organization

I've become aware over the past few months that I probably labor under a mild case of obsessive-compulsive disorder; not that I'm particularly concerned with cleanliness or germs, or even tidiness – but that I've deeply enamored of lists, of keeping my stuff ranged in orderly ranks. (The stuff, that is, that isn't festering in huge piles on the floor or on top of my desk.)

Lately I've been wondering about how I organize music on my iPod. Yes, I've still got a nice mid-range stereo system in the study, and there are various boomboxes around the house that I'll drop a CD into once in a while, but the iPod's become my primary music delivery device of late, & I haven't come close to filling the 80 gigs of space on the iPod Classic some holiday brought me year before last.

The built-in organizational devices on the iPod are very powerful: you can search by song title, by composer, by artist, and by album. But early on in my iPodding, I started constructing playlists which were primarily just dumping grounds for single artists. That rather goes against the intended logic of playlists, which I think are meant to be groups of disparate songs intended for various occasions & moods: dance tracks for this weekend's party, songs I like to listen to when I'm happy/down/bouncy, songs that feature great tabla playing, and so forth. Instead, I have like a "Radiohead" playlist which contains basically all of their albums in chronological order, plus a couple of bootlegged concerts.

This gets pretty unwieldy when I have a more or less comprehensive collection of a single artist – say, every single Richard Thompson album (plus all the Richard & Linda records, and a half-dozen live albums & a handful of "unauthorized" things) – what good is a playlist with 250-odd songs? With some artists of whom I own a truly embarassing number of albums, I end up making subsidiary playlists in order to get ahold of the sprawl: for John Zorn (760 songs total) I have subsidiary playlists of Naked City, Painkiller, Masada & Masada-related stuff, chamber music, etc.

And then there's the problem of someone like Bill Laswell, who's known as much for production & for collaborative work as for records under his own name. If I simply relied on the iPod's "artist" search, I wouldn't find Praxis, or Material, or Massacre, or Axiom, or Last Exit, or any number of his other projects. So I end up with a vast "Laswell" playlist that includes all of those monikers, & thru which I have to wade interminably in order to find a given thing.

It's really, in little, the same problem I'm increasingly having with my bookshelves, which have gone from micro-division (contemporary American poetry divided from 19th-century & colonial, English Welsh & Scottish poetry all having their own divisions, Language Poets separated out from SOQ, etc.) to broader alphabetical bunging. All my American poetry is now in one run, along with Canadian (so it's technically "North American" poetry, tho specifically Anglophone – Francophone Canadian goes in with the French). I'm on the point – it'll be a big & painful job – of incorporating all the British Isles stuff into a single run.

***

Obviously, I'm avoiding prepping courses & grading papers right now; the conference (Louisville) this weekend was great fun, & even intellectually enlivening. I'll say a few words about it soon, I think. Right now I've got to get back to putting the page numbers from the old Nightwood into the new, reset edition (damn you, New Directions – but yes, it's much more readable) so that my (of course scrupulously revised & updated) lecture notes make sense.

conference papers: a poetics (for academics only)

Fritz Senn, the grand deity of Joyce scholars, has been going on for years about how dreary & intellectually vacuous the typical literary studies conference is, where people get up & read prepared papers, & other people, who've listened to the paper & gotten it, or who've listened & haven't gotten it, or who've half-listened & half gotten it, or who've dozed thru it but don't like the presenters' shoes, get to attack them with questions. 

It's not like that in the hard sciences, where everybody's already read the paper & checked the equations & the time's devoted a real, substantive discussion. Senn proposes two solutions:

1) Literary scholars meet to discuss papers they've already read & thought about. A good model, & one that they've been pursuing in the "seminar"-style sessions at the Shakespeare Association forever, & which the Modernist Studies Association has been following for some time. Drawback: it means that you have to have your paper written well in advance of the conference (if you call that a drawback).

2) Scholars just get up & talk, maybe from brief notes, maybe just "cold," so that we're treated to the spectacle of the mind in action. Drawback: this can be pretty exhilarating if the scholar in question is Fritz Senn, or Hugh Kenner in his prime; but I've seen younger Joyce scholars trying this out, and I've seen exceedingly well-established academics who thought they could bluff their way thru 45 minutes of airspace, & they haven't been pretty sights.

But given the way things usually are at academic conferences, from the MLA on down to – well, the conference I'm off to later this week, how precisely do we go about preparing the 20-minute papers we typically deliver? Seems to me there are 3 primary models, the first two of which put one uncomfortably in mind of the Bed of Procrustes:

1) Scholar has biggish MS on hand (a book project, a dissertation chapter, an essay-in-progress), hacks 10-page bleeding chunk out of it and deftly or clumsily sutures up the loose ends. Potential awkwardnesses are obvious: all those moments of "at this point I've cut out a 15-page passage on Alain Badiou, which I'll summarize in 2 sentences, so keep it in mind" or "I'm skipping all the close readings here, so you'll just have to take my grand assertions on faith"; sometimes this works very handily, I'll admit – I spun off quite a few conference papers from books-in-progress over the years – but there're few things more irritating than sitting thru an absurdly truncated slice of an extended argument.

2) Scholar has 250-word abstract written for the conference, and frantically fills it out, zipping four new sentences between every sentence of the abstract, pasting in quotations where appropriate: the paint-by-numbers, or connect-the-dots school of paper-writing. Potential problem: sometimes you get a paint-by-number Sistine Chapel; sometimes you get the get the intellectual equivalent of the "Garfield" (the cat) movie (ie a good 30-second joke stretched out over 90 excruciating minutes).

3) Scholar sits down & thoughtfully constructs a 10-page argument, one that is neither foreshortened nor padded out – like Baby Bear's bed, it's just right for the space allotted; it has a beginning (preferably with a joke), a developmental section, and a clear-cut conclusion. The complex bits are tackled slowly, since even the brightest audience is apt to be tired or hung over in a conference setting, transitions are clearly telegraphed, and the overall level of discourse is just a notch down from what it would be on paper (since even the brightest audience etc.). Drawbacks & problems: none, aside from the fact that you've made your arguments so pellucidly that clever jerks in the audience can actually see the holes in them and call you on 'em during the Q&A.

While I've done a fair number of category (1) papers, & even confess to a few category (2)s, I'd like to think that most of the papers I've presented over the years fall into category (3). The conference paper, after all – & here I'm addressing some imaginary grad student – is not a published essay, nor is it a bloody slice of work in progress, to be admired for its potential & pardoned its rough edges. Rather, it's a very specific performance, a piece of writing that's meant to be read aloud & received & assessed in viva voce. Ignore this at your peril. 

Anyway, I've got to get back to writing – er, polishing – a conference paper.

pineapple (REVISED: grapefruit)

LATE REVISION: Harry Gilonis (polumetis) nudges me: wasn't the fruit in question a grapefruit, rather than a pineapple? And – note my bum-covering "sieve-like memory" reference below – I think he's probably right.* So, another go-round**:

***

Oh yes, the Louis Zukofsky / Whittaker Chambers / Pinchos Zukofsky / Pineapple Grapefruit story – since you so kindly asked. (Among those nudging me, I note, is Chambers's grandson...)

This by way of Guy Davenport, who had it verbatim from LZ. HOWEVER – as many of his interlocutors have probably noted over the years, Guy had a habit of embroidering anecdotes with repeated telling; and conversely, I have a lamentably sieve-like memory for these things. (Frankly, that's probably a good thing for a biographer, since it forces me to rely on documentary evidence.) So I can vouch for neither the accuracy nor the completeness of the story; but it goes something like this:

The young LZ, attending Columbia ca. 1920 or '21, tells his immigrant family that he's bringing his goyish buddy Whittaker Chambers over on an upcoming evening. While LZ & WC are en route from Morningside Heights, a scene worthy of Buster Keaton unfolds in the family tenement apartment. The new icebox, it turns out, makes the kitchen too small for a guest to sit down in; Pinchos Z., having learned something of the lore of hospitality, has purchased a pineapple grapefruit, but has nowhere to put it. The icebox is shoved into a closet. Chambers & LZ arrive; Pinchos – who, remember, has probably somewhat fewer words of English than I do of Yiddish – greets him enthusiastically, opens enigmatically the kitchen closet, and dramatically offers up the pineapple grapefruit: "Welcome – MR. SHEIM-BERG!!"

For what it's worth.

*I seem to have closely-after-the-visit notes from several conversations with Guy, detailing all of the juicy anecdotage (sorry, folks – we're dealing with still-living people, for the most part), but not from the conversation in which Pinchos & the fruit came up.

**Harry also points out that the word "like--?" plays a role in the anecdote, but this bit of 3rd-hand lore's gotten too complicated already.

Wm. Shaxpar's 25 random thinges

Even tho everyone's sick to death of the "25 random things" Facebook meme, here's the First Folio version of William Shakespeare's list, as it appears on Mike McPhaden's MySpace blog (hat tip to Don Share):

Wm. Shakespeare's Five and Twenty Random Things Abovt Me

1 Sometimes I Feele so trapp’d by iambic pentameter... Does that make me a Freake?

2 I haue been Knowne to cry at Bear-baiting.

3 I am not uery ticklish. I am Not. So prithee, do not euen try. Waste. Of. Time.

4 I cannot keep Lice, and know not why.

5 Sometimes I thinke plays are all Talke, Talke Talke, and wish for a cart-chase scene. I tried one in The Merry Wives, but it looked like Shitte, so I cut it. The men playing the horses were so Pissed at me.

6 I once threw vp on a man's head, from a high Windowe. I was so fvcking Sicke that Daye.

7 I hate to wear a Ruff, for I haue such a pleasing Necke.

8 As a player, I am painful-slow to learn my part. Once whilst playing Edward I, I used the prompter so ouermuch that a groundling yell’d ~Stop interrupting, Will! And it was my Dadde. (Kydding!)

9 Sometimes when I am Stvck for a rhyme, I new-mint a Worde because I jvst want to get the Damned script ovt the fvcking doore.

10 I play the Flute yet poorly, but I can make any crumhorn beg for Mercy.

11 When I am happy I call Anne my Kicky-wicky. When I am cross I call her “Olde Fun Killer Hag-Ass.”

12 I keepe my Stashe hidden in our seconde best bedde. Shhh. Don’t tell the Fyve-Oh.

13 The people that loue my Wordes the best are always the most disappointed vpon meeting me. Is thisse List ouer yet?

14 On the topic of dating, my daughter Susanna loues to remind me: ~Jvliet was only thirteen! And I remind her that i) she was Italian, an impulsive race ii), she was actually played by a middle-aged Eunuch named Ned, and iii) she died. That always shvts her right vp.

15 I deteste it when the Low-Comedians improuise the scenes I writ them… becavse they always make them so mvch fvnnier.

16 I haue, on occasion, thovght abovt hiring a Boy to fixe my Latin.

17 When I was sixe, my Goode-Friend Charles brovght to Schoole a wood-cut of his mother, qvite naked. After that we called him Charles Nudie-Mummy, whiche did make him Crye.

18 I take my eggs ouer-medium. If I get them O’er-Easily, I tell my Porter, ~You may thinke this is what I ordered, but it’s snot. I thinke that one is a real Slap-A-Th’Knee.

19 I work ovt my calues thrice weekly, usvally three pyramid sets of Calf-Rises whilst holding a flagon of Meade. I knowe I should stretch afterwards, but it Bores me so I do it not.

20 As a boy in my Bed, I would shriek i’the night that Witches wovld come to eat me. My Mother (bless her) wovld smooth my Hair and whispr ~ Be not afear’d, the Witches onlie eat the Jews.

21 Whitsuntide has become so commercial.

22 Nobody euer forgets where they were the moment they heard that Thomas Kyd died. I was shopping for codpieces in West Cheape. I came ovt of the Change-room and the proprietress was i’tears. I said ~What is it, now?~Kyd is dead. There was a melancholy qviet, and then she said ~And that Piece is a mite too small on ye.

23 Euery time we do the Taming of the Shrew, some pvnter wants his Money backe, because we don’t actually show a shrew getting tamed.

24 I do not vnderstand all the Fvss over Currants. Sure, they are both sweet and Small, but must they bee added to EUERY FVCKING MEAL these days? Yestermonth, found I currants in a Tarte of Spinnedge. I meane come on, People. Seriovsly.

25 When I am feeling Melancholic, I console myselfe with the Knowledge that, aboue all else, I will be remembered for my Musick.

Andrew Marvell: The Complete Poems

The Complete Poems, Andrew Marvell, ed. Elizabeth Story Donno (Penguin Classics, 1985)

Don't quite know how to blog, in a series that's usually fleeting comments on newish contemporary things, a "classic." Marvell pour les enfants: the bridge (to my ears) between the Metaphysicals & Dryden's couplet wit; co-worker with Milton, & author of a tremendous introductory poem to Paradise Lost, in which Marvell lavishly praises Milton's blank verse, even if he can't let go of rhyme himself; ardent Republican; later ardent suck-up (at least in print) to Charles II; author of a couple of endless topical satires, mostly incomprehensible to contemporary readers (Calvin Trillin to readers in 2350 CE); one of the greatest political poets in English, not least because of his painful grasp of the ambiguities of power. By far the greatest garden poet before Finlay.

A handy edition, this Penguin; quite as good, if not as complete, as the Oxford Authors; high points for no-nonsense, non-condescending annotations. And a dandy cover illustration of "King Charles II being presented with a Pineapple by Mr Rose the Royal Gardener" (Thomas Hewart). Remind me to tell you the one about Louis Zukofsky's father, Whittaker Chambers, and the pineapple.

[60/100]

David Shapiro: To An Idea

To An Idea: A Book of Poems, David Shapiro (Overlook, 1983)

I picked this up because I figured that anyone Jonathan Mayhew admires so extravagantly must have something going for him. So what kind of poet would JM admire?, I thought as I opened it up: intelligent, of course; with a deep sense of literary tradition, maybe a massive rooting in Mallarmé; unendingly fresh verbal gifts, surprising the reader in almost every line; & with a great sense of humor, because I don't see Jonathan stomaching large repeated doses of one of those long-range gloomy types. And guess what? That's exactly how Shapiro turns out to be. I've gotta spend more time with this 2nd-generation New York School stuff – it puts a spark in my step that's been sadly missing lately.

[59/100]

o'erwhelm'd

No, I'm not dead – I just feel that way, or that I'd be getting more rest if I were deceased. A houseful of sick people, including me, including the cat; job candidates flying in for the last few weeks, eating up the few days I like to devote to non-teaching work; two essays to write, & a conference paper staring me down like a fast-approaching train. Oh yes, & I chose this week to teach both Molloy & The Sound and the Fury. (NB: I am one of those dullards, alas, who has to reread a book before I can muster the courage to go in front of a class & talk about it, even if it's a book I've read a half-dozen times. So heavy reading.)

Soldiering on. Books to be added to the "100 poem-books" thread pile up in my notebooks.

Last night perhaps the coldest on record in South Florida. Yes, that's a heat wave to folks in Ithaca or South Bend, but it's got me huddling under the comforters & quilts & turning up the heat.

too much fun to resist...

among the English (Zukofsky in Sussex)

[Harry Gilonis listening, Jeff Twitchell-Waas speaking]

The first thing the conference-organizer-doctoral-candidate Richard Parker said to me when he met me in Gatwick last Thursday was (in a touching London accent) "We've got some proper English weather for you." Yeah, as in pissing with rain, bone-crampingly cold, & breathtakingly windy. What I saw of Brighton thru weather-slitted eyes was lovely tho. And the University of Sussex's Centre for Modernist Studies's seminar & performance on & of Louis Zukofsky's "A"-24 the next day was an invigorating, exciting event – one of those intellectual & emotional rechargings I seem to need more & more often as dotage approaches.

First things first, however: while "The Meeting House" at Sussex is a lovely name for the ecumenical chapel on campus, there was very little redolent of 18th-century Quakerism in the very, very unlovely, very mod-early-70s-University-architecture of the building itself; the thing's a bit of a cross between a concrete beehive and a canted brick liberty hat, set off with a rather pitiful little moat, all of three or four inches deep. There was however, to my delight, a rather snazzy original oil of the dissenter Lodowicke Muggleton – you might recognize him from EP Thompson's Witness Against the Beast – hanging forlornly on the otherwise anonymous wall. 

The papers were uniformly interesting; Tim Woods putting "A"-24 & Cid Corman into conjunction; Jeff Hilson speculating on how to read the thing (ending with a lovely account of facing down the score while managing his 8-month-old's spitup bout); Jeff Twitchell-Waas providing all manner of connections, & Harry Gilonis suggesting the work has more in common with Cage than Handel (or so I take him to imply).

And then the performance(s). The evening began with some fiddling, Sarah-Jane Barnes playing Gerhard Münch's arrangement of Clément Janequin's "Chant des Oiseaux" (Pound's Canto 75), taking us all back to the lawn of St Elizabeths in 1954, where Paul Z. played the piece for the old poet. I'd never heard the Chant before (& even if I could read music, doubt if I could make much of the microscopically shrunken score in the New Directions Cantos); but it was an enchanting piece, all bird-song and pizzicati. Then she rendered what "A"-19 calls "the Chaconne," i.e. the chaconne from Bach's Partita in D Minor (#2) – a piece which famously provides the framework for "A"-13. She played beautifully, tho I confess I'd listened to the movement twice on the iPod on the flight over, in PZ's own rendering, & therefore found myself wincing at the perhaps over-free vibrato.

[Francesca Beasley, Ken Edwards, Sean Bonney, Daniel Kane]

"A"-24 was rendered by a crack team of poets: Ken Edwards, publisher of Reality Street Editions, read the "Drama"; Francesca Beasley, resplendent in silver lamé and brightly verdant hair, read "Story"; Sean Bonney read "Poem"; and Daniel Kane lent the performance a welcome New York accent reading "Thought." Ken was the anchor of the performance, dead on time thruout and wonderfully expressive, & the readers did a lovely job of modulating their voices to the instructions of the texts as to volume & dynamics. Sean was the man to watch, however, rocking back & forth alternately to the rhythms of the harpsichord and the other readers, & delivering his lines in a sonorous Hullensian accent (did Andrew Marvell, MP Hull, speak like that? I like to think so...).

Kerry Yong played the Händel harpsichord pieces beautifully, & my only complaint about the performance – if I were to have a complaint, which I don't – is that he was perhaps paying too much attention to the musical score alone, rather than the interaction of the music & the voices. So that while the readers remained "together" pretty much perfectly thruout, the harpsichord had an unfortunate tendency to run away from them, thundering on thru the piece at hand, & a couple of times coming to a finish a page & a half before the voices had caught up with him. [Update: in a comment below, Ken points out that Kerry shouldn't be blamed, as it was literally impossible to hear the voices from the harpsichord.]

But I'm not complaining. It was an exhilarating evening, tho seemingly a bit exhausting for everyone involved. The kind of evening that calls for a more or less epic pub-crawl. (Epic for me, that is – for the natives, it seems that this sort of thing is pretty much par for the course.) Lots of good talk – with Harry G., Jeff T-W., Peter Nicholls (founder of the Centre for Modernist Studies), Sean B., the poet Richard Makin, & many others; lots more stout & bitter. Things wound up back at the faculty apartment where I was being generously accomodated (many thanks, SC) with rounds of single-malt Scotch & big bowls of a carbonara-ish pasta, somewhere in the neighborhood of 4 AM.

Did I sleep on the flight back the next day? Your guess...

***

Update: More (& much better) pictures on Jeff Hilson's blog, here.

Sussex!; Finlay!; new poems

I have only in the last day or so gotten really excited about heading to the U. of Sussex later this week for their Centre for Modernist Studies' Friday symposium on Zukofsky's "A"-24. Imagine – a gathering held on a university campus in something called "The Quiet Room" of a building called "The Meeting House." Around here, our buildings have picturesque names like "General Classroom South" and "Social Sciences." (Donors take note: I suspect it's not too expensive to get one's name attached to these – er – graceful structures: they might as well have "Your Name Here" posted by their doors.)

***

One of the presenters Friday will be Harry Gilonis, who I believe is the picture editor at Reaktion Books. I thought of him as the last of the holiday presents came in thru the transom, courtesy of Amazon.com: John Dixon Hunt's beautifully-produced, career-crowning study of Ian Hamilton Finlay, Nature Over Again: The Garden Art of Ian Hamilton Finlay (Reaktion Books, 2008). This is a volume that I'm having difficulty not devouring at a gulp, even tho I've so many things pressing on my immediate attention. I was delighted, however, to find my own little piece on Finlay from Jacket (and before that, from FlashPoint) mentioned in Hunt's endnotes, however fleetingly. I wonder if this old essay might not be my single most-cited bit of writing, for better or worse.

***

Zach Barocas, recovering from his move back to Brooklyn, has an update to the always-excellent Cultural Society website, including bundles of new writing by various worthies: Robert Archambeau, Wes Benson, Joseph Bradshaw, Derrick Buisch, Cary Conover, Jon Curley, Norman Finkelstein, Michael Heller, Matthew Henriksen, Drew Kunz, Peter O'Leary, Gregory Ott, Adam Fleming Petty, John Phillips, Pam Rehm, Chuck Stebelton, Mathias Svalina, Shannon Tharp, & Jason Stumpf.

And two newish things by yr. humble blogger, "Dawn, New & Improved" and "Vasa Leviathan." Go to Cultural Society & click on "texts," if you're so moved.

Chicago Review: Rodefer!

Fans (oh yes, count me as one) of the ever-enthralling Stephen Rodefer would do well to grab a copy of the latest Chicago Review, which has an enormous feature on Rodefer – lots of stuff, including an interview with Rodefer, critical essays on his work by Keston Sutherland and David Georgi, two essays and four poems by Rodefer himself, a memoir by Fanny Howe and a checklist.

And there's more: poems by Rae Armantrout, Carl Phillips, Ange Mlinko, Endi Hartigan, John Tipton, Joanna Klink, Alice Notley, Paul Éluard (translated by Robert Huddleston) and Elizabeth Arnold.

And my own review of John Matthias's latest, strong collection, Kedging: New Poems.

***

A reminder to Britons, & those who might be drifting thru southern England late next week, that the place to be for the Zukofskynalia this year (that's 23 January, Zukofsky's birthday – 105 if you're counting) is the University of Sussex, where their Centre for Modernist Studies'll be celebrating the event with a performance – by Sean Bonney, Ken Edwards, Daniel Kane and Francesca Beasley, with Kerry Yong on harpsichord – of "A"-24. There'll also be talks by Harry Gilonis, Jeff Hilson, the indispensible Jeff Twitchell-Waas, and Tim Woods. 

And by yr. humble blogger, as well. Someone tell me what the weather's like there; should I bring socks?

grrrl bands – of course – rock

[In counterpoint to Josh's fab-o image of last week.]

Belacqua, c'est moi

Off this afternoon for a weekend at lovely Sanibel Island, on the Gulf coast – white sand, lashings of seashells, birds' cries & the surf in one's ears all night.

In the grip of an unaccountable – but all too familiar – acedia. Too torpid to put pen to paper or listlessly turn a book's pages, save for the scholarly porn of James Knowlson's Beckett life, which trundles from one somatically manifested neurosis to the next. Will our hero make it thru the chapter? How can he live to write all those books he hasn't gotten to yet?

biography, transatlantic

Having 15 minutes on my hands before I had to pick up the girls, I dropped into our local used book emporium & found two jewels on the $5 shelf – Juliet Barker's Wordsworth: A Life (Ecco, 2005) & Charles Nicholl's The Lodger Shakespeare: His Life on Silver Street (2008). They exemplify the weird things that happen when biographies of British worthies cross the Atlantic, I guess. 

The title page of Nicholl's volume reads as follows: "CHARLES NICHOLL | The Lodger | His Life on Silver Street | Viking." Something missing there, no? Turns out the book was published in the UK in 2007 by Allen Lane as The Lodger: Shakespeare on Silver Street. When they got around to resetting the title page for the US release, they fixed the subtitle but not the title itself. Would that they'd been willing to spend the money for the UK endpapers, which the List of Illustrations tells me show "The 'Agas' map of London, c. 1561." The US endpapers are quite blank.

The Barker, on the other hand, is an entirely different piscine kettle. The book seemed a bit slim for a biography of the long-lived laureate, until I realized that the paper was thin enough to account for some 548 closely printed pages. But what's missing? Alas, the entire scholarly apparatus: no references, no notes, no bibliography. Then I consulted the copyright page, where I read: "First published in the United Kingdom by Viking 2000. | This abridged edition published in Penguin Books 2001. | First American edition 2005." According to James Fenton's New York Times review, the original British hardcover clocked in at almost 1000 pages, so the abridgment involves a good deal more than just the 134 original pages of notes and bibliography.

Two comments: First off, it's entirely reprehensible for Ecco to run glowing review quotations from the TLS, the Financial Times, the Daily Telegraph, & a buttload of other British papers on the back of Barker's book without telling the reader that they refer to a substantially different edition of the text. Sorry. Just isn't right. Cheating. Secondly: Reading a biography without references is like having sex without protection; you may be just fine, but in the end you really don't know what you're getting into.

calendar

Sextidi, 16 Nivôse 217 – Nivôse, the "snowy month." (Not around here, hélas.) Day 16 of Nivôse, the day of Silex, or flint. Fabre d'Églantine: "In Nivôse earth is sealed and usually covered with snow. At this time earth is resting and there are no herbal agriculture products to characterize this month. We rather took names of animal and mineral substances of agricultural use." Set a flinty face to the world, to tomorrow's classes, to the stream of job candidates who begin arriving this Friday (Decadi, the 20th), on the day devoted to Van, or – how appropriately – the winnowing basket.

John Taggart: There Are Birds

There Are Birds, John Taggart (Flood Editions, 2008)

I sought out John Taggart on my own, pulled off I-81 on one of those drives between Blacksburg & Ithaca way back when, looked him up in the book at a filling station, & paid the proverbial ephebe's 1st visit. A mentor? Something like that, tho as Ron Johnson said of Zukofsky, "I don't think he liked my poetry much." That was okay. Of all the Taggart books I've accumulated over the years, Loop (Sun & Moon, 1991) stands out, if only because it's biggest – slice that one anywhere & you'll hit a fantastic poem. But There Are Birds is frankly his greatest achievement yet, a set of 5 substantial poems and few outriding "cadenzas." There're elegies: one for Zukofsky, one for Creeley, one for Robert Quine – who would've thought that John, the bop-saturated jazz fan, would also admire the guy who comes close to topping my pantheon of guitar heroes? "Refrains for Robert Quine," a painfully touching elegy that never once directly alludes to the circumstances of Quine's death – in grief over the death of his beloved wife, he took an intentional overdose of heroin – brings me to tears.

The centerpiece is the long and very strange  "Unveiling/Marianne Moore," a poem of place (south central rural Pennsylvania) that is simultaneously an erotic fantasy (delicate, disturbing) about two red-haired virgins, Moore & Emily Dickinson, an homage to the Bartrams & other "nature boys," a horticultural poem, and much more.

If John Adams & Philip Glass evolved their own minimalist techniques into a kind of late Romanticism, Taggart has taken the austere repetitiousness of Peace on Earth and "The Rothko Chapel Poem" & has stripped it down to an angular, 2nd Vienna School lyricism. If he used to be Robert Fripp, now he's Fred Frith.

[58/100]

random bay area notes

Back from MLA; no kudos to US Airways, which now charges $2 a pop for bottled water on their flights, along with all the other indignities one suffers flying coach. Best moment of the conference (most of which was spent interviewing): the redoubtable Daphne Gottlieb, signing my copy of Kissing Dead Girls at the oh-so-stuffy book expo, looking distinctly uncomfortable in her killer bangs & dreads among all the university presses, asks: "So, how's your MLA going?" Me: "Not so fun. Interviewing. Sitting across a table and soaking up lots of young people's angst." DG: "What's not to love about that?"

Meanwhile, my heart leaps up at the sight of not one but two copies of The Poem of a Life on display behind her. You see, now that Soft Skull (her publisher) has been incorporated into the new Counterpoint (which has absorbed Shoemaker & Hoard, publisher of the LZ biography), Daphne Gottlieb & I have more or less the same publisher. Small world.

***

The marathon reading was marathonish as usual. Only the straight-'n'-narrowistas keep to the 2-minute limit, so by the time I snuck out of the vast space of the Yerba Buena Arts auditorium some 2 1/2 hours into the thing, we'd only gotten I think to the O's or P's. Walter Lew didn't cut anybody's tie off this year, but he spent so long footering around with a hotel bedsheet & a portable laptop projector (which didn't work) that he managed to clock in around 12 minutes.

***

Didn't get out enough to savor the varieties of the "MLA gaze." You know how it works: someone walks towards you, glances at your face, drops their eyes to your name tag, & if it doesn't register high enough in their own academic pecking order, proceeds to let their gaze wander around the room in search of bigger game. How to say "hello" while looking around for someone more important to say "hello" to.

en route; Zukofsky online

I'd intended a meaty post assessing the big Pogues box set that turned up under the tree yesterday, but I'm catching a flight for San Francisco & the dreaded MLA at the crack of dawn & I still have a few paragraphs to write on my paper, so any real blogging will have to wait until after the academic circus is over & I'm back. I will leave MLA-blogging to those who actually have the luxury of attending papers & panels. My warmest wishes & profoundest sympathies to the job-seekers out there.

***

In the interim, some new spots of interest on the net:

•It's been already heralded in several venues, but I'd be remiss not to point folks to the wonderful PennSound Louis Zukofsky page, which seems to make available every recorded reading of the thin one. Some lovely extras: the famous Grand Piano performance of "A"-24, Charles Bernstein reading "A Foin Lass Bodders," & Guy Davenport reading the Cats in both Latin & English.

•Jeff Twitchell-Waas's extraordinary resource site for Zukofsky readers & scholars, "Z-Site," has moved to here. (Yes, the old URL has a redirect page; I'm just amazed at how quickly these things change – the address I printed in the notes to The Poem of a Life has already been rendered obsolete.)

•Steven Fama has quietly and craftily started a blog, devoted mostly it seems to reviewery. Latest post is his list of top 20 poetry books of the year. Some good stuff there, things that had passed my radar.

***

In my briefcase: Rae Armantrout, Versed; John Taggart, There Are Birds; Peter Gizzi, Periplum and Other Poems; whatever else I can't leave behind at the last minute.

more Beckett

Some time ago I wrote about Grove Press's sumptuous four-volume collected Beckett, the "Grove Centenary Edition" released two years ago to coincide with SB's 100th birthday. I've been enjoying it, savoring it, for almost two years now – and I've almost read my way thru every last page.

Of course, the Centenary Edition wasn't all that Grove did to celebrate their author's 100th birthday. Mr UPS brought this around the other day: Beckett's most famous play, Waiting for Godot, in a handsome, unjacketed hardcover whose dimensions are uniform with those of the GCE and whose design is close enough (without being identical) to make it clear that this volume is also part of the centenary celebrations. Best of all, this is a bilingual edition, with the original French text on the left page & Beckett's English translation on the right; no more flipping from one's English text to one's tattered old Minuit paperback.

The cynic in me, I fear, smells marketing here. Why only Godot? Why not Godot and Endgame, Beckett's other dramatic masterpiece originally written in French? (And for that matter, since Beckett's English-t0-French translations are as much creative acts as his French-to-English efforts, why not throw in Happy Days and Krapp's Last Tape?) There's certainly space here: the 2006 Grove bilingual Waiting for / En attendant Godot clocks in at 357 pages; that in comparison to only 509 pages in the complete Dramatic Works of the GCE.

I guess it's a matter, in terms of typography, of feast or famine. In the GCE, Waiting for Godot occupies only 87 pages, but they're rather packed pages: fairly narrow margins, stage directions pressed right up against speeches, speakers' names hived off into the left margin. Turning to the 2006 Godot (where the English text takes up 174 pages) is like going from the cramped Oxford World's Classics edition of the King James Bible to a big, airy presentation volume. Margins are vast; speakers' names (in all caps) rest atop speeches; stage directions have paragraphs all to themselves. Really, I can't help feeling, there's too much space. Even as I revel Ronald Johnsonianly or Susan Howeishly in the tracts of white space, I gotta suspect that Grove is stretching things out to make a substantial volume of this.

And as welcome as the bilingual edition is, I'm also a trifle exasperated with what I've called (in reference to the GCE) the "'black box' nature of the textual editing." The 2006 Godot has a teasing introduction by Beckett scholar & textual editor S. E. Gontarski that makes much of the text of this new issue, without ever really showing what's been changed. Gontarski goes over the play's textual history from the first Grove edition of 1954; he spends a good deal of time excoriating Faber & Faber for publishing a "mutilated" version of the play in 1956, and reprinting that text (censored at the behest of the Lord Chamberlain) in 1986, even tho they had access to a 1965 Grove edition that Beckett considered "definitive"; & he draws attention to 2 further revised versions of 1975 and 1955. 

In the 2006 Godot, Gontarski, gloats somewhat anticlimactically, "Grove Press has not only reunited the long separated fraternal twins, the English and French Godot, but has brought British and American texts closer to harmony." Er –– meaning what precisely? Show me the textual notes, guys. You've got over 350 pages to play with here; 15 or 20 pages of texual notes and variants at the end would have been far more welcome than a lot of that beautiful white space in which Didi & Gogo's back-&-forthings echo like Laurel & Hardy in the Sahara. No Shakespeare editor could get away with this.

Emma Bee Bernstein, 1985-2008

This – the death of Emma Bee Bernstein, daughter of Susan Bee and Charles Bernstein – is sad beyond comprehension.

[not of general interest]

The holidays, as they have a habit of doing, have snuck up on me this year. Maybe something to do with the fact that it's hard to feel winter-holidayish when you're still going outside in the middle of the night in shorts & a t-shirt, running the a/c in the car, etc. But trees & wreaths & menorahs are up, presents are stacked ready for wrapping.

J. & P. are in NYC this weekend playing in the snow, so I'm running solo with Daphne, who I guess is a pretty easy job as 4-year-olds go. Anyway, she seems to be relishing the "quality father-daughter time," as she calls it. Still, the place feels empty & lonely. (Tho I'm trying not to be "cranky and bummed out," as Don Share puts it, sweetly.)

A weird twinge of sentimentality last night: on the back porch, on my laptop, into the wee hours, I watched Citizen Kane, courtesy of Netflix; & as I was putting the disk back in the little envelope (you know, the wax-papery inner one with the brief misleading movie description & runtime) I noticed, written lightly in pencil, neatly but in an unfamiliar hand, the message "I love you." 

Who wrote it? Not a member of the household, certainly; maybe one of the guests & friends who've been thru over the last week? (Obviously, we're among the I suspect majority of Netflixers who turn over our movies a lot slower than we thought we would.) 

But then I realized that I'd only broken the seal on the envelope a couple hours before, after putting Daphne to bed. It was the last Netflixer, I guess, who'd decided to trace those archetypal 3 words on an envelope that was about to head out to someone – who precisely, she or he could have no idea. A message in a bottle? (Cynically, the "God Loves You" one finds occasionally on a dollar bill?) It says something about the phenomenology of reading, or maybe about my own state of mind, that I would feel personally interpellated by this anonymous, anonymously-directed scribble; that I would feel struck, alone in the middle of the night, by a touch of human affection.

A figure for the poem. Paul Celan: "I see no essential difference between a poem & a handshake."

Jennifer Moxley: The Line

The Line, Jennifer Moxley (Post-Apollo Press, 2007)

The "line" between sleep and waking, at least in part; between intellection & emotion? The line as something followed, something toed. "I Walk the Line." The language "of the heart," an attempt to use the old tropes of consciousness, of affect, seriously again, without irony. Twenty-first Century Romanticism? The prose poem, but not the New Sentence: the unit of composition is the poem itself (1 or 2 pages), often telling a narrative or a fragment thereof. A kind of clear-eyed "shimmer" to these pieces, a muted awkward grace that has them gnawing into the corner of one's readerly eye as one picks up the next book.

[57/100]

Joshua Clover: The Totality for Kids

The Totality for Kids, Joshua Clover (U of California P, 2006)

To be read with a French dictionary at one's side, along with the latest guide to cultural theory. Honeycombed with referentiality, like a postmodern Rock-Drill, tho always glad to stumble over Warren Zevon & Roxy Music (oddly enough, the latter not indexed). The disturbing thought that dissent itself, at least in its poetic embodiment, may have reached the stage where only the face is left floating above the acid pit of self-dissolving irony, like the worker in the James Kelman story. Very French indeed; kept repressing the impulse to put on a beret, buy a pack of Gauloises, & find a café where I could order a carafe of wine as I read – or to climb a barricade, turn over a Peugeot, throw a cobblestone at something – if I could determine what my target might be.

[56/100]

recurrence

Reading the Iliad is like travelling through a Country uninhabited, where the Fancy is entertained with a thousand Savage Prospects of vast Desarts, wide uncultivated Marshes, huge Forests, mis-shapen Rocks and Precipices. On the contrary, the Aeneid is like a well ordered Garden, where it is impossible to find out any Part unadorned, or to cast our Eyes upon a single Spot, that does not produce some beautiful Plant or Flower. But when we are in the Metamophosis, we are walking on enchanted Ground, and see nothing but Scenes of Magick lying round us.

–Joseph Addison, Spectator 417 (2 June 1712)

Reading "A" is like passing a season in an unfamiliar principality where the landscape is so variegated, the prospects so ample and diverse, that one is always encountering a new neighborhood, an undiscovered village, a previously unremarked vista or grotto.

–MS, The Poem of a Life: A Biography of Louis Zukofsky (2007)

[To my knowledge, I never read Spectator 417 before happening on this passage yesterday in John Dixon Hunt's The Figure in the Landscape: Poetry, Painting, and Gardening During the Eighteenth Century.]

The horse sees he is repeating

All known cultures 

And suspects repeating

Others unknown to him...

–LZ, "A"-12

Zukofsky in Sussex!

Those of you who are Britons, Europeans in general, or just spending January in sunny Brighton, might be interested in the following:

“A”-24: A Louis Zukofsky Seminar and Performance

The Centre for Modernist Studies at the University of Sussex presents the British premiere of Louis and Celia Zukofsky’s “A”-24, performed by Sean Bonney, Ken Edwards, Daniel Kane and Francesca Beasley with harpsichord by Kerry Yong.

Sarah-Jane Barnes plays violin pieces by Janequin and Bach

The seminar will include papers by Harry Gilonis, Jeff Hilson, Mark Scroggins, Jeffrey Twitchell-Waas and Tim Woods.

£10/£5. Places are limited, to reserve a place email Richard Parker at r.t.a.parker@sussex.ac.uk

13.00, 23 January 2009
The Meeting House
University of Sussex
Falmer, East Sussex

the year's reads: selected & notable

So Bob Archambeau's beaten me to the punch, for what it's worth, with a list of things he's read this year; & it's a long one & an impressive one. I'll confine my own to things, like last year, that really struck me or stuck with me:

Poetry

Atmosphere Conditions Ed Roberson

The Church – The School – The Beer chris cheek

Watchword William Fuller

The Tenor on Horseback Christopher Middleton

Slowly Lyn Hejinian

The Outernationale Peter Gizzi

Next Life Rae Armantrout 

AAB Tyrone Williams

Platform Rodrigo Toscano

Music’s Mask and Measure Jay Wright

Not Everything Remotely: Selected Poems 1978-2005 Alan Halsey

Fiction

Sick Heart River John Buchan

The Captive Marcel Proust

King Rat China Miéville

Biography

Hegel: A Biography Terry Pinkard

Dr. Johnson and Mr. Savage Richard Holmes 

Ezra Pound: Poet, A Portrait of the Man and His Work: Volume I, The Young Genius 1885-1920 A. David Moody

Samuel Beckett: The Last Modernist Anthony Cronin

Criticism, Philosophy, et cetera

The Field of Cultural Production Pierre Bourdieu

Blue Studios: Poetry and Its Cultural Work Rachel Blau DuPlessis

Archive Fever Jacques Derrida

George Oppen and the Fate of Modernism Peter Nicholls

The History of the Modern Taste in Gardening Horace Walpole

Isabelle Baladine Howald: Secret of Breath

I think that last post, & its comment stream, demonstrate why I don't really do much teaching-related blogging. It's true I talk about syllabi a fair amount, and course texts, & kvetch about grading, & so forth, but generally speaking my life as a teacher is something that doesn't feature too prominently here. There're obvious reasons for that: perhaps most obviously, I am indeed an employee of Our Fair University, and generally speaking what goes on in the classroom is both a transaction among me, the students, & the course texts and a kind of service rendered by me as a hash slinger in the employ of Our Fair State. More importantly, there's a relationship of trust the one builds up with one's students, an interchange that can be so mutually rewarding & mutually revealing that I'm reluctant to feature it very much on this very public, rather disembodied blogspace. I'm not in the business of denigrating my students – I like them very much, & respect the ways their minds work, & sometimes lament their misplaced priorities or the choices their over-busy lives force upon them: but I'm not going to talk about it here.

On the other hand, when someone pulls a bozo stunt like the one recounted in that last post, it's just plain fair game.

***

Secret of Breath, Isabelle Baladine Howald, trans. from the French by Eléna Rivera (Burning Deck, 2008)

Vast stretches of white space, one voice in roman type, in dialogue or counterpoint to another in italic. War, displacement; the state of the refugee, which is the common state of 20th-century Europe. War, snow, movement, & the inevitability of a death, which lends an existentialist cast to everything that goes down. Not Celan but Trakl; not so much Bonnefoy as St.-John Perse. (But contemporary French poetry is one of my vast ignorances.)

[55/100]

cheeky

[found in a stack of three-year-old e-mails:]

Dear Professor Scroogins [sic],

You probably do not remember me, but I was in [one of your classes] over a year ago. If you do remember, I missed the final because of a mixup of dates and you therefore gave me a D as my final grade. I was supposed to schedule a makeup exam with you, but because my schedule is so crazy I haven't been able to. Being that it is now over a year later I was wondering if you might just call it even and change my D to at least a C. According to the last time I spoke to you my grade was a high B in the class without the final.

[oddly enough, I never got around to replying...]

***

Update: One commenter, choosing a convenient anonymity, asks "Provided that this student email is authentic, what would your employer, Florida Atlantic, think of you openly mocking students online?" What can I say? I can pretty easily imagine "mocking" this e-mail (just as I can imagine someone's mocking various communications of mine); but is it mockery simply to reproduce it verbatim?

(Call me crusty, but I look back in fondness on the days when the university was considered an association of faculty banded together for teaching & research – this was sometime in the late middle ages, I believe – rather than a corporation in which "instructional personnel" nest somewhere between grounds maintenance people and promotional memo writers in the grand hierarchy.)

Bradley comments, rather more helpfully, "You should reply to that email this weekend. 'Being that it's now been three years since you took the class, I'm ready to schedule that makeup exam. Let's do it today.'" In point of fact, I tried to schedule a makeup exam with student in question one more than one occasion in the months following the course, but it just never worked out with student's schedule. 

–which addresses the next (anonymous) comment, "Come on man you could've given him an incomplete. Scary passive-aggressive dude: just not responding." Around here, I fear, you can't just "give" an incomplete – there's a longish, rather complicated paperwork process. If memory serves, I offered to go thru said process with said student, & student opined that it would be better to take the grade earned sans final, then make up the exam as soon as possible. Hey, I reserve my passive-aggression for personal relationships and editors: I'm Mr Upfront with students.

But the only point was to point out cheekiness (something, frankly, which I rather admire): Note how student doesn't suggest "hey, it's time for me to take that exam," but "hey, time's passed; let's just split the difference." I wish I had the chutzpah.

Elizabeth Arnold: The Reef

The Reef, Elizabeth Arnold (U of Chicago P, 1999)

Where Civilization wrestles with a father's dementia, The Reef deals with the poet's own bouts with (I take it) Hodgkin's lymphoma. Harrowing reading, tho beautiful as well. I admire the ambition that leads her to release, as a 1st book, a single long sequence of poems. Much of what makes Civilization so compelling – for me – is only in embryo here.

[54/100]

***

I'm down with these; working on #5, "got prose?" these days.

William Fuller: Sadly

Sadly, William Fuller (Flood Editions, 2003)

If anything, even more disorienting that Watchword, & at the same time a trifle more laconic. Still, tremendous stuff. Fuller indulges his lyrical gifts rather less in this one. The last poem, "I Now Think I Was Wrong," is Wallace Stevens without all illusions, stripped of all gaiety:

Returning to the spring, we see green on the surface

of the water. This is not the earth. Stand still, monkey,

do not run. None of us was ever here before.

[53/100]

Ron Silliman: The Age of Huts (compleat)

The Age of Huts (compleat), Ron Silliman (U of California P, 2007)

There's something about Silliman's work that has always been just there for me – an element of the landscape, a big looming presence of possibility. I like the "compleat" Age of Huts better than the old Roof edition – as LZ says somewhere, "more of a good thing." Tho I don't think Ron would appreciate the comparison, I'm put in mind of the "fractal" character of Eno's ambient stuff – ie, the experience of hearing the 61-minute Thursday Afternoon, in details, isn't different from hearing a 6-minute extract: it just that the former is longer. (That longer, however, is a pretty crucial difference.) A poetry which not only (in Auden's phrase) "makes nothing happen," but in which nothing happens. Or rather, nothing big, dramatic happens, only a constant flow of small-scale events. "A poem without development, without events, without end" ("2197"). Every time I read RS I start covering notebook pages with diagrams & numbers for some large-scale recombinative project which I never end up writing.

[52/100]

The Grand Piano, Part 4

Part 4 is in some ways the most compelling installment to date. But the various entries, some of them revolving around the term "utopia," others providing hard & fast contextual information about such events as the "Talks" series held at Bob Perelman & Francie Shaw's loft, or the 1978 Duncan-Watten dustup following the screening of the NET Louis Zukofsky film outtakes. (Wish I'd had this while drafting the Afterword to Poem of a Life.) All of the pieces, however, suddenly fade into ruminative insignificance when Rae Armantrout announces that she's been diagnosed with cancer – in the real time of Grand Piano's composing, that is, rather than the 1975-1980 era The Grand Piano remembers.

Hey, I'm giving an exam right now, so I'm technically working...

Y'know, every time I think of throwing over my day job in the academy & becoming a free-lance critic/writer type – well, actually every time I think of that a bill comes in the mail, & I'm reminded of how useful an actual income is – I think about the very few folks out there who actually have the big magazine-mass audience-public intellectual gigs. I think about James Wood, whose writing puts me to sleep faster than three double martinis with a quaalude chaser. 

Or I think about Adam Kirsch, who's somehow unaccountably convinced people that he knows something about contemporary poetry. If you care to get mildly or grandly irritated, check out Kirsch's latest in the New Republic on Slavoj Zizek, the malign genius who – if we're to believe Kirsch – "is engaged in the rehabilitation of many of the most evil ideas of the last century." An astonishing farrago of out-of-context quotations, superficial misreadings, and ad hominem attacks. Kirsch makes David Lehman on Paul de Man seem subtle.

On the edge...

of the end of the semester. A storm of papers will arrive later today, to be followed later this week by a stack of final exams. And then I can get to work on what I ought to be writing. But for now a brief breather.

***

Snatching some time to read in the interstices: Ron Silliman's The Age of Huts (compleat); I've known Age for yonks, thru the old yellow Roof edition. "Sunset Debris" and "The Chinese Notebook" are old friends. And I've become very fond of "Ketjak" now. (The recursive structure assures it that by the time you finish the poem, you're either very fond of it, or driven to active loathing.) I have the typically anal project of working thru Ron's big poem Ketjak (not the short "Ketjak"), as outlined in the preface to Age of Huts, in order of its parts: Age of Huts, then Tjanting, then The Alphabet. That's what, maybe 1500 pages of elegantly processed quotidianity? Should keep me off the streets for awhile.

Mostly thru Beckett's How It Is. One of those books that when you lay it down, you can't pick it up again, if you know what I mean. Oh, it's brilliant all right – I wouldn't want at all to sell the thing short of brilliance. But it's frankly the  single most painful read I've ever essayed. The unpunctuated paragraphs are one thing, forcing you to read at pretty much speaking pace, pausing to internally punctuate & repunctuate at every turn, looking for where the pauses ought to (or might) fall. But while that's a painstaking process (a painful process?) not unfamiliar to the reader of contemporary poetry, it's the bleakness of the "action" that really does it for (to?) me. In a few words: Conveyance: standard Beckett blind mud-crawling; Diet: canned good of dubious provenance & sell-by date; Communication media: fingernails in back, digit in arsehole, can-opener to buttocks, sharp knocks to the skull. And other nastinesses, not least of which is the intrusion of "Love" into this hellish scenario. Kathy Acker, by comparison, is sunshine & lollipops.

***

Observations on the state of modernist studies, having read thru almost 200 job applications:

•James Joyce stock remaining high, with no perceptible dips; still King of Hill

•historicism the order of the day; even the crustiest formalists apt to swath their readings in a decent chiton of historical context or anecdote

•William Faulkner holding steady – who woulda thought?

•Langdon Hammer of Yale the busiest dissertation director in the land; how does he find time to chair the department and write James Merrill's biography?

•the Edwin Rolfe renaissance still failing to materialize, despite all of Cary Nelson's best efforts

•poetry, alas, the big loser: by my admittedly unscientific estimate (ie, I don't have the notes in front of me), something like 15% of dissertations

Carolyn Forché: Gathering the Tribes

Gathering the Tribes, Carolyn Forché (Yale UP, 1976)

I've read most of Forché, backwards – 1st The Angel of History (1994) a year or 2 after it came out, then The Country Between Us (1981) maybe 3 years ago, & only now her 1st book, Gathering the Tribes. (Haven't seen the most recent – 2003 – Blue Hour.) I've found them of diminishing interest, I guess, tho I can't really muster much enthusiasm even for Angel. Gathering is very assured, intelligent writing, however: very, very good, of its kind. Stanley Kunitz's foreword leers embarrassingly, even for 1976 ("the outstanding Sapphic poem of an era").

[51/100]

***

Of course, whenever I read a book that I can sense is well-written, deeply-felt, etc. etc. by a poet from another aesthetic tradition & find myself unable to work up any sort of enthusiasm, I get all worried that I'm falling into the manicheanism that Don Share excoriates so nicely in his "little everyday fascisms" post*, referring transparently yet coyly to Ron Silliman's response to the reams of reviewery devoted to the Lowell/Bishop letters. Don makes the case rather nicely for a kind of "big tent" response to poetry, or what Eliot Weinberger calls somewhere "exogamous reading": "I know of no bookshelf," sez Don, "that can't simultaneously contain Lowell, Bishop, and the other poets mentioned above [Zukofsky, Oppen, Olson], along with Niedecker, Bunting, Pound, Eliot, Ashbery, the recently canonized Jack Spicer and dozens more."

I wonder if in my case it isn't a matter of breadth & intensity of attention, whether the enquiring faculties of my poor limited brain aren't simply scrambling for the RAM necessary to keep up a real attention to what's really consuming me at the moment (broadly defined): the five or six poets I'm supposed to be reviewing or writing essays about right now as I blog, the French Revolution, Beckett, garden history & theory, neoclassical architecture, the English Revolution, Hegel, Panofsky, etc.

Or maybe I'm just a dilettante. Hey, that's it! Any way, about 10 years ago I gave up chucking books because they didn't fit into the moment's aesthetic configuration; it always turned out that there would come a moment when I wanted just that volume, & it was gone. So until the shelves are double-full & can hold no more, or the house collapses Umberto Ecoishly, my poetry section is by default a big tent.

***

Hey, did I mention that I have a podcast up at the Poetry Foundation?

*Tho I find it ironical that one of his commenters sees fit to paraphrase a conversation with August Kleinzahler, perhaps the only person on earth I consider a true enemy – tho I've still got his books on my shelf.

t'anks

I don't care for major holidays, for the most part. This year's Thanksgiving was okay, in large part because we went to a friend's house & I didn't have to do kitchen-y things (aside from fixing a ham, making some gravy, carving the turkey, helping with the cleanup, etc.). All pleasantly lubricated with a range of potables.

When one of the young lasses at the kids' table – not one of mine, mind you – suggested we all go around & say what we were most thankful for – things were getting really quite moving, lemme tell ya; "oohs" & "ahs" & "hear, hears," eyes being wiped, & so forth – I found myself muttering some words about family & friends & then, Leopold Bloomishly, staring at my bottle & saying, "I'm thankful Arthur Guinness began brewing at the St. James's Gate Brewery in 1759." And I am. And for lots of other things.

***

Like, for instance, my lovely podcast on the Poetry Foundation website, if you haven't checked it out yet.

Scroggins at the Poetry Foundation!

Got a spare hour? Listen to my lecture on Louis Zukofsky, from Spertus in Chicago earlier this year, now rendered in sparkling podcast audio from the fine folks at the Poetry Foundation. Let me know what you think! (Me, I'm chuffed, tho I hate my reedy voice.)

John Zorn: Bladerunner Project

I wanna know what brand of coffee Jonathan Mayhew's drinking – I need that kind of energy. Not merely does he write books that get published by great university presses, but he's who knows how far into blogging 100 books of fiction, he's gotten thru 170-odd books of poetry in his "9000 books of poetry" project, and now he's started a project of blogging 300 of his favorite jazz albums of all time. I'm guessing he'll be thru this one by April or so.

Me, I continue crawling along at my own petty pace, trying to listen thru the "unplayed" smart playlist on my iPod. But here's something worth a listen: the Bladerunner Project, a John Zorn outfit from back in 2000, including the godlike talents of Zorn, bassist Bill Laswell, guitarist Fred Frith, and heavy metal drummer Dave Lombardo (Slayer, Fantômas, etc.). Pretty standard Zorn stuff – mostly funky, largely improvised, lots of sheer noise – but with some way cool wailing from Frith (an unfortunately rare thing) and lots of flashy funkification from Laswell. So far as I know, the lineup's never made a formal recording, but there are lots of videos on YouTube, and you can download a high-quality recording of their 5 July 2000 Paris concert here, which includes a scrappy version of "A Love Supreme" and a very cool cover of "Prelude (Part 2)" from Miles's Agharta (yes, I confess, my favorite Miles album).

placeholder

Despite a recent resolution to be a trifle more regular about maintaining the blog, I've been swamped, & it's fallen a bit by the wayside. Lordy, I've been busy. The recruitment thing, for one thing, has been a massive time-eater. So many lovely people to choose from, & so well-published, to be applying for an entry-level assistant professor position. I'm just glad I'm not fresh out of grad school myself; I'd be eaten alive, the way things are these days.

***

Next month of course is the MLA  – the monster that ate my holidays, & that'll ruin a perfectly good trip to San Francisco. I'll leave it to the newspapers to make fun of the more recondite paper & panel titles – hey, I want to hear about Jane Austen and masturbating girls! – but I'm always amused by leafing thru the monstrously large program, looking for things that I won't get to see because I'm in a hotel room interviewing nervous young people. I don't mind reconditeness, or bad puns, or even the ubiquitous colonified things ("The X of Y: Adjective Z in the early A of B"), but what really breaks my heart is my colleagues' lame-ass attempts at hipness, usually signaled by punning on some pop song in their paper titles: "What's Habermas Got To Do With It?" or "Watching the (Scottish) Detectives" (the latter about Scottish detective fiction, of course, the former about – oh, I can't be bothered to look it up). Friends, "Watching the Detectives" is now thirty-one years old, and "What's Love Got To Do With It" was a hit in nineteen-eighty-four, a few years before most of our undergrads were born. These are golden oldies, not markers of your with-it-ness. Like, get out the study and buy some records (sorry, I mean download some records).

***

Thinking about gardening these days, having finally picked the splinters out of my hand from ridding a planting of unwanted ferns. What's your favorite garden poems? Yes, Marvell – but other than Marvell?

New specs!

Well, maybe not all that new – ordered in NYC before our trip to Sweden, picked up on the way back to Florida. Dutch. My protest against the ubiquitous clunky square frames that would probably look better on my Karl Rove-ishly round features.

Lisa Jarnot: Black Dog Songs

Black Dog Songs, Lisa Jarnot (Flood Editions, 2003)

Given the Steinian provenance of much of her language, & her penchant for rollicking dactylic meters, it's no surprise that the tone of much of Jarnot's Black Dog Songs is very precisely whimsy. But she wears her whimsy with a difference – it's underlaid with melancholy, with constant reminders of the carnivorous nature of the doggies she so dotes upon, of the dark depression or even madness that can manifest itself in sing-song melodies. The sequence "My Terrorist Notebook" makes a wonderful, light-touched attack on post-9/11 American policy, while the prose poems (& one sestina) of "They" proffer an anthropology of the loves & likings of some unspecified race – "they" – which turns out to look very much like us. I still cherish a great attraction to the overwritten opacities of Jarnot's first volume, Some Other Kind of Mission, but I like Jarnot's whimsy more than anything this side of Stein herself, or Edward Lear.

[50/100]

***

Well, the battery-recharging aspects of last week's vacation wore off pretty damned quickly, I must say, & I'm back in my habitual glums: not merely is there the final gruelling weeks of the teaching semester, along with the various wee writing assignments I've been postponing, but the faculty recruitment committee I'm chairing – an always onerous job, but one with its advantages: finding out what's going on in the discipline, what the bright young things are writing about, what kind of letters of recommendation my friends tend to write, etc. – has been swamped – nay, tsunami'd – with applications for our modest position. Oh my!, as Archie Ammons used to say. I estimate that it will take at least twelve to fourteen hours of steady reading just to do a preliminary triage of the vast sea of letters & dossiers. Keep me in your prayers or meditations, so I don't entirely crack up between now & the MLA.

Wittgenstein & biography

One of the many misses in my long ongoing uneducation was my failure to really connect with James Klagge when he joined the philosophy department at Virginia Tech my senior year. Not his fault, really – I was at that stupid stage of intellectual growth where I actually thought I knew something, or at least that I knew what I wanted to know, & the class of JK's I was enrolled in – Ethics, I think – just didn't dovetail with my interests at the time. If I'd known he was going to turn out to be a bigtime Wittgenstein scholar, I'd have thought differently, because I was already deeply into Wittgenstein, thanks to a seminar taught by the brilliant and Matthew Arnold-bewhiskered Peter Barker.

Come to think of it, doing a philosophy degree at Tech was one of the smartest things I ever blundered into. I read ancient Greek philosophy – painstakingly, slowly – with Nick Smith, who probably knows more about  Sokrates than anyone alive; I read Spinoza, Descartes, Leibniz, and bunches of medieval cosmology with Roger Ariew; I read Kant's Critique of Pure Reason – in the old-fashioned manner, a chapter or two at a time, turning in a precis of what I'd read on a weekly basis – with a now-deceased professor with the resonant name of Bill Williams.

I was on the Tech campus again late last week as part of our annual get-out-of-south-Florida-and-see-the-leaves vacation, and spent an extraordinarily pleasant couple of hours strolling the drillfield and the streets of Blacksburg with Tom Gardner, the man I consider my mentor in this business (greyer and perhaps a trifle balder, but otherwise absolutely unchanged from – well, we won't say how many years ago). And then a couple of days later, in the Barnes & Noble in Williamsburg, I came upon a collection edited by James Klagge, Wittgenstein: Biography and Philosophy (Cambridge, 2001).

Most of the  essays in the book treat particular topics in Wittgenstein's life or particular cruxes in a biographical reading of LW's philosophy. The opening two pieces, however, struck me as especially fascinating: Ray Monk's "Philosophical Biography: The Very Idea" and James Conant's "Philosophy and Biography." I'm interested in them because biographies of philosophers are if anything even more marginalized within academic departments of philosophy than biographies of poets are within English departments, & there's a concomitant dearth of writing about the significance of biographical writing within the study of philosophy. (I admit that there's been a decent number of books about literary biography, but I'd argue that the really good ones can be counted on the fingers of one mangled hand.)

Monk is of course the author of the widely hailed Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (and a more controversial biography of Bertrand Russell), one of the few biographies of a philosopher I've read that made the figure come luminously alive for me. He draws wonderful parallels in his brief "Philosophical Biography" essay between the mode of biography – "showing" rather than "explaining" – and what Wittgenstein saw the task of philosophy to be. "The insights [biography] has to offer have to be shown rather than stated."

I was once taken to task for being "too lenient" with Wittgenstein by not criticizing his appalling treatment of the young children he taught at elementary school. Yet, it seemed to me, and still seems to me, that, if you describe someone beating a schoolgirl until she bleeds because she is unable to grasp logic, it adds nothing to the description to follow it with a comment such as, "That wasn't very nice, was it?"

Ultimately, he argues, the use of philosophical biography lies less in the elucidating of particular cruxes in a thinker's thought than in the illustration or presentation of the overall "tone" of the thinker's intellectual achievement.

Conant, in a much more wordy (call it overtly "analytical") essay, says much the same thing:

If there is an important relationship between what philosophical biography shows and how it shows it, then we should not be surprised to learn that the sorts of change of aspect that philosophical biography permits to dawn in our perception of a philosopher's work are not ones easily brought into view by an alternative genre of writing. In particular, the sort of change of aspect in question will not admit expression via a mode of exposition of a philosopher's thought proper to the exposition of features of his thought graspable independently of their relationship to the character of his thought as a whole.

Conant is especially interested in thinking about the union of thought and life characteristic of early Greek philosophy (think Socrates, for instance), a union whose demise is lamented in Nietzsche & Kierkegaard (not to mention Thoreau) and which is oddly revived in Wittgenstein. (Is there, I wonder, a way of "living" poetry? Did, say, Jack Spicer make more of a "poem" of his life than Louis Zukofsky did?)

Both Monk and Conant quote a delicious anecdote from Stanley Cavell's autobiographical A Pitch of Philosophy, recalling his music theory class with Ernst Bloch at Berkeley:

[Bloch] would play something simple, at the piano, for instance a Bach four-part chorale, with one note altered by a half step from Bach's rendering; then he would play the Bach unaltered. Perhaps he would turn to us, fix us with a stare, then turn back to the piano and repeat, as if for himself, the two versions. The drama mounted, then broke open with a monologue which I reconstruct along these lines: "You hear that? You hear the difference?"...He went on: "My version is perfectly correct; but the Bach, the Bach is perfect; late sunlight burning the edges of a cloud. Of course I do not say you must hear this. Not at all. No. But." The head lowered a little, the eyes looked up at us, the tempo slowed ominously: "If you do not hear, do not say to yourself that you are a musician. There are many honorable trades. Shoemaking, for example."

Craig Watson: True News

True News, Craig Watson (Instance Press, 2002)

Three serial pieces – "Spectacle Studies," "Where/As," & "Home Guard" – that circle around geopolitical themes – interpreted as broadly as possible – "the personal is the political," politics colonizes/conditions consciousness, etc. A deft touch thruout, smart & lively. The 4 sections of "Where/As" are place-specific (Venice, South Africa, China, Ecuador), & bend their essentially similar forms to accomodate a vivid impression of each locale. Most exciting are the quatrain poems of "Spectacle Studies," which touch on stereotypically "big," abstract – even philosophical – questions with a sure hand & a clear sense of when the abstract becomes particular & vice-versa. Nice work; not as lyrical as the 3-4 Watson books I've read before.

[49/100]

***

Last night's election returns more than gratifying – I feel that I can sleep well, at least for a space. Put me in mind of watching other world-historical events – inevitably, on the television: the Berlin Wall coming down in 1989, in a dingy apartment in Ithaca, New York; Boris Yeltsin's tanks surrounding the Russian Parliament, its windows alight with fires, in October 1993, on a hanging set in room in Walter Reed Military Hospital where my father was awaiting surgery for cancer; the collapse of the World Trade Center, in our own house here in Florida, where the three of us (I, J., & a dear colleague of ours now in deep-blue Seattle) practically clung together with shock. Last night's viewing was – for the nonce – far more happy-making.

What the hell are you doing reading poetry blogs? Get out and vote – or get out the vote!

[No offense intended to overseas visitors...]

The Grand Piano, Pt. 3

Bob Perelman hits the proverbial nail on its proverbial head (yes, cliché) in the 3rd installment:

We're all writing discursive sentences here, and isn't that odd?

To say the obvious: all of this, these attempts at presenting our parts, go against an earlier don't that some of us promulgated: critiques of narrative by Ron and others (Bruce Andrews, Steve McCaffery). That don't has reverberated for decades, especially in the reception of Language writing: don't try to construct novelizing, technicolored picture windows, which open onto ideologically fixed theme parks. I promulgated this don't myself in an MLA talk, but I wasn't terrifically enthusiastic about what I was saying. I had more fun quoting Stendhal and Mozart's letters.

The pianists seem to have loosened up here in the 3rd set: there's almost a jazz feel of collective improvisation, as each writer plays around not a single "head" ("love," "city") but the question each previous one has left hanging.

What the hell was this "group," this "movement," this "moment"? several of them seem to ask. And, more winningly, was I really a part of it, or a fellow-traveller allowed into the inner sanctum on sufferance?

Is Barrett Watten, as he reports Robert Glück implying, the André Breton of Language writing? It's a joke, of course, but one feels the chilly touch of judgment a bit later when BW throws out – straightfacedly – an old Jonsonian term:

But the turn to language is not merely an act of self-denial; it has a historical dimension the poetasters do not normally comprehend. [my emphasis]

A scene from the Revelation of St. John the Divine: BW as halo'd Terminator/Christ, purified poets on his right hand, benighted goatish poetasters on his left.

Gentle reader, where stand you?

Barbara Guest: The Red Gaze

The Red Gaze, Barbara Guest (Wesleyan UP, 2005)

[48/100]

A truism – by now, a cliché even – to speak of Guest's poems as "painterly." But they are, after all – poems acting & reenacting the "gaze" of the title, the act of seeing (the viewer's art) & the act of placing colors upon a field (the painter's). Spare poems, like a painter's spare palette, a canvas marked with only a few gestures of color – red, as the title (again) indicates, is prominent, tho never saturating. Perhaps the most purely aesthetic poems I've encountered in some time: that is, poems grounded in the satisfactions of the senses, shutting out the social, the political, the historical even – or setting them far to one side to pursue the immediate gratification of the eyes.

The Grand Piano, Pt. 2

I've only in the last month or so gotten around to subscribing to the The Grand Piano project, & Mr or Ms USPS poked a big stack of the things – #2 thru #7 – into my mailbox Friday, just in time to derail me from any number of other things I should be reading. At least this way (belated as usual, that is), I won't have John Latta's close & compelling & sometimes snarky readings of the successive issues blurring my own responses.

***

The endnote to this second installment of the Language Poets' "experiment in collective autobiography" announces that the original plan of each writer's following whatever "prompt" the first-up batter of a given volume supplies has begun to fall by the wayside, as bits of the project are being written out of order. The 1st volume hewed pretty closely to Bob Perelman's keynote pages on "love," each writing taking some approach to that oldest of poetic topoi. In Part 2, Barrett Watten provides the keynote – "city," one might call it, or "San Francisco" as place, as site – and while most of the other 9 writers do indeed the address the city, there's also some discernable "drift."

What strikes me the most about this second volume of "collective" autobiography is how little sense of collectivity comes thru in this round of writing, despite Lyn Hejinian's rather impassioned insistence that the group was a polis. (How many uses of that word in alt-poetry can be traced to Olson's "polis is eyes"?) Figures cross paths, reappear from one poet's account to the next, couple & decouple, but this time around there's little sense of a shared aesthetic or political endeavour – only a shared milieu, a San Francisco that – unsurprisingly – looks radically different to different member of this gang of ten.

But The Grand Piano 2 contains some lovely writing – I think Kit Robinson's anaphoric "I remember" section takes the prize here – and some fascinating accounts of writers' formations: Bob Perelman's and Tom Mandel's are the standouts. What they amount to, however, is some dandily-written traditional autobiography (tho there's some interesting genre-jumping in Perelman's piece) of the individual sort. This polis is, after all, a bunch of I's. It'll take more than Watten's collectivist invocation to make this "collective" – at least so far. On to Part 3.

***

Y'know, these memoirs by writers between 15 & 20 years older than me, remembering the events of a historical moment when they were at least a decade younger than I am now, are (alas) an occasion for readerly melancholy, for my own sense (oh Jesus there he goes again) of impending age, of mortality, of missed opportunity.

The avant-garde – that is no country for old men.