachy’ is ‘battle with a shadow’—

The letter R ‘is called the canine letter, because it is uttered with some resemblance to the growl or snarl of a cur’

Orgasm defined as ‘Sudden vehemence’

And how Charles Lamb term’d books imprimatur’d with ‘a certain appeal for audacious readers,’ howsoever they ‘lack the essential bookish quality of actually being readable,’‘biblia abiblia’—perfect yakkety-yak lip-blubber. (A lot of that going around.)

Vernon Arena, Wolgast-Rivers boxing match (ca. 1912)

Out of Susan Sontag’s The Benefactor:

I found my heart empty of personal ambition. Ambition if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others. I did not come into this sort of relation, part conspiratorial and part envious, with my peers.

I don’t dream. I find intolerable the slow leakage of my substance in dreams, so I have staged my life to incorporate the energy that is usually diverted in dreaming. My writing forces from me the dream-substance, prolongs it, plays with it.

I am no artist . . . I have no inner burden which I wish to unload upon a passive audience. I do not wish to contribute one jot to the fund of public fantasy.

You have character, like an American temperance tract or the great unfinished cathedral in Barcelona.

I came to understand that words coerce the feelings they attempt to embody. Words are not the proper vehicle for a general upheaval which destroys the old accumulation of feeling.

I feared that the effort of assuming the identity of a writer might deprive her of the scant realism about herself which she possessed.

. . . sexuality, like crime, is an imperishable resource of the impersonal. Properly performed, these acts do blunt the sense of self. It is, I think, because the end is fixed: in sexuality, the orgasm; in crime, the punishment. One becomes free precisely through those acts which have an inescapable end.

An unidentified, lightweight boxer poses with one arm extended and the other drawn back, Denver, Colorado. He wears a tank shirt with leggings, laced boxing shoes, and half gloves. (ca. 1910-1920)

Zoo

2005-11-23T05:37:00.000-08:00

Some brusque random fidelios out of Viktor Shklovsky’s Zoo, haphazard, retrograde, and toxic:

I might swim up to one of those suckers and say: “Dear comrade, please suck out of me the 20,000 devils of love which are ensconced in my soul.”

Frank Chance, Cubs baseball player, standing with a person dressed in a devil's costume on the field of the West Side baseball grounds (ca. 1907)
I’m very sentimental . . . That’s because I take life seriously. Maybe the whole world is sentimental—that world whose address I know. It doesn’t dance the foxtrot.

Pie eating contest during a field day held by the 87th Regiment of the Tenth Mountain Division, on July 4, 1945, near Caporreto, Italy.
Words, and the relationships between words, thought and the irony of thought, their divergence—these are the content of art. Art, if it can be compared to a window at all, is only a sketched window.

~

My hands are freezing.

And some bodice-ripping out of Alexander Kluge’s The Devil’s Blind Spot:

In the wastes of the cosmos the little dog Laika, a stray Moscow mongrel bitch of great robustness, circled the globe for a time.

~

It was one of Walter Benjamin’s characteristics . . . that he would abandon himself totally to a source, an idea, and always with complete partiality. He had the disposition of a bat. It doesn’t hear the sounds it itself is emitting, but the echo of these sounds, which the wall throws back.

She-devils of the Kabbalists: “Lilith is said to have at her command more than 480 troops of evil spirits, Mashkith more than 478. Less frequently mentioned is Iggareth.” Nobody knows the name and character of the fourth, the hidden one.

The Dance on Dun-Can, out of a print by Thomas Rowlandson, 1786.

Boswell: “Though we had passed over not less than four & twenty Miles of very rugged Ground & had a Highland Dance on the top of DUN-CAN, the Highest Mountain in the Island, we returned in the Evening not at all fatigued.”

In Henry Hitchings’s Dr. Johnson’s Dictionary is noted that Johnson, a diffident etymologist, “states that ‘curmudgeon’ is a corruption of the French coeur méchant, on the strength of a letter from ‘an unknown correspondent’—a statement which caused a later lexicographer, John Ash, to claim the word came from coeur (‘unknown’) and méchant (‘correspondent’).

And: Johnson’s somewhat addle’d etymology of ‘spider’: ‘May not spider be spy dor, the insect that watches the dor?’

~

Johnson’s maladies: trouble with eyes, trouble with lungs, insomnia, asthma, gout, rheumatoid arthritis, dropsy, emphysema, one fainting fit, malignant tumour (left testicle), profound melancholy periodically surging toward madness, flatulence.

Johnson’s remedies: opium, oil of terebinth, valerian, ipecacuanha, dried orange peel in hot red port, salts of hartshorn, musk, dried squills, Spanish fly, frequent ‘bleeding,’ work.

~

DISREGARD

In hummock, penetrable, anomie
The dart angles its
Shiv. It may be
Fate or noun, or
Rhythm pleural on loquat.

Grey-wolf, Indian policeman, Crow Indian Reservation, near Pryor, Montana

. . . their story written left,
They die; but in their room, as they forewarn,
Wolves shall succeed for teachers grievous Wolves,
Who all the sacred mysteries of Heav’n
To their own vile advantages shall turn
Of lucre and ambition, and the truth
With superstitions and traditions taint,
Left only in those written Records pure . . .
Milton

Pig.

Sensible

2005-11-22T04:31:00.000-08:00

Virgil Thomson writing to Briggs Buchanan (Paris, 15 March 1927), with “vaguely stirring” European “culture news” lowdown:

The apparent future of painting lies with a Russian, Pavel Tchelitcheff, and a Frenchman, Christian Bérard . . . Picasso, from lack of competition, has become a public monument. One by one, his rivals have faded to obscurity. Matisse, Derain, Braque, Picabia. (Juan Gris, “the perfect painter,” remains just that.) Music is carried on by me and George Antheil. (Stravinsky shares Picasso’s fate, with Satie dead and Germany not a serious rival, even in New York.) Letters remain in the older generation, because there are still two figures to make a polarity. No youngster can do anything till something happens to either Gertrude Stein or James Joyce. And I doubt if anything will, short of either’s death. There are strong because they don’t do each other’s stuff. Gertrude is occupied with compositon; Joyce with reporting.

Christian Bérard’s “On the Beach (Double Self-Portrait)” (1933)
Bérard, Joyce, and Antheil stand for representation, depiction, emotion, the “true to life” effect. Their shapes are borrowed. Tchelitcheff and Gertrude and I represent play, construction, interest centered in the material, nonsense, magic, and automatic writing. The issue is clear. Between knowledge and wisdom. Between the tabloid newspaper and Mother Goose. Between culture and anarchy. The law and the prophets. Kant and Spinoza. Duty and pleasure. The stage and the home.
. . . Cocteau is about. At his usual work of ruining young artists . . . Pound and Eliot remain respectively 2nd- and 3rd-rate poets and 3rd- and 2nd-rate editors. Ezra’s magazine Exile is pretty dumb. transition has appeared with a 1st installment of the new Joyce. It turns out to be like Ulysses only more so.

Later Thomson asks for “more tabloids”—“They please me.” Beyond the gumption of th’assessments (great flinging of wildflowers, &c., casual dismissal easily match’d by glib brouhaha’d certainty, Christian Bérard, who he?—a penny for the old guy, why do I think of that dreadful Bernard Buffet, scourge of the ’fifties?), what’s notable here is range. And say-so willingness.

Pete Anderson cleaning fish near Forty Mile, (Canada, ca. 1938)

Of course, a couple hours plus tard, it all looks suspect, me, Virgil, Virgil, me. Fatigue-o-matic schlock. Do it ever come down that—full of bullion and bumptious—one of you prints out a passle of such bloggery talk, essential “stuff” come down out of the zone blogique, harry’d by its muchness, “happy at the thought,” though gummed out taut on tenterhooks to read it all, and you—oh, The World itself gets its gumption up to demand something of you and that revery-look you wear so affably, and, well, you don’t get back to them pages blogeoises for, oh, a few days? It does me, and it undoes me. I find myself full of kittle and contempt, bilious at the perusal, fanning through the pages like a sneer-wind, worse it is than yesterday’s news in yesterday’s newspapers. (For those, the common consent is, can at least serve for the wrapping up of the post-repast fish bones . . . or the pre-prandial fish guts . . . or the lousy book by Stanley Fish you.) Is it sensible to write junk day after day? Or pour over the books of wayward saints for pre-chewables, quotes and queries for th’international short attention span? Maybe it’s not.

Still from “Reflections on Black,” by Stan Brakhage

Or one stumbles into a lovely thing out of Stan Brakhage’s “My Eye,” and all the mockery and crabbiness looks untoward and discardable, so goeth our unheaven’dly and redeemable days. Brakhage:

I am stating my given ability, prize of all above pursuing, to transform the light sculptured shapes of an almost blackened room to the rainbow hued patterns of light without any scientific paraphernalia.

Makes me want to hunt up Ronald Johnson’s perfectly square’d paragraph about the eye.

Personally

2005-11-21T06:21:00.000-08:00

Finding Gary Sullivan’s bustle and flurry of determination to delimit quite soberly the meaning of the term “flarf” to some originary ludic mayhem amongst a select few, uh, rather alarming. Turf-staking poetics is always a sight. Ain’t we poets here just to roil the language up, to pet its fine coat tail to nape? The idea that one’d attempt to control the usage of that mess vis-à-vis a word that apparently calls for inappropriate behaviour, seems, uh, inappropriate. (I am tempt’d to think the whole massy Elsewhere discourse of late, just another flarfer’s ramping up to a grand ha-ha, ’cepting the over-earnest Sillimaniac slope of it.)

Uh, as to the Google-pruning devices, whether they’s a part of “flarp” or not—I got the same itchy reaction I got to various reports regarding the n/Oulipo conference that kept pointing to “the problem of the blank page.” And I want’d to push my broken nose up in there and say (helium-inhale’d squeakify’d): “Uh, Doc, what problem is that?” Meaning, only problem I see is—“the problem of the full page.” It’s sort of like: if you got to go, you got to go. Point. Google-pruning: why that’d be just like using a suppository under some false-consciousness diatribe “production” consideration that one’s got to be regular, no? (Recall what the good Dr. Johnson bloviate’d—snitelessly: “It is strange that there should be so little reading in the world, and so much writing.”)

More “personally,” (is getting good, isn’t it?) I ain’t sure what them technorati-generated numbers mean, however, I do seriously doubt that the term “flarf” (or any of its Cagneys) ’s ever trotted its horse across the dry arroyo of my brainpan’s gulch even a scrub-hundred times. Say nothin’ about five hundred and twenty-five. Say nothin’ about exit’d the leaking wound of my writin’ hand. Thass juss plarpy.

Out of Michael Allin’s Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris, being the story of a giraffe’s being transport’d, in 1827, out of the Ethiopian highlands, down the Blue Nile to Khartoum, “down the entire length of the Nile, nearly 2,000 miles to Cairo and Alexandria,” and, on foot, after crossing the Mediterranean, the distance between Marseille and Paris, “a royal gift from Muhammad Ali, the Ottoman viceroy of Egypt, to King Charles X of France”:

Giraffe, girafe, giraffa (English, French, Italian)—all derive from the Arabic zerafa, a phonetic variant of zarafa, which means “charming” or “lovely one.”

And:

Children playing in the parks of Paris bought snacks of gingerbread giraffes. Their mothers wore their hair à la Girafe, coiffured so high that they had to ride on the floors of their carriages. That summer the Journal of Women and Fashion reported the chic of “a necklace à la Girafe, a narrow ribbon from which is suspended a pink heart or better yet a small locket of the seraglio in the form of the amulet seen around the neck of the giraffe at le Jardin du Roi.”
The most stylish colors of that year’s fashion season were “belly of Giraffe,” “Giraffe in love,” “Giraffe in exile.” Men wore “Giraffic” hats and ties, and a magazine of the day diagrammed instructions for tying a gentleman’s cravat à la Girafe.
Zarafamania was everywhere—in textiles and wallpaper, crockery and knickknacks, soap, furniture, topiary—anywhere her distinctive spots or long-necked shape could be employed. The recently invented claviharp was renamed the “piano-giraffe.” That winter’s influenza was “Giraffe flu”; and people inquired of the sick, “How goes the Giraffe?”

Tall Horse puppet, collaborative puppetry between South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company and the Sogolon Puppet Troupe of Mali

Please consider, in a couple of succinct pages, the relationship between “flarf” and “Zarafamania.” Essay a determination of th’exact hue of the color “Giraffe in love.”

Saddleback’d

2005-11-20T08:16:00.000-08:00

Mzimkhulu / Natal Drakensberg, Bushman paintings, White Horse Cave

Chinese Horse, Lascaux

The Uffington White Horse

Salient

2005-11-19T12:57:00.000-08:00

Michael Parker

Read my copain Michael Parker’s latest humdinger of a novel, If You Want Me to Stay, oddly twinned in my brainpan now with Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude, happenstance of chronology. Kids growing up with soul music for solace, is that a genre? In Parker’s novel, it’s “Joel Junior” Dunn, who—“mama run off” ’s “learned how not to love,” whose daddy’s “gone off,” who’s trying to do right by’s younger brother Tank. He’s down in the coastal plain of North Carolina, he’s not in pre-gentrify’d Brooklyn. (One point in a list of “THINGS I NEED TO TEACH TANK”—“Difference between Stax/Volt and Motown.”) Parker (“Joel Junior”):

I sometimes, left to my own half-formed judgment, strayed . . . like my brief flirtation with Motown, a label my daddy didn’t much care for because, he said . . . it made black music palatable to white people, lightening it up so it would cross over to the pop charts. My daddy when he was on could be an I-got-there-first snob. He could lecture for hours on the production quality of Motown versus anything out of Memphis or Muscle Shoals, the former being slick and given to the latest technology and the latter being sloppy in the way that perfect things just naturally are—filled with human error, the fuckups there to honor not Allah like the imperfection in the carpet but Jesus-I-don’t-think-so, though if anyone ever came close to convincing me I was bygod Mavis callin’ Mercy . . .

Marvin Gaye

Or, earlier:

We all three knew the story about Al Green’s girlfriend dumping a pot of boiling grits in his lap. We knew he survived and found Jesus in his heart. We knew about Sam Cooke getting shot in a motel by the woman worked behind the counter who he thought was hiding some girl he wanted to get with who had run off from his room when he’d tried to pull her dress off, taking his pants with her . . . We knew that Marvin Gaye had been shot by his very own daddy, and that he, like our own daddy, was prone to going off. (That one got away with me the worst, a gone-off genius getting shot by someone who like as not took care of him and protected him and loved him when nobody else would . . .)

Patti Smith

And somehow the refusal of guilt and redemption is where one always returns, Patti Smith’s “Babelogue” moving straight on into “Rock ’n’ Roll Nigger”:

I haven't fucked much with the past, but I've fucked plenty with the future . . . In heart I am Moslem, in heart I'm an American artist, and I have no guilt. I seek pleasure. I seek the nerves under your skin. The narrow archway, the layers, the scroll . . . We worship the flaw, the belly, the belly, the mole on the belly of an exquisite whore. I have not sold myself to God.

Joe Orton

Scoop’d up at the Friends of the Library—The Orton Diaries, edited by John Lahr. Noted one signature bound in upside-down, good excuse to read publickly, book-invert’d, Elisha Cooke-style, next to the potted palm, no? Random entry of Thursday 6 July 1967:

Weather hot, muggy. Spent the whole day typing the first act of What the Butler Saw. P. Willes rang. ‘Who was that other gentleman sitting with you and Kenneth Williams last night?’ he said. ‘A lorry driver,’ I said. ‘He didn’t look like a lorry driver,’ Willes said, tartly. ‘No,’ I said, he’s given it up and has taken to selling second-hand clothes.’ ‘Are you ever going to wash that tee-shirt of yours?’ Willes said. ‘You’ve been wearing it for ages.’ ‘I let the sweat collect,’ I said, ‘and then when I pick someone up it gives them a kinky thrill.’ Willes rang off after a chat. . . .
Henry Budgen rang. He said sex in Cyprus is difficult. ‘It’s difficult anywhere if your name is Henry Budgen,’ K. H. said.

Gulch

2005-11-18T06:37:00.000-08:00

Guillaume Apollinaire (1917)

Zukofsky, after quoting lines “L’orange dont la saveur est / Un merveilleux feu d’artifice” (“The orange whose flavor is / A marvelous firework”) in The Writing of Guillaume Apollinaire:

The affect of intelligence is inevitable plasticity. That is constant.

A flooded arroyo, New Mexico

Cormac McCarthy (No Country for Old Men):

I know they’s a lots of things in a family history that just plain aint so. Any family. The stories gets passed on and the truth gets passed over. As the sayin goes. Which I reckon some would take as meanin that the truth cant compete. But I dont believe that. I think that when the lies are all told and forgot the truth will be there yet. It dont move about from place to place and it dont change from time to time. You cant corrupt it any more that you can salt salt. You cant corrupt it because that’s what it is. It’s the thing you’re talkin about.

Solari Hotel, Indian Gulch, Mariposa County, California

Jeremy Prynne, out of Poems (Freemantle Arts Centre Press / Bloodaxe Books, 2005), a book dedicated “For Edward Dorn / his brilliant luminous shade”:

LOVE

Noble in the sound which

marks the pale case

of their dreams, they ride

the bel canto of our

time: the patient en-

circlement of Narcissus &

as he pines I too

am wan with fever,

have fears which set

the vanished child above

reproach. Cry as you

will, take what you

need, the night is young

and limitless our greed.

First Snow

2005-11-17T06:25:00.000-08:00

Soldiers of the 343rd Infantry throwing snow during a snow fight at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois, Chicago Daily News photographer (1918)

Snow plow and large piles of snow, Chicago Daily News photographer (1929)

Students of a University of Chicago Department of Botany Field Ecology class coming down a snow field, Mt. Rainier, Washington (1920)

Coleridge (Notebooks): “The Metapothecaries always kicking out at the Mathematicians, the Mattermaticians on the other hand aiming the same asinine Flings at the Metaphysicians. But real Metaphysicians and Mathematicians are Friends, and Lovers; always look at each other respect and welcome, and often walk arm in arm.”

Seer, Sere

2005-11-16T05:02:00.000-08:00

Not Ron Silliman (Ray Kroc)

I see th’indefatigable Ron Silliman’s toeing heartily to the Krocean line first noted at th’Hotel somewheres (something about the way th’arches used to spell out 99 Billion Served). Now it’s product placement charts. Outpost upsprings in the distant outbacks of Gdansk and Kokkola, just the thing for the year-end corporate glossies. Keeping the shareholders happy. Myself, I look forward fondly to the moment the technology reports a Silliman “hit” originating smack dab off the middle of the Champs Elysées. Ah, th’imperial city! (In the vicinity: reports of French-Maghreb youth brandishing roll’d up print-outs of recent Jane Dark’s Sugar High! posts . . .)

~

Amused in Lowry’s Under the Volcano by some minor character’s brouhaha about “modern Vancouver,” (circa 1938-9) and how it’s got:

. . . a kind of Pango Pango quality mingled with sausage and mash and generally a rather Puritan atmosphere. Everyone fast asleep and when you prick them a Union Jack flows out of the hole. But no one in a certain sense lives there. They merely as it were pass through. Mine the country and quit. Blast the land to pieces, knock down the trees and send them rolling down Burrard Inlet . . . As for drinking, by the way, that is beset . . . everywhere beset by perhaps favourable difficulties. No bars, only beer parlors so uncomfortable and cold that serve beer so weak no self-respecting drunkard would show his nose in them. You have to drink at home, and when you run short it’s too far to get a bottle—

My late-blooming enchantment with Vancouver variously and fitfully fuel’d by reports by Christopher Brayshaw, and Peter Culley, and Sina Queyras.

The ventriloquism of Cormac McCarthy’s sheriff in No Country for Old Men, absolutely convincing:

What do you say to a man that by his own admission has no soul? Why would you say anything? I’ve thought about it a good deal. But he wasnt nothin compared to what was comin down the pike.
They say the eyes are the windows to the soul. I dont know what them eyes was the windows to and I guess I’d as soon not know. But there is another view of the world out there and other eyes to see it and that’s where this is goin. It has done brought me to a place in my life I would not of thought I’d of come to . . . I always knew that you had to be wlliin to die to even do this job. That was always true. Not to sound glorious about it or nothin but you do. If you aint they’ll know it. They’ll see it in a heartbeat. I think it is more like what you are willin to become. And I think a man would have to put his soul at hazard. And I wont do that . . .

Entirely fickle reading habits. Stuck in McCarthy’s Texan county of Judge Roy Bean (Formed from the Pecos, Kinney, and Crockett counties, Val Verde officially became a county in 1885 and is 3,242 square miles in area—which is three times the size of Rhode Island. Election records from that year show that Langtry citizen Roy Bean was elected to serve as Justice of the Peace. Legend has it that Bean so greatly admired the English actress Lillie Langtry that he took her last name for the name of his town, and he named his saloon after her nickname, “Jersey Lily.” Unfortunately, a sign painter misspelled “Lily” and the sign still reads “The Jersey Lilly.”) and stay’d up half the blame night reading it.

Not Ron Silliman (Roy Bean)

Hermetic

2005-11-15T04:35:00.000-08:00

Charles Burchfield

Struck by something the Dark Clover put down here—comparing the rather banal mass-consumption one summer of a few reels of retrograde celluloid (Star Wars) to what he sees as “a mass political action” (the recent French “riots”). That nobody registers oneself as participant in history (or in “a singular historic event cycle”)—(that’s, apparently, left to trans-Atlantic instructors like himself). That’s not what struck me, though. What did is how exactly Clover’s report of the “summer of Star Wars” compares with Jonathan Lethem’s in The Disappointment Artist, (though I think he,—being a novelist, viddy’d it some ghastly number like twenty-one showings—against Clover’s mere “six or seven”). For the record, I think I caught parts of it some years later, telly’d.

~

Pound (Guide to Kulchur): “Does any really good mind ever ‘get a kick’ out of studying stuff that has been put into water-tight compartments and hermetically sealed?”

I accept the hokey dialogue only if everything they say is correct (Under the Volcano):

“The Mayas,” he read aloud, “were far advanced in observational astronomy. But they did not suspect a Copernican system . . .” “Why should they? . . . What I like though are the ‘vague’ years of the old Mayans. And their ‘pseudo years,’ mustn’t overlook them! And their delicious names for the months. Pop. Uo. Zip. Zotz. Tzec. Xul. Yaxkin.”
“Mac,” Yvonne was laughing. “Isn’t there one called Mac?”
“There’s Yax and Zac. And Uayeb: I like that one most of all, the month that only lasts five days.’’
“In receipt of yours dated Zip the first!—”
“But where does it all get you in the end?”

And Consul Geoffrey Firmin, inebriated, saying “cheerfully and soberly in passing,” to “the little public scribe . . . crashing away on a giant typewriter”:

”I am taking the only way out, semicolon . . . Goodbye, full stop. Change of paragraph, change of chapter, change of worlds—”

~

How Samuel Palmer’s early paintings rhyme with Charles Burchfield’s (1893-1967):

Charles Burchfield, Cottage in the Trees, (1955, watercolor)

Palmer in a letter to George Richmond (Shoreham, 1828), trailing off into lines by Milton:

Forgive my spirits they sometimes haunt the caves of melancholy; ofttimes are bound in the dungeon, ofttimes in the darkness; when the chain is snapt they rush upward and revel in the temerity of their flight. What I have whisper’d in your ears I should not blaze to vulgar apprehensions: if my aspirations are very high, my depressions are very deep, yet my pinions never loved the middle air; yea I will surrender to be shut up among the dead, or in the prison of the deep, so I may sometimes bound upward; pierce the clouds; and look over the doors of bliss, and behold there ‘each blissful deity, How he beneath the thunderous throne doth lie’.

Samuel Palmer’s “Early Morning” (1825, pen and ink and wash, mixed with gum arabic, varnished)

And, against all savage meekness, against all mean means, against all topiary’d fine erectings, Palmer’s note on excess (1825):

Excess is the essential vivifying spirit, vital spark, embalming spice . . . of the finest art. Be ever saying to yourself ‘Labour after the excess of excellence.’ . . . There are many mediums in the means—none, O! not a jot, not a shadow of a jot, in the end of great art.

Ruckus

2005-11-14T05:07:00.000-08:00

Expunged Sunday pulling long bitter drafts of un-revery’d sleep out of the ventositous ambuscade of the day—handbills and religious tracts sailing whitely about in the gusts. Me an unsawn board of sleep, undisturb’d, flat, noticeable for its rectitude only. That and for the diminish’d ruckus of its senses. A perfect idiot of sleep’s kingdom. See 1601 B. JONSON Poetaster:

Hora. Barmy froth, puffy, inflate, turgidous and ventositous are come vp.

Tibv. O, terrible, windie wordes!

Or waking cursorily to read “at” Malcolm Lowry’s antic Under the Volcano, that book I always intend’d (and attempt’d) to read in a grand manner back in my scuffling days, & found undoable in my drink-diminishment. One kind of reply to Lowry’s own proceedings—that only a drunk comprehends the beauty of “an old woman from Tarasco who plays dominoes at seven o’clock in the morning”:

On the edge of the table her stick, made of steel with some animal’s claw for a handle, hung like something alive. She had a little chicken on a cord which she kept under her dress over her heart. The chicken peeped out with pert, jerky, sidelong glances. She set the little chicken on a table near her where it pecked among the dominoes, uttering tiny cries. Then she replaced it, drawing her dress tenderly over it.

Out of a book—the kind of Anglophile thing I normally avoid, associating it (or its kin) with Lady Di and other “royals” necrophiliack memorabilia—acquired largely against the recognition of the “chimney’d house” logo of Moyer Bell adorning its spine, a thing call’d Literary Britain (by Frank Morley, who “shared an office with T. S. Eliot at Faber and Faber”), a report on the warring styles of Samuel Johnson and Edward Gibbon by one George Colman “the younger,” “a schoolboy of about thirteen when permitted by his father to join the guests at dinner in the Colman house in Soho Square” (‘On the day I first sat down with Johnson, in his rusty brown, and his black worsteads, Gibbon was placed opposite to me in a suit of flower’d velvet, with a bag and sword’):

Johnson’s style was grand, and Gibbon’s elegant; the stateliness of the former was sometimes pedantick, and the polish of the latter was occasionally finical. Johnson marched to kettle-drums and trumpets; Gibbon moved to flutes and haut-boys; Johnson hew’d passages through the Alps, which Gibbon levell’d walks through parks and gardens.

Morley continues:

What won the schoolboy’s heart was that Gibbon in the course of the evening talked once or twice especially with him—‘the great historian was light and playful, suiting his matter to the capacity of the boy;—but it was done more suo; still he tapp’d his snuff-box,—still he smirk’d, and smiled; and rounded his periods with the same air of good breeding, as if he were conversing with men’. Colman, recollecting that talk more than fifty years later, added a pictorial touch: ‘His mouth, mellifluous as Plato’s, was a round hole, nearly in the centre of his visage.’

Yikes.

~

In shower-standing review of the dream-mold, a “mental chuckle” at the self-caught phrase “Tremendous overweening desire for a cigarette.” First (dream-actual) incidence of heading off to purchase a box of Marlboros in ten-plus years of “quitting smoking” (an endless processual thing, apparently). The alarum sound’d before the deed completed.

Criminy

2005-11-13T08:45:00.000-08:00

Dionysus on a boat surrounded by dolphins and grape-bearing vines. Attic Black-figure kylix by Exekias, c. 540-535 BCE

Apollo kylix, Delphi

Orpheus

Stitches

2005-11-12T15:17:00.000-08:00

Samuel Palmer, A Barn with a Mossy Roof, Shoreham

Painter Samuel Palmer (1805-1881):

I believe in my very heart . . . that all the very finest original pictures and topping things in nature have a certain quaintness by which they partially affect us—not the quaintness of bungling—the queer doing of a common thought—but a curiousness in their beauty—a salt on their tails by which the imagination catches hold on them while the sublime eagles and big birds of the French academy fly up far beyond the sphere of our affections—one of the very deepest sayings I have met with in Lord Bacon seems to me to be ‘There is no excellent beauty without some strangeness in the proportion.’

Palmer on Blake:

In him you saw at once the Maker, the Inventor; one of the few in any age: a fitting companion for Dante. He was energy itself, and shed around him a kindling influence; an atmosphere of life, full of the ideal. To walk with him in the country was to perceive the soul of beauty through the forms of matter . . . He was a man without a mask; his aim single, his path straightforwards, and his wants few; so he was free, noble, and happy . . . one of the few . . . who are not in some way or other ‘double-minded’ and inconsistent with themselves; one of the very few who cannot be depressed by neglect . . .

On integrity:

If we merely ask ourselves ‘What will people say of us?’ we are rotten at the core.

Irony: after Palmer’s death, the painter’s youngest son A. H.—lesson of integrity apparently unlearn’d—in 1909—burnt—in ’s words: “a great quantity of . . . father’s handiwork—handiwork which he himself valued more than that work which the public could understand. Knowing that no one would be able to make head or tail of what I burnt; I wished to save it from a more humiliating fate . . .” The conflagration included sketchbooks, notebooks, and original works, and “lasted for days.”

Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden, (1829)

Palmer on Blake’s Virgil wood engravings (1821):

“visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise; models of the exquisitest pitch of intense poetry . . . intense depth, solemnity, and vivid brilliancy . . . a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul, and gives complete and unreserved delight, unlike the gaudy daylight of this world. They are . . . the drawing aside of the fleshly curtain . . .

Palmer’s insistence that the materiality of the natural world (“nature . . . sprinkled and showered with a thousand pretty eyes and buds and spires and blossoms, gemm’d with dew, and . . . clad in living green”) manifests the divine (the “thousand repetitions of little forms, which are part of its own generic perfection.”) See Blake: “it is in Particulars that Wisdom consists & Happiness too.” See Ronald Johnson.

Sophie Brzeska by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1913)

Scoop’d up a copy of H. S. Ede’s Savage Messiah,—chock full of letters between Pound sculptor Henri Gaudier and Sophie Brzeska. It’s what looks like the 1971 edition (no doubt released against plausible winnings due to the contemporaneous Ken Russell film, a scandalously romantickal revery, in all ways perfect if one were nineteen and in love that year—or thereabouts—see the chance meeting in the British Museum reading room, the loud studio under the train tracks, the thief’d cemetery (tombstone) marble and the all-night industry to sculpt a smooth shallow torso for a collector-fop . . .) Publish’d by Outerbridge & Lazard, a curiosity. The other copy I own I fetch’d one glum Sunday over the old mountains of Appalachia, ferret’d out of a big barn full of Mennonites, sun-bonnet’d ones, somewhere shy of Harrisonburg, and publish’d by something like the Literary Guild. (Bibliographical contusions—and memory contusions—abound here.) I like the “Note to Readers,” to my knowledge, only Vladimir Mayakovsky outfit’d himself with a better slew of diminutives:

Henri Gaudier refers to himself in the correspondence (and is referred to) by the following nicknames: Pickna-Zosienka, Pik, Piknis, Pikus, Pikusurinia, and Pipik. The derivation of this name is obscure. Sophie Brzeska is referred to in the correspondence under the following array of nicknames: Madka, Maman, Mamuiska, Mamus, Mamusienica, Mamusin, Manuska, Matka, Matuelenka, Matuska, Sik, Sisik, Smarkoisowi, Zosienka, Zosienkosu, Zosik, Zosikmaly, Zosisik, Zosiskoiv, Zosiulenko, Zosiulo, Zosiumo, and Zosiuno . . .

Henri Gaudier-Brzeska

Baffle

2005-11-11T06:26:00.000-08:00

A Channel Baffle Chute

BA•FFLER. n.s.

[from baffle.]

He that puts to confusion, or defeats.

Experience, that great baffler of speculation, assures us the thing is too possible, and brings, in all ages, matter of fact to confute our suppositions.
Government of the Tongue.

Helen Keller Reading Raised Print, photograph’d by Marshall (1902)

Reading and talking to myself.

See Anne Mansfield Sullivan (ca.1867-1936): “Miss Keller does not as a rule read very fast, but she reads deliberately, not so much because she feels the words less quickly than we see them, as because it is one of her habits of mind to do things thoroughly and well. When a passage interests her, or she needs to remember it for some future use, she flutters it off swiftly on the fingers of her right hand. Sometimes this finger-play is unconscious. Miss Keller talks to herself absent-mindedly in the manual alphabet. When she is walking up or down the hall or along the veranda, her hands go flying along beside her like a confusion of birds’ wings.”

Franco Siron, “D’Aprés Picasso” (1947)

Thinking for no ascertainable reason of a band call’d “Your Mother” I used to listen to in some sweaty cave in the industrial wasteland of Ithaca, New York, down along Route 13. First heard a version of “Nobody Ever Call’d Pablo Picasso an Asshole” out of that band.

Truck

2005-11-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men):

Emma’s paper suitcase is lifted into the truck beside the bedsprings which will sustain the years on years of her cold, hopeless nights; she is helped in upon the hard seat beside the driver above the hot and floorless engine, her slippered feet propped askew at the ledges of that pit into the road; the engine snaps and coughs and catches and levels on a hot white moistureless and thin metal roar, and with a dreadful rending noise that brings up the mild heads of cattle a quarter of a mile away the truck rips itself loose from the flesh of the planed dirt of the yard and wrings into the road and chucks ahead, we waving, she waving, the black hat straight ahead, she turned away, not bearing it, our hands drooped, and we stand disconsolate and emptied in the sun; and all through these coming many hours while we slow move within the anchored roundures of our living, the hot, screaming, rattling, twenty-mile-an-hour traveling elongates steadily crawling, a lost, earnest, and frowning ant, westward on red roads and on white in the febrile sun above no support, suspended, sustained from falling by force alone of its outward growth, like that long and lithe incongruous slender runner a vine spends swiftly out on the vast blank wall of the earth, like snake’s head and slim stream feeling its way, to fix, and anchor, so far, so wide of the strong and stationed stalk: and that is Emma.

What I want’d, what a reach’d into the massy text to lurch up with: “we slow move within the anchored roundures of our living,” or maybe just “anchored rondures” is what stung me into seeing. And pulling it out brought up all the marvelous tough roots and rootlets, clung full of clods of dirt and debris and a sole earwig halved and eating its own hindquarters, that kind of recklessness that Agee’s prose romps in—I know no other like it, though I am remind’d somewhat of Marguerite Young’s ariatic whoosh in Harp Song for a Radical. I love how it is all so perfectly tuck’d between two “Emma”s. One Emma here in the rag-apron’d bosom of family, one there—“that is Emma”—that is, gone, nowhere, annihilated. All one hears at the end of that sentence is the roar of blood coursing in one’s own ears.

~

To note: a book title’d Poets Talk: Conversations with Robert Kroetsch, Daphne Marlatt, Erin Mouré, Dionne Brand, Marie Annharte Baker, Jeff Derksen and Fred Wah, by Pauline Butling and Susan Rudy (University of Alberta Press, 2005)

I thrash’d about in the Jeff Derksen pages, collect’d Derksen saying:

One of my poems—“Jerk” or “Jerk Jeff Derksen” . . . talks about wanting an art more complicated than The Gap. The Gap outsources for its labour. They can make T-shirts more cheaply in Malaysia than in Hong Kong, but making a shirt with a collar is cheaper in Hong Kong. So if you went to The Gap and spent a couple of hundred dollars on looking like a Gap person, then actually you’re wearing all the contradictions of capitalism on your body . . . you are kind of hauling this stuff around.

Which made me think of Gap nothing, though it did make me think of “flarf” (and similar “sampling” techniques) as a kind of outsourcing, a “making cheaply.” Alors, what “stuff” exactly do “flarf” products “haul around”?

And (collect’d, I did) the following parenthetical factoid (just the kind of thing I love) in Derksen remarks regarding a poem call’d “Neighbourhood”:

Then I put the square brackets (in the Vancouver tradition of using square brackets, like Kevin Davies’ Pause Button) as kind of an authorial intrusion into the poem:
. . .
david did idle lentils
slug luggage gage
genuflect ectomorph physical [more 1970s
for me] meal lame me . . .

Follow’d by a mischievous remark: “Because I was a copyeditor and a proofreader I use all the punctuation in the standard forms. So the square bracket is the authorial or editorial intrusion into a text.”

And: an exchange with Pauline Butling regarding a Steve McCaffery comment that “the demise of the phenomenological voice is what these poems provide us with.” To Butling’s question whether the comment makes sense to him, Derksen says:

Well contextually it does. It was written in 1990 or something like that when there was a struggle going on between writing communities—the refigured subject that Language poets and post-language writing were trying to construct, and the more self-assured or stable phenomenological subject, the unified or stable subject.

Pauline: Is “the phenomenological self” unified and stable? I wonder if he was referring to voiced poetry.

Jeff: Yes, I think so. The tension is between a poetics of speech and what’s supposed to be the great rupture that initiates the Language poets, the “I hate speech” (“On Speech”) essay by Robert Grenier. But one of the most stable phenomenological subjects I can think of is Ron Silliman in his big project, Alphabet. So this question was worked out antagonistically in a discourse of poetics, but not so in the poetry.

No comment. I love the sheer bafflement of origin stories. See baffle.

Interrupt’d

2005-11-09T04:37:00.000-08:00

Stacks serendipity. Bolt’d up, as I am liable to, to hie myself into the stacks in search of James Agee (it’s a desire implacable that I suffer, an itch unscratch’d, cannot “settle” before gathering a small heap of somebody’s words, oddly, unknowing how it’s trigger’d, how it’s suddenly Agee, and not Willa Cather). So: stacks confront’d, I pull down a copy of the Letters of James Agee to Father Flye (and think now it must’ve had something to do with Merton, that I should light out for Agee’s particular territory, bad boy religiosos both, one Catholic, one Episcopalian, only one of whom’ll straighten “up.”)

[Answer the ’phone, knowing it’s my son, with a deprecatingly perfervid “Hynyah!”—an all-purpose karate chop of a greeting—mostly because I’m addled by my one post-work (regimen) beer and no grits, and a tiny voice surround’d by deep sea creatures with light’d weed-resemblant appendages, creatures who bark and mutter, says “Khalid?”]

[—Not in Kansas anymore, Toto, you reprobate, you recidivist, you hash!]

[A second caller—identifiably not the first, though expect’d—calls with a message that Edgar Knows Publishing would like me to prendre un pot with them. At my confusion, I am deliver’d the question: “Have you had a recent brainwash or something?” Ah, offspring! Sprung off th’imical boat!]

Alors. Stacks. Pulling down the Father Flye epistle-exchange, out sails a cardlet, white, and flops a series of sags in the air all the way to the pediment. Chancy word-endeavor laying it all on the line. Here’s what it read:

And the rhyming hills complained. In the noontime stillness,
Thawing our frozen beans at the raw face of a fire,
We heard the frost-bound tree-boles booming like cannon,
A wooden thunder, snapping the chains of frost.

Those were the last years of the Agrarian City
City of swapped labor
Communitas
Circle of warmth and work
Frontier’s end and last wood-chopping bee
The last collectivity stamping its feet in the cold.

Thomas McGrath
Letter to an Imaginary Friend

And turning to the mark’d page, how fleet Agee is, with perception and lasso to bring it sturdily down. A paragraph out of an April 20, 1927 letter (Exeter, New Hampshire):

I’ve read very little until the past two weeks. In that time I’ve read Manhattan Transfer, by John Dos Passos. It’s an unalleviatedly filthy book; when it’s bellyful of sexual fifth it descends to coal-dust and orange-peels. But it’s very cleverly done. I hate mere cleverness, so I’m glad to think there’s more than that to it—he’s really a marvelous writer, and the novel is built in an entirely new way. Also, I think for some reason that he writes filth sincerely disbelieving in the existence of anything else—that he’s not a cheap hack-writer, writing Pay Dirt. And the book is full of lovely descriptions—passages of poetry as fine as any I know for color and beauty alone. Then I’ve read The Plutocrats by Tarkington. It’s rather thin and tepid, but a delightful antidote for the more rabid and intolerant parts of Sinclair Lewis’ books. The idea is to glorify Babbitt, to set him up as a barbaric giant Carthaginian—and at the same time to make rather small and foolish the people who belittle him. I thought Lewis had done it sufficiently in Babbitt; but this is much fairer. But by no means as great a book, since its very publication depends on the writing of Babbitt. I’ve today begun to read An American Tragedy, which seems rather fine, in spite of stormy criticism. Dreiser’s English is bum, yet it has a peculiar beauty and excellence. You feel you’re reading a rather inadequate translation of a very great foreign novel—Russian, probably. He’s horribly obvious, and has no humor. But this dullness is a relief from the heady brilliance of Dos Passos or Lewis—and he has a tenderness, a love for his character, that rarely slobbers and is usually strong and fine.

Incredible sleights of hand there. Vague thinking if anybody reads Dos Passos now, I mean—for formal reasons. Tarkington’s Penrod things quaintly satisfy’d my youth, Lewis serves (still?) to nurture the social consciences of adolescents, and Dreiser, whom I read as a long-hair’d lad and complain’d mightily to my blonde companion of that tragic tic of “And yet—”? “Dreiser’s English is bum.”

Happy, too, with the formula—A is by no means as great a book, since its very publication depends on the writing of C. Maybe a little more of that kind of thing’d cut the burgeoning of derivatives (write-through, homage, thievery, gasp) to a trickle.

Walker Evans’s “Washroom and Dining Area of Burroughs’s Home” (1936)

Another sighting of the Spicerean desire for words to become things, real lemons rampant! Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men):

If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs; the rest would be fragments of cloth, bits of cotton, lumps of earth, records of speech, pieces of wood and iron, phials of odors, plates of food and of excrement. Booksellers would consider it quite a novelty; critics would murmur, yes, but is it art; and I could trust a majority of you to use it as you would a parlor game.

~

Morning. A quash’d moment of mannerist ecstasy. Is mannerism only anticipatory to the next period style? That is, today’s mannerism, garish and irredentist, ’ll be tomorrow’s heap of reap-all precursory? Blink, blink, blink. Make it uncanny, make it undeniable, make it of tincture of hysteria. Someone else (the future) ’ll “smooth” the edges . . .

Fuss

2005-11-08T04:19:00.000-08:00

Merton shooting.

The late James Laughlin in Byways, the book of memoirs collect’d in 2005:

When I first went down
To Kentucky to meet Merton
At Gethsemani, his monastery
Near Bardstown, the abbot
Had invited me for a visit
After I’d published Thirty Poems,
I was expecting gloom and obsession,
Grouchy old monks ponderous
In penitence, glaring through
Their sanctity . . . how wrong I was!
To be sure, the background
Was not prepossessing: a drab
Countryside, scrubby trees,
Dry fields, not verdant,
Shacks and billboards along the
Highway; the buildings
Of the compound behind
Its walls monstrously ugly,
Gray stone blocks set square
Without any architectural
Distinction, the spire
Of the church a tin spike
Poking up at the sky,
Over the gateway, in forbidding
Black letters PAX INTRANTIBUS,
It could have been a prison . . .
How wrong I had been about the inhabitants!
These brothers and monks
Were warriors of joy.
Happy and friendly, laughing
And joking, rejoicing in the
Hard life of work and prayer,
Seven services a day from Vigils
In the dark at 3:15 A.M. through
Lauds, Terce, Sext, None,
Vespers and Compline in the dusk,
These chantings of supplication
For the whole world, even infidels
Not just for the monks.
Such brightness, lux in aeternitate . . .

The Guy Davenport penn’d Preface notes:

These carefully crafted lines, unornamented with rhyme and with an intuited prosody as flexible as speech, are not prose sliced up to look like poetry. They are in what should be known as The American Plain Style, Protestant and guileless, as useful to Kenneth Rexroth and Louis Zukofsky as to R. Buckminster Fuller, who wrote his Untitled Epic Poem on the History of Industrialization in it.

Which might conceivably serve to make my admiration of th’alignment of, say, spire and spike in the lines quoted, or the Bunting din of stone blocks set square look like gold-digging, or lily-guilding, but who cares? Further along Davenport claims that a “solid education (New England prep school, Harvard, and erotic conquests rivaling Byron and Casanova) steered him toward imaginative writing, at a great distance from blast furnaces,” and details how a “1538 Latin Homer by Andreas Divus was stolen, together with the briefcase it was in, and his annotated Cantos, when he was at a urinal in Pennsylvania Station on his way to lecture at Yale.”

For some years in my youth, I recall, I confused (interchangeable the two) Thomas Merton and Tom Dooley. Which one died of plugging in an electric fan in Thailand (presumably known then by the name of Siam?)

Han-shan and Shih-te by Tensho Shubun, Japan, mid 15th century.

Isn’t it always the least impeccable narcissist who attempts (always) to hide? Is Thomas Pynchon a narcissist? Is Han Shan? Is Emily Dickinson? What marks narcissism’s pincer movement—hiding and exulting—entry into the modern temper? Any paparazzi diary’ll spell it out: no sport in the self-evident. I rather liked the way some New York Times senior photography editor sent a brusque (read rude) note my way asking where I’d scored the Pynchon photograph I’d point’d at— Cowabunga! I forward’d it to my brother asking if he’d shot that one or’d I. And instruct’d th’editor to use the damn Google machine.

Identifiably Coelenterate (jellyfish)

Coleridge in February 1805 (soddingly inimical at pulling a baseline neologism—the “stuff” of life—out of ’s ear, or forking over an image seemingly irrepressible, apt, and ept):

Now how to get back, having thus belabyrinthed myself in these most parenthetical parentheses? Cut thro’ at once, & now say in half a dozen a Lines what a half a dozen Lines would have enabled me to say at the very beginning / but my Thoughts, my Pocket-book Thoughts at least, moved like a pregnant Polypus in sprouting Time, clung all over with young Polypi each of which is to be a thing of itself—and every motion out springs a new Twig of Jelly-Life /—

Diving into the Notebooks, meaning (is like): “‘Ah daddy, I wanna stay drunk many days’ / on the poetry of a new friend / my life held precariously in the seeing / hands of others, their and my impossibilities.” That old thing revivifiably there.

Suss’d

2005-11-07T04:59:00.000-08:00

(Peter Culley point’d out the photograph and “The complete works of W. N. P. Barbellion (1889-1919)” here.)

Cold. Skittish in headband for the bicycle skitter in. Barbellion’s got moments of existential naught worthy of Sartre. Here, (March 8th, 1915):

On the top of an empty omnibus to-day I cast my eye for a second at a little heap of dirty used-up ’bus tickets collected by chance up in one corner. The sight of them unnerved me. For a moment I felt almost physically sick. This feeling was so instantaneous that it was some time later that I discovered the cause of it, when I began to reflect upon all the implications which the little heap of tickets sent ramifying through the eye to the brain—the number of persons, for example, that daily boarded this vehicle, each one bent on his little project, making use of the ’bus, then passing out of it again; the number of miles the ’bus traversed each day, the number of ’buses “honking” through the streets and all this cataract of London life. My nerves throbbed with the ache of it all. In London even the names over the shop windows scuffle and fight with one another and with you as you pass; advertisements on hoardings, walls, windows, scream at you, wheedle you, interrogate, advise, suggest. At all times the ear catches fragments of conversation as the crowds pass along the streets, or the trample of their footsteps as they rush up and down wooden stairways to the trains—both above ground and below ground—a maelstrom of activity.

Middle of the Great War, the young carrot-top Pound skulking about, reaping bitterness. Modernism about to forego trying to digest modernity in any “meaningful” way.

George “Smitty” Smith, Edward “Sonny” Bivins, Winfred “Blue” Lovett, Kenneth Kelly and Richard Taylor of The Manhattans.)

Saturnine

2005-11-06T13:33:00.000-08:00

Reading W. N. P. Barbellion’s The Journal of a Disappointed Man. Barbellion a young-dying British naturalist, pseudonym of one Bruce Frederick Cummings, dead apparently at the age of twenty-eight on the thirty-first of December, 1919. Author of, besides the Journal, a handful of essays (“The Passion for Perpetuation” is one), another near-dozen of essays in natural history (“Rousseau as Botanist,” “The Scarabee Monographed,” “Curious Facts in the Geographical Distribution of British Newts”—pertaining to the latter, there’s a journal report of B.’s holding a newt by the tail and hearing it emit a tiny squeak, trim spooky salience in a species supposed mute), and a couple short stories (“How Tom Snored on His Bridal Night”).

A sample (1907):

June 5.

A half-an-hour of to-day I spent in a punt under a copper beech out of the pouring rain listening to Lady ____’s gamekeeper at A____ talk about beasts and local politics—just after a visit of inspection to the Heronry in the firs on the island in the middle of the Lake. It was delightful to hear him describing a Heron killing an Eel with “a dap on the niddick,” helping out the figure with a pat on the nape of his thick bull neck.

And (1911):

February 13.

Feel like a piece of drawn threadwork, or an undeveloped negative, or a jelly fish on stilts, or a sloppy tadpole, or a weevil in a nut, or a spitchcocked eel. In other words and in short—ill.

Numerous tinier pleasures: the lady “with a tiny voice like the noise of a fretsaw,” or another’s—“voice piano to pianissimo, her conversation breaks off in thrilling aposiopoeses.”

Cover cotch’d at Soul Shower.

Finish’d Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. And cued up a salutary groove of The Manhattans—“I’ll Never Find Another (Find Another Like You).” Only to weigh “I see you holding hands with a guy of a different face, yeah” in the meagre pans of my astonishment (we’re talking, aren’t we, about music with only the merest trace of irony allow’d, no?) What kind of lingo is that, if not consciously pointing to race?

A word Dr. Johnson apparently overlook’d, though the ubiquitous Lydgate’s got it crucify’d quite rosily, and a couple of Shakespeare’s running dogs got it, too:

saturnine, a. and n.

A. adj.

1. a. Astrol. Born under or affected by the influence of the planet. b. Hence (in later use without allusion to the primary sense), sluggish, cold, and gloomy in temperament.

Saturnine mount, in Palmistry = Mons Saturni: see MONS.

1433 Lydgate, “This cursid Bern, enuyous and riht fals, / And of complexioun verray saturnyne.” 1587 Greene, “The Saturnine temperature is necessarie to dry vp the superfluities of the sanguine constitution.” 1599 Nashe, “Saturnine heauy headed blunderers.”

Oubliette

2005-11-05T05:17:00.000-08:00

Charged with a sleek memory of G. enamour’d by the word oubliette. She reading Hugo’s Notre Dame de Paris. Freely: little hiding place wherein, formerly, one shut up individuals condemn’d to life imprisonment, or individuals one want’d to get rid of. Paris, circa 1972. Oublier meaning to forget.

Is it applicable to challenge th’efficacy of such word root and derive on the grounds a Sontag character (The Benefactor) challenges that of “the value of myth itself: ‘Such tales are just a sop for the credulous, picturesque concessions to those who cannot stand the shock of a naked idea.’” One is immensely attract’d to that “naked idea” without the least (cloth’d or not) notion of what it’d possibly “look” like. The “naked idea” is not invisible, it is inexistent.

Against the ploddingness of some of Pound, say, that underslung desire for “A set of cubby holes whereinto one can sort one’s values and make them into a schema”—always an impulse to be quash’d—Pound himself balances a sassy recklessness (what makes him palatable): “The gent. reader is warned that I shall now devote several pages to an analysis (of a sort) of the Nichomachean treatise. Those in search of daisies and scintillations had better skip the next pages.”

When I “had” about thirteen years (a Manichean age), my ambition drove me to announce plans for a magazine call’d Daisies & Demons. Long hours pass’d in design of a possible cover, entwine of flat flower and flat horn’d devil physiognomy.

Becloud’d

2005-11-04T07:17:00.000-08:00

Susan Sontag (by Annie Leibovitz)

Sontag (The Benefactor):

. . . the appetite for thinking must be regulated, as all sensible people know, for it may stifle one’s life. I was more fortunate than most in that, in my youth, I had no settled ambitions, no tenacious habits, no ready opinions which I would have to sacrifice to thought. My life was my own: it was not dismembered into work and leisure, family and pleasure, duty and passion. Still I held back at first—keeping myself free of unnecessary entanglements, seeking the company of those whom I understood and therefore could not be seduced by, yet not daring to follow my inclinations toward solitary thought to their conclusion.

Solomon Burke

Scuffling about I uncover’d Village Voice’d remarks about Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude made by Robert Christgau—he calls it “the finest rock and roll novel since (or before) The Commitments,” (that Roddy Doyle thing I didn’t read) in the course of noting “Lethem's two-CD, not-for-sale tribute to the music [the novel’s main character Dylan] Ebdus grew up to.”

Funny, I never once thought of the book as a “rock and roll novel.” I thought Mark Twain, childhood and race. Mostly race, undauntedly and excellently so. Though: isn’t rock and roll (and all its variants) mostly about race anyhow. Isn’t the music “industry,” like the fashion “industry”, scored precisely by race (and class) thievery? The source of new music (styles) coming deftly “up” out of the black community, gradually “whiten’d” for mass consumption? New meaning get put (even) to those “angelheaded hipsters” “dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix”—it’s that search for the (authentic) commodifiably new, no?

Ezra Pound (Guide to Kulchur). [In the Confucian “Analects,” talk of the “six becloudings”]:

The love of firmness without the love of learning, whereof the beclouding conduces to extravagant conduct.
. . . in the ideogram called “beclouding” we find confusion, an overgrowing with vegetation . . . “Extravagant conduct” is shown in a dog pawing a king or trying to lick the king’s ear, which is said to mean a dog wanting to rule.

A lot of that is visible in the poetry precincts, no? In the poetry “industry”?

Stench

2005-11-03T06:57:00.000-08:00

“A Sharpshooter's Last Sleep,” photograph’d by Alexander Gardner, at Gettysburg, Pa. in the “Devil’s Den,” July 1863

~

SMUTCH CITY BREAKDOWN

Some kind of unclad skank
fortifying going down in th’air

today, whiffs of the brutal
cafeteria, John Marzetti leftovers, that

and exhaust squirt, and blood
cakes. “The only thing we

knew for sure about Henry
Porter is that ’s name

wasn't Henry Porter.” Oh, don’t
start that again, lost somewhere

in the Commandrine lunch bucket,
Podunk sharpshooter in one hand.

There I could never be
a boy cut of whole cloth

mental voltage, “logical, for use,”
I have wasted my life.

~

The book to the floor, that was the first heave.

Wyndham Lewis, “Ezra Pound” (1939), Tate Gallery, London

Fossicking the Pound’s Guide to Kulchur (E.P. in groan and sepulchre didst give me that word “fossick,” I like to think it means digging oneself into a big hole):

Certain colours exist in nature though great painters have striven vainly, and though the colour film is not yet perfected. Truth is not untrue’d by reason of our failing to fix it on paper. Certain objects are communicable to a man or woman only “with proper lighting”, they are perceptible in our own minds only with proper “lighting”, fitfully and by instants.

Next which somebody’s writ near imperceptibly, in pencil—“Asshole time.” Though under the smutch of my gaze I see it more properly says—“Absolute truth.”

Indefatigable Paul Valéry says: “I do not know whence I derive this very lively sense of the arbitrary. Have I always had it, or have I acquired it?” Or in the year of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus he addresses th’Académic Française (on th’occasion of ’s “ascension”), only to compare “those writers who relieve us of the burden of thought and who dextrously weave a luminous veil over the complexity of things . . .” against those “others, whose existence must be deplored, who have elected to strike out in the opposite direction. They have placed toil of the mind in the way of its pleasures. They offer us riddles. Such creatures are inhuman.”

~

The head against the wall, that was the second heave.

Shanghai’d

2005-11-02T05:01:00.001-08:00

Claude Aspère (The Sayings of Claude Aspère):

Art is vomit, uncontainable, trajectory’d, hurried up by fever. Think only to the projectile vomiting of children and addicts to ascertain its “naturalness” in the cosmick tremelo of all things. Art is a ridding, no more. To scoop forth another man’s vomit and label it parcel of one’s own: that is not art. One’d as well do to collect scabs and make a mosaickal history of this sad world. Yea, to fall to the earth dog-like and purge oneself well, that is the function of art.

~

Shanghai’d by lexickal impertinences out of Johnson's Dictionary:

VO•MITORY. adj.
[vomitoire, Fr. vomitorius, Lat.]

Procuring vomits; emetick.

Since regulus of stibium, or glass of antimony, will communicate to water or wine a purging or vomitory operation, yet the body itself, after iterated infusions, abates not virtue or weight.
Brown’s Vulgar Errours.

Some have vomited up such bodies as these, namely, thick, short, blunt pins, which, by straining, they vomit up again, or by taking vomitories privately.
Harvey on Consumptions.

~

To VO•MIT. v.n.
[vomo, Latin.]

To cast up the contents of the stomach.

The dog, when he is sick at the stomach, knows his cure, falls to his grass, vomits, and is well.
More.

~

To VO•MIT. v.a.
[vomir, Fr.]

1. To throw up from the stomach: often with up or out.

As though some world unknown,
By pamp’red nature’s store too prodigally fed,
And surfeiting therewith, her surcrease vomited.
Drayton.

Vomiting is of use, when the foulness of the stomach requires it.
Wiseman’s Surgery.

2. To throw up with violence from any hollow.

Or O.E.D.’d (oedevotee, oedevious, oedelicious, oedamn’d):

shanghai, v.
1. trans. a. Naut. slang (orig. U.S.). To drug or otherwise render insensible, and ship on board a vessel wanting hands.

1871 N.Y. Tribune 1 Mar. (Schele de Vere Americanisms, p. 347), And before that time they would have been drugged, shanghaied, and taken away from all means of making complaint.

1887 S. SAMUELS Forecastle to Cabin 46 To be carried or forced on board of a ship in this manner is what is termed in sailor parlance being shanghaied.

1909 Chamb. Jrnl. July 440/2, I have got the Grand Duke pretty well shanghaied.

~

That mistake of letting a post-repast shut-eye go late, only to find oneself buzzing with wakefulness at midnight. Scoot’d through more of The Fortress of Solitude, with no inclination to collect tidbits, though I think it terrific. Up to the mid-part, a dozen or so pages call’d Liner Note between the childhood chapters of Underberg and the (presumably) chronologically distant chapters of Prisonaires. Thinking how it thus mimicks the structure of both Sula and To the Lighthouse. And what’s the notorious sentence or two in Flaubert’s Sentimental Education that “solves” the problem of time’s passage? “They _________’d, they travelled.” (Revery of reading that book in Albany, adhered to the dirty porch-couch one whole slayingly hot summer. Who would’ve thunk that that skimming the flat pancake of my brain’s stone off a paragraph I’d been instruct’d to see as instructive would . . . oh forget it.)

Valéry (Monsieur Teste):

The words I and Me point to our central ignorance . . . and evoke it.
It is impossible to think “of oneself” otherwise than in one particular and particularly sensitive way.
Observation: It happens that the knowing-knowledge moment (which is a kind of act) may be remarkably meaningless . . .

Yes, Oaf

2005-11-01T04:52:00.000-08:00

Betwixt tossing candy’d fobs at the Edvard Munch Scream-outfit’d that troop’d by, I fossick’d the pages of a distill’d book of Coleridge’s Notebooks. There’s a man who proceed’d regularly by huge unchewable mouthfuls, ambition itself caught in the craw. What’s stunning is that he complete’d anything in the roil of intent, lists of lists. I like the oddities:

Bright Reflections in the Canals of the blue & green Vitriol Bottles in the Druggist’s shops in London.
Mere plictri-plactri—

Very fond of Vegetables, particularly Bacon & Peas. Bacon & Broad Beans. —

Poetry without egotism comparatively uninteresting —
Mem. Write an Ode to Meat & Drink

A dunghill at a distance sometimes smells like musk, & a dead dog like elder-flowers. —

On a better-most sort of Remark of Dr Johnson’s recorded by Boswell —
a notable Flea-skip for so grave a Bug.

Injury Scotchmen have done our Language —

What a beautiful Thing urine is, in a Pot, brown yellow, transpicuous, the Image, diamond shaped of the Candle in it, especially, as it now appeared, I having emptied the Snuffers into it, & the Snuff floating about, & painting all-shaped Shadows on the Bottom.

Received: No: A Journal of the Arts, No. 4 (2005), edited by Deb Klowden and Ben Lerner ($12, 39 West 29th St. 11A, New York, New York 10001) Cover by Che Chen.

Writings by Robin Blaser, Beth Anderson, Cyrus Console, Robert Creeley, Russell Edson, James McCorkle, Cole Swenson, Peter Gizzi, Mary Jo Bang, Clark Coolidge, Barbara Guest, David Shapiro, Erin Moure, John Yau, Carla Harryman, Ken Irby, Marjorie Welish, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Renee Gladman, Pier Paolo Pasolini (translated by Michelle Cliff), Charles Baudelaire (translated by Keith Waldrop), Ann Lauterbach, David Perry, and Charles Bernstein.

Paintings by Marjorie Welish.

Essays by Forrest Gander (on Maria Negroni), Arthur Danto (on Philip Guston), Michael Clune (on Kevin Davies’s Lateral Argument), Lisa Jarnot (on Robert Duncan), and Ben Lerner and Aaron Kunin in dialogue (on Marjorie Welish).

Philip Guston, “Outskirts”

One immediate delight: the Danto sketch on mandarinism / authenticity in the case of Philip Guston’s exhibition of “notoriously oafish pictures of Klansmen in the Marlborough Gallery in 1970,” resulting in “a major outcry.” “‘It was as though I had left the Church,’ [Guston] said in a talk he gave in 1978. ‘I was excommunicated for a while.’ Among painters, only de Kooning, who had made a comparable but somehow far less incendiary gesture in 1953 in showing his great Woman paintings at the Janis gallery, supported what Guston had done. The Women, though figural, were built up of slashes of pigment, effectively like an Abstract Expressionist canvas. But Guston’s hooded figures were like comic strip characters in Mutt and Jeff.”

And: “All the great Abstract Expressionists discovered a signature style. Guston’s was thought mandarin because it did not seem as if it came from the guts, which was the favored organ of artistic authenticity in that era.”

Danto argues for something like a gradual “apostasy,” quoting remarks Guston made at “a panel on the future of abstraction, held at the Museum of Modern Art in 1960”:

There is something ridiculous and miserly in the myth we inherit from abstract art: that painting is autonomous, pure, and for itself—therefore we habitually analyze its ingredients and define its limits. But painting is “impure.” It is the adjustment of “impurities” which forces its continuity. We are image-makers and image-ridden.

And breezing that against so many poèsies pures, in the issue of No at hand, frankly, what I long for (in the “scene” generally) is more oafishness. Not the recombinant superior gleaming machine-oafishness of flarf-generators, but the droopy drawers, stumbled-down, anything goes inheritors of the Biotherm-esque O’Hara, Berryman’s big mess, and Ammons’s barrages of garbage. Or Bernadette Mayer’s dishevel’d junkyard dog opus, or Alice Notley’s sass in the filigree. Ain’t there a chill despotic cleanliness, a shard-preciosity, all around now? More splendid piss-burn and rags and jags! More guffaw and bêtises! More spilt Willies!

Philip Guston, “The Studio” (1969)

Brute

2005-10-31T05:47:00.000-08:00

Scoot’d through the first hundred or so pages of Jonathan Lethem’s The Fortress of Solitude. Spaldeen, play’d in the Brooklyn streets with a pink-color’d rubber ball. Is that a bastardization of Spalding? The ball manufactory? The way Seeburg juke boxes in the south got call’d Seabirds?

Peter Gizzi

Oobleck, a Suess goo. Relationship to o.blek, a journal of the language arts?

(Was it Ken Fifer, whose house in Bethlehem, Pa. burn’d down, who wrote a poem call’d “Me Being Stupid”? I always rather liked that.)

Poking around in a newish Robert Walser thing, Speaking to the Rose: Writings, 1912-1932, translated by Christopher Middleton. Which includes “fourteen translations from what has come to be called the ‘pencil area,’ or ‘Bleistiftgebiet.’

“The ‘pencil area’ was for a long time thought to be a corpus hermeticum, closed to the mortal mind because composed in an entirely private cipher. It was by matching certain strips of script to extant published texts that Jochen Greven first showed that the cipher had been all along an adroitly, if most idiosyncratically, abbreviated script. The 526 packages of this writing now fill 2,000 pages in the six volumes of Aus dem Bleistiftgebiet, 1985-2000, edited by the meticulous decipherers Bernard Echte and Werner Morlang. So here was a real trouvaille: sometime even before 1924 or 1925, Walser had begun to pencil, on the backs of calendars, on blank spaces offered by rejection slips, telegrams, bank statements, and other sorts of used stationery, an immense reserve of stories, feuilletons, sketches, improvisations, from which to extract, at will, fair copies.”

(It’s possible, one thinks, that items—often writing-saturated—gather’d in places like the Prinzhorn-Collection, or the Musée de l’Art Brut in Lausanne, be codify’d awaiting decipherment.)

Walser: “It can so happen that, for example, horses are unduly put to work, because they cannot speak and thus cannot be asked. They are unable to negotiate. No horse can be asked for its opinion, for nature has denied it the ability to pronounce one. It is altogether disgusting the way human beings do not refuse such delicacies as frogs’ legs . . .” Beginning to spiral off into a consideration of war, with the line “who smiles a fine snaky rhetoric out of his mouth,” and eventually ending with the sentence: “With prayer it is certainly not a matter of succeeding, or accomplishing something useful, but first and foremost of its being beautiful.”

~

Guffaw’d at midnight, reading about Lethem’s nerd white boys, Arthur Lomb and Dylan Ebdus. Arthur, the nerdier, trying to talk the talk: “‘Man, that one guy was trying to act real scary, but I could see his face, he looked like a baby, his lips were all blubbery. Yo, I probly could of taken him if you hadn’t come out just then. Lucky for him I’d say, yo.’ Arthur’s careful slurring of certain words, in contrast to his sharply nerdish pronunciation elsewhere, is wincingly obvious to Dylan, who wonders why Mingus doesn’t just smack him upside the head and command him to stop . . . Arthur turns to Dylan instead. ‘What you think, we could of taken them, yo?’
‘Don’t yo me,’ said Dylan.”

Fort

2005-10-30T15:18:00.000-08:00

Finish’d The Volcano Lover.

“Passion for S . . . was vehemence, aggression. What he could not understand is a passion that finds happiness in a retreat from vehemence, which makes one self-withdrawn. Like the passion of the collector.”

“Because an image can show only a moment, the painter or sculptor must choose the moment that presents what the viewer most needs to know and feel about the subject.
“But what does the viewer need to know and feel?”

“. . . the reigning cliché about the achievement of classical art: that it showed suffering with decorum, dignity in the midst of horror . . . ‘As the bottom of the sea lies peaceful beneath a foaming surface,’ Winckelmann wrote, evoking the standard offered by the Laocoön, ‘so a great soul remains calm amid the strife of passions.”

(The Winckelmann who was murder’d, not unlike Pasolini, by one of ’s lovers.)

The Portland Vase (Copy)

“One February mid-afternoon in 1845, a young man of nineteen entered the British Museum, went directly to the unguarded room where the Portland Vase, one of the museum’s most valuable and celebrated holdings since its deposit on loan by the Fourth Duke of Portland in 1810, was kept in a glass case, picked up what was later described as “a curiosity in sculpture,” and started beating the vase . . .
“The malefactor, discovered to be an Irish dainty student who had dropped out of Trinity College after a few weeks’ study . . . said that he was drunk . . . or that he was suffering from a kind of nervous excitement, a continual fear of everything he saw . . . or that he heard voices telling him to do it . . . or that he envied the maker of the vase . . . or that he had found himself aroused by the figure of Thetis, recumbent, awaiting her bridegroom . . . or that he thought the vase’s depiction of erotic longing a sacrilege, an offense to Christian morals . . . or that he couldn’t stand to see such a beautiful thing be so admired while he was poor and lonely and unsuccessful. The usual reasons given for destroying objects of incalculable value, admired by everyone. These are always stories of a haunting. Self-defined outcasts and solitaries, almost always men, begin to be haunted . . . The ravishing object is there. The object is provoking them. The object is insolent. The object is, ah, worst of all, indifferent.”

The Cavaliere, that is, th’aristocrat: “The first principle of the science of felicity is not to succumb to indignation or self-pity.” (A man unable to speak the word happiness.)

The five renamed months of the short-lived Republic in Naples: “Piovoso (rainy), Ventoso (windy), Germile (budding), Fiorile (flowering), and Pratile (meadowed) . . .”

Cartolina francobollo annullo postale: a memoria del 1779 (Commemorative stamp).

Sontag offers the last word to Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, publisher of the principal newspaper of the Republic, executed: “I was born into that world, I belonged to that class, I experienced the charms of that very agreeable life, I rejoiced in its unlimited vistas of knowledge and skill. How naturally human being s adapt to abjection, to lies, and to unearned prerogatives. Those whom birth or appropriate forms of ambition have placed inside the circle of privilege would have to be dedicated misfits—disablingly sanctimonious or bent on self-deprivation—not to enjoy themselves. But those whom birth or revolt have cast outside, where most beings on this earth live, would have to be obtuse or slavish in temperament not to see how disgraceful it is that so few monopolize both wealth and refinement, and inflict such suffering on others.”

And: “I cannot forgive those who did not care about more than their own glory or well-being. They thought they were civilized. They were despicable. Damn them all.”

Kid

2005-10-29T09:03:00.000-07:00

Most refreshing reading attended: Kate DiCamillo reading a few chapters of her newest: Mercy Watson to the Rescue. Mercy is a pig. No windbag introduction full of flattery, self-flattery, and lies. No third party digs. No self-important asides by the Q & A crowd (though one self-identify’d “teacher” did hint at possible fraud in DiCamillo’s notion of writing somewhat blindly, that is, WITHOUT AN OUTLINE). No fashion-preening by the crowd, no putting on the trappings of the indigent, the trappings of the crazed. Attention honed to the point of one boy—following along in the book—’s blurting out “Crack!” just when “Crack!” happen’d. DiCamillo recount’d rather ruefully how, after a twenties spent sitting in coffeehouses in a black turtleneck, she determine’d to write two pages a day (“That’s a novel a year”) and ’s stuck to it. Recount’d her dead-end job history: at Disney, an eight-hour day of saying, “Look down here, look at your feet.”

Latest most favour’d blog: Aphidhog’s Georgia Sam. (“He had a bloody nose.”) A free-floating terror-humoresque attach’d to a juicy succulent or a poet’s feedbag somewhere in the British Isles.

Revery-report: Trying to do the layout (involving a piece of posterboard the size of two storefronts, text blocks of roughly one storefront-dimension each, an intermittently taut piece of twine stretch’d out by two cowboys, numerous ladder-straddling and roof-perching helpers, me on a ladder with a hammer and a mouthful of tacks) for what I suppose one’d call the elephant (wooly mammoth?) edition of Ted Berrigan’s Collected. Nobody’d work together, everything kept coming up crooked. All of it taking place against the pots and pans and sundries-hung façade of a “Wild West” general store.

And, intermingle’d with th’above, the tiniest conversation. Ange Mlinko: “You put my constellation up,” pointing to a perfect row of four stars with another, a fifth, just akilter. Me: “Yeah, what a terrific alignment.” (So Starred Wire gets acclaim’d by the dream-mould.)

T. E. Hulme, attaining the rank of Spicerean real lemon in “Notes on Language and Style”:

It is seeing real clay, that men in agony worked with, that gives pleasure. To read a book which is real clay moulded by fingers that had to mould something, or they would clutch the throat of their maddened author. No flowing on of words, but tightly clutched tense fingers leaving marks in the clay. These are the only books that matter—and where are they to be found?

And, some stray lines:

[Defining language.] Large clumsy instrument. Language does not naturally come with meaning. Ten different ways of forming the same sentence. Any style will do to get the meaning down . . .

[Under Prose.] A sentence and a worm are the most stupid of animals and the most difficult to teach tricks. Tendency to crawl along requires genius, music to make them stand up (snake charmer).

[Earlier.] The poet makes it stand on end and hit you.

[Last remark.] All theories as toys.

Swing

2005-10-28T06:55:00.000-07:00

Out late listening to Mark O’Connor in a “hot swing” Django Reinhardt / Stéphane Grappelli configuration: Jon Burr (bass), Bryan Sutton (guitar), Howard Alden (seven string guitar) and Roberta Gambarini (vocals). Mostly I admired the way the bassist threw himself like a rag doll dangling down off the top of th’upright, and work’d ’s mouth as if it were full of jawbreakers. That and Roberta Gambarini’s scat-quotations of Sonny Stitt, Dizzy Gillespie and Sonny Rollins renditions of “On the Sunny Side of the Street.” Incroyable.

Stumbled into a little book publish’d by Archipelago Books, Julio Cortázar’s Diary of Andrés Fava, translated by Anne McLean:

Poetry wants to be metaphysics and sometimes achieve it with Lamartine or Valéry. English poetry does it without trying, it emerges on the metaphysical level, which is its firmament and its grace.

Where Mallarmé arrives with his last exhausting wingbeat, Shelley is already naturally up there like a treetop. There is nothing restrictive in this differentiation I amuse myself with pointing out. In essence the achievements are no different, but the French poem emerges from the forge like the diamond from the stone cutter; the English verse shines with that ease we admire in the fish, or in the tennis player who returns a shot almost without moving.

I note that Archipelago Books (a terrific list, authors René Crevel, Novalis, João Cabral de Melo Neto, Georg Büchner, Witold Gombrowicz, Mahmoud Darwish, and Francis Ponge, among others, translated by Robert Bononno, David Hinton, Richard Howard, Ralph Manheim, Ezra Pound, Richard Sieburth, and Richard Zenith, among others) lists “Book Design by David Bullen Design.” Former designer of those old covetable North Point books.

Aboard H. M. S. Victory and patrolling the Mediterranean in order to “contain” the French fleet, Admiral Lord Nelson (first name Horatio, daughter with Emma Hamilton named Horatia) writes to Lady Hamilton (busy furnishing the estate at Merton—outside London—that he’d bought):

I agree to African parrots on the veranda.

Frankly

2005-10-27T07:13:00.000-07:00

Recalling, late ’seventies, my allegiance to Régis Franc’s “Le Café de la Plage,” publish’d daily in the (short-lived) newspaper, Le Matin de Paris. More animals talking A brief appearance by Gertrude Stein, talking excruciating French, portray’d as a pig. More often, Little Nemo ’scapes, and voices carrying in off the miles, a distant ship-speck, a distant Saharan caravan-speck. Lots of “Courage, mes enfants!”

Ando Hiroshige (1797-1858)

The heart of décor is what. (How I want it to be “heart,” knowing in advance that it is not. Décor is what is pull’d (like an eel out of a horse’s water-sod head) out of the heart. The root of ornament is . . .

Samuel Johnson:

DECO•RUM. n.s. [Latin.]

Decency; behaviour contrary to licentiousness, contrary to levity; seemliness.

If your master
Would have a queen his beggar, you must tell him,
That majesty, to keep decorum, must
No less beg than a kingdom.
Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra.

I am far from suspecting simplicity, which is bold to trespass in points of decorum.
Wotton.

Beyond the fix’d and settled rules
Of vice and virtue in the schools,
The better sort should set before ’em
A grace, a manner, a decorum.
Prior.

Gentlemen of the army should be, at least, obliged to external decorum: a profligate life and character should not be a means of advancement.
Swift.

He kept with princes due decorum;
Yet never stood in awe before ’em.
Swift.

Clark Coolidge: “To create is to make a pact with nothingness.”

Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo

Blab

2005-10-26T06:13:00.000-07:00

Oh to feel that peasant (out of F. peser, to weigh, Melusine, ‘I shall gyue hym hys pesaunnt or weyght of syluer.’) veerage toward little & ungaud’d nothings. A desire to slot words into a tiny armature, care-burden’d. No more frivolous slinging.

See Lorine Niedecker:

Asa Gray wrote Increase Lapham:
pay particular attention
to my pets, the grasses.

(In New Goose.) Why? Because it makes me happy, a small kernel of delerium fire’d by a banderole of short a’s. Because it raises the minuscule up to the eyes of a man call’d Increase.

See Vuillard (Lady of Fashion, c. 1891-1892)

Rhyming with Rothko (Red, Orange, Tan, and Purple, 1949)

(Vuillard + Malevich = Rothko)

“When the community wants to fix infinity, or trace its frontiers, it has recourse to conventions. That is why life takes on the aspect of . . . a huge nursery in which children play every possible sort of game, full of imagined rules; and in these games they live reality, build towers, castles, forts and towns, then demolish them, then rebuild them all over again . . .” (Kasimir Malevich, God Is Not Cast Down, quoted in T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism)

Is today’s conventional fix un-undoable: the rules no longer imaginary? Infinity fix’d for an infinity. “We swivel benign in seats of mildew.”

La Sontag notes:

“The Cavaliere has returned to his study and reads, trying not to think about what is going on around him—one of the principal uses of a book.”

“Although no revolutionary voices were yet audible, the look of fellow travelers had already arrived: shorter hair for women, longer hair for men. Watch the evolution of hair styles among the educated class!”

“Who, other than the naïve or benighted, felt they must put into practice what they had enjoyed in a book . . . No, to read was precisely to enter another world, which was not the reader’s own, and come back refreshed, ready to bear with equanimity the injustices and frustrations of this one. Reading was balm, amusement—not incitement.”

“. . . the hero is a romantic: that is, his vanity was matched by an inordinate capacity for humility when his affections were engaged.”

“. . . the Romantics inaugurated the modern cult of thinness . . .”

A castello in Sicily: “. . . the horse with human hands, the Bactrian camel with two women’s heads for humps, the goose with a horse’s head, the man whose face sprouted an elephant’s trunk and whose hands were vulture’s claws.”

“. . . the impression of the grotesque was replaced by the impression of an immense sarcasm . . . the prince’s temperament was a demented variant of the collector’s . . . To piece together fragments of costly porcelain with chunks of kitchenware—was this not merely a mocking echo of the democracy of objects . . . [The objects] did not say . . . look at all the beauty and interest there is in the world. They said: the world is mad. Ordinary life is ridiculous . . . Anything can turn into anything else . . . An ordinary object can be made from . . . anything. Any shape can be deformed. Any common purpose served by objects balked.”

“The prince had taken the curiosity and avidity of the collector to its terminal state, where the attachment to objects releases an ungovernable spirit of raillery.”

Or the attachment to words.

How come vocabulary’s always got semantics—that tagalong!—nipping its heels, juicing it for all its worth? I say vocabulary’s like a blab, a bitten off, behove’d, unthawable, and barnacle’d stench. Singe’d with ball-heyday’d monkeydom. Scorch’d with excrudescence & damascene’d with twang. Go sing a ruthless meaning if you’d ruther. Meaning’s anybody’s guess. It rides a tippy sidecar, is lucky to make it home.

A Sentimental Nod

2005-10-25T09:07:00.000-07:00

To John Berryman, born John Allyn Smith, Jr., in McAlester, Oklahoma (October 25, 1914):

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatedly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes
as bad as achilles,

Who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving
behind: me, wag.

Gasp

2005-10-25T05:11:00.000-07:00

Mostly not writing my words here, too concern’d with making chords, little daily piles of images and words. Borrow’d. Stack’d conglomerate metaphors. Items in a minor viscosity. Historia copulatoriae. Combo ruts.

Empty-head’d and august August (Surely, tu blagues.) leading to what? Shrill tangents of late October? I refuse to mimic Montaigne. « Que sais-je » est un piège. Is a sledge. Hammers unpardonably at . . .

The twenty-first century barges in en forme de a telephonickal recording ascertaining with certainty that I have glean’d off big hazard a prize: two free airline tickets. Round. Trip. There is only one of me. There is only my entire brainpan (unreachable) to inhabit, or foot-storm with my Minolta (a reference that shows my age). And if I ever got there (fat chance, gros hazard), I would not be likely to return. And then itemizer number one is interrupt’d by itemizer number two who says (familiarly) “John, were you pleased with the politesse of itemizer number one?” And I say: “Yes, yes, of course, because itemizer number one is a recording!” Downhill après.

Maybe the dirty word of contemporary American poetics is not syntax. Maybe it’s vocabulary. Anybody’ll (can, does) mix things up. “Crazy, man.” Who, though, ’s got the words that’ll fetch the gods. Pasty-faced and bloat’d, the dying Jack Spicer didn’t say “My syntax did this to me,” did he?

~

Sontag (The Volcano Lover): Goethe call’d the slabby perch whence he saw Vesuvius’s entrails heave “the lip of an enormous mouth,” and determined later that the sight was “neither instructive nor agreeable.”

“. . . the collector, like the impostor, has no existence unless he goes public, unless he shows what he is or has decided to be. Unless he puts his passions on display.”

“. . . unslakeable . . .”

“It is the function of art to conceal the difficulties of its execution.” (Sontag?)

“. . . the notorious lachrymose novel about the lovelorn egotist who shoots himself . . .” (The Sorrows of Young Werther, “notorious lachrymose” Goethe, who never witness’d a self-transformation he didn’t record, writ, aged twenty-four.)

Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s painting of Emma H. as Ariadne, treacherous Theseus (whom she rescue’d) sailing off into the distance, the speck! Vigée-Lebrun: “I am also painting a very beautiful woman, Mrs. Hart, who is a friend of the English ambassador. In a large painting I have made her into a cheerful Ariadne, her face lending itself to this choice.” In a letter to Mme du Barry, 2 July 1790.

And Vigée-Lebrun’s Emma Hamilton as Bacchante.

~

An obituary post’d by cris cheek to the UKPOETRY list led me to Ian Breakwell’s Diary 1964-1985:

12.2.1974 London: Smithfield Market

A man strides out of the main entrance of the meat market, wearing a pair of pig’s ears fastened to his head; he walks across to his parked car, whistling loudly.

24. 2.1974 Leeds

A man in a new overcoat and an astrakhan hat, the weekend shopping in his arms, walking along the pavement barking loudly like a dog.

17.3.1974 7.25 p.m. Leeds-London train

The woman in the corner seat wears a green velvet coat trimmed with imitation fur, and knee-length maroon suede boots. She falls asleep, sinking into the corner of the seat. Her red velvet skirt slides up around her thighs; her mouth falls open and is reflected in the window, superimposed on the night landscape outside. The train runs parallel with a motorway: cars and lorries rush into her mouth, their headlights on full. She wakes up, coughing.

Introduced by Nick Kimberley (author, too, of the obituary):

The diary can be seen as a latterday extension of the work of Mass Observation, that collection of artist-anthropologists who set out in the late 1930s to document a ‘real’ Britain by observing such ‘mass’ phenomena as ‘Behaviour of people at war memorials, shouts and gestures of motorists, funerals and undertakers, the private lives of midwives’, etc.

And:

Here politics is approached tangentially, revealing itself in a phrase let slip, a chance encounter. Yet the purpose of the diary is wholly political, in the same way that the surrealists’ project of permanent revolution took for granted that a transformation of the imagination would equally change society. The diary simultaneously demystifies the human condition, and reinvests it with mystery: there is a reality parallel to the one we know.

What I am reminded of: Katie Degentesh’s carefully observed writings here. Also inform’d by politics. The slightly (and moreso) askew city.

Ian Breakwell’s “Study For The Last Gasp,” 1987, mixed media collage.

William Shakespeare:

How loud howling wolves arouse the jades,
That drag the tragic melancholy night.

James Thomson:

But absent, what fantastick woes arous’d
Rage in each thought, by restless musing fed,
Chill the warm cheek, and blast the bloom of life.

Lateness

2005-10-24T11:00:00.000-07:00

The Coal Cart, New York, by Alvin Langdon Coburn (1911)

Sontag. The Cavaliere (William Hamilton, British envoy to Naples) in Pompeii:

. . . it would have been he who had recalled the line from the Aeneid the excavators found that someone had written on the wall of his house: Conticuere omn . . . (“All fell silent”). Gasping for breath, he had not lived to finish it.

And:

He was waiting for catastrophe. This is the corruption of deep melancholy, that its sense of helplessness reaches out to include others, that it so easily imagines (and therefore wills) a more general calamity.
. . . Every visitor wanted the volcano to explode, to “do something.” They wanted their ration of apocalypse.

(See Bernadette Mayer, in “On Sleep”: “I worry about why the masses sort of love disasters”)

And, the Cavaliere’s “savory discovery of traces of an ancient priapic cult still existing under the cover of Christianity”:

There he was taken to a festival in a nearby village honoring Saints Cosmas and Damian which culminated in a church service to bless a foot-long object, much revered by barren women, known as the Great Toe.

The Last Days of Pompeii, by Karl Briullov (1833)

Learn’d that my hero-auspice and adversary Pliny the Elder “succumbed to the noxious smoke” of Vesuvius, researching no doubt.

And that the philosopher Empedoclus “jumped into the boiling crater [at Etna] to test whether he was immortal.”

And that Goethe got snooty, bestaked himself high above the frivolity, at social gatherings chez the Cavaliere. No monkey he.

Stray

2005-10-23T11:52:00.000-07:00

Received: Wherever We Put Our Hats, No. 2 (Fall 2005), edited by Jon Leon.

Writing by Tyler Carter, Ken Rumble, Kate Schapira, Jon Leon, Ange Mlinko, Kent Johnson, Heather Brinkman, Jen Hofer, and Jess Mynes.

The Heather Brinkman pieces, tough and immediate, apparently out of an abecediary:

h h h

asphalt working worker boys
I gun giver asphalt
fucking working boys on glittering
black top

like inside trolley cars from
this side of town to arcane

city organ pipes, the clockwiser
album of clove leaves
where you and I will remain bound
in Ricard’s Flowers, blood jewels

i i i

time’s beard grows off
your maxilla & I, the pricker
take nothing back
as you the rattler

will continue inside me

& Elvira, let’s throw her
to the cooker & douse her in
a bastard’s game of chips

j j j

if we could only rowboat 1
to grey light 1

Also: a generous wad of Kent Johnson’s epigrams out of the forthcoming Epigramititis: 111 Living American Poets (including one for one “John Latta”—“For he has the subtlety and hissing of a serpent, which in goodness he suppresses”?) All’s I can say is: That book’s going to burn some not-so-negligible (that is to say deserving) asses when it comes out.

~

Padgettesque typo: Look! I typed blook for blood!

***Clyde Embree, bicyclist, Burns, Oregon,* circa *1900***

Greyly overcast Sunday, a bicyclist fleet in empty streets lowing out Dylan’s “Mississippi”:

City’s just a jungle, more games to play
Trapped in the heart of it, trying to get away
I was raised in the country, I been workin’ in the town
I been in trouble ever since I set my suitcase down . . .

Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long.

At the Friends of the Library book shop (I continue to trudge there, pickily, yea, contemptuously, avoiding th’effing dealers with their under-table caches and dishonest breezy patter), I found something call’d America & Alfred Stieglitz: A Collective Portrait. “Edited by Waldo Frank, Lewis Mumford, Dorothy Norman, Paul Rosenfeld & Harold Rugg. With 120 Illustrations.” The Literary Guild (1934). “This book is an attempt to express the nature of the career of Alfred Stieglitz by being, itself, in spirit and form, a communal work, a work organic with its subject.” Besides the editors, pieces by William Carlos Williams, John Marin, Marsden Hartley, Arthur Dove, Charles Demuth, Victoria Ocampo, Gertrude Stein, Paul Strand, Jean Toomer, Sherwood Anderson, and others. Jam-pack’d. Here’s Lewis Mumford waxing lyrical on “the pinnacle of animal achievement”:

While the tree and the sky are dominating symbols in Stieglitz’s work, brought to sharper focus by their steady exclusion from the urban landscape [Humph. I thought it not possible to make a picture of something’s absence. I thought that was the happy onus of words, the not.], there are two others that were important, both in his personal life and in his vision: the race horse and the woman. The thoroughbred horse, quivering in every muscle, nostril open, eyes glaring, hooves delicately stamping, ready for the race or the rut: symbol of sheer animal vitality, bred and nurtured with a single eye to that final outburst of speed which carries horse and rider down the home stretch to victory. From the black heavy-flanked Waterboy or the low-slung, short-legged chestnut Sysonby, to the great Man o’ War and his present-day successors, these horses represent the pinnacle of animal achievement: proof of man’s skill and intelligence in alliance with the world of life, symbolic of those new strains of wheat, those new hybrids or sports in flowers and fruits, whose conquest was ultimately more important to man than were half the mechanical contrivances on which the metropolitan mind doted.

Mumford saves less vigor for Stieglitz’s women— (“. . . if the horse was animal vitality, woman was—if one may combine the words—animal spirituality . . .” O dear.)

James Linton, New Haven Scotland, 1845, photograph’d by David Octavius Hill and Robert Adamson

Paul Strand, arguing that technology determines output, after favorably mentioning the Sotsman D. O. Hill and the Frenchman Eugene Atget, “who died in relative obscurity in Paris but a few years ago”:

For the history of photography . . . is almost entirely a record of misconception and misunderstanding, of unconscious groping, and a fight. The record of its use as a medium of expression reveals for the most part an attempt to turn the machine into a brush, pencil, whatnot; anything but what it is, a machine. Men and women, some who were painters, others who were not, were fascinated by a mechanism and material which they unconsciously tried to turn into painting, into a short cut to an accepted medium. They did not realize that a new and unique instrument had been born of science and placed in their hands; an instrument as sensitive and as difficult to master as any plastic material, but requiring a complete perception of its inherent means and of its own unique approach, before any profound registration was possible.

The arguments for sui generis Internet’d Gesamtkunstwerk forthcoming (pitch to all fronts).

Partial

2005-10-22T13:43:00.000-07:00

Out of Campi Phlegrae, by William Hamilton

Sontag notes (The Volcano Lover) “. . . the hyperactivity of the heroic depressive. He ferried himself past one vortex of melancholy after another by means of an astonishing spread of enthusiasms.”

“. . . the collector is a dissembler, someone whose joys are never unalloyed with anxiety. Because there is always more.”

“A . . . collection is a material concentrate that continually stimulates, that overexcites. Not only because it can always be added to, but because it is already too much. The collector’s need is precisely for excess, for surfeit, for profusion.”

“. . . monkeys, even more than people, are social animals. One monkey can’t express a monkey’s nature. A single monkey is an exile—and fits of depression sharpen his innate cleverness. A single monkey is good at parodying the human.”

Out of Campi Phlegrae, by William Hamilton

“. . . the volcano, Vesuvius was once a young man, who saw a nymph lovely as a diamond. She scratched his heart and his soul, he could think of nothing else. Breathing more and more heatedly, he lunged at her. The nymph, scorched by his attentions, jumped into the sea and became the island today called Capri. Seeing this, Vesuvius went mad. He loomed, his sighs of fire spread, little by little he became a mountain. And now, as immobilized as his beloved, forever beyond his reach, he continues to throw fire . . . Capri lies in the water, in full view of Vesuvius, and the mountain burns and burns and burns . . .”

“As sound decays into inaudibility, euphoria decays into indifference, and that is always unexpected, the way exalted feelings are weakened, undone by time.”

“. . . spoke, jubilantly, gratingly, of a future . . .”

“. . . little protuberances of old angers and longings . . . You think of what you have done, done with brio—great slabs of actions . . .
“Surfeited, his appetite for surfeit . . .”

Bernadette Mayer (Scarlet Tanager):

what it means to be human
i can walk around with a hole in my brain
(avec cavum dans ma cervello)

And:

on simplicity
scarification seems more like
crenellation than heron
is like guest

And isn’t there one here that calls a poem an amuse-bouche? Not in the one with the line “i kept thinking teletubbies was a demanding french form”? No.

My sister J. repeat’d how—during a southerly haul through Morocco, driving some unnamed “blacktop diminishing” in an attempt to find the beginnings of the Sahara—how kids, apparently desert-dwellers, though there’d be no sign of habitation, would come trickling up to the car whenever they stopped, asking invariably for stylo, bonbons, argent (pen, candy, money), always in that order.

Vulcan-Forg’d

2005-10-21T06:26:00.000-07:00

Susan Sontag (The Volcano Lover): “Perhaps every collector has dreamed of a holocaust that will relieve him of his collection—converting all to ashes, or burying it under lava. Destruction is only the strongest form of divestment. The collector may be so disappointed with his life that he wants to divest himself of himself, as in the novel about the book-besotted reclusive scholar with a legendary hoard of twenty-five thousand necessary, irreplaceable volumes (that dream, the perfect library), who pitches himself into the pyre he makes out of what he has most loved. But should such an angry collector survive his fire or fit, he will probably want to start another collection.”

Roberto Calasso on Kafka’s minimalism (a lack of “pyrotechnique”), how he’d “sensed that . . . only the minimum number of elements of the surrounding world ought to be named. He plunged the sharpest Ockham’s razor into the substance of the novel. To name the bare minimum, and it is pure literality. And why so? Because the world was turning back into a primeval forest, too fraught with strange noises and apparitions. Everything had too much power. Thus it became necessary to limit oneself to what lay closest at hand, to circumscribe the zone of the nameable. Than all that power, otherwise diffuse, would be channeled there, and whatever was named—an inn, a file, an office, a room—would fill with unprecedented energy.”

Thinking of George Oppen, and Objectivism. That dual surge: to diminish everything down to “first principles,” the vague, the churn of one wave, one cloud (one trouser). (Calasso begins th’above with Kafka’s K. lifting eyes “in die scheinbare Leere. Literally: ‘toward the seeming emptiness.’”) So seemingly opposed to the plenty. That exfoliating of all things, that indiscriminate cornucopia, the fire-horn conflagration of naming all things simultaneously (a kind of “pyrotechnique”), the over-dub, the sur-pizzazz, the ultra-freighting. Out of which encumbrance: a similar vague, wave, cloud (trouser): a pair of pants.

Grace

2005-10-20T06:48:00.000-07:00

Romare Bearden in Albert Murray’s “Bearden Plays Bearden” (The Blue Devils of Nada):

You have to begin somewhere . . . So you put something down. Then you put something else with it, and then you see how that works, and maybe you try something else and so on, and the picture grows in that way. One thing leads to another, and you take the options as they come, or as you are able to perceive them as you proceed. The fact that each medium has its own special technical requirements doesn’t really make any fundamental difference. My point is that my overall approach to composition is essentially the same whether I’m working with . . . collage, or with oils, watercolors, or tempera.

And (moment of organicist beginning moving into mystical “possession”—or mud, that key pivot-point in any art):

Once you get going . . . all sorts of things begin to open up. Sometimes something just seems to fall into place, like the piano keys that every now and then just seem to be right where your fingers happen to come down. But there are also all those times you have to keep trying something over and over and then where you finally get it right you wonder what took you so long. And of course there are also times when you have to give it up and try something else.

Which idiotically triggers the O’Hara that vamps in my blood (“For Grace, After a Party”):

my most tender feelings
writhe and
bear the fruit of screaming. Put out your hand,
isn't there
an ashtray, suddenly, there? beside
the bed? And someone you love enters the room
and says wouldn't
you like the eggs a little

different today?

Romare Bearden’s “Three Folk Musicians” (1967)

~

Samuel Johnson’s verification of something Richard Hell mention’d, a derivation unbeknownst to atheistickal Bible-skeert me:

MA•UDLIN. adj.
[Maudlin is the corrupt appellation of Magdelen, who is drawn by painters with swoln eyes, and disordered look; a drunken countenance, seems to have been so named from a ludicrous resemblance to the picture of Magdelen.]

Drunk; fuddled; approaching to ebriety.
And the kind maudling crowd melts in her praise.
Southern’s Spartan Dame.

She largely, what she wants in words, supplies
With maudlin eloquence of trickling eyes.
Roscommon.

That “approaching to ebriety” gets added in the fourth edition. Ebriety.

Alfred Jarry’s scatological Faustroll, who experiences “a fit of homicidal madness provoked by the sight of a horse’s head (the epitome, for him, of ugliness), during which he is responsible for a universal annihilation.” Too: Faustroll’s “invention of a curious ‘Machine à peindre’, which he commits to the charge of the painter Henri Rousseau. After the total devastation of the world and the annihilation of all its inhabitants, the Machine continues its random work, producing a series of purely ‘accidental’ canvases . . .” (Out of Keith Beaumont’s Alfred Jarry)

Void

2005-10-19T05:19:00.000-07:00

I keep thinking about Charles Olson. The Charles Olson of the letters (“A Modern Correspondence” it is identify’d subtitularly) to Frances Boldereff. (He calls her “my trout, my bream” and he calls her “my motz”) and says (postmark’d 14 April 1950): “i hold, that is what i am doing, holding, baby (there is an elephant at the zoo—they have such a nervous system!—who, in a rhythm so iterative as to be erotic, moves back and forth in a space of three feet (all day and nights, the keeper tells me) her eye white and mad, with occasional fierce snorts of air from her short indian trunk, her lovely fore legs lifted and placed down as in a dance unborn, nature’s most animate dance: grass blades made animal)”

And later (Boldereff’d ask’d for “some physical thing from near you—some undershirt or handkerchief or tie or something”): “you must know, i hate the literary And this letter, any, is when it is to you, the very other thing yet word, words—no, you know they are not words; all i mean to do is to say with them, these are words which are acts, acts of loving, with no discrepancy between word and act my letters are undershirts for yr pillow, grave one”

Reading “at” Richard Hell’s Godlike, for the milieu, for the roman à clef-ishness thrills and guesses. Lines like: “The magic of intensest poetry-snot penetrating literature”

Or: “A little lithium and I’m a goddamn solid citizen.”

Or dribbles of a collaborative poem by T. and narrator Paul:

and turn, and turning turn and turning turn
ing turn until like Turing I’m a bird on
a bicycle suicided by turds.

Hip idiocy and glee. Or I think (reading about T. loading up a knapsack with “a Bill Knott, a Borges, a Frank O’Hara, David Shapiro’s skinny little January, and Ron Padgett’s Great Balls of Fire): is that “detail” or “brand-naming”? What’s the difference between that and, say, Anne Tyler talking about Marimekko, or Danielle Steele about Gucci?

Walter Benjamin (in a fragment “associated with the composition of “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” call’d “Theory of Distraction”):

Theory of distraction
Attempt to determine the effect of the work of art once its power of consecration has been eliminated
. . .
Fashion is an indispensable factor in the acceleration of the process of becoming worn out
. . .
Just as the art of the Greeks was geared toward lasting, so the art of the present is geared toward becoming worn out
. . .
Art comes into contact with the commodity; the commodity comes into contact with art

~

My intent (imaginary) leans toward pouring over large books whilst seat’d at the wooden table. My subterfuge (indolence) is to flop supine on the pallet and wave a tiny book like a wand above me. Charles Olson’s Maximus or T. J. Clark’s Farewell to an Idea versus Jonathan Lethem’s Amnesia Moon.

~

Kate Greenstreet hied off a copy of Learning the Language my way. Trying to figure out how, exactly, she makes ordinary (opposed to “flambuoyant” or “pyrotechnickal”) language, and ordinary “event” chime out so gorgeously with mysterious forces. In the end of a piece call’d “Bridge”:

Where there is despair
“Since the first log fell across water”
it happened like this:

“Doesn’t anybody have the real potato salad?” Wandering from one
(imaginary) picnic table to the next. The impulse to get under the
table. The answer, in a way, is yes.

Neutral

2005-10-18T06:00:00.000-07:00

Franz Kafka, aged four.

Max Brod, provoking Franz Kafka: “Why then do you fear love in particular more than earthly existence in general?”

Franz Kafka, calm planet, retorting: “You write: ‘Why be more afraid of love than of other things in life?’ And just before that: ‘I experienced the intermittently divine for the first time, and more frequently than elsewhere, in love.’ If you conjoin these two sentences, it’s as if you had said: ‘Why not fear every bush in the same way that you fear the burning bush?’”

(In Roberto Calasso’s K.)

Prospero and Caliban shadow puppets (Underground Railway Theater)

And Caliban again, who haunteth the revery of a man made imbecilic by night:

All the infections that the sun sucks up
From bogs, fens, flats on Prosper fall, and make him
By inchmeal a disease! His spirits hear me,
And yet I needs must curse. But they’ll nor pinch,
Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ th’ mire,
Nor lead me like a firebrand in the dark
Out of my way, unless he bid ’em; but
For every trifle are they set upon me:
Sometime like apes that mow and chatter at me
And after bite me; then like hedgehogs which
Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount
Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I
All wound with adders, who with cloven tongues
Do hiss me into madness.

And Roland Barthes, packing up a discourse (a storeroom) stuffed to the gills (with gillyflowers, with suitcases, an entombment for Mallarmé himself), in The Neutral, “Discourse makes up for language: always recall this, spelled out on the front wall of the literary S [According to the footnote, “S,” apparently, for Semiology, the chair Barthes “held” at the Collège de France—“S,” too, one thinks for Supplement, and Subject, and ‘Stately, plump, Buck . . .”], the offspring of linguistics, but substituting for it (frolicking in its Supplement): Mallarmé, Variations on a Subject. “—Only, we must realize, poetry would not exist: philosophically, verse makes up for what languages lack, completely superior as it is.” Recall that for Mallarmé (“Quant au livre” {“As for the Book”}): “{poetry might be} hidden away—you could call it Prose, but nevertheless it is still verse, if there remains some secret pursuit of music in the storeroom of Speech.” → I recall one more time (since people made a fuss about it) that it is in this sense that I’ve let myself speak of a fascism of language: language transforms its lack into Law, it abusively subjects us to its lacks: Twelve Tables, Uti lingua nuncupassit (named, instituted, pronounced, proclaimed) ita jus esto [“As language put it, so must the law be” quoted out of Michelet on Vico, according to the footnote. Think, too, of Robert Duncan’s “law of the the,” how every word makes a diminuendo, a vanishing, of subsequent possible words.]: language is law, and dura lex. Now, discourse (literature) “turns” the sed lex, it derails it; it’s the supplement, as act of making up: → literature = freedom → faced with the ruling lack of the Neuter (of language), discourse (in the broadest sense of the term: statement: literary, ethical, pathetic, mythical) opens up an infinite, shimmering field of nuances, of myths, that could allow the Neuter, fading within language, to be alive elsewhere. Which way? I would say, using a vague word, the way of the affect: discourse comes to the Neuter by means of the affect.”

~

I am a Hyacinth. There is the story of the Lumina honking wildly in the dull chill dawn, or the story of the bicycle seat shearing off whilst “one” rode flat out like a Comanche in that same dull chill dawn, none of that’ll “do.” Nothing’ll “do.”

Atmosphericks

2005-10-17T05:22:00.000-07:00

***Brutus falling on ’s sword, out of Geffrey Whitney’s* A Choice of Emblems *(1586)***

Brutus, in Julius Caesar:

Between the acting of a dreadful thing
And the first motion, all the interim is
Like a phantasma, or a hideous dream.
The Genius and the mortal instruments
Are then in council; and the state of a man,
Like to a little kingdom, suffers then
The nature of an insurrection.

Thomas Ottaway, The Booke of Bombast & Chicanery (1602): “Just as Planetary Alignements maketh Humours Corporeal rise and abate and Fortunes Quotidian step forth and stumble, so Alignements Artistickal of Like and Unlike deliver Truth out of Concealments Bombastickal.”

Josef Sudek (1896-1976): “One of my first pictures was a sprinkler wagon pulled by horses. I threw the negative away—one should not do that. Many times I was sorry that I did not have it. Horses pulling a sprinkler wagon! That would be quite a rarity today.”

Josef Sudek’s motto: “Hurry slowly.”

Minims

2005-10-16T08:55:00.000-07:00

Joseph Joubert (1794): “I have little sap. Etc.”

Fielding Dawson, Charles Olson, 1956, ink on paper collaged on board (Jargon Society)

Charles Olson (circa 1964):

To have the bright body of sex and love
back in the world—the moon
has her legs up,
in the sky of Egypt

Susan Stewart (The Open Studio, 1987):

Can Queen Victoria Eat Cold Apple Pie?
. . .
Capitoline, Quirinal, Viminal, Esquiline, Caelian, Aventine, Palatine

Petruchio (against a tailor, The Taming of the Shrew):

Thou liest, thou thread, thou thimble,
Thou yard, three-quarters, half-yard, quarter, nail!
Thou flea, thou nit, thou winter-cricket thou!
Braved in mine own house with a skein of thread?
Away, thou rag, thou quantity, thou remnant.

Random

2005-10-15T10:38:00.000-07:00

Fairfield Porter, “Girl in a Landscape” (1965)

Jonathan Lethem (Girl in Landscape):

“The Planet of Withheld Explanations.”

And more about English (according to Archbuilders, including one call’d “Lonely Dumptruck”): “English is a language all of names.” And: “English words are funny . . . English sentences are grave.” (Unmention’d go English paragraphs, pace Gertrude Stein.)

Archbuilder Hiding Kneel on why it refuses to fix “wrecked stuff”: “It would be to pretend a relation I do not have, to all the wrecked stuff.”

Other Archbuilders: Coral Dope, Unimportant Lust, Grinning Contrivance

Some of Geroge Herriman’s Coconino County folks: Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, Milton Mouse, Marshall Mouse, Irving Mouse, Offissa Bull Pupp, Don Kiyote, Joe Stork, Mock Duck, Kolin Kelly (Maker of Bricks), Walter Cepius Austridge, Krazy Katbird, Osker Wildcat, Krazy Katfish, Gooseberry Sprig, J. Turtle, Kristofer Kamel, Joe Bark (the moon hater), Aunt Tabby and Uncle Tomm Katt, Alec Kat, Sancho Pansy, Mr. Wough Wuph Wuff (Bone Trust Magnate), Pauline Parrot, Matilda Mouse, Mrs. Kwak Wak, Mimi, Mr. Kiskidee Kuku, Kitten Kat, Marmaduke Mouse, Mr. Meeyowl, Anita Gata Blanca, Terry P. Turtle, Barney Borracho, and Bum Bill Bee.

(Glancing through Jay Cantor’s 1988 Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels, a week or so after reading Lethem’s talking kangaroo and other ‘evolved’ beasts in Gun, with Occasional Music—thinking What’s the story with MacArthur novelists and talking animals?)

Arch

2005-10-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

Reading Jonathan Lethem’s Girl in Landscape: “Archbuilders describe English as a language of enchanting limitations. The English vocabulary is tens of thousands of words smaller than any language native to their planet. English words seem, to an Archbuilder, garishly overloaded with meaning. One Archbuilder describes speaking English as ‘stringing poems into sentences,’ another compares it to ‘speaking hieropglyphs.’”

More on the Archbuilders: “‘They’re so in love with English, they had to go rename themselves that way. Truth Renowned, Rock Friend, Lonely Candybar, Hiding Kneel. You’ll meet the whole bunch, one name stupider than the other.’
‘Stupider and more carnivalesque,’ said Hiding Kneel, seemingly taking it as a compliment.”

Carnivalesque and / or Calibanesque:

When thou cam’st first
Thou strok’st me, and made much of me; would’st give me
Water with berries in’t; and teach me how
To name the bigger light, and how the less,
That burn by day and night: and then I lov’d thee
And show’d thee all the qualities o’ th’isle,
The fresh springs, brine pits, barren place and fertile:
Curs’d be I that that did so! All the charms
Of Sycorax—toads, beetles, bats—light on you!
. . .
You taught me language; and my profit on’t
Is, I know how to curse! The red plague rid you
For learning me your language.

I have never quite understood the brouhaha about Creeley’s line (dubbed so by Olson), “Form is never more than an extension of content.” For one thing, it seem’d obvious, a kind of gratuitous observation, available to anyone. And for a second thing, it seem’d overly remark’d by others.

Here’s Viktor Shklovsky’s version (A Sentimental Journey): “The formal method is fundamentally very simple . . . Its most remarkable feature is that it doesn’t deny the idea content of art, but treats the so-called content as one of the manifestations of form.”

More stray Shklovsky: “In a work of art, thought is juxtaposed to thought, just as word is to word and image to image.

Art is fundamentally ironic and destructive. It revitalizes the world. Its function is to create inequalities, which it does by means of contrasts.

New forms in art are created by the canonization of peripheral forms.”

And: “There’s no such thing as nonobjective art. There’s only motivated art or unmotivated art. Art develops according to the technical possibilities of the time . . . Hamlet was created by stage techniques.”

Ledger

2005-10-13T07:18:00.000-07:00

Five p.m. yesterday found me in an icy theatre in a building named Quirk, ready to listen to Jeff Clark and Andrew Joron read poems. Each first located with precise whoppers of introductions by Clayton Eshleman, who managed both a subtle dig at the self-proclaim’d Master Innovators of our epoch, and a less subtle nod toward Eshleman’s own cave drawing theories as spelled out in Juniper Fuse: Upper Paleolithic Imagination & the Construction of the Underworld.

According to my sparse notes (and sparser rude memory) Jeff Clark read a longish translation of a thing by Louis Aragon (“let’s spit on love”), “Jade Ache” (Clark: “what started off as a kind of chickenshit spoof of John Ashbery”), “Teheran” (“just me starting to remember my dreams”), “Lunar Tercets,” one of the “Demonologue” poems (“I had a ward I adored and tortured in four ways”), and “The Grass” out of The Little Door Slides Back, and finish’d with “Farewell Antithesis” and “Fountain” out of Music and Suicide. Easy-going boyish perplexity (casually transferring wad of gum out of mouth to music stand that served as lectern) versus occasional violence of imagery (“One dog attacks the back of another’s head / One turns and assaults the rock, one unwittingly shits / on the dismantled rib cage”).

For Andrew Joron, sparser notes and less initial familiarity with the work. He read early pieces out of Science Fiction, a couple out of The Removes, some lively (though difficult to “see”) homonymic things out of Fathom and uncollect’d. The early speculative-fiction influenced pieces less sound-generated than idea-generated—and read with less confidence. The homonymic play: to an end not always apparent to the ear.

In the audience: Joshua Edwards, Patrick Durgin (both recently relocated to the area, unbeknownst to me), Ken Mikolowski of The Alternative Press, and likely scads of low-profile luminaries. We skedaddled, ice-cover’d.

Albertine (Sandra Grindebäck) and Count Charmant (Johan Ehn) in Replika of Stockholm's production of Witold Gombrowicz's Operetta, directed by Jurek Sawka. Third International Gombrowicz Festival, Radom, Poland. Photo: Stefan Okolowicz.

And, earlier, sitting at th’elementary school in the Lumina my ponder heart goes to Ange Mlinko’s human ledger dilemma, the way she says “guys” with a hint of contempt. The twenty-first century human ledger (exterior model) in North America is an un-prepossessing package, isn’t it, a variety pack, meaning these six choices are the only choices, so who needs a daily run-down? (“Dined pleasantly enough, spat’d with X, viddy’d ‘A History of Violence.’”) The human ledger is Capsule Summary City, we all do the things we all do. (See Gombrowicz’s Diary: “Monday. Nothing. Tuesday. Nothing.” And so forth.) Point being: it’s only the “interior model” that scats out a differential, no? And that’s going to be “theory”—if theory is mild concoctions of (cocktails of) images, “thoughts,” “readings,” freight’d only by the wonder of having pass’d close by, unseen and unseeing, in the dust kick’d up by the passing freight of our human daily lives. Freight’d by proximity, sans doute, to those lives, a proximity which is always a manifestation of love, or vice-versa. So: no two ledgers, one ledger (here). The rest is just the mischief of getting by.

Cathisma, Troparia, Pause

2005-10-12T05:20:00.000-07:00

Against all “paltry yatter” (Pound), one turns to King Lear (here, by Edwin Forrest), that cleansing naysayer, that great raging haruspickall:

I abjure all roofs, and choose
To wage against the enmity o’ the air;
To be a comrade with the wolf and owl,—
Necessity’s sharp pinch.

Something to tarry with, to ream out the ear’s cloacal swirl and cavity. O dear.

Tightrope notes (Philippe Petit, translated by Paul Auster, out of a book call’d Translations (Marsilio, 1997), collecting The Notebooks of Joseph Joubert, Mallarmé’s A Tomb for Anatole, André du Bouchet’s The Uninhabited, and Petit’s On the High Wire.): “Each steel cable is lubricated when it is manufactured. The first operation, therefore, is to remove this grease. The best method is to stretch out the cable in the corner of a garden and leave it there for several years. At the end of that time, you will hunt through the tall grass to retake possession of the ‘old’ cable. To make is new again, wash it in gasoline and rub it with emery until it is clean and gray . . .”

And: “A cable must be in good condition. Without kinks or meat hooks. Kinks are traces left by an old loop or hook: the cable has been twisted, and when it is stretched out, a barely perceptible bump remains that even the greatest tension cannot eliminate. Meat hooks are the wires of a broken strand; they bristle up like splinters . . .”

~

Some exercises: “Walking backward.
Wearing disguises.
Imitating characters, animals.
Wearing armor.
. . .
Balancing on a ladder, or on a step ladder.
Balancing on a chair, its struts or legs resting on the rope.
With a table and chair: a meal on the wire.
With a stove and kitchen equipment: cooking an omelette on the wire.
Pistol dancing, sword dancing. Knife throwing.
Precision shooting on the wire, shooting at a moving target, shooting balloons.
On a velocipede, bicycle.
. . .
Fireworks shot off on the wire (knapsack filled with sand in which fuses have been planted; helmet with a pinwheel; balancing pole adorned with flares and Catherine wheels—lighted with a cigarette at the middle of the wire). This exercise is often fatal.”

Some histories: “Jean-François Gravelet, a.k.a. Charles Blondin, prepared an omelette on the wire; he also opened a bottle of champagne and toasted the crowd. He even managed to take photographs . . . of the crowd that was watching him cross the rapids at Niagara Falls.

Madame Saqui created historical frescoes to the glory of Emperor Napoleon, all by herself on the tightrope . . .

I myself have witnessed the delicate crossings of Sharif Magomiedoff several times: he places the tip of his wife’s foot on his forehead and walks along the wire while keeping her balanced.”

And: “. . . be lazy—to the point of delirium!

. . . To be a wire walker in its profoundest sense means to leave the wire behind you, to discover the cables that have been strung even higher and, step by step, to reach the Magic Wire of Immobility, the Wire that belongs to the Masters of the World, The earth itself rests on it . . .”

The Desire of Others to Thieve Covers Off Lovers

2005-10-11T05:04:00.000-07:00

Piet Mondrian, on the deposition of classical paintings in a room: “Not only the general appearance, the forms and colors of a piece of furniture, but even the relations of measurements and colors among themselves should harmonize with the general appearance of a room—otherwise we cannot achieve pure equilibrium. In their primary, usually rectangualar forms, the canvases of naturalistic painters also harmonize with the wall, with the rectangular form of an inhabited room; but it would be better not to look at what is painted inside the frame! It would be better to turn such paintings face to the wall in order to use them simply as elements of wall division.”

What the cocaine-like Forgettol is for in the dystopia of babyheads and gun-slinging kangaroo thugs (Jonathan Lethem, Gun, with Occasional Music): “Don’t go around talking about the past. Memory is rude. That’s what this stuff is for, and everyone uses it. In Los Angeles it’s illegal to know what you do for a living. If you don’t use it, pretend you do. And if you see people talking into their shirt sleeves, they aren’t talking to you. Don’t gape.”

Peter Makin (Provence and Pound): “. . . when the Cantos say

War, one war after another,
Men start ’em who couldn’t put up a good hen-roost

it is clear that the implied persona knows perfectly well how to build a good hen-roost and spends a reasonable proportion of his time in doing things like that. The good writer is the master of necessary technologies, one of which happens to be the apparatus of writing, like Hemingway punching away in a standing position at his Corona typewriter (or mitrailleuse), the boxer / soldier and poet à ses heures.”

~

Peddled in lightless in the 7 a.m. black dawn-sludge, whipping sidewalk-ward at th’approach of a car. Vague intimations of something new. That, or a bouncy affability due primarily to sleep-deprived mental occlusion’d mayhem that’ll soon turn to punk-orf’d irritability. Place your bets in the coffers now.

“Currently Unavailable”

2005-10-10T05:13:00.000-07:00

Henri Beyle a.k.a. Stendahl (Memoirs of Egotism), Rome, June 20, 1832:

Have I a remarkable mind? To tell the truth, I do not know. Moreover I rarely ponder over these basic questions because I live for the moment, and besides my judgments vary with my moods. My judgments are no more than fleeting impressions.

As I begin this self-examination, pen in hand, let us see whether I shall arrive at something positive, something that will remain true for a long time in my own eyes. How shall I react to what I am writing about now when rereading it, say, in 1835, if I live till then? Will it be the same as in the case of my printed works? A deep feeling of melancholy comes over me whenever, for want of other books, I read my own again.

Oh, those insufferable French. Dainty, self-serving, and wholly faux under the sad “sincere” shuffle cadences of experimentalism.

Akin to “an apocryphal anecdote” the editor, Matthew Josephson recounts in a footnote “about Talleyrand’s arranging a hunt for Napoleon.”

Since the Foreign Minister had no game in his park at Auteuil, he ordered some 5,000 tame rabbits at the Paris market and let them loose on the grounds. Having been starved for a day the rabbits, instead of fleeing before the hunters, ran up to them, and Napoleon is said to have killed a large number before he realized that it was all a trick. The tale goes on to the effect that Talleyrand let loose a big black pig from his own barnyard in the Bois de Boulogne so that Napoleon could have the pleasure of hunting “big game.”

~

Sub-moronic drizzling.

~

Dribble-mist.

~

Note, citoyens, the side whiskers.

~

Oh, to make a career of sneering.

Dogmatism

2005-10-09T13:17:00.000-07:00

Loggy, unstaged, and aimless Sunday, th’unhappiest day of the week. I go back to sleep, reading, a scant hour or so after waking. Or I transport my bearish self to book emporiums and drift about listless, pawing word-grubs, caches of word-grubs. I find Hagiwara Sakutarō tragically handsome on the cover of a Green Integer book, and plunk down the dough, for it and Toby Olson’s Utah, unable to determine (or recall) if I ever read the latter. It’s not the one about golf, it’s not the one about the miniature horses. Toby Olson looks like an Old Testament prophet. The clerk asks if I like the Green Integer “series,” and I do a Dylan thing, “Some of them, not all of them, some of the time, not all of the time.” Sakutarō:

This utterly unknown dog follows me,
shabby, limping on its hind leg, a crippled dog’s shadow.
. . .
Ah, I do not know where I’m going,
a large, organism-like moon is vaguely afloat ahead of me,
and in the lonely street behind me,
the tip of the dog’s thin long tail is dragging on the ground.

Driving back, at Main and Williams a car with Ohio vanity plates: VISIONRY. Pilot’d by a man who resembles a young Al Green. The license plate border’d by that line about “come the rapture” and the “unmanned” vehicle. That’s the definition of rapture, isn’t it? To be completely unmanned? No more corpulence and sweats? No more tether’d heart? The cumbersome body replaced by what? Light? Music? Lite music? (Speeding off, I think That plate should read VENTRILOQUY, stomach talk, side-of-the-mouth talk, wooden-puppet talk, the idiot wind.)

~

A 5 a.m. revery of someone’s [a poet’s, she is not a painter that I know of] paintings, three-dimensional, high intricate polychrome’d (motley, inlay and marquetry?), and huge, lining one side of the dirt road that ended at the Chukovsky’s farm (Otsego County, near Gaylord, Michigan, where we bought eggs). Possible triggers: the newly garish lavender Victorian, the book for kids call’d The Big Orange Splot.

~

Finish’d: The Disappointment Artist and other essays (Jonathan Lethem)

Misreading: IMAGINATION DEAD MACHINE for Beckett’s IMAGINATION DEAD IMAGINE

Beckett, “Enough”:

All that goes before forget. Too much at a time is too much. That gives the pen time to note. I don’t see it but I hear it there behind me. Such is the silence. When the pen stops I go on. Some times it refuses. When it refuses I go on. Too much silence is too much. Or it’s my voice too weak at times. The one that comes out of me. So much for the art and craft.

Places Everyone!

2005-10-08T08:28:00.000-07:00

A human pyramid crashes, on a riverbank in Mirpur, 1994.

~

“The twenty-first century (ceinture, F., belt, see cinch) will be poetickal, or not be at all.”

“A century of anxiety and handwringing . . . over words!”

“Henceforth, thin clad, in rain.

In Johnson’s Dictionary: “Buggery, penis, and shit were excluded, though all were common.”

~

Michael Hofmann, thinking aloud through reasons he translates (German, mostly Joseph Roth, also the terrific Lichtenberg and the Little Flower Girl, written by Hofmann’s father, Gert):

I don’t really know what it is. An expression of my fealty to German? Or to prose? Something Macchiavellian, a practical identification of a type of work that’s always there to do, and that’s endlessly portable? Or something altogether more sinister: a kind of driven self-obliteration? . . . Perhaps poetry, at my rate of output, just doesn’t seem enough to show for a life. “A slim bundle of dead writs,” Ian Hamilton puts it . . .

Hofmann points out a droll (Pelham Grenville) Wodehousian warning: “. . . what P. G. Wodehouse called ‘the series habit’—which, along with the growing of side whiskers, he claimed to find the besetting danger to the writer . . . If you’ve done five, you do a sixth.” (Or, if you’ve done A, you do B . . .)

Hofmann’s identification with James Schuyler.

~

Typo: “poutput” for “output”

~

The negative as human invention, and the predominance of irony. Kenneth Burke: “To use [words] properly, we must know that they are not the things they stand for . . . since language is extended by metaphor which gradually becomes the kind of dead metaphor we call abstraction, we must know that metaphor is not literal . . . we cannot use language maturely until we are spontaneously at home in irony.”

Pulchritude and Swashbuckler

2005-10-07T06:18:00.000-07:00

“I have no news to tell you . . . The grass looks very dingy, the Celery is all gone, and there is nothing to enliven one but a few Cabbage Stalks that seem fix’d on the superannuated List.”

John Keats to Fanny Keats, 6 February 1820

“In Bacon destruction stems from irrevocability—the irrevocability of time. The economy of his practice demands that the painting not go beyond a certain point, or the work is lost; in this economy, excess requires—demands—destruction. To paint beyond the work is to introduce the tyranny of a will that pushes the work over into stasis and death. Hence the aleatory or sacred: in reverence the painter maintains the spinning theater of action, the great wheel driven by fate and contingency, which carries him beyond the merely articulate and intelligible.”

Susan Stewart, “Explosion at San Giovanni in Laterano, Summer 1993: Notes for Francis Bacon’s Figure with Meat (The Open Studio: Essays on Art and Aesthetics)

Francis Bacon: “. . . one has to remember as a painter that there is great beauty in the color of meat.”

(“Portrait of Francis Bacon, 1952,” by John Deakin)

Wormy

2005-10-06T06:42:00.000-07:00

Henri Focillon, in The Life of Forms in Art (1942), pointing out the dangers of what he labels “evolution” (the “activity on the part of a style in the process of self-definition, i.e., defining itself and then escaping from its own definition”), what I’d be inclined to call “the eschatological trappings of avant-gardism”:

its deceptive orderliness, its single-minded directness, its use, in those problematical cases in which there is discord between the future and the past, of the expedient of ‘transition,’ its inability to make room for the revolutionary energy of inventors. Any interpretation of the movements of styles must take into account two essential facts. First, several styles may exist simultaneously within neighboring districts, and even within the same district; second, styles develop differently in accordance with whatever technical domain they may occupy.

~

Jonathan Lethem nails a feeling (like an animal skin) to the grim stretch-plank of the page (As She Climbed Across the Table): “the first pangs of my coming loss.”

“My heart, to put it more simply, got nostalgic for the present. Always a bad sign.”

Today’s C. Plinius Secundus sort falls under the title “Pontic Wormwood”:

And Cato affirmeth, that whosoever have the pontic wormwood about them, shall not be galled between their legs.

Pontic wormwood, also call’d Wormwod pontike, wormwod gentle, Absinthium santonicum, wormwode Romane, small leafed Wormwood, absinth wormwood (Artemisia absinthium L.), garden or Cypres Wormwood, Tree Wormwood, and French Wormwood. See Thoreau, Walden (1854): “It was overrun with Roman wormwood and beggar-ticks.”

Did I ever relate the story of drinking absinthe with Wim Wenders, and playing Dimension (pinball, “middle-style” pre-digital machine) in the Royal Palm Tavern in Ithaca, New York? The difficulty there? Inebriation-fog lends it—the story—a second-handedness that saps any possible essence.

In a 5 a.m. revery: a man named Ford Ford rebuilt my guitar, ruining it. (Post-rebuild, it had a “flexible” neck, a multitude of whiny strings, and several whack’d C-clamps.)

Catty

2005-10-05T05:35:00.000-07:00

What’s that Frank O’Hara line city-dwellers use for a mantra against total “civilized” immersion? “I can't even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life.” Recall’d to me whilst reading Lethem’s Motherless Brooklyn, Lionel Essrog in Maine, first jaunt (ever) out of the five boroughs:

I was off the page now, away from the grammar of skyscrapers and pavement. I experienced it precisely as a loss of language, a great sucking-away of the word-laden walls that I needed around me, that I touched everywhere, leaned on for support, cribbed from when I ticced aloud. Those walls of language had always been in place, I understood now, audible to me until the sky in Maine deafened them with a shout of silence. I staggered, put one hand on the rocks to steady myself. I needed to reply in some new tongue, to find a way to assert a self that had become tenuous, shrunk to a shred of Brooklyn stumbling on the coastal void: Orphan meets ocean. Jerk evaporates in salt mist.

What a city is: a language dump.

~

And here, again, Lethem in the “writing (“Freakshow!”) is only another version of Tourette’s” vein:

Assertions are common to me, and they’re also common to detectives. (“About the only part of a California house you can’t put your foot through is the front door”—Marlowe, The Big Sleep.) And in detective stories things are always always, the detective casting his exhausted, caustic gaze over the corrupted permanence of everything and thrilling you with his sweetly savage generalizations. This or that runs deep or true to form, is invariable, exemplary . . .

Assertions and generalization are, of course, a version of Tourette’s. A way of touching the world, handling it, covering it with confirming language.

~

Start’d, in my madly obsessive “coverage” of a writer, Lethem’s As She Climbed Across the Table.

Peter Culley, who, from behind the mosses of the Old Manse, invariably points to things worth looking at (and occasionally interlards those with ’s own fine-weighted lines—see, “& if on that night I'd drowned / your sleek otter dive / would have been my unearned / polaroid epitaph”), got me recently to the tenth issue of “W,” the Kootenay School of Writing’s magazine, an issue subtitled “A Duncan Delirium.” At which I paw’d this morning over my Cheerios, skimming the transcription of a talk call’d “A Life in Poetry” that Robert Duncan gave on August 5, 1963. Lots of talk about “drawing the sorts” (see, too, Ashbery’s “Sortes Vergilianae”), that scant-shabby and amusing game of opening a book and plowing one’s finger into it to demarcate a future, an advice. Hence, the following, out of the Natural History of C. Plinius Secundus, translated by the great “translator-general” of the late sixteenth century, Philemon Holland. Under the title “Compensation”:

As touching the statue of L. Actius a famous poet, I will report unto you what writers have recorded, namely, that being himself a very little man and low of stature, he caused his image to be made exceeding big and tall, and so to be set up within the temple of the Muses of Rome.

Meow.

Nothing

2005-10-04T05:11:00.000-07:00

Jonathan Lethem, noting a dilemma solved (post-immediate dispatch of “some guy name Ullman”) in Motherless Brooklyn:

“Have you ever felt, in the course of reading a detective novel, a guilty thrill of relief at having a character murdered before he can step onto the page and burden you with his actual existence? Detective stories always have too many characters anyway. And characters mentioned early on but never sighted, just lingering offstage, take on an awful portentous quality. Better to have them gone.”

Paul Klee (“On Modern Art”):

Color is primarily Quality. Secondly, it is also Weight, for it has not only color value but also brilliance. Thirdly, it is Measure, for besides Quality and Weight, it has its limits, its area, and its extent, all of which may be measured.

Tone value is primarily Weight, but in its extent and its boundaries, it is also Measure.

Line, however, is solely Measure.”

(Also, in the Notebooks: “The dot takes time to become a line.”)

Robert Steiner, in Toward a Grammar of Abstraction: Modernity, Wittgenstein, and the Paintings of Jackson Pollock:

“Wittgenstein: “What can be shown cannot be said” (Tractatus, 4.1212). This is the heart of the problem of writing about art, which if considered rigorously would leave us in the position of either writing about the problem or revealing that what has been written about art are mere remarks, even when the latter appear within a system that accounts for the “transcendent” nature of all aesthetics. The question is not only of what sort of propositions do paintings consist, but what sort of propositions are made about paintings? We know that language cannot mirror painting, but it is harder to recognize that language cannot mirror its own forms of representing paintings or mirror its own forms of representing the problem of representing painting. It would seem to leave us in that place where there is either silence or where we venture on high while pulling the ladder up behind us—the place of either mysticism or the senseless (the critique of language). We have, perhaps, a site without an object, a locus suggested by the Homeric verb therkesthatai (“to look, at nothing, with longing”), and which ended with the epic. To pose the question another way: if we cannot speak logically about painting, how can we speak of it? If we have not been speaking logically, how have we? To what end? That is, knowledge with regard to painting is always possible; if not, none of us could ever speak of painting. But the meaning of painting, a mysterium, can never be the subject of writing about painting when knowledge is a ratio for understanding.”

~

THERKESTHATAI

There kiss’d that I.

To look at nothing.

To look at longing with nothing (like longing).

To look at nothing

With longing.

There.

~

A sod morning of definitions, “wheels within wheels.”

Two

2005-10-03T05:02:00.000-07:00

“It is, of course, a luxury to create art and . . . to insist on expressing one’s own artistic opinion. Nothing is more luxurious than this. It is a game and a good game . . . one of the few games which make life, difficult and depressing as it is sometimes, a little more interesting.

Love in an animal sense is an illness, but a necessity which one has to overcome. Politics is an odd game, not without danger I have been told, but certainly sometimes amusing. To eat and to drink are habits not to be despised but often connected with unfortunate consequences. To sail around the earth in 91 hours must be very strenuous, like racing in cars or splitting the atoms. But the most exhausting thing of all—is boredom.

So let me take part in your boredom and in your dreams while you take part in mine which may be yours as well.

To begin with, there has been enough talk about art . . .”

Max Beckmann (1884-1950), “On My Painting,” 1938

“The logic of life does not tolerate permanent revolutions. There are possible on paper . . . The most dizzying experiments are permissible, but even in Art the logic of life arrests the experiments as soon as they have reached the point when the death of the experimental objects becomes imminent . . .”

“The apparently ideal companionship between Form and Content in the old Art was indeed an unequal division of rights and was based on the obedience of the Form to the Content. This obedience is explained by the fact that all formalistic movements in the history of Art, whenever they appeared, never went so far as to presume the possibility of an independent existence of a work apart from the naturalistic content, nor to suspect that there might be a concept of the world which could reveal a Content in a Form.

This was the main obstacle to the rejuvenation of Art . . .”

Naum Gabo (1890-1977), “The Constructive Idea in Art,” 1937

Prosody

2005-10-02T12:29:00.000-07:00

Greil Marcus: “. . . that beloved American story, that Gothic weather report, about a girl swept off a Kansas farm by a tornado and dropped down into another world as the killer of a witch. There is a way in which Dorothy’s adventures in the land of Oz are really about the frustration of a young woman who wants more than anything to escape from a language in which every vocal sound has been so polished in taciturn mouths that neither a laugh nor a scream can be made, let alone heard, let alone be paid any mind.”

Which makes me curious: where did Marcus grow up?

~

Rather tickle’d to receive an hieroglyphickal gush of spam with the sender list’d as “Finally K. Blanches.”

~

My reverting—in the new place—to one-pot-ism: suppers of endless leftovers always add’d to, like a sourdough. Some individuals covet stray lines that way, starter kits. Never sweeping off the all, tabula-rasaickally.

Reading: Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn. A story related by orphan turn’d detective agency “heavy,” Lionel Essrog, who suffers the touching, rearranging, repeating compulsiveness of Tourette’s Syndrome, along with its uncontrollable (quasi-filthy) nonsense shout-outs: Eat me, dickweed!

(Besides activating the sleeping adolescent in me, I begin to think of mild Tourette’s as a sine qua non for the writing of poetry: that compulsive measure, counting, repetition, that word-roar, radical combo-ship, that missing off-switch to the brainpan’s rabble-gouge.)

“Tourette’s teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive—it teaches you this because you’re the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous, and disruptive their way.”

“Speech was intention, and I couldn’t let anyone else or myself know how intentional my craziness felt. Pratfalls, antics—those were accidental lunacy, and more or less forgivable. Practically speaking, it was one thing to stroke Leshawn Montrose’s arm, or even to kiss him, another entirely to walk up and call him Shefawn Mongoose, or Lefthand Moonprose, or Fuckyou Roseprawn. So, though I collected words, treasured them like a drooling sadistic captor, bending them, melting them down, filing off their edges, stacking them into teetering piles, before release I translated them into physical performance, manic choreography.”

~

Of note: Otis Books / Seismicity Editions put out a call for submissions of manuscripts of poetry and fiction. Details here.

Dispersal

2005-10-01T12:41:00.000-07:00

Greil Marcus: “‘The Coo Coo Bird’ was a ‘folk-lyric’ song. That meant it was made up of verbal fragments that had no direct or logical relationship to each other, but were drawn from a floating pool of thousands of disconnected verses, couplets, one-liners, pieces of eight. Harry Smith guessed the folk-lyric form came together some time between 1850 and 1875. Whenever it happened, it wasn’t until enough fragments were abroad in the land to reach a kind of critical mass—until there were enough fragments, passing back and forth between blacks and whites as common coin, to generate more fragments, to sustain within the matrix of a single musical language an almost infinite repertory of performances, to sustain the sense that out of the anonymity of the tradition a singer was presenting a distinct and separate account of a unique life. It is this quality—the insistence that the singer is singing his or her own life, as an event, taking place as you listen, its outcome uncertain—that separates the song, from which the singer emerges, from the ballad, into which the singer disappears.”

~

There’s a line walk’d tipsily between pure revelatory release—in language—and blithe spittle’d idiocy.

~

A devotee of Mother Ann Lee comparing the heart to “a cage of unclean birds.”

The dozen or so Drosophila: now numbering in the hundreds. I put the fruit away. A dispersal occurs: where dozens lined up earlier on the lathed two-by-twos of the “breakfast bar,” now I locate individuals maundering and lost, inconsolably flying a slow hang and hover down the hall to th’apartment’s nether regions. An open container of colamata olives collects its dead: Drosophilae diving into oil enshroudment. Critical mass.

~

Note: Robert Cándida Smith, Utopia and Dissent: Art, Poetry, and Politics in California

Deadpan

2005-09-30T06:35:00.000-07:00

Down with Higgledy-Piggledy-isms!

Down with the My Black Hen-esqueries of critical gaping!

Down with the squeezed-out perfectionism of egg-laying!

Down with Gentlemen in snot-color’d cravats!

(Down with the all allusive dew on the boatman’s brow!)

(Down with contraband dog!)

~

THE BLACK HEN

Hickety, pickety, my black hen,
She lays eggs for gentlemen;
Gentlemen come every day
To see what my black hen doth lay.

(Higgledy, piggledy, my black hen,
She lays eggs for gentlemen.
Sometimes nine, sometimes ten—
Higgledy, piggledy, my black hen.)

André Breton: “Poetry is the attempt to represent, or to restore, through screams, tears . . . those things or that thing which articulate language obscurely tries to express.”

Steve McQueen, “Deadpan,” 1997, video still

Greil Marcus: “. . . the mask is what in the nineteenth century came to be called the deadpan, the poker face: precisely what the coachman wipes off the rider’s face.”

Bohemian

2005-09-29T06:53:00.000-07:00

Oscar Wilde, ever aphoristic and nudging, there in the lily-lit gloaming, offers up: “The only difference between a caprice and a life-long passion is that the caprice lasts a little longer.”

(How Turgenev, late in life, fell in love with Maria Savina, “a vivacious young actress with bohemian habits”—love, “only in the sloppiest sense of the word” is how Robert Dessaix puts it (Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev.) The famous story of th’arrangement Turgenev made to join Savina in her compartment on the train as she passed near Turgenev’s Spasskoye estate on her way from Moscow to Odessa. How he boarded in Mtsensk, (the railway station where Chekhov had a cup of coffee he claim’d tasted of smoked fish) and descend’d one hour later at Oryol. Voilà les histoires d’amour, incalculably bête et futile, inutile and comprehensible to God or no one, c’est tout.)

Turgenev, of course, dismissed the idea of God. Dessaix: “To be fair, what he dismissed was the existence of Bog. (Actually pronounced ‘bawkh,’ this is the word Russians use for the Christian ‘God.’ It was meticulously spelt with a small ‘b’ throughout the Soviet period, as if this might somehow call the deity’s bluff . . .)”

Elsewhere (History of Criticism) George Saintsbury: “Ancient without Modern is a stumbling block, Modern without Ancient is foolishness utter and irremediable.” (There’s a lot of that going around lately.)

Constellatory

2005-09-28T04:54:00.000-07:00

Odd constellation flung up into a sky coming undone. Cloud tatters nail’d to officious blue planking.

I trundled off (dogging the current crop of sublime—or coy—ironists) to find Friedrich Schlegel and encounter’d Arno Schmidt, Scenes from the Life of a Faun:

The moon’s bald Mongolian skull slowly shoved its way toward me. (The sole value of discussions is: all those good ideas that occur to you afterwards.)

And:

Must one follow through on good intentions, or is it sufficient just to formulate them?!

And:

Color blindness is rare: art blindness the rule . . . There is even an ancient Sanskrit proverb that says, most people give off sparks only when you land a fist in their eye!: and so, painter, paint! writer, write! with your fist! (For they have to be awakened someway or other, all those semi-people living on the other side of the boundary line: so go ahead and let yourselves be cursed as “ruffians” by the fainthearted; and as “arsonists” by the firemen; and let the sleepy-heads accuse you of “breaking in”: they should thank the appropriate gods that somebody has finally roused them!)

Faint accruals of Schlegelismus? Ja. Maybe. Poetic enthusiasm (making) versus ironic skepticism (destroying). Schlegel:

“The most intense passion is eager to wound itself, if only to act and to discharge its excessive power.”

And:

This self-infliction is not inaptitude, but deliberate impetuousness, overflowing vitality, and often has a positive, stimulating effect, since illusion can never be fully destroyed. Intense agility must act, even destroy; if it does not find an external object, it reacts against a beloved one, against itself, its own creation. This agility then injures in order to provoke, not to destroy.”

Against irony: wit (see Dr. Johnson’s sketch: the “combination of dissimilar images, or discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike,” or “the most heterogeneous ideas . . . yoked by violence together.” Schlegel calls wit “an explosion of the compound spirit.”) That dialectic / shudder / wobble: the attempt to thrust things together, to assert new formal pliabilities, to combine (inexhaustibly, abundantly) whilst irony disassembles, claims unattainability. Schlegel’s irony is “the only entirely involuntary and nevertheless completely conscious dissimulation. It is equally impossible to attain it artificially or to betray it. . . . It is a good sign if the harmonious dullards fail to understand this constant self-parody, if over and over again they believe and disbelieve until they become giddy and consider jest to be seriousness and seriousness to be jest.”

Which uncommon harrumphings somehow brought me (involuntary) to Rodrigo Toscano’s To Leveling Swerve (Krupskaya, 2004) A dervish in feldspar is something like “Axionometric Manhattenings.” Fits the Schlegel wit / irony mash-up to a T:

Somebody lost to endeavoring.

Jumped out in front.

Seriously unserious about it—everything.

Acute receptivity.

At the base of a scaffold elevator at the exterior of the beamwork perspective.

Site, terrifically gnarled spot-welding on the way up.

Beauty, achieved, leads to.

Aesthetic ideals.

Serious qualitative cloaca.

Somebody lost in endeavoring.

Somebody else rams smack into it.

That to the front (jumping) is to be more exposed than to the back (jumping).

Poetic practicality.

Unserious about core issues, a hyper-serious core heating up.

Lives that happen one by one that cling by twos and threes.

. . .

Enacts and illustrates (and, with it under the skin of one’s imaginary, is “about”) Schlegelismus. Ja-maybe.

Irony in the note that the ghost of Belle Starr that initiate’d the fandango, that brilliant post is gone, lasso’d neatly and haul’d down, strainlessly (only the musical “strain” is left behind).

Keep

2005-09-27T05:08:00.000-07:00

What’s the source of my crab-persnickety feeling about D’Oyly Carte-ism, the Hurokesque, impresario-rutting, Diaghilev-ism. Self-satisfy’d nonstop poetry boosterism, who needs it?

Here’s what we mean by life: all the rules are rescinded except the ones that keep things standing, and it’s bigger and whip-like, uncoiling with a snap that flicks the quivering cigarette out of the lovely actress’s mouth so she can go back to licking and being licked. Sometimes it just slides in and out like a mink through the boards at the base of a barn wet with snow melt. Here’s what we mean by life: I want to be the street. Because some things are immortal in keeping with the personal, it offers each one more access to the rest. It tells each beading mystery with chalky fingers.

Ed Barrett, Rub Out, (Pressed Wafer, 2003)

~

Note: Isaiah Berlin, Russian Thinkers
E. H. Carr, The Romantic Exiles

Fragment

2005-09-26T05:17:00.000-07:00

What is is thought itself,
as well as what is thought of.

You will not find thought apart from being,
to which it is betrothed.

In the same way, time
is not—and is not going to become—
something other than and separate from being.

Being’s share of being
holds being motionless and whole . . .

Parmenides, trans. Robert Bringhurst in Carving the Elements: A Companion to the Fragments of Parmenides by Robert Bringhurst, Dan Carr, Peggy Gotthold, Daniel E. Kelm, Peter Koch, Christopher Stinehour, and Richard Wagener. (Editions Koch, 2005). A book about making a book, The Fragments of Parmenides & an English translation, by Robert Bringhurst, illustrated by Richard Wagener (Editions Koch, 2004)

A wood engraving by Richard Wagener.

Cobbler

2005-09-25T12:07:00.000-07:00

Opera mezzo-soprano Pauline Viardot’s St. Petersburg dressing room theatricks circa 1843: “There in the softly lit, heated room beneath the stage she would receive Turgenev and his three fervent rivals, seating each of them on one paw of the magnificent bearskin they’d brought her, the bear’s claws now replaced with claws of gold. As Virginia Woolf cruelly remarked, this paw was to become his permanent lodging. Viardot herself seems to have sat somewhere in the middle in a white lace peignoir . . .”

Viardot: “her fiery, hooded eyes, sooty black, her large mouth and her shiny black hair, drawn back severely in a part from her high, white forehead.”

Heinrich Heine (and nearly everybody) thought Viardot ugly: “‘but with the kind of ugliness which is noble.’ When she opens her large mouth to sing he wrote, ‘we feel as if the most monstrous plants and animals from India and Africa are about to appear before our eyes, giant palms festooned with thousands of blossoming lianas,’ leopards, giraffes, ‘even a herd of young elephants.’

Robert Dessaix, Twilight of Love: Travels with Turgenev (Shoemaker & Hoard, 2005)

~

(Note: Shoemaker & Hoard’s forthcoming Forrest Gander essays, A Faithful Existence.)

~

The ci-gît is an unruly white lie, a contre-verity of itself. A here marker envelopes a now that is irrefutably absent, a never-here. A monstrous restlessness measures the way one proceeds “down.” A songe (revery) enraptures every mensonge (lie).

Th’irascible Edward Dahlberg, who hated everything and everybody, turns up eponymously in Jonathan Lethem’s The Disappointment Artist (Doubleday, 2005). Out of The Sorrows of Priapus, “a kooky,” according to Lethem, “diatribe against the human body and sexual desire”:

The phallus is a slovenly bag created without intellect or ontological purpose or design, and as long as the human being has this hanging worm appended to his middle, which is not good for anything except passing urine and getting a few, miserable irritations, for which he forsakes his mother, his father, and his friends, he will never comprehend the Cosmos.

Or:

A man may want to study Mark or Paracelsus, or go on an errand to do a kindness to an aging woman, but this tyrant wants to discharge itself either because the etesian gales are acerb or a wench has just stooped over to gather her laundry . . . the head is so obtuse as to go absolutely crazy over a pair of hunkers, which is no more than a chine of beef.

~

Lost is the basic slant craft’d beatitude of making it up out of whiled away swaths of afternoon sloth. Replaced by teem and oratorio, loud manumissions, Latinate urges, a broth.

Lost the gall-big leaf, the inky cap smear, the spore-dusky slip of a moth in trouble. Operatic noises disengaging, metaphoric bluster as puerility itself.

Lost the manner of irresolute thinking laid down, sliced together. Thought daub’d over with vocabulary.

~

Note: Tom Stoppard, The Coast of Utopia

Coop’d

2005-09-24T15:16:00.000-07:00

Some of Darwin’s pigeons: “Tumblers, trumpeters, laughers, fantails, pouters, polands, runts, dragons, scandaroons.”

~

“The classic barnacle is an animal with the body plan of a volcano: a cone with a crater at the top. It colonizes rocks, docks, and ships’ hulls. Every day when the tide rolls in, each barnacle pokes out of its crater a long foot like a feather duster and gathers food. When the tide goes out, each barnacle pulls in the feather duster and clamps its crater closed with an operculum—a shelly lid. To mate, a barnacle sticks a long penis out of its crater and thrusts it down the crater of a neighbor. Since every barnacle in the colony is both male and female, this is not as chancy as it sounds.”

Jonathan Weiner, The Beak of the Finch (Vintage, 1995)

~

“Taxonomists can be classified into splitters and lumpers.”

Faced with the diversity of contemporary American poetries, some splitters recognize dozens and dozens of genera, hundreds and hundred of species and subspecies. Some of the sillier lumpers go so far as to believe it possible subsume all poetry under two distinct species.

What solicitors offer Wisconsin dairy farmers (“There’s salesmen everywhere . . . Whole countries made of salesmen.”): “Protein lick, calf booster, ivermectin, steroid tags, lactose, dehorners, lice powder—you name it.”

Sam Shepard, The God of Hell (Vintage, 2005)

Reed (Broken)

2005-09-23T09:06:00.000-07:00

Donald Sultan, “Lemons,” Set of four aquatints. Black and white. Edition of fourteen. 64 x 48 1/2 inches. 1987.

Conjobble

2005-09-22T06:55:00.000-07:00

Dr. Johnson:

Essay. A loose sally of the mind; an irregular indigested piece; not a regular and orderly composition.

Sally. Escape; levity; extravagant flight; frolick; wild gaiety; exorbitance.

Escape. Sally; flight; irregularity.

Thousand ’scapes of wit,
Make thee the father of their idle dreams,
And rack thee in their fancies.
         Shakespeare. Measure for Measure.

Loose ’scapes of love.
         Milton.

Irregularity. 1. Neglect of method and order.

As these vast heaps of mountains are thrown together with so much irregularity and confusion, they form a great variety of hollow bottoms.
         Addison on Italy.

Irregularity. 2. Inordinate practice; vice.

Vice. The course of action opposite to virtue; depravity of manners; inordinate life.

No spirit more gross to love
Vice for itself.
         Milton.

afreet, Azazel, Bacalou, Belial, cacodaemon, Eblis, energumen, hob, jinnee, Keelut, Lucifer, mojo jojo, Mokoi, Puck, sorceress, tokoloshe.

Equine Prayer

2005-09-21T04:48:00.000-07:00

“How long shall we nourish and keepe this fiery Asse in vaine?”

~

“Rampant and inconsiderable cock-of-the-walk-ism.”

~

“. . . a cancer of a book, grotesquely verbose, its cargo of brilliant ideas borne aloft by a tone of viscous solemnity and by ghastly repetitiveness.”

Susan Sontag on Saint Genet

~

“Visciously solemn.”

Pinch

2005-09-20T04:37:00.000-07:00

“A pluvial Tuesday.”

~

“Natural selection is supposed to scrutinize the slightest variations in nature, ‘daily and hourly.’”

“Black mutants conquered the Continent too. In 1867 a pair of them were caught copulating on an elm tree in the Netherlands, in the province of North Brabant.”

Stories of rapid evolutionary darkening in Carbonaria, a kind of moth, against the “unparliamentary” soot of the Industrial Revolution. Subsequent lightening.

Voici

2005-09-19T04:38:00.000-07:00

Voice-print of the distant antic. Cat-prowl and shirrings out. Cirrus lashings. Th’under husky. Canny lackadaisical capable of unleashing fury. A fine laughter. That word Nabokov claim’d hid in slaughter. Just a rasp-sassy hint of Mariel Hemingway: “I never say anything f-filthy.”

A tizzy of turnings here, bridled. Shoe-leather burning and wind-tunnel.

“What are men anyway but balloons on legs, a lot of blown-up bladders? Flies, that’s what we are. No, not even flies. Flies have something inside. But a man’s a bubble, all air, nothing else.”

Petronius, trans. William Arrowsmith, The Satyricon, (Meridian, [1959], 1994)

~

Charting the categories and assignments of the droll astrologer (Petronius):

Aries (The Ram): “owns heaps of sheep and lots of wool” “head is hard, forehead like brass, horns like swords” “many professors and also muttonheads”

Taurus (The Bull): “bullies and cowboys and people who lie down in soft pastures”

Gemini (The Twins): “two-horse teams, yokes of oxen, lechers who are led around by their balls, and two-faced politicians”

Cancer (The Crab): “walks on many legs” “possessions stretch over land and sea” “at home in both elements”

Leo (The Lion): “gluttons and big shots”

Virgo (The Virgin): “useless women, deserters, and those who wear chains on their ankles, fetters for men, bracelets for women”

Scorpio (The Stinger): “poisoners and murderers”

Sagittarius (The Archer): “cross-eyed thieves who cock an eye at the beets but snitch the ham”

Capricorn (The Goat-Horn): “because it means goat-horn, come men who have horns or corns; corn-men are workers who sweat for their wages and horn-men are cuckolds all.

Aquarius (The Water-Carrier): “innkeepers who water the wine and people who are all wet.”

Pisces (The Fish): “the fishier types of men: gape-mouthed lawyers or just plain fish peddlers.”

~

“That’s why things are as they are.”

Poor

2005-09-18T08:54:00.000-07:00

Got a haircut, poor man’s miniature Lyle Lovett style.

~

Why the upsurge of fetishizing writing “spaces”? I write anywhere. Everywhere.

Early morning mostly silent conversation with the Drosophila who work my bowl of bananas. Maybe eight or nine or so. I peer closely, my big blue human eyes, trying to determine eye-colors. Red, mostly. (Opposing white.) I note how one fly trails another—never gaining, never falling behind, never taking wing, running along on legs that pure insect speed makes invisible.

“You’re idiots! Manipulated! You believe the newspapers! Yes! Inhale! Yes! I’m telling you that the Americans sacrificed several thousand of their citizens so they could attack the Taliban trash. Whether it’s oil or some other crap they’re after, I don’t know. But it’s not a battle for the freedom of some oppressed women, I’m sure of that. You’re surprised the Americans sacrificed their own people. Americans? Yes indeed, ladies and gentlemen! So whose lives should they sacrifice? Hungarians? . . . What on earth do I have to do with ‘them’? What on earth do the Taliban women have to do with the Americans? Nothing, but in fact they do. I, daughter of the I-hope-late Z>ivko, and a fucked-up Taliban woman with headwear, we’re the same. So is the American who takes little slippers off Taliban women’s little feet in the middle of nowhere. Someone is plying a game in our name. The chador is being removed for our good. But, my blind friends, what you don’t get is that we’re all under the chador. The fucking Taliban women are under the chador. The deceased Americans from the twin towers are under the chador, so are the living Americans in godforsaken Indiana and Afghanistan and Iraq and Iran and Bosnia-Herzegovina and Guatemala and the Philippines and in Italy. I’m under the chador, and so are you assholes who don’t understand a fucking thing. Is there anyone who’s not covered, I hear you yelling full of hope. There are. In the world there are perhaps a hundred or a hundred and fifty sons of bitches whose heads aren’t covered and who hold our lives in their hands. The entire world is being fucked by five corporations, ones like Coca-Cola. The rest of us are Taliban women.”

Vedrana Rudan, trans. Celia Hawkesworth, Night, (Dalkey Archive, 2004)

Interview.

Timorous

2005-09-16T07:10:00.000-07:00

Sought: a way to reverse Kertészian “emotional atrophying.”

“I am entangling her, tying her to myself, turning, swirling like two brightly colored, agile circus performers, who, in the end, take their bows, deathly pale and empty-handed before a malicious spectator—before failure . . . yes, indeed, one has to, at least, strive for failure, says . . . because failure and failure alone remains as the one single accomplishable experience, say I. Thus, I, too, am striving for failure, if strive I must, and I must because I live and write and both are strives, life a rather blind one, writing more of a seeing strive and as such a different striving from life. Perhaps the strive in writing is striving to see what life’s strive is, and for that reason, since it can’t do any differently, it retells life, repeats life as if it were life as well, even though it is not, quite fundamentally, quite incomparably it is not, and as such its failure is fundamentally assured as soon as we begin to write and write of life.”

Imre Kertész, trans. Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson, Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Northwestern University Press, 1997)

~

Post midnight, with G. tossing restless, too excited to sleep (he’s off with ’s violin teacher to Itzhak Perlman in concert with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra today), I think: “Wee Sleekit, couring, timorous beastie,” for a small animal.

B. B. King is eighty. Recalling a hot Sunday afternoon in Washington, D.C. circa 1968-9, opening act: Chairmen of the Board. Some flipped out cat wild windmill-dancing up on stage, and dragged off by cops. Nothin’ bother’d B. B.

Jump

2005-09-15T06:41:00.000-07:00

The two of us stepping out into a startlingly fresh morning at the new place, and G. announcing: “The air smells happy.”

“No,” I said immediately and forthwith, without hesitation and spontaneously, so to say, for it is quite obvious that our instincts actually work against our instincts, so that, so to say, our anti-instincts act instead of, or even as, our instincts . . . So go my witticisms, if indeed these can be considered witticisms, that is, if naked, miserable truth can be considered a witticism. Thus I expound to the philosopher walking along with me after he and I both halted to catch our breath because of dieting, or sickness, or perhaps consumption in the midst of an almost audibly gasping oak forest, or glade, whatever you call it: I admit, I’m rather ignorant when it comes to trees; all I immediately recognize is the pine because of its needles, and the plantain because I like it, and what I like—even today—I recognize even by anti-instinct. I recognize it even if it is not by the same striking, stomach-gripping, ready to jump, in one word, inspired sort of recognition with which I recognize those things that I hate.”

Imre Kertész, trans. Christopher C. Wilson and Katharina M. Wilson, Kaddish for a Child Not Born (Northwestern University Press, 1997)

~

Jon Leon, author of the “Diphasic Rumors” series and editor of the swift new journal “Wherever We Put Our Hats”: My Maserati.

Staccato

2005-09-14T04:57:00.000-07:00

“Life flows in staccato pieces belonging to different systems.
Only our clothing, not the body, joins together the disparate moments of life.”

Viktor Shklovsky, A Sentimental Journey

“. . . others said that the twentieth century began when it was discovered that people come from apes and some people said they were less related to apes because they had developed more quickly. Then people started comparing languages and speculating about who had the most advanced language and who had moved furthest along the path of civilization. The majority thought it was the French because all sorts of interesting things happened in France and the French knew how to converse and used conjunctives and the pluperfect conditional and smiled at women seductively and women danced the cancan and painters invented impressions. But the Germans said that genuine civilization had to be simple and close to the people and that they had invented Romanticism and lots of German poets had written about love, and about the valleys where there lay mists. The Germans said they were the natural upholders of European civilization because they knew how to make war and carry on trade, and also to organize convivial entertainments. And they said the French were vain and the English were haughty and the Slavs did not have a proper language and language is the soul of a nation and Slavs did not need any nation or state because it would only confuse them.”

~

“Internet users represented a new type of citizen, which they called a hypercitizen. The hypercitizen was the first supranational and totally free citizen in history and anyone could become one if they managed to stop thinking the old way and started to think differently, because in the coming world order, labor and capital and raw materials would no longer play any role. And parliamentary democracy would give way to hypercivic democracy and each hypercitizen would be equal to every other hypercitizen and everyone would live interactively. And every week one language and 35,000 hectares of forest expired on average. And 96% of the world’s population spoke 240 languages, while 4% spoke 5,821 languages and 51 languages were spoken by only one person. And in 1996, the United Nations launched a program called UNIVERSAL NETWORK LANGUAGE, and many Anarchists studied Esperanto and in 1910 a handbook was published in Esperanto explaining how to assassinate political leaders.”

Patrik Ouředník, trans. Gerald Turner, Europeana: a Brief History of the Twentieth Century (Dalkey Archive, 2005)

~

Ouředník in an interview: “Is it possible to express a period of time, a specific historical time, without using traditional narrative means, however direct or allusive they are, such as a historical novel or an intimist narrative? To find a form that would enable the narrator—like History itself—to be terribly banal, while pretending to be original.”

And: “Of course, we would like to get rid of this stupid century. However, I don’t think that people have decided to do so.

In any case, my goal was not to conceive of the twentieth century as a theme—not even in the sense of a “reflection theme”—but as a literary figure. The primary question wasn’t to know what events, what episodes were characteristic of the twentieth century, but which syntax, which rhetoric, which expressiveness belonged to it, in what sense was it redundant, etc.

I could simplify this: what were the key words of the twentieth century? Undoubtedly, haste (rather than “chaos,” which is no more appropriate to the twentieth century than to any another). This meant, let’s try to write a hurried text. Another peculiarity of the twentieth century, I think, is infantilism—with everything that it implies, from the romantic-commercial image of juvenility to the refusal of taking the full responsibility of one’s acts and words. Let’s try then to write a childish text, a text that could have been told by a kid reciting his lesson or by the village idiot. Thirdly, this century has been explicitly scientific. This meant, let’s use a vocabulary more or less scientific, with all its contradictions and, if possible, with all its vacuity. These are the elements that gave birth to the form and content of the book.”

~

Missing: catalpas, Carmen, correspondances.

Brittle

2005-09-13T05:06:00.000-07:00

“Some ingenuous souls, including a few guardians of left-wing orthodoxy and the odd mischief-maker, declared that rehabilitating a Falangist writer was vindicating (or laying the ground work to vindicate) Falangism itself. The truth was exactly the opposite: rehabilitating a Falangist writer was just rehabilitating a writer; or more precisely, it was vindicating themselves as writers by rehabilitating a good writer. I mean that the fashion arose, in the best cases (the worst aren’t worth mentioning), from the natural need all writers have to invent their own tradition, from a certain urge to be provocative, from the problematic certainty that literature is one thing and life another and that it was therefore possible to be a good writer at the same time as being a terrible person (or a person who supports and foments terrible causes) from the conviction that we were being literarily unfair to certain Falangist writers, who, to use Andrés Trapiello’s phrase, had won the war but lost literature.”

On Falangist writer Rafael Sánchez Mazas:

“He always had an impertinent, haughty, brittle and melancholic genius . . . He was a romantic after all, would he not have judged deep down all victory to be contaminated by unworthiness, and the first thing he noticed upon arriving in paradise,—albeit that illusory bourgeois paradise of leisure, chintz and slippers that, like a needy travesty of old privileges, hierarchies and securities, he constructed in his last years—was that he could live there, but not write, because writing and plenitude are incompatible.”

~

“. . . a Chilean lost in Europe who would be smoking, his eyes clouded, standing back a little and very serious, watching us dance a paso doble beside Miralles’ grave just as one night years before he’d seen Miralles and Luz dance to another paso doble under the awning of a trailer in the Estrella de Mar campsite, seeing it and wondering if maybe that paso doble and this one were in fact the same, wondering without expecting an answer, because he already knew that the only answer is that there is no answer, the only answer is a sort of secret or unfathomable joy, something verging on cruelty, something that resists reason, but nor is it instinct: something that remains there with the same blind stubbornness with which blood persists in its course and the earth in its immovable orbit and all beings in their obstinate condition of being, something that eludes words the way the water in the stream eludes stone, because words are only made for saying to each other, for saying the sayable, when the sayable is everything except what rules us or makes us live or matters or what we are . . .”

(The Chilean being novelist Roberto Bolaño.)

Javier Cercas, trans. Anne McLean, Soldiers of Salamis (Bloomsbury, 2003)

Cupid-Bairn

Unhappie is the man for evirmaire
That teils the sand and sawis in the aire;
Bot twyse unhappier is he, I lairn,
That feidis in his hairt a mad desyre,
And follows on a woman throw the fyre,
Led be a blind and teichit be a bairn.

A Name

2005-09-12T06:08:00.000-07:00

“The imbalances stalking us show up everywhere, but I think the most horrible one is the imbalance between the names of things and the things themselves. Things have started slipping out of their names like peas from a dry pod. So far names had clung close to things in an inseparable whole, just as the atoms of hydrogen and oxygen formed the molecule of water. And when man managed to separate the hydrogen atoms from the oxygen atoms, incredible energy was released. Imagine that energy multiplied a million times and you’ll get an idea what will befall us when names are finally separated from things. I think there will be no explosion, but rather something much more horrid. I will not give it a name for the time being. Because the names create the named.

We must talk only in allegories.”

~

“I knew that different flowers opened up at different times of the day. I spent two years searching botanical books and meadows; I roamed the fields for days on end. I wanted to find the appropriate flowers and, planting them in a circle, to create a natural clock. A clock with a natural mechanism. Asked what the time was, people would no loner answer ‘3 P.M.’ but ‘tulip.’ I was proud of my idea. And then, two days before the planting of the flowers I had already collected, I happened, just happened to read in the trivia section of a newspaper the following note: ‘Carl Linnaeus, the father of botany, knowing the precision of botanical cycles, planted in the sections of a circle flowers that opened up at specific times of the day.’”

~

“If you want to write a Natural Novel, you must watch the visible world closely. You must find resemblances. Each autumn the cabbages mock the raised-collar style from the time of Marie Antoinette. Or Marie Antoinette had an eye for cabbages. Who can say whether history is influenced by botany or vice versa? The Novel of Natural History makes no such distinctions. Yesterday the market was full of decapitated Antoinettes.”

Georgi Gospodinov, trans. Zornitsa Hristova, Natural Novel (Dalkey Archive, 2005)

~

Thumbing through the new Fence and spying the first line of Jorie Graham’s “Disenchantment,” thinking it reads:

I shit my self . . .

(For “shift.”)

A Desert

2005-09-09T05:15:00.000-07:00

Atacama

“. . . I went on writing reviews for the newspaper, and critical articles crying out for a different approach to culture, as even the most inattentive reader could hardly fail to notice if he scratched the surface a little, critical articles crying out, indeed begging, for a return to the Greek and Latin greats, to the Troubadours, to the dolce stil nuovo and the classics of Spain, France and England, more culture! more culture! read Whitman and Pound and Eliot, read Neruda and Borges and Vallejo, read Victor Hugo, for God’s sake, and Tolstoy, and proudly I cried myself hoarse in the desert, but my vociferations and on occasions my howling could only be heard by those who were able to scratch the surface of my writings with the nails of their index fingers, and they were not many, but enough for me, and life went on and on and on, like a necklace of rice grains, on each grain of which a landscape had been painted, tiny grains and microscopic landscapes, and I knew that everyone was putting that necklace on and wearing it, but no one had the patience or the strength or the courage to take it off and look at it closely and decipher each landscape grain by grain, partly because to do so required the vision of a lynx or an eagle, and partly because the landscapes usually turned out to contain unpleasant surprises like coffins, makeshift cemeteries, ghost towns, the void and the horror, the smallness of being and its ridiculous will . . .”

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Chris Andrews, By Night in Chile (New Directions, 2003)

~

Ornamental Piety

My clayey
tabernacle
dissolves.

A Different Story

2005-09-08T05:17:00.000-07:00

Topple’d by one’s “own born poetry.” (Whitman)

Naw.

A Book

2005-09-07T04:29:00.000-07:00

Sometimes, trembling with cold, I would go to a soda fountain and order a Bilz. I would sit on a bar stool and gaze all misty-eyed at the droplets running down the surface of the bottle, while somewhere inside me, a bitter voice was preparing me for the unlikely spectacle of a droplet climbing up the glass, against the laws of nature, all the way up to the mouth of the bottle.

. . .

It was around that time that I met Mr Raef and, a little later, Mr Etah . . . I think they had a clam-tinning plant and shipped the tinned clams to Germany and France.

. . .

Pigs suffer too, I said to myself. And immediately I regretted that thought.

Roberto Bolaño, trans. Chris Andrews, By Night in Chile (New Directions, 2003)

~

If ye guttes be fallen on ye ground yt it be foule / thanne lay it in warm gootys mylke / & clense it therin / & than put it agayne in to ye belly.

~

The mannys yarde is a plowman of the nature of mankynd / and is also a waye of the vryne / & is made of skynne / musclus / vaynes / senowes / and grosse stryngys / and it is plantyd vpon the bone Pectinis / and ye bondys com from the bone Sacris / or holy bone. In the yarde be. ii. pryncypall wayes or pypes / the one for the sede / and the other for the vryn. The ende of the yarde is namyd Ballanum & the hole is namyd mitra. The fyrst ouergoynge skynne of the yarde is prepucium / and the yarde is commonly. viii. or. ix. fynger brede longe / and must be of resonable bygnes / accordynge to the quantyte of the matrix or moder. Permenium or Peritonium is the place betwene the ars and the yarde / the whiche is a seme that foloweth the lyne of the yarde.

A Lytell Brekynge of a Brayne Panne.

2005-09-06T11:43:00.000-07:00

Och,

           I've maistert mysel therr,

I've stappit

                           the hass o my sangs

                                                                       wi my ain pen.

Mayakovsky, translated by Edwin Morgan

A Category

2005-09-01T06:10:00.000-07:00

Glen Baxter: “I prefer the fantasy where everyday objects can suddenly become more interesting. I really like that aspect of it. I am in agreement with Breton’s definition of ‘marvelous’: ‘The marvelous has never been better defined than as being in complete contrast to the fantastic.’ In my work I present the impossible happening in a world where impossibility is the rule (as opposed to works of fantasy, where we see the impossible happening in a world where impossibility is outlawed).”

Interview’d by Bill Zavatsky in 1976 (Out of Sun, Vol. V. No. 1, 1983)

A category in Justin O’Brien’s Journals of André Gide: “Detached Pages.” Insert’d at the end of each year. Being, presumably, undated, stray, bereft. And not, unstain’d, unspotted, gouache’d up. Unchain’d melodies. My detached pages.

Gide is so completely wrong about most things it’s a grutch-pother to read him. The New Sincerity crowd could make him a mascot:

When one has begun to write, the hardest thing is to be sincere. Essential to mull over that idea and to define artistic sincerity. Meanwhile, I hit upon this: the word must never precede the idea. Or else: the word must always be necessitated by the idea. It must be irresistible and inevitable: and the same is true of the sentence, of the whole work of art. And for the artist’s whole life, since his vocation must be irresistible. He must be incapable of not writing (I should prefer him to resist himself in the beginning and to suffer therefore).

[On rappellera l’anecdote qui met en scène le peintre Degas et le poète Mallarmé, telle que la rapporte Paul Valéry in Degas danse dessin. Degas déplore : « Je ne parviens pas à écrire. Ce ne sont pourtant pas les idées qui me manquent ». Mallarmé réplique : « Mais, Degas, ce n’est pas avec des idées que l’on écrit, c’est avec des mots ».]

Edgar “No Shortage of Ideas” Degas versus Stéphane “Word’ry” Mallarmé.

A poet needs flee ideas.

~

Olivier Cadiot in “Invented Lives”:

“The incessant sound of waves breaking against iron”

~

Fog-stymied catalpas.

~

To work.

A Slip

2005-08-31T10:55:00.000-07:00

The dying Kafka, under doctor’s orders not to talk, wrote notes on little slips of paper:

Somewhere in today’s newspaper there is an excellent little article on the treatment of cut flowers, they are so terribly thirsty, another such newspaper . . .

Above all, I would like to tend the peonies because they are so fragile.

And place lilac in the sun.

Have you a moment to spare? If so, would you please lightly spray the peonies?

Eleven years earlier in a letter to Felice, Kafka’d admitted that he’d “never had any real feeling for flowers”:

Ever since childhood there have been times when I was almost unhappy about my inability to appreciate flowers.

~

That terrible lack of purity that dogs Kafka: “almost unhappy.”

~

To work.

A List

2005-08-30T05:54:00.000-07:00

Against Lists

For the list constitutes a first impulse towards commodity-making.

For it is a blind prospectus, a devil in the sun.

For an inevitable hierarchy shall storm the leaflets, and damage the tender crops.

For it makes of all items equal, the flotsam and jetsam of indiscriminate minding.

For it skates like a water strider across the tense surface of the community, and dares not roil its surface.

For it solicits unwarrant’d attention of men and women of true industry.

For it indicates none of th’internal pressures of its source.

For anthology (a collection of flowers) be verily related to anther, a male organ (“a double-celled sac containing the pollen, and the filament, a slender footstalk supporting it.”)

For I see no pistillogy in listing.

For the field itself, unspaded and untill’d goes barren.

~

To work.

A Thing

2005-08-29T05:27:00.000-07:00

~

A MARK

Pool bottom scorch-mark of
An angel. Post-precipice angelic

Mark. Memory cut of sweet
Fleet angel gone. There against

Pool-shimmer where I dove
Like a seizure, tongue-clamp’d

Against a fit. To name
A thing burns nobody clean.

~

Emerson to Fuller: “Whoever lives must rise & grow. Life like the nimble Tartar still overleaps the Chinese wall of distinction that had made an eternal boundary in our geography.”

A CLARIFICATION

A confederate demands more about how “reading without regard for clique- and claque-lines” gets label’d dilettantism. See my scruffy one-liner about “hypervigilance.” Fair enough.

Reading against one’s clique—that is, omnivorously, unhesitantly, exceedingly—is the sine qua non of any robust criticism (or its recent simulacrum of “author-divvying”) or poetry writing. Part of the job description. To constitute it as a particular “project” (donc, “admirable,” donc, “worthy of our attention”) smacks, yes, of dilettantism, attending schematically to a superficies. Gourmandizing.

~

Noted: a moth gone mad, a little two
Millimeter ash-color’d smutch of a thing,
Launching and re-launching itself and expertly
Landing. Flying loops the size of a hole.

~

To work.

A Bug

2005-08-26T05:20:00.000-07:00

Continuance of rough translating: Emmanuel Hocquard’s Ma Haie. Here’s another selection of “Ma Vie Privée” (“My Private Life”):

3. Entering a bar, the Continental Op sees a sign posted:
WE SERVE ONLY AUTHENTIC
BRITISH OR PRE-WAR
AMERICAN WHISKIES
He reacts by observing: “I am trying to count how many lies I can uncover in that statement and I find four of them, just for starters.” (Dashiell Hammett, cited by Steven Marcus.)

[. . .]

8. Suppose you stumbled on my letters and read them: what I wrote my girlfriend is not what you’d read. Because you are not my girlfriend. On that subject, one could say something like: you’d see only our profiles, while we saw face to face.

9. Anecdote II. Nightfall. In the distance, behind the house on the rue du Village, the blackening contours of Old Mountain. Paul and two friends are getting ready to camp there overnight in a tent. They ask if I’ll come along. Though I want to go the thought of it fills me with fear. I don’t dare say no and so hide myself in a bed of periwinkles, where I see them depart without me after some lengthy calling out and looking for me. Lights flicker up on Old Mountain, whose outline is now invisible against the night.

10. Nobody ever insists enough on the one who’s addressed. Everything is there. In my end is my beginning, dear Thomas Stearns. Dear Mademoiselle Lynx. And the madman of an Author who reads Kierkegaard to the chickens. Then when the grey wolves everychone / Drink of the winds their chill small-beer / And lap o' the snows food's gueredon, dear Ezra. My intention is the one who’s addressed.

11. I’ve never had a calling card. However, there was a period when I told myself that if I had to have one engraved, I’d put “television viewer” under my name. Just as television is aimed not so much at people as at television viewers, so the Literature Machine is aimed at its Readers. The reader is a piece of that machine. A machine that runs on itself and for itself. The chicken makes eggs and Literature manufactures Readers. When I write to my girlfriend, I don’t write to a Reader.

12. In the course of producing Readers, the Literary Machine produces Authors. Cows make milk and Literature makes Authors. These days, they’re even seen on television. And there’s where the superiority of television over literature lies: it goes further in the same direction: toward the obscene. When I write to my girlfriend, I am content to sign my letter. I am not the Author of my letter.

13. I don’t reproach television for being what it is. It is very good such as it is and if it didn’t exist someone would have to invent it. Television shows not things as they are (cf. Battman, in Le Commanditare), but television as it is when it intends to show things as they are. It seems to me one would need a huge helping of hypocrisy or ignorance to imagine that Literature could be more pure, in Mallarmé’s sense of that term. Literature, too, is a corrupt place, though its corruption wears a mask of all that is honorable. It’s that mask that interests me.

14. Literature is a machine to produce Literature, not thinking, not critique. In order to study, or to critique, I have no need of Literature. No more than I do philosophy. To tell the truth, for thinking, nobody needs it. I have no need of Literature for critical thinking, but I need to think critically about Literature seeing as how I’ve so imprudently fallen into it. To think critically about Literature is not a way to make it; it’s a way to remove it, to rub it out, to undo it. And, by doing so, remove it in me, undo it in me, rub a hole in the paper of my faults. I’m in the camp of the chicken and the cow, but I think about what the little girl reads. About what there is a little suspect in what she reads.

15. [. . .]

~

Stray notes, translating. Th’impulse is mostly to avoid the literal: disappointment with the loss of exoticism of the French results in a certain tendency to gussy up th’English. Tant mieux. I’m trying to make a device as thrilling to the tactile tongue of the ear in English as I find even the most maladroit or mundane French original. La camionette est en panne, il me faut marcher. It is an unutterly untenable comme but. I cannot decide if my meretricious English combined with my slaughterhouse French is “up” to the task. That is, if th’execrable is of service.

It is preposterously slow work, even done “messily.” Am I entering into Hocquard’s head? No. I am riffing, rambunctious, one way to begin. Le Commanditaire, and Battman: completely unbeknownst and mystifying. The Pound lines: wolfishly aping filler for Loup qui fait sa cour pour de la nourriture. The Hammett via Marcus: “somebody ought to check that.” Don’t ask, as Philip Levine’d say.

~

Needed: a method for “desaturating” a whole landscape. Whole memory palaces of ghost shrews under echinacea, &c. in want of expunging. In need.

Found: a cicada, perfect specimen, green iridescent tinged wings, that moist chalkiness underslinging th’abdomen, perfect, dead. When I tried to place it back down into the long grasses, it stuck to the smooth skin of my hand, its pattes hooks. Unbearably tiny hooks.

~

To work.

A Story

2005-08-25T05:35:00.000-07:00

Common Rue

If one supposes that Hotel Point throve here, 11, rue Hazard à Sombreville, one supposes wrong. An ounce of chance ratiocination’d tell one that. That meretricious “establishment”? Home of naïfs, runaways, giddy bumpkins? With décor of daffy buncombe? Forget it. Here the ruddy featureless apothecary reigns, and the dispensary is punctual, measure’d rot, spansule by spansule of immeasurable rot. Oh boy.

One thing that’s needed: translation of a fat slice of Emmanuel Hocquard’s work. Here’s a selection of “Ma Vie Privée” (out of Ma Haie: Un privé à Tanger 2 (P.O.L., 2001), put raw, and roughly:

MY PRIVATE LIFE

1. There’s that absurd story of the Chinese artist to whom the Emperor has offered a commission for a landscape that’ll go in one room of the palace. The painting finished, the Emperor is invited to come examine the work. Delighted by what he sees, he turns toward the painter to commend him. The painter, however, is nowhere in the room. He’s gone into the landscape. There’s something a little suspect about that story. I always get caught up there: there’s something suspect about that story.

2. Here, too, there’s something a little suspect. My sixth sense is warning me that this is a trap. I’m going to have to proceed on tiptoe. Or scuttle sideways like a crab up to the world of Official Literature.

3. [. . .]

4. Did you say Literature? Last night, December 32, 1994, in answer to the question, “What’s on television tonight?” Alexandre said: “Television! on every channel!” Well put! In answer to the question, “What is there to read in all these books of literature?” one’d say: “Literature, on every shelf!”

5. Anecdote I. A late afternoon walk around the playing fields. Light going down under the eucalyptus trees. Back to the house. Having along the way bought a roll, Life Saver-shaped, of red candies. With a hideous pharmaceutical taste. And eaten all of them. Nightfall. Disgust. Nausea. Terrible guilt. That day my life changed. Boredom and mistrust, the result of eating red candies.

6. Yesterday, aboard the Paris-Bordeaux express train, a little girl reads in a loud voice: “The chicken makes eggs, the sheep makes wool, the cow makes milk.” I am struck by the complete absurdity of what I hear. And the poet, what does he make? This is the way we become such liars. Through repeating such absurdities in loud voices on express trains.

7. Let’s suppose, for just a minute, that a chicken could talk. And that it says: I make eggs. Does anyone think, even for a minute, that its egg-making talk would have the same meaning as that of the little girl on the express train? No, of course not. The meaning could never be the same because the intonation wouldn’t be the same. If anybody asks, I’m in the chicken’s camp.

8. [. . .]

~

There are forty-two parts to “My Private Life.”

~

Any notes regarding fautes, sauts, howlers, Bowdlers, &c. appreciated. I make my French up pattes de mouches, meaning to say—heartily, on the fly, avoiding all but the most club-foot’d moochers.

~

How does hypervigilance differ from dilettantism? Something disagreeable about such agreeable even-handedness, particularly when coupled with no apparent gumption to indict malefactors.

~

Somewhere in late 1569 or early 1570, Montaigne, the essayist, had a brush with death “when he was knocked hard off his horse in an accidental collision on a narrow lane with a bigger man on a bigger horse.” Semi-conscious, ill, half-recovering, what Montaigne consider’d on th’occasion: whether he oughtn’t purchase a horse for his wife.

~

To work.

A Humbug

2005-08-24T05:14:00.000-07:00

O Praxilla of Sikyon, you number the uncucumber’d days!

The loveliest of the things I leave is sunlight,
Followed by the blazing stars,
The face of the full moon,
Ripe cucumbers, apples, and pears.

~

Melville, in Pierre or The Ambiguites: “Now he began to curse anew his fate, for now he began to see that after all he had been finely juggling with himself, and postponing with himself, and in meditative sentimentalities wasting the moments consecrated to instant action.”

~

To work.

Rue Hazard

A History

Defunct

Sinister

Pleasers

Pelican-Betty (One Off Man-Mental)

Auden and MacNeice setting out, Hraensnef, 1936

Betty Bird, 1901-1944

Pea-fowl

Marcel Duchamp lighting a cigarette with a bird on his shoulder.

Eugene O'Neill standing next to a bird bath, Lafayette, California, July 1937.

Barricade’d

Vue générale d'un phalanstère

Ishkibibble

Flarf-bunny.

Aragon and friends.

Railroad tracks in Winnebijou, Wisconsin, 1928

Oof!

Drawing by Koba (Kiowa), prisoner in Fort Marion, “Fighting over a Bird” (ca. 1875)

Gumby

Mako tries his hand at a semi-wildstyle piece with vivid fill-ins. A smiling Gumby takes the place of the O. Photograph by Ben Ostrowsky.

Gumby on Venus. The large fault-bounded trough in the center of the image was nicknamed Gumby (after an animated cartoon figure) by Magellan scientists. Gumby measures 5 km. wide and 100-200 m. deep.

Gumbo

Charles Bell, Gumball Fragment #1 (1976)

Water

Fishing for the moon (1907)

First line: A dreamy little youngster lived beside a quiet lakeChorus: He went fishing for the moon

African American woman, seated on ground, fishing, at the Tidal Basin, Washington, D.C. (Toni Frissell, 1957)

Young woman holding a fish on a fishing line, sitting in a rowboat in a body of water with two other women. (1928)

Boxer Jack Dempsey holding a fishing pole and fishing, on a narrow dock jutting out into a body of water. (1919)

Sub rosa

Men watch a boxing match at Woods Saloon in Turret, (Chaffee County), Colorado. The referee stands between the boxers; they wear trunks and gloves and are poised to begin fighting. (1905)

Vernon Arena, Wolgast-Rivers boxing match (ca. 1912)

An unidentified, lightweight boxer poses with one arm extended and the other drawn back, Denver, Colorado. He wears a tank shirt with leggings, laced boxing shoes, and half gloves. (ca. 1910-1920)

Zoo

Frank Chance, Cubs baseball player, standing with a person dressed in a devil's costume on the field of the West Side baseball grounds (ca. 1907)

Pie eating contest during a field day held by the 87th Regiment of the Tenth Mountain Division, on July 4, 1945, near Caporreto, Italy.

The Dance on Dun-Can, out of a print by Thomas Rowlandson, 1786.

Boswell: “Though we had passed over not less than four & twenty Miles of very rugged Ground & had a Highland Dance on the top of DUN-CAN, the Highest Mountain in the Island, we returned in the Evening not at all fatigued.”

Grey-wolf, Indian policeman, Crow Indian Reservation, near Pryor, Montana

Pig.

Sensible

Christian Bérard’s “On the Beach (Double Self-Portrait)” (1933)

Pete Anderson cleaning fish near Forty Mile, (Canada, ca. 1938)

Still from “Reflections on Black,” by Stan Brakhage

Personally

Tall Horse puppet, collaborative puppetry between South Africa’s Handspring Puppet Company and the Sogolon Puppet Troupe of Mali

Saddleback’d

Mzimkhulu / Natal Drakensberg, Bushman paintings, White Horse Cave

Chinese Horse, Lascaux

The Uffington White Horse

Salient

Michael Parker

Marvin Gaye

Patti Smith

Joe Orton

Gulch

Guillaume Apollinaire (1917)

A flooded arroyo, New Mexico

Solari Hotel, Indian Gulch, Mariposa County, California

First Snow

Soldiers of the 343rd Infantry throwing snow during a snow fight at Camp Grant in Rockford, Illinois, Chicago Daily News photographer (1918)

Snow plow and large piles of snow, Chicago Daily News photographer (1929)

Students of a University of Chicago Department of Botany Field Ecology class coming down a snow field, Mt. Rainier, Washington (1920)

Seer, Sere

Not Ron Silliman (Ray Kroc)

Not Ron Silliman (Roy Bean)

Hermetic

Charles Burchfield

Charles Burchfield, Cottage in the Trees, (1955, watercolor)

Samuel Palmer’s “Early Morning” (1825, pen and ink and wash, mixed with gum arabic, varnished)

Ruckus

Criminy

Dionysus on a boat surrounded by dolphins and grape-bearing vines. Attic Black-figure kylix by Exekias, c. 540-535 BCE

Apollo kylix, Delphi

Orpheus

Stitches

Samuel Palmer, A Barn with a Mossy Roof, Shoreham

Samuel Palmer, In a Shoreham Garden, (1829)

Sophie Brzeska by Henri Gaudier-Brzeska (1913)

First line: A dreamy little youngster lived beside a quiet lake
Chorus: He went fishing for the moon

***Clyde Embree, bicyclist, Burns, Oregon,* circa *1900***

***Brutus falling on ’s sword, out of Geffrey Whitney’s* A Choice of Emblems *(1586)***