Scratchpad Dump
“bodily cloggs and impediments”
~
“who wills and nills, chuseth and refuseth”
~
Place is a thorn and moves as perilously as a fossil.
Race to suborn and thieve as viciously as possible.
~
Ars adulandi, the art of flattery, by Ulpian Fulwell, fl. 1586
Ars adulandi (Adulate
My arse) the
Art of flattery
(A brown flounder)
by Ulpian (“Gulp”)
Fulwell (Know-it-
All), fl. (flourishing)
1586 (Fifteen hundred
Eighty-six this . . .)
Or catalog under
“Toadyism, Early works
To 1800.” Natch’.
~
Friday, November 14, 2003
Diary Usual
Stein: “A diary should not be in writing.”
“Why does a narrative replace a diary. Because it does not.” (“A Diary”)
More reading in the Dydo book, after the usual Thursday routine of ferrying G. to tap dancing and to basketball, and getting back for a late dinner of meatloaf, broccoli, potatoes.
Questions of narrative. Narrative is about the continuum, about continuity—it is not about anything that happen’d. In one sense, a diary is about constant beginnings. An entry is always a new beginning. A sequence, a series, of “total present immediacy.” (Dydo). A “sense of being inside the rich heterogeneity of the here and now.” (Dydo) Fictive, though, ineluctably fictive. All tidbit, loose ends, piecemeal, interrupt’d, strands, scraps, no fabric howsoever gauzy that might stretch over the all. “Only living renders daily life.”
“A diary should be simply be.”
“A diary is as it were outstanding.” (“A Diary”)
Out-takes. Remnants. Parcels.
~
I see Ron Silliman is worrying about those ingrates with the audacity to call him for earnestness, or el grande malo serioso (the great serious disease), or pomposity. I’m probably one of the barkers up that tree. Or if not, I probably should be. I don’t know Ron Silliman, though I did, lately, rather on a whim, send him copies of my two books (I recently land’d a small net full of Rubbing Torsos, and what to do with them, flopping there in the glisten and shine and stench of the day to day?) I respond more to one “Ron Silliman” who, while unimpeachable in energy and heroic in a willingness to engage, fully committed to the art, strikes me occasionally as in danger of ossifying, or of going all didactic. “It is youths duty to confront the visible elders (most elders hide),” I pronounce like a loudmouth. (In truth, I am meek (though surly), and older than I should be.) When I josh and chide and needle “Ron Silliman” on occasion, I do so in an attempt to keep him out of the dogma we are all in danger of stepping in. Stuff that dries on your shoe, stuff that’ll take a terrible energy to scrape off. And to add to the story that Ron is determinedly and admirably telling.
“Let my lines be measure’d, and my prose be inappropriate, immeasurable, mal-proportion’d, unsuitable, and rash.” (Oscar de la Renta)
“Why does a narrative replace a diary. Because it does not.” (“A Diary”)
More reading in the Dydo book, after the usual Thursday routine of ferrying G. to tap dancing and to basketball, and getting back for a late dinner of meatloaf, broccoli, potatoes.
Questions of narrative. Narrative is about the continuum, about continuity—it is not about anything that happen’d. In one sense, a diary is about constant beginnings. An entry is always a new beginning. A sequence, a series, of “total present immediacy.” (Dydo). A “sense of being inside the rich heterogeneity of the here and now.” (Dydo) Fictive, though, ineluctably fictive. All tidbit, loose ends, piecemeal, interrupt’d, strands, scraps, no fabric howsoever gauzy that might stretch over the all. “Only living renders daily life.”
“A diary should be simply be.”
“A diary is as it were outstanding.” (“A Diary”)
Out-takes. Remnants. Parcels.
~
I see Ron Silliman is worrying about those ingrates with the audacity to call him for earnestness, or el grande malo serioso (the great serious disease), or pomposity. I’m probably one of the barkers up that tree. Or if not, I probably should be. I don’t know Ron Silliman, though I did, lately, rather on a whim, send him copies of my two books (I recently land’d a small net full of Rubbing Torsos, and what to do with them, flopping there in the glisten and shine and stench of the day to day?) I respond more to one “Ron Silliman” who, while unimpeachable in energy and heroic in a willingness to engage, fully committed to the art, strikes me occasionally as in danger of ossifying, or of going all didactic. “It is youths duty to confront the visible elders (most elders hide),” I pronounce like a loudmouth. (In truth, I am meek (though surly), and older than I should be.) When I josh and chide and needle “Ron Silliman” on occasion, I do so in an attempt to keep him out of the dogma we are all in danger of stepping in. Stuff that dries on your shoe, stuff that’ll take a terrible energy to scrape off. And to add to the story that Ron is determinedly and admirably telling.
“Let my lines be measure’d, and my prose be inappropriate, immeasurable, mal-proportion’d, unsuitable, and rash.” (Oscar de la Renta)
Thursday, November 13, 2003
Splotch Structure
Pre-dusk walk with the sky east a vibrant Maxfield Parrish blue, chased over by ominous dark splotches of clouds. Wind up and cold.
~
An addition to the Charles Wright comments: in a list of “approaches to the poetic line,” he names “Structure (form is a subspecies of this: form imposes, structure allows, or: form is finite, structure is infinite.”
~
Dydo: “Our definitions and comparisons are useless. Associative language makes nonsense of description.”
Stein: “Letting it be not what it is like.” (“An Acquaintance with Description”)
Troubling myself lately about metaphor. Is it appealing because of its “idiotic” (I called it that a few days back) reach? Is it “only natural” (nothing’s natural) to connect and liken? Is it that understanding begins in overlay and alliance, those bicycle handlebars and saddle forming the Picasso bull? The salt and pepper shakers on the table as meek and withholding as opera glasses? If Stein says “Description is relating reinstating,” is that somehow opposed to “letting it be”? Metaphor is first a relation. Any relation is the beginning of a series. It is not the thing itself that we respond to—it is its relatedness. That relatedness found in arrangement—arrangement implying a plurality. More than a single item.
“There is an arrangement as berries. There is an arrangement as loop holes. There is an arrangement as distance. There is an arrangement as by the way. There is also an arrangement as at first. There is also an arrangement as to be. There is also an arrangement as disappointed. There is also an arrangement as why and let. There is also an arrangement as poplars . . . There is also an arrangement that it can be twice chosen. There is also an arrangement which is advantageous.” (“An Acquaintance with Description”)
Dydo: “With a minimal, monotonous vocabulary and great economy of means, she arranges the world in words that are not representations but analogues. For she writes not of the order of things but of the order of composition . . . out of the objects of the world of nature, she creates arrangements that do not exist in nature and are unlike any we have ever seen.”
A Dydo flourish (this comes at the end of a long chapter mostly concerned with the 1926 “Composition As Explanation”) suddenly fraught with adipose orotundity? It’s hard to get away from “words that are not representations” for very long—maybe if one stays only in the realm of some prepositions, some connectives (“which” is a fine Steinism) (as I’m writing these words the already tiny scroll of grammatical terms’s caught fire and is burning up, unwinding itself in its burning like a reel of film in my “head”), a, an, the, but, unless, except, there, here.
The arrangement of “There is an arrangement”’s just remarked is “an arrangement of berries,” ripe, rhetorical, plump.
~
An addition to the Charles Wright comments: in a list of “approaches to the poetic line,” he names “Structure (form is a subspecies of this: form imposes, structure allows, or: form is finite, structure is infinite.”
~
Dydo: “Our definitions and comparisons are useless. Associative language makes nonsense of description.”
Stein: “Letting it be not what it is like.” (“An Acquaintance with Description”)
Troubling myself lately about metaphor. Is it appealing because of its “idiotic” (I called it that a few days back) reach? Is it “only natural” (nothing’s natural) to connect and liken? Is it that understanding begins in overlay and alliance, those bicycle handlebars and saddle forming the Picasso bull? The salt and pepper shakers on the table as meek and withholding as opera glasses? If Stein says “Description is relating reinstating,” is that somehow opposed to “letting it be”? Metaphor is first a relation. Any relation is the beginning of a series. It is not the thing itself that we respond to—it is its relatedness. That relatedness found in arrangement—arrangement implying a plurality. More than a single item.
“There is an arrangement as berries. There is an arrangement as loop holes. There is an arrangement as distance. There is an arrangement as by the way. There is also an arrangement as at first. There is also an arrangement as to be. There is also an arrangement as disappointed. There is also an arrangement as why and let. There is also an arrangement as poplars . . . There is also an arrangement that it can be twice chosen. There is also an arrangement which is advantageous.” (“An Acquaintance with Description”)
Dydo: “With a minimal, monotonous vocabulary and great economy of means, she arranges the world in words that are not representations but analogues. For she writes not of the order of things but of the order of composition . . . out of the objects of the world of nature, she creates arrangements that do not exist in nature and are unlike any we have ever seen.”
A Dydo flourish (this comes at the end of a long chapter mostly concerned with the 1926 “Composition As Explanation”) suddenly fraught with adipose orotundity? It’s hard to get away from “words that are not representations” for very long—maybe if one stays only in the realm of some prepositions, some connectives (“which” is a fine Steinism) (as I’m writing these words the already tiny scroll of grammatical terms’s caught fire and is burning up, unwinding itself in its burning like a reel of film in my “head”), a, an, the, but, unless, except, there, here.
The arrangement of “There is an arrangement”’s just remarked is “an arrangement of berries,” ripe, rhetorical, plump.
Wednesday, November 12, 2003
The Helper
Crows in the Diag. As autumn comes down the crows roost nights in the trees there, or in the trees in the cemetery that spills off Geddes down the hill toward the Arboretum, where Frank O’Hara walk’d restless for New York City on Saturdays when everybody else was off rooting for the Wolverines, a sadly misnamed football team, for no evidence’s ever been uncover’d that that particularly vicious carnivore (Gulo gulo), “capable of bringing down prey that is five times bigger than itself,” ever lived in Michigan. Crows like large black leaves, and the ruckus of cawing. I stand in the seven o’clock fog-singe’d light and listen: there are identifiable heights suddenly diminuendo’d to near-silence to the racket. As daylight comes up they’ll drift off singly, or doubly, or, most commonly, in threes to the woods and cornfields surrounding the city. The third crow is known as a “helper.”
~
My son G., a third grader, is writing paragraphs—topic sentence follow’d by pertinent details—of late.
~
The catalpa tree limn’d, a severe pen and ink, the stringy pods hanging down, black slashes, in lines directional and wild.
*
Catalpa tree lim’d,
A severe pen
And ink, stringy
Pods hanging down,
Black slash lines
Directional and wild.
~
In the voice of Ezra Pound, to Ron Silliman: “If line be forsook, a poem hath no measure.”
~
Reading Silliman’s wrestling with the unpublish’d Williams essay / notes in The Poker, I recall’d that Charles Wright used to make a distinction between “form” and “structure” too, one that I paid little attention to, and never understood. (Two things inevitably related?) So I went to “Improvisations on Form and Measure,” in Wright’s “Poets on Poetry” collection of prose (1988) to see what I could see.
All kinds of things “in the scarified air” around me as it turns out:
“The line is a unit of Measure: measure is music: the line is a verbal music. Which is to say, until we start talking about poems again, and not Poetry, we are still lost. Poems are put together with words, not Language. Word by word. Theory comes after the fact, it is not the fact. The line is a fact, it is not a theory.” (Wright)
Is that the American pragmatism, the nuts and bolts, that Williams, too, points at, invoking Stein? “A poem is a use of words (as emphasized by Gertrude Stein) to raise the mind to a level of the imagination beyond that attainable by prose. It is prose plus.” (Williams) And that “raise the mind”? Is that what Dydo is talking about in The Language That Rises? “One of those fine verbal miniatures that suddenly rise from the page” (Dydo)?
More Wright:
“In poems, all considerations are considerations of form.”
*
“Form is nothing more than a transubstantiation of content.”
*
“The asyntactical endings William Carlos Williams used so brilliantly for syncopation and measure—and which Robert Creeley used so well in the poems collected in For Love—in his short-line poems have crept along gradually to the ends of longer-lined free verse poems in our time. Any thought of a jazzy syncopation is gone because of the lengthened line, and the surprises to the ear and eye that Williams created, pleasurably, are now muted or totally overwhelmed by a sense of incompletion, as though the last part of the poem, horizontally, had been torn off . . .”
*
“I myself am interested in a kind of structural investigation of the line, an attempt at some kind of harmonics involving new patterns and new designs using a long image-freighted line . . . that can carry information (and “sincerity”) and a lyric intensity at the same time. Not only will it sing but it will tell time too.” (Wright)
Is this nothing more than a kind of stirred up mud, a dissolution of terminology? I don’t know. Is “structure” here—in “structural investigation,” (a rather homely scientistic / avant-gardist term intending what exactly?)—the same thing as “pattern” and “design”? A musical requirement for the line, the poem, is called for, but vaguely: “some kind of harmonics,” “lyric intensity,” and “sing” (the note continues with an additional sentence using Fats Domino as examplar, a canny choice speaking to Wright’s Southern roots and American poetry’s on-again / off-again love affair with the vernacular, the outsider . . .) And the line / structure / (is it right to say “form”?) here is no longer transubstantiate with content: here it is a freightcar: able to “carry information,” along with “image” and “sincerity.” (“A poem is not a suitcase.”)
Here, mostly, I want to fall down chuckling like an idiot boy and turn to Ron Padgett’s line (it graces the back (I think) of Great Balls of Fire, something about a poem’s being “something deep and mysterious that nobody understands.”) Sure I’ve got that wrong. Idiot boy. The old story of “keeping oneself stupid.”
More Wright:
“All great art has line—painting, poetry, music, dance. Without line (and here, it’s Wright who is ventriloquizing that ghost of Pound—JL) there is no direction. Without direction there is no substance. Without substance there is nothing (which seems a terrible falling-off of the oracular, akin to ending with a whimper—JL).”
And here, what I was looking for perhaps:
“Form is finite, structure is infinite.” (Wright)
A kind of Platonism, I suppose, but seemingly reversed from what I thought I was understanding before. Here “structure,” what seem’d akin to “pattern,” “design,” the way the measure of lines might fall out into an array, a series, a group of relationships, suddenly seems posit’d as an overarching universal, and “form” becomes the tiny snippet of the grander thing.
~
Gotta work.
~
My son G., a third grader, is writing paragraphs—topic sentence follow’d by pertinent details—of late.
~
The catalpa tree limn’d, a severe pen and ink, the stringy pods hanging down, black slashes, in lines directional and wild.
*
Catalpa tree lim’d,
A severe pen
And ink, stringy
Pods hanging down,
Black slash lines
Directional and wild.
~
In the voice of Ezra Pound, to Ron Silliman: “If line be forsook, a poem hath no measure.”
~
Reading Silliman’s wrestling with the unpublish’d Williams essay / notes in The Poker, I recall’d that Charles Wright used to make a distinction between “form” and “structure” too, one that I paid little attention to, and never understood. (Two things inevitably related?) So I went to “Improvisations on Form and Measure,” in Wright’s “Poets on Poetry” collection of prose (1988) to see what I could see.
All kinds of things “in the scarified air” around me as it turns out:
“The line is a unit of Measure: measure is music: the line is a verbal music. Which is to say, until we start talking about poems again, and not Poetry, we are still lost. Poems are put together with words, not Language. Word by word. Theory comes after the fact, it is not the fact. The line is a fact, it is not a theory.” (Wright)
Is that the American pragmatism, the nuts and bolts, that Williams, too, points at, invoking Stein? “A poem is a use of words (as emphasized by Gertrude Stein) to raise the mind to a level of the imagination beyond that attainable by prose. It is prose plus.” (Williams) And that “raise the mind”? Is that what Dydo is talking about in The Language That Rises? “One of those fine verbal miniatures that suddenly rise from the page” (Dydo)?
More Wright:
“In poems, all considerations are considerations of form.”
*
“Form is nothing more than a transubstantiation of content.”
*
“The asyntactical endings William Carlos Williams used so brilliantly for syncopation and measure—and which Robert Creeley used so well in the poems collected in For Love—in his short-line poems have crept along gradually to the ends of longer-lined free verse poems in our time. Any thought of a jazzy syncopation is gone because of the lengthened line, and the surprises to the ear and eye that Williams created, pleasurably, are now muted or totally overwhelmed by a sense of incompletion, as though the last part of the poem, horizontally, had been torn off . . .”
*
“I myself am interested in a kind of structural investigation of the line, an attempt at some kind of harmonics involving new patterns and new designs using a long image-freighted line . . . that can carry information (and “sincerity”) and a lyric intensity at the same time. Not only will it sing but it will tell time too.” (Wright)
Is this nothing more than a kind of stirred up mud, a dissolution of terminology? I don’t know. Is “structure” here—in “structural investigation,” (a rather homely scientistic / avant-gardist term intending what exactly?)—the same thing as “pattern” and “design”? A musical requirement for the line, the poem, is called for, but vaguely: “some kind of harmonics,” “lyric intensity,” and “sing” (the note continues with an additional sentence using Fats Domino as examplar, a canny choice speaking to Wright’s Southern roots and American poetry’s on-again / off-again love affair with the vernacular, the outsider . . .) And the line / structure / (is it right to say “form”?) here is no longer transubstantiate with content: here it is a freightcar: able to “carry information,” along with “image” and “sincerity.” (“A poem is not a suitcase.”)
Here, mostly, I want to fall down chuckling like an idiot boy and turn to Ron Padgett’s line (it graces the back (I think) of Great Balls of Fire, something about a poem’s being “something deep and mysterious that nobody understands.”) Sure I’ve got that wrong. Idiot boy. The old story of “keeping oneself stupid.”
More Wright:
“All great art has line—painting, poetry, music, dance. Without line (and here, it’s Wright who is ventriloquizing that ghost of Pound—JL) there is no direction. Without direction there is no substance. Without substance there is nothing (which seems a terrible falling-off of the oracular, akin to ending with a whimper—JL).”
And here, what I was looking for perhaps:
“Form is finite, structure is infinite.” (Wright)
A kind of Platonism, I suppose, but seemingly reversed from what I thought I was understanding before. Here “structure,” what seem’d akin to “pattern,” “design,” the way the measure of lines might fall out into an array, a series, a group of relationships, suddenly seems posit’d as an overarching universal, and “form” becomes the tiny snippet of the grander thing.
~
Gotta work.
Tuesday, November 11, 2003
Chair the Air
A BRICK
Quite differently the literal string
Hangs impetuous when the seekers meet
To chair the air where a vastness accounts
For undue bounds of th’introductory.
So the contents of this history make
Opening compleat and exact, make noise
In all likelihood, most probably rude
And affiliations of regret denounced
As chimeras by the masters of voice.
For the troubles necessitate that urge
To subdue a passion glancingly, with
A look said of others to be subject
To wonder. No, we doubt it not. Not that.
We have come beyond fair reprisals and
Humid squats with papers peeling off the walls.
To resent disaster is but recipe
For a hard measurable abandon:
To such strange excess do I consider
This my last and best happiness tonnage.
~
A hefty selection of a Dale Smith poem titled “These Days” is up today via Chris Murray.
~
The Oral History Program’s interviews of the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art via Jeff Ward. Hours and hours of reading pleasure there, I'd wager.
Quite differently the literal string
Hangs impetuous when the seekers meet
To chair the air where a vastness accounts
For undue bounds of th’introductory.
So the contents of this history make
Opening compleat and exact, make noise
In all likelihood, most probably rude
And affiliations of regret denounced
As chimeras by the masters of voice.
For the troubles necessitate that urge
To subdue a passion glancingly, with
A look said of others to be subject
To wonder. No, we doubt it not. Not that.
We have come beyond fair reprisals and
Humid squats with papers peeling off the walls.
To resent disaster is but recipe
For a hard measurable abandon:
To such strange excess do I consider
This my last and best happiness tonnage.
~
A hefty selection of a Dale Smith poem titled “These Days” is up today via Chris Murray.
~
The Oral History Program’s interviews of the Smithsonian Institute’s Archives of American Art via Jeff Ward. Hours and hours of reading pleasure there, I'd wager.
Watty Piper
Read: The 1923 piece titled “An Elucidation,” in the Ulla Dydo edited A Stein Reader (Northwestern University Press, 1993). Consider’d with amusement the relationship between the Watty Piper author’d The Little Engine That Could (Dydo says published in 1930, but “preceded by an early version in 1910.”) and some Steinisms.
Noted lines:
“. . . If we say, Do not share he will not bestow they can meditate I am going to do so, we have organized an irregular commonplace and we have made excess return to rambling. I always like the use of these, by not particularly.
(Somehow reading these words on the heels of Ron Silliman’s ruminations about Keston Sutherland’s ruminations about the uses of, need for “vagueness,” I thought Stein was also addressing the question. As one who is also suspicious of those who tout clarity above all, though just as readily enough flabbergast’d by one academickal roister-doister in my presence who claim’d not to be saying something “with the proper difficulty,” I like the “balance” here between “organization” and “rambling,” between “excess” and “commonplace,” between “the particular” and something vaguer, of use. Question: does reduction, a “paring down,” a “whittling smooth” lead to clarity? Question: does exfoliation, a “daubing up,” an “assembling amassment” lead to vagueness?)
. . .
If in order to see incidentally incidentally I request to see extraordinarily.
. . .
If he can recall a boast of victory, I can refuse to be resolutely sure of what he and I both mean to collect.
Now do you see that this is a thing to erase and eradicate.
. . .
To explain I will explain.
~
Read: the chapter titled “1923 ‘An Elucidation’” in Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises.
Noted:
“Geography is about words in relation in the space of the composition. A piece is never simply about what the words signify, but it is the realization of a word arrangement . . . Geography explores volume in auditory construction . . .”
Stein, in “Geography”:
Immeasurably. Immeasurably and frequently. Frequently and invariably. Invariably and contentedly. Contentedly and indefatigably. Indefatigably and circumstances. Circumstances and circumstantially.
(Adverbs, the use of. Why wary we of adverbs be? I think of two things here. First up: One of David Foster Wallace’s characters in The Broom of the System working for a company called “Frequent and Vigorous.” I may be completely wrong about that. The other is, is it Frank O’Hara in a little satyrickal piece making fun of John Rechy’s City of Night and its gush of adverbial jism? I may be completely wrong about that. Such be th’indiscretions of he who’d better soonest get to work.)
Dydo:
“. . . hearing takes place in space, where words can be taken in free of reference as physical things that relate, resemble, rhyme, attract, and repel and do their sibling punching and punning by sound and volume.”
(What would writing that gives no information about the world look like in the glut and yammer of the age of information?)
Noted lines:
“. . . If we say, Do not share he will not bestow they can meditate I am going to do so, we have organized an irregular commonplace and we have made excess return to rambling. I always like the use of these, by not particularly.
(Somehow reading these words on the heels of Ron Silliman’s ruminations about Keston Sutherland’s ruminations about the uses of, need for “vagueness,” I thought Stein was also addressing the question. As one who is also suspicious of those who tout clarity above all, though just as readily enough flabbergast’d by one academickal roister-doister in my presence who claim’d not to be saying something “with the proper difficulty,” I like the “balance” here between “organization” and “rambling,” between “excess” and “commonplace,” between “the particular” and something vaguer, of use. Question: does reduction, a “paring down,” a “whittling smooth” lead to clarity? Question: does exfoliation, a “daubing up,” an “assembling amassment” lead to vagueness?)
. . .
If in order to see incidentally incidentally I request to see extraordinarily.
. . .
If he can recall a boast of victory, I can refuse to be resolutely sure of what he and I both mean to collect.
Now do you see that this is a thing to erase and eradicate.
. . .
To explain I will explain.
~
Read: the chapter titled “1923 ‘An Elucidation’” in Dydo’s Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises.
Noted:
“Geography is about words in relation in the space of the composition. A piece is never simply about what the words signify, but it is the realization of a word arrangement . . . Geography explores volume in auditory construction . . .”
Stein, in “Geography”:
Immeasurably. Immeasurably and frequently. Frequently and invariably. Invariably and contentedly. Contentedly and indefatigably. Indefatigably and circumstances. Circumstances and circumstantially.
(Adverbs, the use of. Why wary we of adverbs be? I think of two things here. First up: One of David Foster Wallace’s characters in The Broom of the System working for a company called “Frequent and Vigorous.” I may be completely wrong about that. The other is, is it Frank O’Hara in a little satyrickal piece making fun of John Rechy’s City of Night and its gush of adverbial jism? I may be completely wrong about that. Such be th’indiscretions of he who’d better soonest get to work.)
Dydo:
“. . . hearing takes place in space, where words can be taken in free of reference as physical things that relate, resemble, rhyme, attract, and repel and do their sibling punching and punning by sound and volume.”
(What would writing that gives no information about the world look like in the glut and yammer of the age of information?)
Monday, November 10, 2003
Boyish, Celestial
Lunar eclipse Saturday. An old man interrupt’d our dinner at Metzger’s (bratwurst, spatzen, red cabbage, beer), a large man with a red face cover’d with mischief-lines, boyish. “The eclipse is perfect now,” he announce’d. And it was, or nearly so. The thinnest goblet of white tracery along the underside—and brown-shadow’d above. Somehow a little dispiriting after the man’s enthusiasm.
Sunday. Scanning the night skies, looking for auguries and wonder, post-tempest mayhem. What is it, that need to claim, say, that the Big Dipper’s caught the drip and overflow of moonlight leaking horizonward? Or that the Big Dipper’s just scoop’d up and flung high the ball of its moon in a game of celestial lacrosse? What could be more idiotic?
~
Found on the new book shelf:
Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923-1934, by Ulla Dydo with William Rice (Northwestern University Press, 2003)
So the reading goes. Always a bird in the brambles to point the binoculars at—even as one’s got them train’d at a finely-mark’d kestrel hovering in the air. Drop’d, at least briefly, the Paradiso. Took up with the Mr. (Stein and Toklas did refer to one another, on one occasion, as Mr. and Mrs. Reciprocal.)
Some notes:
The idea of “audience writing”—late work, to please.
“Compulsively readable”: the first few chapters. Dydo on the carnets versus the cahiers, the tinier notebooks versus the manuscript books. How the former often provide context for material “finished” (that is, stripped of its contexts) in the latter.
Sexual love and writing. “Having a cow” and “having babies.” Codework.
Juan Gris: “the composition of a painting determines its subject, and not vice-versa.”
Stein’s letting space constraints / requirements determine composition. End of notebook equals end of poem. Width of notebook equals width of poem. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year.
Stein’s handwriting (there are a number of manuscript pages and photographs reproduced in Dydo’s book). Spiky, European, p’s as elongate z’s slash’d at page. In a letter to one Hubbell, I misread “You must not observe things” as “You must not obscure things.”
Sunday. Scanning the night skies, looking for auguries and wonder, post-tempest mayhem. What is it, that need to claim, say, that the Big Dipper’s caught the drip and overflow of moonlight leaking horizonward? Or that the Big Dipper’s just scoop’d up and flung high the ball of its moon in a game of celestial lacrosse? What could be more idiotic?
~
Found on the new book shelf:
Gertrude Stein: The Language That Rises 1923-1934, by Ulla Dydo with William Rice (Northwestern University Press, 2003)
So the reading goes. Always a bird in the brambles to point the binoculars at—even as one’s got them train’d at a finely-mark’d kestrel hovering in the air. Drop’d, at least briefly, the Paradiso. Took up with the Mr. (Stein and Toklas did refer to one another, on one occasion, as Mr. and Mrs. Reciprocal.)
Some notes:
The idea of “audience writing”—late work, to please.
“Compulsively readable”: the first few chapters. Dydo on the carnets versus the cahiers, the tinier notebooks versus the manuscript books. How the former often provide context for material “finished” (that is, stripped of its contexts) in the latter.
Sexual love and writing. “Having a cow” and “having babies.” Codework.
Juan Gris: “the composition of a painting determines its subject, and not vice-versa.”
Stein’s letting space constraints / requirements determine composition. End of notebook equals end of poem. Width of notebook equals width of poem. Ammons’s Tape for the Turn of the Year.
Stein’s handwriting (there are a number of manuscript pages and photographs reproduced in Dydo’s book). Spiky, European, p’s as elongate z’s slash’d at page. In a letter to one Hubbell, I misread “You must not observe things” as “You must not obscure things.”
Birding Books
Bought (Friends of the Library):
How to Know the Birds: An Introduction to Bird Recognition, by Roger Tory Peterson (New American Library / Signet, 1957)
The finest introduction to birding. I keep buying books my father owns, things that surround’d my youth. For G., probably. I didn’t recall, or never noticed, the color plates--paintings in environments, as opposed to the more stylized and regular (repetitions, series) “field mark” paintings Peterson did for the first Field Guide.
Animal Camouflage, by Adolf Portmann (University of Michigan Press / Ann Arbor Paperback, 1959)
Whales and Dolphins, by Evarhard J. Slijper, postscript by John E. Bardach (University of Michigan Press / Ann Arbor Paperback, 1976)
Camouflage of cetaceans, there’s a combo.
~
Received:
Magazine Cypress #2 (2003), edited by Dana Ward (1118 Cypress Street, #3, Cincinnati, OH 45206). $5.
New work by: Anselm Berrigan / Joel Bettridge / Sean Cole / CA Conrad / Jordan Davis / Tsering Wangmo Dhompa / Brandon Downing / kari edwards / Greg Fuchs / E. Tracy Grinnell / Aaron Kiely / Susan Landers / John Latta / Dan Machlin / Christopher Martin / Anna Moschovakis / Sawako Nakayasu / Standard Schaefer / Mark Tardi
Lime green cover, near square format, simple smart design. Of particular interest: Anselm Berrigan’s three poems (“Some Assembly Required--11/23,” “Coaxed to Vapor and Dusk,” and “Poem for Ryan’s Irish Pub”), Jordan Davis’s two poems (“Poem” (Because it has a furnishing . . .) and “Poem” (Moving across the top of the stack . . .)), and Greg Fuchs’s “Charles” (I’m not sure I’m “in it” enough to know who Charles is: Borkhuis?), a longish thing cobble’d together of lines from documents and love-letters left in a mysterious blue suitcase in, apparently, Berrigan’s and Fuchs’s apartment, and of Springsteen lines (“My only rule to writing this poem was to listen to Bruce Springsteen during its composition.”) (Bringing me to the question: why do I wake up every morning with some line about “the bright elusive butterfly of love” running madly through the limit’d space of my cranium?) Fuchs:
“My diet at 26 is coffee, two cigarettes, burrito,
one donut, seven cigarettes. July 7, 1999
no breakfast, one coffee, a slice bought by Dave,
another slice bought by Mathilde.
Later Dave bought me an ice-pop. Then I crashed
at his place. Smoked three cigarettes. Fell asleep.”
Something affecting about the un-romanticized rather drab quotidian here, aligned often enough against funnier lines:
“The runaway Ameican dream. At work I furrow
and hiccup all day. I need to pee.”
~
Borders’s original store is striking here. Begun Saturday. Apparently only one store in Minneapolis and now the “downtown” store in Ann Arbor are unionized. At issue: a living wage, affordable health care, less use of part-time (that is, completely benefit-less) employees, recognition of the quality of the workers. One thing I’ve noticed recently (since the new CEO, a man whose previous experience was mostly in groceries): rearranging the “merchandise.” A particularly annoying way of increasing sales: in the attempt to find the olives, the customer’ll stumble into the canned cream’d corn, and exit with both. In the attempt to find the new Guy Davenport, the customer’ll bark her shin on the stack of the new Patricia Cornwell’s, and blow it all flying out with, um, both . . . G. and I a few weeks ago were notify’d that the children’s fiction was now arranged by topic, what? As somebody was quoted as saying: “Retail’s the new blue collar.”
I would encourage others to support the strikers here by avoiding Borders stores altogether. (Having work’d briefly for Borders's major competitor, Barnes & Noble, who were, in the early nineties, engaging in many of the same foul practices, I would encourage all to stay away from them too.)
How to Know the Birds: An Introduction to Bird Recognition, by Roger Tory Peterson (New American Library / Signet, 1957)
The finest introduction to birding. I keep buying books my father owns, things that surround’d my youth. For G., probably. I didn’t recall, or never noticed, the color plates--paintings in environments, as opposed to the more stylized and regular (repetitions, series) “field mark” paintings Peterson did for the first Field Guide.
Animal Camouflage, by Adolf Portmann (University of Michigan Press / Ann Arbor Paperback, 1959)
Whales and Dolphins, by Evarhard J. Slijper, postscript by John E. Bardach (University of Michigan Press / Ann Arbor Paperback, 1976)
Camouflage of cetaceans, there’s a combo.
~
Received:
Magazine Cypress #2 (2003), edited by Dana Ward (1118 Cypress Street, #3, Cincinnati, OH 45206). $5.
New work by: Anselm Berrigan / Joel Bettridge / Sean Cole / CA Conrad / Jordan Davis / Tsering Wangmo Dhompa / Brandon Downing / kari edwards / Greg Fuchs / E. Tracy Grinnell / Aaron Kiely / Susan Landers / John Latta / Dan Machlin / Christopher Martin / Anna Moschovakis / Sawako Nakayasu / Standard Schaefer / Mark Tardi
Lime green cover, near square format, simple smart design. Of particular interest: Anselm Berrigan’s three poems (“Some Assembly Required--11/23,” “Coaxed to Vapor and Dusk,” and “Poem for Ryan’s Irish Pub”), Jordan Davis’s two poems (“Poem” (Because it has a furnishing . . .) and “Poem” (Moving across the top of the stack . . .)), and Greg Fuchs’s “Charles” (I’m not sure I’m “in it” enough to know who Charles is: Borkhuis?), a longish thing cobble’d together of lines from documents and love-letters left in a mysterious blue suitcase in, apparently, Berrigan’s and Fuchs’s apartment, and of Springsteen lines (“My only rule to writing this poem was to listen to Bruce Springsteen during its composition.”) (Bringing me to the question: why do I wake up every morning with some line about “the bright elusive butterfly of love” running madly through the limit’d space of my cranium?) Fuchs:
“My diet at 26 is coffee, two cigarettes, burrito,
one donut, seven cigarettes. July 7, 1999
no breakfast, one coffee, a slice bought by Dave,
another slice bought by Mathilde.
Later Dave bought me an ice-pop. Then I crashed
at his place. Smoked three cigarettes. Fell asleep.”
Something affecting about the un-romanticized rather drab quotidian here, aligned often enough against funnier lines:
“The runaway Ameican dream. At work I furrow
and hiccup all day. I need to pee.”
~
Borders’s original store is striking here. Begun Saturday. Apparently only one store in Minneapolis and now the “downtown” store in Ann Arbor are unionized. At issue: a living wage, affordable health care, less use of part-time (that is, completely benefit-less) employees, recognition of the quality of the workers. One thing I’ve noticed recently (since the new CEO, a man whose previous experience was mostly in groceries): rearranging the “merchandise.” A particularly annoying way of increasing sales: in the attempt to find the olives, the customer’ll stumble into the canned cream’d corn, and exit with both. In the attempt to find the new Guy Davenport, the customer’ll bark her shin on the stack of the new Patricia Cornwell’s, and blow it all flying out with, um, both . . . G. and I a few weeks ago were notify’d that the children’s fiction was now arranged by topic, what? As somebody was quoted as saying: “Retail’s the new blue collar.”
I would encourage others to support the strikers here by avoiding Borders stores altogether. (Having work’d briefly for Borders's major competitor, Barnes & Noble, who were, in the early nineties, engaging in many of the same foul practices, I would encourage all to stay away from them too.)
Friday, November 07, 2003
Jealous Trout
Scratchpad Dump
Collect’d by a Person of Quality
~
The jealous Trout that low did lie,
Rose at a well-dissembled Flie.
~
These following are to be understood two ways:
I Saw a Peacock, with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing Comet, drop down hail
I saw a Cloud, with Ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy Oak, creep on the ground
I saw a Pismire, swallow up a Whale
I saw a raging Sea, brim full of Ale
I saw a Venice Glass, sixteen foot deep
I saw a Well, full of mens tears that weep
I saw their Eyes, all in a flame of fire
I saw a House, as big as the Moon and higher
I saw the Sun, even in the midst of night
I saw the Man that saw this wondrous sight.
~
Ione takes her neat rub'd Pail, and now
She trips to meet the Sand-red Cow,
Where for some sturdy Foot-ball Swain
Ione stroaks a Syllabub or twain.
~
On a FART.
I Sing the praises of a Fart,
That I may doo't by terms of Art;
I will invoke no deitie,
But butter'd Pease and Furmetie;
And think their help sufficient
To fit and furnish my intent;
When Virgils gnat, and Ovids flea,
And Homers frog strove for the day;
There is no reason in my mind,
Why a Fart should come behind,
Since that we may it paralel,
With any thing that doth excell;
Musick is but a Fart that is sent,
From the guts of an Instrument;
The Scholler Farts, when he gains
Learning with cracking of his Brains,
And when he hath spent much pain and oyl,
Thomas and others to reconcile,
For to learn the distracting art.
What doth he get by it? not a Fart;
The thunder that does roar so loud
Is but the Farting of a Cloud;
And if withall the wind do stirr up
Rain, then 'tis a Farting Sirrup;
The Soldier makes his foes to run,
With but the farting of a Gun,
That's if he make the Bullets whistle,
Else 'tis no better then a sizle;
Fine boats that by the times about,
Are but Farts several Docks let out;
They are but Farts, the words we say,
Words are but words, and so are they;
Farts are as good as Land, for both
We hold in Tail, and let 'em both;
As soon as born they by and by
Fart-like but only sing and dye;
Applause is but a Fart, the rude
Blast of the whole multitude;
And what is working Ale I pray;
But Farting Barme, which makes a way
Out at the bunghole, by farting noise,
When we do hear it's sputtring voice;
And when new drank, and without hopps,
It makes us fart, and seldom stops.
I more of Farts would write I vow;
But for my gutts I cannot now,
For now they wonderfully rumble,
And my stomack begins to grumble,
Which makes me think that Farts e're long
Will at my nock there find a Tongue,
And there sing out their own praises,
In thundring and in choaking Phrases;
Where I leave them, and them to you,
And so I bid you all adieu.
What I have said take in good part,
If not, I do not care a Fart.
Collect’d by a Person of Quality
~
The jealous Trout that low did lie,
Rose at a well-dissembled Flie.
~
These following are to be understood two ways:
I Saw a Peacock, with a fiery tail
I saw a blazing Comet, drop down hail
I saw a Cloud, with Ivy circled round
I saw a sturdy Oak, creep on the ground
I saw a Pismire, swallow up a Whale
I saw a raging Sea, brim full of Ale
I saw a Venice Glass, sixteen foot deep
I saw a Well, full of mens tears that weep
I saw their Eyes, all in a flame of fire
I saw a House, as big as the Moon and higher
I saw the Sun, even in the midst of night
I saw the Man that saw this wondrous sight.
~
Ione takes her neat rub'd Pail, and now
She trips to meet the Sand-red Cow,
Where for some sturdy Foot-ball Swain
Ione stroaks a Syllabub or twain.
~
On a FART.
I Sing the praises of a Fart,
That I may doo't by terms of Art;
I will invoke no deitie,
But butter'd Pease and Furmetie;
And think their help sufficient
To fit and furnish my intent;
When Virgils gnat, and Ovids flea,
And Homers frog strove for the day;
There is no reason in my mind,
Why a Fart should come behind,
Since that we may it paralel,
With any thing that doth excell;
Musick is but a Fart that is sent,
From the guts of an Instrument;
The Scholler Farts, when he gains
Learning with cracking of his Brains,
And when he hath spent much pain and oyl,
Thomas and others to reconcile,
For to learn the distracting art.
What doth he get by it? not a Fart;
The thunder that does roar so loud
Is but the Farting of a Cloud;
And if withall the wind do stirr up
Rain, then 'tis a Farting Sirrup;
The Soldier makes his foes to run,
With but the farting of a Gun,
That's if he make the Bullets whistle,
Else 'tis no better then a sizle;
Fine boats that by the times about,
Are but Farts several Docks let out;
They are but Farts, the words we say,
Words are but words, and so are they;
Farts are as good as Land, for both
We hold in Tail, and let 'em both;
As soon as born they by and by
Fart-like but only sing and dye;
Applause is but a Fart, the rude
Blast of the whole multitude;
And what is working Ale I pray;
But Farting Barme, which makes a way
Out at the bunghole, by farting noise,
When we do hear it's sputtring voice;
And when new drank, and without hopps,
It makes us fart, and seldom stops.
I more of Farts would write I vow;
But for my gutts I cannot now,
For now they wonderfully rumble,
And my stomack begins to grumble,
Which makes me think that Farts e're long
Will at my nock there find a Tongue,
And there sing out their own praises,
In thundring and in choaking Phrases;
Where I leave them, and them to you,
And so I bid you all adieu.
What I have said take in good part,
If not, I do not care a Fart.
Hole Morning
Cold night. Drop’d to twenty-eight degrees F. Near full moon piercing th’heavens, a drill’d out hole. And this morning hoarfrost outlining the oak leaves’ ribbing and veinage, sharp white coruscate. Glint and hodge-podge to the spikiness.
G. left a poem-draft on the table for me when I got back with C. Bonzo Dog.
Daddy and Carmen
went out for a walk.
Now I’ll never see them
or get to talk.
~
Dale Smith, at the Possum Pouch, in announcing a new column at Bookslut, mentions getting an admonishment for “straying into a deformed bickering modus,” a phrase I love. Though I think bickering’s got a place. Roiling the placid waters. Seeing what’s settled out that might, risen, too, be of use.
~
I was reading the selection of Smith’s poem (titled “Notes No Answers”) that graces the pages of the new issue of The Poker this morning. I think it’s difficult to pull off writing anything as a string of questions: the interrogative sustain’d always begins to sound querulous, whiny, shrill, pleading. To me. Thus it’s either a measure of my inattention or of Dale’s ability that I didn’t note (in spite of title-prod) until well into the third page that the poem consists of all questions. Partly due to the asterisks fragmenting it, slowing the onslaught of it and limiting the voice’s attempt to scale the ever higher wall of its asking.
All the leaves
in your voice, the pink
flesh church where
you kneel, that lovely
nipple—
can’t we run on for-
ever in these meat
folds?
*
Do you think
there’s a way
out?
. . .
Shall we dance
abandoned to quick
chance, kick out stiff
legs to the standard
numbers?
*
If the forces of
nature can be
harnessed or
tamed, can the ass-
umptions of mod-
ernism be far
behind?
The pacing here is impeccable. The short lineations turn one’s attention to small discernible language-events within each question, and slow down the reading. Rhymes and consonances: dance, abandoned, chance, standard. Quick, kick, stiff. Harnessed, ass-. Mod-, behind. The forced hyphenations quarry the words for bury’d connexions, cross-fertilizing: the gumption and fashion-sense of modernism, the mod ass (the modest?) kicking still stiff to its standard numbers. Now that (perhaps) chance is itself a “standard number,” I think Dale is looking for a change of terms (“a way out”), an untaming that could allow (again?) for beauty, for all of us running on “for- / ever in the meat / folds.”
~
Unpacking a poem. A poem is not a suitcase. Language always betrays our intent. Nothing in that suitcase. Except us. We are in the suitcase of language.
G. left a poem-draft on the table for me when I got back with C. Bonzo Dog.
Daddy and Carmen
went out for a walk.
Now I’ll never see them
or get to talk.
~
Dale Smith, at the Possum Pouch, in announcing a new column at Bookslut, mentions getting an admonishment for “straying into a deformed bickering modus,” a phrase I love. Though I think bickering’s got a place. Roiling the placid waters. Seeing what’s settled out that might, risen, too, be of use.
~
I was reading the selection of Smith’s poem (titled “Notes No Answers”) that graces the pages of the new issue of The Poker this morning. I think it’s difficult to pull off writing anything as a string of questions: the interrogative sustain’d always begins to sound querulous, whiny, shrill, pleading. To me. Thus it’s either a measure of my inattention or of Dale’s ability that I didn’t note (in spite of title-prod) until well into the third page that the poem consists of all questions. Partly due to the asterisks fragmenting it, slowing the onslaught of it and limiting the voice’s attempt to scale the ever higher wall of its asking.
All the leaves
in your voice, the pink
flesh church where
you kneel, that lovely
nipple—
can’t we run on for-
ever in these meat
folds?
*
Do you think
there’s a way
out?
. . .
Shall we dance
abandoned to quick
chance, kick out stiff
legs to the standard
numbers?
*
If the forces of
nature can be
harnessed or
tamed, can the ass-
umptions of mod-
ernism be far
behind?
The pacing here is impeccable. The short lineations turn one’s attention to small discernible language-events within each question, and slow down the reading. Rhymes and consonances: dance, abandoned, chance, standard. Quick, kick, stiff. Harnessed, ass-. Mod-, behind. The forced hyphenations quarry the words for bury’d connexions, cross-fertilizing: the gumption and fashion-sense of modernism, the mod ass (the modest?) kicking still stiff to its standard numbers. Now that (perhaps) chance is itself a “standard number,” I think Dale is looking for a change of terms (“a way out”), an untaming that could allow (again?) for beauty, for all of us running on “for- / ever in the meat / folds.”
~
Unpacking a poem. A poem is not a suitcase. Language always betrays our intent. Nothing in that suitcase. Except us. We are in the suitcase of language.
Thursday, November 06, 2003
Tan Tremendous
Subject: Re: Tan Lin
On Wednesday, November 5, 2003, Kent Johnson wrote, responding to my remarks (Friday, October 31, 2003) on reading Tan Lin’s “Ambient Stylistics”:
I was on a panel with Tan Lin once and he was a very unpleasant man. Had his mind made up about me before we even said hello. Of course, since he had already called me a racist in print, I suppose I couldn't have expected anything else!
A true asshole, he struck me as, not all that different from most tremendous writers.
Kent
~
I reply’d immediately on reading Kent’s letter this morning, Thursday, November 6, 2003:
Kent,
Shall I publish your remarks on “Hotel Point”? Complete with half-assed snappy rebuke like “Which is why I refuse to meet any writers.”?
My biggest giggle of late was “Rex”commenting on Silliman's gush about blogger precedents—Pepys, Thoreau, Whitman. “Rex” says: “You fuss too much.”
Rappin’
John
~
And toute de suite got Señor Johnson’s reply:
John,
I’d be delighted if you printed my e-mail. I’m sure Tan Lin would too. The poetry world is too boring and needs more loving insults. Of course, the great thing about this is that I will never get any more reading invitations, so won’t have to deal with my social anxiety issue in that regard . . .
Could you maybe say something to frame it so that people take it in the right spirit? Something like, I wish people would write e-mails like this about me . . . or something such?
[Here I snipped out some regalia about the terrific calamari to be had in Freeport . . . Gee, I do wish somebody would say something nasty about me. Or about Kent Johnson. Trouble is, I probably wouldn’t notice . . . nothing ever “registers” with us poets, you know, up to and including “that final flat imperative: ‘Get in the car!’” of the men in blue . . . (A line I’ve always remember’d, Bill Bathurst, I think, or was it for Bill Bathurst . . . ? Oh dear.]
Gracias, amigo.
Kent
On Wednesday, November 5, 2003, Kent Johnson wrote, responding to my remarks (Friday, October 31, 2003) on reading Tan Lin’s “Ambient Stylistics”:
I was on a panel with Tan Lin once and he was a very unpleasant man. Had his mind made up about me before we even said hello. Of course, since he had already called me a racist in print, I suppose I couldn't have expected anything else!
A true asshole, he struck me as, not all that different from most tremendous writers.
Kent
~
I reply’d immediately on reading Kent’s letter this morning, Thursday, November 6, 2003:
Kent,
Shall I publish your remarks on “Hotel Point”? Complete with half-assed snappy rebuke like “Which is why I refuse to meet any writers.”?
My biggest giggle of late was “Rex”commenting on Silliman's gush about blogger precedents—Pepys, Thoreau, Whitman. “Rex” says: “You fuss too much.”
Rappin’
John
~
And toute de suite got Señor Johnson’s reply:
John,
I’d be delighted if you printed my e-mail. I’m sure Tan Lin would too. The poetry world is too boring and needs more loving insults. Of course, the great thing about this is that I will never get any more reading invitations, so won’t have to deal with my social anxiety issue in that regard . . .
Could you maybe say something to frame it so that people take it in the right spirit? Something like, I wish people would write e-mails like this about me . . . or something such?
[Here I snipped out some regalia about the terrific calamari to be had in Freeport . . . Gee, I do wish somebody would say something nasty about me. Or about Kent Johnson. Trouble is, I probably wouldn’t notice . . . nothing ever “registers” with us poets, you know, up to and including “that final flat imperative: ‘Get in the car!’” of the men in blue . . . (A line I’ve always remember’d, Bill Bathurst, I think, or was it for Bill Bathurst . . . ? Oh dear.]
Gracias, amigo.
Kent
Imbecilia
I’m not one for quizzes, or polls. I am, however, fond of sniggering imbecilia and sophomorics. So when I see someone (“Rex,” I think) ’s sqwawkbox’d Ron Silliman against the claims for blogger precedents (Pepys, Thoreau, Robert Duncan) that Silliman’s briefly made, and I see “Rex” say, “You fuss too much,” I nearly chortle in my soup. And think: wouldn’t that be a terrific title for a book of Silliman’s criticism. You Fuss Too Much: Collected Critical Writings. Or would “Literally”: Collected Criticism do it? How about Grrrr (No Owl): Dogged Prose? Or . . .
~
I read some more of Lezama Lima’s Paradiso last night, chin collapsing against collar, battling for a spate of wakefulness in the finally slumbering house. Thought of García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad. Thought of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. The García Márquez and the Lezama Lima seem to’ve been written nearly simultaneously. I’ve seen two dates for first publication of Paradiso: 1965 (in Cuba?), and 1968 (Buenos Aires). One Hundred Years of Solitude appear’d in Buenos Aires in 1967. That old “in the air” thing.
I must’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude about thirty years ago. What I remember of the “magical realism” is that it is painted in the broad strokes of the situational: one of the old Aureliano’s (is that the name?) tied out in front of the house in Macondo like a dog, the warming milk boiling up to worms at the instant of another Aureliano’s birth, the big old house filling up with moths? Or dust? Oh my raddled memory. Shot full of, not exactly holes, but plausible and implausible patches for what holes we’ve got there. My sense, however, is that the truth in One Hundred Years of Solitude lies in the odd event, the storm’d dream-bulwarks, rather than in the language itself. It is, essentially, an allegorical book.
Paradiso in its first fifty pages—how slowly I read!—seems to proceed with a bounding insouciance regarding event, a moseying and dallying (it may be, of course, that I am just not seeing its proper contours yet), but with a ferocious attention to the careerings of the language itself.
See:
“‘[X] . . . is happier than a goat in the breeze.’ He liked to choose a phrase that was wittily vulgar, or a proverb, to insert slight modifications in meaning or onomatopoeia. That expression ‘goat in the breeze,’ as could be seen, had been born in him more out of vigor than because of any boldness in language. Sometimes he would say, joining the start of a proverb with a mathematical axiom: ‘The eye of the owner fattens the horse, therefore one takes as the multiplier the one with the fewest digits.’”
Or:
“[Y] . . . short, taciturn, who by speaking very rarely lent extraordinary weight to all the vacuous things that occurred to him.”
Or:
“The square in Taxco was filling up with masked people who exploded verbal labyrinths or made ferocious stabs at the extra-dry air with their small knifes, as if numberless noses had come to blow into a jar which would concentrate that breath like a preserve.”
~
I want to read the new memoir / autobiography by García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, translated by Edith Grossman (Knopf, 2003).
I think I recall reading a piece of such in the New Yorker umpteen hazy yesteryears ago. All about quitting cigarettes. Burying a pack like a little coffin in the ground. And how, most horribly (because most accurately), García Márquez admitted how he “missed the little fuckers.”
Maybe it wasn’t the New Yorker. Mr. John Keats’s got them tiny hands of his’n on my throat this morning.
~
Misreading: “the overwhelming Mayness of the world.”
~
I read some more of Lezama Lima’s Paradiso last night, chin collapsing against collar, battling for a spate of wakefulness in the finally slumbering house. Thought of García Márquez’s Cien Años de Soledad. Thought of Lautréamont’s Les Chants de Maldoror. The García Márquez and the Lezama Lima seem to’ve been written nearly simultaneously. I’ve seen two dates for first publication of Paradiso: 1965 (in Cuba?), and 1968 (Buenos Aires). One Hundred Years of Solitude appear’d in Buenos Aires in 1967. That old “in the air” thing.
I must’ve read One Hundred Years of Solitude about thirty years ago. What I remember of the “magical realism” is that it is painted in the broad strokes of the situational: one of the old Aureliano’s (is that the name?) tied out in front of the house in Macondo like a dog, the warming milk boiling up to worms at the instant of another Aureliano’s birth, the big old house filling up with moths? Or dust? Oh my raddled memory. Shot full of, not exactly holes, but plausible and implausible patches for what holes we’ve got there. My sense, however, is that the truth in One Hundred Years of Solitude lies in the odd event, the storm’d dream-bulwarks, rather than in the language itself. It is, essentially, an allegorical book.
Paradiso in its first fifty pages—how slowly I read!—seems to proceed with a bounding insouciance regarding event, a moseying and dallying (it may be, of course, that I am just not seeing its proper contours yet), but with a ferocious attention to the careerings of the language itself.
See:
“‘[X] . . . is happier than a goat in the breeze.’ He liked to choose a phrase that was wittily vulgar, or a proverb, to insert slight modifications in meaning or onomatopoeia. That expression ‘goat in the breeze,’ as could be seen, had been born in him more out of vigor than because of any boldness in language. Sometimes he would say, joining the start of a proverb with a mathematical axiom: ‘The eye of the owner fattens the horse, therefore one takes as the multiplier the one with the fewest digits.’”
Or:
“[Y] . . . short, taciturn, who by speaking very rarely lent extraordinary weight to all the vacuous things that occurred to him.”
Or:
“The square in Taxco was filling up with masked people who exploded verbal labyrinths or made ferocious stabs at the extra-dry air with their small knifes, as if numberless noses had come to blow into a jar which would concentrate that breath like a preserve.”
~
I want to read the new memoir / autobiography by García Márquez, Living to Tell the Tale, translated by Edith Grossman (Knopf, 2003).
I think I recall reading a piece of such in the New Yorker umpteen hazy yesteryears ago. All about quitting cigarettes. Burying a pack like a little coffin in the ground. And how, most horribly (because most accurately), García Márquez admitted how he “missed the little fuckers.”
Maybe it wasn’t the New Yorker. Mr. John Keats’s got them tiny hands of his’n on my throat this morning.
~
Misreading: “the overwhelming Mayness of the world.”
Wednesday, November 05, 2003
Puff
Why do the heathen rage, and the people puff up a vane thing?
Mrrrmf?
You don't need a weathervane to know which way the wind blows?
Huh?
Mr. Vain has left the building. To you.
I'm sorry?
Mrrrmf?
You don't need a weathervane to know which way the wind blows?
Huh?
Mr. Vain has left the building. To you.
I'm sorry?
Gallop, Public, Gossip
Received: The Poker #3, edited by Daniel Bouchard (P.O. Box 390408, Cambridge, MA 02139). Poems by Fanny Howe, James Thomas Stevens, Dale Smith, Daniel Bouchard, Jacqueline Waters, Alan Davies, Gleb Shulpyakov, Andrew Schelling, Jules Boykoff, Bruce Holsapple. Interview with Kevin Davies (by Marcella Durand). Essays by William Carlos Williams, Fanny Howe, Aaron Kunin. Review of Anselm Berrigan’s Zero Star Hotel (by Noah Eli Gordon).
I went galloping through the Durand / Davies conversation, compulsively over-reading it (like over-driving one’s brights on a back country road), skipping every other line in my eagerness (like the way Carmen the doggo goes at her chow, blind gulping voracity) to get at the veracity of the lives of the poets in New York . . . I’ll go back to it, more slowly, but it’s fun, witty—two jokers in The Poker—and’s got gobs of names and a kind of public version of gossip (Marcella’s cat named Perdita after H.D.’s daughter, Kevin’s digs with Douglas Rothschild and, briefly, Bill Luoma—the “Disgraced Boys Club,” or “Displaced”?) Of the poems, a sustain’d look’s due Waters, Davies, Smith, and Bouchard (all, I notice, parts of longer pieces, as is Howe). I think The Poker’s on its way to becoming one of the era’s defining vehicles. (Another candidate would be Ben Lerner’s No: A Journal of the Arts.) (But now I’m talking in heroickal measures of hyperbole, something I try to avoid.) Bouchard says (in an insert) that he’s got “a goal to publish at least 12 issues, 3 per year if possible.” Put a Jackson or two in the mail and subscribe.
~
Reading: Paradiso, by José Lezama Lima, translated by Gregory Rabassa (Dalkey Archive, 2000)
I’ve had Paradiso sitting next to my bed for a month or so, along with items too numerous to mention. Working in a library I tend to “heap up . . . a Cumulus” of books, those aery nebulosity’s of haruspicall divinations ever-awaiting a Peruser . . . (Oh yeah I do.) I had been intending to move to Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings by John Berryman, edited by John Haffenden. And start’d it breezily enough before getting stymied by th’impedimenta of Berryman’s penetralia. Meaning, I suppose, I thought it’d be smarter to read Shakespeare’s Henry IV before Berryman’s undeniably smart rehash and commentary. Moved to Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman by Paul Mariani (Oh, my biographical fetish . . .) Here, cut short by a prose style with all the finesse and panache of a slumlord’s eviction notice. A sample:
“The leech-gatherer symbolized the poet, gathering his poems by dint of long labor where he could in a time of diminishment. ‘That’s the way I must be!’ Berryman shouted. ‘That’s the way I will be.’” (Okay, already.) I note that James Laughlin admits in jacket copy that Mariani “has done his usual competent job on Berryman.” Done a job on. Competent. I’d call that damn’d fine feinting with the praise, Jay.
Paradiso. “. . . sleep thick as marzipan.” “. . . with the puffy face and mussed-up hair of a bass-viol player.”
~
Leaf report. Shagbarks and ash nearly bare. Maples ranging between the thin wash and the merest freckling. Oaks gone to Coppertone’d sheeny browns. The most muscular of the bunch, they’ll retain a good percentage of leaves through winter, leaves push’d off and out and into the aery funk and crepitus of the surround by next year’s new growth. Disjecta membra.
Fire bushes a dismal caked-blood black-red matting the annuals below. Raked and piled in the streets and wheel’d over in rain, a leaf slurry forms, pooling tannins Adirondack in color.
I went galloping through the Durand / Davies conversation, compulsively over-reading it (like over-driving one’s brights on a back country road), skipping every other line in my eagerness (like the way Carmen the doggo goes at her chow, blind gulping voracity) to get at the veracity of the lives of the poets in New York . . . I’ll go back to it, more slowly, but it’s fun, witty—two jokers in The Poker—and’s got gobs of names and a kind of public version of gossip (Marcella’s cat named Perdita after H.D.’s daughter, Kevin’s digs with Douglas Rothschild and, briefly, Bill Luoma—the “Disgraced Boys Club,” or “Displaced”?) Of the poems, a sustain’d look’s due Waters, Davies, Smith, and Bouchard (all, I notice, parts of longer pieces, as is Howe). I think The Poker’s on its way to becoming one of the era’s defining vehicles. (Another candidate would be Ben Lerner’s No: A Journal of the Arts.) (But now I’m talking in heroickal measures of hyperbole, something I try to avoid.) Bouchard says (in an insert) that he’s got “a goal to publish at least 12 issues, 3 per year if possible.” Put a Jackson or two in the mail and subscribe.
~
Reading: Paradiso, by José Lezama Lima, translated by Gregory Rabassa (Dalkey Archive, 2000)
I’ve had Paradiso sitting next to my bed for a month or so, along with items too numerous to mention. Working in a library I tend to “heap up . . . a Cumulus” of books, those aery nebulosity’s of haruspicall divinations ever-awaiting a Peruser . . . (Oh yeah I do.) I had been intending to move to Berryman’s Shakespeare: Essays, Letters, and Other Writings by John Berryman, edited by John Haffenden. And start’d it breezily enough before getting stymied by th’impedimenta of Berryman’s penetralia. Meaning, I suppose, I thought it’d be smarter to read Shakespeare’s Henry IV before Berryman’s undeniably smart rehash and commentary. Moved to Dream Song: The Life of John Berryman by Paul Mariani (Oh, my biographical fetish . . .) Here, cut short by a prose style with all the finesse and panache of a slumlord’s eviction notice. A sample:
“The leech-gatherer symbolized the poet, gathering his poems by dint of long labor where he could in a time of diminishment. ‘That’s the way I must be!’ Berryman shouted. ‘That’s the way I will be.’” (Okay, already.) I note that James Laughlin admits in jacket copy that Mariani “has done his usual competent job on Berryman.” Done a job on. Competent. I’d call that damn’d fine feinting with the praise, Jay.
Paradiso. “. . . sleep thick as marzipan.” “. . . with the puffy face and mussed-up hair of a bass-viol player.”
~
Leaf report. Shagbarks and ash nearly bare. Maples ranging between the thin wash and the merest freckling. Oaks gone to Coppertone’d sheeny browns. The most muscular of the bunch, they’ll retain a good percentage of leaves through winter, leaves push’d off and out and into the aery funk and crepitus of the surround by next year’s new growth. Disjecta membra.
Fire bushes a dismal caked-blood black-red matting the annuals below. Raked and piled in the streets and wheel’d over in rain, a leaf slurry forms, pooling tannins Adirondack in color.
Tuesday, November 04, 2003
Midwest, Sod
Walk’d a book off to be mail’d. Getting hot out there. Look in the crevices of the bricks and one sees Asian lady beetles galloping about. Not the old fly away home variety. New and import’d. I read it in the news. These beetles like to bite off a minuscule chunk of one’s finger as a way to say hello.
~
And thought about “the Midwest sod.” Being one, I get to talk like that. Though, truthfully, I allus prefer’d my father’s “Jack pine savage.” When I was a northern tyke in upper lower Michigan. Finished the Mossman. I like how he goes after Eastern (and Western) provincials:
One character mocks the Californian known as “Henry bastard”: “he’s not up on too much east of the San Bernardino Mountains.”
“That’s west all right. Reminds me of some of some Eastern provincials I know. Don’t know cows from raisins. I guess I was just stuck in the middle out there, you know, Aristotelian, riding the Golden Mean.”
But we’s all hermits out here anyhow. And just funnin’ ya. Just.
~
In the barbershop on Saturday with G. I thumb’d a crumpled National Geographic
“to see what the poets of the lost
tribes of the Amazon are doing these days . . .”
Got an eyeful of a man daubing and dripping some milky plant sap into the eye of another. (Not in the barbershop. In a picture in the magazine. An “exceedingly painful” way of making the jungle canopy appear multi-dimensional, making it easier to locate gray monkeys in the foliage.
~
Picking up my proofreading: “the whole frame of the Universe, shall . . . turn to its Mother-nothing . . .” What the?
And “improved . . . to a Culmen . . .”
~
Mossman. Final notes.
“She was a tall, nervous woman who looked as if she often chewed her fingers late at night after sneaking volumes of Conrad Aiken in the bathroom.”
Attttsssss Mossman.
Evidence of Pynchon’s caricaturing of character through name: girlfriend Summer Letch, earlier girlfriend Becky Thatcher, pal Ratshit Rawlings. Cf. Benny Profane.
Evidence of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The Dow Mossman character (Dawes Williams) sitting in the Rio Grande tearing pages out of his notebooks. (We get the pages, reproduced somewhat tediously in near-agate type.) Somewhere the ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin gets mention. Mythic drinking and death in Mexico, vaguely “Jungian.” Mess of whore versus Great Mother imagery.
~
“The first time he had noticed it, language, was in the fourth grade when Miss Norman Jean Thompson, his teacher, turned against the whole class and said:
‘All Americans eventually go to heaven.’
‘By sweet Jesus,’ Ronnie Crown had said that afternoon, sitting on Dunchee’s wall, waiting for Dawes Williams to come tell him about it, ‘that’s about the God Damn dunbet thing I ever heard.’
Dawes Williams had agreed immediately that the message was insipid, but he thought for years that the syntax was inspired. In fact, the first time Norma Jean Thompson had said, ALL AMERICANS EVENTUALLY GO TO HEAVEN, was also the first time Dawes Williams had ever noticed the English sentence.
. . .
But language . . . was not even remotely related to anything else. It was a narrow extent, a jar without water. It kept no flowers living, dancing, breathing in sunlight. To possess a word . . . was to be possessed by nothing at all.
. . .
But tonals faded . . . and you made images; but images faded and you made words; but words failed and you made nothing. Then nothing bloomed and you made words again; finally you had only sentences left which had rooms within windows, and houses within rooms.”
Attttsssss Mossman.
~
And thought about “the Midwest sod.” Being one, I get to talk like that. Though, truthfully, I allus prefer’d my father’s “Jack pine savage.” When I was a northern tyke in upper lower Michigan. Finished the Mossman. I like how he goes after Eastern (and Western) provincials:
One character mocks the Californian known as “Henry bastard”: “he’s not up on too much east of the San Bernardino Mountains.”
“That’s west all right. Reminds me of some of some Eastern provincials I know. Don’t know cows from raisins. I guess I was just stuck in the middle out there, you know, Aristotelian, riding the Golden Mean.”
But we’s all hermits out here anyhow. And just funnin’ ya. Just.
~
In the barbershop on Saturday with G. I thumb’d a crumpled National Geographic
“to see what the poets of the lost
tribes of the Amazon are doing these days . . .”
Got an eyeful of a man daubing and dripping some milky plant sap into the eye of another. (Not in the barbershop. In a picture in the magazine. An “exceedingly painful” way of making the jungle canopy appear multi-dimensional, making it easier to locate gray monkeys in the foliage.
~
Picking up my proofreading: “the whole frame of the Universe, shall . . . turn to its Mother-nothing . . .” What the?
And “improved . . . to a Culmen . . .”
~
Mossman. Final notes.
“She was a tall, nervous woman who looked as if she often chewed her fingers late at night after sneaking volumes of Conrad Aiken in the bathroom.”
Attttsssss Mossman.
Evidence of Pynchon’s caricaturing of character through name: girlfriend Summer Letch, earlier girlfriend Becky Thatcher, pal Ratshit Rawlings. Cf. Benny Profane.
Evidence of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano. The Dow Mossman character (Dawes Williams) sitting in the Rio Grande tearing pages out of his notebooks. (We get the pages, reproduced somewhat tediously in near-agate type.) Somewhere the ex-Consul Geoffrey Firmin gets mention. Mythic drinking and death in Mexico, vaguely “Jungian.” Mess of whore versus Great Mother imagery.
~
“The first time he had noticed it, language, was in the fourth grade when Miss Norman Jean Thompson, his teacher, turned against the whole class and said:
‘All Americans eventually go to heaven.’
‘By sweet Jesus,’ Ronnie Crown had said that afternoon, sitting on Dunchee’s wall, waiting for Dawes Williams to come tell him about it, ‘that’s about the God Damn dunbet thing I ever heard.’
Dawes Williams had agreed immediately that the message was insipid, but he thought for years that the syntax was inspired. In fact, the first time Norma Jean Thompson had said, ALL AMERICANS EVENTUALLY GO TO HEAVEN, was also the first time Dawes Williams had ever noticed the English sentence.
. . .
But language . . . was not even remotely related to anything else. It was a narrow extent, a jar without water. It kept no flowers living, dancing, breathing in sunlight. To possess a word . . . was to be possessed by nothing at all.
. . .
But tonals faded . . . and you made images; but images faded and you made words; but words failed and you made nothing. Then nothing bloomed and you made words again; finally you had only sentences left which had rooms within windows, and houses within rooms.”
Attttsssss Mossman.
Actualist Disco
A higgle and a piggle of an aggravated morning. I’ll try to keep my growl-y sounds to myself.
~
I have to register a strong protest against the removal of all means and manner of printing from a diskette (floppy disc) for Macs at the computing center in Angel Hall. I have regularly (for the past six years) gone there to print research documents prepared at home on my circa 1992 Quantum 605. I do not have an Internet connection at home.
The fact of the matter is that the University, by ignoring past technologies like the floppy disk, is encouraging the planned obsolescence of products, in the rush to purchase ever newer, bigger things. I would be grateful if just one adjustment could be made for those of us who believe an adequate, useable technology suffices.
One floppy disc reader attached to a Mac somewhere on campus shouldn't be too much to ask for.
Sincerely,
~
Insect scritch and niggle dying out with the weather. Too cold, too rainy. So what’s that rhythmic weet-weet, weet-weet-weet, loudening somewhat in the catastrophes of light? There. Astraddle a horizontal, one plump squirrel, tail tuck’d up in a stately S, buck-toothing a husk’d walnut, that’s what, Mulligan. Like a fur-cover’d water pitcher. Incising. Rejoyce.
~
In the sonnet number’d CXXI, Shakespeare writes: “I am that I am.” What does Popeye mutter? “I yam what I yam”? Toot-toot.
~
I noticed that August Kleinzahler used these lines of William Carlos Williams’s “January Morning” for one epigraph:
I have discovered that most of
the beauties of travel are due to
the strange hours we keep to see them
I think Darrell Gray used the same lines for the stapled mimeo’d book titled The Beauties of Travel. Published by Doones Press (Ray DiPalma, right?) in Bowling Green, Ohio in 1971. I’d been thinking Toothpaste Press, but that was the later (1974) Scattered Brains. I think I still have a copy of The Beauties of Travel that Jim Bertolino may’ve “laid” on me (such was the lingo then, right?), but it must, spineless, be in a stack somewhere, hard to eye quickly. What I did find last night, perusing, were two copies of David Morice’s (I’d been thinking Curtis Favile, wrong!) Gum (Ah, those teethy Iowans of yesteryear! There was also Toothpaste’s by-product, the letterpress’d Dental Floss).
~
Gum is a little (about four by five-and-a-half inches) little mag. Mimeo’d. “Stencil’d” is probably the closer term. Single copy: 25¢. No. 6 (September 1971) quotes “5 issues for $1.” By No. 7 (March 1972) that’s gone up “5 issues for $1.50 for people.”
Contributors (No. 6): Raymond (sic) DiPalma, Allan Appel, Darrell Gray, Tony Towle, Jim Preston, Michael Waltuch, Judson Crews, James Schuyler, Robert Grenier, Tim Hildebrand, Paul Carroll, Clark Coolidge, Jim Bateman, Lee Larcomb, Larry Fagin, Terence Anderson, George Mattingly, Tom Veitch, John Batki, Aram Saroyan, Anselm Hollo, Elizabeth Marraffino, Ira Steingroot, Gerard Malanga, Allan Kornblum, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, John Sjoberg, Anne Waldman, Dave Morice, Kathy Friedman, Andrei Codrescu.
First thought typing: what a boy’s club! Would it be instructive to study a similar issue of, say, The Lamp in the Spine, edited “just across town” (or did it begin elsewhere? It had, at some point, a St. Paul, Minnesota address . . .) by James Moore and Patricia Hampl, title via Virginia Woolf? Here’s a mix of cut-ups and clowns, equal parts Creeley and second generation New York School, all heap’d up on some poor Midwest sods (not Allan Kornblum. A New Yorker, he’d work’d for Bill Graham at the Fillmore East avant the Iowa stint. All part of that “I’d rather be a rock star” come-down, pervasive in poetry circles.) Oh dear.
~
Darrell Gray:
NEPENTHE
The many senses like little open doors
Into one huge room full of colored fumes
Speeding across the sky
My hand touches yours
Yours mine
A spine-tingling actuality
Born and raised on a pin-head
In the fraction of time it takes
Gloom to glisten
The faucet to drip
As you enter the room and are seized
By the information
~
And so the Actualists arrive? No, that came a little later. It should be noted (in my ongoing search for precedents to Robert Grenier’s Sentences and Ron Silliman’s New Sentence) that both issues of Gum that I have at my disposal (odd phrase, but I’m hungry for lunch and hurrying) are chock’d full of Grenierisms, one-liners, caught speech, repetitions with variations. And many are present’d “landscape”-style on the page, offering the size and look of a stack of three-by-five cards.
~
I have to register a strong protest against the removal of all means and manner of printing from a diskette (floppy disc) for Macs at the computing center in Angel Hall. I have regularly (for the past six years) gone there to print research documents prepared at home on my circa 1992 Quantum 605. I do not have an Internet connection at home.
The fact of the matter is that the University, by ignoring past technologies like the floppy disk, is encouraging the planned obsolescence of products, in the rush to purchase ever newer, bigger things. I would be grateful if just one adjustment could be made for those of us who believe an adequate, useable technology suffices.
One floppy disc reader attached to a Mac somewhere on campus shouldn't be too much to ask for.
Sincerely,
~
Insect scritch and niggle dying out with the weather. Too cold, too rainy. So what’s that rhythmic weet-weet, weet-weet-weet, loudening somewhat in the catastrophes of light? There. Astraddle a horizontal, one plump squirrel, tail tuck’d up in a stately S, buck-toothing a husk’d walnut, that’s what, Mulligan. Like a fur-cover’d water pitcher. Incising. Rejoyce.
~
In the sonnet number’d CXXI, Shakespeare writes: “I am that I am.” What does Popeye mutter? “I yam what I yam”? Toot-toot.
~
I noticed that August Kleinzahler used these lines of William Carlos Williams’s “January Morning” for one epigraph:
I have discovered that most of
the beauties of travel are due to
the strange hours we keep to see them
I think Darrell Gray used the same lines for the stapled mimeo’d book titled The Beauties of Travel. Published by Doones Press (Ray DiPalma, right?) in Bowling Green, Ohio in 1971. I’d been thinking Toothpaste Press, but that was the later (1974) Scattered Brains. I think I still have a copy of The Beauties of Travel that Jim Bertolino may’ve “laid” on me (such was the lingo then, right?), but it must, spineless, be in a stack somewhere, hard to eye quickly. What I did find last night, perusing, were two copies of David Morice’s (I’d been thinking Curtis Favile, wrong!) Gum (Ah, those teethy Iowans of yesteryear! There was also Toothpaste’s by-product, the letterpress’d Dental Floss).
~
Gum is a little (about four by five-and-a-half inches) little mag. Mimeo’d. “Stencil’d” is probably the closer term. Single copy: 25¢. No. 6 (September 1971) quotes “5 issues for $1.” By No. 7 (March 1972) that’s gone up “5 issues for $1.50 for people.”
Contributors (No. 6): Raymond (sic) DiPalma, Allan Appel, Darrell Gray, Tony Towle, Jim Preston, Michael Waltuch, Judson Crews, James Schuyler, Robert Grenier, Tim Hildebrand, Paul Carroll, Clark Coolidge, Jim Bateman, Lee Larcomb, Larry Fagin, Terence Anderson, George Mattingly, Tom Veitch, John Batki, Aram Saroyan, Anselm Hollo, Elizabeth Marraffino, Ira Steingroot, Gerard Malanga, Allan Kornblum, Ron Padgett, Dick Gallup, John Sjoberg, Anne Waldman, Dave Morice, Kathy Friedman, Andrei Codrescu.
First thought typing: what a boy’s club! Would it be instructive to study a similar issue of, say, The Lamp in the Spine, edited “just across town” (or did it begin elsewhere? It had, at some point, a St. Paul, Minnesota address . . .) by James Moore and Patricia Hampl, title via Virginia Woolf? Here’s a mix of cut-ups and clowns, equal parts Creeley and second generation New York School, all heap’d up on some poor Midwest sods (not Allan Kornblum. A New Yorker, he’d work’d for Bill Graham at the Fillmore East avant the Iowa stint. All part of that “I’d rather be a rock star” come-down, pervasive in poetry circles.) Oh dear.
~
Darrell Gray:
NEPENTHE
The many senses like little open doors
Into one huge room full of colored fumes
Speeding across the sky
My hand touches yours
Yours mine
A spine-tingling actuality
Born and raised on a pin-head
In the fraction of time it takes
Gloom to glisten
The faucet to drip
As you enter the room and are seized
By the information
~
And so the Actualists arrive? No, that came a little later. It should be noted (in my ongoing search for precedents to Robert Grenier’s Sentences and Ron Silliman’s New Sentence) that both issues of Gum that I have at my disposal (odd phrase, but I’m hungry for lunch and hurrying) are chock’d full of Grenierisms, one-liners, caught speech, repetitions with variations. And many are present’d “landscape”-style on the page, offering the size and look of a stack of three-by-five cards.
Monday, November 03, 2003
Bigger
New embers.
Silence clutter’d with bigger silences.
~
Late to work (in circa one o’clock). Half day at the elementary school, so G. and I go grocery shopping. And xeroxing copies of G.’s drawings.
He’s been working out of a library book—Fifty Famous Heads and How to Draw Them. (That can’t be it.) Henry VIII, Sitting Bull, Charlie Chaplin, Harriet Tubman, Yvonne Goolagong.
—Dad? Who’s Yvonne Goolagong?! (Clearly a book published in the seventies.)
~
Bought: The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, by August Kleinzahler (FSG, 2003)
~
Weekend gone in a frenzy of violin recital, basketball game, rain, vacuuming, uncluttering the desk. Read nearly to the end of Mossman.
~
Woke in the middle of the night doing what I think of as Heriberto Yepez Variations:
—There is no theory. There is only practice that exhausts itself and makes such practice impractical.
—Practice is always untheoretical. That is the meaning of practice.
—Unruly practice revenges theory’s tidy emissaries of thinking.
—Thinking itself is never ruly, it is theory that makes it so.
—Whenever practice waxeth ydle, Hell lacketh Guests, and Theory on earth waxeth ruly.
—If theory is ruly and regular, let practice be rueful, pitiable, pitiful, and woe’d.
Silence clutter’d with bigger silences.
~
Late to work (in circa one o’clock). Half day at the elementary school, so G. and I go grocery shopping. And xeroxing copies of G.’s drawings.
He’s been working out of a library book—Fifty Famous Heads and How to Draw Them. (That can’t be it.) Henry VIII, Sitting Bull, Charlie Chaplin, Harriet Tubman, Yvonne Goolagong.
—Dad? Who’s Yvonne Goolagong?! (Clearly a book published in the seventies.)
~
Bought: The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, by August Kleinzahler (FSG, 2003)
~
Weekend gone in a frenzy of violin recital, basketball game, rain, vacuuming, uncluttering the desk. Read nearly to the end of Mossman.
~
Woke in the middle of the night doing what I think of as Heriberto Yepez Variations:
—There is no theory. There is only practice that exhausts itself and makes such practice impractical.
—Practice is always untheoretical. That is the meaning of practice.
—Unruly practice revenges theory’s tidy emissaries of thinking.
—Thinking itself is never ruly, it is theory that makes it so.
—Whenever practice waxeth ydle, Hell lacketh Guests, and Theory on earth waxeth ruly.
—If theory is ruly and regular, let practice be rueful, pitiable, pitiful, and woe’d.
Friday, October 31, 2003
Plano-spheroids of Speechlessness
Read Tan Lin’s “Ambient Stylistics” in Conjunctions #35. Stunned, breathless, “nothing to say.” Do all the best things lift us up into the plano-spheroids of speechlessness? I experienced something similar with W. G. Sebald’s books. Is that connection made only because Lin, too, lards the print’d text with photographs. Photographs seeming somehow non-illustrative, but obliquely relevant. Here, Lin includes several of newspaper clippings (headlines legible, though stories not). Or of album covers: Gloria Gaynor’s “Never Can Say Goodbye” next to one titled simply “Soul Center*.” Tacked to a wall.
Lin: “To have a photograph is not interesting; to have a photograph of a photograph is, and this is what a poem does better than any photograph can. Only such relaxing enclosures of image within image or word within word allow the emptiness of all human feelings to surrender themselves without obvious grotesqueries and thus make the present a place to have a cigarette. All biographies, like all poems, are best when they fail to suggest anything about their subjects at all. A good poem is very boring.”
What I know about Tan Lin. He is the brother of Maya Lin, sculptor / architect of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, and of the “Wave Field” (which G. and I look’d for and never found). Both the “Wave Field” and the Wall depend partly on surface for “meaning.” I find the brother and sister relationship a sumptuous factoid, I am in “dumb amazement” in considering it, it is “all out of proportion” with its “interest.”
What I know about Tan Lin. He wrote a book with “Kangaroo” in the title. Or “Shampoo.” Some three word non-sequitur published by Sun & Moon (?) that made me think: dedicated follower of fashion. Made me think: West Coast language-y repeat offender ho-hum.
Lin: “In a perfect world all sentences, even the ones we write to our loved ones, the mailman or our interoffice memos, would have that overall sameness, that sense of an average background, a fluid structure in spite of the surface disturbances and the immediate incomprehension. The best sentences should lose information at a relatively constant rate. There should be no ecstatic moments of recognition.”
G. and I tried to find the “Wave Field” because we’d heard it was a good place to play hide-and-seek. It is hidden in a courtyard.
What I know about Tan Lin (later). He wrote a book titled Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe published in 1996 by Sun & Moon. He teaches (back cover) at the University of Virginia. Kangaroo is a mammal of the wrong continent. Lotion is a more “boring” word than shampoo. I left out the hint of violence, or cowboy regalia, or sado-masochism.
Lin: “. . . the best literature is often written in times of war where puns themselves suggest the origins of language in a consciousness that cannot use language to make any distinctions between language and thought, speaker and world, signal and noise, sound and word.”
Speechlessness. Why keep sucking the marrow out of the empty head of a prawn once consumed?
~
One correspondent writes:
“How are you? no news no nothing . . . tu squattes l'hôtel?”
Lin: “To have a photograph is not interesting; to have a photograph of a photograph is, and this is what a poem does better than any photograph can. Only such relaxing enclosures of image within image or word within word allow the emptiness of all human feelings to surrender themselves without obvious grotesqueries and thus make the present a place to have a cigarette. All biographies, like all poems, are best when they fail to suggest anything about their subjects at all. A good poem is very boring.”
What I know about Tan Lin. He is the brother of Maya Lin, sculptor / architect of the Vietnam Veteran’s Memorial, and of the “Wave Field” (which G. and I look’d for and never found). Both the “Wave Field” and the Wall depend partly on surface for “meaning.” I find the brother and sister relationship a sumptuous factoid, I am in “dumb amazement” in considering it, it is “all out of proportion” with its “interest.”
What I know about Tan Lin. He wrote a book with “Kangaroo” in the title. Or “Shampoo.” Some three word non-sequitur published by Sun & Moon (?) that made me think: dedicated follower of fashion. Made me think: West Coast language-y repeat offender ho-hum.
Lin: “In a perfect world all sentences, even the ones we write to our loved ones, the mailman or our interoffice memos, would have that overall sameness, that sense of an average background, a fluid structure in spite of the surface disturbances and the immediate incomprehension. The best sentences should lose information at a relatively constant rate. There should be no ecstatic moments of recognition.”
G. and I tried to find the “Wave Field” because we’d heard it was a good place to play hide-and-seek. It is hidden in a courtyard.
What I know about Tan Lin (later). He wrote a book titled Lotion Bullwhip Giraffe published in 1996 by Sun & Moon. He teaches (back cover) at the University of Virginia. Kangaroo is a mammal of the wrong continent. Lotion is a more “boring” word than shampoo. I left out the hint of violence, or cowboy regalia, or sado-masochism.
Lin: “. . . the best literature is often written in times of war where puns themselves suggest the origins of language in a consciousness that cannot use language to make any distinctions between language and thought, speaker and world, signal and noise, sound and word.”
Speechlessness. Why keep sucking the marrow out of the empty head of a prawn once consumed?
~
One correspondent writes:
“How are you? no news no nothing . . . tu squattes l'hôtel?”
Thursday, October 30, 2003
Skimming
“Only assassins keep notebooks.”
—Dow Mossman, The Stones of Summer
~
Briefly reading, skimming poems by James Schuyler this morning. Struck by the affable clarity, directness, the unmanner’d. Something of the childlike. Which is likely part of what makes Schuyler’s novel of the two kids, Alfred and Guinevere, such a palpable delight. Though, if I recall, those kids are rather precocious (or smart-alecky). Wiser than the years.
The line of the morning: “the pond goes altogether black.” In “Evenings in Vermont.” Which “altogether” seem’d perfect—somehow capturing the spreadingness of darkness over the water’s surface, and its completion. Then, biking in, I was thinking: “the pond gone ungovernably black.” Because I couldn’t quite recall the Schuyler line (though I knew it wasn’t “ungovernably”), and because I rather liked “ungovernably black.” Then, though, I start’d thinking of the implications (more folds in the gray-stuff) of tying “ungovernable” to “black” in these untied racist States. Then, the phrase itself broke—even the sound (which may have been its catalyst—gone gov-, and -bly, black—began to seem coy and mannerist.
~
Two tiny vignettes:
One of my friends Pritchard in Virginia asking John Ashbery (in an altogether un-smirking and innocent way—Pritchard, too, un-bumptious and good-humouredly headlong as a any kid): “If you could be a fruit, what fruit would you be?” I thought I saw a tiny apoplectic flicker in Ashbery’s eyes, out to measure any possible animosity, but then, rather slowly, he replied: “Oh, a kiwi, I suppose.”
One of myself under a monstreux wooden head of a hangover one morning of a visit by Richard Howard to a Charles Wright workshop at Virginia. Howard admitting he loved to play the rôle of the “poetry impresario” (which I want’d to relate somehow to the red shoes he’d worn the night before at the reading, though, having just this morning read, too, some of the recent Smithsonian’s article on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, complete with Plath-apparel notes at the party where they met, I’m now suspecting Howard of “a nod to Sylvia” in choice of hoof-wear.) Anyhow, Old Wooden-Head on this occasion rear’d up with a question (as instruct’d) for the redoubtable Mr. Howard: “I know you do countless translations, lots of editing, etc. etc. besides writing poems—um, how do you manage to be so profligate?” I knew the word wasn’t quite right the moment I saw it leave my mouth. Charles Wright wiggled, blanched, interject’d: “Uh, productive, you mean.” With the finality of a housemother. “Yeah,” chagrin’d, “I guess so.” And walking down the hall later with Sellari: “Tom, what does ‘profligate’ mean?” And not waiting for a reply: “I think it means you jerk off a lot, doesn’t it?”
~
Au travail, comrades.
—Dow Mossman, The Stones of Summer
~
Briefly reading, skimming poems by James Schuyler this morning. Struck by the affable clarity, directness, the unmanner’d. Something of the childlike. Which is likely part of what makes Schuyler’s novel of the two kids, Alfred and Guinevere, such a palpable delight. Though, if I recall, those kids are rather precocious (or smart-alecky). Wiser than the years.
The line of the morning: “the pond goes altogether black.” In “Evenings in Vermont.” Which “altogether” seem’d perfect—somehow capturing the spreadingness of darkness over the water’s surface, and its completion. Then, biking in, I was thinking: “the pond gone ungovernably black.” Because I couldn’t quite recall the Schuyler line (though I knew it wasn’t “ungovernably”), and because I rather liked “ungovernably black.” Then, though, I start’d thinking of the implications (more folds in the gray-stuff) of tying “ungovernable” to “black” in these untied racist States. Then, the phrase itself broke—even the sound (which may have been its catalyst—gone gov-, and -bly, black—began to seem coy and mannerist.
~
Two tiny vignettes:
One of my friends Pritchard in Virginia asking John Ashbery (in an altogether un-smirking and innocent way—Pritchard, too, un-bumptious and good-humouredly headlong as a any kid): “If you could be a fruit, what fruit would you be?” I thought I saw a tiny apoplectic flicker in Ashbery’s eyes, out to measure any possible animosity, but then, rather slowly, he replied: “Oh, a kiwi, I suppose.”
One of myself under a monstreux wooden head of a hangover one morning of a visit by Richard Howard to a Charles Wright workshop at Virginia. Howard admitting he loved to play the rôle of the “poetry impresario” (which I want’d to relate somehow to the red shoes he’d worn the night before at the reading, though, having just this morning read, too, some of the recent Smithsonian’s article on Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, complete with Plath-apparel notes at the party where they met, I’m now suspecting Howard of “a nod to Sylvia” in choice of hoof-wear.) Anyhow, Old Wooden-Head on this occasion rear’d up with a question (as instruct’d) for the redoubtable Mr. Howard: “I know you do countless translations, lots of editing, etc. etc. besides writing poems—um, how do you manage to be so profligate?” I knew the word wasn’t quite right the moment I saw it leave my mouth. Charles Wright wiggled, blanched, interject’d: “Uh, productive, you mean.” With the finality of a housemother. “Yeah,” chagrin’d, “I guess so.” And walking down the hall later with Sellari: “Tom, what does ‘profligate’ mean?” And not waiting for a reply: “I think it means you jerk off a lot, doesn’t it?”
~
Au travail, comrades.
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Toy Horn
Here’s one machination:
Carmen the doggo and I walking in the rain. A nuthatch yank-yanks (Roger Tory Peterson) up in the boughs of a great Norway spruce. A feeble yank-yank. Little in the rain. In the wan rain. Yank-yank like a tin horn in the rain. A toy horn. Pitoyable in the rain. (Words with toy hid within.) Pitiable. Pitiful. (What’s the difference?) Mr. Pitiful. (In the great gray concert hall a song’s a-borning and about to out. In the gray rain. A-borning. Like a feeble tin horn. Yank.) Otis Redding. (Nobody in the rain.) Going for the lusty sweat-provoked full-throat'd wail. Call me Mr. Pitiful. Mr. Pitiful in the blue-slate zoot suit and orange cravat yank-yanking in the rain. In the ever-lusting rain. Lustig. Carmen lustig in the rain. Otis Redding begging: Can I explain? (James Tate: “You are not meditating.”)
~
Here’s another machination:
Dye like Dog in string.
Dye, Dog, like a string.
Dog like a dy’d string.
String-dy’d like a Dog.
Like Dog in string dye.
~
--It’s quiet today.
--Yeah. Too quiet.
Carmen the doggo and I walking in the rain. A nuthatch yank-yanks (Roger Tory Peterson) up in the boughs of a great Norway spruce. A feeble yank-yank. Little in the rain. In the wan rain. Yank-yank like a tin horn in the rain. A toy horn. Pitoyable in the rain. (Words with toy hid within.) Pitiable. Pitiful. (What’s the difference?) Mr. Pitiful. (In the great gray concert hall a song’s a-borning and about to out. In the gray rain. A-borning. Like a feeble tin horn. Yank.) Otis Redding. (Nobody in the rain.) Going for the lusty sweat-provoked full-throat'd wail. Call me Mr. Pitiful. Mr. Pitiful in the blue-slate zoot suit and orange cravat yank-yanking in the rain. In the ever-lusting rain. Lustig. Carmen lustig in the rain. Otis Redding begging: Can I explain? (James Tate: “You are not meditating.”)
~
Here’s another machination:
Dye like Dog in string.
Dye, Dog, like a string.
Dog like a dy’d string.
String-dy’d like a Dog.
Like Dog in string dye.
~
--It’s quiet today.
--Yeah. Too quiet.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)