Custard

~

Bought (Friends of the Library):

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

Backwardsly completing what (for me) The Secondary Colors start’d. Here, obviously, Theroux amasses the factoids and citations on blue (both aesthete Walter Pater on Swiss lakes—“Horrid pots of blue paint,” and Fairfield Porter’s poem “A Painter Obsessed by Blue”—

No color isolates itself like blue.
If the lamp’s blue shadow equals the yellow
Shadow of the sky, in what way is one
Different from the other?

get quoted), yellow (color of “potato wart, old paper, chloroflavedo in plants, forbidding skies, dead leaves, xanthoderma, purulent conjunctivitis, dental plaque, gimp lace, foul curtains, infection and pus (‘yellow matter custard, dripping from a dead dog’s eye,’ sings John Lennon . . .”), and red (“the libido is all mixed up with red. . .”)

~

Sappho: A New Translation, by Mary Barnard, foreword by Dudley Fitts (University of California Press, 1958)

I hear that Andromeda—

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

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

Henry Rago—the finest and most ecumenical editor Poetry’s had:

Our concern in these pages is . . . with the kind of work that needs more room than we can usually manage. To see enough of it . . . all in one place, might give some sense not only of the broader intentions of each of these poets at this moment but also, within all the obvious limits, of some larger “work in progress”: energies, directions: the going thing, in its motion, here and now. One talks too much about literary “situations”; then one becomes skeptical about “situations” and permits himself no such talk at all. We have made the point here more than once that poems are made by poets, not by groups or power blocs or enterprising journalists. Correspondingly, the poets make poems: not slogans or programmes or “news”. But when enough poets are seen in one place, at one time, each minding his own business, some larger impressions just might be possible.

Which is canny stuff. Lest it seem Rago’s mocking Pound a mite egregiously with “news,” I should mention that earlier (meaning in the first short paragraph—this is the whole of the second, of three) he’d liken’d the issue to Pound’s “active anthology” notion of the magazine’s earliest days. I note that Hugh Kenner’s list’d as sole Contributing Editor under Rago.

~

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

McConkey’s a former teacher, one of the few who seem’d to comprehend and admire the reckless ways of youth, one of the few whose “soul” (not a word I normally use) seem’d genuinely moved—torment’d, aggrieved, made reckless—by literature. He writes a gentle prose, precise, humble, calm, never showy:

In late April of the year 1890, T., who had been undergoing a depression so severe that his most recent biographer believes he might have been nearing a breakdown, left his home in Moscow for the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin, a journey of over sixty-five hundred miles, or more than a quarter of our planet’s circumference. Knowing little about the expanse he would be traversing without friends or previously known companions, but imagining it could contain dangerous beasts and escaped convicts who were murderers, he purchased a knife (“useful also for salami,” he said) and a revolver.

T. being Chekhov.

~

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

~

To work.

Fauve

~

Received:

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

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

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

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

Paintings: Virginia Creighton, with commentary by Molly Hutton

Seems just the blink of a spider mite’s eye since I got my dander up bad-mouthing Dean Young’s poems in the last issue. (Those were the days, eh?) Not much up to the macho plaint of chewing up anything here, meaning, I suppose, there ain’t much vittle to the sausage, (as my Scoutmaster’d say). I do appreciate some of the localized little deposits of lexical bravurae in Brendan Galvin’s pieces about (and “by”) Roger Williams and William Blackstone:

A Proposal of Banishment

Roger Williams, 1669

Unless he be astray in his wits, no man wishes
for increase of wolves, which we have in plenty
to our confusion now, their cause somewhat
the Gadarene Revenge, whereby one sow
may farrow twice in any year, bearing
upward of two dozen. A whole kennel
of wolves, those gluttonous runnagadoes,
will fasten upon a single free-ranging hog
and reduce it to ribs and trotters ere
a farmer may fire a salute in the direction
of their banquet . . .

It continues, an acceptable piece of ventriloquism (though that “free-ranging” sounds a little yuppify’d, no?) (and, though I suspect Henry Gould’d know the specifics and could certify th’historickal accuracy better’n me), and ends in high demesne with

                       . . . where they cannot
fatten wolves or cause our hoodwinkt neighbors
East and North and West to sharpen their designation
of us from Island of Error to Island of Ordure.

~

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

~

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

~

Sous les pavés . . . to work.

Chief Plastic

~

Of note: the new Bookforum arrived with a snippet of a substantial manuscript “probably written during the late 1930s and early ’40s,” and abandoned, by Mark Rothko. To be publish’d by Yale University Press under the title, The Artist’s Reality: Philosophies of Art.

If one understands, or if one has the sensibility to live in, the particular kind of space to which a painting is committed, then he has obtained the most comprehensive state of the artist’s attitude toward reality. Space, therefore, is the chief plastic manifestation of the artist’s conception of reality. It is the most inclusive category of the artist’s statement and can very well be called the key to the meaning of the picture. It constitutes a statement of faith, an a priori unity, to which all of the plastic elements are in a state of subservience.

Writ long before the “pure space Rothkos” got paint’d, the ones in which color is depth. To which Rothko’s remarks about Egyptian wall painting (“undiluted example of plastic spatiality”) seems apt, and prescient:

. . .in looking at these paintings we feel the existence of these figures in space. The color that surrounds these monochromatic mythic figures has the quality of air—or of colored air, rather—in which these figures are bathed. In fact, it can best be described as a sort of mucous or jelly substance in which these figures are imbedded. In other words, space is here pictured not as a quality of something behind the figures but as a substance having tangible volume that approaches the frontal plane of the wall, together with the figures.

Think of that “figure” used here as comparable a large ragged Rothko rectangle, and there it is, late Rothko.

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

Stewing overnight in the proprietary “noodle,” in the skeptical brainpan: more Rothko words. Find myself in midst of above mechanickal snippiness thinking about how he says:

Modern art has manifested again this lack of unity as it would appear when carried to its logical conclusion. It has produced in Dadaism and surrealism a philosophy of skepticism—chiefly a plastic skepticism. Is not the investigation toward ultimate unity in itself worthless, these modern artists ask? Is it not a delusion commensurate with the thousand other illusory faiths that have futilely entertained mankind throughout its history? Hence we have an art evolved, which ironically, and with sadistic and masochistic whimsicality, goes about combining discrepant and antagonistic faiths. These are an expressed mockery of ultimate unity, and are the bitter fruits of skepticism.

Rothko, disregarding the rhetoric here, next insists that “we shall not moralize” about such works.

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

~

To the woods.

The Era

~

Of note: Joshua Corey’s report on the Zukofsky / 100 conference at Columbia. Stephen Rodefer’s polemical dash, “The Age in Its Cage,” in Prague Literary Review:

I feel like IKE, warning the post-McCarthy era of the military-industrial complex. Is there an academic-literary complex equivalent, or at least similar, to that? Why are we not more uneasy with this cozy arrangement? Because it’s bringing in money, jobs, new careers.

~

Received:

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

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

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

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

Some romantic froth never hurt anyone. The Dark Months of May, oddly enough, reminds me of another “narrative in pieces”—of a love ending: Donald Hall’s The Yellow Room. At least, the short poems in the beginning of the book do. Things like:

an old crab apple breathes new leaves
a striped towel dries in the wind
her voice on the phone

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

purr of a finch in flight
a pheasant croaks her name

lacework chorus of young Scots pine
auditions by a pool

Or:

I Spit on My Need When I Need You

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

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

dawn, break on her head
like a rotten egg

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

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

Pickard’s “sondages” resolve and intermix details out of the following broadly limn’d locales:

A derelict World War II air-raid shelter where a homeless man sleeps. Early twentieth-century bus station. Nineteenth-century tannery and lead works, medieval foundations. Travellers with heavy luggage. Some are getting out or passing through.

What’s at issue is akin to what’s at issue in my plaint about “history”-making above: how the present condemns the past to its presentness. Here’s “Sondage #5”, rather with th’appearance of a list, though most of the “sondages” are “in” prose:

a cleaner sweeps cigarette butts into a pan
a nervous Securicor guard carries a tin box of cash to his wagon
it is the last day of September 2002
a fireweed grows in the bus shelter roof gutter
an onion clock above the brewery shows 2.45
traffic moves freely round the roundabout
the Liverpool bus arrives
afternoon shadows fall across the bus station concourse
the diggers push barrow-loads of finger-sifted soil from the site
an ambulance siren ricks the air

The book’s design is impeccable, even daring (the stitch-thin, spindly, chalk-color’d traces on black stock, for half-title, title, and libretto-title pages is terrific). Ron Silliman, a man deeply suspicious of beauty, suggest’d here that the blurbs (Fanny Howe, Annie Lennox—one doesn’t read blurbs so much as register who wrote them, do one? That Eurythmic Annie Lennox?) lost legibility to the darkness of the back cover—if so, at least they allow one to “read” the tufts and hummocks of grass (reprised—with enlargement—from the front cover). It is, however, the first of all the Flood Editions books to feel like a too-luxuriant vessel for the quality of the mostly workmanlike, direct speech, of the poems. A little self-conscious in its finery—August Sander’s “Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance.”

~

To work.

Jars

~

The tiniest
Rampancy jars

A head
Unused to

Snapping back
At what

Concern turns
To dismay.

~

Lion-tooth’d
Greens vinegar’d

Up proper
Next to

A plate
Of peas

Blackeyed’s all
Get out.

~

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

~

Lambent light
Walks the

Torpor out—
The day

Manoeuvres itself
Into man’s

Works, and
Dispels recumbency.

~

Divergent is
So wildly

Done and
Inapplicable when

Mostly things
Come about

To degree
A similar.

~

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

~

Flimsy as
In ‘liable

To provoke
An abundancy

Of breakdowns’
Is stupid,

To put
It stupidly.

~

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

~

To work.

Proust Notes 4

~

Proust Notes 4

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

Le bonheur des méchants comme un torrent s’écoule . . .

drop it like a hot potato, and skedaddle Proustless.

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

It is only in the midst of a lengthy metaphor whose front-end’s dug out of Jean-Henri Fabre’s lively and amusing entomological memoirs that I see out of what “initiator,” and “predecessor,” such “gigantesque” metaphor-constructing hails: it’s Homeric, surely. “Just as . . . ,” follow’d by “so.” Proust:

And like the hymenopteron observed by Fabre, the burrowing wasp who, so that its young may have fresh meat to eat after its death, summons anatomy in aid of its cruelty and, after capturing a few weevils and spiders, proceeds with a marvellous knowledge and skill to pierce them in the nerve centre on which depends the movement of their legs but not their other life functions, in such a way that the paralysed insect near which it deposits its eggs provides the larvae, when they hatch, with prey that is docile, harmless, incapable of flight or resistance, but not in the least tainted, Françoise found, to serve her abiding desire to make the house intolerable to any other servant, ruses so clever and so merciless that many years later we learned that if we had eaten asparagus almost every day that summer, it was because their smell provoked in the poor kitchen-girl who was given the job of scraping them attacks of asthma so violent that she was obliged in the end to leave.

The sapience, or fear, or suspicion, leaking up, whilst I type, that poetry’s a kind of puny preoccupation, a little too “took” with itself whilst the novel sails off not even scornful, poetry being to inhibitedly “small” or “slight” for true scorn. I often thought the like reading Marguerite Young’s Harp Song for a Radical, her thirty-years in the attempt, unfinish’d Debs biography.

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

~ ~ ~

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

~

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

To work.

To Ampliate

~

Received:

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

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

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

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

Alis

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

Here’s another:

Oremoth

Stolen. Variegated. Pierced. Purple. Heckled.
The oven governs accomplices, the aisles of tall
Hats. He gave way to the impressions of habits,
Grave heritage, the reasons the doctor priestly
Put forth the original mask. From which the sky
And laughter alluded, left. No puncturing, no
Thing, no fits. Who knew the diamond chose the
Children. Mutterings. Left. To guide. To sleep.
Versus shade of plates, leanings on familiar and
Desiccant opinions. Privilege insinuated in house
Division. In stares. In polishing the offspring. One
Grammar. Faulty. Sugar. As a large flower.
Dripping. For no one. For the softened spoons.

One is more apt to find identifiable rhythms here than other possible cohesions—in typing, at the point of “One / Grammar. Faulty. Sugared. As a large flower . . .” my brainpan start’d knocking with echoes of “One nation / under God, / indivisible . . .” Other lingering identities: Clark Coolidge (who is evoked, the first “Lingo” is dedicated to him). The “New Sentence” (though not the Silliman version, which is mostly hodge-podged descriptive bits the eye stands behind more often than not)—Wagner works less to depict than to gather something like literal “sound bites” (I keep thinking machinist’s shavings, industrial minutiae detritus.) Which makes even the wide-angle glance of a line like “I tested dill in / Wyoming” stand out—“I can see that.”

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

~

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

~

Stumbling, incompletedly, to work.

~

Vaguely

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

Proust Notes 3

~

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

~

The breakfast ruminant and the too-tellingly metaphorickal. (Or, who’s manning the guns of the swift boats of metaphor?) Found in the Ann Arbor News in a report on Ralph Nader’s speech yesterday at the University of Michigan. Quoted is one Esha Krishnaswamy, co-coordinator of the Nader campaign at the University:

“To me the difference between Bush and Kerry is the difference between getting a piano dropped on you and getting slapped in the face. And who wants to get slapped in the face?” she said.

~

Proust Notes 3

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

~

What’s the relationship between Proust’s sense of the strikes-quick-and-unsparingly banality of photographic reproductions, and Benjamin’s lost aura of the mechanickally reproduced? (Or is the connection obvious, facile, contemptible?) Proust’s narrator on the grandmother’s insistence on “useful” gifts, meaning “aesthetically edifying”:

She would have liked me to have in my room photographs of the most beautiful monuments or landscapes. But at the moment of buying them, and even though the thing represented had an aesthetic value, she found that vulgarity and utility too quickly resumed their places in that mechanical mode of representation, the photograph. She would try to use cunning and, if not to eliminate commercial banality entirely, at least to reduce it, to substitute for the greater part of it more art, to introduce into it in a sense several ‘layers’ of art: instead of photographs of Chartres Cathedral, the Fountains of Saint-Cloud, or Mount Vesuvius, she would make inquiries of Swann as to whether some great painter had not depicted them, and preferred to give me photographs of Chartres Cathedral by Corot, of the Fountains of Saint-Cloud by Hubert Robert, of Mount Vesuvius by Turner, which made one degree of art more.

A sleek premonition of Roland Barthes’s zero degree? (Or is the connection obvious, facile, contemptible?) (Or, far-fetched, hare-brain’d, thick-lipped?)

~

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

~

Trying to figure out whence comes the feeling of immense consolation, a relief almost, in reading the lengths of the Proustian sentence. Clarity, a kind of chisel’d “cleanliness,” a movement not unlike that of running one’s fingertip along the grooves and narrows of a finely carved picture-frame whilst studying the landscape within? Tangible, rightly weight’d, containing (nearly always) worlds caught within worlds (the effect of metaphorical abandon?), room to sigh and stretch, the wildness, the out-flaring caught up, tuck’d in, a safe deposit, constant pressure inner and outer, global, spherical? An example:

And on one of the longest walks we took from Combray, there was a spot where the narrow road emerged suddenly on an immense plateau closed at the horizon by jagged forests above which rose only the delicate tip of the steeple of Saint-Hilaire, but so thin, so pink, that it seemed merely scratched on the sky by a fingernail which wanted to give this landscape, this exclusively natural picture, that little mark of art, that indication of human presence.

As Proust later describes the steeple itself, sentences with an “absence of vulgarity, of pretension, of meanness.” “An air of naturalness and an air of distinction.”

~

“Volleys of crows.”

~

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

~

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

~

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

~ ~ ~

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

~

The Lip

~

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

The breakfast ruminant’s breakfast is getting cold.

~

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

~

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

~

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

~

Re: Vološinov’s “stream of speech”—one of a number of uncaptured-for-the-moment Proust notes, the narrator Marcel on Aunt Léonie Octave, who for some reason “reminds me” of Robert Duncan, or stories thereof, or do I only see dear Léonie as a kind of Ur-blogger avant la letter? ’Zais pas:

In the next room, I would hear my aunt talking all alone in an undertone. She always talked rather softly because she thought there was something broken and floating in her head that she would have displaced by speaking too loudly, but she never remained for long, even alone, without saying something, because she believed it was beneficial to her throat and that if she prevented the blood from stopping there, she would reduce the frequency of the fits of breathlessness and the spasms from which she suffered; besides, in the absolute inertia in which she lived, she attributed to the least of her sensations an extraordinary importance, she endowed them with a motility that made it difficult for her to keep them to herself, and lacking a confidant to whom she could communicate them, she announced them to herself, in a perpetual monologue that was her only form of activity.

~

Harrumph.

~

Rubbish.

~

Grrr.

~

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

Upend’d

~

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

~

Bought:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In talk of “experimenting” with language:

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

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

~

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

~

To work.

Merest Wisp

~

Received:

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

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

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

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

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

~

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

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

~

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

~

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

~

Proust Notes 2

~

Proust Notes 2

Beckett pointing to the Proustian narrator’s sudden exalt’d understanding of “the necessity of art”:

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

~

Beckett, he who pares things down to nigh nothing, could’ve possibly gone in the “other direction,” exfoliate gigantism and awe-singed conflagrations and upswellings:

He is ushered into the library, because ex-Mme. Verdurin, at once the Norn and Victim of Harmonic Megrims, is enthroned in the midst of her guests, passionately absorbing Rino-Gomenol in the interest of her mucous membrane and suffering the most atrocious ecstasies of Stravinskian neuralgia.

”Norn?” “One of the female fates in Scandinavian mythology.” And, as usual with Beckett, fossicking about in the dictionaries’ll dig one in deeper: “The three principal Norns or Nornir are Urd, past time; Verdandi, present time; and Skulld, future time.”

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

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

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

~

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

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

And, earlier, Beckett on the plasticity and multiplicity of both Self and Name in Proust: following comment on Albertine’s migrating beauty-spot (akin to Emma Bovary’s eye-color switcheroos?):

Thus is extablished the pictorial multiplicity of Albertine that will duly evolve into a plastic and moral multiplicity, no longer a mere shifting superficies and an effect of the observer’s angle of approach . . . , but a multiplicity in depth, a turmoil of objective and immanent contradictions over which the subject has no control. Yet already he concludes, before the kaleidoscope of her expressions, before this face that from being all surface, smooth and waxed, passes to an almost fluid state of translucid gaiety, and from the chiseled polish of an opal to the feverish black-red congestion of a cyclamen, that the Name is an example of a barbarous society’s primitivism, and as conventionally inadequate as ‘Homer’ or ‘sea.’

~

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

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

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

~

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

~

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

~

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

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

~

Saperlipopette!

~

Proem

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

~

Gah.

Slake

~

Received:

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

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

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

Bank Six


If you climb on now

What penance

Requires



One girl

Down in the marsh



Not for that



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

But one man

Yes



Resolves the particulars

Later


~


Bank Seven


Tit for tat



Your border gives in



        Under the wet awning, a bomb



Or something

We think—



        We were animals



Friend

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

~

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

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

Thickets of broke-down speech-act-ifying, sense hinge-ing out (often) of syllabic isolation:

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

Coming out of the pristine slake and ease of Sims’s smaller, cleaner constructions, Timm’s poems here throw up a gnarly façade, a briar-patch out of which “one” wants a way “free.” Of primary interest (though here over-occurring?): the way expectations get thwart’d in the breakage—where one thinks “ex / pression” (line 6-7), one gets “ex / it”; where one thinks “obs / truct” (line 13-14), one gets “obs / tacle.” The device pushes at the reader, taunts, undercuts, forces th’attention. On the page, the pieces resemble David Antin’s “talks”—same “look” of phrasing without punctuation, a score for / of the ragged breath, but Timm’s pieces successfully thwart, too, attempts to “hear” them as speech:

some midst about      facing-time      abolition
of dry as ice cracked deckwise      this page
like all failure      steady, steady      a riggeder
rigor      curse of foot on snow      abhord sound as
though another sake      & so      some parley
pursuant to loss in rigorous allow      permit me
compounded in a tardy reacherhood      my fat
ass! a proof of      the meant failure      sorry
ful      i am aloud      some nearingness old old
story      that verb of light in its alter      that
crown bared & that      those      it is a sky be
hind      i at half welter the less      no telling
source      the wonder is it      is enough
      the caught in throat      did you say introit

Which does exhibit felicities of rhythm and “reacherhood” and snubs readerly integration and its ingratiating ways.

~

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

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

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

~

To woik.

Proust Notes 1

~

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

*

Proust Notes 1

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

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

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

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

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

Proust’s book: Contre Saint-Beuve.

Example of why—after picking up Forgetting Elena “because Nabokov—whose capacity for admiration of contemporaries measured in the half-ounce range?—blurb’d it,” I decided I would read anything and everything by Edmund White:

Proust . . . learned a method of presentation that falls midway between that of Dickens and that of Henry James. Dickens assigns his characters one or two memorable traits, sometimes highly comic, which they display each time they make an appearance; James, by contrast, is so quick to add nuances to every portrait that he ends up effacing them with excessive shading. . . . Dickens could draw with a firm bounding line but used so little shading he gave no sense of perspective. James was all shading and depth, but . . . nothing vigorous distinguished the profile of one character from another.

Story of how Proust—(more for the rentiers and writers file)—would have successive versions of the manuscript set by typesetters, and would then “crowd the margins with more and more new passages.”

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

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

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

The sewing machine heiress Winnaretta Singer.

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

*

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

~

To work.

Benign, or Malign

~

Bounty found through th’useful compilation at Attention Span: Peter Culley’s Hammertown (New Star Books, 2003). I’d known Culley’s Mosses from an Old Manse, a sometimes useful and generally amusing “index” or “scrapbook” blog (rather than “opinion” or “writing” blog—if I can make the distinction—the former consists mostly of pointers to material found elsewhere, whilst the latter points rather little and spins out its own benign, or malign, tale for the tribe . . . For some reason, I’ve start’d thinking of the “index” blog as “Canadian”—likely due to the excellent and hefty wood s lot.)

Alors, Hammertown, where that at?

Huge uproar lords it wide.
A tim’rous grader halts
before an overflowing ditch, its
big bad boy body slumped
as if thwarted at its gigging.
In the shed’s cartoon shadow
wee dinosaurs sport and romp, their urgent
          territorial beefs
strangely comforting somehow.
The missives of October
          tonk against the upstairs windows
like desperate and ancient flies . . .

. . . fuck ’em.
I tried to climb the glass mountain
          but I kept hitting
the glass ceiling, so
If you want to read
          “decay”
into this rocky heap
of nasty moss, this
eggy newspaper intrusion, that’s your
          quattrocento prerogativo—
but the pheasant remains,
nailed to the outhouse door, the hare
          limps trembling past the dozin’ cat, the sedges
and streams of my late youth
          cleared and flattened . . .

That’s nearly the whole of the first page of the book, of a five page poem call’d “Greetings from Hammertown.” Pump’d up, heady, and vacillant the diction, a “swing” natural line, cartoon industry meets heavy industry, economic “overhead” (“glass ceiling”) keeping us down on the farm that’s being dismantle’d under our feet. Hints of cat and mouse games with the destroyers: Burns’s “tim’rous” making even the grader a momentary mouse. Opposite page: two epigraphs: one out of Perec’s Life: A User’s Manual mentions a puzzle being “reassembled”: “a fishing port on Vancouver Island, a place called Hammertown.” The other is Philip Guston (Culley, according to cover copy, also writes art criticism):

In front of the wall, a sort of scrimmage is taking place—arms, discs, etc., the abstract forces are trying to pile themselves up into a permanent mount—BUT—a hammer looming in from the top-side is definitely hitting this structure, making it seem as if it is crumbling, collapsing.

Guston’s late “cartoonish” work, lots of rivets, patches, winding sheets, jalopies. The used-up and gawky. Here’s another patch of Culley, at random:

The drunken commodore,
whose only weekend chore
had been to choose between
the white and yellow moons
wuffles awake inside his cap
at the back of the boathouse,
outside and on the windows beads
the kind of Celtic mist
birds like, also
soaking it up
the furry flowers
under the lawnmower’s blade.

”Wuffles.” And even the rhyme, that first couplet, recalls some motor-mouth’d lovable two-dimensionality done up in primary colors, as do the “furry flowers.”

Hammertown, not unlike Gaul, is divided into three parts. The first twenty pages and the final (roughly) twenty-five pages, both writ in similar “predominantly normal syntax” mode—even if startlingly original (“No chit / will evict me / from this yeomanry.”)—nestle between them a section of six poems with the overall title of “Snake Eyes.” Here the method is the fragment—no capitals, no punctuation—consistently stack’d in seven line, double-spaced “piles”:

suave civvy street gorillas

freeze with coos bark dazzle eye

contacts split with menaces

dandy phantom shoofly cola

sweats alpha sugar dustcoats

can calendar specked though

elapse yield thus to tams trig



no i wouldn’t want to be

a kid about it

not if it meant heaping up

the days like then i did like

cottonballs on a shelf of

plexi cement plugs gainst

forlorn outbuildings nosing



it hangs its sheets in june

dismantles the island of

sleep in crisp suspensions dam-

eronian it hinges thirdstream

residue cabinessence

starched cool breeze hospital fold

refreshed palm a workbook warm

Which is “piles”—stanzas—three through five (out of thirteen) of the second poem in “Snake Eyes”: “A Book of Quiet Numbers.” (Others are: “A Poem for the English Poets,” “Woodland Suite,” “Homage to Quiz,” “Dedicated to You But You Weren’t Listening,” and “Reasons Why I Mumble.”) Interspersed throughout the section: small snapshots of (mostly) urban landscape. Presumably Hammertown? The pictures serve less to illustrate than to provide a lower-level text-break, the way “one” uses any mark—an asterisk, a tilde, a leaf—to mark breaks.

Do these rhythmic, syncopated, lexically jazz’d up bits descend out of Harryette Mullen’s Muse and Drudge? I claim’d not long back (here) that Ted Pearson’s terrific work in Songs Aside remind’d me of Mullen, too. I note with some “unh-hunh” verification-satisfaction that Culley does run a Pearson (“syntax of place divulges the outward”) line as epigraph to “House Is a Feeling”—which poem, briefly, owes less to Edgar A. Guest’s “It takes a heap o’ livin’ / To make a house a home . . .” than to Ronald Johnson’s Ark (“Oh monumentalising beam!”).

Nanaimo, where that at?

Need I “prefer” one kind of music to the other? Here, in Hammertown, I’d argue that the mode of the “Snake Eyes” section is the weaker of Culley’s styles. Oddly enough, I’d say it is not rhythmically consistent enough to allow a bigger, more rampant elasticity in—that is, a steadier beat’ll give in the stretching. Give way. Admittedly a far-fetch’d way to talk about the line. Stalk the line. The music of the first and third sections is various and encompassing by being just that, and, I should note, not entirely syntactically regular—grace-patches of local disfunktion “conjunctions” show up here and there—streetcorner hoodlums taunting the “regular” Joes.

~

Lovely temperate night of insect titter and click—insect chits—and traffic wash, a “natural” cloth wove now into the urban soundscape. A scent of mash’d crabapples lifts off the earth, “one’s” wee drunkard’s nose for the tinge and delivery of fermenting anything putting a name to it. It makes one want an oily little Calva or marc, something to drill a hot hole in one’s belly to excavate the soul, to route out the troubled congress of doubters who gather there, fibbing. Which is, as the Cretan, or Zeno, or Zorro, or somebody, knows, a fib. I find myself now thinking about Flip Wilson for no discernable reason.

~

Beckett, whom I could quote endlessly, makes me curious as to my own “reminiscential needs.”

“. . . essential significance from the shallow well of a cup’s inscrutable banality.”

~

To work.

~

Lunch, Again

~

So long, Donald Allen . . .
“Off to lunch with Frank again . . .”

~

Hied off today with a somewhat weather-beaten copy of Marc Saporta’s book in a box, Composition No. 1, (Simon and Schuster, 1963). Box in orange and black, hinged. The University of Chicago’s copy. Richard Howard translated, though I find no credit. $3.95. Box design: Janet Halverson. Instructions fill the four black O’s of the title, in discreet italic orange: “The pages of this book may be read in any order. The reader is requested to shuffle them like a deck of cards.” Which is repeat’d, inside left. And continues: “to cut, if he likes, with his left hand, as at a fortune-teller’s. The order the pages then assume will orient X’s fate.” New paragraph. “For time and the order of events control a man’s life more than the nature of such events . . .” In the lower half of the cover-verso is what seems an uncharacteristic sample page (rifling through the stack—about an inch and a half high—I found it). Whereas all th’other pages seem to consist of a few complete paragraphs, interspersed with dialogue, this one begins:

Buisson says: We’ll take care of you after school.
Cohen says: You’re a good guy, but it isn’t worth it.
Helga says: Get out.
Marianne says: That’s how you treat your wife!
Dagmar says: I could never forgive a lie.
Gisèle says: It doesn’t matter. You confess. And start over.
Lise says: I really care for Robert.
The Chaplain says: He died in a state of grace.
Lucas says: The envelope is in the middle drawer, with the confessions of all the tortured resistance fighters.
. . .

Sweet cheat that I am, I pull a page randomly out of the stack. There’s something a little Harlequinesque (gush-romantic) about the prose, is what my cheatin’ heart is saying. Aaarrgh. Fate intervenes in the form of my fingers pulling out the title page, and, shadowing it, another copy of the “instructions.” Which end: “Whether the story ends well or badly depends on the concatenation of circumstances. A life is composed of many elements. But the number of possible compositions is infinite.” (The title page does identify Howard as translator, and is the only page print’d on two sides, usual copyright claim is there, library rubber-stamp, and Cutter number: PQ2637 .A64C71 H8.

Second draw:

Dagmar stands in the light from the Christmas tree, under the glow of twenty tiny candles with wavering, interlacing flames.

In the halo of light, her hair, caught up in a chignon [I knew it.] that reveals the graceful neck and the white shoulders, has exactly the same color as the flames and the glittering garlands. [Err, this is not going so well.]

Her large eyes sparkle, her mouth is Christmas red [Yuck.] beneath the Grecian nose. The face itself, animated by a transport of exaltation, resembles a Christmas tree. [No, please, anything but that.]

The light plays on the delicate neck, marks the shadow of the chin, descends toward the collarbone, scarcely visible beneath the skin, and streams over the shoulders . . . [Unbearable. Eyes skipping ahead.]

. . . like one more fantastic toy. . . Even her legs instinctively assume a perfect attitude . . .

Calm, a little sad . . . she measures all the distance that separates people, in love and out of love.

She is presence and impulse. [Cowabunga!] All the lines of her body are vanishing lines. [Wha?]

. . .

She is nake . . .

Oh dear. “One” notes how even an “experimentalist’s” “good” “idea” can flail and drop under the weight of “bad” writing, and end up on that heap of history work’d over by the dung-beetles.

A dunce’s prize, though, in the form of a muss’d and sign’d 3 x 5 card stuck in the bottom of the box. Here I learn that R. B. Martin had the book first (due Feb 7 ’64, according to the rubber-stamp). Then, in rather rapid succession: M. Gilunas (Silunas?) (Mar 21 ’64), Evan M. Zuesse (Apr 1 ’64), Norma Ference (whose black pen ran out of ink—she completed her signature in green) (stamp’d half off the page: -r 2 ’65), J. Goldsmith (Nov 9 ’64), R. Arthur (Apr 16 ’65), Eugene Wildman (Feb 19 1966), Robert Silver (uncertain about that S) (Nov 8 1966), S. Hawkins (Nov 16 1966), Rachel Kahn (Apr 16 1969), S. Fischer (R. B.) (May 21 1969), R. Mareus (Aug 19 1969), the extremely tidy Karin Silverman (Jan 27 1970), A. Koleus (Mar 6 – 1970). Some of the names are accompany’d by addresses, some probably abbreviated offices (W-17), some apparently streets (5306 S. Greenwood).

~

Eugene Wildman, who he?

Not the author of the experimental novel, The Bonnyclabber, that’s George Chambers. Author of the experimental novel, Montezuma’s Ball. Editor of The Chicago Review Anthology of Concretism. More recently, short stories: The World of Glass.

~

Closed down the blinds of night reading Beckett’s Proust. The Beckett who writes: “Habit is the ballast that chains the dog to his vomit.” And at one point lays into “the Gideans” who “advocate a habit of living”:

They imply a hierarchy of habits, as though it were valid to speak of good habits and bad habits. An automatic adjustment of the human organism to the conditions of its existence has as little moral significance as the casting of a clout when May is or is not out; and the exhortation to cultivate a habit as little sense as an exhortation to cultivate a coryza.

~

A coryza, what that?

Coryza [L.; ad. Gr. ko’ruza running at the nose.] The running at the nose which constitutes or accompanies a cold in the head. Catarrh.

In “R. H.”’s Salerne’s Regim.:

These rheumes
If to the Breast they flow . . .
Th’ are call’d Catharre.
But running through the Nose
It’s call’d Corisa:
Others say the Pose.

~

And (Beckett) noting how a “future event cannot be focused, its implication cannot be seized, until it is definitely situated and a date assigned to it. . . . Whatever opinion we may be pleased to hold on the subject of death, we may be sure that it is meaningless and valueless. Death has not required us to keep a day free.”

~

A W. S. Merwin poem tosses itself up out of the landfill of my “mind”—something like “On the Anniversary of My Deathday”: “Every year you pass without my noticing . . .”

And the tiny bulldozer park’d between my “ears” rumbles forth to re-bury it under fresher, more pertinent garbage . . .

~

Biked with G. to school and head’d on in. “Running” late. To work.

~

Mon Copain Proust

~

Alors, mon copain, put that Silliman stack away. Ask me how my Benjamin reading is going if you want to see some manly tears. It’s always something. The little books submerging the big. And “distractedly” is a word akin to “distraught.”

I had a clobberingly pummelkopf “idear” today: to read “along” with Steve Evans’s Proust tutorial. A lointain tutor’d. The Lydia Davis translation in hand. Fifteen weeks in a semester goes into three thousand pages, oh.

Two hundred pages a week. And then I went to one of the Proust linkages and noted the Beckett Proust and thought I want’d to start there—following, natural progression backwards like a crawdad, out of B. S. Johnson, who

Idolized Beckett, and Beckett idolized Joyce and went crimping about the ornery planet in Joyce-sized shoes (with big Sam-sized feet). Idolization is so twentieth century. I ought to be more adamant in my choices, though what I love

About reading is how one book tips you up and into another (I think that’s how C. D. Wright put it), which is why I’m always tying up and then deciding to depart (I think that’s how Frank O’Hara put it). Inspecific, blue, and fleeting,

Like my eyes. I could read Proust and finally comprehend how the whole culms up to change its parts—as my “tutor” in French suggest’d’s the case with À la recherche du temps perdu. Each mention of “tutoring” puts me in the shoes

Of Tom Clark, who wrote “Drugs are a tuition, / and tuition is teaching, / but in French tuer is to kill . . .” and so delighted me with rampant possibles when I was a youngster and rock music was “out to get me.”

It didn’t, poetry got me “in its stead”—in its own staidly democratic way, and I liked that too, blurting out immiscibles in a crazy motherfucker way at “literary” events beholden to the creepy de-agonized neuter filial mush of late-bloomers

Or bobby-soxers. Oh. The other “on deck” reading project is The H. D. Book, by Robert Duncan, though there’s something unwieldy about a four-hundred page print-out of a .pdf file wobbling in a folder.

I’d probably lose some pages and then where’d I be? I remember Robert Morgan about a quarter of a c. ago telling me Duncan’s H. D. Book was of signal importance. He (Morgan) in the wilds of tracking each chapter and verse down in the “littles.”

That long before he show’d up on Oprah with a novel. Or, worse, got report’d bad-mouthing modernism for its deleterious effects on the “common reader” in Greensboro. How many common readers could be in Greensboro anyhow?

~

A Fever is
Climbing the trellis
Of my ribcage

To peek into
My verboten mouf.
In a manner

Inspecific to lust
I go hot
For its sit.

~

Where I’d be is back in Combray in a cambric shirt, about to eat a biscuit or do the drugs Tom Clark told me about . . . when old clubfoot sleep got me down in a full-Nelson and there I lay until, drugged over by morning’s soft dewlaps, I woke . . .

~

To work.

~