Anthony Barnett: Poem About Music

A couple of things well worth reading: Peter O'Leary's beautifully researched & balanced essay on the making of the "'Objectivists' 1931" issue of Poetry magazine, on the Poetry Foundation's website: this will be the definitive account for some time to come. And for the strangely melancholy occasion that is Father's Day, an essay in The American Scholar by Jim McConkey – an old Cornell acquaintance of mine who carries on the EB White tradition of graceful essayism – on the uncertainties of fatherhood.

***

Poem About Music, Anthony Barnett (Burning Deck, 1974)

[25/100]

Altho I have a handful of his books, I know little about Anthony Barnett. He seems to have been instrumental in promoting – or introducing – Zukofsky's work to the French poets back in the day (the first page of Poem About Music, I'm convinced, is a nod to LZ); he published Prynne, & the collected poems of Veronica Forrest-Thomson; he's a jazz violin aficionado, & runs a jazz fiddle (& poetry) website which is one of the very few sites that Paul Zukofsky's record label site links to. Poem About Music is a long poem with very few words, sometimes only one word to a page; & many of those words aren't Barnett's but Charles Olson or Charles Montagu Doughty's. The Doughty, at least, gives long stretches of the poem – if one can speak of "long stretches" in a work this delicate & evanescent – a somewhat archaic, "literary" flavor. The whole thing reminds me strongly of early John Taggart or mid-period Theodore Enslin: the pursuit, at all cost, of the poem as literal music.

Lisa Jarnot: Night Scenes

Night Scenes, Lisa Jarnot (Flood Editions, 2008)

[24/100]

Ever notice how rare it is these dark days to come upon a book of really happy poems? I get a sense from Night Scenes that Lisa Jarnot is at a really good place in her life, & the poems that have resulted – some of them rhymed, some sonnets, a few oulipian procedural things, an "imitation" or two – make me really happy, make me smile. Her afterword – nodding to three of the best of her contemporaries, Elizabeth Willis, Lee Ann Brown, & Jennifer Moxley – makes it clear that Night Scenes is out to recapture some of that early joy & excitement in poetry that I for one sometimes feel I've lost. And it's a success.

***

Possibly related moments of recent poetic delight: P. (aet. 6), at J.'s instigation, reciting snatches of Stein's The World Is Round; Peter O'Leary reading – with relish – Ginsberg's autumnal ode to his sphincter.

Christopher Middleton: The Tenor on Horseback

The Tenor on Horseback, Christopher Middleton (Sheep Meadow, 2007)

[23/100]

Everything I said about CM the other day – particularly the part about his just getting better & better – still applies. Tenor is a somewhat less hefty collection than Tankard Cat – considerably shorter, many of the poems more ostensibly "slight" – a number of them almost "found" bits of dialogue, short observations, or anecdotes. But the poem-by-poem density of language & sharpness of thought is very high indeed. The title piece is of all things a meditation on theodicy, the problem of existence & of human suffering; it's an amazing performance, a perfect thing of its kind.

William Fuller: Watchword

Watchword, William Fuller (Flood Editions, 2006)

[22/100]

Damn, William Fuller is one weird, fascinating poet. My own tendency is towards the musical, the lyrical, whether in the complex, baroque musics of Bunting, the bare dissonances of Zukofsky, or the super-lush organ-tones of Ronald Johnson, Swinburne, or Milton. Fuller's poems are so dissonant that I want to call them not just alyrical, but anti-lyrical. Nonetheless, for all their syntactic dead ends, their strange & abrupt shifts of register, their abstractions resting cheek-by-jowl with their vivid images – or perhaps because of all those things – the poems of Watchword are as imperatively readable – that is, they force you to read, & read on, & read again – as anything I've opened in the last year. I find this stuff hard to describe: maybe imagine Thomas Traherne crossed with some 17th-century philosopher, crossed with a particularly eloquent writer of legal briefs – but with an extraordinarily loose sense of syntax, & a keen eye for the visible & invisible worlds.

back; chris cheek: The Church – The School – The Beer

So I'm back from a long week in God's Country, in heat somewhat hotter tho less humid than Florida's, tending to not particularly fun familiar business. As always when I'm staying in the old homeplace, I find myself pawing thru my Dad's shelves & taking things down (& back here). This time around, I found myself engrossed in CM Bowra's The Greek Experience & a crunky 1940s-era biography of Freud. Also reread Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time, which I must have gone thru a dozen times in childhood. It still reads well; funny, I didn't remember all the Christianity, which now slaps me across the face. And read thru a bunch of volumes of poetry, which I'll try to blog over the next few days.

***

The Church – The School – The Beer, chris cheek (Plantarchy, 2007)

[21/100]

The method by which these transcribed talk pieces were produced is almost too complex to go into. chris cheek spent an hour a day walking around downtown Norwich in a nice gray suit, talking into a hand-held CB radio transmitter while listening to various texts piped into his earphones; simultaneously, he was being filmed from across the street, where auditors could listen to his live transmissions & watch a video feed. (There's much more, which I won't even try to describe...) At any rate, the published transcriptions – no doubt a pale shadow of the several-ring media circus this project was – a wonderful mingling of overheard conversation, sociological speculations, immediate observations, & sheer rambling, are a wonderful read. No-one composes on his feet like chris cheek does. Is it "poetry"? Who the hell cares.

Tom Pickard: Ballad of Jamie Allan

Ballad of Jamie Allan, Tom Pickard (Flood Editions, 2007)

[20/100]

I've always cherished & respected Tom Pickard as the young chap who jump-started the elderly Basil Bunting's career, but I've always felt that there was an element of special pleading in the Baz's extravagant praise of Pickard's early work. Some of it, it's true, was a wonderful kind of drug-era updating of the Northern ballad tradition; a lot of it just didn't move me. The recent run of Flood Editions Pickard titles – a new & selected poems, The Dark Months of May, & now Ballad of Jamie Allan – have changed my mind: count me in with Bunting's shade as a full-fledged Pickard booster. Jamie Allan is really quite wonderful: the reconstruction of the life of an 18th-century Northumbrian piper, horse-thief, & general ne'er-do-well, told thru a collage of legal documents, newspaper reports, impressionistic 1st-person lyrics, and wonderful ballads. It's a mixture that constantly seems on the verge of falling apart into scrapbookery, but which miraculously hangs together, & rings in the mind afterwards.

Elizabeth Robinson: Apostrophe

So, back from Chicago this afternoon – a lovely time with old friends, a high degree of meat consumption, some very satisfying mandolin-strumming, & even some talk about poetry – just in time to leave tomorrow afternoon for Tennessee (ie, God's Country). There may be a weekish hiatus in the blog, not that anyone's on the edge of their seat.

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Apostrophe, Elizabeth Robinson (Apogee, 2006)

[19/100]

Robinson is prolific – I know I've read several of her books & chapbooks, there are at least a half-dozen I've never laid eyes on. I suppose for me one of the most compelling elements in the 2 or 3 generations of poets that have come in the wake of Language Poetry has been the attempt to reinvent the religious poem, the poem addressing the numinous. (Cf. the "Apex of the M" phenomenon, and maybe that's one of the big things at stake somehow in the celebrated Watten/Duncan dustup of 1978.) Robinson does it as compellingly as anyone I know. The poems of Apostrophe seem to breathe a kind of oblique faith, an openness to the divine less Christian or even Buddhist than simply, delicately gnostic. Few big gestures here – an unruffled surface of language chosen with almost obsessive care – but very lovely nonetheless.

Christopher Middleton: Tankard Cat

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.

endgames

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. 

Chicago!

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...)

Friday

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?

Burton Raffel: Pure Pagan

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.

Seamus Heaney: Beowulf

Beowulf, Seamus Heaney (FSG, 2000)

[16/100]

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.

"No such thing as bad publicity,"

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.

glutton for punishment

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!

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.
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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?

the glums; Zizek on Courbet & Malevich

[Kazimir Malevich, Black Square, 1915]

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?

mostly musical

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.)

Hello Kitty Darth Vader

How did I miss this the first time around?

philosophizing

I have a limited stock of anecdotes, so I've probably already told the one about my undergraduate philosophy professor, newly arrived in southwest Virginia & dating a local girl, introducing himself to her backcountry farmer father: "I'm a philosopher." To which the father responded – beautifully – "Ain't that somethin'? What er some o' yer sayins?" & thereafter Nick would tell folks that he was a "professor of philosophy." Or as Thoreau writes in Walden, "There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers."

My colleague Richard Shusterman has explored in some detail how between antiquity and modernity the conception of the philosopher shifts from one who leads a life of integrated thought & practice to one the conduct of whose life is incidental to the power of her or his thought. Thoreau expresses the ideal of the pre-Sokratic philosopher, or of Sokrates himself –

Yet it is admirable to profess because it was once admirable to live. To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust. It is to solve some of the problems of life, not only theoretically, but practically. The success of great scholars and thinkers is commonly a courtier-like success, not kingly, not manly. They make shift to live merely by conformity, practically as their fathers did, and are in no sense the progenitors of a nobler race of men.

– and along the way he manages to denigrate our own anemic generation of mere "scholars & thinkers."

It's I suppose even a further shift to go from Thoreau's armchair thinkers to contemporary professors of philosophy, many of whom spend their careers writing commentaries on earlier thinkers, never venturing to produce anything that might be mistaken for a "new" thought. I had a semi-savage argument with my father-in-law over this some years ago: He held that one who merely writes on earlier thinkers shouldn't be called a philosopher at all; I argued that commentary & assessment of previous systems of thought was one of the basic modes in which philosophy gets done. Was I playing devil's advocate, or was I simply besotted with Derrida on Rousseau, Deleuze on Spinoza, Cavell on Emerson?

At any rate, one of the lovely threads in the vast shaggy tapestry of Walter Kaufmann's Hegel book was a series of quotations from Hegel's latish letters addressing the issue of studying philosophy. I won't actually quote, but simply render the gist: Hegel argues, repeatedly, that if one truly studies philosophy – not just absorbing potted summaries (like Kaufmann & Peter Singer) but actually working one's way thru the primary texts with all the sweat, tears, & blood that sometimes requires – one isn't merely studying thought: one is actually doing thought, is repeating the process by which the world-soul becomes conscious of itself. Original, new thought is highly overrated, & far rarer than one supposes; almost as rare is the spectacle of a student of philosophy transforming herself, by submission to the great works of earlier philosophers, by thinking alongside and through them, from a student into a thinker herself.

Excuse me; now I'll get back to another reading of the Preface to the Phenomenology.
***
On the earbuds: John Zorn/Naked City, Torture Garden

holding pattern

A momentary lull, before the next round of assignments due & department meetings. I have vague hopes of trying to wrest my study into some sort of order, or to get down to actually writing a mid-length poetry project I have planned out – but I suspect the best I'll do is to reply to perhaps 2/3 of the score emails that need to be answered.
***
Finished Walter Kaufmann's Hegel: A Reinterpretation (Anchor, 1966). Not sure who I'd recommend this to – dedicated Hegelians won't need or want it, neophytes are better off with Peter Singer's OUP introduction – but I enjoyed it immensely in a rather perverse way. Kaufmann trawls thru the entire body of Hegel's career & works, providing one of the most perverse running commentaries I've ever encountered. It's almost like the t-shirt: "I don't have an attention problem – hey, look! a chicken!" He'll start talking about the Logic or the Preface to the Phenomenology, then tack off on a two-section tangent about how Royce misread Hegel, & how Wm: James's essay on Hegel is really an essay on Royce, then wander into a discussion of how poorly the various posthumous editions of something have been edited. An endless session of foreplay, it seems at times. Let's discuss the Encyclopedia: but before we can actually talk about the contents, we need to lay out the detailed contents pages of the 3 volumes; oh, look – Hegel changed some of the contents between editions, & he combined some sections – how fascinating! 20 pages later, the patient reader gets 3 pages, not summarizing, but pronouncing on the significance of the Encyclopedia.

Long discursuses on how Goethe didn't influence the Phenomenology, how Schopenhauer, Heidegger, Schleiermacher, & Kierkegaard got it wrong. And a lovely packet of letters & reminiscences at the end, including this jewel from Heinrich Heine:

One beautiful starry-skied evening, we two stood next to each other at a window, and I, a young man of twenty-two who had just eaten well and had good coffee, enthused about the stars and called them the abode of the blessed. But the master grumbled to himself: "The stars, hum! hum! the stars are only a gleaming leprosy in the sky." For God's sake, I shouted, then there is no happy locality up there to reward virtue after death? But he, staring at me with his pale eyes, said cuttingly: "So you want to get a tip for having nursed your sick mother and for not having poisoned your dear brother?" – Saying that, he looked around anxiously, but he immediately seemed reassured when he saw that it was only Heinrich Beer, who had approached to invite him to play whist...

***
On the earbuds: Gavin Bryars, Cadman Requiem; Art Ensemble of Chicago, The Third Decade; Praxis, Transmutation (Mutatis Mutandis)

groundhog

If this blog has retained any regular readers, they will no doubt have noticed the paucity of any sustained discussion of – well, anything serious lately. It's just been a really snowed-under moment of the academic year, a feeling of continually treading water merely to keep up with one's responsibilities. I can barely say I'm staying abreast of the reading for my own classes (tho I have managed to make dents in Mansfield Park and Edmund Gosse's Father and Son lately, both "pleasure" reads, & the sinuously weird divagations of Walter Kaufmann's big Hegel book keep me returning to that volume, rather like the Solitaire game on my iPod keeps distracting).
***
The last of this spring's thesis defenses is tomorrow afternoon – well, later today, that is. The defendant in question has opted to schedule for 1.00 pm on Good Friday, which I can only read as a severely inauspicious time-slot. One of the committee members should bring the nails, another the hammer; I'll pack the crown of thorns. (Or as Shane MacGowan says, "They're gonna crucify me / in those old cotton fields back home...")
***
Bob Arnold runs Longhouse Poetry, a bookshop & poetry press in Vermont; I only have one or two of their publications, but am impressed by their attention to detail & clean design. Arnold seems to be the primary torch-bearer of the Cid Corman legacy – he has a stack of Corman titles in print, & in fact has been at the helm of a sixth series of Origin, the groundbreaking poetry journal that Corman edited for so many years, & which was so instrumental in the careers of Olson, Zukofsky, Niedecker, Bronk, & others.

So I was pleased to see The Poem of a Life receiving sustained and generous attention in the 2008 edition of Arnold's "Woodburners We Recommend" (scroll down about halfway): the money phrase this time around? – "Leon Edel caliber scholarship."

And whoever writes copy for the Strand bookshop in Manhattan has called the book "compelling" and "very readable."

Jonathan Williams, 1929 – 2008

Education is a rhizomatic affair – or at least mine has been, a matter of following leads in all directions, running down stray references & following intriguing names. I can date one of my own most important introductions to 20th-century writing to around 1985 or '86, when Tom Gardner handed me his copy of Guy Davenport's The Geography of the Imagination, knowing I was interested in Pound, & said "I think you'll enjoy some of these essays." To say the least. I think I've followed up maybe two-thirds of the scores of leads Guy proffered in that collection: one of them, Louis Zukofsky, has proved personally & professionally absorbing; another, the poet, publisher, photographer, & all-round cultural cheerleader Jonathan Williams, turned out to be almost a fruitful as Davenport himself.

I was lucky, reading Guy's essay on this latter-day backwoods North Carolina Catullus, to be at Virginia Tech. One of the art professors there, Ray Kass, was a member of the foundation of the Jargon Society, Jonathan's exquisite publishing outfit (does one need to run thru the names he published?: Zukofsky, Olson, Ronald Johnson, Mina Loy, Lorine Niedecker, Paul Metcalf, among many others), & Jonathan was wont to make Blacksburg a stop on whatever promotional tour he was pursuing, whether he was showing slides he'd made of British poets' gravesites or curating shows of wacko-spiritualist-outsider artists. (He knew Howard Finster before R.E.M. & the Talking Heads had ever heard of him.) I was walking downtown one day when I almost ran into the tall figure I recognized from the jacket photo of Rues & Bluets/Blues & Roots. "You're Jonathan Williams," I said; "Why yes I am, young man," he replied, "And do you know where I can buy a cigar?" A year or two later my then girlfriend bought a copy of his Portrait Photographs, where I first saw the stunning portrait of Zukofsky that I sometimes imagined might one day appear on a book of mine. (That particular imagining came true – tho Shoemaker & Hoard, quite rightly, opted to put the rather benign full-face photo on the front cover of The Poem of a Life, reserving my own favorite – the mantis-like profile – for the back cover and frontispiece.)

I bought practically every Jargon book I could find, & have collected JW's own books for over two decades. (My copy of Get Hot or Get Out was purchased in a Memphis boutique called "Men of Leather," & was probably the only volume of poetry on display among the chaps, codpieces, & motorcycle boots.) His recent career-spanning Copper Canyon volume, Jubilant Thicket, is a treasury of well-wrought, funny, & sometimes spectacularly indecent poems, a book that just gets better & better as one reads & rereads.

I had known Jonathan was in declining health (tho his letters to me in re/ the LZ biography-in-progress were models of Williamsesque jauntiness), but I was surprised & deeply saddened to learn – from a comment by Don Share to, & then a last-minute revision of, Ron Silliman's post today on the essay collection Blackbird Dust – that Jonathan had died. It is of course a great loss to American poetry. It feels like a personal loss to me, a severing of the last link between my own experience of poetry & that generation of heroic post-war modernists (LZ, Olson, etc.). My father's generation is dying around me: Guy Davenport, Robert Creeley, & now Jonathan Williams.

Parnassus; August Kleinzahler: The Strange Hours Travelers Keep

It's been a bleary last few days. J's been out of town at the Shakespeare Association conference in Dallas, so I've been flying mostly solo with the girls, running thru the usual hit & miss of menu choices (palak paneer: Daphne yes, Pippa no; gumbo: D. no, P. yes; mac & cheese: both yes), trying to get to bed a trifle earlier than usual to anticipate the 7 AM wake-up visits, & in general struggling to keep the whole complex machinery of the household from falling apart. But now we're once more a foursome, & J & I can play divide & conquer when things get touchy.
***
My old friend Eric – ¡Hola, viejo! – reminds me that I ought to draw attention to the just-released 30th anniversary issue of Parnassus: Poetry in Review. Check out their website for a list of some of the goodies in this almost 700-page behemoth, including "Marrow-Bones and Turkish Delight," my own biggish career overview of Ronald Johnson's work – an essay I've been imagining my way thru for a decade or so now. Not that it turned out nearly as good as I'd like, but the beginning's pretty snappy:

While my own native greens-and-ham-hock southern cuisine is a hard sell to my friends with more sophisticated palates, my mother’s pecan pie recipe has always been well received. A simple concoction: in a single bottom piecrust (home-made or store-bought) you set out a layer of halved pecans, then pour over them an inch or so of beaten eggs and heavy corn syrup. In the oven, the pecans rise to the top to be crisped in the heat, while the syrup-egg mixture congeals into a hard gel. Crunchy pecans, flaky crust, and a center of unadulterated, primordial sugar: what’s not to love (if you aren’t a diabetic, that is)?

The poet Ronald Johnson (1935-1998), who worked as a chef and caterer and who made most of what little money writing brought him from his excellent cookbooks, offers a variation of the traditional southern pecan pie in The American Table (1984). (My own copy has reached the stage of broken-spined, gravy-spattered dilapidation that marks a personal classic in the genre.) Instead of “the usual bottled dark ‘Karo,’” Johnson’s pie is based on a syrup made of sugar, orange juice, and the thinly sliced peels of two oranges. It’s still a pecan pie, the saccharine nemesis of dieters everywhere, but a pecan pie with a sophisticated twist, the orange peel adding a sour, slightly bitter zest like the tang of remorse.

I go on to talk about poetry, by the way, not just cooking.
***
The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, August Kleinzahler (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003)

[9/100]

This one won the 2004 Griffin Prize, the big Canadian jackpot. And good for August K., I say. I've been reading him – never religiously, always with pleasure – for over 20 years now, since Guy Davenport told me (on a blurb to Storm Over Hackensack) that his poems were "structures as cunningly built as kites and canoes." I suppose some of my friends would toss Kleinzahler into whatever oubliette of their imagination corresponds to Ron Silliman's "school of quietude" – & it's true that K's working in a sturdy, straightforward idiom that's essentially similar to what WC Williams forged 85 years ago. But his ear for music is so strong, his diction is so aggressively varied, & he never lingers too much on himself: the world outside – its sights, noises, smells, songs, minute particulars – is so interesting that the last thing Kleinzahler wants to do is lamnet his own fuckups or celebrate his own sensitivity. A lot of travel poems here, & some of them it's true come perilously close to the "I'm lonely on a reading tour" subgenre. But Kleinzahler's scorn for the prima donna aesthete stance is so acidly evident that even a poem about the yearly shutting-down of an artists' colony – "The Art Farm" – reads like a savage indictment, without a single explicit word. A nature poet, but his nature's urban.

The Poem of a Life: Review

No sooner am I back in south Florida than I find myself in the midst of thesis-defense season – MFA theses, that is, the sort of documents that you can't really contest on the grounds of argumentation or density of citation, but have to find real live aesthetic critiques to make about. One down today (Monday), another scheduled for Wednesday, & I believe a couple (I'll have to check my datebook) coming up next week.

Our defenses are technically open affairs, which means that one or two friends and family members of the defendant show up and nod along with the proceedings; I sometimes hanker after the old-style European system, where one would have to defend in a big auditorium, in full academic regalia. None of this lounging around the seminar table and chatting friendly-like.
***
On a more depressing note, the benighted Florida legislature seems on the verge of castrating the Board of Governors, the body that runs the state university system, & reshaping it as a rump group with no more than "advisory" powers: in short, doing away with the only body in the state capital that has a clear idea of what a university actually is & opening the state universities to direct political control from Tallahassee. This will be a nightmare, something far worse than the periodic budget crises we suffer (we're in the midst of a doozy right now). If the legislators get their way (& I suspect they will) I predict a wholesale exodus of active research faculty from the state. I imagine a lot of folks are polishing up their vitas even as I write this.
***
While I was delighted that Marjorie Perloff reviewed The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (link to amazon.com on the right, if you haven't yet ordered your copy) in the TLS ("incisive") & that Dan Chiasson called it "terrific" in the New York Times Book Review, I'm majorly pleased to learn that Nicholas Manning, who edits the excellent Cosmopolitan Review and maintains the blog The Newer Metaphysicals, has written about the book – at length – in a forthcoming issue of John Tranter's Jacket.

It's not merely that Jacket allows reviewers a rather more expansive space in which to examine books, but that Manning – addressing an audience who already knows something about Zukofsky, and who doesn't need to have the salient facts of his career repeated to them – has paid close attention to the form, the rhetoric, & the procedures of the biography, & has made some really lovely points about them. It's a nice review, & I'd consider it nice even if it weren't as positive about the book as it is.

(The money word this time around: "extraordinary.")

back

I suppose a plurality of the folks who've moved to south Florida for the more-or-less constant warmth would consider us masochists, but we like to take in a little real winter once in a while. Got back yesterday from a rather frigid New York to be greeted by some of Florida's weirder weather – torrential rains & high winds last night, followed by a blissfully sunny (but rather humid) day today with the prospect of what they call a "cold front" moving in tomorrow.

The 4 of us squatted for 5 days in an apartment that could fit into the master bedroom closet of many of the macmansions down here, tripping over toys & books & small children at every turn. It would have been claustrophobic if it weren't New York, where there's something to do & somewhere to go all the time – & even then, it got pretty claustrophobic. The only bit of real culture – the one family outing to the Metropolitan Museum was J. & P., leaving me to take D. to the Children's Museum for the 3rd bloody time – was an evening at City Opera, where we caught Mark Morris's adaptation (reduction?) of Purcell's King Arthur. A splendidly silly early baroque musical really, with text by Dryden & really luminous music. (Michael Nyman has spun about 8 hours of music out of the "frost" scene, last time I counted.) Morris – he's more a dance guy than a conventional opera guy, I gather – opted to cut a few things: all the (spoken) dialogue, the characters, & the plot, leaving King Arthur as something of a dance revue, where dancers performed in whimsical modern costumes to beautifully performed Purcell "numbers." Great fun – for a while. But after a couple of acts, it began to feel like postmodernism lite, & I found myself hankering for the different kind of silliness that Dryden & Purcell themselves had cooked up – fairies & goblins & Saxons & all.

Stuck in an apartment full of an educated New Yorker's books, my own bag bulging with recent dense volumes of criticism I'm supposed to be reviewing, of course I ended up hauling down a copy of The Fellowship of the Ring & trawling thru it in something less than 4 days.

I snuck away one evening to The Strand, where I came away with the usual ragbag of slim volumes of poetry, volumes of criticism, & thises & thats. The real find was a recent translation of Flemish philosopher Arnold Geulincx's Ethics. Geulincx was a Cartesian & a close contemporary of Spinoza's, tho nowhere near as interesting as Zukofsky's "blessed" one. I suspect the only reason this rather weird tome got itself translated into English is the influence Geulincx had on Samuel Beckett, who found the philosopher's most famous quotations – Ita est, ergo ita sit ("it exists, therefore it is so") & Ubi nihil vales, ibi nihil velis (roughly, "Where you are worth nothing, there you should want nothing") – very congenial to his own grumpy pessimism. Cf. Murphy.

John Godfrey: Midnight on Your Left

Midnight on Your Left, John Godfrey (The Figures, 1988)

[8/100]

Zap! Pow! Biff! I need an occasional shaking, like this volume of John Godfrey's, to remind me that poetry isn't all the serious exploration of historical antinomian impulse, of subterranean currents of occluded counter-speech, of the ever-deferred wanderings of nomadic cultural impulse. Sometimes it's sloppy (but precise), urbane (and oh so urban, even gritty), super-sexy, funny, & just plain fun. Godfrey's got a great ear, evident especially in his short-lined lyrics, & he's got a keen (if sometimes scopophilic) eye & analytic mind. So who's to gainsay him if the poems of Midnight on Your Left spend more time in the region of the crotch than the rafters of philosophical analysis? At any rate, I'm chalking this one down for possible inclusion in the "postmodern eroticism" project that I might get around to one of these years. The flâneur as cruiser: the poetry of (carnal) knowledge.
***
Golly how time flies! It turns out, as the clock at the corner of the desktop rolled over from Thursday to Friday, that Culture Industry has been on the web for exactly 3 years now. Thanks for dropping by.

there & back; Susan Howe: Souls of the Labadie Tract

No sooner home than away again: or so one hopes. The tickets for "spring break" in NYC are ready for tomorrow, but P. abruptly manifested a 104-degree fever this afternoon, & is as limp as a rag doll, pale as Helena Bonham-Carter in her Sweeney Todd makeup. Alarming indeed. So travels might be modified, depending on what the pediatrician has to say in the morning.

A dreary department meeting this afternoon, working over the figures of what the regular bi-yearly state budget crisis will do to the university.
***
Dear E –
Oh yes, the times have changed, & to be called the "leading" anything makes one's beard go greyer on hearing. "Jokerman" may have been the last really first-rate Dylan song, & one of my favorite music videos of all time. If you scroll thru the "related" videos in the YouTube crawl beneath that one, you'll find Bobby Z performing it on Letterman with a black-clad bunch of punkish 20-somethings; they belt thru 2 or 3 verses, then the band vamps thru the rest of the song as Dylan futzes around looking for a harmonica in the effing right key.

I want my conversion kit, & soon. Let's get down to business, bay – by.

Dear N –
A post soon on "My Paul Auster Problem." Those last two – The Brooklyn Follies & Travels in the Scriptorium – make me despair of our boy. But there's a first-rate joke in the latter (actually clean) which makes it worth the (remaindered) admission.
***
Souls of the Labadie Tract, Susan Howe (New Directions, 2007)

[7/100]

Vintage Howe, in many ways: to my ears, less impressive than The Midnight but more moving than Pierce-Arrow. The method is of a piece with her earlier works, the evocation or reanimation of angular or marginalized voices form the past, whether the 18th-century Utopian Quietist (note to ND blurb-writer: not "Quietest") Labadists, or the insurance lawyer & executive (& sometime poet) Wallace Stevens. For Howe the truly obscured voices – tho I haven't lived with this book long enough to assert this with any assurance – are female: Stevens's wife Elsie (model for the Liberty dime), the women Labadists, Jonathan Edwards's wife Sarah Pierpont, a fragment of whose wedding dress the exceedingly fragmentary textual scraps of the final poem – "Fragment of the Wedding Dress of Sarah Pierpont Edwards" – circle around.

The proportion of prose to verse is lower than in Howe's earlier books, the paratexts framing the poetry proper less extensive & developed. In earlier writings such as the long poems collected in The Nonconformist's Memorial (my own favorite), the "explanatory" prose sections & the more oblique verse sections had been more closely interwoven, what might be regarded as the prosaic "frames" interrupting & even impinging upon the exceedingly dense "poetic" sections. In Souls, in contrast, the proses lay the scene for each poem – the Utopian community of the Labadie Tract, Wallace Stevens's home at 118 Westerly Terrace, Hartford – then retreat before the poems proper. It is as if Howe were drawing back from the generic cross-cutting of her earlier poems, reforming her poetics – like some 21st-century Puritan – into a purer, simpler, more nakedly scriptural generic mode.

post-conference; Nathaniel Mackey: Splay Anthem

[The panelists: L–R, Eric Murphy Selinger, Yr Humble Blogger, Peter O'Leary, Joel Bettridge]

Returned yesterday from the Louisville Conference on Literature & Culture since 1900, anxious a little to be back in south Florida's warmth, more than a little weary after 2 1/2 days of nonstop socializing, polite listening, & – well, partying: in short, conferencing. The Ronald Johnson panel organized by old friend & co-conspirator Eric Selinger went off well: Joel Bettridge presented an overview of the forthcoming Bettridge/Selinger-edited Ronald Johnson: Life and Works; Peter O'Leary read a goodly and riveting portion of his memoir of being mentored by Ron in the art of poetry; Eric gave a lovely account of his quarter-long experiment of guiding a class of students thru the implications of a two-line Johnson poem, something between collaborative "thick description" and Holmesian sleuthing; & I tossed out some piffle about anagrams. (Ask me why "love" is like a "vole" sometime.)

The picture above captures the panel in full glory: Peter in characteristic towering handsomeness; Joel doing a imitation of Lou Reed imitating Brad Pitt; Eric with an intimidating growth of Absalomian curls; me – er, I suppose every 4-piece ensemble needs the homely drummer to make the front men look better. Anyway, it was fun.

There was much more on offer: formal presentations by a range of smart & diverting people – Kristen Prevallet, Tom Orange, Robert Zamsky, Norman ("not that NF") Finkelstein, among many others – and a keynote address by Aldon Nielsen which featured video of Nathaniel Mackey accepting his National Book Award & Jacques Derrida visiting Nelson Mandela's cell & photos of Derrida dueting with Ornette Coleman. Deconstruction, whether adumbrated by M. Derrida or the fantastic African American poet Russell Atkins, may never be the same.

[The Poets: L-R, Nathaniel Mackey, Joseph Donohue, Tyrone Williams]

The main attraction poetry-wise was a reading by Nathaniel Mackey Friday afternoon: as usual, a riveting event, tho marred by the facts that a) Nate's presentational style is a very definitely low-key affair – ie, he does not project, nor does he try to, and b) for some reason, the auditorium did not have a microphone that could reliably pick up his voice, which would have been okay but that c) the damned heating system in the room kept cutting on and drowning out the low subtle bits for the folks in the back rows. But as usually for Mackey, an excellent reading.

Reprised in part at a Saturday night party at Alan Golding & Lisa Shapiro's, where Nate read another section from Bass Cathedral, among a cloud of other poets (too many to name). A great party, followed by a night of carousing in good company (which of course followed two other nights of the same). (Needless to say, I slept on the plane home, when I wasn't reading Paul Auster's – possibly sleep-inducing – The Brooklyn Follies.)

A definite recharging of the batteries, both intellectually & socially. I haven't been to a conference in some time where there was such a concentration of alt-poetry scholarship & talent. But Nate Mackey – that reminds me:
***
Splay Anthem, Nathaniel Mackey (New Directions, 2006)

[6/100]

I've been following the nomadic wanderings of Nathaniel Mackey's sequences "Mu" and Song of the Andoumboulou for a couple of decades now, thru his first three volumes of poetry – Eroding Witness, School of Udhra, & Whatsaid Serif – watching as they've circled around one another, coiled, braided, & finally, in this magnificent latest volume, virtually merged. I'll admit I've put off reading Splay Anthem for some months, for wholly selfish reasons: Mackey's simply so good, the dense and tasty music of his verse so entrancing, his play with pun & anagram so fertile, that whenever I spend time with one of his books I find myself irresistibly drawn to slavish (& mawkishly inferior) imitation. Like School of Udhra & Whatsaid Serif, much of the early part of Splay Anthem follows its speaker(s) thru a dreamlike, surreal, cross-cultural pilgrimage, always surprising, always lively. It's grand & lovely & consistently unexpected – rather like being astonished by what Don Cherry & Ed Blackwell will come up with next on the Mu albums that are one of "Mu"'s referents. The real surprise in Splay Anthem, however, is the horrid spiritual & geopolitical stasis of the final section, "Nub" – "the imperial, flailing republic of Nub the United States has become," Mackey writes – one of the most impressive & horrifying visions of George Bush's American one could imagine.

airborne

Leaving at the crack of dawn for the Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture Since 1900 – a mouthful that; a mark of my own age that I remember when it was merely the "Twentieth-Century Literature Conference" – to talk about Ronald Johnson and anagrams, & to spend some time in deep discussion with old friends & new. I quite frankly love conferences (except for MLA – everybody hates MLA): staying in a posh hotel, eating foods one wouldn't normally allow oneself, drinking & smoking way too much.

Best of all is the sense one sometimes gets of a kind of concentrated attention being paid to the things one cares about, one's "discipline." It happens in flashes in the department halls of Our Fair University, but all too rarely. Sadly enough, one finds one shifting from graduate school – a non-stop carnival of intellectual stimulation, of new books & ideas & movies & so forth (along with a great deal of angst, of course) – to a situation in which talking about poetry has become a job, & conversations with your colleagues seem to be about 50% bourgeoise housekeeping (the state of one's home, the progress of one's kids, which restaurants one should visit), 20% teaching "shop talk," 20% full-bore office politics & administrative kvetching, & a bare 10% ideas. At the best conferences, it's ideas most of the time.

"I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes," said Thoreau. But I've disregarded Walden & togged myself out in some new pants & couple of new sweaters, in eager anticipation of the sub-freezing weather predicted for points north. (My Chicago friends will snort derisively to learn that our current "cold front" has temperatures down to 66 at night.)

So here's to getting airborne!

Robert Duncan: Roots and Branches

[5/100]

Roots and Branches, Robert Duncan (1964; New Directions, 1967)

Looking back at my poems a couple years ago, I was astonished at how deeply my own modes & formal conceptions had been shaped by an early reading of Duncan's late work – from Bending the Bow forward, especially the sequence "Passages." Surprising then it's taken me so long to make my way – after many abortive starts, much reading here & there – completely thru Roots and Branches. So much that puts me – reticent, Protestant, skeptical, puritanical (?) – off: the operatic emotionalism, the wide-eyed mysticism, the persistent play with theosophical themes. All of which, to other eyes, could be seen as among the very glories of RD's poetry. I'm still divided, but find it impossible to gainsay the vatic power of the verse, the continual sense of a keen mind striving at questions on the very verge of knowledge, the exquisite modulations of a Romantic lyric voice almost unsurpassed in the 20th century.

submerged

Bouts of drenching rain the past few days – nice for the plants ("Florida, venereal soil" – Stevens) but nail-biting for us, as the roof's a sieve of yet-to-be-repaired holes. After a weekend of epic scribbling, I have a draft of this week's conference paper. Terrified to look at it & realize what a farrago of half-digested thises & thats it might be: a bit of Cratylus, leg of Saussure, dashes of Puttenham Dryden & Addison, smidgens of JH Prynne & RW Emerson – that sort of paper.

Now back to the "real" world, where quotidian responsibilities have piled up over my dizzy head: 31 chapters of 1 Samuel to read, stacks of student sonnets to address, mid-terms in a blue-book'd stack on the bar ("mark me, mark me!" they cry, like the marks in Blake's "London"), & off in the not-so-distant future, a half-dozen pieces I've committed to write over the next half-year. And I need to get a haircut in some interstice of time over the next three days, & buy some new clothes so that I don't slouch the corridors of conference-land in the same drab & awful uniform I've worn for the last decade.

(Unhelpful that we've been having the floor in the "spare" bedroom – formerly D.'s bedroom, now officially the playroom – redone, so that every corner of the upstairs is cramm'd with toys & furniture & stacks of children's reading material. My toes black with late night stubs.)

Is It Still Cool To Like Radiohead?

Who cares? Me, I'm stoked – yesterday I managed to get advance sale tickets to the first show of their 2008 tour, just up the road in West Palm Beach.

tweak

I replaced the snazzy Skia typeface of the blog with Hoefler Text, which is rather more traditionally "bookish," with all the serifs & little paradiddles that supposedly make a typeface more readable. I may go back to Skia, which I like very much.

Trimming Boswell

It was only at the last minute that I decided the Biography seminar ought to be actually reading Boswell, rather than just talking around him – a biography course without Boswell like a modern poetry course without Pound (oh yeah, like the one Wyatt Prunty taught when I was an undergrad). But golly, he's so long: the RW Chapman Oxford World's Classics I have clocks in a bit over 1500 pages. After much mousing around, I discovered that the only complete Boswell on the internet had only been scanned thru about 1773, with great chunks still to go.

So, with about a week & a half to spare before the beginning of the semester, I put in an order for the most readily available Penguin abridgment, edited by Christopher Hibbert. I have a constitutional antipathy to assigning abridged texts, but this one isn't bad: Hibbert trims the loquacious Scot down to about 350 pages, in large part by savagely cutting all of the letters Boswell includes. There's also a lively introduction & some (not enough) explanatory notes at the end.

Examining the two books side by side, I'm struck by the judiciousness of Hibbert's abridging: he's not just cutting pages & paragraphs, but even extraneous sentences within paragraphs. Makes for a much tighter read – even gives it something approaching biographical form.

But then again, we don't read Boswell for form, do we? We don't even really read him for story. After all, the Great Cham (or as I call him in my more bilious moments, the Fat Bastard) got born at the beginning, & is going to die at the end. If we want Johnson's life as a psychological progression, we read Walter Jackson Bate; if we want a judicious assessment of his literary career & importance, we read Robert DeMaria. We read Boswell, first & last, for the anecdotes & the conversation. And it pains me find some of my faves missing from Hibbert's Boswell. The abridged Boswell – any abridged Boswell – is like ordering your favorite stiff drink & finding the bartender's shorted you on the liquor.

Rae Armantrout: Next Life

[4/100]

Next Life, Rae Armantrout (Wesleyan UP, 2007)

Poems so spare & taut one is afraid at first glance they'll evaporate from the page. but then, as one finds oneself caught in the double imperative to read onward, to find out what comes next, and at the same time to read more & more slowly, so achingly slowly that the lines might as it were slow down & run backwards, the incredible strength & cunning of Armantrouts's work becomes evident: the unfailing keen eye for the quotidian detail, the steel architecture of dizzyingly precise syntax. The poems are all bones, sinews, & corded muscle, spare machines of observation & groping, musical thought.

talk angst

I'm off to a conference week after next – Louisville, in case you're interested; say hi, let's have a drink, etc. – & am going thru my usual "conference-in-12-days & I-haven't-written-the-paper" meltdown. Some people can talk from notes or an outline; some people, heroic adventurers, can improvise something worthwhile on the spot. Not me: I need a full-blown script. If I have a script, I can ad-lib a bit, I can insert the odd joke or dance move – but without a script, I'm dead meat.

I may have been scarified by a performance I witnessed many MLAs ago, when a guy my age, one of the most brilliant scholars of contemporary poetry I know, absolutely melted down into a puddle of embarrassed incoherence as he tried to improvise a talk from a handful of pages of notes. (Yes, Hugh Kenner I'm told regularly used to improvise his talks from notecards, but that falls in the "don't try this at home, kids" category.) Or I've been disgusted by big-name, big-bucks academic speakers who thought that they could bullshit their way thru their 40 minutes, take the check & go home, as if every disconnected observation that fell from their lips would somehow turn into gold before it hit our ears. So me, I stick to the script.

There're problems with the paper-delivery model of academic gatherings, I know. And I applaud meetings like the Shakespeare Association of America & the Modernist Studies Association, in which most of the meetings are gatherings to discuss papers that have already been shared among the participants – something more along the lines of what the hard scientists do, I believe. And I even have some admiration for the notion that Fritz Senn, the grand old man of Joyce criticism, has been promulgating for some time: that there's no point in hearing something we could read: instead, we need to see scholars thinking on their feet, improvising. Problem is, when I've heard Joyceans take up Senn's gauntlet & improvise their talks, most of the time the results are pretty incoherent, unimpressive.

I could probably fly up to Kentucky with the pages & pages of notes I have & talk thru something that my 4 auditors would find interesting, I guess. Or I could make a jackass of myself, as I tend to do whenever I don't have enough notes for my classes. Maybe I'm just feeling discouraged because of the general tepidness of my courses this semester. Getting tired of the sound of my own voice.

time wasters

So I got addicted to LibraryThing some months ago – addicted enough to be maybe halfway thru cataloging my entire book collection. It's a lovely website, & seemed to answer all my desires for an application that would help me sort out & assess all those shelves of (mostly unread) books. I was only mildly interested in its social applications – the fact that you can be "friends" with other LibraryThingers & exchange comments & queries & so forth.

But then that delightful madman Bill Keckler sucked me into GoodReads, which is something else altogether: Facebook or MySpace for book-heads. Here the emphasis is very heartily & heavily on the social aspects of bookreading & collecting. It's all fascinating, & great fun. I'm collecting "friends" like a south Florida yenta at the Swap Shop! Now maybe I should make a stab at actually reading some books...

Halsey & Mac Cormack: Fit to Print

[3/100]

Fit to Print, Alan Halsey & Karen Mac Cormack (Coach House / West House, 1998)

A transatlantic collaboration between an English (AH) & an Anglo-Canadian (KM) poet, Fit to Print takes the newspaper – its squished columns, its typos, its sometimes hilarious juxtapositions – as formal inspiration. All great fun, particularly in tracking Halsey & Mac Cormack's thefts & plunderings from the daily repository of pathos & inanity, tho the 2-columned form in which the book is set (appropriately enough) sometimes makes my eyes wuzz. I give the edge to Halsey's contributions, if only because I find his whimsy a trifle more congenial than what sometimes seems too earnest in Mac Cormack's pages, but I respect her keen eye for the economic & political implications of the Globe & Mail's quotidian cubist epic.

I begin to worry

Only four weeks or so in to the semester, & for some reason the classes are already showing signs of mid-semester fatigue. Me too, maybe. The Biography seminar last night – Johnson's life of Milton, Rambler #60, Idler #84 – left me weary: I had things to say (rarely at a loss for words, even if they don't happen to be relevant ones); the guy presenting on Johnson had lots to say; everybody else was in a thoughtful listening mode. Which I'm hard put to interpret: we haven't done the reading? we've done the reading but found it boring as hell? where's the beef?

But a bit of fun: visited a colleague's class as show 'n' tell display: Actual Living Poet – read his pomes & ask him questions about 'em. My fave the old chestnut, "Do you write with a pencil or a pen or on a word processor?" No, I write with my hearrrrt.