Off at the crack of dawn for Chicago, to talk to Spertus about Louis Zukofsky. Looks to be a good time, tho much of the academic community has breezed out of town; there're still be enough poets & old friends to make this a fine & dandy outing.
***
Tankard Cat, Christopher Middleton (Sheep Meadow, 2004)
[18/100]
Anthony Cronin subtitles his Beckett biography "the last modernist" (a phrase I savagely wanted for the LZ book), but of course neither LZ nor SB is the "last" in the modernist tradition. Me, I have a deep fondness for poets still working in the knotty, poly-referential, full-blown hi-octane modernist tradition. Not all of them are named "John," but John Matthias and John Peck are 2 of the best. And Christopher Middleton, who must have recently turned 80, just keeps getting better & better. The poems of Tankard Cat range from simple & pellucid to mid-strength dense, but they're all shot thru with the same musicality & sharpness of eye, nose, & palate, & informed by the same keen intelligence. Cosmopolitan – "world citizen" – poetry at its best.
Coming to the end of a biography is always a sad prospect, given that one is fairly confident of how the narrative will conclude. We each of us come into the world in much the same way, & while there are lots of different manners in which a life can conclude, conclusion itself is pretty much inevitable.
The last 20 pages or so of Anthony Cronin's Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist make melancholy reading, but Cronin does a delicate job of balancing between presenting Beckett's last days – mostly debilitated, in a spartan nursing home, most of the friends & companions of his youth & middle years dead – as the grim endgame of perhaps the majority of us in the post-industrial west – in short, a commonplace scenario, remarkable here only for the artistic identity of the protagonist – &, on the other hand, as a kind of blackly ironical playing-out of the plots of so many of Beckett's writings: Molloy, Malone Dies, the ashbin parents of Endgame, the buried Winnie of Happy Days.
Chicagolanders take note! I'll be in town next weekend to give a talk at the Spertus Institute of Jewish Studies (that's their fantastic new ultramodern building in the photo, at 620 S. Michigan Avenue).
The talk – "Louis Zukofsky: The Modernist Poet as Jew" – will take place at 2 pm on Sunday June 1st. I'm assured there'll be books for sale, and of course I'll be on hand to sign them (in case you want to destroy their resale value).
I'll be around for much of the Saturday beforehand, as well, so backchannel me if you'd like to arrange some sort of gettogether. Looking forward – oh how I'm looking forward – to getting out of the oppressive heat for a while.
***
Flying solo with the girls this Memorial Day, as J. is out of town. Aside from the unearthly hours at which preschoolers seem to wake up – haven't they ever heard of the snooze button? – it's been going pretty well so far. Nobody's sick, nobody's damaged themselves irreparably.
***
The Kleinzahler LRB review has begun to assume the aspect of a mere ugly memory, rather than an immediate anguish. It seems to have in part prompted Nicholas Manning (who wrote that fab, perspicacious review in Jacket) to reflect a bit on the ethos of book reviewing in general, & bad reviews in particular. His term for Kleinzahler's piece – a "knee-capping job" – seems about right to me. And Jonathan Jones over at Belgianwaffle puts his finger on how hilariously vague & inaccurate The K's version of Language Poetry is.
Hey, but we're the London Review & August Kleinzahler; we can't be bothered to get the equals signs into "L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E," or to get the capitalization right on "Poem beginning 'The,'" or even to spell "A" correctly. (Bitter, me? maybe a little...)
Dreary, clammy, rainy day – pouring down in buckets, sheets, all sorts of domestic animals. Poking at books: Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction (having just finished The Field of Cultural Production), Detlev Claussen's Theodor W. Adorno: One Last Genius (full, jam-pack'd, bursting with interesting sociological, historical connections, but absolutely, aridly devoid of any narrative drive), Beckett's Murphy (whose 1st line definitely makes the top ten of such things: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new."). Feeling myself a kind of Murphyan intertia, the desire to do nothing – or perhaps the desire simply not to do anything.
***
Familial pressure, now that P. (aet. 6) has begun to show a real aptitude for the violin (yesterday's grand expotition, thru sheeting thunderstorms, purgatorial traffic, to acquire her a new quarter-sized fiddle), to take up a string'd instrument – in anticipation of turn-of-the-last-century style domestic quartets. And the pressing question: viola or 'cello? Viola pros: lovely moody sound, portability, always seats in the local community orchestra, John Cale. 'Cello pros: lovely moody sound, getting to sit down (cf. incipient middle-age back problems). Suggestions, votes?
Pure Pagan: Seven Centuries of Greek Poems and Fragments, trans. Burton Raffel (Modern Library, 2004)
[17/100]
I seem to be on a classics/translations track lately. Nothing offensive, but very little memorable either about these version of classical Greek lyric. Indeed, there seems to be a strong scent of "sweepings," which is perhaps explained by Raffel's professed desire to avoid redoing poems more strikingly translated by Dudley Fitts, Guy Davenport, Mary Barnard – in other words, to try to find some decent leavings in an already pretty well-glean'd field. Drinking, death, bravery – not nearly enough sex. Guy D. contributes a scattered introduction, a fair specimen of his late, unfortunate essay style – all over the place but very occasionally to the point. Heart not in it.
I think I read chunks of Beowulf in high school; I'm sure I read a least a graphic novel adaptation of it (or "comic book," as we used to say), & as well John Gardner's novel Grendel, narrated from the monster's point of view (tho I remember nothing of that but the cover art). I recall learning about kennings & ring-givers, but – laboring under the disadvantage of being an American – I never had a go at the Old English itself, even in college, where I read the thing thru at some point (not for a course) in Burton Raffel's translation.
Seamus Heaney's version of the poem won prizes & praises, & I gather is now the text for the Norton Critical Edition. I'm sure he needs the money. Its sounds pretty Heaneyesque to me thruout, which moves me neither one way nor the other. I'd forgotten what a wonderful subject-jumper the Beowulf-poet is, how much trouble he has keeping his attention on the matter at hand. Guy Davenport did Old English with Tolkien at Oxford, which he would later recall in nightmares. Haven't seen the movie yet.
I keep telling myself, stiff-upper-lippishly. But that doesn't mean receiving a 3500-word panning – nay, spanking – nay, drubbing – from August Kleinzahler (now known as "stinky-feet Augie" to two small girls in my household) in the 22 May London Review of Books doesn't hurt. Man, it does.
(And no, I'm not giving you the link. Look it up your own bad self.)
Casting my mind back to the Kübler-Ross "5 Stages of Grief at a Bad Review," I suspect I'm somewhere on the "depression" side of the passage from "depression" to "acceptance," having passed thru the stages of "denial" (surely they sent him the wrong book?), "anger" (cf. Franz Wright, passim), & "bargaining" (but even a bad review in the LRB will surely sell some books to masochistic types?). But the sting is still too real & immediate for me to say much coherent about what's wrong with Kleinzahler's take on the book, and what might be right about it.
Suffice it to say, for those of you who might be taking up pens & cudgels on my behalf, that Kleinzahler's version of Language Poetry makes Tom Clark's (remember "Stalin as Linguist"?) look sophisticated, & that while he spends the better part of a paragraph excoriating my final appendix, he seems to have entirely misread it. Man, I have so many other nasty things I want to say that I've just gotta close now.
Expressions of sympathy – flowers, bonbons, bottles of booze – entirely welcome.
Google Alerts alerts me that August Kleinzahler has reviewed The Poem of a Life in the London Review of Books; but hey, I don't subscribe, so I can't access the piece online; & while I get the sense that this isn't a good review by any means – one anonymous commenter to Culture Industry calls it "mean-spirited" – I still wanna read it. Anybody able to backchannel me the text? (mw dot scroggins at gmail dot com) *** UPDATE: Many thanks, Jonathan. So now I've read it, & am smarting all over. More later. Ouch!
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...
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.
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.
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.
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 (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.
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.
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.
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 reviewsThe 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?
Astonishingly slumpish depression today – occasioned largely by a morning spent reading bureaucratese documents from the various administrative levels of Our Fair University about how to become fulfilled – er, how to go thru the procedures for promotion to Full professor. So far as I can tell, it's much less a matter of having written books & articles & essays & taught classes than it is of getting about 5 million documents in the right format & order in the right kind of ring binder. The very prospect of spending a couple of 40-hour weeks putting this paper & plastic simulacrum of myself together – & by the beginning of August, to boot! – is deeply disheartening.
And then, casting my eyes over one page of criteria, I see a requirement for "2 recent letters of evaluation of teaching," & think, Oh crap, I haven't had a colleague visit one of my ramshackle excuses for a class in half a decade or more; I gotta line up visits – in the next three meetings, before the semester is over!
But mostly, on a lovely spring day, I'm feeling kind of quiet, becalmed, bored, & directionless. *** Wishing Jeffrey Lee Pierce, Madeline Kahn, & Bob Creeley were still alive. *** "We can now understand in what precise way – and paradoxical as it may sound – Malevich's 'Black Square', as the seminal painting of modernism, is the true counterpoint to (or reversal of) 'L'origine [du monde]': with Courbet, we get the incestuous Thing itself which threatens to implode the Clearing, the Void in which (sublime) objects (can) appear; while with Malevich, we get its exact opposite, the matrix of sublimation at its most elementary, reduced to the bare markings of the distance between foreground and background, between a wholly 'abstract' object (square) and the Place that contains it. The 'abstraction' of modernist painting should therefore be viewed as a reaction to the overt presence of the ultimate 'concrete' object, the incestuous Thing, which turns it into a disgusting abject – that is to say, turns the sublime into an excremental excess."
–Slavoj Zizek, The Fragile Absolute – or, why is the christian legacy worth fighting for?
Can't really explain the hiatus in blogging – no heavy-duty reading series planning, literary foundation-laying, or newish child duties, like the estimable Josh Corey – not much productive reading gotten thru, certainly no writing to speak of (save for the first poem of a series that I'm still too superstitious to say much about, but have high hopes for). We're in the throes of having a new roof installed, after 6 or 7 years of running about with towels & buckets whenever it started to rain.
Roofing – I'm not sure I'd wish it upon an enemy. They spent a full day ripping off the old roof, sending clouds of grit & ick down thru the slanted tongue-&-groove ceilings of several rooms, in the process discovering acres rotted wood that needed replacing. (A rather unsettling experience to arrive home after having gone out to dinner – who wants to cook & eat among such racket? – and find a 4'x4' hole in the ceiling of the den – late afternoon sun streaming thru – & a highly competent fellow with a soul patch named Israel assuring us that it'd be closed before it was too dark.
The next day – Friday – they installed what they call "paper," but which I gather is actually some sort of watertight composite covering. You install it by nailing. Suffice it to say nobody spent much time around the house that day. This weekend it rained: it rained four 14 hours straight, buckets & poolfulls, which promptly came trickling thru the "paper" in about a dozen different spots.
All this, I've been assured, is a thing of the past, since they came Monday and painted the whole damn'd thing with hot tar & laid down another layer of something or another. All that's lacking now is installation of the tiles, which will give us perhaps another two days of relentless noise. And then there's a decent chance much of it'll get blown off come the hurricane season in a couple of months, & we can start over from scratch. *** I've been working my way slowly thru The Poem of a Life: my first real reading of the book in print. Mostly looking for errors – typos, misstatements, things that might get changed if I live long enough for a second edition to be needed (I fool myself – I'll be lucky if the things goes into a second printing). A number of helpful people have sent me corrections & suggestions, which I heartily welcome. I may, I fear, be entering the stage of post-partum depression with the book: that sense that the thing, like so many other things I do, has fallen off the edge of the world, & said world has nothing to say to me but "what have you done for me lately?" *** In the interstices of my days, I've been seriously ripping my CD collection onto a hard drive, discovering scores of disks I didn't know I owned, had perhaps listened to once or twice then shelved. Much listening these days to old P-Funk things, to the jangly alt-rock things of my youth, to vast blocks of Beethoven quartets. Don Share (himself a native Memphian) reminds me of one of my youthful enthusiasms, the twisted post-rockabilly of Tav Falco's Panther Burns, one of the strangest phenomena to crawl out of the Memphis region during my high school years. The fact that I only own a vinyl copy of Behind the Magnolia Curtain, which features not merely the godlike Alex Chilton but the Tate County, MS Drum Corps – the closing apocalyptic version of "Bourgeois Blues," which ends with Tav ranting the first lines of "Howl," is one of the grandest moments in recorded music – is at the moment my greatest spur to unpacking J.'s USB turntable & figuring out the software for converting LPs to MP3s.
Mostly tho I've been rediscovering the many faces of bassist/producers/impresario Bill Laswell: his work with John Zorn's Painkiller; the funky Material; his various dub remixes (Miles Davis & Bob Marley on heavy rotation) & collaborations with folks like Jah Wobble. A stroll thru a Boca thrift shop yielded surpringly enough a copy of the first Praxis album, a sort of metal-funk supergroup put together by Laswell that includes P-Funk veterans Bernie Worrell & Bootsy Collins & the pretentiously masked but undeniably virtuosic guitarist Buckethead. Here's a later version of Praxis, with Buckethead on guitar & Laswell himself on bass:
And here's Laswell really laying it down in a live performance of Zorn's 3-piece Painkiller outfit. (Turn down your speakers, ye of tender ears...):
Come to think of it, I haven't seen a picture of Laswell without headgear in 20 years or more, & it's a look I rather like. So a year hence, look for me in stocking cap. (I don't think I'll go for the pointy beard, tho.)
![L'origine [du monde]](http://www.escriva-art.com/courbet.jpg){kind=link}