Silliman Notes 3

~

SILLIMAN NOTES 3

21.
Silliman’s answer to a question regarding “just why was the sentence the primary unit of interest” (Poetics list, 22 October 1998):

Olson’s poetics, based on the equation of line & breath, had been the most rigorous fomulation of the previous decade or two, and one could read a wide range of material (from O’Hara to Ginsberg) with such in mind [ignoring , apparently, Olson’s “facts to be dealt with . . . / . . . they must / be played by, said he, coldly, the / ear!” or O’Hara’s ambivalence toward Olson, calling him both a “great spirit”—which “one” could translate as “full of hot air”—and noting how “he’s extremely conscious . . . of saying the important utterance, which one cannot always summon up and indeed is not particularly desirable most of the time”] . . . But there were obvious flaws with this equation, especially with Olson’s superimposition of Place on top of the whole, so that the prospect of writing in this tradition began to appear to be a “fill in the blank” completion of an already implicit literary geography (as in “he breaks his lines just like someone from Ukiah”) Each succeeding poem would thus be a less significant formal act. [Um, this is incoherency masquerading as argument. Line based on breath determined by place is a “rigorous formulation”? Place, in a society as mobile that of the U.S., is a rigorous nothing . . .]

Sentences and paragraphs were one way out of that. It’s worth noting that the “miniaturist” tendency—Saroyan, the Grenier of Sentences—turns up first. Sentences and paragraphs also had the advantage of raising some international(ist) issues vis à vis surrealism, European poetry in general, that the excessive jingoism of Olson . . . never really addresses . . . [Mention of Williams’s Kora, Stein, Harvey Brown’s edition of Spring and All, Coolidge’s “first long poems,” Ashbery’s Three Poems, and Creeley’s Mabel and A Day Book.] . . . there was just a lot of stuff in the air. It suddenly seemed to be an area in which there was an enormous amount of work that could be done without already being weighed down by too much prior stuff.”

22.
Coleridge lecture notes (circa 1808), quoted in Richard Holmes’s Coleridge: Darker Reflections: Imagination: power of modifying one image or feeling by the precedent or following one . . .” (cf. Silliman’s “syllogistic movement”?)

23.
Kenner, again, in The Poetry of Ezra Pound: “Ideogram, at least as a poetic principle, is not a Sinophile fad. It inheres in Aristotle on metaphor.” And: “On a page of poetry there are set in motion the intelligible species of things. words are solid, they are not ghosts or pointers. The poet connects, arranges, defines, things . . .

24.
Silliman: “The sole precedent I can find for the new sentence is Kora In Hell: Improvisations and that one far-fetched.

I am going to make an argument, that there is such a thing as a new sentence and that it occurs thus far more or less exclusively in the prose poems of the Bay Area.” (“The New Sentence,” in Talks (Hills 6/7)

25.
Silliman, in a post title’d “Three tests for poetry” to Poetryetc, dated 26 February 1999: “I tend to ask three level-setting questions of a poet when I get to know her / his work:

1) Integrity

Would they write this way (whether traditionally or not) if it did not already exist as an established genre? . . . When you see somebody who writes like nobody who ever came before—Judy Grahn’s early work or Kathy Acker or, more recently, Mary Burger, or Hejinian’s My Life—there is an immediate jolt you get from the recognition of this element . . .

2) Efficiency

Do they then do what they set out to with the poem with any sort of interest and elegance and grace? . . .

. . . there are a lot of poets who can do this, but fail my first test . . . A fair amount of technically good avant-garde writing has this problem. [What is “technically good avant-garde writing” but a wild oxymoron under such conditions of recognition.]

3) Does their work change my sense of what the poem is and can be? That really for me is the test of a poem and poet.

For those for whom I would grant all three of these tests, I’ll read them forever. Raworth, Creeley, Grenier, Armantrout, Perelman, Hejinian, Kit Robinson, Zukofsky, Langston Hughes, Stein, Spicer, Williams—the list is far too small, even if that’s just a part of it.”

[Which makes it appear, alarmingly, that there are far more poets who’ve changed “one’s” “sense of what the poem is and can be” than any other kind . . .]

26.
“To transcribe the real creates, by the same act, an unreality, something besides the real which is its transcription, since the writing is one thing, what it transcribes another, the writing a fiction, necessarily and always so. The only real in writing is writing itself.” (Williams, The Embodiment of Knowledge)

And: “The province of letters is that realm of the intelligence in which words and their configurations are real and all ideas and facts with which they deal are secondary. . . . Its function is to re-enkindle language, to break it away from its enforcements, its prostitutions under all other categories. For language that is used as a means to an end foreign to itself is language used as an expedient—something that cannot be scientifically or philosophically sanctioned—impurely. This is “symbolism.” It is a union of expediency which tends to crumble apart as the words shift in meaning or become dead . . . By taking language as real and employing it with a full breadth and sweep, letters frees it from encroachments and makes it operative again. [The name of the province of letters is “the alphabet”?]

27.
Apollinaire’s “new spirit”: “A freedom of unimaginable opulence . . . an encyclopedic liberty . . . [in] what constitutes the material and manner of art.” “Simultanism.” A poetry of juxtapositions, “without connectives.”

“Psychologically it is of no importance that this visible image be composed of fragments of spoken language, for the bond between these fragments is no longer the logic of grammar but an ideographic logic culminating in an order of spatial disposition totally opposed to discursive juxtaposition. . . . It is the opposite of narration; narration is of all literary forms the one which requires discursive logic.” (In Joris & Rothenberg’s Poems for the Millenium.

28.
Silliman, in “The New Sentence”: “Literary criticism ought to serve as a corrective.”

29.
The notion of “sentence” is a vagary (as is—maybe moreso—“syllogistic movement,” though I suppose it’s the old formula of deriving the general out of particulars, rehash’d). Note the summarizing footnote to the abridgement of “The New Sentences” as it appears—decapitated—in Claims for Poetry: “Earlier, looking at modern linguistics (Chomsky, Saussure, Ivic, Ries, Voloshinov, Potter, Moskowitz, Hjelmslev, Bloomfield) and philosophy (Derrida, Wittgenstein, Ayer, Quine) Silliman finds no consensus as to the definition of the sentence.”

Whatever makes one attend to the prose of Hejinian’s My Life or Harryman’s Under the Bridge pieces (or Silliman’s work) is not prosiness or the “sentence” as “unit” (something not differing dramatically from “image” as “unit” or “line” as “unit,” provided that the under-throb, the support-structure, is in each case that same old same old notion of the next to, the juxtaposed).

Except that in the case of the “sentence” as “unit,” one’s lost the vector’d push that goes with lineation, sentence breaking against line . . . What makes one attend—makes one alert to possibilities for the new ain’t the size (or nature) of the “unit,” but the mastery in its employ, its “positioning.” The putting of things—they are things—next to one another in ways out of which new relations, dispersals, consequences appear. Picasso’s bicycle seat and handlebars equal bull. The precedents for that activity—Pound’s “ply on ply”—come out of Aristotle, out of Coleridge, out of Flaubert, out of everywhere. Either we are still modern, ’ve always been modern, or we never were.

30.
Valéry talking about a “type of attention [that] makes the structure of expressions more felt and more interesting that their significance or value. Properties of transformations are worthier the mind’s attention than what they transform . . .” [A recipe for lengthy arrangements of inconsequential particulars, consequence inhering in th’arrangement?]

31.
“Ford and Conrad talked too much about Flaubert but did not waste time playing hide-and-seek with the precise word. They surrounded their meaning with successive approximations instead, and so repeated in the texture of prose the pattern by which their narrative captured their theme. It is a circuitous technique, prodigal of paper. For sure, Flaubert would not have recognized it: yet nebulosities and imprecisions are much of our landscape without or within, and worth reproducing . . . There are explorations that can never end in discovery, only in willingness to rest content with an unsure glimpse through mists, and uncertain sound of becks we shall never taste: approximations. To this Ford’s rhythm and diction in these poems tend steadily; to this their matter is organized with great skill.” (Basil Bunting, editor of Ford Madox Ford’s Selected Poems)

32.
Silliman, in “®”: “The impulse of the sentence is to extend, never to close off.” And in “Skies”: “(I am not interested in description, but detail, transition, all the nameless, half-known tones reducible to blue)”

33.
“. . . one of the provisions in the contract between poet and reader. The reader undertakes not to tear a word from its context and scrutinize it in isolation . . . What is the contextual unit? If we say . . . “in the context of the whole poem”, then we are faced with Ezra Pound’s Cantos, a poem of enormous length which has appeared in snatches during the past twenty-five years and is still incomplete . . . (Donald Davie, in Articulate Energy: An Inquiry into the Syntax of English Poetry, 1955

34.
Adorno: “Gaps.—The injunction to practise intellectual honest usually amounts to sabotage of thought. The writer is urged to show explicitly all the steps that have led him to his conclusion, so enabling every reader to follow the process through and, where possible . . . to duplicate it. This demand not only invokes the liberal fiction of the universal communicability of each and every thought and so inhibits their objectively appropriate expression, but is also wrong in itself as a principle of representation. For the value of a thought is measured by its distance from the continuity of the familiar . . . Texts which anxiously undertake to record every step without omission inevitably succumb to banality . . . Every thought which is not idle . . . bears branded on it the impossibility of its full legitimation . . . (Minima Moralia, 50)

~

Full shiny-faced moon bashful as a schoolboy in the tree-lined east. Big off to school morning “on the morrow.” First day back excitement. I trot my regular trapline with the C-dog, appraisingly, and retire.

Moon and me, we
Hob-knob’d lots of yore—
And nod not now nor
Stop to plot or talk, or moan.

~

To work.

~

Screwy

~

Sidelong screwy-eyed “you is delusional out your Midwest ass” look from Aaron McCollough just after work today after I claim’d I didn’t see myself as “obsessional” about much of anything. (He’d been talking about a friend with nine bicycles, each minimally lighter than the first.) Swerve to talk about deluded Blogland: is that high vaunted “communitas” just a canned subset of like-mind’d delusionals, pure products of the general American overblown delusion? Four percent of the world’s population us, and we use nigh forty percent of the world’s resources. See the little piggies run . . .

~

G. asking: “What’s the first word I ever typed?”

~

Received:

No: A Journal of the Arts, No. 3 (2004), edited by Deb Klowden and Ben Lerner for Lost Roads Publishers ($12 / issue, $20 / two issues, 39 West 29th Street, 11A, New York, New York 10001)

The one with the cover (by Che Chen) of tamper’d-with photograph of the burly swimmer doing the cross-chest rescue carry on another man, who bears a rather distinct resemblance to Frank O’Hara. Probably not one of the nights of dashing into the ocean naked (trunks, ’fifties-style, submit’d as evidence). What I continue to love about No: the angry mess and emballage of its artwork, a kind of unfinish’d quickness caught mid-spatter and drip, improvisatory—first stroke, best stroke.

Poetry: Xue Di (translated by Hil Anderson and Keith Waldrop), Karen Volkman, Elizabeth Willis, John Kinsella, Kevin Young, Bin Ramke, Margaret Christakos, Lisa Jarnot, Cyrus Console, Rishi Zutshi, Jaime Saenz (translated by Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson), Erín Moure, Stephen Ratcliffe, Juliana Leslie, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, Aaron Kunin, and Barbara Guest.

A play: “Troilus,” by Jack Spicer, with an introduction by Aaron Kunin.

Prose: Marjorie Perloff on Maggie O’Sullivan’s Red Shifts (Etruscan Books, 2001) and Ben Lerner on Rosemarie Waldrop’s Blindsight (New Directions, 2003) and Love, Like Pronouns (Omnidawn, 2003).

Art: Canan Tolon.

~

“Paganini does not repeat.” What, according to a short biography I read to G., Paganini call’d out whilst cries for an encore fill’d the theater.

~

In a muddle of thinking about the “new sentence” and its forebears—doing that night walk thing—when a leash liveliness unleash’d me out of my revery and coagulant in bare time to see a mighty broadly white-striped skunk purposefully, if rather lumpily, shouldering itself à la Toshiro Mifune across the road. That ripple and roll in the samurai-outfitted back-muscles—post-enemy-disposal mode—that pent-up power of contain’d pride. That’s how that skunk went off—and the C-dog tugging berserk with anticipation quell’d, if not squelch’d.

~

Weekend of dutiful reading (the B. S. Johnson biography, compell’d to finish, gone a little sluggardly on me, less animatedly necessary than th’excitement and command it seem’d, unread, to offer—ain’t it so often like that). Weekend of heavy Saturday night rain puddling up the cellar. Weekend of the arrest of the anti-Bush bicyclist. Weekend of a swim with G. and my father. Weekend of a terrific chicken and broccoli and white sauce’d penne cook’d by J. Sunday through the tiniest mist and drizzle with G., making th’usual bike’d rounds, library, garage sales.

~

The “SILLIMAN NOTES 3” episode is ragged and more than alarmingly inchoate, even for “notes.” Too many weekend chores. “Remember That I Have Remembered.” Domani, with “one’s” prayers unceasing.

~

In one of B. S. Johnson’s final works, a film titled Fat Man on a Beach—“a simple but audacious idea . . . forty minutes of Johnson sitting on his favourite beach, Porth Ceiriad [in Wales], and talking directly to camera about anything that happened to come into his head”—he tells “a long, horrible anecdote about a motorcyclist being thrown from his bike and landing on a wire fence which cuts through his body ‘like a cheese cutter cutting through cheese.’” And at some point Johnson “loses his thread and starts talking about how cheese comes in packages, so we never see the cutting process by which the squares are produced, and he adds, feelingly, ‘Thank God.’ For a moment he has forgotten that he is talking about cheese, not about the human body. Suddenly, he has ‘no access to metaphor’—a common symptom . . . of people with delusional disorders.”

~

To work.

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Silliman Notes bis

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[Yesterday’s notes made my own self curious, so I haul’d out a manila folder of xeroxes, print-outs, and scribbles mark’d “Silliman Essay.” To see what junk I’d collect’d, to see what hare-brain’d notions I’d had.]

SILLIMAN NOTES bis

12.
“. . . when I was still a teenager I wrote to Pound suggesting that the final Canto should be a photograph of junks—the floating kind—in the Hong Kong harbor.” (Ron Silliman, in a 20 February 1999 post to Poetryetc.)

13.
“It should be noted . . . that the ideogrammic method as a means of prose exposition permits inter-relation of interests and perceptions drawn from diverse materials in a way impossible to schematic presentation. [Footnote: Fenollosa remarks of syllogistic method that ‘Even in its own sphere it cannot think half of what it wants to think. It has no way of bringing together any two concepts which do not happen to stand one under the other and in the same pyramid.’] To understand this the reader need only think of what is meant in college curricula by ‘English’. Hamlet’s personality, Browning’s poems, Milton’s theological and Burke’s political controversy, . . . Dryden’s jingoism and Carlyle’s Teutonism, are all wrenched into a single ragged line of stylistic mutation and their vital centres of interest and importance relegated to ancillary or ‘background’ status. The method of a book like Culture on the other hand is to present each of number of foci of interest—Erigena, Aristotle, painting, Chinese history, musical criteria, architectural achievements, in contact with as many others as possible. Topics recur and recur, never twice with the same neighbours. The juxtapositions are precisely calculated, and this is as far as possible from . . . the hurling at the reader of block after block of enthusiastically recorded but quite indiscriminate entities. (The latter is after all the method of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). (p.94, The Poetry of Ezra Pound, by Hugh Kenner, 1950).

14.
The background grey—every sentence equal to every other sentence—of some of The Alphabet’s parts versus foci, lines of force and attention to offer the receptive mind perceived patterns. Is something like Xing of greater interest due to lineation, that backbeat and syncope—stanzas actively working to retard or rev against the over-thrust of a minimally differentiated prose drive. In spite of sentence length. (A “weaker” measure than the line.)

15.
“1) The paragraph organizes the sentences;
2) The paragraph is a unit of quantity, not logic or argument;
3) Sentence length is a unit of measure;
4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy / ambiguity; [“Ambiguity”? Attention, New Critics . . .]
5) Syllogistic movement is (a) limited (b) controlled;
6) Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences; [Which is to say, “juxtapositioning” is likely the primary semantic engine available.]
7) Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;
8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader’s attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.” (Silliman, “The New Sentence,” p.216 in Talks (Hills 6/7, edited by Bob Perelman), Spring 1980)

16.
Oddly enough: barely a mention of Pound in “The New Sentence.” And that in relation to Grenier’s Sentences. Which—though it “directly anticipates the new sentence”—the “sentence” itself therein “is the extreme case for the new sentence.” “By removal of context, Grenier prevents most leaps beyond the level of grammatic integration.” [“Leaps,” a Bly word. Juxtaposition and the Europe-inflect’d surreal.] Silliman’s Pound mention: Grenier’s “‘sentences’ are more properly utterances and in that sense follow Olson and Pound and a significant portion of Creeley’s work in that area.” [“Utterances,” as in I HATE SPEECH?] (p.212-13 in Talks (Hills 6/7, edited by Bob Perelman), Spring 1980)

17.
“One’s immediate attraction to these poems lies in their clear craft and almost infinite suggestiveness. Yet beneath this dreamy, erotic world of glimpses awaits a powerful and complex machine, a structure which can be perceived through the jeweled surfaces if only the reader will understand the title of “These are the Aspects of the Perfect” to be a statement of literal fact. Uniting for the first time the “French idiom” of the New York School and the field composition techniques of Duncan and Olson, Melnick has achieved the last significant goal of modernism and begun a major career.” (Silliman’s blurb for David Melnick’s Eclogs, Ithaca House, 1972)

18. Is Mr. Silliman Our Flaubert?
Out of Kenner’s early (1958) book of essays on contemporary literature, Gnomon, in a chapter with the ominously satisfying title “Remember That I Have Remembered,” pertinent lines: “. . . the key to twentieth-century English poetry is nineteenth-century French prose; . . . the writers of the half-century just closed [that is, 1900-1950, and here we are still “stuck” with modernism a half-century later?] ‘weigh’ in exact proportion to their grip on this key.

As Mr. Pound has been telling us for forty years, Stendhal’s repudiation of “poetry with its fustian à la Louis XIV” was a crucial event in the history of letters. “At that moment the serious art of writing ‘went over to prose,’ and for some time the important developments of language as means of expression were the developments of prose. And a man cannot clearly understand or justly judge the value of verse, modern verse, any verse, unless he have grasped this.”

. . .

It was Ford . . . who in the first decade of this century absorbed and retransmitted the discoveries of Stendhal and Flaubert on an English wavelength. . . .virtually alone in his tireless insistence on (1) the adequation of language to the thing perceived or the sensation undergone rather than to an overriding concept of “style”; (2) the importance of making every episode, sentence, and phrase function—carry forward the total effect (“progression d’effet”) ; and (3) the principle of juxtaposition without copula of chapter with chapter, incident with incident , character with character, word with word, as the mainspring of poetic effect.

The quality of Bouvard and Pécuchet’s rapture at their inheritance is both rendered and placed in twelve words by just one collocation of enthusiasms: “Nous ferons tout ce qui nous plaira! nous laisserons pousser notre barbe!” In the technique of that sentence lies all modern letters in embryo: the exact words, the thematically relevant detail, the hokku-like [see Kent Johnson’s Aerial piece on renga?] juxtaposition of imperial felicity and an unchecked beard.”

19.
“We cannot carry the corpse of our father everywhere along with us. (Guillaume Apollinaire, in The Cubist Painters, 1913)

20.
“The total constructedness of [Harry Partch’s] vision, from tuning to inventing the instrument to the use of found materials . . . are part of what I take to be a reasonably American prototype. Another example would be Simon Rodia and his towers in Watts. Whitman’s poetry a century earlier seems very much a part of this same spirit . . .

I’ve always taken the Partch, Rodia and Whitman as models for what my own work should be. They each take responsibility for every element of their work. It’s a question I’ve asked students to address whenever I’ve taught: what would you do if it was your responsibility to invent poetry, not just write a poem that looked like every other poem ever written, but to actually invent and take responsibility for the entire genre from scratch? That seems very much the scale that Partch et al operate on.

Why else even bother?” (Silliman post to British and Irish Poet list, 17 January 2001.)

~

Ehm, having stirred up the long-smouldering embers of “one’s” dour proposal, now I seemingly got a blaze and conflagration going. And’d better quit here for now. Having just uncover’d a third pertinent cache in a notebook where I kept things that wouldn’t keep well in my too-febrile brain-pan . . .

~

G. is at work with me, printing out violin music and whistling soft airs. And so, to work.

~

Yarn

~

G. is making mustaches out of yarn, and singing Ruddigore verses. Earlier it was Mozart wig and improvisation at the piano, and Mozart wig on the Carmen-girl, who now comes up with her demanding nose to nudge my arm, repeatedly. Dull throb of sleep-lack headache. J. is out. G. and I did the usual macaroni and omelet shebang, quick.

~

So I sit “reaming out” my nose, (cf. and pace Robert Hass, “Shame: An Ode”) and reading various nods and blandishments re: Silliman’s little pout about the need for imperfections, for, gosh, “risk”—a word I ain’t heard put down without an accompanying sly wink since The Workshop got shut down by The Authorities. Risk’s in the heart of th’endanger’d, I’d think, just commonsensical, how batty to attempt a measurement, no? I mean, you’d think anybody’d long to try something new and different once, say, every quarter-century or so, just so’s not to die out yaller and prickly like purslane in the ancient creekbed. (On the way to the contagious hospital.) “Craft’d” can imply a sly insouciance bordering on automatonic, the first shot going in the can irregardless, but it can can a craven can-can and waltz on out the door, too. Meaning there’s nothing negligible about expertise, or beauty, either. Or constant. Look how Richard Wilbur’s first book, a doozy, ’s called The Beautiful Changes. And look (if you can) where he is now. Look, if cha-cha’d-up incoherency’s to be taken automatically as insincerity—as Bill Withers [okay, Luther Ingram] (or Bill Yeats) first “rough beast” of a draft went—I don’t wanna be right. We’re not among schoolchildren here.

~

“Mozart” is conducting a full-throttle hortatory Offenbach in the next room, it’s Pleistocene’d my nerve-endings: what’s getting through—fossilized feelings. I like it like that. That roar of rock bloodying up that little smithy whose shop’s shingle hangs over the inner-ear mechanickals—anvil, hammer, stirrup.

~

Still chuckling about what a good game Sasha Frere-Jones plays.

~

Surely “one” mustn’t fall into a rectitude and funk at even what “one” considers the merest “use” of language—we, and “it,” are not part of the “service industry,” y’know. At the very least a little affectionate tomfoolery’s in order, a nudge and a noogie—toy language, kid language. “One” needn’t be so all-Ivan Goll-darn’d glum at the saying.

~

[What’s here: a tiny accumulation of notes made during the last six or seven years—others reside in pencil in various notebooks, and some xeroxes exist. What start’d as an intention to show a lineage—Pound’s imagism credo to Silliman’s New Sentence—got befoul’d by a strict combination of my sloth and my sloth. I bump’d into the file here in a dark alley around midnight, and decided to “post” it here. For anybody’s use. “My” essay’ll never get written.]

SILLIMAN NOTES

1.
The model for my own “Fragging”: “Second Avenue.” Where’s Frank O’Hara in the mix?

2.
What, The Figures, 1988. Lineated new sentences. “A short line / makes for anxious music.” (p.[7]) “Retrofit theory to text.” (p.10) “Rodefer / has referred to me / as a romantic / which I’d deny.” (p.26) “To choose the line / as a painter might choose color, / to decide, as the period / determines a sentence, / fixing whatever lies within.” (p.65) “The line tends to scratch (the advantage of prose is / or, I should say, may be / not that it has no line—each word, each letter / holds the line—but / that its linebreaks being hidden / demands the reader work).” (p.98) “It is not that / there is no narrative / here (each sentence/is a narrative, / each line moves) / but that there is / no hierarchy / of narratives (not even / the story of the / poem), no sentence / to which the others / (all the others) defer / and are ranked / (the map is not / built about the city).” (p.100-1) “Between method and / technique lies / style but / between / style and method / comes program.” (p.101) “No ideas / but in positioning.”

3.
Paradise, Burning Deck, 1985. “Naturalism is administered, bite-size.” (p. 10) Silliman’s neutrality, pointillist, beige, scales of gray. What becomes tangible (memorable) is any hint of the rhetor: reference to “flower sermon” coming again in What:

            What
was
        the flower sermon anyway
(but the content of a word
lacking difference)?

4.
ABC, 1983. “Carbon,” part VI, 3) “No such thing as a phrase.” [unpaginated], part VII, [final line of book] “A rain begins with drops.” Where is that line that expresses a small longing for a letter beyond Z?

5.
N/O, 1994. Poundian content of “Non.” [line breaks, patches of text, the riffs on Cantos opening . . .] (p.9):

“Continuity demands a margin
What is the import of detail?”

p.50: “The courage of an awkward, ugly work.”

“Oz”: p.80: “One lives through detail.”

p.86: “That the flood of detail itself thwarts reason.”

p.104: “Continuity requires suppression.”

p.107: “The way continuous perspective disperses attention / until you seem to float freely, apart / from your body, attuned instead to the rhythms / of the world . . .”

6.
Sontag on Benjamin: “Fidelity lies in accumulating things—which appear, mostly, in the form of fragments or ruins. (“It is common practice in baroque literature to pile up fragments incessantly,” Benjamin writes.) Both the baroque and Surrealism, sensibilities with which Benjamin felt a strong affinity, see reality as things.” (p.120, Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980)

“Collectors are people with a tactical instinct”—Benjamin, p.121.

“Ambiguity displaces authenticity in all things”—Benjamin, p.121.

7.
Sontag on Artaud: “The contempt for literature—a theme of modernist literature first loudly sounded by Rimbaud—has a different inflection as Artaud expresses it in the era when the Futurists, Dadaists, and Surrealists had made it a commonplace. . . . For Artaud, the extreme mental—and also physical—pain that feeds (and authenticates) the act of writing is necessarily falsified when that energy is transformed into artistry: when it attains the benign status of a finished, literary product.”

“All writing is garbage”—Artaud in The Nerve Meter, quoted by Sontag, p.20, Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980.

Cf. Ammons’s Garbage, Ashbery’s swirling garbage of “Self-Portrait”

The process is heroic and authenticating, but at completeness is falsified, benign, tidy, examinable.

8.
Sontag on Artaud bis: “That narrow tonal range which makes up “the so-called literary tone”—literature in its traditionally acceptable forms—becomes worse than a fraud and an instrument of intellectual repression.” p.22, Under the Sign of Saturn, 1980.

9.
Sontag on “camp”: “One is drawn to Camp when one realizes that “sincerity” is not enough. Sincerity can be simple philistinism, intellectual narrowness.” p.288, “Notes on ‘Camp’” in Against Interpretation. Consider how far away from Camp Silliman is, though an important element of Camp sensibility is the equivalence of all objects. Another is delight in artifice. Delight in Silliman?

10.
Minima Moralia, Adorno, p.74: “Nothing less is asked of the thinker today than that he should be at every moment both within things and outside them—Münchhausen pulling himself out of the bog by his pig-tail becomes the pattern of knowledge which wishes to be more than either verification or speculation.”

p.77: “. . .truth itself depends on the tempo, the patience and perseverance of lingering with the particular: what passes beyond it without having first entirely lost itself, what proceeds to judge without having first been guilty of the injustice of contemplation, loses itself at last in emptiness.”

p.78: “The exclusiveness implicit in time gives rise, by its inherent law, to the exclusive domination of hermetically sealed groups, finally to that of big business.”

p.79: “The specific is not exclusive: it lacks the aspiration to totality. But in another sense it is exclusive, nevertheless: the experience indissolubly bound up with it does not, indeed, forbid replacement, but by its very essence precludes it. The protection of anything quite definite is that it cannot be repeated, which is just why it tolerates what is different.” Specific vs. particular.

p.80: See xerox. Gaps and imagism.

p.86: “Precisely the writer most unwilling to make concessions to drab common sense must guard against draping ideas, in themselves banal, in the appurtenances of style.” vs. Joyce’s “Thought is the thought of thought.” Wherein “idea” falls asunder without the drapery itself.

p.86 bis: “The writer ought not acknowledge any distinction between beautiful and adequate expression. He should neither suppose such a distinction in the solicitous mind of the critic, nor tolerate it in his own. If he succeeds in saying entirely what he means, it is beautiful. Beauty of expression for its own sake is not at all ‘too beautiful’, but ornamental, arty-crafty, ugly.” If I say ‘old hat,’ is that beautiful and adequate?

p.99: “Even the odious division of talk into professional conversations and strictly conventional ones, hints at our sense of the impossibility of uttering thoughts without arrogance, without trespassing on the time of others. The most urgent need of exposition, if it is to be in the least serviceable, is to keep such experiences always in view, and by its tempo, compactness, density, yet also its tentativeness, to give them expression.”

11.
Mallarmé to Jules Huret in the Echo de Paris (in Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods): “There are verses in the genre called prose, sometimes wonderful verses and in every rhythm. But to tell the truth, prose doesn’t exist: there is the alphabet and then there is verse, which may be more or less tight, more or less diffuse. Every time there is a strain toward style, there is versification.” (p.129)

Mallarmé to Jules Huret in the Echo de Paris (in Roberto Calasso’s Literature and the Gods): “Above all what has gone is the unquestionable notion that in a society with neither stability nor unity one cannot create a stable art, a definitive art.” Hence “the restlessness of minds”; hence “the unexplained need for individuality of which contemporary literary manifestations are the direct reflection.” (p.130)

Two things: rhythm and the alphabet. Language comes into being as a function of rhythm. Beat begets style. Literature is the result of style. Prose doesn’t exist, nor poetry, two blurry items on a continuum.

~

Miniature

~

Down to Toledo for a Mud Hens game. Against the Indianapolis Indians. Who won, 4-2. And G. want’d more than anything to climb in the Ohio Lottery “tornado chamber”—zipped into a clear bubble to grab at a miniature twister of dollar bills. Home and dog walk’d and settle’d about midnight.

~

Which left little opportunity to read. Though enough to find out about Composition No. 1 (1962), by Marc Saporta (1923-). French translator of Kerouac and Hemingway. Author, too, of novels La Quête (1961), La Distribution (1961), and Les Invités (1964). Jonathan Coe, in considering B. S. Johnson’s The Unfortunates (publish’d in 1969, written in 1967) (unbound sections—of various lengths—publish’d in a box, shuffled pages “based on randomness, because that was the nature of cancer,” says Zulfikar Ghose, Johnson's book is meant to intersperse memories of friend Tony Tillinghast, dead of cancer in 1964, with coverage of a Nottingham (where Tillinghast'd lived) football match . . .)—Coe points to the irremediable fact that Johnson knew about the Saporta book:

This novel—featuring the stream of consciousness recollections of a car-crash victim—had been published in Paris in the early 1960s, and translated into English by Richard Howard in 1963. Although Howard’s translation was only ever published in America, by Simon & Schuster, the book’s reputation had extended to Britain: as early as October 1962, Scene magazine had contained references to it in a piece . . . called ‘Shuffle the Pages as You Will’ . . .

That issue of Scene being one wherein Johnson, too, had a piece (on Beckett). Coe:

‘The other fiction pioneer,’ Smith [William G., the author of the Scene piece] had written (after discussing Burroughs’s cut-up techniques), ‘is the French Marc Saporta whose idea is that the pages of a novel should be issued in an unbound stack which the readers will be invited to shuffle around in any order they please.’ The main difference between Composition No. 1 and The Unfortunates, in fact, is that Saporta’s novel is entirely loose-leaved, and every single page runs on to every single other page, no matter what order you arrange them into. Technically, this makes it a far more remarkable achievement than The Unfortunates . . .

Johnson (feisty, combative), whilst admitting he’d used “a modified form of Saporta’s technique,” claimed a superiority in the “separate signatures” of The Unfortunates, writ to “whatever length the material dictates.” Opposed to “the page and what type can be fitted on it” which seem’d, to Johnson” “to impose another arbitrary unit . . . on the material.”

Curious about the Saporta item, I’m tracking a copy down. As some anonymous cataloguer notes:

Separate leaves, printed on one side only, issued in a case. “The pages of this book may be read in any order. The reader is requested to shuffle them like a deck of cards.”

“We” shall see.

~

Prose here present’d comme argument for more sleep. Woozy and Mehitabelishly yawning. Inchoate deburdening of “klutzy” “thoughts.”

~

“Louringly” is what I found in that book. Which prompts a Word of the Day: Lour, or lower. Cf. early modern Dutch loeren (Kilian) to frown, knit the brows; to look askance; to wink; to watch stealthily, to lie in wait. “He lourede with sori semblaunt: and þeos wordes out he caste:” to work.

~

Undercut

~

(Here, in a moment of prose, parenthetical although fundamental, the Author puts forth a rudimentary theory, frivolous like the times, for purely egotistical ends, those of a prose-writer who refuses the beckonings of the novel, without any “philosophical” hesitation or responsibility, nor, truthfully, any other . . .)

Which is what happens when I translate. Here: something out of Jacques Roubaud’s Poésie: I veer and transgress (delicious word of the seminar table, hein?), I undercut sense with arabesques, an odalisque who’s busily scratching one foot with one toe of another foot joins me, O joins me!

Rain in a pure drench just after G. and I finish’d up a C-dog neighborhood investigation. And I threw together a lettuce and tomato salad, put the rice on to simmer. J.’d done up the sausage and peppers earlier. And I “poked around in” (my preferr’d reading style, that of a gigolo, I suppose) the handy Monsieur Roubaud.

Which is what I tend to do to de-solidify my brain-wave patterns, which I find completely capable (and permissible!) of riding th’haplessly blinking cursor in full plonk’d dérive if not provided with a “textual” nudge. I learn’d, I think, to write by reading Lawrence Durrell, Nobel-robbed Brit he.

As, pardonnez-moi, Nabokov was. Robbed for being a stylist, insufficiently sérieux and too clever by half. Roubaud says: “In solidifying itself, in any case, poetic form reveals something of its essence, makes its own skeletal underpinning plain.” Which is, de toute façon, what death is,

A spatialized (de rigueur) showing-off of skeletal verity. Which brings me up with a snort: how come those “language” boys all write topic-sentence prose, statement, explication, conclusion, with no smudge, no pother? As if the combustible dainties of the age could be “captured” in five-paragraph “theme.”

Where’s the richness of the whorl and strain, the crisis of saying the bloody unsayable? Too much “taken-for-grant’d” “instrumental” “good gray” prose hereabouts—c’mon, guys, if “one’s” gonna make a case for “difficulty,” don’t let’s act like perennial third-graders . . .

~

Vroom. Type’d a little for G. who’s writing a story about a time machine. Olivetti, mechanickal, requiring an imbecilic force (used-up ribbon, dried up hardware). The solidity of the noise. Kerthunk. A book he check’d out of the library says: “Hook the reader.” And provides an example:

Cal dodged out of the way as a truck came barreling down the street.

And its variant (hooks):

—Look out, Cal!
A truck came barreling down the street.

Or:

—Look out, Cal!
Charles Olson came barreling down the street.

Or:

—Jump back, Cal!
—Dizzee Rascal’s gonna git yo’ momma!

~

B. S. Johnson, writing to Edward Lucie-Smith (“Dear Teddy”) concerning “an extension of Beckett I’ve always thought I’d like to try:”

say more or less on the first page ‘I’m going to write a novel—don’t know what’s going to be on the next page, let alone in the middle, the end: but fear not gentle reader, I have written novels before, you’re in fairly safe hands.’ And just go on, and after 250 pages stop, and see if it is a novel.

B-bu-but. I thought that is how “one” writes a novel. Or anything.

At some point Gordon Williams (Scottish novelist, author of, among other things, The Siege of Trencher’s Farm, “filmed by Sam Peckinpah as the notorious Straw Dogs) writes to Johnson regarding Johnson’s “experimentalist” stance (particularly as codify’d in a piece for Vogue, a sort of precursor-piece to the eventual introduction to Aren’t You Rather Young To Be Writing Your Memoirs?—most writers are still stuck in 19th c. practices, ’ve learn’d nothing from Joyce, “the Einstein of the novel,” “telling stories is telling lies,” a reader’s curiosity to know what happens next is “primitive, vulgar and idle,” and the writer who provides it no different from any boring old snort in a pub, etc.):

Attempts to formalise [the meaning of “experimental”] into didactic public addresses must necessarily look either like bandwagon jumping (fashion being the art of labelling tomorrow’s stray impulses as a trend) or slightly desperate efforts to convince oneself that one is doing the right thing. [We see a lot of this, looking out over the hacienda.] My view is that any writer with a conscience is entitled to wrestle publicly with his attitudes in his books. I think one might even be allowed two or three books in which one’s internal arguments about the nature of books themselves dominated other considerations. Sooner or later, however, you have to get onto questions of a more serious nature: What are you saying? Does your writing prove you have any right to say it? To whom are you addressing yourself?

Which, first reminds me slightly of Flaubert (“Shut up and write”) and second, ends up formalizing itself with its dicta regarding the “serious,” the audience, writing as a sort of try’d-and-test’d (and found worthy) product.

Back to. . . So it goes. Anyone is always trying to replicate itself . . . (Gordon Williams: “a working-class Scot with solid socialist principles,” “plenty in common with Johnson”) and strays not . . . dogs

. . . means anything come

All coming down to . . . plausible, reckless, encode anybody rapture

not mine

“Skin”

~

Received:

Spell, by Dan Beachy-Quick (Ahsahta Press, 2004)

Which seemingly bounces off the “skin” of Melville’s Moby Dick, book in pursuit of a book. Often, apparently, by dips repeated into th’etymological sea. Random salient details (th’obsessional matching Melville’s—or Pound’s?—by means of the luminous right image):

Sailors etch their dark stories

On whale-tooth. Skrimshander. Dark
Story with their eyes they lived.

They can make a toothpick of a tooth.


Whale’s head, unfolded. Uses thereof.
1. Brain-cask, to-be-flame. (A profit)
2. Papered-mouth, tooth-to-be-carved.
3. Eyes, ears (A physiology). Note

Two eyes small as foal’s
Eyes on opposite sides of the head.

A forward vision is lacking.
When the God-spark strikes

The white whale knows to swim furious
Nightwards, starless, blind. Stave boat.

Break lance, bite. Murder the unseen
Man. Between eyes a flaming

Globe waits a match
That could not light the eyes if lit. Mustn’t

A blind-thought remain blind? Ink
Unspoiled by the page? Keep the book

Closed. The ears of the whale are
Small enough to plug with a quill-pen.

~

Making a “toothpick of a tooth”—what any writer is always doing, language picking at language. And helplessly, driven, Ahab’d by the whiteness of the page? Sometimes Beachy-Quick sounds almost Dickinsonian, that knowing plaint (in the letters) that is almost a taunt:

. . . Sir, the whale dive past margin.
I see the world is flat and the map flat
That records it, and both page and world
Speak each other forever. Put a fold
In eternity and it is just as flat and wide.
Take the map of the world and fold it
Into a boat and the boat becomes the world.
If only, Sir, if only the whirlpool sucked
Through the page into no words—
There with the whale the world could end.
Is that what I want? Why I sang?
Even your “No” is breath cupped in the sail.
A red pen is rudder, uncapped, red ink
On horizon is sunrise: delete dawn . . .

~

Awash, again, in loose papers, print-outs I mismanage, fail to finish. I stack and intend, it’s a losing proposition. How’s that Ammons poem go? “Spit the pit in the pit / I told the cherry eater . . . but / if you come to impossible / productions on / absent trees, get out the / bulldozer and shove the / whole thing over smooth.” (“High Surreal”) That (constant) (ongoing) (riff and suasion) temptation (we ain’t talkin’ just about print-outs neither . . .) to destroy rather than harbor destruction’s rattletrap-ready impulses.

~

In the next room I hear G. saying “Carmen’s gas station could be call’d ‘Dogears’!”

~

Gershom Scholem’s report of Benjamin’s remark about Goethe’s “autobiographical life, which is founded on concealment.” How he (Benjamin) thought he could “deduce the truth about Goethe from Goethe’s marriage.” Which, oddly, makes me want to read Goethe, whose attractions heretofore seem’d negligible. After a “late adolescent” (of course, my adolescence did go on exceedingly long) run-in with Young Werther which (—I should say “who”) seem’d unremarkable, tepid, and rather moronically “ejaculatory.” (Erm, “prone to the shallow outburst.”) And whom I often fail’d to distinguish from Vladimir “Volodya” Mayakovsky, as if he—W. of the “sorrows”—were but a bitty homunculi perch’d on the massive Russian’s bicep. Quick: which of the two wore the shockingly yellow vest? (Causing a post-mortem run on yellow vests.)

~

Scholem’s “negative capability”:

I did not adopt an Orthodox way of life—a step I have repeatedly considered and have always rejected with mounting determination . . . I formulated my explanation something like this: for me that manner of life was connected with the concretization of the Torah in a false, premature sphere—as evidenced by the paradoxes of the tricks that become manifest in the process and that are necessarily inherent such a false relationship. Something is wrong with the application; the orders clash. I said I had to maintain the anarchic suspension.

I love that final phrase—“maintain th’anarchic suspension”—refusing the ideological, the “tried and true,” the static, the product, the categories. Which is the danger in th’embrace of any system, the ossifying hug. I know little of Gershom Scholem—he admits: “Only later did my historical perspective change—in a direction that disposed of the problem” (which may or may not indicate an eventual adopting of Orthodoxy, and may or may not represent the kind of tying-in-knots justificatory behaviors individuals who’ve abandon’d the kinds of heighten’d malleability / uncertainty / drift of youth.) Student not master be—ni loi, ni toit.

~

Vathek, by William Beckford. And that board’d up villa near Sintra, in Portugal, surround’d by spectacular flowers and the cartoonishly round’d trees we decided were pinyon something or others, nutty Beckford’s place. Did we picnic there and talk of starting a university? No, we (R. and D. and the two little girls, C. and J.) were beyond talk of starting a university. We’d enter’d the quotidian slog of parenting and stability. Or they had. I was skimping around “nursing” a broken something caught in the ribcage of my . . . oh stop it.

~

Biking downtown again with G. Saturday. Sunday grocery-shopping. And short walk down along the Huron with the C-dog and G. Saw a rather too-finely-dressed-for-fishing black man pull in a sizeable fish below the dam house in the deep water. Near the sign that says something like “If horn sounds, vacate the area.” (I always picture illustrated news lithographs of the Johnstown flood disaster . . .) So we climb’d the hill, soft-foot’d it over the catwalk, and descend’d the wooden steps on the dam house side to ask him what he’d caught: “Bass.” He had two poles keeping him busy.

~

Out under the banana-like moon, yellowish, indistinct in its outlines, sagging low, slack moon of summer’s end. B. S. Johnson: “The proper end of love is to destroy.” He wrote with a note pinned to the wall above the desk: “Anyone would think I writing for the PUBLIC.”

And—I dove back into th’unfinish’d biography—wrote about, admired, and knew th’original New Brutalist architects Peter and Alison Smithson, who design’d the Economist building in London “so that all the muck washed off.” Design’d with “the essential insistence on honesty in their architecture, the concern to put structural materials such as concrete on show, not to hide them”—as Jonathan Coe says—“just as Johnson himself always liked to make the mechanics of novel-writing visible to the reader.” (“The narrator of Christie Malry epigrammatizes that the modern novel should be ‘nasty, Brutalist and short.’”)

~

To work.

Fickle

~

Abhominable (which I’d like to mean “superhuman”) digging in the “source code” (fickle origin) and I think I pry’d my title out from under that log that logger with a B drop’d on it. I thief’d a few lines off Franklin Bruno and owe him a big thanks. No more muckin’ about with it.

~

Dog yap in the periphery, and Carmenissima’s stalking room to room, restless. Found (new book shelf) copies today of both Laynie Browne’s Pollen Memory (Tender Buttons, 2003), a thoughtfully-wrought thing, and Carolina Knox’s He Paves the Road with Iron Bars, (Verse, 2004). The first impresses immediately with its care, its quiet, its pacing, its “containment.” The second with its wacko verve and mayhem, its true willingness to plunk down anything resembling language into a poem (precursor in that sense to someone like Alan Sondheim, though I doubt any real “commerce”’s exist’d betwixt the two). (Here, a couple stanzas pluck’d out of “SPAM Haiku Found Epic”: “50mg / 31% Amount/ / Serving %D // V* Total Carb. 0 / g 0% Fiber 0% Su- // gars 0% . . .” Oddly enough it reminds me of Kenneth Goldsmith’s Day in miniature—everything off the Hormel SPAM tin, with the ante upped by lineation!)

Here’s random Laynie Browne:

Grown in clusters indicates future flight

*

Two brothers traveled together to Kitty Hawk where today tourists climb the dunes with heat and admiration. The dunes persist in their mass. If not they would no longer exist. Some have been swept to sea simply because of location.

Evolution does not occur continuously. Some individuals hold their ground. Squirrels and pigeons are not timid. Firefly blinking codes are seduction frequencies. Frogs who croak the loudest attract the most partners but also the most predators. The same is true for the peacock’s scattering of eyes, in which it is difficult to makes one’s way through the brush unencumbered.

*

Memory is the vessel a shell becomes

*

The darkness was not at all transparent, so that turning to look behind me even the small path dissolved except for what appeared to be a punctuated flashing of solitary eyes. Peripheral vision test. Not meeting a single step or light in passing. This small patch of night is an accomplice, a relative to the larger galaxies. How easily we forget our history, with such certainty. Into the past as a mirror, into the self as a meteor.

*

Scissors in the middle of the banks

Important to note that the pieces here (consecutive) appear one per page. So that all recto pages carry a single line in bold (sans-serif) type. All verso (usually) one (sometimes two) paragraphs of (left and right justified) prose. The single lines come (sometimes) out of the prose. Effect of weave, of return, of highlight and emphasis. A rehearsed notational style. The solitary lines exist in a border position—not title, not annotation. Reminiscent of Lyn Hejinian’s box’d marginal lines that accompany and swerve out of the prose blocks of My Life. Preliminary: I’ve not read the whole.

~

Here’s the first stanza of Caroline Knox’s “John Singer Sargent”:

We read John Wheelwright’s poems and John Mason Brown’s essays and John
Philip Sousa’s memoirs. Then I read John Peale Bishop and John
Malcolm Brinnin. Then a little John Greenleaf Whittier and John
Quincy Adams’s Amistad letters, and John
Bernard Myer’s exquisite essay, “The Other,” about animals in art. I next read John
Singleton Copley, by Jules Prown, and then together we (my friends and I, not Dr. Prown) read Émile, par Jean-
Jacques Rousseau, avec notre lexique tout près de nous. John
James Audubon we next read part of in the great Library of America edition. John
Henry Newman’s Callista I read some of. It takes place in a sewer. And Burn’s “John
Anderson, my Jo, John.”

Subsequent stanzas mention The Singer of Tales and Arthur Schlesinger and Henry Kissinger, and Sargent Shriver and Sargeant Bilko and Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. A bit Kenneth Koch it occurs to me, typing. It’s the self-mirth and dare at the heart of such activity that I find so appealing.

~

Odd note and confession: I see (thrill’d, shock’d) Knox acknowledges Chiaroscuro, the poetry magazine I “did” with Chris Henkel, starting in 1976, ending in 1986, a mere six issues (and one a double at that). I think we print’d “The Loafers of the Sea”—“This is Mudguard the beautiful / wreathed along the fusts as usual . . .” of the current collection. And others, a near quarter-century ago.

What I recall, chagrin’d, is how one summer day I received a note—impeccable stationary, exquisite hand—from Caroline Knox, saying she’d be crossing the New York State Thruway soon, and want’d to stop in Ithaca for a visit. I was living in Baxter Hathaway’s cellar, cooking on a hotplate, separated by a hideous reptile-green leatherette accordian-fold’d divider from the Hathaway storage shelves—Johnson’s Universal Encyclopaedia, ’fifties board games, Melmac tableware, the odd assortment of homemade chutney and preserves, abandon’d sporting goods, etc. Cellar in a series of cellars I inhabit’d whilst “doing” Ithaca House. Henkel and I paid ourselves for the printing we did. On a basis of “what the place could spare”—, pre-“reading fee” and “judge’s fee” and “handling fee” and the contest gauntlet (though that mode was beginning), it usually amount’d to a few thousand a year. I love to get the periodic Social Security statements, the ones that show “if you retire now, you could get benefits of $12 per month . . .” Mine show a magnificent span of 4-5 years in my late-twenties when I earn’d zero. Off the books, odd jobs, cellar-dwelling.

I don’t remember what I told Caroline Knox. I couldn’t picture it—someone I had stuck in my head as gracing the well-appoint’d grounds and patios of Newport, Rhode Island . . . Maybe I told her nothing. Maybe I act’d like I wasn’t home. Maybe I act’d like I was out to lunch. Many a time in those years I was out to lunch. And I regret it (not the “out to lunch” bit, that was fun, the “dodging a C. K. visit” bit). I continue to admire her work, and I’m glad Verse seems commit’d to it—the present collection follows 2002’s A Beaker: New and Selected Poems. She’s a singularity. Read her.

A Buck a Throw

~

Quid-inspir’d idea for a newsletter. Call’d Susan B. Anthony, for the one dollar coin design’d by Frank Gasparro, designer, too, of the 1959 post-“wheaties” penny. Corner-stapled, a buck a throw. Made of cupro-nickel, two millimeters thick.

It’s the hammering around here: can’t think for beans. Paint fumes. Leftover “smash the state” red and black paint at th’Hotel for anybody who needs it . . .

~

Pizza-for-the-baseball-team evening left me in radiant overstuff’d fatigue state and I nodded a little over Scholem on Benjamin and call’d it a night. Noted: “[Benjamin, circa 1916] said he was still not sure what the purpose of philosophy was as there was no need to discover “the meaning of the world”: it was already present in myth.” Which I comprehend not at all, and would’ve liked better if it read: “already present in the world. Rather like how the meaning of a poem is, most deftly, the poem itself. (Kind of talk’d get “one” call’d a “’fraidy-cat” in some parts of “the world.”)

~

Benjamin bought a huge Aztec-Spanish dictionary in order to teach himself Aztec, how wonderful!

~

Another foul’d comprehension: Scholem, reporting a conversation with Benjamin about time: “Did time, which surely was a sequence, have direction as well? I said that we had no way of knowing that time does not behave like certain curves that demonstrate a steady sequence at every point but have at no single point a tangent, that is, a determinable direction.” Hunh?

~

Benjamin, translator of Proust, reporting that Flaubert (“In [Benjamin’s] room there was also a very fine French editon of Falubert’s Bouvard et Pécuchet. [He] praised the Catalogue des opinions chics. . .) is “utterly untranslatable.”

~

Benjamin missing a reading by Franz Kafka of “In the Penal Colony,” in Munich, November 10, 1916, and so never meeting the jug-ear’d and morose Herr K.

~

“Amplitude” anon.

Exalt’d, Good

~

Though my smart-aleckiness about the aura of inauthenticity fell into my ample (I am tempt’d to say “skirt’d”—the snicker light is always the first to go “on” in my house) lap out of yesterday’s royal blue heavens, I am thinking now how something like it’s been nagging me longer. Here’s a piece I wrote circa 1995 and sent to the late Stanley Lundberg, then-editor of The Georgia Review. A job-seeker’s ditty, I later pastiche’d off and out of it some salient bits to portray my own “work.” Thievery and use. It goes under the impossibly exalt’d title of “On Good Writing” due mostly to the fact that th’assignment asked for a definition of exactly that. (I did not, natch’, “get” the job, and did not move to Athens, Georgia, where, in all likelihood, I would not’ve made a good “fit,” sporting at such late date, as I did, an incredibly tall beehive “’do” . . .)

~

On Good Writing

In Henry David Thoreau’s Journal there is a gentle deriding of writers who “express themselves with too great fullness & detail,” who “give the most faithful natural & living account of their sensations mental & physical,” or whose sentences “say all they mean.” The lines remind me of hearing Charles Simic poke fun at writers for whom fealty to the accurate detail means succumbing to a dull, undifferentiated, and “full” factuality: how, Simic hinted, that line about fixing the Volvo got in the poem simply because the writer’s own Volvo went on the fritz that day. In lieu of such sound and replete representations as these—what Thoreau calls “mere repetition”—there is in the Journal a call for writing as “creation,” for the framing of sentences

concentrated and nutty. Sentences which suggest far more than they say, which have an atmosphere about them—which do not merely report an old but make a new impression—Sentences which suggest as many things and are as durable as a Roman Acqueduct.

All that seems exactly right. Sentences with “an atmosphere” point toward world-making as the proper aim and result of good writing—the line could be read as kin to something apparently so distant as Umberto Eco’s theory of the “open work”—writing that assumes the task of supplying an image not by narrating it, but by being it.

I begin with Thoreau out of a belief that attention to language is as crucial to good writing as is attentiveness to the variety and minutiae of the world. And out of a belief that just as crucial is a recognition that the two—language, world—cross, go akilter, make ever an uneven fit. I think of Ernest Fenollosa’s pronouncement that “a true noun . . . does not exist in nature”—such isolation and stability impossible there in the ever-incomplete and ever-changing processual all. Good writing is always the trace of a process—that of language attempting to align its measure alongside the amplitude of the world. Never an easy task. Never one that can ever merely close in on the world to capture it, or represent it without distortion, gaps. I think good writing must strive to recognize the futility of representing the world which braving the caprice of attempting to do so. How it this possible? Good writing proceeds with at least a modicum of self-consciousness, calling attention to itself and its way of proceeding. That is to say that all good writing aspires to the condition of poetry: autonomous, musical (formally or not), with always a hint of disruption, a discontinuity with the world. Good writing offers something that works to alter and augment the prior known quantifiable melodies. Without wanting to sound like a drum-beater for the merely experimental or an apologist for the avant-garde, I would insist that good writing is always new. For that reason, one of its first tasks is teaching the reader how to read it. One of its second tasks is teaching the reader how to reread its precursors—as, say, Virgil “makes” Homer Homer, or Dante Virgil Virgil. As Guy Davenport notes: “our attention is modified by the new and the old acting together.”

Admittedly, these are big noises about good writing—the kind that likely go unheard in the daily perusal of the contents of any editor’s mailbag. It is not my aim to register a narrow dogma here—I point only to a theoretical underpinning that I think structures my approach to a wide variety of writing in several forms. In practice, I am open and eclectic, believing that a stew’s gallimaufry of ingredients is what makes it savory.

~

Writ, I swear it, at the end of my “good writing do this, good writing do that” period. The burnt-out smoky ends of days of walrus rind and oyster tails, like a sapience amortized by the rabble, or howsoever that banker puts it. End of semi-public disclosure and dull embarrassment.

~

Of course we recall that the notion (category) of the “good” is a “vex’d” one, a “contest’d” one, and “knowing” that, we can knowledgeably assert it, though value, even that value, is a temporary astringent, unfix’d even when it makes us pucker up so to declare it. No?

~~~

Proem

Out brusque into a gentle rain, and big lightnings distant, measure’d by thunders slow to emerge, slower to subside. Cut a lick down Mayfield and paused only for the poop and retrieval, my yellow slicker leaking. A false-slicker, repellant. Any rub of uncloth’d skin makes moisture seep in. The C-dog sniffs and laps at the broad-leaf’d hostas, a competitor’s pool’d up pee, no doubt. I find curious notes writ in my own unremarkable (bordering on execrable) hand: “stopped thinking,” and “effuse and mix” they read, “esteem’d semen, we” and “cloacal local” they read. And somewhere today I saw how experimentalists’d concluded that men whose names thrust forth brash, forward, “open” vowels—Matt, Ed, Mike—were consider’d more handsome to women than men in whose names the vowels tend’d to be swallow’d up, and hid—Paul, John, Sean. Sign’d, Handsome Sam.

~~~

“In the room the women come and go,
Talking of Joe DiMaggio.”

~

A line sliced out of a Quid, wherein Andrew Duncan and Angel Exhaust cohorts study the Glaswegian avant-garde. On Richard Price: “everyone likes his poetry but no-one seems to think it is important.”

Sort of a “Lines for the Fortune Cookies” dig, and Swiftian and need’d, though offhand no U. S. contemporary (or “oldster”) “name” comes readily hot-footing it forth over the sizzling rashers spitting greasily in my brain-pan just now, I mean, to “fill the bill . . .”

~

Frank Kermode reviews B. S. Johnson in the 5 August 2004 issue of the London Review of Books and gets into the meaning of the material structure of books:

[Johnson’s] basic error arose from his belief that the truth of narratives was incompatible with the usual way of presenting them: that is, in books which by their very technology insisted on a spurious sequentiality. At the same time, he thought that the neglect of all manner of various typographic opportunities, long since exploited by Sterne and now shamefully ignored, was another enemy of the truth. That the material structure of books can affect their contents is of course true. The use of the codex in preference to the scroll made for a decisive difference between the Gospels and the books of the Hebrew Bible . . .

~

To work.

~

Feedback

~

Proem

A cachet nocturnal in bug-noise, stepping off the ’fifties-built one-stories, Carmencita-dog in tow, or front-man to the dog-walking I. The stratosphere’s coming in low tonight, screeching big nothings into imperfectly symmetrical ears. A microphone whinges up to the speaker-bank and starts off a feedback horrific and banal. So goes the twenty-first cent. Someone in the audience offers up the notion that every noise is allegory to lived experience and points, murderously, to a number of unverifiable clews. Not so, hombre, I reply, no bigger than a stick.

~~~

The past in its “historical” guise, liable to myth. History as “how life was” versus history as “how life is remember’d.” Versus history as “life as if has been ‘forgotten.’” Benjamin under the spell of Proust, related by Buck-Morss, tamper’d with by Latta. The attraction of the conundrum is how it sews a sampler, or a garden, of ineffables, cross-stitch’d, or cross-pollinated. (I’m wondering a little gloomily if this is an example of “depressive thinking,” or just crown-feeble fail’d-academickal obscurantism. Secretly I think “obcurity” is mighty fun!)

~

I see one “Paul Murphy” is rattling the screens on the New Poetry list, all regarding the reliability of the “real” when it comes to Jaime Saenz, Bolivian poet. And Gabriel Gudding is up with the “back off with that fraud talk, Paul.” Now, what I like, obscurantist or no, is how I used to read “Paul Murphy”’s scribbles on the British and Irish list, thinking “he” was “Kent Johnson.” Now I am inclined to think “he” is “Gabriel Gudding.” Who “Jaime Saenz” is? Aucune idée.

~

Unless he be René Daumal, author of La Grande Beuverie, or A Night of Serious Drinking, or, better, The Big Binge, who tried unsuccessfully through the use of carbon tetrachloride, ether, opium, and alcohol to reach the “beyond” before dying of tuberculosis in 1944. “So Jaime Saenz, throughout his life, ‘experimented’ with death.”

~

Reading Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson’s masterfully enigmatic piece on Saenz, “Some Days in the Life of The Night: Notes from Bolivia, June 20-30, 2004,” I think of such others—Daumal, Malcom Lowry, Frank Stanford, Jack Spicer, Benjamin. Gander and Johnson write of the indigenous Aymara women, “their rainbow-colored rebozos (portage or carrying shawls) full as spinnakers over their backs.” And:

What fills the spinnakers blows toward the past. And yet the women on the street trod forward, hunched, their domed bowlers blind and impartial, like dark beacons. Invisible, the aparapitas in their stitched, bricolaged raiment, drink to the dregs, barely speaking, sunk in dank, unmarked bodegas, knowing, as Saenz affirmed, that they know nothing and know everything, everything that matters in the end.

Which, undeniably, cossets and diddles Benjamin’s “angel of history,” (“face turned toward the past . . . The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward”) with chill irony, the future faced blindly, impartially, tugging the past reluctantly behind, the “debris” here the aparapitas themselves (“When he knows his life has been long enough, an aparapita works tirelessly to make enough money to drink himself to death . . .”)

~

Reading interruptedly (writing in the gaps), in snatches, the Saenz piece. I cannot put down my hunches, my lurching eye for th’inauthentic, the tell-tale gaffe, something that’ll expose a possible fictive underpinning. Call it the “Kent Johnson effect.” And I begin to find the situation decidedly seductive, theory-making, churning the brain-pan meats to a buttery consistency of paradigm-shift ripeness. What if it be the case—in the present day of “The Work of Art in an Age of Fact, Memoir, and Shabby Quotidian Authenticity”—that the aura of inauthenticity is what marks “Art”? Is what is necessary to highlight and burnish its value beyond the hegemonic humdrum of the merely accurate? And, by golly, frisson I do. It is—sublime-caustic-wit-writ-doings aside—the attention to the possible (likely?) disparity of details in the Saenz piece that [illegible, possibly “militates”] me, with that inner quake I acknowledge as seismic-register of Art’s presence. There. I feel it. “A Jewish Nazi spouse, with an Amazonian panther on their conjugal bed.”

~

“Natush Bush.” Too perfect. Isn’t that the kind of thing that’ll send one (lambently reading supine against a lace-fringed pillow one moment) flying bolt upright and dexterously into the ever-open Google-maw (the next)? Yes, it is. And the Saenz piece militates exactly for such a getting out the smug rut of our own cupped satisfactions: if Natush Bush (leader of a 1979 “attempted fascist coup”) escape’d me, what about “Bolivia’s leading literary journal, Global Lepidoptera”?

News of our more recent poetry hasn’t reached them yet—just as almost none of their more recent poetry has reached us. In fact, almost none of their literature has reached us, colonial, modernist, or postmodern!

Ouch.

~

Gander and Johnson’s report is laced with trace elements of “el Boum” magical realism of the ’seventies. (It occurs to me that some of Yasusada’s artifacts could be said to’ve fallen under the spell of magical realism, too.) There’s the llama fetus “buried under every house” in La Paz, the meal of tunta, the “ancient potato that can be stored for thirty years . . . its flavor steadily intensifying,” the tiny pinprick-sized holes in the nostrils of Jaime Saenz’s death mask. Terrific. And not without a fine self-deprecatory humor—I like the “live fast, dine out” picture of the “aging turistas”:

The aparapita with his cargo, ten times larger than himself, running uphill past us, almost brushing us with his load, his eyes glazed, doesn’t even glance our way, though here we are, gringos, sticking out like baboons at a baptism. He trots up the cobblestoned street, his dark cheeks almost Dizzy Gillespied with coca leaves. He goes up and up. We walk down, “fresh and rosy,” as Saenz says in To Cross This Distance, from our “thousand vitamins.” Then we go back to the hotel, sit in the flowered courtyard and puff up our cheeks with some just-bought leaves ourselves — we, aging turistas, talking postmodern poetics, swallowing the juice of the poor. The winter sun feels good on our hamster-like jowls.

Read it.

~

Major side benefit. It points one back into Immanent Visitor: Selected Poems of Jaime Saenz. Which, I admit it, I look’d into briefly and toss’d off as, oh, South American Novalis. Or something. Look:

That’s what “E” means. “E,” so dead and quiet and architectonic as you, experimenting with whether or not to use it, saying “I’m here,” “one,” “were,” “fear,” “hope,” “petticoat,” “Caquiaviri,” “then,” “Erasmus”; or better, “student,” “we’re on our way to my father’s house,” “I am here to invite you all to crumpets,” “illusion,” “don’t tickle gentlemen on the bus,” “it seems like they insist on not putting the leashes where they belong,” “grooves,” “the faggots have not yet been taken from the oven,” “a couple brothers want to sell their coffee shop, but for cash,” “the clothes are wet,” “you always want to have it your way,” “sewer drain.”

That’s how “E” is.

Excerpt’d out of “The Candle and the Breeze.” Terrific.

~

To work.

~

Ruby Boots

~

Walter Benjamin writing to Gershom Scholem re: “that bourgeois life-rhythm so indispensable for all work.” My twinge of recognition, and regret.

~

Am I beginning a several-prong’d attack on Walter Benjamin, replete with pincer movements and daily (lying) news reports of my advancement and assured success? Something suitable for the war-imaginary that puddles dark around our broken-down shoes? Or are those ruby boots, and no such imaginary’s enter’d the ring in which we hammer our opponents senseless? No, no such imaginary. Shi’ite, man. Look at “one’s” metaphors.

~

Reading, in a simultaneous smear of desperate injunctions against so doing: Gershom Scholem’s Walter Benjamin: The Story of a Friendship, translated by Harry Zohn (Jewish Publication Society of America, 1981), though recently reprint’d by the New York Review of Books; the Buck-Morss mention’d earlier; Rainer Rochlitz’s The Disenchantment of Art: The Philosophy of Walter Benjamin, translated by Jane Marie Todd (The Guilford Press, 1996). And Benjamin out of the Harvard splurge. Question: should I add the Momme Brodersen biography (Verso, 1996) to the fandang?

~

Finding myself considering the relationship between Blogworld and various forms of attention deficit disorder (ADD).

~

The banality of spectacle: five minutes of beaming boy in large paper boat (with commentary about the blue and white stripes of the Greek flag recalling the waves of th’Aegean) and I back off. The commercial for the multinational telecommunications giant—“sponsor” of, one notes, its own officialdom, no oversight committee need apply—pushes me right out the door.

~

Of use for the Chain “fact”-finders: Benjamin’s “The construction of life at the moment lies far more in the power of facts than in convictions.” (Under “Gas Station,” opening One Way Street.) (See also Goethe’s "everything factual is already theory," cited by Benjamin.)

~

Benjamin on th’endless triviality of contemporary life: “Freedom of conversation is being lost . . . it is now replaced by asking the price of the other person’s shoes or umbrella . . . It is as if one were trapped in a theater and had to follow the play on the stage whether one wanted to or not, and make it again and again the subject of one’s thoughts and speech.”

~

Received:

Chicago Review, Vol. 49, Nos. 3-4 / Vol. 50, No.1, edited by Eirik Steinhoff ($10, 5801 South Kenwood Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60637)

A self-admit’d “truant” issue, being (mostly) an essential collection titled Edward Dorn: American Heretic, with Dorn poems, select’d letters (with Raworth, Olson, & LeRoi Jones, among others), an interview, and transcription of a Naropa workshop piece here call’d On the Authority of Root Meanings, & the External, Dale Smith on Dorn’s 1966 The Shoshoneans: People of the Basin-Plateau, Jennifer Dunbar Dorn on Rolling Stock, bibliographer and printer Alastair Johnston’s picture-soak’d piece on Zephyrus Image press and Dorn, and Keith Tuma on Dorn’s late poetry.

And:

Poems by Chris Stroffolino, Peter Riley, William Fuller, Christine Garren, among others.

A chunk of Eleni Sikelianos ‘s “The California Poem” with a Sikelianos interview (with Eric Elshtain).

Fiction by Jacques Jouet and Dallas Wiebe (who play’d—I recall through some year-smear’d, or beer-smear’d(?) haze—a superb, nigh-scarifying game of pinball in Cincinnati circa 1974-5.

Peter O’Leary on the misanthrope of Carmel, Robinson Jeffers.

Reviews: Lisa Jarnot on Tom Clark’s Dorn, John Tipton on Christopher Logue’s Homer, Joe Safdie on Ammiel Alcalay, and Dan Featherston on Devin Johnston’s Precipitations: Contemporary American Poetry as Occult Practice.

And—comme on dit—more.

~

Bought:

The Europe of Trusts, by Susan Howe (New Directions, 2002)

First publish’d in1990 by Sun & Moon. Collects “Pythagorean Silence,” “Defenestration of Prague,” and “The Liberties,” all early-’eighties pieces.

“North Americans have tended to confuse human fate with their own salvation. In this I am North American . . .

I write to break out into perfect primeval Consent. I wish I could tenderly lift from the dark side of history, voices that are anonymous, slighted—inarticulate.”

Which comes uncomfortably, for me, close to liberal condescension, no? Here’s a clutch out of “Defenestration of Prague”:

Skeletal kin

tilt
italic lunacy

long lines of little difference

Seventy memories
masks

singing and piping
to be

(half words)
beginning and begetting

strangers nodding to one another

stumbling and scrambling

(uncertain theme)
random form

strong arm of my name

Emblem
Sign strewn flapping

(flapping of ravens in rain)
What sequence

Mothers hide harmless

weary for antiquity
the simple

Eglantine
Soldiers moving as toys in a

world soul
War

Obdurate as ocean he went forth
conquering

—and to conquer
Anathema

who was my father

Empty dominions beyond structure

~

The Secondary Colors: Three Essays, by Alexander Theroux (Henry Holt, 1996)

The three being, natch’: orange (“wife of blue” and “very, very rare in Picasso,” “an adult’s seventh color preference”), purple (“the magisterium,” “color of transmission fluid, borscht, Easter and Resurrection . . . shadows, carbon paper, razor blades, birettas, dung beetles, boudin . . .”), and green (“nature’s fuse,” “the preternaturally ambiguous color of life and death, the vernal sign of vitality, and the livid tinge of corruption, a ‘dialectical lyric’ (to borrow a term from Kierkegaard ) . . .”) Ever since I saw Tony Tost’s mention (where?) of Theroux’s earlier Primary Colors, and peek’d at it, I keep a fierce lookout for any Theroux, who, along with Echenoz, could be mistaken for Julian Barnes in a blind line-up. Brother to Paul, whom I’ve always found (for no readily discernable reason) slightly annoying.

~

So, here’s a test: is any of this rattle and muss any different than my saying “How much’d’ya pay for them Doc Marten’s?”

~

Monday morning. Some excellent new “points bulletins” just in: Steve Evans’s 2004 edition of “Attention Span,” sixty or so pages of recent notable books, recommend’d by a range of writers. Forrest Gander and Kent Johnson with a photo-bejewel’d report on Jaime Saenz and travels in Bolivia, “Some Days in the Life of The Night: Notes from Bolivia, June 20-30, 2004” in Jacket #25. And (alert’d by Benjamin Friedlander in Evans’s “Span”)—twelve pdf. issues of Quid, Keston Sutherland and Andrea Brady’s “fugitive journal of materialist poetics and politics.”

~

To work.

~

To Quash, To Err

~

To quash th’impulse to err aimlessly. Which’s become the default setting. Content is no longer th’attempt to find a form, convulsive beauty or not. Content is the scratching to quell the itch of content’s lack. Or content’s overload. To rev the cornpicker up and—smashingly—harvest the whole field, just to extract one kernal out of one blemish’d cob.

~

Viddy or divvy: Thomas Pynchon versus Marguerite Young.

~

Finish’d Berg and its existentialist mayhem:

A moment ago yes I am willing to admit it, the nausea had been caused by an acute attack of boredom, the futility of everything, especially the game of human relationships: the fact that she had obeyed him, reacted exactly as imagined, and brought him back into the circle of himself.

And:

Love is purely a temporary artifice, and why should I disregard the fact, why should I desire to be in the throes of illusion, when I know that love comes in disguises and is rarely recognised at the time or ever appreciated?

~

Keep pedaling around a dead cat on Hill Street, first day the stiff grimace, then the day of stench, then a day of maggots—short white paint strokes modeling cat-becoming-not-cat, fitting into shadow and bulge, a jittery moving van Gogh.

~

All there is is th’immediate—a reclaim’d recent thrust back at the present. Out th’usual door into th’usual pitiable noctambulant set, and self—and halfway around the block the C-dog bolts—I see a rabbit—or a Babbitt, they’re around here too—score the dark with its fleet straight shot into black depths and note the peculiar final tug of the leash slipping off my fingertips. I hear Carmen thrashing the brush so I amble back through several backyards in vague pursuit—thinking how conspicuous and vulnerable I feel. Though noticing, too, how conspicuous and vulnerable that woman sitting there six feet away with the television-lit face looks. Eventually I collar the dog who’s snuffling along the garage-sized doghouse of a competitor . . .

~

Early misadventure with Buck-Morss’s The Dialictics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (The MIT Press, 1989). She writes: “It is only by acceding to the fact that his brilliant writing, which we are so predisposed to canonize, is really only a series of captions to the world outside the text, that we are able to make headway in penetrating the Passagen-Werk.” Which seems like the bolt upright, breathless, and false discovery of somebody too long steep’d in the brine of Jacques “Il n’y a pas de hors-texte” Derrida and that breed, that “era”. Isn’t B-M’s just a (rather gussied up) version of a traditional “commonsensical” way of reading? The assumption that word points to world? So why the garish bafflement?

~

Later Monsieur Imbécile is enlighten’d: Benjamin as source of Franklin Bruno’s (always excellent) KONVOLUT M and likely a stop along the way in Steve Evans’s way of making “constellations.”

~

Nonetheless I plough avidly ahead. Plow. Plouuaagh.

~

In the title-swap bin today: “Ideologue Polygraph” and “Languor and Grit.”

~

To work.

~

Bloke Reading

~

Mmrr. I got to pass along what David Wheatley just deliver’d to the British and Irish Poets list:

The following from the “Cuttlefish”’s blog. I’ve always been partial to a bit of Trisha myself, now that Kilroy-Silk is no longer with us. (DW)

We see where Salt publishing have a new ad in the Guardian featuring a representation of their ideal reader: a bloke in his mid-thirties, clearly off his meds and in the grip of some hellish meridian accidie—lying on his bed and staring at the ceiling and obviously in need of a bit of Drew Milne in his life. Sorry—did we say his single bed? Never mind, his Mum should be up with a cup of tea and a biscuit in a bit. And it can’t be more than an hour or so till his afternoon wank.

Priceless.

[The allusions sail over my not-up-on-my-Anglopops head, though it, I think, hardly matters . . . (JL)]

~

Torpor and Ruts

~

Each day that period, roughly four o’clock, when all things seem possible, out of my mid-afternoon torpor I see cranial ruts in the backs of books, and drag alacrity off in my cart piled high with wisdom blocks. Preparing for a night of hasty pudding intellecting, running the gears through the numbers, skipping none, grease and lightning.

~

And today, home, walk’d the dog with G. and found a boy and’s mother and neighbor kid all launching darts with atlatls. Green thin bamboo tomato poles with string-tied-on turkey feathers, pointed sharp, and drilled out in the butt-end where one fit the atlatl itself, the crook’d branch for slinging it. “The atlatl is an angular accelerator, accelerating the dart from the rear in an arc.” No wrist-snapping, and a complete follow-through—a hard combination to master. G. says: I’d like an atlatl.

~

Point being: all that four o’clock pep goes into the limelight of the dying afternoon, an unaccountable period fraught with th’unavoidable imperfections of habit and cramp bah! M. claim’d four o’clock is the hour of dying, that little sunset bringing about so many bigger, that horrible clench of gut of houselights coming on, streets emptying, dinner bells.

~

I probably shouldn’t be left to my own devices. Should keep a book under my nose. A feedbag. Full of gray matter, punch’d out plugs of an admixture of cardboard and soybean smutch. I end up overusing a word like smutch. I end up claiming a space for dandling th’inarticulate raw pre-fix’d word-booster in me. You know the fella. The one that likes the “look” of “akimbo,” the “noise flub” of “moll.” Most folks, if caught up in the ravages of the guy’s brainpan, arm themselves with “prehistoric” weaponry, wait on the “lips” of caves until the tiny festoon’d hunchbacks stop running back and forth carrying “words” here and there like long planks. They’re “building” something. There goes two scuttling off now, each trying to manhandle’s own slippery end of a monstrously long, oh, there, it says “unsentimentally.”

~

Ridick. Nuisible.

~

Here’s one that cheats: Caetano Veloso versus Speedy Gonzalez.

~

Cheater: Edith Piaf versus Jello Biafra.

~

Reading about van Gogh to G. (who’s mostly struck by the saw'd-off ear story) I come across note of van Gogh’s avoidance of the Romantickal catches: “J’ai écrit à Bernard et aussi à Gauguin que je croyais que la pensée et non le rêve était notre devoir . . .” The “must” of thinking over revery. Reporting it to brother Theo, all part of van Gogh’s need and attempt to form a community of painters in Arles. And:

. . .je me vois revenir moi même d’un travail mental pour equilibrer les 6 couleurs essentielles rouge—bleu—jaune—orange—lilas—vert travail et calcul sec et où on a l’esprit tendu extrêmement come un acteur . . . dans un rôle difficile—ou l’on doit penser a mille choses à la fois dans une seule demi heure.

Mental work, dry calculating, balance, over-exerted like an actor who must think of a thousand things all at once in a single half hour. The sense of heroics is there. Not the genius outpouring all unthinking gush unbelabour’d, no, you got the wrong van Gogh, buddy.

~

Three ring circus: Gal Costa versus René Lacoste versus Constantin Costa-Gavras.

~

Lars Eigner versus Larry Eigner.

~

Boots Randolph versus Bootsy Collins.

~

Noysome, pestiferous.

~

Cab Calloway versus Death Cab for Cutie.

~

Cudgel

~

LIKELY


I keep making lissome negligible

Excuses as to how I

Got cudgel’d by immediacy in

The middle of its sour

Demand, and got bogged down

In a tendency, a lean

Motile flux and disorder that

Portend’d answer. Which is likely

The kind of finality not

So toxic as grave, punctuality’s

End-point. When what one’d

Long’d for, an agon-free

Unreeling, a stint and spiel,

Got the thumbs down, yup.

Issueless I sat. Stretch’d black

Electrickal tape on my bat.

~

Off to read. I ain’t even gonna look at that thing.

~

Ongoing list of readers lost to petulance, hebetudinal slurring, and sloth:

The one who said she’d grown thick in the middle—a Californian Flaubert of the beer and burritos—lost to “my vocabulary did it to me” in the constabulary hinterlands of the writerly bis. Her favorite word was dorf.

The one who oh blessèd hebetude soak me up . . .

~

And the moon a gumshoe’s footprint in the sky.

~

I dawdled, I dyspep’d, I enter’d into a sobering negotiation with Dame Procrastination, I elbow’d myself out of the way. I ran interference handing out horehounds, I snuggled up to Inertia, that hipster-no-cred. I smoked a blunt. What use stamina. What use dreck.

~

Morning.

Low clouds solid muss the celestial interface.

Cosmos wave silkily mauve.

A goldfinch flies its bob and dip through the corridors of air, singing—on the rebound—its three-note song.

~

Susan Buck-Morss on Walter Benjamin versus Avital Ronell on Friedrich Nietzsche.

~

Diderot versus Dieter Roth.

~