No No Yes No Yes

rhinoceroceros

2011-08-31T16:48:00.000-07:00

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)

2009-08-14T00:35:00.001-07:00

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.

Spirals, Splinters

2009-07-17T00:17:00.000-07:00

For the last very long time, insofar as a week and a half is a very long time, I've been driving west and northwest and west until finally today, when I finally drove down an on-ramp by a sign marked "EAST." Every few days on the road a truck loaded with perfectly cylindrical logs will barrel along and some splintery dust will come rocketing at the car, pelting the windshield with the noise of the near-shattering of shatterproof glass. Each time it comes I wince in a face that requires actual imaginary calamity - imaginary imaginary calamity will not do, which I learn when I try to reproduce the expression for Farrah. And luckily each time so far the calamities have been imaginary, and the windshield remains dingless, or at least as ding-free as it was when we left a seemingly long time ago to head out in this general direction.

I've been thinking a lot about these sounds of rupture and breakage, especially since we managed to my probably endless satisfaction to squeeze into a packed drive from Denver to Salt Lake City a mildly harrowing trip at near-dusk down unmaintained rocky desert roads to Robert Smithson's spiral jetty, on a remote inlet in the northern stretches of the Salt Lake. It was much more far flung than this very helpful web site seemed to suggest, requiring a solid hour of driving even after we made Brigham City on the interstate to get out to the desert hills we had to cross to find the site. I anticipated that the excursion would be lightly tinged with danger, a race with sundown that would at least put us at the jetty at the golden hour. Yet I hadn't imagined the extended slow-motion anxiety of the last few miles, after we'd passed the final cattle gate and had to weave the car gingerly between the rocks jutting seemingly tooth-shaped at the tires rolling carefully past until we gave up and got out, listened at the wheels for pops or hisses, and, satisfied there were none, went to hike the remainder.

The jetty hides from view until virtually the last minute, offering in its place around a previous bend in the trail a rectilinear industrial relic of a jetty, slathered enough with salt to make us squint and wonder if we were indeed seeing ghost spirals at its tips. There have been dark rumors for a while of a major new disturbance in the area - oil core sampling that could unsettle the soil and the ecology (in industrial ways that might nevertheless be very Mike-Mulligan-and-His-Steam-Shovel Robert Smithson-y) but all human action seems to be on hold for now. In addition, according to my book of photos of the jetty, there were years when it was submerged in the Salt Lake slurry water, others when it was caked in a weird salty pink a way back from the water. Right now, though, when we finally found it, around the next bend after the next bend, it was simply a brittle crust of causeway heading out where not-quite-beach turned into flats that got muddier and muddier until there was a shallow puddle of water on the edge of the jetty just as its curviness began. I think I must have imagined the jetty I think as existing out in deepish water but it seemed clear in reality that, if one was willing to get soggy shoes, one could fairly easily traipse in the wet furrows between the turns of the spiral.

For some reason, after I scrambled down the bluff to the salty shore where the jetty protruded, I decided to walk not down the rocks of the jetty itself but beside it in the sludgy damp silt. It was here that I made the astonishing discovery of the sound of the jetty - or at least the sound of the shore next to the jetty, of the layer of salt that coated the shore and coated the jetty such that being with the jetty meant interacting with it, interacting with the silent jetty through it. This noise, crumbling under foot, was a shimmering crackle, the sound of fissuring coming from all over, of crystals shattering not in one place but everywhere all at once, the shards tinkling and chattering against each other.

I have no idea if this was simply a wonderful synchronicity but I immediately thought of the wondrously scary Smithson piece at the Dia: Beacon that piles sheets of broken glass in the rough outline of an imaginary map of Atlantis. The piece in the museum seems to beckon, daring you to lose your balance and impale yourself upon it. And yet it is silent, the shards only mutely containing the memory of the surely loud violence of their smashing and shattering.

In a wonderful lecture I went to about Smithson at the Dia this spring, an art professor named Nico Israel turned from the spiny Atlantis glass pile to look out the window at the poisoned gray gravel plot that happened to lay outside, a flat expanse memorializing a former woodsy hillock where Nabisco once dumped the excess ink waste from its boxmaking operation before the factory became a museum. Rising in pitch, he pointed passionately at the two John Deere bulldozers plunked there, either because the rehab project had been completed and forgotten, or else the actual landscaping had not yet begun. It was an impeccably appropriate, Smithson-ish landscape, totally by accident. "John Deere, like deer," he proclaimed. The suddenly scifi-ish animal-shaped tractors' implied rumble, of course, silent.

In the car today we've been listening to a book on tape of Jonathan Lethem's GIRL IN LANDSCAPE where an alien landscape of another planet is peppered with tiny, almost invisible deer, observing mutely from the shadows, preternaturally able to get out of the way. (They are called household deer, which would make a great band name if it isn't one or five already.) Outside the car a few times, heading east from Vancouver across Canada as we listened, we saw actual deer in the gully beside the highway. Farrah has taught me a driving game that, like poker, only reveals expertise after hours and hours of play: every time you see a horse, you say "zip" and get a point. Two horses, "zip zip," two points. More than three horses, "zap!" and 10 points. A graveyard near the road, "bury your horses!" and best of all the other players lose all their points: back to square one, back to the shore. Weirdly, but to the good I suppose for safe driving purposes, there are no penalties for mistakes. If, in your brisk peripheral vision traveling at 110 km per hour on the road to Kamloops, you misidentify as a herd of horses a herd of cows in cloud shadow, that's okay. You can shout a "zip zip" two lonesome deer on the other side of a barbed wire fence, no problem. "Bury your horses," still, is brutal and puts you on the lookout not only for jolly populated farms but also for cemeteries which, next to the interstate usually through a hedgerow are always lonesome and gray, a peppering of broken old stones. It is strange to be so attuned to graveyards, so elated to point one out, even just a tiny churchyard under one weedy weeping willow.

Walking across the pan of salt, I also thought of the sound ice makes, breaking. I remember my dad and I, an unseasonably warm day after a cold snap a few winters ago, taking a canoe out on the Sudbury River outside Boston to row in the open water between two raised and sinuous furrows of blocked out ice. As we disturbed the water, our wake would flood up from time to time onto the ice and the sheets would cleave in huge cracks with an unfamiliar, soprano keening. I started working on a poem a couple years ago that included this noise and as I wrote the creaking violence became transmuted willy-nilly into the crumple of an ice bag as it sags under a warm tap in the kitchen sink. Deer become household deer, ice becomes household ice. Enormous and unassimilable is assimilated.

From the trail coming in, the spiral jetty is deceptively small; Farrah stayed on the hill at the overlook with her camera and reported my near-disappearance as I threaded my way along the flats on the strand. From a distance, it might be the whorl of a fingerprint, an artist marking his canvas, leaving the mark on the scene of the crime.

The fancy glass plates my parents had when I was growing up had a ridged spiral on the underside, an opaque swirl of glass winding towards the center. Hairline cracks in these plates must be virtually invisible which is why, a few years ago, my mom scrubbed at one in the sink after dinner one day and put here finger right through, cutting deep into the flesh and partly severing the nerve. For many months she had a button sewn to the tip, stretching the nerve back out from where it had sprung itself back down into her finger; even now long after the button was taken off and the nerve repaired there is a odd buzzing when she touches a certain patch of skin just right just wrong.

On my fourth finger of my right hand I have a strange, subtle dimple that runs across the tip and then bifurcates into a teensy scar where the finger was smashed between two bowling balls at a third or fourth grade birthday party and then put back together miraculously. My piano teacher deftly negotiated the plaster cast on my arm as it was healing by teaching me the complicated left hand part of a melancholy Bach partita where all the important melodic action was in that hand, bouncing over the other.

I have never been fingerprinted but it surely would show up as a distinguishing characteristic; really, I am simply lucky that it healed, that it could have been put back together. Smithson might have labelled the pile of broken glass on the museum floor Atlantis to declare the glass irretrievably broken and the irretrievably broken glass beautiful. The spiral jetty is not really a jetty in the sense of a breakwater or a dock, though when I was researching the possibility of swimming in Salt Lake, I read a posting from someone who insisted that they had taken a wonderful dip in the water off the tip of the spiral. Whatever you do, articles I read admonished, do not get the salt water in your eyes - it is seven times as salty as the ocean and will burn terribly. One might want to rub it out with ones fingers but they too will be so salty as to only make it worse. The thing to do if you do is to suck the salt off your own fingers before you try to rub it out.

Now we are back up against the Rockies but thousands of miles away from the Spiral Jetty, days later, heading the other direction across North America and finally I have a free night in Salmon Arm, BC, to write all this down. As I was getting ready for bed earlier tonight, I slipped on the strangely canted Holiday Inn Express shower floor and gave myself a bruise on my back and my elbow but, very luckily, I broke nothing and am basically unharmed. Earlier, yesterday, Farrah called me a klutz when I leaned in to kiss her on the back of the neck in the morning and accidentally bonked our heads together. (Klutz comes from a Yiddish word meaning "wooden block, lump," which is to say, unbreakable.) I do this sort of thing a lot but I suspect everyone does. My grandfather, before I was born, heard a noise downstairs when he was in the shower and slipped in his rush to get out and fell straight through the glass shower door.

Someone told us that they heard that the spiral jetty had been recently worked on by some people perhaps from the Dia foundation or some other interested party, stones added to recuperate the years that surely must be wearing away at the jetty even in the still edge of the lake. When I visited the wild horses ("zap") of Assateague and Chincoteague Island off Virginia a few years ago, I read how a channel dug through further north, near the Delaware-Maryland border, was slowly eating away the the sandbar and would eventually threaten to erode Chincoteague itself, sending the salt out to sea. Repairing the spiral jetty seems both wonderful -- if it weren't still there, I could never have visited it -- and also somewhat Sisyphean. The salt seems endless and timeless but the wind comes in across the water. And then there is that possibility of real industry coming into the bay of the lake nearby, drilling for oil.

A drawer between the two front seats in our car grows fuller and fuller with receipts from gas stations, as we fill the tank about once a day, watching the mountains get humpier, then flatter, then sharper, then humpier. (My car gets pretty good gas mileage, though for some reason it demands 90+ octane.) This is all extraordinary luck, though there is no such thing as luck. The little bruise on my back is already healing.

On the spiral jetty website, the Dia reports that, as of February, the oil drilling requests were on hold as the gas exploration company undergoes corporate reorganization due to falling oil prices. Even so, the update continues, the firm anticipates that they will indeed resubmit the application to drill in the future.

Can't get there from here

2009-03-03T01:53:00.000-08:00

I've had a romance with the idea of contemporary opera ever since classical music survey courses in high school, where like (us) American (oy) history weirdly ending during WWII, with the modern and the contemporary still synonymous, our classical music trajectory headed like a river towards a delta, a heady stream becoming an illegible tangle. (Or going underground the way streams do when they hit the beach--revealing how the beach is always secretly already the ocean.)

So contemporary opera is maybe like spelunking under the sand--buried to the neck perhaps like David Bowie in Oshima's Merry Christmas Mr Lawrence which I never saw but which image made a massive impression on me in my childhood book of film directors, second only to the stuffed corpse in the rocking chair from Psycho, which page I would flip past as quickly as possible just to be safe. I won't suffer you the actual image.

In any case, being a contemporary classical opera composer, perhaps even more than being a poet--who at least has all the tools available to work in rebel quiet--always seemed to me a kind of noble King Canute figure, turning back the waves, perhaps on the self-same riverine beach at twilight. First you have to get all these people, with all these esoteric and perhaps ill-advisable skills (see, opera voice), together and build this romantic non-romatic gadget, new but not new but not not new. You have these trouble spots, better-than-popular or almost-popular-but-strange or pretentiously-antiquey, and then maybe you end up like J. Alfred Prufrock anyway, getting your pantlegs soaked.

In the last day I flew over a whole lot of water at sunset--chasing the dusk for what seemed like four hours before emergency landing in Halifax with a sick passenger--and spent some of the time, when I wasn't gobbling Richard Stark Parker novels out of print in America but still available overseas, thinking back over John Adams's Doctor Atomic, which Farrah and I saw while we were in London over the weekend. It's determined moderny synth and chord bang minimalism, people singing in English with supertitles while wearing lab coats and ties plotting atomic bomb tests in 1940s Los Alamos underneath expensive sets with fancy quiet dolly-walls rolling delicately about the stage. The fact that the walls comprised bookcases of physicists like periodic table-tableaux, so much the better. The music was predictably kind of both what I was hoping and not hoping for, minimalism gone percussive with occasional melodrama. I was left thinking about melody and connective tissue, particularly after I read an over-the-top review that called the aria that Robert Oppenheimer sings to the words of John Donne's Batter My Heart sonnet the greatest since Puccini. I can't speak to Puccini but I kept wondering why John Adams had the singer stuck up in the rough and ragged bellow-opera range, and why the director had Oppenheimer actually battering himself in the chest and staring out into the middle distance like Celine Dion. I love the concept of the collage of poetry and memoir and politics that Adams and the librettist, Peter Sellars, cooked up but I worried about this notion of poetry. I don't think it is what Oppenheimer meant when he said he liked John Donne, anyway.

My favorite moment came with a little melodic motif that Oppenheimer's wife sang, in a scene of the two of them half-connecting at bedtime, over the line "Am I in your light?"-- wonderful the mixture of the casual apologetic and the flirtatious and the jealous in this response to Oppenheimer's reading/working in bed. After hanging out on a note for a while, the melody lilts up a step, which I learned in high school music theory was kind of a paradigmatic motion for coherent melodies: incremental, contained, tense, unpredictable. The step move says, things connect but we don't know what they connect to. Most of the sung melodies in Doctor Atomic, on the other hand, were huge superimposed leaps that seemed to exist in a plane of their own over the orchestra, involuted logics that meant you had to pay attention to the ideas in the language because the music just kept saying, hold on for dear life. Which maybe makes sense when you're talking about exploding huge bombs and, according to Doctor Atomic, the Manhattan Projectiles weren't totally sure they weren't going to set the entire atmosphere on fire and flash-fry the whole planet. Real, yes, touch and go.

All this talk of connections and half-steps and links makes me think of another very good text I came across recently, the Eula Biss prose poem essay in the latest Harper's (I think it will be in her new book) that retells the early battles over the erection of telephone poles across the country. Who would have imagined that there was once such institutional resistance, with sheriffs and town councils and vigilantes alike sawing down poles as fast as they could throw them up. Biss describes how there was literally a stalemate until linemen were posted up at the tops of poles day and night till the system was on and sawing down an active telephone line was a felony. Then, suddenly, everywhere was connected, and not the way that dirt roads could connect, the way pavement connects, a constant stream that delineates space between as islands. That's maybe one version of melody and Eula Biss, who connects the idealistic pole raising with its darker use as the gallows tree of the lynching, maybe suggests some of the problems with this idea of connecting everything, everywhere.

A brilliant cultural environmentalist who I always meant to study with in college but never got around to it, John Stilgoe, talks in a great book called Outside Lies Magic about how you can literally feel and hear the electricity getting grounded near poles, and how, along roads, the domesticated and crew-cut trees, set back to a polite distance from the pavement, is a relic of a fairly radical credo: to protect the line. There's this phenomenal road near my parent's house in Sudbury called Water Row where, for maybe a third of a mile, the road runs without a telephone line and the trees literally swallow the road, so it wends this way and that, part of the forest, not apart from it. It makes me think now of a wonderful bit of sculpture by Andy Goldsworthy, at Storm King Art Center, where an uncommonly obliging stone wall respects the ecology--winding between trees rather than colliding with them, and then running down into the middle of a pond rather than insisting on dredging up its own thronelike berm. After all, who minds getting a little wet.

One of the stranger things about the road map is the way it is a story about connections and a story in which everything does connect. I remember at first in New York, riding the subway from neighborhood to neighborhood, it felt like nothing was linked, like there were only litttle islands of knowledge. Now, all it is for me is knowledge, a big splattery ab-ex canvas. And out in the country, the roads connect to the town roads which connect to the city roads. It's this one uninterrupted bead of asphalt you could land a plane on. Over the ocean, the roads wonderfully end. You can't get there from here. Somewhere underwater there's a pipe vibrating with information but the water is all just little waves that don't talk to each other. It's like when you get close to a waterfall on a river; you can hear it, but the water doesn't seem to care. The previous trip I went to London, I wrote in a poem I like to think about, "Not everything is connected." It's a threat as well as a consolation.

The New Vague

2009-02-22T17:07:00.000-08:00

This post is for Farrah, who like a Wild West homesteader knocking pressure-treated fence posts into the ground before the surveyors come with their railroads and organic certifications, has just started her own blog which is wonderfully like and unlike her. In her newbie zeal she has been encouraging me to get back in the game, and as if to join the chastening chorus I just got an email about a poetry reading next week in Brooklyn that included the following bio line: "blogs actively at..." Lest I blog inactively:

This post is also, necessarily, for insomnia, which I now suffer out of jetlag on holiday and for the location in which I am located, in a city so fanciful it threatens to tear down pragmatic notions of what cultural projects are possible; even as the snow-globe relic of itself it seems at the border of fiction. In fact it feels like it vitiates such distinctions: dream and non-dream, rational and non-rational. So this post is then also for vitiating distinctions. Yesterday I spent the evening with tired feet tromping over bridges in a Harlequin mask.

Tonight, however, while Farrah has been typing away I have been catching up on last month's magazines and was fascinated by the (vitiate-able?) distinction that the New Yorker a few issues back seems to enact between two visions of fiction in an unintended contrast of articles, one a plummy and leonine profile of Ian McEwan, the other a bit of squinty spelunkery into the early works of Donald Barthelme. McEwan seemed to me to come off as a kind of lacquered alien -- not Martian, more pod-man -- ostensibly invoking Freud as a source of his violent surgeries of books, but exclusively the supposed-to-know doctor who endoscopes diagrams, not muddles of squish. The article seems to raise the specter of a link between rationalism and psychopathy, and is almost parodic in its antispectic vision of the novelist as bricklayer (though, wonderfully, we discover that, unlike his late-discovered journeyman half-brother. McEwan is a terrible actual bricklayer). Unsuperstitious, McEwan happily divulges his unfinished, even unwritten plots, reads pieces from scenes, seems even to view scenes as scenes at all, essentially detachable pieces that require different attentions.

I remember being once naively shocked at the notion of moviemaking as a checklist of necessary images, the mantra do we have the shot, as opposed to, what are we going to do today. As a poet I feel often like the latter is how I write, like these literal labyrinth streets here in city-land that may require indecent backtracking past the next canted corner. I'm constantly creating and honoring vestigiality, which seems weirdly beside the point to McEwan's happies and unhappies. Barthelme, on the other hand, seems vaguely kindred with his collage-ist grin. My favorite quotation in the article has Barthelme cri-de-coeuring grungy language like a refreshing raw egg plopped in a whiskey shot: "The confusing signals, the impurity of the signal, gives you verisimilitude. As when you attend a funeral and notice, against your will that it's being poorly done."

Barthelme is presented in the article as a blurry post-modernist but, in a very tricksy rationalist way, the article anatomizes post-modernism to reinforce modernism, to mean it will never go away not ever again: dream the baby dreams about peek-a-boo fragments. The article, in which New Yorker is necessarily both frustrating foreground and background, reminded me of an argument that I had with the idea of Barthelme when I first read him, and this odd firewall that keeps his work apart from the similar thrust of poetry I most appreciate to chunk up its sentences and knock them against each other. (The bad brickworker once again, I suppose, but better.) The problem, I keep writing about these days, is whether people in stories are necessary to people or to stories. Is the story just public relations, suppository with sentences inside? Is it the expectation of a difference that needs to be torn down? Yes, tear down that wall, Mister - or Signore - Whomever, equals a pile of bricks.

In this city of watery places I'm tempted to another metaphor, wandering up and down streets in search of a bridge, and there is no bridge. In Jim Henson's movie Labyrinth a big sad fuzzy creature (Barthelme, possibly inspired by Meret Oppenheim's fur teacup: "The aim of literature is the creation of a strange object covered with fur which breaks your heart.") produces a howl of despair and woe that magically raises empathetic rocks from the squishy depths that the protagonists may cross. There's something there in that quizzical relation between the wail of surrender and the exit ex machina. There's this science of putting it all together and then, there's something else.

here we go again again

2008-11-11T21:18:00.001-08:00

Speaking of movies filmed in my neighborhood (well, sort of speaking, in the sense of speaking a while ago in my last blog post, now cobwebby), tonight I went for the second time to see the movie Synecdoche, New York, which I admired all the more for being able to watch the edges of the frame, the extras who the film insists are not extras but heroes of an unimaginable performance art piece that swirls around them, centerlessness implying gleaming centers every which where. My friends and I, somewhat embarrassingly, were the only ones in the audience laughing at the movie's dark, cruel, humane jokes - everyone else seemed vaguely shell-shocked by the miserablist palette of decay and soily bodies. But I absolutely adored it.

It's a drastically swervy story, setting out to explore depression, disease and deterioration and then veering off into manic creation, existentialism as an excuse for endless recreation of the present, trying to slice greater and greater chips off the fact of the passage of time. Thus the act of reenactment becomes pretext for more reenacting, which is to say the present builds the future. The film keeps lurching forward in its timeline, starting in 2005 and then silently bypassing our actual late 2008 to graze plausibly along into furrows of the near future.

A character at one point says there is such a thing as fate, it is what is happening. So why not let it keep happening? Who should let the present get in the way of telling a story? (Screenwriting last month, my collaborator and I spent a while discussing whether to set our story in the presumably similar futures of 2009 or 2010; either way, the date will presumably be past should our script ever be filmed. But how ambitious can we reasonably be?) On the other hand, the hero of Synecdoche New York, a theater director mounting an unconventional revival of "Death of a Salesman" featuring twentysomething actors in old-person makeup -- funny-tragic, see? -- by defending his casting choice as "a decision." Because decisions are what artists do that make them artists, you know? If this is a story about loneliness begetting art as a quixotic race against impermanence, the secret problem is all about deciding: which way won't we get caught? which way won't they catch us? (who are they?) Characters undertake the most important actions for reasons they barely understand; meanwhile the actors in the movie are handed constant, obsessive notes detailing their motivation.

I was reminded of the novel "Remainder" by Tom McCarthy which I read last summer, a similar story about a person who uses an unexpected windfall of capital to recreate the past - or, more precisely, the feeling of the present as it recedes. The narrator tries to copy exactly the material of a memory which he can only recall partially and out of context. It becomes a quest to find the perfect building that can be retrofitted to resemble the memory, the actors who will resurrect the event. Yet McCarthy veers a different way, not into the painful self-consciousness of recreation but the aggression underlying this desire to control, to be creative. The narrator of Remainder turns quickly from Proustian apartments to more exciting recreations of chaos and overstimulation. He orders reenactments of gangster murders reported in the newspaper, then a crime that has never even occurred. The endless possibility for decision making becomes an excuse for a childlike id to run amok, to make present.

By contrast, Synecdoche, NY seems far more concerned (qua the title) with the metonymic juxtaposition of elements (children and their future adult selves, for instance, placed side by side in montage) than with any metaphorical work of transforming or distorting reality to be something else. The violence is all inward, and yet beyond the stage, the film suggests that the world at large is falling apart. The truth is only that how it feels right now is a feeling that is followed by another feeling that occurs at the next moment - the film turns repeated to the clock and intones "Now it is 7:43, now it is 7:44."

I wrote a poem recently called "Post Meridiem" that dealt precisely with this problem, trying to think rigorously about the nature of time intervals through the clarification of a bounded absence of, notationally, thirteen minutes. I was thinking about the waiting that takes place while events occur, impermanences but not impermanences that are galling, rather those that reassure. Don't worry, it will come back, it will leave again and come back again. It is not only loss you will face but the loss of loss and then, even so, bearing with it a new unbearable business dealing with desire, with love, with history. A short time can be no different than a long time. Time simply passing is epic, is the epic.

I hadn't made the connection at the time when I was writing this, but "Synecdoche" and the movement of waking up, 7:43 becoming 7:44, prompted me to recall my visit several years ago to Walter De Maria's Lightning Field in New Mexico. The epic art piece distributes over a huge plain in perfect geometric rows a series of pencil-shaped vertical lightning rods, jabbing out of the dry desert earth. The effect, though, is not only to discipline space, but time - walking through the array, step by step, the spires pull into alignment, forming an asterisk of intersecting corridors. Another step, then it is a phalanx of poles once more, a flowchart of obstacles. One more step, one more eclipse, one more decentering.

The secret advice given to pilgrims who visit the Lightning Field is to wake up before dawn and wander the array in the waning darkness. Despite the artwork's ominous title there is little risk of being caught the lightning that buffets the plain almost daily; the weather stabilizes at night. One must be outside, in any case, at the precise moment when the sun breaches the horizon. It is just then, for no more than a minute (now it is 7:43, now it is 7:44?) that the tapered tips of De Maria's poles catch the sunlight at the perfect angle and glow brightly, briefly. Then, the effect dissolves, the day finds its own equilibrium, for a while. This is art located not where it is alone but also when it is. It will happen again, just exactly so, after another day, twenty-four hours exactly. Give or take a minute or two.

from no distance at all

2007-11-19T21:43:00.000-08:00

Today while stopping at a crosswalk uptown waiting for the light to change, I spent a while soaking up the poster for the new Will Smith movie I Am Legend, printed on the side of a city bus. Hilariously, the picture features Will Smith standing somewhere under the FDR downtown in Manhattan looking across a post-apocalyptic East River of broken bridges towards DUMBO with my apartment building framed gloriously in the near distance. It's wonderful in a way, seeing my building so stately and picturesque and sepia-toned, surviving armageddon--and seeing it approach me so randomly in my commute around the city. I remember once while I was on a vacation in Canada, driving as faraway as I could possibly drive from New York, turning on the television in the city of Prince Rupert (just south of the Alaska border in British Columbia) and watching a ridiculous cop movie starring Jim Belushi as a dirty cop making drug deals around the corner from my house. Perhaps it comes with the territory of living in a New York that has fully transitioned to internationally beloved simulacrum (with all the attendant traffic problems) but the Will Smith poster sent my thoughts in an alternative direction, thinking about futures of the past and pasts of the future.

In the poster (the movie's filming kept Farrah and me up nights during shooting with klieg lights under the Brooklyn Bridge blowing out refugee-flee-manhattan-extravaganza shots and inadvertantly scorching my bedroom with film noir shadows), a huge photoshopped sun frying Will Smith in a halo of light neatly blots out the new, inappropriate skyscrapers that have cropped up in DUMBO over the last few years--as I understand it the result of bait-and-switch tactics from developers taking advantage of architecture-buff neighborhood boards in 2002 but then stinting on the architecture. Perhaps this is merely the result of the I Am Legend being photographed some months in the past, before the buildings were completed. Or perhaps they did not fit the vision of the art director looking for the post-apocalyptic mood to befit a disaster-horror movie. But what occurs then appears to be a vision of a future New York that either demands a selective tearing down of recent changes (a conservative future as return to the past) or an understanding that the future is already defunct, that we're already there, and past. In a way, I prefer the second possibility, which certainly feels accurate to the wonder of watching old movies with young people captured and now no longer young. (In many ways all my poetry writing these days feels leveraged on this disjuncture, the writing moment receding into funnier and funnier miscues, distortions, changes.) It all reminds me of the historical epics of the sixties, say, in which everyone seems to have sixties hair. I wonder, did they know that they were creating a vision of Ancient Rome, or medieval England, or Renaissance Italy so utterly dated? And what will happen when shaggy sixties hair comes back into style unironically and without distance; will we watch these movies and think how utterly accurate they seem as pure history?

The Will Smith movies calls itself I am Legend and is its own bait-and-switch if it's anything like the pretty good novel, a post-apocalyptic disaster story that turns out to be a by-the-book vampire-vs-van helsing throwback, very doomed machismo. The legend is presumably Dracula, Transylvania, et al and the crux of the book is that if its protagonist is living in legend (vant to suck your blood etc.) and is A legend (a lone hero standing against the monsters) there's no one left to remember him. Will Smith (like Charlton "The Omega Man" Heston before him) is made of Legends lacking people to possess them. But isn't this the problem of the sci fi film which is always a historical drama, the future as it could have turned out but didn't, the story that didn't procreate, no one remembers what didn't happen, dogs not barking, etc.? Trees falling on each other in the woods. Or suspension bridges with the snapping cables magically missing my vulnerable windows... My sister has been studying for the GRE and, relating the fortune cookie essay question topics to me, she mentioned one that asserts that we can't learn from history because we're living in it. A lot of the questions have this weird parallax of essaying pessimism from a vantage point of freed up energy, such as decrying competition while competing for trails of a grad school bell curve or eschewing study in order to embark on the most intensive study of one's life. Here is the past of me, now how about some future?.What happens next.

cardboard paper tigers

2007-10-21T23:00:00.000-07:00

In one of the most lovely scenes in Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, which I gratefully caught a rare screening of tonight at the Film Forum, Jean-Pierre Leaud and Anne Wiazemsky (I think it was her but my memory could be failing me; it could have been Juliet Berto in this scene) share a cup of tea. He comments, apropos nothing in particular, that he wishes they were blind so that they would pay more attention to words, listening and speaking. Somehow the fleeting idea sets off a chain of free word associations back and forth, Leaud and Wiazemsky throwing Maoist buzzwords and catchphrases at each other punctuated by Leaud's "tenderness" and--responding to her paper tiger--"rock..." (a dramatic sip of tea) "..and roll." The moment encapsulates Godard's wonderfully double-edged portrayal of his earnest student heroes: responding with great tenderness to their seriousness of purpose and youthful idealism and at the same time ironically aestheticizing their ideals, placing them in front of overwhelming color fields and confronting them with the deflating faces of older radical politics. It is a movie as much about age and time as it is about social change or group identity. Like so many of the French nouvelle vague movies of the time (like Jacques Rivette's Out 1 or, a latter day reenectment, Philippe Garrel's Les amants reguliers) is partly wonderful is the setting, always the most concerted regency chairs and ornamental wall moldings to appoint the revolution.

Filling the wall panels with chalkboards and painting old window shutters Chinese red, Godard gets this; his main argument is more with time than with culture as the serious worst imperialist. Or he would refuse to make the distinction. (Another key moment has Wiazemsky turning up the radio and staging a romantic breakup with Leaud to teach him the power of keeping multiple ideas in the air at the same time. Multiple fronts.) And yet the tenderness seeps through the ideas, the way in the middle of lexical association Leaud can't help himself from a little of the word. The tension of loving the culture one is sworn (somehow, anyhow) to abolish.

I am reminded of a time when, on a drive through quiet Massachusetts woods last summer, inspired by various online questionaires, Farrah and I played a word association game of our own, throwing random words at each other to see what would pop out of the other's mouth. One of us was supposed to be leading with the word prompts, the other with the telling stream of consciousness. In practice, though, we both thought the other was in the directing role and we were merely following. Then, for maybe twenty captive minutes, we went back and forth with words: response, response, response, swimming further and further along through the language. I learned an actor's exercise in summer camp in which, like Groucho and Harpo and Chico in Duck Soup, two people would mirror each other's gestures across an imaginary midpoint, slowly trading the phenomena of decision until like a ouija no one could tell who was in charge. Is that the real anarchy: no one in charge? Or is it, don't worry: someone is the director, maybe all of us this very minute?--but sorry, no one's saying.

dream songs

2007-10-19T15:20:00.000-07:00

My central enthusiasm of the last few weeks has been Neil Gaiman's exceedingly rich series of graphic novels collectively called "The Sandman." It is a gift of a narrative, variously textured, with stories of horror, magic, wonder and myth as well as more practical concerns: love, mourning, gender, politics, religion. I haven't read much Gaiman before - only the nifty horror tale "Coraline" - but what is so striking here is his serious humanism, a willingness to accept various characters in their inadequacy and difficulty and by returning to them over and over again over the course of many years of work on the project, find a openhearted forgiveness for each. It is not moralistic in opting out of unhappy endings, but it is a moral universe he creates, in which there is serious goodness.

One of my favorite parts of the work is a scenario in the third volume which the hero, a punkish brooder who is the embodiment of dreaming, has commissioned Shakespeare to write A Midsummer Night's Dream as a tribute to the actual King Auberon and Queen Titania of fairyland. The play is then presented to an audience of fairies (Puck, in particular, objects to his defanged portrayal as a benign joker), presented in a pastoral stage en plein airas if it were the original summer Shakespeare-in-the-park performance. This radical notion re-envisions this fanciful comedy as something closer to one of Shakespeare's history plays, with all the associated baggage of politics and the patron who must be minded--as in the way Macbeth, for instance, implicitly lionizes the new King James. A Midsummer Night's Dream already has a certain self-reflecting quality; Gaiman doubles down the mirrorings and discovers new wellsprings of poignancy, beauty and depth in the play. Making it new, making it fresh.

I kept having to remind myself as I read The Sandman that it was a 'guilty pleasure,' mainly because it is easy to read, riding on the greased slope of visual storytelling and cultural association. I met with the poet Marjorie Welish this week to discuss my poetry manuscript in progress (depending on when you ask me it is coalescing, near finished, long completed, and/or scarcely begun) and her advice to me, regarding my own poetic output, was that if something comes easily, you're not making it hard enough.

In a way, I think this is the central problem for comic book experiences like the one I had with the Sandman--it is profound, challenging emotionally, complex narratively--and yet it necessarily flies by as all comic books do. Even as it engaged the question of pastiche and the introduction of soap opera superhero narrative elements, the Sandman seemed to use such a light hand and such a free associative delicacy that it is hard to see these as inorganic or shallow. And yet I'm chastened by Joshua Clover's peremptory criticism of Gaiman on his blog for what he sees as shallow, mealy spiritual mumbo jumbo Joseph Campbell mythwork, all pseudointellectual hero king quests. And there is something to that, though the meandering, mosaic approach of comic book narrative does much to disguise it as something more substantive. Clover dismisses Gaiman essentially as Napoleon among the dwarves and, when my girlfriend asks me why I'm reading so many graphic novels lately, I can't help but feel the sting.

Still, if I compare it with the equally redoubtable Y the Last Man, a very clever saga by Lost writer Brian K. Vaughn imagining the realistic aftermath from a worldwide plague of male hominids, the superiority (the pygmy giant indeed) of Sandman is obvious. Where most popular fictions derive their pleasure from the modulated spinning of the wheels of plot, Gaiman's dream stories excite through their nesting, their meandering, in a word their form. Gaiman is delivering form over content, which, for a story about dream and the wispy fabric of our lives, is just about perfect.

taking attendance

2007-09-24T12:28:00.000-07:00

This appears to be my twentieth post since No No Yes Etc. was inaugurated nearly three months ago. I'm ambivalent about whether this is a sufficient pace of publication. On one hand, this has to be a secondary mode of output, creatively speaking, to my main writing, which I am getting my mind around as a book manuscript right now. But as a blog reader I know how important new blog material is, and how the old material has a way of going instantly out of date regardless of how topical or evergreen the subject may be. Even the format of the vertical blog text, which sends old entries into the internet netherzone of the archive, suggests the demand for fresh thought. I had a discussion with my mother's friend who is a librarian and who noted the problematic meshing of library science with the onslaught of online blog material overwhelming research tools and filters. In a way, it would appear, blog entries' format, with auto-archiving and permanent online niches, render the librarian almost nugatory or at least superfluous, except insofar as they might point you to the unlisted blog or the secret entry. But isn't that what Google is for? I feel like we're rearguing atonal music all over again, the science of science. But, then, who's arguing?

My own impulse in terms of inventing a blog writing style has been to think fast and try to make connections, paragraph to paragraph of the seemingly disconnected. Paul Rosenberg, a very smart blogger at Openleft.com, engaged in an interesting discussion of conspiracy theories, vis a vis Naomi Klein's new book, The Shock Doctrine, which Farrah has been talking about a lot this week. He debated whether it is conspiracy thinking to point out dormant structural connections or whether it requires a special cabal, public masks, cigars in a room where a lot of inexplicable down town occurs. Today I read Klein's related article in Harper's, which predictably raised my blood pressure but is basically a simple observation: the government has funded a disaster relief industry that now lobbies to maintain market dominance. No conspiracy, just politics.

I thought again about the fantastic Don Siegel movie I watched the other night, The Big Steal, in which one bad guy chases Robert Mitchum who chases Jane Greer who's chasing another bad guy. The movie starts out with lots of normal tough guy wit but halfway through suddenly goes wordless as Mitchum and Greer flirt by driving crazily over a series of switchbacks in the mountains of Oaxaca. Suddenly it's like a dream I keep having, taking these hairpin turns in a car that drifts through the curves as if its plummet over the precipice would be deliberate and gentle. It's not the speed that makes the characters fall in love, it's the skill with which they don't quite lose everything. Two details seem especially dreamlike: the pavement, which because of the minimal Mexican infrastructure (cf Klein) peters out almost indecisively at the edge of the road, like a passing fancy; and the background, which lurches from soundstage backdrop to reality with an antic abandon. While the projected backdrop skitters up and down, Mitchum and Greer barely jostle. They're just that good, or it doesn't matter one way or the other as long as they show up at all.

theology at lunch

2007-09-11T11:15:00.000-07:00

My hair still damp, I just walked in the door from an outdoor lunchtime reading in Bryant Park that proved to have the second most exciting weather of any poetry readings I've attended. The most exciting was a year ago, when I flew to Buffalo to attend a conference at U Buffalo on Robert Creeley and landed in the midst of a gathering early October blizzard. By the time I made it downtown where the reading was getting underway in a church on the main boulevard, it was flurrying heavily, and just as Robin Blaser got up to read, an overwhelming fusillade of thunder boomed through the gallery. I remember Blaser raising his arms in mock triumph before continuing. It was obviously uninterpretable (no more than the paranoid who holds the airplane or the world aloft through their compunction) and yet totally appreciated, simultaneously overstating and understating the Importance of Art in the face of Nature as an answer that could be tiny and also sufficient. Blaser, not large, was perhaps taking credit where credit was due.

And yet the weather did win after all; I never made it to the conference. Instead, braving the highways of Buffalo in snow so thick with lake effect as to make the road signs literally unreadable, where I holed up during a total electricity blackout in a Marriott in full-on emergency mode: the electric locks on the rooms requiring manual keys and the stocks of snack-size potato chips and irradiated apples running low as the generator's gas supply dwindled. For twenty-four hours it was the apocalypse and then the plows arrived with fresh supplies of early autumn.

This time the squall arose through midtown as Joshua Clover stood behind a microphone in Bryant Park's so-called Reading Room. It had already been drizzling around the tent but the rain grew in intensity as Clover read (he suggested at the outset that the scenery was appropriately apocalyptic, and given the oddity of his reading his elegy-for-modernity-through-pop-wizardry poems on September 11 -- compounded with a setting next door to the Fashion Week tent -- one was inclined to believe him) until, interrupting the second work of a line, a huge crash resounded overhead. I wondered across the park what the runway models in their air-conditioned pavillion took as their proximate cause, which seemed surely the appropriate thought to be having: not, what should we do, but, what was it we did.

The fact that the next time Clover repeated the same word - "Capital" - the same thunder replied in its gospel call-and-response only compounded the humor, the avowedly secular death's door conversion. It was money's fault, wasn't it. (Or not fault--laugher.)

And the thing about opulence is someone will always enjoy it. (The recent Paul Goldberger article in the New Yorker lauding the new Stern palace on CPW reads like an advertisement--pay no attention to the man behind the curtain, etc.) Clover reminded me of this through the title of one of his terrific poems, which referred to the first mall in the world ever constructed, in Brussels: the Galleries St-Hubert. As if by some force, Farrah and I were drawn through the central streets of Brussels to the glassed promenade when we visited Belgium last year. I would glibly call it an American thing, and yet only in imitation.

We had a free evening and returned in the mall to a movie theater sliced off the Rue de la Reine to see the excellent, conveniently wordless German documentary Our Daily Bread. Annals of late capitalism, the film presents completely compelling images of the efficient, heavily mechanized food production system that can vacuum every nut from a well-shaken tree, carefully cover acres of root vegetable furrows in gleaming mylar blankets, and, with only a resolute, industrial thud, truss pigs calmly onto an elegant stainless steel Catherine wheel and unzip them at the belly. It's an unsparing film to watch, but excellent and inspiring, offering stories from the slow motion apocalypse that has been going on, to judge by the two-century mall on Brussels' Grand-Place, basically forever. Cue the sound effects, turn down the iPods.

time flies buzzing

2007-09-08T08:02:00.000-07:00

I ran out of time on yesterday' afternoon's entry and had to run out the door to go to a reading for the new issue of Lit magazine (which includes two pieces by my friend Matthew Pennock). Running down the clock meant I didn't have time to say anything about the good book I was reading yesterday, Sandy Florian's Telescope. It's a daunting bit of work--long prose pieces unpacking an abecadarian of exotic everyday objects over many pages. I had a curious experience reading it of a rapid succession of shutter-speed associations as I read: first it made me think of Gertrude Stein in its chunky syntax that is developed into something like a moral philosophy. I remember having this thought originally when I was studying the masonry of dry stone wall building in France and struggling desperately to remember and wield French vocabulary at the same time. So Florian makes me think of this, first language as a second language, workmanlike, something to strive for.

Telescope is also like Stein's Tender Buttons in its "stony stones" Russian formalistish attempt to look at an object--say, an accordian for Florian like a carafe for Stein--minus its pragmatic usage but still drenched in its visual and tactile impact and its cultural context. Suddenly I'm thinking this is a totally structuralist idea but in both cases it's too personal to become a myth.

I'm also reminded in a similar way of Lawrence Weiner's '70s artwork in which he presents not a minimalist sculpture but a description of one painted on the wall as if the word could be what it means rather that meaning it. Here's an example which I hope I get right, squinting at a too small picture on the Dia:Beacon web site: "Two slabs lying against each other to form a form with another slab lying on the ground." It's like this in Telescope, the feeling that words just have to be vacuumed and swept enough to produce something actual. It's an idea so idealistic it makes me want to try it myself, like Pygmalion.

But then at the same time in Florian's consistent use of "And." "For." "Or." etc. to link sentences I find myself pondering Bertrand Russell's Principia Mathematica and logic, all those "intersection of" and union of" ideas built out of upside-down U's and transformative ='s. Reading it is a little like unraveling a proof, following sentences into algebraic chains. And strangely this is practically the opposite of words becoming things: it's words as numbers to juggle in a perfect flowchart, the pure purest ideas. I think this is the crux of the book and what it makes it impressive, that it can simultaneously feint (float like a butterfly, sting like a bee?) to both sides of some Platonic dichotomy. The distinctions won't hold but if old metaphysics needs work here's evidence to get us somewhere.

I found Florian's name perusing the schedule of a wonderful-sounding English language reading series in Paris. Now there's an idea that's transporting.

not it

2007-09-07T14:06:00.000-07:00

(place your finger beside your nose while contemplating)

I woke up this morning with a strange anxiety that it was possible in my last post that I had misidentified the Dorothea Lasky from the interview video as the poet--no particular reason from the video, perhaps some residue from a dream of people wearing masks of their own faces or some such. In any case, some youtube sleuthing (the video comes from "weirddeermedia" which has a link from Dorothea Lasky's site) reassures me but I was momentarily fascinated by this problem. I have thus far been fairly generous with links but it is certainly possible I would it get it wrong. I was discussing this problem with friends last night in reference to my own name which, when googled, reveals a plethora of creative and productive people who are not me. There is even a musician or two and, apparently, a writer.

These are not my accomplishments or opinions and it strikes me as strange that just as the Internet has the problem of flattening text of affect (a recent article I read claimed that this is why exclamation points are more acceptable in text messages) but also personality and identity. Taken to the extreme are horrible cases of overzealous renderings from Macedonia or JFK to black sites for questioning we hear barely about. Of course I don't mean to imply there would be some actual person for whom extraordinary rendering might be appropriate--I try to ascribe to 'ordinary' theories of people relating.

In any case, to ward off confusion, this is me now. And besides those to the right here are a few other prior instances .

dropping a frog into boiling water

2007-09-06T11:36:00.000-07:00

Being back in New York has me grappling once again with the notion of the structure of the city, as enveloping a situation as an ideology. Obviously there are layers within layers of decision makers and when the subway is delayed it is because someone somewhere made it so. And yet the experience of obstructed and facilitated motion is so discombublatingly organic compared to a jog in the woods, where the pace and the mind are in sync on the surface as the muscles and the neurons fire off in teams. Here it's all momentum, commuting in traffic with the laws of thermodynamics. I saw on television an interview this summer with a journalist imagining the world quietly disintegrating and also persisting after the disappearance of humanity, leaving behind a detrits of bronze sculptures and feral housepets; today I read the John Seabrook article in the New Yorker about the Global Seedbank on Spitsbergen in the Svalbard archipelago (where there is excellent terrain for cross-country skiing, incidentally) where they could collect noble heirloom plant seeds that could survive the apocalypse as a great big vegetable blight. (Spill some wine for that future passover.) So which is it anyway: screeching to a halt or skidding forever forward on the old tracks? How is it being involved, but not entirely accustomed?

I've been trying to give Farrah (yay!) good advice as she works on her novel in progress and find myself through lack of practice with fiction no longer acclimated to the basics, such as narration. It's amazing in a way that after a few hundred years of writing these things we just accept the feeling of this person writing with an "I" in which there is simply no context. I feel the same way when I turn on network television after a long time away, or right now as I wander by the propagandistic ad posters glued all over Manhattan: what a completely radical, noisy, totally artificial landscape to feel normal around. Astonishing what you don't even notice yourself getting used to. So I open a book and keep thinking, why are you telling me this. (Italics can be distributed as preferred.) Of course it's taken weblogs about ten minutes to normalize the converse relation of private/public journal. But obviously the mixture of voice and tense in fiction makes the problem all the more glaring--who are you and when did we get intimate, like waking into a marriage of amnesiacs, or at least one drunken one night stand...

I was reminded of this issue today browsing books in the Barnes and Nobles on Lexington at 86th st. (which boasts a surprisingly decent poetry section and should not be confused with the branch on 86th st east of Lexington, which doesn't) and getting sucked into Dorothea Lasky's Awe. It caught my eye because I had just been looking at H-NGM-N's web site yesterday and read about the flipbook-chapbook they made out of poems of hers and my Columbia mate Sam Amadon's. In any case, Awe was a fun discovery for the day and absolutely demonstrates the very unexplored weirdness of talk as a formal device. Lasky sometimes uses tiny emphatic Q and A intrusions into a smear of directed thoughts that suggest arrows shot off at funny angles and bouncing round to smack the archer. Let me answer my own questions, in other words, and with exclamation points. It might be a little slapstick but, you know, "poetic slapstick," as Pauline Kael said, and thus disarming and windowlike. I don't see tricks here so much as personality--there's a fair amount of the word God in the book (goes with Awe, perhaps) deployed I think as a placeholder for why anyone would tell anyone anything. Because, maybe, they already know? Funny, given my instant thought of Q and A in the bookstore that when I googled her name just now I came up with the above video of her literally being interviewed.

The other book I've been reading lately is Joanne Kyger's selected poems As Ever. I loved her poem "Carl Jung Greeted" in Stephanie Young's aforementioned Bay Poetics, which seriously ranges--psychology, politics, the cosmos--to capture a very accurate portrait it seemed to me of how it feels to feel these days. I found it fascinatingly hard to locate a copy of the book, despite its being published by Penguin--no copies for instance anywhere in Boston, so far as I could tell. Strange because it illustrates elegantly what can grow over decades in an Olsonian open field and it seems to me people that people would like that. I like this: "There was a long time in silence. For myself I can tell you that certain things give me limited pleasure for short stretches of time / but I do not know where to put them."

She can tell me, and I can tell you.

stitches, sunspots

2007-08-31T12:13:00.000-07:00

During this last quiet week in Sudbury Mass I went to a whopping two movies in the theater: "The Invasion" and "Sunshine." Sunshine is probably the easier to talk about, and was quite instructive in gaining a better handle on the pros and cons of a certain strand of wonderment sci-fi--think of 2001. I never had much use for 2001, particularly its clammy psychedelic vista of eternity as played by Lullabies from the Womb, but now I see what happens when you replace hermetic Kubrickisms with a ecstatic drenched quality typical of Danny Boyle: still the snag of Plot. Like Boyle's previous movies with Alex Garland a stately aura in the first few acts degenerates into Mansonland for the climax where the secret chthonic truth of heroism as a death cult wraps up the thesis. It's a tight but fairly conservative attitude as hippie peace leads to an open field leads to violence: Antonioni (Vive le!) deposed by Charles Manson.

Still, the violence here falls under the shakiest category of the movie, a gambit of "alone-in-the-universe-I-am-the-mad-king" seen previously in most sci-fi thrillers like Walter Hill's disavowed "Supernova" or "Event Horizon" to justify bloodlust for no good reason besides 'is that what people want?' Hollywood executivism. In other words, we have another chapter in the endless story of not trusting the image. And what stays with me, days later, from "Sunshine" is images and only images: Mercury seen from a near orbit, or the sun through filters as a giant, broiling orb. To see is to scorch: shades of Phoebus wanting to see the true image, or Icarus. And of the essentially suicidal nature of this mission to save the solar system, flying purposively into the sun. It has not been lost on many reviewers that there are shades of "Armageddon" here--plucky humans save the world through outer space know-how--but patriotism has been replaced with a kind of existentialist aestheticism. It is and it deserves to be because it is beautiful, which is what's best about art I suppose always.

Of course, then, the movie is also an allegory for movies, which is always interesting to see in movies: sitting in the dark hoping to see something gorgeously beautiful and dangerous. In any case it far transcends whatever broken idyll structure we might impose upon it.

The other movie I saw, interesting for entirely other self-conscious reasons, was "The Invasion," famously the subject of intensive re-shoots and re-imaginings that transformed an early cut perhaps based on claustrophobia and distrust into a schizophrenic movie that has no patience even for cause and effect (the editors in an attempt to shave blood from the stone of the film's running time, jumble up even something so simple as saying goodbye and getting into a car so that we have the whole rest of the movie seemingly happening at once). The strangely central image of the movie is of the muffler of a car, leaching condensation and exhaust.

It wasn't, in any case, possibly to describe this as a good movie per se, but it was fascinating watching something so utterly hybridized as a narrative, the stitches so obvious, and scars of editing so raw. I was almost made to think of it as an objectivist experiment in the undermining of story. A few critics snarked that the movie itself was the pod person sucked clear of personality, but it brought more to my mind images from John Carpenter's "They Live," where the magical sunglasses show you the truth behind ideology, the stories of capital as an alien with no skin.

And still there is personality here, even if it is a clash of middlebrow ideas--fascism begins at home versus technology as the saving grace from technology. The movie stayed with me a little like a cento or a found poem project reminiscent of Ronald Johnson's "Radi Os" which I was looking again at excerpts of when I found his out-of-print selected poems TO DO AS ADAM DID in Grolier Bookshop in Cambridge this week, an extremely happy find. It's interesting how Johnson's technique, whiting out his way through Milton, oscillates between trick and miracle, whispering the secret ecstatically and then being spoken past. You can hear through it but also hear it in and of itself. That is of course the brilliant double-ness of the title swept away from Paradise Lost: we have both a radius around which we are orbiting, radios tuning into the frequency of the transmission, and the radiant light-giving image somewhere close by of whatever sun is shedding light on this. So little saying so much.

Farrah claimed that our cat (living indoors with no experience of other cats and quite indifferent to the minks, deer, hedgehogs, chipmunks, dragonflies and goldfinches trotting past the windows here in the Sudbury woods) sees only us as giant leonine cats. I imagined a machine to generate the experience of voices interpretable by the technology of his little feline ears. Big lionish sounds, their cadence and melodies, murmuring and tintinnabulations. We can understand emotions behind language even with the words blotted sonically out. In "Sunshine" the possessed keep demanding less filters, turn up the sun.

Coming of age in the monoculture

2007-08-22T12:08:00.000-07:00

After reading the mostly completed screenplay that I worked on in June, my sister recommended I see "Superbad" for its very strong parallels, allegorizing a bildungsroman story through the search for prohibited substances that turn out to reveal and destabilize assumptions as they offer entry into "adult" dangers and involvement. It is "universal" insofar as the story of adolescence is the story of going from the anxious outsider to the anxious insider. Like "Knocked Up", which has paved the way in terms of marketing and theme (both films derive from similar impulses in like-minded --ie the same-- people), the comedy is essentially mitigated because growing up means dealing with other people. Both stories move from a pornographic mindset into a social one and both feature male protagonists fondly/bitterly parting from mono-gendered viewpoints into more complicated, sexual one. As Joshua Clover pointed out very accurately in his recent blog about adulthood and Adam Sandler, the films equivocate between taking the new adult world as an improvement or a necessary evil towards perpetuating the Way Things Are. In other words, you were right to be afraid because now the only reason you aren't afraid anymore is because you've lost. Which is not exactly satisfying.

Here I am, for instance, back in Massachusetts and passing along quite quietly not in the city. I've been continuing to explore Stephanie Young's excellent anthology Bay Poetics which makes me lonesome in a different way for the West Coast, if not old Brooklyn where I'll be within the week, I think. The anthology has a certain grab bag quality (the poets are presented in a mysterious, neither alphabetical nor thematic order) that accentuates a feeling of embarrassment of riches, which feels fairly accurate to the history and centrality of the area poetically, given that what we're talking about is somewhere between academic principality and willy-nilly subculture. I guess what it comes down to is that the people really, really matter. There is an energy in Oakland/Berkeley/San Francisco, or in Brooklyn for that matter, that is weirdly thinner up here in the Boston area, save for a few counterexamples holding down the fort. Or maybe I'm just insatiable.

Maybe that's why today I'm so excited about Laynie Browne's Daily Sonnets, one of which, a poem presenting itself literally in the context of vibrant literary community of readers and readings, appears in the Bay Area collection. I picked up Browne's book on the same visit and love what feels like a celebration of the capacious in this thickish series of poems. Browne uses elastic, punctuationless lines that flit between a sense of performed or lived experience and a more formal, visitation style. Its stutters are satisfying and continuous. The last two lines of the poem from the Bay anthology, "Sonnet while Listening to Kit Robinson Read," are

There is a surface you prepare
And a surface everyone sees

which kind of cuts to the heart of this question of public/private/preparation, doesn't it? Welcome to the world as seen through everyone else's eyes, except not.

clarity, confusion, shock

2007-08-16T08:22:00.000-07:00

I am writing this from out in Marin County, California where up on this mountain one can go days without seeing anyone. I've been reading CHARMED CIRCLE, an account of the agglomeration of artists and arties surrounding Gertrude Stein in Paris before WWI: hijinks and gossip and a lot of how-the-who's-who-knew-who's-who. The effect of this treatment of capital-c Celebrity and celebrity creation (the author James Mellow has one theory of how Gertrude Stein cultivated fame by maintaining links with successive generations of young literati) on me here in the gloriously empty meadows on the coast of the Pacific Rim is rather strange. What do you do with people? Coming out here I feel vaguely haunted by the San Francisco Renaissancers--Spicer, Duncan, etc--and then the Berkeley/Oakland circles that followed. As if it might be possible merely be being here as I write and transcribe work to be a San Francisco or Bay Area poet ipso facto.

And now similarly by Picasso, Matisse, Apollinaire et al floating diaphanously around the Stein residence in Paris circa 1909. What is lost amid the scholarship of who did what when in Mellow's rather impressively exhaustive account of Stein -- who it turns out did live in Oakland in her adolescence, thus in spirit and despite her proud Allegheny PA lineage, setting her among the Northern Californians -- is how the connections happen. Her brother Leo goes off to Europe in a vague spirit of becoming an art critic, or a historian, or an artist as is hobnobbing with Bernard Berenson and Bertrand Russell as if this is merely a matter of course. And then the salons seem merely to materialize. I hope this is not merely some kind of class mystification exercise, such as in Apted's 21 UP when the maligned noble preps protest that a film of them at seven predicting the rungs of their ascents to Oxbridge turn out to be mostly accurate fails to capture the sweat, toil and sheer uncertainty of climb. As lawyer Andrew in the documentaries says not entirely convincingly "it all could have gone wrong." But what is wrong and how would you know if it were happening? In retrospect there are perhaps foggy recollections but essentially a narrative and one that is thus in its linearity, easy. This happened, versus could. And so they went to the studio of Pablo Picasso, about which she remarked...

Right now I am surrounded by fog blowing in off the ocean that is impenetrable laterally but through which the sun beats down. Despite the cloud cover one can get a sunburn. Perhaps this has me meditating on the obscurities. But a little clarity to wrap up:

I learned about CHARMED CIRCLE first in an aside during a class at Columbia on the '50s martinis-and-madness circle of Lowell, Berryman etc. taught by Liam Rector. Liam was caustic and open-hearted, aphoristic in a slightly orotund but also endearing way. He insisted on the depth of shallowness, repeatedly attacking a culture unwilling to embrace "look-ism," taking joy of gossip and diaries and private photographs and such. A necessary corrective perhaps to too much serious seriousness. Not that Liam Rector wasn't serious, but he liked to play. I just learned from Ron Silliman's blog that Liam died yesterday, news that is shocking and sad. I remember Liam decrying the latest puritans and pondering the difficulty of locating the current indefensible intolerances that are not without but within. For him it was possible we were living in invisibly situations of inquity and bad relation that would only become obvious in retrospect, or through a bracing encounter with perspective. Liam was I think always in search of this breath of fresh air.

Me versus me

2007-08-06T13:18:00.000-07:00

Last night, half inspired by somewhat recent reading from THE GRAND PIANO memoir, I started reading aloud bits of Zukofsky's A to Farrah. I haven't before spent much time on the poem overall and was drawn to section 22 (the source of a well-remembered group reading from the 1970s in the bay area) where the poem suddenly switches gears into quasi-Latin/Elizabethan drama, repelete with characters out of Plautus or somesuch--A dramatis personae leading the way. Farrah referred to the changeover as 'disconcerting,' a comment which I think unpacks a certain set of assumptions about poetry and the 'lyric' having to do with the voice being A voice or at least Assumed Voices, the line containing a certain set of materials existing in a certain plane vis a vis the rest. And by contrast this move - one might call it "experimental" though I suppose the experiment must have passed a while ago from the preliminary findings stage to peer review - seems to explode such readings and demand a constantly replenished reading, as if such useful things as genre had not yet come into existence. Still, what does it DO for the work to move like this? I think of the Circe chapter from Joyce's Ulysses for an analogue and I suppose the experience of reading a screenplay as novel (Farrah has shown me a YA novel doing just this) might cause similar parallax reactions, concretizing the language while at the same time destabilizing this character-colon effect. Just words? Just peoples?

I picked up a copy of Paul Killbrew's newish, pretty chapbook Inspector vs Evader at McNally Robinson a few days ago and was very struck by the similar principle of re-evaluation line by line, as Killebrew constructs the long poem out of interlocked but not necessarily contiguous voices in a series of end-stopped lines coinciding with but not necessarily equal to sentences. What is the difference between the line and sentence? Who is it now? I sometimes feel that tug when writing: you press the enter key and everything can be different now. Cliche: this is the first day of the rest of the sentence. And yet there's all this baggage. (I remember, after meeting Paul Killebrew at a reading last year I ran into him a few weeks later in the Jetblue terminal at JFK, though not specifically in the baggage claim...) His book is I think a bit about the question: what am I doing and what do I do now. Which is a good question to be asking yourself or having someone ask you. (But which is it? How would you tell?)

In the Simpsons movie which I just got home from seeing, there is a very funny scene when Homer slogs endlessly by himself through a wasteland, tireder by the step, monologing like a Beckett character: "I can't go on I must go on Shut up No you shut up I can't stand you" etc. My father, with whom I've been on exhausting bike and ski rides countless times, was practically hyperventilating with identification. And who was Homer talking to when Homer was talking to Homer? I imagine the screenplay, just as I read Paul Killebrew's also funny chapbook. Aloudness counts for something; printed pages are very, very flat.

Test of Test of

2007-08-03T09:12:00.000-07:00

At Jacob Riis Beach on Rockaway Beach my reading was Louis Zukofsky's A Test of Poetry, demanding in its attempt to sever assocations from the process of reading by (in its first and third sections) omitting author and date data while demanding the reader judge the work: in other words, discovering or setting criteria. And at the same time as it appears to suggest that while this criteria might seem personal, there is also strongly, in the second part of the book where Zukofsky offers glosses and attributions, a right answer and a wrong one. To be lured by music to the elimination of sense is a bridge too far, and to be prosy and unimaginative equally wrongheaded. And so one founders on the shores of objectivity, though I found surprisingly that when I was struggling it turns out, qua Zukofsky, it is for a reason. It is not the poetry that is to test me, but, for Zukofsky, that I am to test the poetry. The outcome is moral, and to be shared.

Riis Park is like so much of New York the vision of Robert Moses hewn out of the private city and a robber's consensus. To celebrate it is to celebrate the vision of populist accessibility (the largest parking lot in the world at its time) but also the tyranny of vision. It is a matter of confidence (it must be done) but also conspiracy (we do it for them, il duce, etc). Which is, ironically, precisely what Zukofsky sets out to avoid in his criteria, which thematizes greed and power in its rendering of good poetry while setting a silent thumb on the scales. (Rachel Blau DuPlessis is very insightful on this in her essay on Zukofsky at Jacket.

On the beach I read for a while and then went out in the waves, which I could only body surf so far without getting sand in my ears. ("There is no Atlantic Ocean")

Cut, print

2007-07-28T18:17:00.000-07:00

I went to the Harry Potter movie the other night with Farrah and her niece -- her parents have been in town, hence the hiatus in posts -- and enjoyed it too much to join the general hoot. Afterwards, though, what stayed with me regarding the basically decent directing job from British TV guy David Yates was the weirdness of the it'll do edits, specifically in one scene with Robbie Coltrane talking about his giant half brother. It seemed almost glaringly obvious that the scene had been pared down, probably for time reasons though just as possibly to excise some gaffe or invisible issue. It made for a certain emotional hiccup, as I felt like the emotional beats seemed suddenly to speed up, or skip over the information needed to convey them. This is perhaps more generally the feeling that an adolescent Harry Potter reader might have as certain scene bits suddenly glide past wonderful or even crucial details too necessary to the shape of the experience to lose. And yet there is the obvious other argument for time's winged chariot, and the feeling of the well-oiled machine, even one missing a few aesthetic but not technically necessary parts, churning forward. Better a two hour movie where a few plot holes sag on the drive home from the theater than a three hour movie with a third hour ostensibly about the wish to drive home.

One of the weird things about deleted scenes in the DVDs from movies - an effect which is almost always unsettling and delirious in equal parts, as if there is this possibility that with more scenes one could eventually have a special, special DVD experience that would actually contain the entirety of the beloved character's life, perhaps lived in a equal or even longer span than the viewer's own (like Borges' map with a 1:1 scale to reality) - is that they are almost always bad. That is, the director was almost always right to take them out, to substitute the desire for completeness with the wish for speed. These scenes show the lines in some weird state of overstatement, or the actors' flu not quite makeup-ed over, or the camera not quite so. And then the cut says to the viewer: get on with your life, there is something more important than this and yet this is all you need to know. You don't need everything in order to have everything; you can split the difference after all between a Platonic realm of the imaginary deleted scene and the reality of the impeded view.

Still from the seat at the editing suite it is only about telling the most pared and efficient story, I assume, or at least the most believable and effective one, which usually comes to the same thing. And so movie after movie (especially in its Hollywood, test-screened incarnation) has this deliberate feeling of adulteration, of those moments when a corner has been cut because it should have been cut but one imagines the next, impossible take of the scene that could have incorporated this knowledge better, more fully, more truly. As if the producers are cheating the actors, or the actors the characters, or the characters the format they deliver themselves in. Is this to say the difference between good bad filmmaking and bad good filmmaking? The quality of invisibility? At the same time one must appreciate these moments for their window into the process even as the actual process remains cloaked. Like performances by certain actors whose stardom ups the ante on their "acting" to impossible degrees of sweat, the work is more important than what it produces. One has to appreciate, someone is trying.

Sundry

2007-07-18T12:41:00.000-07:00

Just finished reading Rebecca Solnit's brilliant piece in Harper's magazine while waiting for my shower to heat up after a morning pulling up invasive European buckthorn from the woods here in Massachusetts. It appears that the buckthorn (small, woody undergrowth) grows much faster than I could possibly uproot it, and my activity well rhymed with Solnit's evocation of "arcadian" Detroit returning to a quasi-wilderness, still inhabited but even post-post, after the rhetoric of Devils Night arson gangs seems to have passed from crisis into a permanent lore. My Sisyphian gardening seemed to foreground the weirdness of nature as a construct, all of these plants growing wildly amid the question of containment, beauty, utility, etc. And of course yesterday and the last few days I was running around feeding sheep, who need constant care it seems not to wander, scare, or eat themselves to death. Nature is half what survives and half what is let to survive, though obviously making someone let you (wool, milk, cuteness) is as much tactic as accident. Or tactic as accident, accident as tactic.

As if the Grand Canyon does need us after all, contra the very silly Imax movie I saw at the resplendant Boston Museum of Science last night. (To my great relief, Leonard Nimoy still gives a magisterial introduction over John Williams's out-coplanding copland New England hymn that was even better than I remembered from being ten years old.)

And meanwhile, Detriot is changing. Solnit describes the heroic atempts to turn the abandoned urban landscape into new farms, farm schools, sustainable eating infrastructure, etc. She rightly pauses to note the disturbing echo of sharecropping that so many people moved to Michigan to escape in the new "improved" Detroit tomorrowland. And yet-- and this is what I think makes Harpers magazine's naysaying easier to take than other paper political rags like the Atlantic Monthly's chicken little Neo-isms -- there's hope in that tomorrow, as if the apocalypse might already have happened, and no one has noticed yet, and it's going to be ok.

Should art do this, be the bitter pill as consolation for the bitter pill? Speaking of apocalypses, I saw the new Die Hard movie and was, as expected, fairly entertained by the incompletely averted apocalypses that the movie seemed to be admitting had already happened. I jibed against the predictable conservative government-as-good-once-we-weed-the-arrogant-bad-apples bit but was left with a weird feeling that somehow the scrim is thinner than it looks. At the Mugar Omni theater they shine lights behind the screen to reveal a network of speakers, pipes and braces and I always try to figure out whether I'm seeing the real back or a projection of it, and if it is a projection, whether it's accurate. Or if it's not accurate, is it ideal? Detroit for the alien as a complicated greenhouse or a neighborhood full of squatters...

Right now a hummingbird is humming in the flowers in the window watered by the rain.

How to rescue a reputation

2007-07-13T13:35:00.001-07:00

I had dinner last night with a Boston musician who brought to my attention the strange case of French composer Germaine Tailleferre, who was a member of the French circle of composers known as Les Six. Somewhat unlike Milhaud or Poulenc, who seem to have some lasting visibility, Tailleferre has never even entered my consciousness, one of the most accomplished female composers practically ever. The fact is, I could probably name all the female composers I could think of on one hand-- which is not to say that many incredible composers do not exist, just that I haven't been informed of them or successfully sought them out, and not for lack of trying. But beyond say, Clara Schumann, Fanny Mendelsohn, Ruth Crawford Seeger and Hildegard von Bingen my well runs near dry. I can think of the recent film composer Rachel Portman, or I don't know, Joanna Newsom? and I start to struggle. Wow. I know I shouldn't be surprised, but I am surprised.

I tried to do the same thing with visual artists recently and found that, excluding the last three-quarters of a century in which the contributions of artists like Frida Kahlo, Agnes Martin, Eva Hesse, Georgia O'Keefe, Louise Bourgeois (who I'm not as personally fond of), and abstract expressionst painters (Frankenthaler etc.) it's equally hard. It makes a discovery like Gego's artwork at the Drawing Center in NYC right now especially exciting for me because the depth of my awareness seems suddenly so depressingly minimal. And if I try to start before, say, 1920 it gets almost blindingly murky. A friend of my mother's responded with the British artist Jessie Marion King, who is certainly another excellent example of yet again a brilliant female artist whom I had not been aware of. So maybe the story if my own failure here, but I wonder how pervasive this problem is.

This very post seems to resort to a terrible tokenism, as if reducing these artists to their femaleness in a way that would be as epistemology un-useful for men. It becomes a shorthand for "outsider" in a way I'm not sure to be helpful. The story may be one of lack of access to resources; perhaps this is why there are plenty of well-known women writers going back a few centuries (let's see, from the top of my head - Frances Burney, Helen Hunt Jackson, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, Baroness Orczy, Lafayette, the Brontes, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, etc.). Perhaps here there has been a stronger and more concerted job to refocus attention? Or is it easier for a woman to be accepted for her writing? I would postulate the need for prohibitive insidery art school or music school educations perhaps except then I would expect more well-known visionary 'outsider' artists like Grandma Moses or Charles Ives, which I'm not totally aware of. Certainly with the case of music so much depends on navigating the limited outlets for performance-- Tailleferre in fact even composed for Diaghilev, so she clearly was able to achieve enormously on this front, though might she be the token-ish exception?

How do you even rescue a reputation -- and do you want to? One of the great pleasures in life must be discovery, and then sharing. It's hard to share discoveries of the obvious; that's why they call it obvious. But then again, no one has any problem still taking pleasure from the good old pleasures.

So I guess the final question is what I want to have happen through increased visibility for women artists of the past, or what I want to happen to me. I don't much think that there is a women's way of seeing the world I want access to (eww) and even those French feminist ideas about "women's" writing I think have offered tools and new approaches that have become wonderfully available to everyone, myself included. (Feel free to accuse me here of being part of a force of gentrification; capitalism has its ways of using well-meaning creative people to clearcut the danger zones, then raise the rents...) Even some idea of eventual fairness reeks of something like retroactive religious conversions or victor's justice. Just a richer canon of choices? One life to live. One life... But then there's the idealist who lifts up a head (his or her, hmm) and says at varying volumes:

Here are some metaphors... Whack away.

A pack of

2007-07-10T20:33:00.000-07:00

The pronunciation eludes me. It appears that west of the Mississippi they are two syllables but a third syllable is added as the animal has drifted eastward, like some parvenu pretension. Recent experience demonstrates not their innate tricksiness, as they are unable to recognize people who are aboard tractors or trailers behind tractors as such. In circumstances such as me this is intelligent as I have no desire to hurt one, though I'm sure there are those who would take advantage of this curiosity. For now the coyote (three syllables) lopes beside the machinery, hoping for a stray rodent, none the wiser.
Still I wouldn't sit down in the field and wait very long.

Observations from spent

2007-07-10T18:25:00.000-07:00

I have been on a farm for the last three days herding sheep and hoisting haybales. (It turns out that sheep farming is basically a grass maintanance job. Pasture versus meadow versus field. Another issue where synonyms are not quite synonyms. When I was screenwriting last month it seemed everything always might be sorted out with a voluminous enough thesaurus. Because of the differences...) In any case, my chain gang education is a detriment to the brain part, hence my driving home exhausted and not much reading and not much writing. Inauspicious maybe to the theory of the Well rounded man.

But this will do for now.

I am still getting use to the public forum-ishness of this public forum. There are perforations and these are always interesting. After my last post on Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse it appears she has re-out-shouted me. Which is odd, and good. Or is it strange and poignant? Synonyms for good are not much. Out here there may or may not be rules.

Apocalypse flavors

2007-07-07T09:15:00.000-07:00

One of the challenges in life is to replace other people's prejudices with your own prejudices. I've been spending the last couple years deciding what I think of chapbooks, which some voice in my head told me a long time ago to be wary of. Or maybe it was someone else's voice, it's so hard to tell the difference anymore. But on one hand, they disappear into the bookshelf, wedged between books and on the other, they can be so handcrafty and pleasing to hold. And far better to travel with also.

Yesterday afternoon I spent reading Anne Boyer's Good Apocalypse, from Effing Press - which I made the unusual effort of ordering after reading her totally inspired hilarious trans-Marxist contempo piece "I Love LIterature" on a blog or somewhere.

And the chapbook is totally great and I know a lot of people know that already but why not reinforce the chorus. I first accidentally typed "Bad Apocalypse" when I was writing in the book's title in the last paragraph and my slip shows how much more unusual and great her perspective on this takes us. There's a creepy brilliance in her lightheartedness dealing with Problems, call it hate as glee maybe, or meant irony, or the ecstasy of smarting. She's posing this great question about culture throughout and how it's consituting us internationally, emotionally, etc. She brings up Omar Sharif in one poem, who is a great example of this, the arab/Russian/heartthrob/exotic/mustachioed man etc. The etcetera, say. That's what she's talking about.

Zizek says that the problem is we're living now in this obscene age where it appears that the revolution has been thoroughly discredited, that we're past choice, that the free market global economy capitalism is simply how it is and how it always will be. And if we're dreaming of the revolutionary, they are simply part of the order, either as outgrowable stage or hipster entertainment. And here's Boyer slyly quoting Guy Debord over the picture of a platypus "The grand style of an era can always be found in what is governed by the secret yet obvious necessity for revolution."

So it needs to be done... but that doesn't mean anybody wants to do it.

Clouds, picnics

2007-07-05T18:23:00.001-07:00

Tonight the weather turns out to be not awful, though the outdoor movie night in Brooklyn Bridge Park is cancelled. Up in my building sometimes I have to check the Internet to find out what the weather is outside: a little fog looks like a little rain. Out in California on the coast, you stand in fog and ten miles inland it can blaze blue. Technology keeps giving us a sense of other people telling us what is happening right now. And of course jobs are about not right now but almost right now, believing in next week's check and tomorrow weather. The rain after the armistice. Blue sky over the gallows.

And of course nobody knows at the same time as it's better to assume. This won't be the moment when the cat starts telling secrets to the houseguests. This won't be when, as in Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock (seen last night) when we start getting murdered by some metaphors. A little fissure and the whole system floods. So the continuum slips.

Picnic at Hanging Rock was a brilliant movie because it held out all the pleasures of narrative without its conservative fulfillment. So silly to ask a bunch of why. I have to remember that. Belief in gravity (qua physics) is actually keeping the person down. As if there's a belief in maths, and a belief in Garibaldi.

Fireworks, Sigmund Freud

2007-07-04T18:56:00.000-07:00

I just walked in the door from watching the July 4 fireworks, which this year included (as, hopefully, always) a new ingenious firework that floated slowly like a ghost not so far off the ground, letting off a spectral trail of shimmering light and then, touching ground, *bounced* off and headed back into the air for an encore flight. Amazing. There are so few universal vestiges in the modern of magic that really seems like magic. Who are our wizards? In the movies, the wizard profession seems so frequently to be the psychoanalyst, who has special knowledge and possibly dark, Svengali-ish powers. There's a whole cottage industry in simply locating the epistemology of psychiatrists in film who are either powerful wizards or hapless con men. (Or both.)

But the fireworks specialist remains something apart, kind of a mystical offshoot of the mad inventor/entrepeneur (Tucker, Hughes). I found myself flashing back to two fireworkers I remember, watching tonight's display from the hallway window: 1) the righteous fireworks terrorist in RAGTIME, unveiling the secret radicalism underneath the bonding display of American patriotism and 2) a childhood vacation in early July on Martha's Vineyard when we watched the - as I recall - award winning French brothers' display off Oak Bluffs, their daunting French-ness suggesting some other secret Euro-wizardry informing the celebration of independence.

And of course there is the fact that something is exploding up there.

a picture of me

2007-07-04T12:56:00.001-07:00

This is me

first blog entry

2007-07-04T12:43:00.000-07:00

Here is my new blog. I hope to soon have a more interesting (though fast loading) template up soon. For now, it is 'minimal' which I can justify as my nod to the last truly named ism of the arts. Has it been said enough how weird that contemporary art now seems to start in 1960 and go until the present day, and thus that contemporary art includes fairly long dead people? I still feel like there's some weird cut off between people who died before I was conscious - say, 1980ish - and those afterwards who have died in the Era of Now... Which is like not dying at all, or dying but remaining part of the Conversation. But perhaps, conveniently many call 1980 the last year when all the Moderns died, so that's very convenient. Coincidence? Or does someone like Andy Warhol mean something more and different than, say, Robert Smithson? Samuel Beckett, Joan Miro, etc. The Early Eighties....

Farrah was just complaining about all the older, established poets we compete with for poetry contests. And then the dead keep popping up with new, contemporary work. WCW's new poem in the Paris Review, say. Where do they find this stuff? The attic from the Goonies? Margins of the poet's library installed at the Research Library of Young Turk's University? My mother has been requesting that I try to write a book "based on research." Who needs glasses? and who will?