Ruskin, in spades

In the home stretch of the semester, which may account for the slackness of blogging around here. One class is in the midst of Harryette Mullen, Trimmings (this week) and Muse & Drudge (next). The graduate seminar is watching Samuel Beckett whittle his characters down: week before last, we watched the progressive burial of Winnie in Happy Days; this week, we regaled ourselves with talking canopic urns in Play; next week, the disembodied mouth of Not I. Reading (my own) has almost ground to a halt, save for a few novels. Paul Auster's latest, Man in the Dark, last weekend (perhaps a trifle better than the dire Travels in the Scriptorium, but still a very very weak effort); Michel Houellebecq's Platform this week.

Much of my spare time seems to have gone into painting. Alas, I'm pretty sure that I'm no better a painter than I was 25 years ago, when I spent far more time with pencils, canvases, & paints. But one learns new things every time around: (1) don't do your canvas sketching in pencil: graphite is oily, refuses to be erased from the gesso ground, & leaches up thru your paints; (2) blue underpainting produces wonderfully cool shadows in flesh; & (3) glazing medium is da shit.

***

I don't call myself, in any sense Walter Benjamin would recognize, a book collector – I'm rather a book accumulator. Mine is for the most part a working library, with lots of second-hand editions, & things I've read rather tatty & marked-up. Only occasionally do I go over the edge & invest in a scholarly "complete works," like year before last when I took the plunge with the Gary Taylor Thomas Middleton from Oxford UP, 3000-odd pages of plays, poems, pamphlets, entertainments, & whatnot that I've yet to really scratch the surface of.

But now I've done it. Now I have to become a full-time John Ruskin scholar. Yes, it's true – I've acquired a set of the impossible-to-find, bank-account-breaking, second-mortage-requiring Works of John Ruskin (Library Edition), edited by Cook & Wedderburn, in 39 volumes (1903-1912). I have set myself up to become the object of death threats, assassination attempts, & general black envy on the part of real Ruskinians everywhere – you know, those folks whose library carrells have been groaning under the weight of these books for years (since the library won't check them out), or whose interlibrary loan fines (since most libraries don't own the set) are outpacing their car payments.

[The set pictured here, by the way, is in the super-fancy leather binding; the one the UPS person delivered yesterday – in 4 huge cartons, approximately 150 pounds total – is in a far more modest morocco cloth – but this gives you some idea of the sheer mass of the thing: those books are approximately 10 inches tall.]

The Library Edition, compiled after Ruskin's death by his followers Edward Tyas Cook & Alexander Wedderburn, is by all accounts one of the glories of scholarly editing. C&W, with full backing of George Allen & Co., Ruskin's own publishers, set out to gather pretty much everything Ruskin had ever written; and like a true Victorian, he'd written an awful lot. (They didn't get every last piece, but they came close.) Each of the 38 volumes (the final volume is an astonishingly lengthy & comprehensive index) has a large introduction & copious running footnotes. They're illustrated thruout – over 800 wood blocks, almost a thousand color plates, & over 100 facsimiles of Ruskin's manuscripts, all beautifully reproduced: none of the muddy pictures you encounter in too many contemporary books. (Guy Davenport used to complain how various publishers had reduced his painstakingly cross-hatched drawings to "burnt toast.")

These are beautiful books. That's really all I can say. And the editing is beautifully done, as well. It's a testament to Cook & Wedderburn's labors that the Library Edition, a century after its publication, remains the gold standard for Ruskin scholarship. Sure, there've been a zillion paperback selections, & a handful of his books keep getting reprinted in Penguin editions, but nobody's attempted a new Collected Ruskin. (Edinburgh UP seemed to have started one back in the 1990s, but it didn't get past Praeterita and a selected Fors Clavigera.) If you write on Ruskin, you rely on the Library Edition: and if you don't have access to the Library Edition, then you're at a distinct disadvantage in your Ruskinizing.

So, don't ask me what I paid for this leviathan (it was a bargain, but I'm still not telling). And expect more – much more – 39 volumes' worth – Ruskin blogging in the future.

finish (continued)

Not dead yet, merely snowed under with various responsibilities. Not so much that I haven't continued thinking about the issue of "finish" in art. Indeed, I started a canvas – a representational one no less, a nude even – & decided I would pursue it in the old masters' manner: underpainting (en grisaille, this time – not brave enough for the green, somehow), followed by glazing: multiple layers of thinned color. Titian claimed he would go thru 30 layers or more in painting flesh – which is a pretty lengthy proposition, considering the drying time for oils. Me, I'm using acrylics, so after underpainting over the last couple days, then blocking in shadows in blue & burnt sienna, rosy bits in diluted crimson, & highlights in white, I've spent part of today glazing in flesh tones. Six layers so far, & maybe as many to go. I dunno if they were always right about suffering, but the old masters were damned patient.

Doughty

This seems to be the week for winding down the biographies of long-lived, long-winded Victorians. Charles Montagu Doughty (1843-1926) is probably best remembered for Travels in Arabia Deserta, perhaps the single greatest Briton's-eye venture into the xenophobic world of the 19th-century Arabian Peninsula. Lawrence of Arabia worshipped the book, & indeed found it so accurate & comprehensive that he used a copy as a kind of Baedeker during the military adventures that would fill The Seven Pillars of Wisdom.

But Travels in Arabia Deserta is not merely an incomparable travelogue, but an eccentric masterpiece of English prose – an idiom which Doughty felt had only gone downhill since Spenser and Chaucer. Like his contemporary G. M. Hopkins, Doughty favors an out-of-the-way, Anglo-Saxon vocabulary, and constructs his sentences around Biblical, sometimes recondite cadences. As Andrew Taylor shows in God's Fugitive: The Life of C. M. Doughty (HarperCollins UK, 1999), Doughty came to value his poetry – he wrote a number of epics and closet dramas – over his travel writing: his memorial tablet reads "Poet, Patriot and Explorer," & it's in that order he hoped to be remembered. It's turned out much the opposite: Doughty's known as an explorer-writer first; a handful of experts (if that many) know his poems; and the less said about his bloody-minded boosterism of the Boer War and the First World War the better.

Taylor's a solid, businesslike writer, a veteran journalist who's spent many years in the Middle East. So while he does his best to do Doughty's poetry justice, a solid half of the book is taken up with an almost day-by-day recounting of Doughty's 2 years in Arabia. Many a time I was tempted to just chuck the biography and dive into Travels in Arabia Deserta itself – which, mind you, is not at all an improper response to a biography.

Best of all, Taylor manages to give a vivid if somewhat distant personal impression of one of the weirder of the great Victorian writers.* And he says just enough about the poetry to make me want to hunt up some of those antique volumes & plunge in – even if Pound & Yeats together made little headway: as EP recalls in The Pisan Cantos: "did we ever get to the end of Doughty: / The Dawn in Britain? / perhaps not..."

*Weird, I suppose, in a tameish sense, compared to the double-household-maintaining Wilkie Collins, the pedophilic Ruskin, the whip-fetishist Swinburne, & so forth.

FLARF! NOISE PUTTY

[photo: MS; photoshoppery: Amy Letter]

Poot! Spoo!

Makes Awful Noises!

Poke / Squish / Disgusting / Great Fun!

6 Smells:

Orange

Lemon

Banana

Strawberry

Pineapple

Grape

SAFE & NON-TOXIC

finish

[James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket, ca. 1875]

The opening stage direction of Beckett's Happy Days specifies that the backdrop behind Winnie, representing "unbroken plain and sky receding to meet in far distance," is a "very pompier trompe-l'oeil backcloth." Pompier? I muttered to myself like Krapp, then like Krapp scuttled off to the dictionary. Pompier is of course French for "fireman." L'art pompier, surely what Beckett means, is a derisive term for 19th-century academic art, salon art, art that puts a high premium on a certain notion of realism, and on a high degree of "finish." "Fireman's art."

***

John Ruskin saw Whistler's Nocturne in Black and Gold in June 1877 at The Grosvenor Gallery, & it so troubled him that he wrote about it in Fors Clavigera, the number dated 18 June:

I have seen, and heard, much of Cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.

There followed one of the best-known dramas of art history: Whistler sued Ruskin for libel; Ruskin, when the case went to court the following year, was incapacitated, or he would have given some doubtlessly memorable speeches. His attorney, cross-examining Whistler, elicited the following memorable exchange:

Attorney: Can you tell me how long it took to knock off that Nocturne?

Whistler: Two days.

A: The labour of two days, then, is that for which you ask two hundred guineas?

W: No; I ask it for the knowledge of a lifetime.

As Tim Hilton points out in the second volume of his monumental John Ruskin, the "only aesthetic issue of the trial," it emerged, was that of artistic "finish," the degree to which the artist worked over the objects represented on the canvas, removing the marks of his own hand – the rough brushstrokes, the paint-spatters, the hasty blocking-in of colors fields – until the canvas became a "window" to a represented world. Ruskin's old associate the pre-Raphaelite painter Edward Burne-Jones testified against Whistler, as the Times reported:

Mr Edward Burne-Jones said that he had been a painter for twenty years, and during the last two or three years his works ahd become known to the public. Complete finish ought to be the standard of painting, and artist ought not to fall short of what for ages had been acknowledged as essential to a perfect work. The "Nocturne" in blue and silver representing Battersea reach was a work of art, but very incomplete... Its merits lay only in colour. Neither in composition, nor in detail, nor in form had it any quality whatsoever...

The trial's outcome was grim: the jury found for Whistler, but awarded him an ironical farthing of damages – and no costs. Ruskin's lawyer fees (£400) were paid by his many admirers; Whistler jauntily wore his farthing at the end of his watch-chain, but was bankrupted by his own legal fees.

Clearly Ruskin was on the wrong side of history on this one: the future would belong to Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, and so forth, & highly "finished" art – whether pre-Raphaelite or otherwise – would become the province of Socialist Realism and Norman Rockwell, both complex & highly interesting traditions universally poo-poo'd by art criticism.

But I still find myself fascinated by, even hankering for, high "finish" in artworks, even in artworks that are strictly speaking non-representational, "abstract." Not sure I buy the old epic narrative of abstract expressionism baring the souls, the psyches, the unconsciouses of its practitioners. Or that I'm interested in it. I'm interested in the evidences of painstaking craft, toil, reworking – even if that toil is paradoxically in the service of effacing itself & producing a "casual" surface. Maybe I have a kitsch streak: I prefer Puvis to Monet, Tom Phillips to Jackson Pollack.

Allen Ginbsberg: "First thought best thought."

Me, to workshop: "First thought (usually) crap."

My student Michael: "First thought lunch; second thought crap."

***

Just finished Tim Hilton's John Ruskin: The Later Years (Yale, 2000), an enormous brick of a book that just gets sadder & sadder as it nears its inevitable (it's a biography, after all) end.

Kit Robinson: The Champagne of Concrete

The Champagne of Concrete, Kit Robinson (Potes & Poets, 1991)

More expansive & formally various than Ice Cubes, the last KR book I read, yet also more funny, more testy, more politically acute. A wonderfully quirky, slanted set of observations of American corporate life. If Dilbert were taller, handsomer, had a penchant for memorable verbal formulations & social critique – & if he weren't a comic strip character – he might be something like the Kit Robinson of this volume. "The world is the case / It's a brief case." The book's almost too smart for me to diminish it with a "great fun."

[70/100]

Peter Cole: Things on Which I've Stumbled

Things on Which I've Stumbled, Peter Cole (New Directions, 2008)

Cole is an acclaimed translator of Hebrew & Arabic poetry. I was nuts about his 1st 2 books, Rift & Hymns & Qualms. This new one strikes me as more straightforward, more 1st-person – but still terrifically impressive. Plainspoken wit, lots of gestures towards traditional form, a questioning but always humble mysticism, drawing as much on Muslim as Jewish sources. A number of savage, bitterly funny critiques of Zionism. The long, dazzling title poem is Cole's wanderings through the materials stowed in the geniza – "a storeroom that holds worn out and discarded Hebrew texts" – of a Cairo synagogue, now held in Cambridge. A brilliant & haunting collage of bits & pieces, ritual texts, love poems, letters, everything. "Strange how I've become a modern / poet of a medieval kind – / making poems for a different diversion, / as they point toward what's divine."

[69/100]

who's listening?

Undine is right in the comments box on that last post: 500 words a day is probably plenty, if they're the right words – & if one can manage to squeeze out that much, day in & day out. But then there's the inevitable question: who is one writing for?

Over at Say Something Wonderful, Eric has been musing on the issue of audience – who reads what we write, & for whom do we write it in the first place? And I've been casting a cold eye over both my CV & a table of contents I'm playing with for a "selected odds & sods" volume, & wondering much the same thing. Despite my whining in the last post, while I still lament how hard writing itself is, I suspect I've published way too much. Or at least that too much of what I've published has been published for the wrong – read career – reasons: it's been published, that is, with no clear idea of an audience save for the committees who read annual reports & measure progress towards tenure & promotion.

My CV includes a bunch of items – encyclopedia articles, reviews, etc. – that got written for no other reason than that someone asked me to write them & then offered to publish them. Does anyone actually read these gigantic literary reference guides? I wrote these pieces – not all of them, but too many of them – in a kind of vacuum, not knowing or questioning for whom they might be useful. They filled lines on the vita; there's some good writing there, and sometimes some decent thinking (some of it recycled from earlier work), but for the most part my heart was somewhere else.

The first Zukofsky book – LZ & the Poetry of Knowledge – was a revamped & expanded version of my dissertation, & it shows. Okay, so the thing gets cited once in a while in Zukofsky circles, but I honestly have trouble looking back over it, all of that stilt-walking prose & convoluted argumentation. It deserved its ambivalent reviews, even tho as I read them I could pick out the precisely the ideological & scholarly axes each reviewer was grinding. (Tho one of my most treasured possessions is a 4-page letter from Guy Davenport, reading his way thru the book with pencil in hand & saying such nice things that I blush to think about them.)

I've tended to flit around butterfly-like, writing tons of polished conference papers that went over well at the time, that had people saying "when are you going to publish that one?" – but then never getting around to doing anything with them. There, on my hard drive like the snows of yesteryear, are dandy embryonic essays on Alasdair Gray, on Robert Sheppard, on Stephen Jonas, on Sir Walter Scott for God's sake. I just never got around to doing anything with them – I was distracted by teaching, by parenthood, by the latest commissioned piece, by whatever. And perhaps I never imagined an audience for those papers beyond the 6 or 12 people who heard them the 1st & only time.

Oddly enough, the extended periodical pieces into which I've put the most blood sweat & tears – the big essay-reviews for Parnassus – are the ones I wrote with the clearest audience in mind (Herb Leibowitz & Ben Downing, the ruthless blue-pencilling editors – and beyond them, Eric himself, who righteously slapped down my pretentious academese early on in our friendship, for which relief much thanks), & simultaneously the ones that have gotten the least response. I've never written a Parnassus piece on a subject for which I didn't feel passionately: either passionate enthusiasm (Ron Johnson, John Matthias) or passionate ambivalence (Anne Carson, Theodore Enslin). And line for line, they're my best slices of writing. Nonetheless, aside from some gentle remonstrances from Ted and a nice remark or two from John, those essays seem to have fallen into a void.

I spent a lot of time thinking about audience in respect to the LZ biography; I wanted to write a book that would appeal to someone other than the 250 people who came to the Columbia LZ centenary celebration, or the 100 who'd read LZ & the Poetry of Knowledge. I wanted to write a book that would introduce & open up LZ to people who'd heard the name but kept confusing him with Bukowski. I wanted, I sometimes told myself, to target the New Yorker readers who thought they knew something about contemporary poetry but hadn't read past Robert Lowell. I was pretty disheartened when my editor decided that he should allow the book its "scholarly tone" – a tone I was precisely trying to avoid – & even more irritated when one blogger called the book "every bit as stiff as the author's portrait on the dust jacket" (ouch!). But the bio did provide me something I hadn't gotten before: for a while, a pretty steady stream of readerly feedback, most of it positive; for once, I felt like I wasn't writing into an empty room.

Once upon a time I wrote an essay on Ian Hamilton Finlay for the folks at FlashPoint; it was written out of nothing more than enthusiasm for his work. I didn't have a job at the time, & I didn't expect that piece to help me get one. John Tranter at Jacket picked it up & republished it. Heaven help me, it may turn out to be the most-cited piece I've ever written. I'm still rather proud of it, even tho I can see its shortcomings all too clearly. I just looked back it, in fact, & realize that when I finally get around to writing that Finlay book, the essay's ideas may be at its core – but every single sentence is going to have to be revised. I'm no longer interested in writing for an audience that will abide that sort of turgid, tangled prose.

The work that is closest to my heart – my poetry – may have evoked the least response at all. There may be 12 people out there who'll click on a link to read a poem by MS – and yes, I know them all by name, I think. (Anarchy dropped off a cliff into an abyss of indifference, so far as I know – tho I have copies, if anyone's interested.) But the poems are for me, or for an idealized reader whose sensibility is awfully similar to mine; and on some level, I suspect that's how many poets work, trying to create the poems that they themselves would want to read & be surprised by, & let everyone else listen in if they so desire.

the hard stool

Nearing the end of Tim Hilton's big 2-volume Ruskin biography, which grows more & more melancholy, & that's in addition to the usual deathwatch of the final 50 pages of a life-story. But even as he sinks into madness, isolation, depression, etc., Ruskin still seems able to keep cranking out the prose.*

On the other hand, just read a review of a new George Steiner collection – a mere 28 of the one-hundred thirty-four pieces he published in the New Yorker between 1966 & 1997. And that's in addition to all the other essays, reviews, & books he was pumping out during that period.

And recently, thru the magic of Facebook – which rapidly seems to be supplanting many of the purely social functions of the blogosphere, for better or worse – got back in touch with a woman I knew in high school, who after various adventures has landed happily married in Ohio, dealing rare books & writing fantasy/romance novels. By my count, she's turned out 6 full-length novels over the past 3 or 4 years, each of them clocking in over 100,000 words. She blogs engagingly about her own writing, & details the interplay of plotting, drafting, editing, etc., and comes up with the (for me) eye-popping number of between 7000 & 9000 words produced per diem.

Heaven knows, I don't aspire to be John Ruskin; I'm not sure I'd want to be George Steiner (Guy Davenport: "well, his grad students are awfully erudite, aren't they?"); and (writing) fiction just isn't my bag (cf. Josh Corey's recent posts thereon). But I do wish writing weren't such a painful, slow process. I was enormously thrilled recently when I managed to knock out my last 3 projects in relatively rapid, 1000-2000 words-per-day bursts; but I wish I could sustain that momentum for more than a week or two. "Lying fallow" is one thing; constipation is something else altogether.

*Remind me to start blogging my way thru Ruskin again sometime soon.

promotion

The last of this spring's thesis defences went down this afternoon, & went well. As the typist in the poem says, "that's over & I'm glad." I hasten to add – a far more pleasant experience than the typist's.

The provost at Our Fair University has been doing this thing with tenure & promotion cases the past couple of years; he doesn't reveal the results of the university committee's vote except in a face-to-face meeting with the lucky candidate, & then he teases about for a few minutes, cat-with-mouse-style, before letting one know whether one's made it thru the latest hoop or not. (In my more sullen moments – which are usually the accurate ones – I read this as management asserting its life & death power over labor: it certainly has little to do with the ideally democratic organization of the classic university.) Anyway, it looks like I'm on track to be a Full Professor by the end of the semester. I've passed thru the department, college, & university committees, & now the provost has recommended my promotion to the president (largely a pro forma gesture). Celebrations in order, I suppose.

window

So I just sent off my latest Parnassus piece to be typeset, after going over the editors' edits – maybe 200-250 of those little Word bubbles over 25 pages. And it's not like my prose is so bloody hopeless in the first place, it's just like that at a place where they really edit. Everyone ought to do some writing for real, dedicated editors sometime; it does wonders for your prose, your argumentation, the clarity of your thought. Most academic editors don't really edit: they just select, & then touch up around the corners after they've accepted something.

Busy week so far – a thesis defence yesterday, then going out for drinks with a departed & much-missed pair of colleagues; Thursday's Beckett seminar tackles Endgame & Adorno on Endgame – some fun! – & then there's a student club reading Friday at which I've been invited to read, & at which I might or might not be able to read. Plus lots of house-related busyness.

But Parnassus is out of the way, at least until the next deadline heaves into the 2-month visibility zone. So I can buckle down to my next essay project. I've decided to be very Mayhewian (Mayhevian?) about this from now on: strict word counts, at least 500 words per diem, crap or otherwise. I've been a very lazy wastrel all these years, & it's time to make something of myself.

google-puttering

Ara Shirinyan's Your Country Is Great: Afghanistan–Guyana (Futurepoem, 2008) is great fun, even if it's not one of those books you want to devour in a sitting. Shirinyan feeds the phrase "[a country] is great" into Google (with quotation marks, so he gets precise appearances of, say, "Barbados is great"), then constructs poems out of the results. Great fun, and telling: for Afghanistan, you get lots of appearances of "the need for X in Afghanistan is great"; for other countries, it's more like "diving in the Bahamas is great," or just plain "France is great."

I'm terribly perplexed, tho: is this Flarf or is it Conceptual Poetry?

For a lark, inspired by Susan Schultz's Google results for "unfortunately, Susan," I entered "Mark Scroggins is great." Alas, zero results. Same for "Mark Scroggins is okay." At least "Mark Scroggins sucks" only got one result: "Mark Scroggins sucks! After 6 games, he is all the way down in 13th!" on the "allbowling.com" forum. I'm guessing that's my alter ego, MS the professional bowler.

post-spring break

This is the 1st week here after spring break; my students – some of them at least – seem rested, enlivened, reset. Me, I'm wondering where it went, & why it left so few positive marks on me. In short, behind & exhausted: par for the course. Of course, this might be the aftereffects of this evening's Beckett seminar (Godot) for which I forgot my "talking" notes, & ended up trying to reconstruct them on the fly, in the process realizing just how painfully aphasic I can be when I haven't enough sleep.

And it's thesis defense season around here, so I have acres of lovely poetry & prose by wonderful students demanding to be read & thought about – no, I'm serious, it's good stuff, but where will I find the time to do it justice?

I've been poking & prodding at a few projects this week: how long, & how substantial, would a collection of my fugitive essays & book reviews be? Turns out pretty damned long – around 100,000 words, even leaving out the real crap. (And ignoring the more relevant question: who'd be mad enough to publish such a thing?) And I've been looking at my poems, moving them around, thinking about sending out a book manuscript. But most by golly most pleasurably, I've been painting. Found a canvas in a closet that I'd prepared a couple of years ago, lines all drawn for the filling in, & then found a little combination paintbox (cheap acrylics)/easel some holiday had brought me. So I sat down and painting, & took deep, sensual pleasure out of laying paint down on canvas with a brush. I have a tiny bit of talent, a knack for drawing & painting that was one of my consuming obsessions back in school. If I'd kept at it, I could have been perhaps not a real artist, but someone who did art for a living. Most of it's faded with decades of disuse, but I can still squeeze a little thrill out of making marks on a field once in a while. (This one I think I'll finish; it's all gold, orange, black & red, a iconic chessboard on a Vorticist background, with Tom Phillips-like text bubbles – from Scott's Fortunes of Nigel – floating in the center.)

felix dies natalis

& while I almost missed it, it seems that Culture Industry has quietly entered its fifth year of (more or less sporatic) existence (initiated, that is, back in March 2005). Thanks for dropping by; once I find some time to breathe, I'll try to do some actual thinking.

(Pozzo: Stand back! [Vladimir and Estragon move away from Lucky. Pozzo jerks the rope. Lucky looks at Pozzo.] Think, pig! [Pause. Lucky begins to dance.] Stop! [Lucky stops.] Forward! [Lucky advances.] Stop! [Lucky stops.] Think!)

Charles Alexander: Near or Random Acts

Near or Random Acts, Charles Alexander (Singing Horse Press, 2004)

A shy, unassuming charm to this volume; the 1st half is 70 7-line, 5-word-per-line sections, the second half a further run of such poems, this time interspersed with Alexander's notebook entries & notes on the manuscript & compositional process. An "opening-up," as it were. The parallels of the 1st 70 poems – "near or random acts" – with Zukofsky's 80 Flowers are obvious (Alexander himself makes the connection in an author's note at the end): the word-count constraints, the quotidian nature of much of the material, (sometimes) the allusions. But Alexander's aren't LZ's hyper-dense nuggets impacted history, philology, & allusion, whatever inspiration he may have taken from Zukofsky's last completed work. Instead, they're rather airy, highly musical units, suffused more often than not with a quizzical wonder at the spectacle of the poet's growing young daughters. A rather rare thing for me lately, & a very welcome one – a book of unabashed & enthusiastic love.

[68/100]

Anne Portugal: Quisite Moment

Quisite Moment, Anne Portugal, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Burning Deck, 2008)

A slim but delightful chapbook. A series of 14 9-line poems, each with a single 3-line footnote. The trick here – as in the title, which wants to be or once was "Exquisite Moment" – is that the first letters or syllables of each line seem to be missing, leaving a fertile lacuna for the reader to speculate on what came before, to fill in the blanks. As in "sing in the bedroom" ("cursing in the bedroom"? "musing in the bedroom"?):

end came

ipitously

cuss

digiously strong

kini

nty

retched out on

ouch

ton bedsheet

"Bedroom" gestured erotica to me – maybe that's my bent* – but here it's infected, distempered by the loppage of words, "stretched" to "retched," "touch" (?) to "ouch." I can't imagine the procedures Rosmarie W. went thru to find English "equivalents" for the original French.

*my favorite of the "footnotes":

the Swiss well

it's their Swiss bent

love Switzerland

[67/100]

what to read next?

Today the UPS-person delivered the carton I'd shipped from New York Thursday, containing mostly books of poetry, mostly acquired at the Strand:

Charles Alexander, Certain Slants

Jenny Boully, The Body

Thomas Fink, Clarity and Other Poems

Allen Grossman, Descartes' Loneliness

Paul Hoover, Rehearsal in Black

---, Totem and Shadow: New and Selected Poems

Devin Johnston, Aversions

Geraldine Kim, Povel

Garrett Kalleberg, Some Mantic Demons

Joseph Lease, The Room

Aaron McCollough, Welkin

Jill Magi, Threads

John Olson, Echo Regime

Bob Perelman/Francie Shaw, Playing Bodies

Donald Revell, A Thief at Strings

Chris Tysh, Continuity Girl

Elizabeth Willis, Meteoric Flowers

C. D. Wright, One Big Self

So, what to read next? (After, that is, going over my talking points for Lolita?)

The Pogues in south Florida

You needn't have known me long to find out that I'm something of a rabid Pogues fan, have been for the past 20-odd years or so. Strangely enough, I've never seen the band in concert, tho I did catch singer Shane MacGowan on his tour for The Snake back in 1997 or so – a disspiriting show, in which John Doe of X opened to a frankly uninterested crowd & Shane himself delivered a 45-minute, slurred & disoriented set.

The Pogues, who've been performing "reunion" tours with their classic 8-member lineup over the past 9 years or so, were scheduled to play at this weekend's Langerado Festival in Miami; I wanted to go, but didn't want to pony up the massive ticket price, so it was almost a relief when the entire festival was cancelled. Not good for the Florida music scene, certainly, but it relieved me of a big financial dilemma ($150 for one band). Shane & the boys, however, seem to have already booked their tickets & shipped their gear, for about two weeks ago I discovered they had rescheduled to the Pompano Beach Amphitheatre (dig ye olde Englishe spelling, typical around here), where we saw them last night in all their aged glory. (Promotion could have been a bit better – the turnout was frankly pretty embarassing, giving rise to Spinal Tap in Marineland jokes in the half hour before the band took the stage.)

Shane is as drunken & disoriented as ever: he began the set by with a bit of slurred raving about how glad he was to be in "Miami, My Mammy!," & quoting (I take it) some lines from Scarface. He moves like an old man needing hip replacement surgery, paunchy, his cheeks sunken from his lack of teeth. One could understand only every 3rd of 4th word of his between-songs banter. But his singing, while worlds away from the magnificent bellow of the band's heyday, was remarkably assured. And the band itself is better than ever. Okay, there's a suspicious number of shaved pates among the band members; and sure, they've more or less become an "oldies" attraction, since they haven't written any new songs since 1996: but they have a wonderfully rich repertoire to draw on, & played a scorching set of selections from their five classic MacGowan-fronted albums. As players, they're sharper & more precise than ever.

I was particularly taken with Terry Woods, the cittern/mandolin player (picture above, in the band's heyday). Woods was brought into the band in 1986, for the EP Poguetry in Motion; he was about 10 years older than the other members of the band, having played in a number of 1970s folk-rock outfits (he was with Andy Irvine & Johnny Moynihan in the influential Sweeney's Men, and a founding member of Steeleye Span). Woods brought a level of instrumental competence to the group, especially in playing the tunes & ornamentations of traditional celtic dance music, far beyond that of most of the rest of them: where the Pogues had been an accordian-driven group, now they were an accordian & cittern-driven outfit.

The cittern fascinated me when I saw it cradled in Woods's arms on the photo from If I Should Fall From Grace With God, and when I heard him play it. (Woods's "cittern" is an 8-stringed, 4-course instrument, tuned an octave down from a mandolin – it's essentially identical to what in current circles is called an octave mandolin or Irish bouzouki.) I had to have one, & had to learn to play it. Which I sort of did, & still do – I now have at least 3 citternish instruments around the house, and can bash out most of the Pogues's repertoire in my own fumbling fashion.

At 62, Woods remains the linch-pin of the group: if anything, his playing is even more fiery & exciting than it was back in 1989. He's an inspiration to all balding, aging bouzouki players everywhere. And the Pogues, I'd say to anyone who's in the neighborhood for their upcoming Atlanta, DC, Boston, & New York shows, are better in person than they've ever been.

***

For true analites, the set list, in blurrily remembered order:

Streams of Whiskey

If I Should Fall from Grace With God

Turkish Song of the Damned

A Pair of Brown Eyes

Repeal of the Licensing Laws (an instrumental, Shane's first break)

The Broad Majestic Shannon

Sayonara

Cotton Fields

Bottle of Smoke

Tuesday Morning (sung by Spider Stacy, Shane's second break)

Sunnyside of the Street

The Body of an American

Lullaby of London

The Sickbed of Chuchulain

Thousands Are Sailing (sung by Phil Chevron, Shane's third break)

Sally Maclennane

A Rainy Night in Soho

Dirty Old Town

Greenland Whale Fisheries

Poor Paddy

The Irish Rover

Fiesta

Joseph Donahue: World Well Broken

World Well Broken, Joseph Donahue (Talisman House, 1995)

Back in the mid-90s, someone in middle Tennessee was regularly funnelling review (?) copies of new Talisman House, Sun & Moon, & Coach House books into a stall in an antique mall in Nashville, where I would come by a couple times a year & buy them all. I remember checking out with Joe Donahue's World Well Broken, anent which a blue-haired woman working the cash register commented to a friend, "Looka that – 'world way-ull broken' – well, it surely is, isn't it?"

World Well Broken, aside from the opening "Opiate Phobia," entirely leaves behind short lyrics in favor of more expansive things. "Spectral Evidence" is like a course in hauntology, the ghosts of Maya Deren & Harry Smith popping up at every turn. "Christ Enters Manhattan" is tremendous, the Second Coming imagined as a horror movie scripted by William Blake & directed by Luis Buñuel.

[66/100]

Joseph Donahue: Before Creation

Before Creation, Joseph Donahue (Central Park Editions, 1989)

I try not to lend books myself; my own copy of Joseph Donahue's first book, I admit with only a little shame, actually belongs to my grad school friend Patty Chu, lent to me more years ago than I care to admit. She's not gettting it back, I'm afraid. So I've known Joe's work a deal longer than I've known Joe himself. There're some great short poems in here (I'm partial to "Lou Reed" & "Adam, In Hell") but the standouts are the long, multi-part pieces like "Transfigurations" & "Crania Americana," in which you can see Donahue's characteristic limpid mysticism beginning to emerge from a more familiar, more ordinary "American Surrealism." "Purple Ritual" is a gripping collision of childhood memories of growing up in Texas, the poet's early observations of President Kennedy, and an imagining of Lee Harvey Oswald strangely conflated with the singer Orpheus: the JFK assassination, perhaps the nearest recent history gets to real live Greek tragedy, a persistent textual ghost haunting much of Before Creation.

[65/100]

Gertrude Stein: Tender Buttons

Tender Buttons, Gertrude Stein (1914 – any number of editions, this time thru in the Vechten-edited Selected Writings)

Too long – a couple of years at least – since I've reread this one , long enough for me almost to forget what a fantastic Wunderkammer of delights & surprises & puns & rhythms & implacably sensible nonsense this little book is. There should be centenary celebrations all over the world for its birthday 5 years hence, for it's as fresh now as the day it was first printed. It makes most of last century's American poetry, from the early LZ & Oppen down thru Black Mountain, the Beats, & much of the post-avant scene, seem immediately dated. Not irrelevant, mind, & not less than valuable – but dated.

[64/100]

Peter Gizzi: Periplum and other poems

Periplum and other poems, 1987-1992, Peter Gizzi (Salt Publishing, 2004)

Much earlier work than what I've read of Gizzi before. Trying on various voices, various idioms, all with some success. I love the almost Ashberyan discursiveness of "Deux ex Machina" & "Hard as Ash," tho I'm perhaps drawn more immediately to the fragmentary notations of the chapbook-length Music for Films. (Brian Eno gives this one its title, an album I've played so many hundreds of times times on vinyl that I've never felt the need to buy the CD – every note is there in my memory.) Nods to Spicer (of course), to Duncan. Is Peter Gizzi the preëminent male love poet of his generation? A fair bet.

[63/100]

C. S. Giscombe: Prairie Style

I've just gotten back from a quick "spring break" week in New York, where the girls spent scads of time dabbling in the snow & I spent lots of time shivering. Not a busy week, in literary terms. Ran into Bruce Andrews on the subway for a quick moment; had dinner – a busy, chattering, family-style affair – with Mike Heller & Jane Augustine. But I did make it down to the Strand one late evening, & a large carton of slim volumes of contemporary verse should be UPS-ing its way towards Florida right now. For the nonce, I'll content myself with blogging some of the books I've read over the past couple of months but haven't gotten around to inserting:

***

Prairie Style, C. S. Giscombe (Flood Editions, 2008)

Cecil Giscombe & I go way, way back – too far back, it seems these days – to when he was a whole lot younger than I am now. I knew his daughter when she was a prelingual toddler (there's a poem dedicated to her in Anarchy); now she's graduated from college. His poetry just gets better and better, as he works steadily & slowly (Prairie Style is only his 4th collection), but more & more perfectly. The African diaspora across the Great Plains, with conceptual side trips to Canada & Jamaica. Foxes & trains, both of them quick, intelligent, & indigenous. A soft, persistent, imperative, ironical voice, telling a tale of the tribe; but more specifically telling – as has always been Giscombe's obsession – telling the phenomenology of particular places. CSG is to the midwest what Stevens was to Key West, Bishop to an American's Brazil, Olson to Goucester. (Olson, frankly, is the only direct influence on Giscombe of those three hat-plucked names.) The only thing I miss here, in these beautifully sculpted, eye-brow raised prose poems, is CSG's peerless sense of the line.

[62/100]

Kit Robinson, Ice Cubes

Ice Cubes, Kit Robinson (Roof, 1987)

Continuing my trundle thru The Grand Piano (just finished #5), I took down a couple of Kit Robinson's books. Of all the Grand Pianists, he & Steve Benson are the ones with whose work I'm probably least familiar. Ice Cubes is in 3 sections: "Up Early," a run of 12-line poems (composed in early morning? limbering-up exercises? – at any rate, spare, tense, & intelligent); "Oleo," a series of longer-lined, 5-lined stanza'd pieces, rather denser and more witty – I'm way keen on "Nesting of Layer Protocols":

Theory has it the word came first. But you always

have to take somebody's word for it. That word,

built up over time with letters from various

alphabets, edges polished by the erosion of speech,

is itself a result.

– and the 50 or so pages of "Ice Cubes," poems in 4-line stanzas, one word per line. A neat trick, the form placing equal emphasis on each word, forcing Robinson to make lexical choice "count." For the most part (as in the earlier sections) straightforward syntax, casual tone, but a light effect very unlike the sometimes ponderous Orientalism of Zukofsky's 1-word-per-line passages.

these

cubes 

designed 

to

cool

your

drink

dissolve

faster

than

sound

thinking

[61/100]

***

Tho Louisville isn't really a "book town," I managed to add a fair stack to the "unread" poetry shelf. Tell me what to read next:

Collected Poems, Paul Auster

Terra Lucida, Joseph Donahue

Crown of Weeds, Amy Gerstler

Ghost Girl, Amy Gerstler

Inventions of Necessity, Jonathan Greene

Teth, Sheila E. Murphy

Unrecounted, W. G. Sebald

Ours, Cole Swensen

Mental Ground, Esther Tellermann

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.)

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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.

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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.