The Babycarrier Book Tour

Farrah, Roman and I are hitting the road in the south! We just survived our first flight with the baby and are now in New Orleans LA where we will be attending a wedding celebration this weekend and then embarking on a mini poetry reading tour for Farrah's WOLF AND PILOT and my new Bloof Books chapbook THIS IS WHAT IT IS LIKE TO BE LOVED BY ME. Here are all the details on dates and places we will appear with strollers, snugglies, bottles and other accoutrements:

4/16 in Hattiesburg MS at University of Southern Mississippi, 118
College Dr. #5037, 5:30pm

4/18 in Baton Rouge LA at Underpass Reading Series at Chelsea's Cafe,
2857 Perkins Rd, 8pm

4/19 in New Orleans LA at The Diane Tapes Reading Series at Maple
Street Bookshop, 3141 Ponce de Leon, 6pm

4/25 in Conway AR at La Lucha Space, 2035 Prince St at Donaghey Ave., 7pm? (tbd)

4/26-27 in Fayetteville AR at the Ozark Small-Press Poetry Festival
for Cannibal, Nightbird Books 205 West Dickson Street, 7-10pm both

nights 

Also, I have been posting totally new poems every day this April on the Bloof Books blog - check it out here!

NEXT BIG NOTHING

Recently I was asked by Steven Karl (Thanks, Steven!!) to take part in a round robin interview chain - here is my contribution ---

What is the working title of the chapbook?

This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me

Where did the idea come from for the chapbook?

I started working on the pieces that became this chapbook while I was traveling, thinking about love and how it is like reading or like looking, like trying to describe something objectively in exquisite detail, over time, while the describer is in motion and in flux. I had in mind projects like Monet’s haystacks seen in many kinds of light and On Kawara’s paintings of every day’s date for many decades each in the format of the country he found himself in and Stephen Ratcliffe’s every-morning practice of writing the same sized poem about the same landscape: observation as weather. I found myself thinking in particular about describing a loved object and how this becomes a sort of projection onto a mirror, as Roland Barthes theorizes in his very mysterious and beautiful book A Lover’s Discourse. Nursing a distance, looking very closely, but also looking at something imaginary at the same time.

I found my way to the line “This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me.” With these ideas embedded in it, the phrase seemed vertiginous, oscillating back and forth between the position of the lover and the object of love, projection into a paradox. This complicated effect of suggestion and identification is I think often a key part of reading, and certainly almost always writing: hearing someone else’s voice in one’s head, being infected by feelings. It probes narcissism but in a funny, raw-nervy way. And maybe a creepy way too – I held on to the image of watching someone sleep—a kind of strange and special intimate thing to know about someone that they can’t know about themselves.

Under the heading “This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me" I started writing, adopting a diaristic/daybook mode which meant that the poem could become a story of a relationship over time, dilating and contracting and deepening. I mean the open-ended relationship of poems and their speakers and their readers but also a very particular relationship, as I incorporated little jokes between my wife Farrah and I: our road-trip games, our joshing turns of phrase. We got married between the time I started writing and finished editing this poem so I couldn’t help making the poem romantically not only a courtship itself but also the record of one. But it isn’t so much a poem about falling in love as about being in love.

Many pieces for this series formed while I was traveling; sections take place by the pool in the Hotel Oceania in Santa Monica, in my parents’ cabin in Northern California where I stayed for a few days by myself in January 2011 writing, going for walks and reading R. Crumb’s illustrated Genesis, and (in fantasy at least) riding the Trans-Siberian Railway which I hope to do actually someday. Somehow Winnie the Pooh and Leo Tolstoy came into the poem. Rimbaud’s line “Je est un autre” – I is an other – kept occurring to me. I have been working at the same time on poems involving the Norwegian folk hero Peer Gynt so somehow with his looky-loo first name like a burglar he jimmied his way into this poem too.

What genre does your book fall under?

This series of pieces started out as see-what-happens prose in which the opening phrase was sometimes a prompt and sometimes a way of complicating or interrupting or redirecting the flow of an impulse or an idea. As I was editing and looking for ways to bring more air into the prose I came across a great piece by Brenda Hillman in Lana Turner #2 adapting a hybrid form called ‘haibun’- mixing haiku and prose. I think the idea traditionally in Japanese literature is to use to the prose in a travel diary-memoirish way to situate the haiku pieces so these little gems of observation and contemplation are presented in a fabric of time instead if floating in space as they usually do. Haibun’s cut lines can aerate the prose while prose blocks impart to the cut lines a jazzy sense of contingency and visibility like a viscous colored liquid imbued with bubbles. I love how the form foregrounds travel and motion and the sense of a work as its own commentary, writing in dialogue with its process of creation, a journal of an adventure. Thus it comprises not only viable haiku-sized poems with a prose midrash of elaboration but a single long hybrid work in which it is possible for more unexpected things to happen. Hillman’s contemporary adaptation of haibun was extremely inspiring to me. (Here’s a link to her poem, and while I’m googling I just came across another example here. And incidentally today I happened to spot that EOAGH just published a haibun by Steve Benson, using the haiku as part-hinge, part-springboard to leap into a void…) These American haibun show me how the form could work against essay and normal prose poetry writing like engine-braking with a gear shift in a car, dramatically changing the pace by using the text’s own momentum against itself.  Similarly, just by rolling forward quickly enough and forcing the stick shift into gear, it’s possible to get a car to start.  

What actors would you choose to play the part of your characters in a movie rendition?

Here is a partial list of dramatis personae for This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me:

A bicycle. The City of Philadelphia. The City of New York. A salt flat in Utah. A volcano. The Berkshires. Fog. Peer Gynt. Gertrude Stein. Arthur Rimbaud. Leo Tolstoy. The mathematician Georg Cantor. Snow monkeys. Sea lions. Anarchists. King Arthur. Calypso. Ulysses.  Gulliver. Winnie-the-Pooh. A bearwolf. Me. Farrah.

This film is a fiction autobiopic so everybody can portray themselves – or versions of themselves (think Arlo Guthrie as Arlo Guthrie in “Alice’s Restaurant,” John Malkovich as John Malkovich in “Being John Malkovich,” Eminem in “8 Mile,” Howard Stern in “Private Parts,” Los Angeles in Thom Andersen’s “Los Angeles Plays Itself”). But like these movies there is a script – this is not documentary or improvisation. It doesn’t matter whether the actors are good or convincing actors; in some ways it works better if the self-impersonations are vague and stylized and somehow unconvincing. The screenplay, like what it is like to be loved in the poem, is by me.

The chapbook includes these lines: “The actors portraying us tell us how we look each morning. They study our trash to fill us with hope.”

What is the one sentence synopsis of your book?

This is this is what it is like to be loved by me.

(These words are what it is like to be loved by me.)

How long did it take you to write the first draft of the manuscript?

I started writing pieces for this series on an October 7 – I know because that’s what it says on the first page of the poem, in the poem. I think it was 10/7/10. I had gone to Los Angeles for my friend’s bachelor party in Big Bear and afterwards I stayed near the ocean, writing and getting ready for a road trip of readings that would take Farrah and me from Venice Beach to Austin, Texas where the same friend was getting married. One day I took a break from writing for an afternoon and rented a Segway and rode along the Santa Monica boardwalk feeling ridiculous. Mostly it was rainy, which was very weird since I thought it never rains in LA. When Farrah arrived the day before our reading at Beyond Baroque the weather cleared so we took out bicycles and rode north on the boardwalk to the edge of Pacific Palisades and Malibu. On our way back we tried to head in from the coast and had to ford our way through a huge puddle of rainwater in a tunnel under the Pacific Coast Highway.

I continued working on the prose blocks that became This Is What It Is Like To Be Loved By Me for the next year and a half, during which my cat died, I went on a Tolstoy reading marathon, grew out my beard and then shaved it, got married, and conceived a child with Farrah. The manuscript was finally finished during the spring and summer of 2012.

Who or what inspired you to write this book?

My wife Farrah. My friends and their weddings. The opening line from Dante’s Inferno about the “selva oscura” – dark forest – in which he finds himself midway through life.

What else about your book might pique the reader’s interest?

This chapbook has sex-style sex in it. It also includes secret instructions for getting into a house in Sudbury, Massachusetts and the true story of how I met my wife in the Kensington Stables in Brooklyn taking horseback-riding lessons, years before we exchanged even a word. I've also included the rules for a very fun road trip game we call “zip zip,” which involves scoring points when you spot horses. When you pass a graveyard, you shout out "bury your horses!" and the other person loses all their points. It is ruthless and morbid. When we drove across the country Farrah and I tried adding bonus points for silos during the long trek across Iowa but that made it too easy and I don’t recommend it.

Will your book be self-published or represented by an agency?

Shanna Compton of Bloof Books has been extraordinarily generous in making an amazing edition of this chapbook as part of an incredible lineup of chaps from phenomenal poets. As one of only a couple men published on this great press I feel particularly honored. I’m speechless and beside myself with excitement.

Tag, you're it.

As future interviewees, I am tagging Ian Dreiblatt, Paige Taggart, Keith Newton, Justin Marks, and my fellow 2013 Bloof chap-pers (though I think many have already been tagged and even done the interview): Hailey Higdon, Becca Klaver, Pattie McCarthy, Jennifer Tamayo, Kirsten Kaschock.

a book tour

I'm traveling the west coast this week with Farrah, in support of her new book from Four Way Books, WOLF AND PILOT! We are traveling with Dan Magers; here's our calendar for the whole tour - 

Sept 30--reading for Ghosts and Projectors, 7pm

featuring Jared White, Dan Magers, Farrah Field and Kyle Crawford
The Crux, 1022 W Main Street, Boise ID

October 2--reading for If Not For Kidnap, 7:30pm

featuring Farrah Field, Jared White and Dan Magers with musical guest import/importRecess Gallery, 1127 SE 10th Avenue Portland, OR

October 5--reading at Studio One Reading Series, 7:30pm

featuring Dan Magers, Farrah Field and Jared White
Studio One Art Center, 365 45th Street  Oakland CA

Oct 6--radio appearance on Poet as Radio, KUSF

with Jared White, Farrah Field and Dan Magers

Poet as Radio airs Saturday from 9-10am in San Francisco, CA

Oct 8--poetry talk and teatime at CalArts with the CalArts Poetry collective, 4pm

featuring Dan Magers, Farrah Field and Jared White
CalArts campus (Langley Hall), 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia CA

Oct 9--reading at the Pop Hop bookstore, 7pm

featuring Jared White, Farrah Field, Dan Magers and Michelle Detorie

5002 York Boulevard, Los Angeles (Highland Park) CA

rhinoceroceros

Last week Farrah and I finally returned to a movie theater for the first time since we spent twelve hours in early July with Jacques Rivette's Out 1.  We headed over to one of our favorite Brooklyn spots, the Cobble Hill Cinema and saw Woody Allen's "Midnight in Paris." I always love to go to the movies and as far as this one went I was basically satisfied and entertained though it was kind of a Cliff's Notes Expat Guide level tour of modernism. In one scene, Adrian Brody portrays a youngish Salvador Dalì who intones his own name as if it were a magician's flourish, with every word seeming to be preceded with an implied ellipsis like... this!), then lapses into shallowly 'surreal' reverie of a frolicking rhinoceros. I joked with Farrah the other day that this rhinoceros bit, built out of randomness repeated until it becomes funny, like a recipe, seemed to take on some weird extra resonance because of Brody's own enormous rhinoceros-ish beak. (His Dalì was way more about jolly nose than sad eyes, I think. Woody Allen's Man Ray was less fun, since he lacked any Emanuel  Radnitzky Brooklyn-ness and was left essentially played the widow's peak and nothing else.)

During my freshman year of high school I played the pivotal role of the Grocer in a production of Ionesco's Rhinoceros. (Maybe four or five lines and mostly a lot of quiet background color during monologues by the principles sipping espressos at the cafe stage-right.) Sadly, in the middle of the first act in our debut and probably only live performance, I was stranded onstage by my supposed partner, the Grocer's Wife, who broke the fourth wall mid-scene to chat with her friends in the audience, leaving me to frantically revise our planned background business into a slapstick soliloquy. I recall pantomiming a comprehensive spit-shining of our fruit stand with each imaginary apple apron-wiped to a perfect invisible red in a futile attempt to drag her back into character. I think the trauma of this abandonment must still be raw because I don't remember if we ever actually transformed into rhinoceroses as prescribed by Ionesco, though I suppose it must be so, if perhaps only offstage, inexorable grind toward ridiculous apocalypse. Why not!

I can't remember if I wrote this on the blog before (it's been awhile! I'm going to try again to knock up some more current thoughts here!) but I have been trying lately to write poems with closures that work like in late Bunuel films when the characters are talking and then all of a sudden out of nowhere come huge explosions and... Fin! For instance, in "That Obscure Object of Desire," the Fernando Rey character walks with Conchita in one of those flaneur-ish 19th century arcade malls and peers into a store window and then... boom! Fin!

A poem I finished last week concludes with a recitation of my phone number and cell phone. Just in case! A kid I knew in high school was extremely proud about calling Allen Ginsberg on the phone, just to say hello because why not, since Ginsberg was listed in the phone book, because why not.

I've been in Massachusetts since we were mandatorily evacuated from our building in advance of Hurricane Irene. I found my sister's copy of Walter Benjamin's Arcades Project and loved the first few pages. Benjamin describes how Daguerre began his career as a panorama painter and began making proto-photo daguerreotypes the same year his panorama gallery The Diorama was consumed in a fire. (Boom! Fin!)

My conversation with Farrah about Adrien Brody's rhinoceros nose took place in a parking lot of a Walgreens in Waltham where, ten years ago on an icy winter night, I slipped off the curb and flipped over entirely upside down in mid-air before landing hard on my head on the asphalt.

Last evening I spent awhile at the Harvard Coop bookstore in Cambridge, picking up a physics textbook for my sister while she was in class and then sitting in the cafe and reading "War and the Iliad" which many friends of mine will be reading this month though I will be unable to join our discussion of it because we will be away on our honeymoon in Rome. The physics textbook, being used in a course for pre-meds, depicts on its cover a skier in mid-air, overlaid with vector lines showing velocity, acceleration, etc. We joked about a skier coming into the emergency room with a broken leg and the doctor graphing emergency parabolas, ever grateful for the premed training. Now I think of Herzog's Sculptor Steiner, plummeting off dangerous ski jumps if only prove their danger to the unheeding judges.

Several people online write with consternation that the Trojan Horse does not appear in the Iliad. No Cassandra, no Laocoon, no burning of Troy.

I would like to see Michelangelo's statue of Laocoon and his sons, being strangled together by a welter of sea serpents. I can't figure out how it has become so indelibly stamped in my mind despite my never taking an art history course or seeing it in person. It makes me think of a statue at the Met by Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux that depicts Ugolino, from Dante. Apparently, for Carpeaux it was a sort of homage to Michelangelo's earlier piece, which I only just now learned. Ugolino has the most amazing expression, gnashing stone teeth.

Our sweet old cat has been diagnosed with extreme tooth decay that is causing nosebleeds and making it harder for him to eat, though he seems preternaturally unfazed, brave, macho, stoic. The veterinarians need to perform an echocardiogram to determine if he can be safely anesthetized for the appropriate dental care. We brought him along with us from Brooklyn to Massachusetts as a third evacuee from the storm. This is his first visit to my childhood house in Wayland. When we arrived, the radio was reporting tornadoes spawned by the hurricane and I said to the cat, "we're not in Kansas anymore!"

For the first couple acts of an excellent production this summer of Shakespeare's "All's Well That Ends Well" at the Delacorte Theatre in Central Park, I was terribly distracted by aural déjà vu, trying to place the vocal tone of the actor playing Parolles. He was extremely funny but there was some so oddly familiar about him. Finally I closed my eyes and spent practically a full minute with my eyes shut before realizing that he was channeling Bert Lahr as the Cowardly Lion. Which is fairly perfect since Parolles is totally cowardly and totally a lion.

Farrah and I have shared a running joke for ages in which we refer to our cat as a doctor and make reference to his MD. We have conferred on him in this role as physician the last name "Chinski" and we riff on consultations, diagnoses, etc. For no particular reason we decided that his specialty in medicine is as an ear, nose and throat doctor, an ENT.

I remember as a kid being driven many times along Storrow Drive in Boston past the Massachusetts Eye and Ear Infirmary and always noticing the name, emblazoned in huge type on the side of the building. Just past the hospital was a billboard advertising the housing development at Charles River Park that read, "If you lived here, you'd be home now."

Once when I was six or seven years old my father had to go to the hospital in for emergency treatment when, running through the woods outside our house: he had scratched a cornea on a tree branch. Afterward he had to wear a Robert Creeley-ish eyepatch for several mythic-seeming weeks.

While picking up the textbook for my sister tonight at the Harvard Coop I spent a while perusing the neighboring shelves, reminiscing about this ritual from college in which I would shop classes by shopping syllabi, and luxuriating in all the readable, studyable things someone will soon be teaching to someone. At random I picked up a copy of a short Caryl Churchill play from a bookshelf devoted to some sort of course being offered in contemporary drama. The play, entitled "Far Away," was extremely engrossing; it took place in that pseudo-fascist-martial magical alternative universe dystopic present a lot of contemporary fiction seems to take place in (like Jesse Ball's "The Curfew," which I've been reading aloud to Farrah sometimes in the car when she takes a turn at the wheel).

In the Churchill play, the first scene has a girl reports to her aunt about violent, vaguely genocide-ish actions she has secretly witnessed her uncle participating in; later, the girl crafts odd, elaborate hats for a procession of prisoners to wear for some sort of mass execution that is performed wordlessly in a devastating sucker punch of a sequence slotted into the middle of the play. Churchill insists in a prefatory note that, despite only four castable speaking roles in the play, at least twenty and even a hundred other actors should be conscripted into this pageant scene, if not more.

At the end of "Far Away" the girl launches into a shocking monologue about how the entire world has been engulfed in war, with not only guilds and nations of people have taken sides, but also species of animals, plants, objects, even light and air turning into homicidal partisans and soldiers. The memorable last image of the play has the girl describing dipping a foot into a river, uncertain of whether the river can be trusted or whether it is an bloodthirsty enemy combatant.

Later in the evening, I read from "War and the Iliad" the last part of the essay by Rachel Bespaloff, discussing the ethics of the Iliad. Bespaloff relates how Homer's gods manipulate the elements of the world - dust, birds, light - to intervene in the world of the war between the Greeks and the Trojans. Yet even the gods too are ultimately humbled by the great inexorable wave of "Fatum": things turning out as they turn out, the possible giving way to a history of whatever happened. In the meantime, Bespaloff writes, "A grand anthropomorphic imagination forges a new bond between the individual and the universe, sanctifying the relationship of man to the elemental forces. Mountains and islands, rivers and springs join in the praise of God or enlist in the struggles of heroes."

My dad found a remarkable video on youtube, showing the flooding in our neighborhood the day after the hurricane.

A few years ago we visited Jesse Ball and his partner Thordis in Iceland and they took us to the edge of the tectonic rift at Pingvellir at night. We thumbed a cork into a wine bottle and sat at the edge of the ravine, watching the aurora borealis glimmer endlessly over the vast dark plain. Against the darkness the craggy protuberant boulders along the path became such anthropomorphic heaped giants it made a belief in Scandinavian trolls guarding the night seem entirely reasonable.

Before the storm Farrah and I debated whether to bring all our binders full of poems in the car with us to Boston for safekeeping. East River waves apparently lapped the sidewalk in front of our building but no damage, thankfully--even the towels we draped on our windowsill were dry.

Here in Massachusetts the Sudbury River flooded picturesquely and I kayaked around, grazing the tips of bushes submerged in water with the bottom of my boat.

 
I tell myself that the storm, luckily less dreadful than feared for most places nearby (though not all, sadly!), may be a symptom of ongoing global warming in which extreme once-in-a-century events are becoming almost commonplace. The past will now be unreliable as a guide to the future of the present.

Taking stock, the only serious casualty for me from the hurricane was the frustrating though necessary cancellation/postponement of my reading for the Stain of Poetry series, which should have taken place on Friday. Among a few other newish poems I had been planning on reading the one with my phone number at the end of it. It is entitled "Ancient Yoga of 1880" and is not as far as I can tell part of my growing manuscript of poems involving Peer Gynt, which I am calling THE TROLLS. I loved Robert Wilson's production of Ibsen's Peer Gynt at BAM a few years ago and have been working on this ever since.

The Brooklyn Flea, where we bring a selection of chapbooks out every weekend as Berl's Brooklyn Poetry Shop, was also canceled because of the weather. In writing this piece I realize just now that, as co-proprietor of this outdoor stand, I am replaying my role as the Grocer in Rhinoceros, sweating away beside a table of wares. Sometimes this summer, despite the shade under our tent at the Flea, at the end of a long hot day everyone looks like a rhinoceros.

I love writing "rhinoceroceros" as the title of this post. I wrote an email to my friend recently offering "congratulatations" and she said this reminded her of a Aram Saroyan poem (eyeye! lighght!) and I felt happy about this

Farrah listens to political podcasts sometimes these days as she knits and then mutters knowingly to me afterwards, "Hell in a handbasket." It makes me think of her bicycle basket, which attaches jauntily to her handlebars. It has a little sliding latch so it can be removed for errands, though sometimes it sticks a bit and has to be jiggled loose.

What color is the Schwitters (more, also and again)

This week I've been reading a wonderful new collection of "Merz Fairy Tales" by Kurt Schwitters. I found the book last weekend on the Recommendations shelf at Unnameable Books, which just relocated inside Brooklyn from Park Slope to Vanderbilt Avenue in Prospect Heights. (It's just down the street from the bar where I went to drown my sorrows after I left a notebook in a cab outside the Brooklyn Museum of Art. The best features of the new bookstore location are totally phenomenological, affecting the body and how it moves. For instance, in the small anthro-soc section in a corridor near the back, the shelf walls are so close together you have to walk backwards out of the alcove just to turn around. Then, in the backyard, the ground is lined with chunky gravel over some sort of acrylic drainage fabric that together produces this wonderful quicksandy crunch when you walk across, making rough sunken pits instead of foorprints.)



The Schwitters tales are pretty fantastic; I'm always a sucker for a sidewise-tragic renovated fairy tale, as in Henry Miller's "Smile at the Foot of the Ladder" or Pierre Louys or for that matter Jacques Demy's "Donkey Skin" and I am all the more excited now to discover that the Schwitters will be the first in a whole series of modern tales, from writers such as Apollinaire, Italo Svevo and Anatole France.



The Schwitters tales are wonderful in their inversion of fable logic, offering instead of morals a sense of the deep arbitrariness by which greed is sometimes rewarded, kindness and hostility both arrive often without pattern or context, and the worst way to make something happen is to try to, or worse, to try to try to. The tale that left the strongest impression on me is actually the first story in the book, in which a solitary swineherd, "serene and also content, but not happy" meets a writer who, to better offer the swineherd a chance at happiness, writes the peasant flesh and blood into his "masterwork" in order to cure his loneliness with the company of fictional characters. A sly remodeling of the wish-granting god or genii, the storyteller offers his own imagination as a basis for wish-granting yet, in pursuit of desire fulfilled the peasant only loses his serenity and contentment, romancing imaginary peasant maidens and contriving a secret identity as a son of an imaginary king. Then, worse, the swineherder bumps up against the limits of the writer's conventional imagination; even in the world of make believe, swineherd princelings should not dare to dream to marry mere peasants, lest they upset the very order of things. Ultimately the swineherd returns chastened to an imaginary reality where happiness is not so important, is only a sort of elusive construct, an absence that exists in the mind of a blithe twittering urbane bourgeois "illustrious writer", scribbling away at the masterwork that is capital, is hierarchy, a pack of diamonds symbolized greater than and less than (<>), a null set fairy tale, a tower of Babel.

In my writing I spend a fairly inordinate amount of time thinking along these lines about happiness and its varieties and its costs, personal and social. Perhaps happiness is not thinking about the future but if that is the case then the series of moments it allows string together only ex post facto meanings. Marjorie Perloff brilliants parses the broken mirror trail of hap-happening-happenstance-haphazard here as a way into Lyn Hejinian's great poem "Happily"; another Marjorie, Marjorie Welish, advising me about poetry a few years ago, told me to focus on events and how they happen. Read the times, she said a few weeks later. As in, I thought, How Happenings Happen, and For Real.

I was thinking about all this, funnily enough, as I watched the new Harry Potter film last week, the latest in this slow-motion maxillofacial maturation series in which, entering early adulthood, some of the child actors' mouths billow sidewise into rakish comedian snaggles while others upturn like jaunty hats, or stretch like nervous rubber bands, taut and slithery. (I've just shaven a three month beard back to choppish sideburns in the last few weeks so I am experiencing my own rediscovery of the over exposed upper lip. Mine is always more marginal than I ever remember though nonetheless very distracting!)

Weirdly, given that I have no serious stake in the Harry Potter, this is the second post on my blog I am offering on the subject of a Harry Potter film. To be honest, each time I've seen one of these movies I mostly ignore the storyline and revel in the guiltily idealized boarding school ambience. The quality that I like best in the Potter films (and which this latest one evokes most of them all because the heart of the film is crushing adolescent angst instead of hero's quest and magical portent and general ology-ology) is of a precious momentousness of Happening that is both extremely slow and totally ephemeral. This is exactly the feeling of existing inside a big, almost but not quite benign institution: there are always very important things happening all over the place all the time but, no matter how many of these important moments you observe or take part in, there are other maybe more important moments that you are constantly failing to attend. You are following one schedule but you so easily could be following another -- and look, right on this calendar, here it is, here is what you missed, here is why there will be such terrible and wonderful consequences.



This was the also the quality I felt watching the naiads-meet-quantum geometry choreography of the Merce Cunningham company that I saw perform last week in Battery Park City, only days after his death. (Just this moment, finding this picture in the Times review of the performance, I discovered that a schoolmate of mine in high school -- which was not so much like Hogwarts, really -- is now apparently part of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.)



Cunningham's aleatory zen games of dice-rolling ensure that what you see is always a partial performance out of all possible performance permutations, and even in that partial performance one only witnesses a fraction of what is possible. I remember when I saw a performance a few years ago in which he'd collaborated with Radiohead and Sigur Rós at BAM; because of the dice throws determining the order of dances and musical tracks you could never witness the whole or "official" piece, only what happened to occur when a certain part of the music coincided with a certain element of the dancing. Taking this even farther to brilliant effect in the outdoor park setting last week, the dancers flitted between two makeshift stages to perform in which no matter where one stood, one could never see more than one of the two stages; one could enjoy the maths of dancers performing alone and in groups on oe stage but never forget that, just beyond one's peripheral vision, another stage was featuring an altogether different choreography at any given moment, a profusion of beautiful activity and forms.

You might choose one and then other at any given moment but always the choreography would include you, turning your head from side to side, not seeing it all, only a part. My friend Steven had told me earlier in the day, that this literally would be the last ever performance of the Merce Cunningham group since Cunningham had decreed that the group vanish with him. Judging from their nonchalant post-performance exit, I understood that the company would continue performing at least through a final months-long world tour. If I'd known I'm not sure I would have made the effort to hustle us downtown from Farrah's poetry reading earlier in the evening. I'm so glad I saw it though, and its non-continuance continuance seems even more appropriate: one last statement about lastness and the impossibility of one more, followed by one more.

I'm always a little baffled by the ritual of encores that always provide the coda to concerts; the audience knows on some level that, since the lights have not come up to reveal the ugliness of a utilitarian space that has been used utilitarianly, the concert is not over; the performer leaves the stage knowing they will come back; the encore is usually programmed in advance; the audience roars upon the performer's return knowing of course that this would happen and happen almost certainly regardless of their roaring; nevertheless the audience is thrilled that they have participated in making it happen; this thing that dooms the show to be almost over, though it is not over already. When the lights come on without an encore, though, despite it feels often to me in spite of this awareness s if something cheap has been foisted over, I have not been satisfied and who knows if I ever would have been satisfied but I am even less satisfied than I would have been in my otherwise state of dissatisfaction, without the encore, without more. Tomorrow night Farrah and I are going to see Alela Diane, one of her favorite, perform at a bar in Park Slope. Wonder if there will be encores.



Encore: In high school French I had trouble far too long with the word "encore" which for some reason lodged in my head in some mid-ground between 'more,' 'again,' and 'also.'

Encore: I was thinking during the Merce Cunningham show about what if one tried to live one's decision in life according to the Cage-Cunningham aleatory techniques, a roll of the et cetera dice. Then I realized, that's already how it is.

Encore encore: walking back home from the Merce Cunningham performance across the Brooklyn Bridge, I asked Farrah what she thought of the name "Merce." We play this game a lot, plumbing the Baby Name Wizard and thinking of unlikely names. (From our family trees, we often ponder our grandfathers, "Otis" and "Harmon." Harmon, mine, went by a nickname: Berl. Farrah mashes them up: "Otis Berl." "OB." "Obie.") I pondered the possibilities in Cunningham's case - Mercy? eMerson? - but Merce is apparently short for Mercier. I like the mixture of the tender-hearted and the magniloquent-transcendental in the pairing of mercy and Emersonian though. Merce also seems an American variant of Kurt Schwitters' school-of-one movement trademark, Merz. The Fairy Tales book I bought insists on the cover that these are "Merz Fairy Tales" (merz is highlighted in orange amid the other black font words); the introduction describes Merz as a sort of lower-register dada replacement after Schwitters' application rejection from Official Dada (snicker, shudder) on account of insufficient polemical sneering and an excess of jackets and ties. It appears Schwitters dreamed up the term Merz as a sonic glyph signifying this new logic, his call to reject perfectionism in favor of the attainable. Merz was a badge of alienated charm: "a smile at the grave and seriousness on cheerful occasions." Merz is also a parody of capital and art markets and merz-ish merchandising. According to the introduction, the inspiration for the word "merz" comes from the official Kommerzbank in Weimar Germany, the merz extracted so that it echoes with a smidgen of the German word 'ausmerzen,' to demolish, to annihilate. If Schwitters is for creative destruction, though, it is a soft apocalypse that pokes gently into the ribs, an apocalypse only of a wrong way of frowning. In the very engrossing introduction to the Merz Fairy Tales, the series editor Jack Zipes quotes at length a famous Schwitters poem from 1919 that I hadn't read before. I am awfully moved by the ironclad logic of these following lines:

Anna Bloom, red Anna Bloom, what are the people saying?

Prize question:
1) Anne Bloom has a screw loose.
2) Anna Bloom is red.
3) What color is the screw.

Blue is the color of your blonde hair.
Red is the color of your green screw.


That seems like the paradigmatic Merz syllogism: saying "I know, I know,": first ruefully, then sheepishly, then wolfishly. (Both Kurt and Schwitters are such toothy, lupine words in my mouth--total wolf, though maybe a dancing wolf.) In exile in England during the Nazi period in Germany, Schwitters wrote some of his last fairy tales in English. In one, he describes a painter painting a hyperreal three-dimensional portrait not on canvas but on the air itself. The painted figure hovers then blows away in the breeze as a onslaught of verbs: "He trembled and scrambled in the air, and he shivered and schwittered, like the air under him schwittered and shivered... Suddenly he grew quite thick round the middle, blew himself up, burst, and fell into pieces." According to the winking conclusion of this faux-bitter tale, the magical painter gives up his magical craft in the face of all this blowsy schwittering and "therefore, painters now paint plain, flat figures with flat brushes on canvas."

I snuck into a second movie after watching Harry Potter and watched the previews. It turns out there will be another film in the 'can't escape death' gotcha! series "Final Destination" which, instead of dutiful receiving a Roman numeral, will instead be the last last last, ie "THE Final Destination." I'm sure it will not be as beautiful as the claymation extravaganza "Coraline" of last winter but like it, it will be shown in 3-D using the new polarized lens technology that has been named, invitingly, RealD.