Thursday, September 30, 2004

A Swan

~

Call it walking ambivalence, akin to walking pneumonia, the kind that comes and goes. What of the book that strikes one favorably one morning, and the next evening—zilch. Or rather something other than zilch and its zeroesque insupportable mullions, something like a vague irritant: what look’d perky—honest capture of speech-samples true to the baby millennium—suddenly looks retard’d. Ain’t nobody talk that way. What look’d like profundity (ha, when’s the last talk about profundity got you down for?) suddenly looks like smarmy prophylactic nonsense of the self-help set. What’s troubling is it’s a book “one”’d like to like.

~

Thumbing Cage’s Silence looking for a story that ends with Cage saying something like “because he’s left some writing in the hotel or somewhere, during such and such piece he’ll simply say nothing. And David Tudor admitting: “That’ll be a relief.”

~ ~

Riffs on a Line by Jordan Davis

Whereas the gorgeous intends to absorb attention, even, uh, retard it.


Gorgeous, you retard
My attention sufficiently

That the buttering
Up I normally

Obfuscate my manoeuvres
With falters, and

Down I go,
Necessary and prickly

As a hatpin,
Which, gorgeous, is

What I stood
To attention for.

~ ~

Hamper’d by time. Time, that hamper bulging with used-up items of the soil’d now. Oh dear, the kind of things one “comes up with” in the serious morning shower. Maybe it’d do no harm, Hippocrates, to, uh, just, leave it at that. A relief. Map of th’ornery doubt. Map of the clamorous, map of the Parsifalian hesitation: “Kundry, an ageless woman of many guises, rushes in wildly with balsam for Amfortas.” Who’s Abe Fortas? “Bob, who’s Ugo Betti?” A swan falls into the Priapic sea, panderistic, imponderable. A key worn down by insertion. “We know the French think time is weather”—it’s a gorgeous day out.

~

I’ll go off and sob in my stuff’d shirt now.

~

Twerp.

Wednesday, September 29, 2004

Proust Notes 6

~

Proust Notes 6

Proust against objectivist reductionism (and all its running dogs). Encountering Gilberte: “Her dark eyes shone, and since I did not know then, nor have I learned since, how to reduce a strong impression to its objective elements, since I did not have enough ‘power of observation’, as they say, to isolate the notion of their colour, for a long time afterwards, whenever I thought of her again, the memory of their brilliance would immediately present itself to me as that of a vivid azure, since she was blonde: so that, perhaps if she had not had such dark eyes—which struck one so the first time one saw her—I would not have been, as I was, in love most particularly with her blue eyes.” Suggesting the much-vaunt’d “power of observation” is just another social tic—rather like the “little dictionary of manners” the narrator admits he carries inside—so that memory and text (blonde “read” previously, “interpreted” as blue-eyed) combine with desire to stand-in for objective “seeing.”

~

Seeing “beyond the wheat the two chiselled rustic spires of Saint-André-des-Champs, themselves as tapering, scaly, imbricated, chequered, yellowing and granulose as two spikes of wheat.” Adjectival exfoliation: spike and spire and all th’intervening gnarliness and spread of the field somehow caught. And not by sheer’d off, stripped down, “clean” language. By untidy buzz, and contort, and effluoresce.

~

The “blank” of content (that thing that authenticates the writerly “soul”): the narrator’s dreams of Mme de Guermantes’s demands that he “tell her the subjects of the poems that I intended to compose.” Dreams that “warned me that since I wanted to be a writer some day, it was time to find out what I meant to write. But as soon as I asked myself this, trying to find a subject in which I could anchor some infinite philosophical meaning, my mind would stop functioning. I could no longer see anything but empty space before my attentive eyes. I felt that I had no talent or perhaps a disease of the brain . . .”

And later: “the black hole that opened in my mind when I looked for the subject of my future writings.” Oddly enough, at first reading, the narrator’s self-portrayal as “one who aspires to write,” or “one with ambition” seem’d out of character, hardly credible, a thin design-lattice stuck to a robust character. I think I’d imagined the narrator / Proust as something like an idiot-savant, a naïf, one who, without command, or preparation, or intent, simply began accumulating moments, and so made a book.

~

Initial moment of excrescence deluxe, th’emergent emergency of growing light, the new world naked: “I was obliged, for lack of other company [“. . . singing softly to myself: / ‘I am lonely, lonely, / I was born to be lonely, / I am best so!’”], to fall back on my own and try to recall my steeples. Soon their lines and their sunlit surfaces split apart, as if they were a sort of bark, a little of what was hidden from me inside them appeared to me, I had a thought which had not existed a moment before, which took shape in words in my head and the pleasure I had just recently experienced at the sight of them was so increased by this that, seized by a sort of drunkenness, I could no longer think of anything else.”

How landscape connects one to “that life which, of all the various lives we lead concurrently, is the most abundant in sudden reversals of fortune, the richest in episodes, I mean our intellectual life. No doubt it progresses within us imperceptibly . . .”

~

“Since of the charms, the grace, the forms of nature, the public knows only what it has absorbed from the clichés of an art slowly assimilated, . . . an original artist begins by rejecting these clichés.”

~

“. . .since a pure work of music contains none of the logical relationships whose alteration in language reveals madness, madness recognized in a sonata seemed to him something as mysterious as the madness of a bitch, the madness of a horse, though these can indeed be observed.”

~

Note to myself: danger of (merely) collecting the sententious remark, the “bon mot,” the happy truisms of naught. As if the “texture” consists of a few handsome bristles.

~ ~ ~

First jacket-weather. Little gusts of wind-bravado out, keening in the nooks. Crannies. Cranny of th’uncanny. Dog walk. The cold seems to’ve lower’d the boom on th’insect-choruses. A few thin stragglers, one unidentifiable whine high up. First exoskeletal leaf-armors scuttle against the pave—Eliotic scripts. Poor dry’d up Tom, nasal as a banker, fortify’d as a bunker. Is it enough to pickle the weightier cukes pluck’d off the tangled vines of Proust’s prose in the brine and vinegar of what begins to look like a commonplace book? Squat commentary.

~

Notes One Toy’d With Whilst Looking at Rae Armantrout’s Newest Book

By saying a writer
Is writing the best

Work she’s ever done—
She’s “up to speed”—

Aren’t we only admitting
That we’ve finally learn’d

How to read her,
And that through all

The foolish antagonisms of
Youth—finally half-shrugged

Off, only those of
Abiding consequence to th’art

Still adhering—what we
Took as her missteps

Were only our own
Faltering attempts to follow?

~

To La Plata.

Tuesday, September 28, 2004

Proust Notes 5

~

Proust Notes 5

Steve Evans point’d me at Theodore Adorno’s “Short Commentaries on Proust,” in the first volume of Notes to Literature (Columbia University Press, 1991). Apparently originally a radio address, one following which, Adorno says, he “received letters of protest about my allegedly excessive use of foreign words.” German tolerance for French on th’airwaves I can’t judge—what is astonishing is that such a dense intelligence’d be radiophonically dispersed at all.

Adorno, in defending an approach that examines a few individual passages versus one that presents an “orienting overview” or “grand survey” argues: “the relationship of the whole to the detail is not that of an overall architectonic plan to the specifics that fill it in: it is against precisely that, against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced on from above, that Proust revolted. Just as the temperament of his work challenges customary notions about the general and the particular and gives aesthetic force to the dictum from Hegel’s Logic that the particular is the general and vice versa, with each mediated through the other, so the whole, resistant to abstract outlines, crystallizes out of intertwined individual presentations.” Which seems both to offer Proust’s work as a culmination of an essentially organic manifestation of form, and to insist on the “rightness” of such a way of proceeding. Adorno: “Great musicians of Proust’s era, like Alban Berg, knew that living totality is achieved only through rank vegetal proliferation.” (The image itself is Proustian: note how often humans, in particular, go plantlike in Proust’s esurient metaphorical rooting in the Search. See the peasant-girl the narrator pictures in “the woods near Roussainville”—“that girl, whom I could only envisage dappled with leaves, was herself like a local plant . . .”) Is the formulation useful for justifying a turn away from constraint-based (generally, I think I’d argue, “top-down”) writing strategies? Is such a turn desirable? I’m thinking aloud, and without the Hegel. I’m struck though by Adorno’s next sentence: “The productive force that aims at unity is identical to the passive capacity to lose oneself in details without restraint or reservation.” That via negativa of finding a oneness exactly by dispersing oneself in the many. The line rings with Keatsian echoes: “capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts,” maybe not a settling for half-knowledge, but a strategy on the way to knowledge. Or—I stray, far afield.

~

Adorno: “What changes in people, what becomes alien to the point of unrecognizability and returns as in a musical repeat, are the images into which we transpose them. Proust knows that there are no human beings in themselves beyond this world of images; that the individual is an abstraction . . .” Nothing so crass as psychology to disturb the surface-changes in the puddle of self. Think of Swann’s identifying of the features of acquaintances with painterly models—it is the painting, the fact of the individual characteristics’ existence in a painting, that gives meaning to the person.
Swann had always had this peculiar penchant for liking to rediscover in the paintings of the masters not only the general characteristics of the real world that surrounds us, but what seems on the contrary the least susceptible to generalization, the individual features of the face we know: for instance, . . . in a portrait by Tintoretto, the invasion of the cheeks fat by the implantation of the first hairs of the side-whiskers, the break in the nose, the penetration of the gaze, the congestion of the eyelids of Doctor du Boulbon . . . These individual characteristics gave him pleasure by assuming a more general meaning as soon as he saw them extirpated, emancipated, the resemblance between an older portrait and an original which it did not represent.
~

Bergson’s “allergic reaction to ready-made thought, to the pre-given and established cliché, is,” as Adorno says, “certainly characteristic of Proust; his sense of tact cannot stomach the things everyone says.” Which, one’d think, point one to Flaubert. Adorno, though, elsewhere (“The Position of the Narrator in the Contemporary Novel”), seems dismissive of Flaubert, connecting him with the “report form”:
The traditional novel, whose idea is perhaps most authentically embodied in Flaubert, can be compared to the three-walled stage of bourgeois theater.
Adorno grudgingly admits that Flaubert sidesteps the supposed “objective purity” of such an approach by some manoeuvre “in the purity of the language, which, by spiritualizing language, removes it from the empirical realm to which it is committed.” Not at all clear what it means to “spiritualize” language. Adorno does make a distinction between two kinds of “reflection”—the “moral” sort, associated with the ”pre-Flaubertian,” that “takes a stand for or against the characters in the novel,” and that of the Proustian novel where “reflection breaks through the pure immanence of form” and “takes a stand against the lie of representation, actually against the narrator himself, who tries, as an extra-alert commentator on events to correct his unavoidable way of proceeding.” All of which leaves Flaubert half-floundering, a pivot-figure in no camp.

~

Noted: Adorno’s claim that “in the guise of metaphors, disruptive Surealist ‘actions’ . . . would be completely appropriate” in some Proustian scenes. See, for example, the metaphor of the “pup-tent-man,” equal to any Man Ray invention: “He did not shut himself up in the edifice of his relationships, but had transformed that edifice, in order to be able to raise it again on the spot whenever he found a woman who pleased him, into one of those collapsible tents of the kind explorers carry with them.”

~

Adorno, on accusations of snobbery against Proust: “Like every love, snobbery wants to escape from the entanglement of bourgeois relationships into a world that no longer uses the greatest good of the greatest number to gloss over the fact that it satisfies human needs only by accident. Proust’s regression is utopian. He is defeated by it, as is love, but in his defeat he denounces the society that decrees that it shall not be.”

~

Unabashedly quoting now, shock’d by how well I glom to the literary Adorno—I countenanced Minima Moralia a few years back with rather negligible and tepid delight, if that. “False generality disintegrates under Proust’s ravenous gaze, but in return what is usually considered coincidental acquires an oblique, irrational universality.” With reference to Lukács’s “category of the contingent”—Proust “depicts a life bereft of meaning, a life the subject can no longer shape into a cosmos. For Proust’s perseverance, however, which surpasses that of the nineteenth-century novelists, contingency is not completely bereft of meaning. It carries with it a semblance of necessity, as though some reference to meaning had been interspersed throughout existence, chaotic, mocking, haunting in its dissociated fragments.”

~

How hard Proust looks and how “oceanic” the glimpse, how the world, in pieces, is remade by metaphor’s ability to expand, to encompass, to carry. Point: the “thinly scattered” cornflowers that “announced to me the immense expanse where the wheat breaks in waves, where the clouds fleece, and the sight of a single poppy hoisting its red flame to the top of its ropes and whipping it in the wind above its greasy black buoy made my heart pound like the heart of a traveler who spies on a lowland a first beached boat being repaired by a caulker and, before catching sight of it, cries out: ‘The Sea.’”

~

Bonus point. Tranmogrifying the Proustian rhetoric for the benefit of je ne sais qui: “He was not like so many writers, who either from laziness or from a resigned sense of the obligation created by their belletrist grandeur to remain attached to a certain mooring, abstain from the pleasures that writing offers them outside the helplessly perseverated situation in which they remain confined until the day of their death, and are content, in the end, to describe as poems, for lack of any better idea, once they have managed to become used to them, the mediocre amusements or bearable tedium they commit to paper.”

~

To the barricades.

Monday, September 27, 2004

Custard

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

The Primary Colors: Three Essays, by Alexander Theroux (Henry Holt, 1994)

Backwardsly completing what (for me) The Secondary Colors start’d. Here, obviously, Theroux amasses the factoids and citations on blue (both aesthete Walter Pater on Swiss lakes—“Horrid pots of blue paint,” and Fairfield Porter’s poem “A Painter Obsessed by Blue”—
No color isolates itself like blue.
If the lamp’s blue shadow equals the yellow
Shadow of the sky, in what way is one
Different from the other?
get quoted), yellow (color of “potato wart, old paper, chloroflavedo in plants, forbidding skies, dead leaves, xanthoderma, purulent conjunctivitis, dental plaque, gimp lace, foul curtains, infection and pus (‘yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye,’ sings John Lennon . . .”), and red (“the libido is all mixed up with red. . .”)

~

Sappho: A New Translation, by Mary Barnard, foreword by Dudley Fitts (University of California Press, 1958)
I hear that Andromeda—

That hayseed in her hay-
seed finery—has put
a torch to your heart

and she without even
the art of lifting her
skirt over her ankles
~

Incidences, by Daniil Kharms, edited and translated by Neil Cornwell (Serpent’s Tail, 1993)

Kharms (in a diary): “I used to know a certain watchman who was interested only in vices. Then his interests narrowed and he began to be interested only in one vice. And so, when he discovered a specialization of his own within this vice and began to interest himself only in this one specialization, he felt himself a man again. Confidence sprang up, erudition was required, neighbouring fields had to be looked into and the man started to develop. This watchman became a genius.”

And in the midst of the Stalinist purges (1937): “I am interested only in ‘nonsense’; only in that makes no practical sense. I am interested in life only in its absurd manifestation.”

~

The Evolution of Useful Things, by Henry Petrosky (Vintage, 1994)

Pins, forks, paper clips, hammers. “Where fashion does not monopolize form, it is the business end of a tool that gets the most attention. Thus, in a collectors’ handbook of hammers, handles are consistently cropped from the photos of at least a thousand unique tools.”

What’s the business end of a poem? That part that “delivers the goods”? That “gets the job done”? Poem as plausible tool, useful, limit’d, wedge?

~

Ka: Stories of the Mind and Gods of India, by Roberto Calasso, translated by Tim Parks (Vintage International, 1999)

“The mind was confined in a compound, like the Cows, like the Dawns. Whatever happened, happened inside a fence, inside the walls of a palace, inside a cave sealed by a great stone. Outside foamed the immense ocean of the world, barely audible beyond a thick wall of rock. Inside, in the compound, was another liquid, a ‘pond,’ which, however small, was nevertheless equivalent to the ocean without. The ocean was outside the mountain but inside the mountain too. By splitting the rock Indra allowed the inside ocean, ‘the ocean of the heart,’ hrdyá samudrá, to communicate with the outside ocean, the palpable ocean of the world.”

~

Poetry, Vol. CVI, Nos. 1-2 (April-May 1965), edited by Henry Rago.

An issue titled “Work in Progress, Long Poems, Sequences,” cover the green of Ronald Johnson’s The Shrubberies, with Juliet Rago’s quick-limn’d preening Pegasus asprawl over it. Contributors: Wendell Berry, Hayden Carruth, Robert Creeley, Robert Duncan (“The Fire”), Ronald Johnson (from “The Book of the Green Man”), Galway Kinnell, Kenneth Koch (some lines out of “Seine,” not something I know), Denise Levertov, Charles Olson, David Posner, Adrienne Rich, Ernest Sandeen, Anne Sexton, Gary Snyder, Charles Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull, Theodore Weiss, and Philip Whalen.

Henry Rago—the finest and most ecumenical editor Poetry’s had:
Our concern in these pages is . . . with the kind of work that needs more room than we can usually manage. To see enough of it . . . all in one place, might give some sense not only of the broader intentions of each of these poets at this moment but also, within all the obvious limits, of some larger “work in progress”: energies, directions: the going thing, in its motion, here and now. One talks too much about literary “situations”; then one becomes skeptical about “situations” and permits himself no such talk at all. We have made the point here more than once that poems are made by poets, not by groups or power blocs or enterprising journalists. Correspondingly, the poets make poems: not slogans or programmes or “news”. But when enough poets are seen in one place, at one time, each minding his own business, some larger impressions just might be possible.
Which is canny stuff. Lest it seem Rago’s mocking Pound a mite egregiously with “news,” I should mention that earlier (meaning in the first short paragraph—this is the whole of the second, of three) he’d liken’d the issue to Pound’s “active anthology” notion of the magazine’s earliest days. I note that Hugh Kenner’s list’d as sole Contributing Editor under Rago.

~

To a Distant Island, by James McConkey. Foreword by Jay Parini. (Paul Dry Books, 2000)

McConkey’s a former teacher, one of the few who seem’d to comprehend and admire the reckless ways of youth, one of the few whose “soul” (not a word I normally use) seem’d genuinely moved—torment’d, aggrieved, made reckless—by literature. He writes a gentle prose, precise, humble, calm, never showy:
In late April of the year 1890, T., who had been undergoing a depression so severe that his most recent biographer believes he might have been nearing a breakdown, left his home in Moscow for the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, a journey of over sixty-five hundred miles, or more than a quarter of our planet’s circumference. Knowing little about the expanse he would be traversing without friends or previously known companions, but imagining it could contain dangerous beasts and escaped convicts who were murderers, he purchased a knife (“useful also for salami,” he said) and a revolver.
T. being Chekhov.

~

Proust continues. My reading of Proust continues. The notes toward “Proust Notes” cover the legal pads. Waiting for the compilation monkeys. Soonest. Dawdling walk with G. before light got floody. He posed the question: if you stood on Orion’s foot, how many more of you—standing on your shoulders—would it take to reach Orion’s upraised arm? So we consider’d how to figure it out and the C-dog plunged after the squirrels. So we plunge ahead, dogging th’angelus novus of the boat blown backwards against the current, the contemporary, the tides . . .

~

To work.

Friday, September 24, 2004

Fauve

~

Received:

The Gettysburg Review, Vol. 17, No. 3, edited by Peter Stitt ($6, Gettysburg College, Gettysburg, Pennsylvania 17325-1491)

Poetry: Karin Gottshall, A. F. Moritz, Brendan Galvin, Debora Greger, Jeanne Murray Walker, Rebecca Givens, Stephen Dunn, David Wagoner, Jill Osier

Fiction: Dev Hathaway, Rosie Dempsey, William Conescu, Shimon Tanaka, Scott Schrader

Essays: Dorinda Clifton, Caroline Tompkins, Kristen Carson, Gerald Weales

Paintings: Virginia Creighton, with commentary by Molly Hutton

Seems just the blink of a spider mite’s eye since I got my dander up bad-mouthing Dean Young’s poems in the last issue. (Those were the days, eh?) Not much up to the macho plaint of chewing up anything here, meaning, I suppose, there ain’t much vittle to the sausage, (as my Scoutmaster’d say). I do appreciate some of the localized little deposits of lexical bravurae in Brendan Galvin’s pieces about (and “by”) Roger Williams and William Blackstone:
A Proposal of Banishment
Roger Williams, 1669
Unless he be astray in his wits, no man wishes
for increase of wolves, which we have in plenty
to our confusion now, their cause somewhat
the Gadarene Revenge, whereby one sow
may farrow twice in any year, bearing
upward of two dozen. A whole kennel
of wolves, those gluttonous runnagadoes,
will fasten upon a single free-ranging hog
and reduce it to ribs and trotters ere
a farmer may fire a salute in the direction
of their banquet . . .
It continues, an acceptable piece of ventriloquism (though that “free-ranging” sounds a little yuppify’d, no?) (and, though I suspect Henry Gould’d know the specifics and could certify th’historickal accuracy better’n me), and ends in high demesne with
                       . . . where they cannot
fatten wolves or cause our hoodwinkt neighbors
East and North and West to sharpen their designation
of us from Island of Error to Island of Ordure.
~

Of th’offerings here, Virginia Creighton’s paintings strike me most bluntly and fully. Recalling the colorist Milton Avery’s landscapes, or the homespun Ohio visionary Charles Burchfield’s, Creighton’s paintings here may be less landscape than details of landscape, most often in the form of tall works dominated by the trunks of trees. Color’d by a palette nearly fauve. And limn’d with rudimentary skill. They go abstract, flat, and—by being cropped so closely (one sees how much of the tree is un-pictured), they ask for one’s participation, one’s inclusion.

~

Note: now that Ron Silliman’s essay’d a distinction between the polemickal (talking to equals) and the pedagogical (talking down out of being up in the American hierarchickal tree—though, here, not to muddy the horse in mid-stream is th’original: “Polemic writing presumes its reader is a peer, an equal, someone to be persuaded the way one persuades a neighbor in an election. Pedagogic writing, however, presumes just the opposite, that there is a hierarchy of knowledge, information & meaning and that expository writing is fundamentally the transmission of proprietary data to an audience of blank slates.”), may we presume to ask where he places himself along that Polemick’d to Pedagoguery’d line? What audience is sought, for surely that determines such, no? And being one who seems to argue (and think) that writers proceed “according to plan” (and not piecemeal, scroungingly, improvisatory-saturate, see the recent remarks on Duncan (or any “poet who prepares him or herself to embark . . . on a major project that well not just create a poem of lasting importance, but also force readers (and expecially critics) to rethink that poe’s oeuvre”), why such a tactic—to what ends?—now?

~

Sous les pavés . . . to work.

Thursday, September 23, 2004

Chief Plastic

~

Of note: the new Bookforum arrived with a snippet of a substantial manuscript “probably written during the late 1930s and early ’40s,” and abandoned, by Mark Rothko. To be publish’d by Yale University Press under the title, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art.
If one understands, or if one has the sensibility to live in, the particular kind of space to which a painting is committed, then he has obtained the most comprehensive state of the artist’s attitude toward reality. Space, therefore, is the chief plastic manifestation of the artist’s conception of reality. It is the most inclusive category of the artist’s statement and can very well be called the key to the meaning of the picture. It constitutes a statement of faith, an a priori unity, to which all of the plastic elements are in a state of subservience.
Writ long before the “pure space Rothkos” got paint’d, the ones in which color is depth. To which Rothko’s remarks about Egyptian wall painting (“undiluted example of plastic spatiality”) seems apt, and prescient:
. . .in looking at these paintings we feel the existence of these figures in space. The color that surrounds these monochromatic mythic figures has the quality of air—or of colored air, rather—in which these figures are bathed. In fact, it can best be described as a sort of mucous or jelly substance in which these figures are imbedded. In other words, space is here pictured not as a quality of something behind the figures but as a substance having tangible volume that approaches the frontal plane of the wall, together with the figures.
Think of that “figure” used here as comparable a large ragged Rothko rectangle, and there it is, late Rothko.

~

Also in Bookforum: Joseph Donahue on Robert Kelly’s Lapis, “named for the element long sought after by alchemists, the one that would turn lead into gold.” And Vince Passaro on Russell Banks’s The Darling, about a former member of the Weather Underground: “Banks writes novels in which the poor are never quiet, though they are often defeated.” I would probably still put Continental Drift on a list of essential contemporary American fictions.

~

Typing poems for G. What I recall, in a self-definition piece: “lover of music, / retrievers, / Van Gogh. / Fears large wasps.” Now he’s arranging and “sizing” the words, enjoying the “look” and typographical choices more than the composition. In a generation or so it’ll be: “upper limit 72 point Caslon, lower limit agate Tzigane.”

~

Belly-big moon. If Heraclitus claims the sun’s width is that of a human foot, the half-moon tonight’s exactly the hemispheroidal size of a “carrying” woman’s belly. Egyptianly-turn’d—profile’d—linea negra occluded by the surrounding black nightishness. The moon lights up the Toasted Oats box, flatten’d for the paper recycler. Lights up the bicyclist drifting by unlit with ticks and mutters, imploring a husband home. Or a husband to go. Lights up the scratchy mischief-dashes of th’earliest down’d leaves . . .

~

One the those quasi-dreadful morning’s when one is harass’d by a squad of gods domestic and appliancial—first the coffeepot conks out, then the chain goes off sprocket on the G.-bike, and tedious uproar ensues. Aftermath of black hands and general grouchiness. Short dog walk. Consolation of building sentences “about.”

~

Stewing overnight in the proprietary “noodle,” in the skeptical brainpan: more Rothko words. Find myself in midst of above mechanickal snippiness thinking about how he says:
Modern art has manifested again this lack of unity as it would appear when carried to its logical conclusion. It has produced in Dadaism and surrealism a philosophy of skepticism—chiefly a plastic skepticism. Is not the investigation toward ultimate unity in itself worthless, these modern artists ask? Is it not a delusion commensurate with the thousand other illusory faiths that have futilely entertained mankind throughout its history? Hence we have an art evolved, which ironically, and with sadistic and masochistic whimsicality, goes about combining discrepant and antagonistic faiths. These are an expressed mockery of ultimate unity, and are the bitter fruits of skepticism.
Rothko, disregarding the rhetoric here, next insists that “we shall not moralize” about such works.

What “stew’d” though: if I think of unity—man-made—I go skeptical too, a brusque bouncer off the (mostly) religious demands and panaceas of th’ages. However, the urge persists, to insert oneself (and one’s works) into the “natural world,”—a thing larger, the only unity (though one man in’s overweening confidence rerides and denies), and one incapable of skepticism—to catch the eco-drift one’s left off holding to, to see oneself another plank in the maelstrom. How? Aucune idée. Not talking about more poems about the pine siskin exactly, though I’d welcome that. That bug of th’artifice of any man’s works—I see it’s late, and I am spluttery and incoherent—I see th’only possibility in renouncing th’human shore and stalking off into the beastly woods . . .

~

To the woods.

Wednesday, September 22, 2004

The Era

~

Of note: Joshua Corey’s report on the Zukofsky / 100 conference at Columbia. Stephen Rodefer’s polemical dash, “The Age in Its Cage,” in Prague Literary Review:
I feel like IKE, warning the post-McCarthy era of the military-industrial complex. Is there an academic-literary complex equivalent, or at least similar, to that? Why are we not more uneasy with this cozy arrangement? Because it’s bringing in money, jobs, new careers.
~

Received:

The Dark Months of May, by Tom Pickard (Flood Editions, 2004)

If I dig out a tatter’d address book—a dishevel’d red number with embossing that faintly reads “–bey & Son, Inc. / Harwich / 432-0100” (I think I acquired it summer of 1973, connect it mildly to a hitchhike out to Cape Cod with G. G., and I like to think it did read “Dombey & Son,” before a piece of packing tape cover’d it . . .), if I turn to the P’s I can read “Tom Pickard / Morden Tower / (place to give poetry readings)” in my sempiternal nineteen-year-old scrawl, disagreeably tidier than any current hand (of mine)’s able to manoeuvre . . . What I do know is that William Matthews furnish’d me with the name, and the locale, in a letter of that summer—responding to my announced intent to leave school to travel.

The histories that come down do so too cleanly, disallowing the burrs and ticks that snarl up the old dog’s coat. Or the stories get told, and wrongly, onlyto buttress and abut today’s sorry agenda, which is—in the storyteller’s version—an “heroic” one of oppositional clarity. Horseshit. Oppositions get refined and extend’d to shine a percipient light on the presumed opposer. Truth is, it’s more complicated, and friendlier, than that. Matthews pass’d along addresses, too, for Stanley Plumly in London, for Mary Feeney (Jean Follain translator) in Paris, and for Basil Bunting, suggesting only that the latter liked “deferential” visitors. (As if it were possible—at nineteen—I’d be anything but . . .)

I never made it to Newcastle. I shot up to Inverness with a French woman in a deux chevaux and slid back down the far side of Loch Ness with a bunch of hippies clinging to the flat bed of a truck. I wasn’t so determinedly “poetic” as adamant about “landscape,” the seeing of it, imbibing snatches of it as it whipped by. Or I whipped by. Point is, and I’d like my tiny (overwork’d) example to “stand for” a larger “sense”: the “community” didn’t come with any predetermined system of fracture and reprisal, didn’t carry the ballast and baloney of schoolkid-loud political manoeuvring. That arrived later. Like longhairs, like poets: that period of cohesion, camaraderie, and trust.

Some romantic froth never hurt anyone. The Dark Months of May, oddly enough, reminds me of another “narrative in pieces”—of a love ending: Donald Hall’s The Yellow Room. At least, the short poems in the beginning of the book do. Things like:
an old crab apple breathes new leaves
a striped towel dries in the wind
her voice on the phone

her voice on the phone
not harsh but cold
others in the bar can hear her

purr of a finch in flight
a pheasant croaks her name

lacework chorus of young Scots pine
auditions by a pool
Or:
I Spit on My Need When I Need You

an owl swoops past on a rat raid
good summer hunting
when the rodents are tourist fat

you’re so mad that rumour
of your betrayal reached me
before you had the pleasure
of telling me yourself

dawn, break on her head
like a rotten egg
That’s unstudy’d, direct, deft-colloquial, and the humor is covert (“You laugh, I’ll bust your jaw—only I get to laugh” is how the dare goes.) The work of propelling the usual story (it is the most usual story and cannot hold our attention on its own account) out of its speech-based (“bar talk”) proclivity and decelerating it down into a region of likeness one can attend, that work falls to a buff’d-up language of (mostly) landscape. Scottish borderland and Cumbrian words: rouk, mithering, clough. Or the change in register (as above) between “others in the bar can hear” and the “lacework chorus” of pines. I’m not altogether convinced that the latter—language—carries enough weight for interest beyond th’occasion of a single reading.

The other sections of The Dark Months of May are a group of “sondages”—(OED’s got: “A deep trench dug to investigate the stratigraphy of a site.” The French use the word commonly for opinion polls.) and parts of a libretto (“The Ballad of Jamie Allan,” J.A. being not the boy in the prospect of flowers, but a story’d and song’d (eighteenth-century) seventy-year old horse thief of the Scottish borderland.

Pickard’s “sondages” resolve and intermix details out of the following broadly limn’d locales:
A derelict World War II air-raid shelter where a homeless man sleeps. Early twentieth-century bus station. Nineteenth-century tannery and lead works, medieval foundations. Travellers with heavy luggage. Some are getting out or passing through.
What’s at issue is akin to what’s at issue in my plaint about “history”-making above: how the present condemns the past to its presentness. Here’s “Sondage #5”, rather with th’appearance of a list, though most of the “sondages” are “in” prose:
a cleaner sweeps cigarette butts into a pan
a nervous Securicor guard carries a tin box of cash to his wagon
it is the last day of September 2002
a fireweed grows in the bus shelter roof gutter
an onion clock above the brewery shows 2.45
traffic moves freely round the roundabout
the Liverpool bus arrives
afternoon shadows fall across the bus station concourse
the diggers push barrow-loads of finger-sifted soil from the site
an ambulance siren ricks the air
The book’s design is impeccable, even daring (the stitch-thin, spindly, chalk-color’d traces on black stock, for half-title, title, and libretto-title pages is terrific). Ron Silliman, a man deeply suspicious of beauty, suggest’d here that the blurbs (Fanny Howe, Annie Lennox—one doesn’t read blurbs so much as register who wrote them, do one? That Eurythmic Annie Lennox?) lost legibility to the darkness of the back cover—if so, at least they allow one to “read” the tufts and hummocks of grass (reprised—with enlargement—from the front cover). It is, however, the first of all the Flood Editions books to feel like a too-luxuriant vessel for the quality of the mostly workmanlike, direct speech, of the poems. A little self-conscious in its finery—August Sander’s “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.”

~

To work.

Tuesday, September 21, 2004

Jars

~

The tiniest
Rampancy jars

A head
Unused to

Snapping back
At what

Concern turns
To dismay.

~

Lion-tooth’d
Greens vinegar’d

Up proper
Next to

A plate
Of peas

Blackeyed’s all
Get out.

~

A headache—fatigue-induced—had me drooping and listless, follow’d by flat and bliss’d, follow’d by snoring like a wuss, oh stop it. I didn’t “get” “much” “accomplish’d.” Up today various and vivacious, a tiger, a veritable Mozambique of variety and charge! And to think all’s needed’s provided in eight words.

~

Lambent light
Walks the

Torpor out—
The day

Manoeuvres itself
Into man’s

Works, and
Dispels recumbency.

~

Divergent is
So wildly

Done and
Inapplicable when

Mostly things
Come about

To degree
A similar.

~

A solace somehow to work small—upshot of reading Proust? Mere solace of constraints—finally?—put in place? Last night thinking—walking the Carmenissima—of possible titles for a series of headache-y little scribbles: “Head Butt Owie,” “Wooden Head Nickel,” “Bonk City Breakdown,” “Me Grimmest Megrim.” Oh stop it.

~

Flimsy as
In ‘liable

To provoke
An abundancy

Of breakdowns’
Is stupid,

To put
It stupidly.

~

End of the month catch-up, redeeming the deleterious effects of our fiercest neglects. I’d better scat.

~

To work.

Monday, September 20, 2004

Proust Notes 4

~

Proust Notes 4

Oddly enough, the British (Penguin) edition of the Lydia Davis translation (which I am reading, the library-acquired paperback being more bike-portable), part of the complete Christopher Prendergast edited In Search of Lost Time, with separate volumes translated by James Grieve, (In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower), Mark Treharne (The Guermantes Way), John Sturrock (Sodom and Gomorrah), Peter Collier (The Prisoner and The Fugitive), and Ian Patterson (Finding Time Again), in addition to the Davis (Swann’s Way), differs in one detail from the American (Viking) edition (which is not completely available here, and the volumes released thusfar, available only, I think, in hardcover. Where the British offers quoted material in the French original (with translations provided in the notes), th’American version reverses the situation (French relegated to notes only). Quel horreur that a shopper in, oh, Peducah, Kentucky just possibly’ld open a copy of Swann’s Way and, encountering Racine’s
Le bonheur des méchants comme un torrent s’écoule . . .
drop it like a hot potato, and skedaddle Proustless.

~

Proust on what lists and rankings and categories in a brainpan’ll do: “Between the manner in which one actor and another delivered, nuanced a declamatory speech, the tiniest differences seemed to me to have an incalculable importance. And I would rank them in order of talent . . . in lists that I recited to myself all day long, and that in the end hardened in my brain and obstructed it with their immovability.”

~

Giotto’s Vices and Virtues of Padua. See the kitchen-maid in “Charity.”

~

The mind protect’d—or addled, if by addled “one” means unable to see anything “purely,” that is, without being “taunt’d” by the knowledge that one is, in fact, “looking”—by a salve, the smeary film of the (textual) self interposing itself: “When I saw an exterior object, my awareness that I was seeing it would remain between me and it, edging it with a thin spiritual border that prevented me from ever directly touching its substance; it would dissipate somehow before I could make contact with it, just as an incandescent body brought near a damp object never touches its wetness because it is always preceded by a zone of evaporation.”

~

The (textual) self, meaning “one” would not, one suspects, know what love is without having had read first about it in a novel. Proust: “. . . all the feelings we are made to experience by the joy or the misfortune of a real person are produced in us only through the intermediary of an image of that joy or that misfortune; the ingeniousness of the first novelist consisted in understanding that in the apparatus of our emotions, the image being the only essential element, the simplification that would consist in purely and simply abolishing real people would be a decisive improvement. A real human being , however profoundly we sympathize with him, in large part is perceived by our senses, that is to say, remains opaque to us, offers a dead weight that our sensibility cannot lift.” And later: the “novelist’s happy discovery,” that replacing th’inpenetrable human material with th’immaterial “image.”

~

Noted by Brassaï—the shifting Proustian view of art’s progress. In Contre Saint-Beuve, circa 1909, Proust upholds th’ahistorical “individual genius” stance: “In art, there is no initiator, no precursor (at least in the scientific sense of those words). Everything is within the individual; each individual recommences, for himself, the artistic or literary enterprise, and he works of his predecessors do not constitute, as they do in science, an acquired truth from which their successor may profit. A writer of genius today has everything to accomplish. He is not much in advance of Homer.” Donc, no avant-garde, by definition. Proust tempers th’above somewhat later, admitting that “insofar as art reveals certain laws, once an industry has vulgarized them, the anterior art retrospectively loses something of its originality.” (The before-noted loss of what Benjamin would subsequently label “aura.”)

~

What a novelist collects: “moments—which I am separating artificially today as if I were cutting sections at different heights of an apparently motionless iridescent jet of water—in a single inflexible upsurge of all the forces of my life.”

~

Noting how quick Proust is with the lingo and effects of the new: the narrator Marcel looks in on the sleeping (“snoring lightly”) aunt, who stirs: “the noise I had made had probably interfered with her sleep and made it ‘shift gears’, as they say about cars, because the music of her snoring broke off for a second and resumed on a lower note . . .”

~

“. . .he looked like some inert and mechanical slave of happiness.”

~

It is only in the midst of a lengthy metaphor whose front-end’s dug out of Jean-Henri Fabre’s lively and amusing entomological memoirs that I see out of what “initiator,” and “predecessor,” such “gigantesque” metaphor-constructing hails: it’s Homeric, surely. “Just as . . . ,” follow’d by “so.” Proust:
And like the hymenopteron observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp who, so that its young may have fresh meat to eat after its death, summons anatomy in aid of its cruelty and, after capturing a few weevils and spiders, proceeds with a marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce them in the nerve centre on which depends the movement of their legs but not their other life functions, in such a way that the paralysed insect near which it deposits its eggs provides the larvae, when they hatch, with prey that is docile, harmless, incapable of flight or resistance, but not in the least tainted, Françoise found, to serve her abiding desire to make the house intolerable to any other servant, ruses so clever and so merciless that many years later we learned that if we had eaten asparagus almost every day that summer, it was because their smell provoked in the poor kitchen-girl who was given the job of scraping them attacks of asthma so violent that she was obliged in the end to leave.
The sapience, or fear, or suspicion, leaking up, whilst I type, that poetry’s a kind of puny preoccupation, a little too “took” with itself whilst the novel sails off not even scornful, poetry being to inhibitedly “small” or “slight” for true scorn. I often thought the like reading Marguerite Young’s Harp Song for a Radical, her thirty-years in the attempt, unfinish’d Debs biography.

~

What sidelong besmirch of interest’ld cause me to note Brassaï’s note about Robert de Montesquiou, model for Huysman’s Des Esseintes in the novel À Rebours, and, to some extent, for Proust’s Charlus. Apparently a fana of photographs. As Brassaï reports: “Two life-size photographs decorated his strange bathroom at Passy: one of the acrobat Larochefucauld in an athlete’s uniform, the other of Pierre Loti, stark naked, with the famous dedication: Academy of an academician.” It’s the “famous” I find troubling, I think.

~

Narrator’s seeking of Bloch for an explanation “to quiet the disturbance . . . caused in me when he told me that fine lines of poetry (from which I expected nothing less than a revelation of the truth) were all the finer if they meant nothing at all.”

~

Swann sous rature, or, portrait of Swann as the young Derrida: “when he talked about serious things, when he used an expression that seemed to imply an opinion about an important subject, he took care to isolate it in a tone of voice that was particularly mechanical and ironic, as though he had put it between quotation marks, seeming not to want to take responsibility for it . . .” (Not, certes, the kind of eraser tag Derrida play’d, but I succumb easily to patent nonsense, affinity, and the suggestive, most particularly when the earnest are about. Let us just remark on the way a Proustian self is never just a self, but is always getting gussied-up (in order to give someone a good dressing down . . .) (I think that’s the second time that kind of talk’s used me—I am spoken, I am spook’d.)

~

If Aunt Léonie indicates—by “shifting gears”—some “essential,” unexpungeable duality, or multiplicity, within “character,” is it something that’ll bourgeon up ineffable in others? So, M. Vinteuil’s daughter’s sensitive “doublette” is glimpsed: “If [she] said to us in her loud voice how happy she was to see us, it would immediately seem as if a more sensitive sister within her were blushing at this thoughtless, tomboyish, remark.” So, the look at Legrandin’s “second”: “. . . if I asked, ‘Do you know the Guermantes?’, Legrandin the talker would answer: ‘No, I have never wanted to know them.’ Unfortunately, he was not the first Legrandin to answer, but the second, because another Legrandin whom he kept carefully concealed deep inside himself, whom he did not exhibit because that Legrandin knew some compromising stories about our own, about his snobbishness, had already answered by the wound in his eyes, by the rictus of his mouth, by the excessive gravity in the tone of his answer . . .”

~ ~ ~

Rabbled and napped. Chores. Leaf and debris raking. Lawn cutting. Hack’d out some buckthorns. Bought groceries. Library with G. Vacuum’d. Bicker’d. Assemble’d lunch-stuffs in bags. Walk’d the C-dog. Cobbled together the existing Proust scribbles. Bought furnace filter. Muck’d about with the collapsing under-sink PVC pipe. Not in th’above order.

~

In “late.” Had to wait for the plumber. Had to fork over the yearly plumber wad. Headache-y and over-alert. Bah.

To work.

Friday, September 17, 2004

To Ampliate

~

Received:

The False Sun Recordings, by James Wagner (3rd Bed, 2003)

I know James Wagner mostly through the reviews he’s been posting at Esther Press, serious and sustain’d pieces, and moving amongst a variety of writers and styles—Lyn Hejinian, Rosemarie Waldrop, Christine Hume, Marjorie Welish, &c. In the glut of things poetic abounding these days, I didn’t recall seeing Wagner’s poems. After getting the Laura Sims and Steve Timm chaps, and writing a little about each here at the Hotel, Wagner wrote first with a mark-up question (what I know’s not enough to grease a grasshopper’s knee-joint with—though I pounce aphidly on clues . . .), and later asking if he could send The False Sun Recordings. Which title I associate with some amalgam of Harry Crosby / Delta blues artists / ’sixties bootlegs in plain coarse-paper jackets and smeary rubber-stamp’d art.

It’s not that. There is high concentrate attention to sound in Wagner’s poems—including a section of homonymic translations call’d “Auralgraphs” (with Vallejo, Celan, and Reverdy as the original perps who get the treatment), and a section of pieces titled (at least—I’m not sure a musical-horse-without-a-trot like myself can ascertain further connections) after identifiable musicians / recordings. Cf. “Mingus / The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady.” Or “Dolphy / At the Five Spot, Vol. 1.” The sound-work is less song-like (open, big, variable, soaring) than percussive (tight, local, condensed, hard-edged). That’s th’initial “look.”

And I do recall seeing some of the poems—some, I think, in Jon Thompson’s Free Verse. Wagner works in series—there is a section of number’d “Lingo” poems, there is a group with titles permutating off of the letters l, i, s, and a—presumably the dedicatee. Here’s one:
Alis

The slake exactly bemoans a lemony injury.
Retrieved: goons, low moles. I tested dill in
Wyoming. We were wrong and wrong some
More for one another. Eastern pillow smoke.
As the lectern escaped, as the smile lied, as
Instead of cancer there is meat beaten on
A board already bloody. No one shoes flies,
Deviant Plexiglas, nor do bruxists adjust a
Dream. Next year the movies will be awful
Again. The fish feel. You may be dying in or
Of grinning. It is a defense, it is a green ore.
Very softly shy evil men reach one’s knees.
Here’s another:
Oremoth

Stolen. Variegated. Pierced. Purple. Heckled.
The oven governs accomplices, the aisles of tall
Hats. He gave way to the impressions of habits,
Grave heritage, the reasons the doctor priestly
Put forth the original mask. From which the sky
And laughter alluded, left. No puncturing, no
Thing, no fits. Who knew the diamond chose the
Children. Mutterings. Left. To guide. To sleep.
Versus shade of plates, leanings on familiar and
Desiccant opinions. Privilege insinuated in house
Division. In stares. In polishing the offspring. One
Grammar. Faulty. Sugar. As a large flower.
Dripping. For no one. For the softened spoons.
One is more apt to find identifiable rhythms here than other possible cohesions—in typing, at the point of “One / Grammar. Faulty. Sugared. As a large flower . . .” my brainpan start’d knocking with echoes of “One nation / under God, / indivisible . . .” Other lingering identities: Clark Coolidge (who is evoked, the first “Lingo” is dedicated to him). The “New Sentence” (though not the Silliman version, which is mostly hodge-podged descriptive bits the eye stands behind more often than not)—Wagner works less to depict than to gather something like literal “sound bites” (I keep thinking machinist’s shavings, industrial minutiae detritus.) Which makes even the wide-angle glance of a line like “I tested dill in / Wyoming” stand out—“I can see that.”

Nobody these days wants Robert Lowell anywhere nearby, but the density of Wagner’s poems reminds me of the early Lowell, that binding in of a veritable thicket of sound (and mostly Christian theological symbology—which Wagner avoids, though one could catch a whiff off something like: “. . .Grave heritage, the reasons the doctor priestly / Put forth the original mask.”) Wagner’s poems avoid for the most part—I’d claim somewhat concern’dly, and rather warily—a content beyond that of “constructedness.” They are machines—“brutally efficient,” as Tony Tost’d say. There are occasions of Breton-style surrealism (the serious sort)—like here, “As the lectern escaped, as the smile lied . . .”—but I miss something like a felt whimsy in the poem’s own dazzle, insolence, and clash.

~

“Nowe that wee have ampliated the fylthye concupiscence and superfluous pryde of the Poets and Wrigters, and augmented the insaciable glotonous vomyting mawes of the poetrye-sayers. Yea what myschife is there that these bought and solde bookes of poetrye haue not kyndled?”

~

Stumbling, incompletedly, to work.

~

Thursday, September 16, 2004

Vaguely

~

Th’impossibility of it all. The vaguely sore throat, talk-roughen’d. The humidity, kneecaps yowling out as I kneel to disassemble G.’s desk drawer. To free up a sheaf of wedged-in papers. Noting the recent high exasperation levels. Coupled with low concentration levels. Result of low, etc. Partout. Note of the K. who’s had a “blank” year. The part of me that leans toward th’annihilates of winter. Is my scratching here dutiful? Or necessary? Writing: a habit to keep th’habitual in abeyance, sunk, asunder? That “blank”? The one that teems with th’unexamined?

~

Bosh and farfalle. I gather something something a klepto Hoosier. The words coming in in a din, indistinguishable, inextinguishable. Tintin. In Paris the year of rue de l’Amiral Roussin I found a long roll’d up poster of Tintin and the square-head’d white schnauzer X. Something something Egyptian mummy. And hung it up. And quickly found it and its ostentatious six feet or so meretricious, a bane. And burn’d it. In the fireplace that had not suffer’d th’attentions of a ’sweep in a dog’s age. A somewhat audacious and illegal activity as another one convey’d it.

~

With those grunts and mutters I shall begin my day . . .

~

Wednesday, September 15, 2004

Proust Notes 3

~

Of note: Sarah Mangold interviewed by Chris McCreary. Stan Persky on Richard Brautigan, etc. Mark Jarman once a reader for George Hitchcock’s Kayak?

~

The breakfast ruminant and the too-tellingly metaphorickal. (Or, who’s manning the guns of the swift boats of metaphor?) Found in the Ann Arbor News in a report on Ralph Nader’s speech yesterday at the University of Michigan. Quoted is one Esha Krishnaswamy, co-coordinator of the Nader campaign at the University:
“To me the difference between Bush and Kerry is the difference between getting a piano dropped on you and getting slapped in the face. And who wants to get slapped in the face?” she said.
~

Proust Notes 3

Is inspecific anguish the “original” free-floating signifier? What K.—friend of my sun-glazed cloud-bank’d youth along the railroad cuts and river rocks of lower Michigan—identify’d once as “ongoing low-key mopery.” Proust: “. . . this anguish comes into us before love has made its appearance in our life, it drifts as it waits for it, indeterminate and free, without a particular assignment, at the service of one feeling one day, of another the next . . .”

~

What’s the relationship between Proust’s sense of the strikes-quick-and-unsparingly banality of photographic reproductions, and Benjamin’s lost aura of the mechanickally reproduced? (Or is the connection obvious, facile, contemptible?) Proust’s narrator on the grandmother’s insistence on “useful” gifts, meaning “aesthetically edifying”:
She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of the most beautiful monuments or landscapes. But at the moment of buying them, and even though the thing represented had an aesthetic value, she found that vulgarity and utility too quickly resumed their places in that mechanical mode of representation, the photograph. She would try to use cunning and, if not to eliminate commercial banality entirely, at least to reduce it, to substitute for the greater part of it more art, to introduce into it in a sense several ‘layers’ of art: instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or Mount Vesuvius, she would make inquiries of Swann as to whether some great painter had not depicted them, and preferred to give me photographs of Chartres Cathedral by Corot, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud by Hubert Robert, of Mount Vesuvius by Turner, which made one degree of art more.
A sleek premonition of Roland Barthes’s zero degree? (Or is the connection obvious, facile, contemptible?) (Or, far-fetched, hare-brain’d, thick-lipped?)

~

Brassaï, in a book call’d Marcel Proust sous l’emprise de la photographie, translated by Richard Howard as Proust in the Power of Photography (University of Chicago Press, 2001) (though my sense of it would be something more forceful—“under the hold of,” “gripped by,” “in the thrall of”) points to a veritable obsession and onslaught of pictures, “the sempiternal appearance of photographs” chez Proust. Thus André Maurois: “All his life Proust attached an extraordinary importance to the possession of a photograph. He kept a whole collection of them in his bedroom and would eagerly show them to his friend.” Thus “the young Jean Cocteau” (in 1910) “subjected to the ordeal-by-album” in the Boulevard Haussmann apartment where “there were two tables in the room, one, within arm’s reach of Proust’s bed, covered with bottles, notebooks, the other ‘piled with photos of tarts and duchesses, dukes and footmen employed in great houses.’”

~

Trying to figure out whence comes the feeling of immense consolation, a relief almost, in reading the lengths of the Proustian sentence. Clarity, a kind of chisel’d “cleanliness,” a movement not unlike that of running one’s fingertip along the grooves and narrows of a finely carved picture-frame whilst studying the landscape within? Tangible, rightly weight’d, containing (nearly always) worlds caught within worlds (the effect of metaphorical abandon?), room to sigh and stretch, the wildness, the out-flaring caught up, tuck’d in, a safe deposit, constant pressure inner and outer, global, spherical? An example:
And on one of the longest walks we took from Combray, there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on an immense plateau closed at the horizon by jagged forests above which rose only the delicate tip of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, but so thin, so pink, that it seemed merely scratched on the sky by a fingernail which wanted to give this landscape, this exclusively natural picture, that little mark of art, that indication of human presence.
As Proust later describes the steeple itself, sentences with an “absence of vulgarity, of pretension, of meanness.” “An air of naturalness and an air of distinction.”

~

“Volleys of crows.”

~

To bring to one’s job “an indifference mingled with whimsy.” (One of those rather obnoxious underlinings, or notes, done out of certainty that it “fits me to a T.”)

~

Metaphor (Proust’s modus operandi) “puts the world in.” One begins to fail at seeing the clumsiness, th’inappropriety of some metaphorickal connections, caught up “trusting” the narrator, and the narrator’s pell-mell and matter-of-fact inclusions. Here, a brioche is brought to the table—lunch, after Mass—and “we would have the steeple there in front of us, itself golden and baked like a greater blessed brioche, with flakes and gummy drippings of sun, pricking its sharp point into the blue sky.” The wild inaccuracy of equating (sleek, sheer, point’d) steeple and (dumpy, round’d, doughy) brioche gets accept’d due to what? Sheer prevalence of the miscibles (interchangeables) of the Proustian world?

~

Earlier, the narrator’s noting of the charm of “the old ways of speaking in which we see a metaphor that is obliterated, in our modern language, by the abrasion of habit.” How it might “answer a need.” The consolations of metaphor.

~ ~ ~

“Dull dinners, with the sempiternal saddle of mutton.” Ah, the boffo English! Too long tracing my finger in the dust this morning, I’d better hie to it, or be spotlessly reft from my own true self untrue . . . Here Comes Everybody (and why can’t I think of Mr. Earwicker’s prenoms just now?) ’s got a sassy Kent Johnson interview up last I look’d, the sun is shining into a perfect autumnal day in Ann Arbor and I ain’t got no “meeting” today . . .

~

Tuesday, September 14, 2004

The Lip

~

The breakfast ruminant is contemplating—after observing how the coffee comes off the lip of the new pot cleanly, with little or no back-curl, run and subsequent drip—how “one” “might” develop a poetics built around the Bernoulli effect. [Mrrr. “The higher the velocity of a fluid, the lower the pressure.” Is that what I mean?] How language, a fluid—cf. Vološinov’s “stream of speech”—not unlike air or water—should in its writing cling to th’immediate. The “wild,” the outflingings, the velocitiz’d, the quick, the there play’d contra the homebody’d, the dribble, the ponderous, the local, the here. The poem writ against—constantly pulling out of—the evidence of that immediacy. Play’d against the middle of, stuck in the mediated occasion of its making. Not to go scot-free.

The breakfast ruminant’s breakfast is getting cold.

~

Reading the sports pages about football: “Poetics” is the ultimate American game: five seconds of action (poem) followed by a half-minute (a half-day, a half-century) of second-guessing, assigning blame and planning for the next flurry.

~

A friend’s story of the train-ride to Chicago: The conductor, apparently about to exceed the allow’d—mandated by law—conducting “period” for any one individual engine-driving man, simply stopped the train, call’d for a car to fetch him off a nearby country road, and left. So the train sat. Awaiting a new conductor. Whose taxi got lost. So the train sat until a second train arrived and “pushed” it to a spur track. Where it sat until a third train arrived with a “spare” conductor. Who board’d and got th’iron horse head’d to the Chi-town pastures, against probable irreparable passenger mayhem. Of course, fares’re at the lowest, something like $26 dollars one-way. For what could be a twelve hour trip. They’s no beatin’ that.

~

“Not to run into the common excess of Riot, nor to comply with mad Mirth and Jollity, offensive Gallantry, or any Extravagancy that is in Fashion, is accounted Stoical Superciliousness and Morosity.”

~

Re: Vološinov’s “stream of speech”—one of a number of uncaptured-for-the-moment Proust notes, the narrator Marcel on Aunt Léonie Octave, who for some reason “reminds me” of Robert Duncan, or stories thereof, or do I only see dear Léonie as a kind of Ur-blogger avant la letter? ’Zais pas:
In the next room, I would hear my aunt talking all alone in an undertone. She always talked rather softly because she thought there was something broken and floating in her head that she would have displaced by speaking too loudly, but she never remained for long, even alone, without saying something, because she believed it was beneficial to her throat and that if she prevented the blood from stopping there, she would reduce the frequency of the fits of breathlessness and the spasms from which she suffered; besides, in the absolute inertia in which she lived, she attributed to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance, she endowed them with a motility that made it difficult for her to keep them to herself, and lacking a confidant to whom she could communicate them, she announced them to herself, in a perpetual monologue that was her only form of activity.
~

Harrumph.

~

Rubbish.

~

Grrr.

~

Intangible and tangible blockades in the present scenery: “Meetings.” “Training.”

Monday, September 13, 2004

Upend’d

~

Rattle along the grapevine (grapevine? Hell! The interstate!)’s got it—soonest publish’d, soonest upend’d—that a large collection of Kent Johnson’s epigrams for American poets’ll shortly see print. Now, knowing (well, “suspecting”) how many of my contemporaries love a good spanking—just so long as it’s publickally done, opportunity for th’Histrionickals that shore up sagging “reputations”—I know (well, “suspect”) there’ll be semi-rabid outcry and teeth-gnashing in many a town and provincial capital about the book. There’ll be that, and recriminations, and the steadfast powers’ll be moved to prime powders and take down th’old Muskets—“Why ain’t that the lyin’ li’l Creep what wrote up that poubelle Japonaise? Varmint!”

And some few monsters, tender cheeks already burning with anticipatory whacks, ’ll be pressing they plumb-umber’d noses up against the Johnsonian window—revolutionist’s hideout cum candy manufactory—just longin’ for a spanking of they own, one masterly, aye, loving. “Do me. Do me! Genius!”

What communiqué I got—pass’d along by a pirate in the alley off Liberty Street where a one-arm’d Michael Jackson look-alike dances interminably most nights, a spotlessly “deck’d-out” pirate saying “Heh, yuh, gars, c’mere . . .”—goes something like:

Epigramititis: 108 Living American Poets, Praefatio by Kent Johnson, Introductio by Dale Smith, Approbatio by Ed Dorn (ca. 1999, correspondence with the Author). 240 pages, with images verso accompanying each epigram.

I suspect it’ll completely undo a number of “us.”

~

Impossible weekend of skinny’d-down days. Lots of bicycling with G. Two book “functions.” Regular chores. Grill’d end of summer chicken chez J. (one of my sisters). My little (few) reading notes in a state of Kabbalistickal mayhem—I will re-integrate them into the world (or disintegrate them out of the world) “soonest.” Still tracking little Marcel of the blue-black beard. Who once—comme lycéen—used the pseudonym “Bob.”

American pragmatism up against the French mumbo-jumbo of “le temps retrouvé” in the form of Benjamin Franklin’s “Lost time is not found again.” With reprise by Bob Dylan, with the Band, Music from Big Pink?

~

Bought:

Double Jeopardy, by Jean Echenoz, translated from the French by Mark Polizzotti (University of Nebraska Press, 1994)

The Best of Simple, by Langston Hughes, illustrated by Bernhard Nast (Hill & Wang, 1961)

The Farewell Symphony, by Edmund White (Vintage International, 1998)

Being in the Text: Self-Representation from Wordsworth to Roland Barthes, by Paul Jay (Cornell University Press, 1984)

Folk Tale, Fiction and Saga in the Homeric Epics, by Rhys Carpenter (University of California Press, 1958)

I Am a Memory Come Alive: Autobiographical Writings, by Franz Kafka, edited by Nahum N. Glatzer (Schocken, 1976)

Cruising Paradise: Tales, by Sam Shepard (Vintage International, 1997)

Time’s Arrow, by Martin Amis (Vintage International, 1991)

Because I ain’t never read the bad boy of English letters, he of the fix’d teeth.

The Big Supposer, by Lawrence Durrell. A dialogue with Marc Alyn, translated from the French by Francine Barker, illustrated with paintings by Lawrence Durrell (Grove, 1974)

In talk of “experimenting” with language:
M. A.—You have described the English language as a ‘punching-ball’. Don’t you agree that it lends itself better to this sort of experiment than French?

L. D.—By far, yes. Your syntax is so much less flexible. If you write bad French you end up with bad French. Whereas in English you can make any number of grammatical errors and still retain control, so that mistakes (whether or not they are deliberate) turn into gems. Take Conrad: his mistakes had such a beauty about them that the English ended by imitating them. A French poet needs a lot more temerity before he sets about destroying the grammar. When Rimbaud writes ‘Je est un autre’ he is deliberately attempting to break down logical structure; as a result he is thought of as a phenomenon. In England we take that sort of thing in our stride, as if the language belonged to each individual.”
~

Eric Gill: “Legibility, in practice, amounts simply to what one is accustomed to.”

~

To work.

Friday, September 10, 2004

Merest Wisp

~

Received:

New American Writing No. 22, edited by Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff ($12 / 3 issues for $27, 369 Molino Ave., Mill Valley, CA 94941)

Poetry: Gustaf Sobin, Wang Ping, Toby Olson, Eleni Sikelianos, Rusty Morrison, Laura Mullen, Mark McMorris, Eileen Myles, John Latta, John Olson, James Tate, Todd Swift, Noelle Kocot-Tomlin, Joseph Lease, Molly Bendall, Lisa Samuels, Spencer Selby, Maxine Chernoff, Nathaniel Tarn, Brian Henry, Terence Winch, G. C. Waldrep, Dale Smith, Joanna Fuhrman, Sarah Manguso, Donna Stonecipher, Richard Silberg, Joel Lewis, Jesse Lee Kercheval, Linda Nemec Foster, Gabriel Gudding, Carolyn Guinzio, Bruce Beasley, Albert Flynn DeSilver, Armand Capanna, Jason Stumpf, Garin Cycholl, Jonathan Thirkield, Christopher Janke, Jeffrey Jullich, Noah Eli Gordon, Che Qianzi (translated by Wang Ping and Lewis Warsh), Yu Jian (translated by Wang Ping and Ron Padgett), Jia Wei (translated by Wang Ping and Alex Lemon), Ko Un (introduced by Gary Gach, and translated by Gach, Brother Anthony of Taizé, and Young-moo Kim), and Nguyen Quoc Chanh (translated by Mông Lan).

Selections of Benjamin Péret’s Je ne mange pas de ce pain-là (1936) (translated by James Brook).

Fiction: “Five Chicago Stories,” by Peter Orner.

Essay: “The Modernization of Vietnamese Poetry: A History from a Vietnamese Poet’s Perspective,” by Hoàng Hung.

~

Stretch’d out and thinned down to the merest wisp tonight, tally of my days, rocketing home to ferry G. to tap-dancing (skedaddled into the shitty remainder’d books warehouse, and skedaddled right back out—same old dusty Olson Selected, In the American Tree with a cover to make it resemble an Ammons book, and a mess of Stephen Sandy-impressionists, Robert Pinsky-roustabouts, a stray Kleinzahler I already “own”). Home to sup and off by bicycle to the pique-nique alimentaire, which only a faux-scholiast like myself’d translate as elementary school picnic, where, we decided, we’d miss’d “not” “one” “thing.” Good to train the boy early in the art and hazard of social misfitting. Skimmed the new NAW (a more precise “account render’d” later), read about the recovery of the 1924 Everest climber George Mallory’s remains 75 years after he and companion Andrew Irvine disappear’d (always say “mysteriously disappear’d”)—to G. who promptly, peak’d-looking, head’d for Slumberland.

And bolt’d back out into the night with Carmen, where I thought of tithes, the titheless hobble’d boyo under th’abundancy of stars. For full-spatter’d, dash’d ’gainst th’heavens with The Painter’s widest brush dipped in and pull’d out dripping with light. I spotted Casseopeia queen-regal in her northerly chair and cranked my vids about wildly in search of Cephus the king. The pipsqueak king who looks like he inhabits a barn. The querulous fanny-sag of a ruin’d king. The scowling king of treetops and horizontal hideouts. King of the sycophants and bush. Vigilant lying crofter king. King Ass.

~

And read a little Proust, what I tiptoe into. In Lydia Davis’s translation lithesome, clarified, poised. She’s able to use a nineteenth century word like “hindersome” without fatuity. And Proust: “The anaesthetizing influence of habit having ceased, I would begin to have thoughts, and feelings, and they are such sad things.” Which somehow reminds me of Robert Duncan . . .

~

Noted, yesterday: Dale Smith’s posting of “Baraka on Donald Allen.”

~

Thursday, September 09, 2004

Proust Notes 2

~

Proust Notes 2

Beckett pointing to the Proustian narrator’s sudden exalt’d understanding of “the necessity of art”:
For in the brightness of art alone can be deciphered the baffled ecstasy that he had known before the inscrutable superficies of a cloud, a triangle, a spire, a flower, a pebble, when the mystery, the essence, the Idea, imprisoned in matter, had solicited the bounty of a subject . . . And he understands the meaning of Baudelaire’s definition of reality as ‘the adequate union of subject and object,’ and more clearly than ever the grotesque fallacy of a realistic art—‘that miserable statement of line and surface,’ and the penny-a-line vulgarity of a literature of notations.
~

Beckett, he who pares things down to nigh nothing, could’ve possibly gone in the “other direction,” exfoliate gigantism and awe-singed conflagrations and upswellings:
He is ushered into the library, because ex-Mme. Verdurin, at once the Norn and Victim of Harmonic Megrims, is enthroned in the midst of her guests, passionately absorbing Rino-Gomenol in the interest of her mucous membrane and suffering the most atrocious ecstasies of Stravinskian neuralgia.
”Norn?” “One of the female fates in Scandinavian mythology.” And, as usual with Beckett, fossicking about in the dictionaries’ll dig one in deeper: “The three principal Norns or Nornir are Urd, past time; Verdandi, present time; and Skulld, future time.”

“Megrim?” “Hemicrania.” “A feruent mygreyn was in þe rygt syde of hurre hedde.”

“Neuralgia?” Reminds me, by a complicated route, of Dave Matthews. Evenings I spent ensconced au bar drinking innumerable bourbons at a restaurant call’d Millers, downtown Charlottesville, late ’eighties. Where Matthews, pony-tail’d, wait’d tables. If I tipped off my stool and head’d to the tiny cubicle of a john, I’d read—glaring out under my hood’d lizard eyes—the wallpaper’s sobering repetitions of quack-medicine labels, solutions to cure dyspepsia, dipsomania, insomnia, neuralgia, lumbago, quirks, and rhythm-loss. Powders for those suffering heteronymia, logophobia, or the ever-likely sour constitutional. Back to barstool, wary and alert. I never knew Matthews even to dabble in music until—um, fall of 1990 would be my guess—he return’d, short-cropp’d hair, from a month or so in South Africa. I fell out—oh, how breezily I put it!—of the hard drinking Millers scene, and left town about a year later. Later, stories through New York friends how “big” he and the band’d got there. Saying goodbye to the sister, Jane, “with whom” I shelved books at Alderman Library, and covet’d her Cutter number PS’s—American literature . . . She an unmistakeable Doppelgänger to Dave.

Whilst were bandying names about, ask me about the night drinking with Wim Wenders in The Royal Palm Tavern in Ithaca, New York. That one, two words, “I forget.” Either my inebriation expunged the relevant memory-cells, or I spent most of the evening playing pinball . . .

~

Proust’s cinematic beings, as if he’d the other Marcel’s “Nude Descending a Staircase (No. 2)” in mind: “A being scattered in space and time is no longer a woman but a series of events on which we can throw no light, a series of problems that cannot be solved, a sea that, like Xerxes, we thrash with rods in an absurd desire to punish it for having engulfed our treasure.” The odd veer to punish, misogynist in the context, isn’t that a Duchamp’d quality, too . . . ?

The other memory-nudge: Fenollosa’s “no nouns in nature.”

And, earlier, Beckett on the plasticity and multiplicity of both Self and Name in Proust: following comment on Albertine’s migrating beauty-spot (akin to Emma Bovary’s eye-color switcheroos?):
Thus is extablished the pictorial multiplicity of Albertine that will duly evolve into a plastic and moral multiplicity, no longer a mere shifting superficies and an effect of the observer’s angle of approach . . . , but a multiplicity in depth, a turmoil of objective and immanent contradictions over which the subject has no control. Yet already he concludes, before the kaleidoscope of her expressions, before this face that from being all surface, smooth and waxed, passes to an almost fluid state of translucid gaiety, and from the chiseled polish of an opal to the feverish black-red congestion of a cyclamen, that the Name is an example of a barbarous society’s primitivism, and as conventionally inadequate as ‘Homer’ or ‘sea.’
~

Friendship, according to Proust, according to Beckett: “Friendship is a social expedient, like upholstery or the distribution of garbage buckets.”

“For the artist, who does not deal in surfaces, the rejection of friendship is not only reasonable, but a necessity.”

“The artistic tendency is not expansive, but a contraction. And art is the apotheosis of solitude. There is no communication because there are no vehicles of communication.”

~

Beckett’s identification of the Proustian rhetoric as “the chain figure of the metaphor . . . a tiring style . . . The clarity of the phrase is cumulative and explosive. One’s fatigue is a fatigue of the heart, a blood fatigue. One is exhausted and angry after an hour, submerged, dominated by the crest and break of metaphor after metaphor: but never stupefied.”

~

Beckett recording Proust’s botanickals: “Albertine’s laugh has the colour and smell of a geranium.”

~

Beckett on Proust’s “impressionism”: a “non-logical statement of phenomena in the order and exactitude of their perception, before they have been distorted into intelligibility in order to be forced into a chain of cause and effect.” Which sounds both Keatsian and epiphanic à la Joyce? Examples: “a napkin in the dust taken for a pencil of light, the sound of water in the pipes for a dog barking or the hooting of a siren . . .” “And we are reminded of Schopenhauer’s definition of the artistic procedure as ‘the contemplation of the world independently of the principle of reason.’”

Ah, those years of intoxicants, in the drear desire of thwarting that “principle.” Ah, fatigue-writing. Ah, oddball constraints and constructivisms.

~

Saperlipopette!

~

Proem

After the conflagration, piecemeal hordes of bytes, colonies surviving in pockets—no idea what I’m talking about—the Beckett that lives’ll determine the Becketts of the, uh, thirty-third century, the way scraps of Sappho and Anacreon got scrubbed up out of rhetor’s copybooks, out of blogs, exempla and illustration, perfervid scat-songs for you all, bubble-brains of the future, as Ron Padgett would say in that just kiddin’ Oklahoman he speaks to people of the future: “How I hate you, you’re alive and I’m not.”

~

Gah.

Wednesday, September 08, 2004

Slake

~

Received:

Bank Book, by Laura Sims (Answer Tag Home Press, 2004)

Covers and etching (of two potted plants, one leafy and plain, one tangly and veering out of the frame of the page, just as the regularly-pattern’d tablecloth they sit on begins fraying and rooting at the fold) by Karl Nelson, So & So Press, Northfield, Minnesota.

A spare fourteen-poem sequence, with space for silence, swung-about sense, and will’d ambiguity. Narrative twinges and twitches like the body of a large animal at rest, unresolved:
Bank Six


If you climb on now

What penance

Requires



One girl

Down in the marsh



Not for that



Not for all the cold cash in the world would I do it

But one man

Yes



Resolves the particulars

Later


~


Bank Seven


Tit for tat



Your border gives in



        Under the wet awning, a bomb



Or something

We think—



        We were animals



Friend

“Bank” as saving, socking away, as a turning back, or away, as a border, as a shelter, as a fortress.

~

Averrage, by Steve Timm (Answer Tag Home Press, 2004)

Cover illustration (of what—in silhouette—could be a standing man-flower, or a moon-flower-man . . .) “based on Vasyl’ Iermilov’s design for Verse of Ekaterina Neimaer (1920).”

Thickets of broke-down speech-act-ifying, sense hinge-ing out (often) of syllabic isolation:
a lout down clamber manage      into is out
of      direction brings both reflected      &      or
      reflection      all out into extravagancies      cal
led light of      alone is they still      no mis
take      allert      called motion for this kind of en
trance i could only take carriage to its extreme      ex
it      eyed never      choices until before      wan start
le as reflection of the out-into      if this
is lost sign up as one does ask      if I can walk
that way now that neither scent      the morphemes
i’m on      clamation arc      this special attach
meant carry on      this more tally unwind in
blustery      nothing on that rough plain to obs
tacle      if it is reaction      how still is clung the
clung to it rings the extant extend

Coming out of the pristine slake and ease of Sims’s smaller, cleaner constructions, Timm’s poems here throw up a gnarly façade, a briar-patch out of which “one” wants a way “free.” Of primary interest (though here over-occurring?): the way expectations get thwart’d in the breakage—where one thinks “ex / pression” (line 6-7), one gets “ex / it”; where one thinks “obs / truct” (line 13-14), one gets “obs / tacle.” The device pushes at the reader, taunts, undercuts, forces th’attention. On the page, the pieces resemble David Antin’s “talks”—same “look” of phrasing without punctuation, a score for / of the ragged breath, but Timm’s pieces successfully thwart, too, attempts to “hear” them as speech:
some midst about      facing-time      abolition
of dry as ice cracked deckwise      this page
like all failure      steady, steady      a riggeder
rigor      curse of foot on snow      abhord sound as
though another sake      & so      some parley
pursuant to loss in rigorous allow      permit me
compounded in a tardy reacherhood      my fat
ass! a proof of      the meant failure      sorry
ful      i am aloud      some nearingness old old
story      that verb of light in its alter      that
crown bared & that      those      it is a sky be
hind      i at half welter the less      no telling
source      the wonder is it      is enough
      the caught in throat      did you say introit
Which does exhibit felicities of rhythm and “reacherhood” and snubs readerly integration and its ingratiating ways.

~

David Pavelich sent me these “two latest chapbooks in my garden variety series,” work by two writers whose writings I last noticed in Stacy Szymaszek’s Gam. Like Gam, Pavelich’s Answer Tag Home Press publishes—according to th’enclosed announcements—“innovative writing by poets living and working in the Midwest.” (The squib continues: “All publications are limited in edition and distributed free of charge.”) As Pavelich writes (out of Madison, Wisconsin): “My ‘press,’ if it could be called that (maybe ‘imprint’ is better) is distributed solely as gift culture demands: mailed to friends, friends of friends, etc., with no solicitation.” Other chapbooks Pavelich’s done include works by Jesse Seldess, Corey Mead, and Stacy Szymaszek herself.

I remain too much the hermit snarling at the flower petal dropped on the Hotel flagstones, sign of the perceived intruder and disruption—too much that to associate and join, but I do salute the unmistakable signs of a Midwest avant-gardist build-up, and go giddy with the notion of a positive swarm of writers, a loud-buzzing hive of poets taking up residence in the lands of Bavarian beer, spatzen, sauerkraut, and bratwurst. Hog-callers and launderette owners, lumberjacks and tool and die cutters, beauticians and solitary scrubbers of the hospital floors: “the narrowest hinge in my hand puts to scorn all machinery.” If for no other reason than to deflect some of the puppet-noise that careens in off the coasts, that music-box gaiety and unaccommodating boister, or that saturnine gruff palsy-walsiness nobody alive cannot see through . . . or, “one” ’d think, to hear ’em tell it, do without. I say: “there there, Oakland, quiet down.” I say: “Hart Crane it all, Brooklyn, shaddup!

Aww, ya know I’s only funnin’ ya’s . . .

~

To woik.

Tuesday, September 07, 2004

Proust Notes 1

~

Long weekend, little accomplish’d, if accomplishment is the name of one’s desire routed. Which is permissible, though not necessary. Read at Edmund White’s little Penguin book about Proust. Bought G. a bigger bicycle, one with gears. Biked around with G. Walk’d around with the C-dog. Ate fish and drank Murphy’s stout at the Irish place. Dandy weather, a breeze over-roiling th’humidity.

*

Proust Notes 1

White on Proust’s “contagious style”: “Walter Benjamin, who became Proust’s German translator, wrote the philosopher Theodor Adorno that he did not want to read one more word by Proust than was actually necessary for him to translate because otherwise he would become addictively dependent, which would be an obstacle to his own production.”

Proust on imitations: “Do a voluntary pastiche in order to become original again afterwards and not produce involuntary pastiches the rest of one’s life.” And White noting how Proust avoid’d “writers such as Mérimée and Voltaire, since a simple, straightforward style like theirs was difficult to parody (just as drag queens avoid “doing” unadorned beauties such as Audrey Hepburn and are inspired by highly constructed women such as Mae West or Barbra Streisand).”

How Proust was “frightened” by George Eliot’s portrait in Middlemarch of Casaubon, “who labored [Proust’s words] all his life on an insignificant and absurd work.” Et qui [—in execrable schoolboy French—] sera trouvé d’être le Casaubon de notre temps?

Proust on what White calls Proust’s “endless stalling” before beginning the novel: “No doubt, my idleness having given me the habit, when it was a question of work, of putting it off from one day to another, I imagined that death too might be postponed in the same fashion.

(Am I endlessly stalling my beginning to read the novel itself, circling it, keeping cover in the green commentary . . . Suffering a form of “Sainte-Beuverie,” addled by and getting ever drunker on the biographical. The Sainte-Beuve who dismiss’d Stendahl, Baudelaire and Nerval—having judged unsatisfactory th’answers to such questions as: “What was his routine, the style of his daily life?” and “What were his vices; his weakness?” and claiming that “None of the answers to these questions is irrelevant in judging the author of a book and the book itself. . .”)

Proust’s book: Contre Saint-Beuve.

Example of why—after picking up Forgetting Elena “because Nabokov—whose capacity for admiration of contemporaries measured in the half-ounce range?—blurb’d it,” I decided I would read anything and everything by Edmund White:
Proust . . . learned a method of presentation that falls midway between that of Dickens and that of Henry James. Dickens assigns his characters one or two memorable traits, sometimes highly comic, which they display each time they make an appearance; James, by contrast, is so quick to add nuances to every portrait that he ends up effacing them with excessive shading. . . . Dickens could draw with a firm bounding line but used so little shading he gave no sense of perspective. James was all shading and depth, but . . . nothing vigorous distinguished the profile of one character from another.
Story of how Proust—(more for the rentiers and writers file)—would have successive versions of the manuscript set by typesetters, and would then “crowd the margins with more and more new passages.”

What puts Proust suddenly and irrevocably into the twentieth century: how he apparently attended the opening night of The Rite of Spring, and afterwards, “dined with Diaghilev and Nijinsky as well as with the composer, Stravinsky, and Proust’s new friend the very young and brilliant writer Jean Cocteau.”

And how he subscribed to Théâtrephone, “a service that held a telephone receiver up at a concert, which allowed people to stay at home and hear live music on their receivers.”

Proust on the admirably explicit and “full” Wagner: “spitting out everything he knew about a subject, everything close or distant, easy or difficult.”

The sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer.

Proust’s last sentence (dictated the night before he died): “There is a Chinese patience in Vermeer’s craft.” Death at fifty-one. Like Balzac.

*

Biked G. to school and dash’d in to find the meeting isn’t at nine. But at ten. “Chinese patience.” Phrase of the morning: “Those who are not lost are lost.” Listen’d Monday in the car to some of CBC Radio’s “countdown” of “50 essential songs of the 20th century.” With fifty-second mostly intelligent defenses of the choices and no commercials—it almost return’d me to the early days of FM, WABX in Detroit, the only sponsors being head shops. With Larry Miller sampling the promotional albums and singles and busting the ones he didn’t like over the microphone . . .

~

To work.