So buy my guitar, okay?

A bit of spring cleaning, including weeding out the string'd instrument collection (okay, partially so I can justify the next impulse guitar purchase). Nothin' special – an Epiphone (that's the downmarket brand of Gibson) Les Paul with the nifty tremolo arm that one doesn't encounter too often these days on Les Pauls. I bought it in a fit of Neil Young-worship, then realized that getting the Crazy Horse sound has less to do with having a guitar that looks like Neil's than it does with the single-coil pickups & just the whole amplifier/effects stack. But this one's way cool, & is going for a song: "fit & finish," as they say, are to my eyes comparable to the Gibsons. And mention Culture Industry if you win the auction & I'll give you a break on the shipping.
***
After many back-&-forth e-mails, my department chair has finally lined up external reviewers for the promotion process. Three real doozies, I must say – all I can do is fall on my knees like Wayne & Garth & moan, "I'm not worthy!" (Tagline from my days of obsessive Sir Walter Scott-reading: "Party on, Gurth! Party on, Wamba!")
***
Reading, desultorily. Malcolm Bowie on Lacan; Jacques Derrida on the Freud archive (which I thought I ought to have read before teaching the biography seminar, but have decided I didn't need to); Alex Ross's The Rest Is Noise, which makes me wonder why nobody writes middlebrow literary history anymore – it would be great fun to do for 20th-century poetry what he does for 20th-c. music; a half-dozen books of poetry; Dashiell Hammett, who might just be God; & Bourdieu, who is.
***
This is Culture Industry's 500th post. Golly. Long strange trip etc...

Radiohead; Sophocles/Tipton: Ajax

Okay, I'm feeling a bit rough today, the aftereffects of a few Newcastle Browns & standing on a concrete surface for two hours bopping along to the opening show of Radiohead's American In Rainbows tour last night. I can't say I've been to many arena rock concerts in the last decade or two – most of the acts I like these days are hard-pressed to fill a large club space or medium theater – but Radiohead's show reminded me of just how exhilarating a large-scale pop music show can be.

I'll admit to being a big Radiohead fan; the band seems to me to have filled the space in popular culture that the circa-1969 Beatles did: an outfit of really fine melodic sensibilities (read: "catchy pop songs"), but pushing the envelope with innovative arrangements, oblique approaches, & really hard-to-get-on-the-1st-few-listens songs – dragging a mass audience along with them to new places.

Nifty pictures & a complete set list here. If there're tickets available for a show in your neighborhood, by all means don't miss.
***
Ajax, Sophocles, trans. John Tipton (Flood Editions, 2008)

[15/100]

I haven't read my way thru the corpus of Greek tragedy, & Ajax was new to me before picking up John Tipton's energetic, precise new version of the play. Tipton's lodestars here are Christopher Logue's wonderful, anachronism-laden versions of the Iliad (tho Tipton has the advantage over Logue of actually knowing Greek), Louis & Celia Zukofsky's "homophonic" translation of Catullus, & (tho Tipton oddly doesn't mention it in his afterword) Zukofsky's five-word-per-line version of Plautus' Rudens ("A"-21). Tipton renders the Greek hexameters into six-word lines (except of course for the choruses, whose various meters he shifts into other word-counts): there's not the slightest hint of translatorese here, just a muscular, sensitive contemporary American English that packs an emotional impact I've only rarely encountered in translations of classical drama (one gets flashes of it in Pound's Sophocles versions). The story itself – which opens with Ajax, possessed of a divine madness, having slaughtered a herd of domestic animals, proceeds to his offing himself midway thru the play, then ends with a debate over his burial – is weird enough to be compelling in the most prosaic rendering. Tipton's late-modernist idiom makes it oddly magnificent.

new sticker

I got a bunch of these boss stickers here, & now they're going on the car, the computer, the guitars, the kids, wherever.

C'mon folks, let's get those library orders rolling! Seriously, tho – a plea specifically addressed to blogreaders who have access to academic or public libraries, inside or outwith of the US: Somehow The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky got passed over by the library-directed review magazines (Choice, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal, etc.), & it's not getting picked up by libraries the way it ought to be. Tell your librarian to buy the book! Request it at the front desk! Ask why they don't already have it!
***
Is it my imagination, or is my iBook running about 2/3 faster now that I cleaned – in a half-hour devoted to avoiding grading – something like 85 items off of the desktop?
***
Grading 2/3 done: only the hardest bits yet to go.
***
Go read Craig Bryant's boss new blog devoted to his read-thru of the new Oxford Thomas Middleton.

Samuel Menashe: New & Selected Poems

New and Selected Poems, Samuel Menashe, ed. Christopher Ricks (Library of America, 2005)

14/100]

Samuel Menashe's preface to this volume in the Library of America's "Poets Project," winner of the Poetry Foundation's "Neglected Masters Award," underscores what I've suspected for a long while: that SM's been getting a hell of a lot of mileage out of his own "neglected" status – this despite the fact that he's been well-published in England, & that Talisman House brought out a "new & selected" volume almost as compendious as this one no further back than 2000. Stop whining, I think: Blake had it a lot worse.

But Menashe's undeniably got an idiom all his own, a mode that I find more impressive in long stretches than in brief batches (pace Christopher Ricks's overclever introduction, which wants to show us that every Menashe lyric holds "eternity in a grain of sand"). Menashe's little poems aren't quite epigrams, nor do they have the gloomy gravitas of William Bronk's little poems; they certainly aren't haiku-like, nor do they have the slipshod, tossed-off likableness of many of Cid Corman's poemlets. They're uniformly clever, & sometimes – rather often – quite moving. Still, for micro-machines made out of words, give me

the
desire
of
towing

any day.
***
NB: My own copy of The Niche Narrows, the 2000 Talisman House new & selected Menashe, was picked up a summer or two ago at The Strand. It's inscribed to a prominent English critic-biographer, & contains about a half dozen poems added on the endpapers in Menashe's hand. Shame on you, J––– T–––, for tossing this one out! And shame on you, G––– H––– (prominent American poet), for discarding the copy of John Peck's Poems and Translations of Hi-Lo I found in Eugene, Oregon, in which Peck had entered a dozen or more tiny, meticulous corrections.

Novalis: Hymns to the Night

Hymns to the Night, Novalis (trans. Dick Higgins) (3rd ed., MacPherson & Co., 1988)

13/100]

Apart from Schlegel's fragments, a couple volumes of Hölderlin, & a few of Goethe's lyrics, German Romanticism is terra incognita to me. Who woulda thought that Dick Higgins, Fluxus artist & the guy behind Something Else Press, had translated Novalis's gloomy prose poetry & free verse set of death-meditations? The translations strike me as solid enough, if not particularly felicitous sometimes; Higgins translates into a kind of colorless contemporary English, rather than the ersatz "Romantic" diction one encounters way too often in this field, but he's no Richard Sieburth or Christopher Middleton. And my cold fish inability to buy into the Romantic excess of it all leaves me a bit chilly – tho I'm intrigued by some of Novalis's reworkings of mythological & Christian material.

Devin Johnston: Sources

Devin Johnston, Sources (Turtle Point Press, forthcoming)

[12/100]

Hey, this one's a set of uncorrected proofs – how often do you see that in the poetry world these days? – so don't look for the full color version until Turtle Point releases the book in September or so. I'm keen to see what the omnipresent Jeff Clark has done with the cover, but the interior design & typesetting is exquisite as usual. Johnston is of course one of the movers behind the always excellent Flood Editions, & the poems of Sources are almost a continuation of the aesthetics of Flood books: clean, lithe, spare, & quirky. "After Propertius" is tremendous. "The Pipe" amused me at first as a reprise of Mallarmé's prose poem "La Pipe," in which the accidental discovery of a pipe throws the Frenchman's imagination back to his London days – then I realized, from its "charred bowl and thatched screen," that DJ's is that kind of pipe, not the tobacco sort.

Patrick Pritchett: Antiphonal

In the interests of shameless self-promotion, & cuz I just can't quit rereading the thing & grinning, once again here's the link to yesterday's Michael Dirda Washington Post review of The Poem of a Life. Any reason your local library – public, academic, etc. – hasn't ordered this yet?
***
Antiphonal, Patrick Pritchett (Pressed Wafer chapbook, 2008)

[11/100]

An odd rush almost of nostalgia reading this nicely-produced, cleanly laid-out, & precisely but passionately written chapbook – a sense of the idioms & concerns of the Apex of the M crowd back in those "how the hell do we get out from under the shadow of the Language Poets?" days, that heady mixture of post-Black Mountain, post-Objectivist poetics, Jabès- & Derrida-inflected nrratives of loss & deferral, & Levinasian (or Samperian) reachings towards the numinous, the spiritual. My inner Zizek (or Hume) snorts: my inner Robert Duncan, enthralled by the cumulative music especially of the latter poems of Antiphonal, is delighted, just delighted, & moved.

Melanie Neilson: Natural Facts

Natural Facts, Melanie Neilson (Potes & Poets, 1996)

[10/100]

Way back in the day in Ithaca, MN was one of the poets of "my" generation that Ted Pearson kept telling me to read. So I read Civil Noir (Roof, 1991), & enjoyed it. Bits of Natural Facts (love the r&b resonance of that title, combined with the RW Emerson of Nature) are explicit sequel to Civil Noir; other bits make use of some of the same overtyping and manuscript presentation. A big sense of humor here, a willingness to indulge in some serious slapstick among all that disjunction. And not that kind of allusive, highbrow-political Benjamin-quoting that starts the chuckles among the brow-furrowing reading-audience crowd, either. Real guffaws. All senses in play here.

glums ii, & something much happier!

Much of yesterday was burned up in a university level promotion "workshop." A little background (consult last post if necessary): when one applies for promotion to a higher grade at Our Fair University, one's massive packet of materials ascends thru a number of bolges: a review at the department level; at the college level; at the university level; by the Provost; and then by the President himself. (By the way, just to make things the slightest bit more uneasy, every one of these reviews up to & including that of the Provost is technically merely "advisory": one is promoted, that is, at the will of the President – who of course is more than willing to take the Provost's word for it, happily.)

Anyway, this "workshop" consisted largely of a recap of the procedures that had been far more usefully spelled out at the college-level meeting last week, & an opportunity to get to see & hear from the university Promotion & Tenure committee, which consists of representatives from every college in Our Fair University. And they seem to be mature, level-headed folks, for the most part, all looking to make fair decisions. The one really unsettling moment of the proceedings, however, was when the representative from another college rather grandiloquently announced that he made a habit of never reading the lengthy self-evaluative narratives that candidates are supposed to produce: you know, those walk-thrus of one's work that serve the purpose precisely of explaining the value & relevance of your intellectual labor for members of other colleges who might have no idea of what you're doing. Oh my, I thought; I can't wait until I get on this committee, so I can judge the physicists & biochemical engineers without bothering to listen to their explanations of what they do.
***
On a far happier note: Michael Dirda reviews The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky in tomorrow's Washington Post Book World. This one's a dandy, paying attention (if perhaps too briefly) to both LZ's career & poetry & to the form & strategy of the biography itself. The money words this time around: "splendid"; "speed, clarity and zest"; "scholarly yet down to earth, full of good sense and useful information." Now who wouldn't want to buy that book?