andrewjshields

Quiet Rooms

2012-01-17T09:18:00.001+01:00

QUIET ROOMS

You know I think it's fine to talk about those things in quiet rooms. (Mitt Romney)

We talk about these things in quiet rooms
where nobody can sit alone for long.
We weave our words as if on ancient looms,
turning our measured voices into songs
everyone begins to sing as one.
We choose our usual places in the choir,
pursuing harmonies nobody spun
and tunes that leave us nothing to desire.

If several singers always take the lead,
it's only that their voices are the best.
If anyone's outside, why don't you come
and join us? We'll teach you what you need
to know to sing our songs, or play a drum.
Or just come in and listen. Be our guest.

Mark Wallace on Dieter M. Gräf

2012-01-16T11:25:00.001+01:00

Mark Wallace recently reviewed Dieter M. Gräf's Tussi Research, the second of the two selections of Gräf's work for Green Integer. Thanks to Mark for his review, which is here.

Gross- und Kleinschreibung in der deutschen Lyrik

2011-12-12T10:17:00.004+01:00

[Einmal etwas nur auf Deutsch]

Hier das heutige Gedicht des Tages von Fixpoetry:

Carl-Christian Elze

ich lebe in einem wasserturm am meer, was albern ist.

ich bin immer versalzen, aber das süße halt ich nicht aus.

eine katze schlich ums haus & hat sich auf den rücken geworfen.

was das nur soll? ich will keine ergebenheit, ich will liebe.

woher ich meine liebe nehme, ist mein größtes geheimnis.

ich habe einen tank voll davon, aber nicht in meinem turm.

ich bin oft betrunken vor liebe & oft ein stinkendes feld.

das meer ist eine katze, der ich nichts anvertrauen mag.

in den dünen finden sich manchmal die knochen von engeln.

trete ich aus meinem turm heraus, liebe ich heftig die sonne.

Hier mein Facebook-Kommentar dazu:

Mir gefällt dieses Gedicht, aber wie so oft, wenn alles kleingeschrieben ist, frage ich mich, warum das so sein muss. Wie ist das kleingeschriebene Gedicht anders als die mögliche grossgeschriebe Form? Was bringt es gegenüber die Standardschreibung:

Ich lebe in einem Wasserturm am Meer, was albern ist.

Ich bin immer versalzen, aber das Süße halt ich nicht aus.

Eine Katze schlich ums Haus & hat sich auf den Rücken geworfen.

Was das nur soll? Ich will keine Ergebenheit, ich will liebe.

Woher ich meine Liebe nehme, ist mein größtes Geheimnis.

Ich habe einen Tank voll davon, aber nicht in meinem Turm.

Ich bin oft betrunken vor Liebe & oft ein stinkendes Feld.

Das Meer ist eine Katze, der ich nichts anvertrauen mag.

In den Dünen finden sich manchmal die Knochen von Engeln.

Trete ich aus meinem Turm heraus, liebe ich heftig die Sonne.

Das ist letztendliche keine Kritik an Carl-Christian Elze, sondern eine generelle und sehr ernst gemeinte Frage an die zeitgenössischen deutschsprachigen Lyrikern, die so schreiben, von einem in der Schweiz wohnhaften amerikanischen Lyriker, Übersetzer und Songwriter, der einfach nicht versteht, warum diese Form so geläufig ist, da sie sich, meine Erfahrung nach, selten mit irgendeinem Gewinn gegenüber der Standardschreibung rechtfertigt, und relativ oft (obwohl nicht in diesem Fall) nur Verwirrung stiftet.

"Then you get another guy"

2011-11-15T15:17:00.005+01:00

In the "Talk of the Town" section of the November 7, 2011, issue of The New Yorker, there's a description of the singer Gillian Welch and her guitarist David Rawlings driving from Philadelphia to New York. The article is not available on-line (except for subscribers to the magazine or the magazine's archive); here's the bit I noted:

The other thing that Rawlings had brought to divert himself was a collected works of Shakespeare. "I've been reading the histories," he said. "I'm up to the third act of 'Henry V,' and when I'm done I might even start them again. I like how fatalistic they are. They feel a little like the Iliad and the Odyssey. I like it in the Iliad when Homer introduces a warrior and says who he was and where he grew up and who his parents and his grandparents were and what they did, and then Hector disembowels him. Then you get another guy."

I love a guitarist who reads Shakespeare on the road and compares the plays to Homer, with superb comic timing in the next-to-last sentence of the passage. What would it mean to play guitar like this, with a flurry of information and then a comic twist?

Since I'd not only read that passage but also read it out loud to my son Miles (who was not as amused as I was ...), it was striking to find the same point made in a different article in the same issue: "Battle Lines," Daniel Mendelsohn's review of Stephen Mitchell's new translation of the Iliad, which begins like this (also only in the on-line archive):

For sheer weirdness, it would be hard to find a passage in the Western canon that can compete with the tenth book of Homer's Iliad—the one classicists call the Doloneia, "the bit about Dolon." Not the least of the book's oddities is that it's named after a nobody: Dolon is a character whom the poet conjures merely so that he can kill him off, a few hundred lines later, in literature's nastiest episode of trick-or-treating.

This is not the first time I have come across such a doubling in the New Yorker. I wrote about a case a few years ago, when articles by Malcolm Gladwell and Caleb Crain referred to the same thing in consecutive issues. And in April of 2006, I also wrote about two profiles in the same issue (of Pete Seeger and Maurice Sendak), which both included images of the profiled celebrity interacting with a famous poet (Seeger with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sendak with Marianne Moore). Amusingly, the Seeger profile is by Alec Wilkinson, who also wrote the bit about Welch and Rawlings.

Michael Hulse and Quinn Latimer, reading in Basel, Monday, November 21, 2011

2011-11-12T11:34:00.003+01:00

ESP (English Seminar Poetry) presents:

Michael Hulse and Quinn Latimer will read from their poetry on Monday, November 21 2011, in the Grosser Hörsaal of the English Seminar of the University of Basel, at Nadelberg 6 in downtown Basel.

For more information, click on the image of the flyer below.

Ashes of American Flags

2011-10-30T06:00:00.000+01:00

"I wonder why / we listen to poets," sings Jeff Tweedy in Wilco's "Ashes of American Flags." It's a somewhat odd way of putting it, since mostly poets get read, rather than listened to. But the range of possible meanings is still quite limited: it might refer to poetry readings (where we listen to poets, rather than read them), it might mean "listen to" in the sense of "do as someone tells you to do" (with poets as sources of moral guidance), or it might mean that lyricists who sing their poems are also poets (opening up the "are lyrics poetry?" can of worms). The rest of the lyric might help one decide among these three readings, if that's what one is inclined to do.

When I said that "Art of Almost" seemed primarily "suggestive" and not much more, I meant that the lyrics were so open to interpretation that even such an enumeration of the straightforward readings would not be possible. "Ashes of American Flags" is more than "suggestive," in this sense, because its text is more limiting in its possible interpretations.

Ashes of American Flags

the cash machine
is blue and green
for a hundred in twenties
and a small service fee
I could spend three dollars
and sixty-three cents
on diet coca-cola
and unlit cigarettes

I wonder why
we listen to poets
when nobody gives a fuck
how hot and sorrowful
this machine begs for luck
all my lies are always wishes

I know I would die
if I could come back new

I want a good life
with a nose for things
a fresh wind and bright sky
to enjoy my suffering
a hole without a key
if I break my tongue
speaking of tomorrow
how will it ever come
all my lies are always wishes

I know I would die
if I could come back new

I'm down on my hands and knees
every time the doorbell rings
I shake like a toothache
when I hear myself sing
all my lies are only wishes

I know I would die
if I could come back new

I would like to salute
the ashes of American flags
and all the falling leaves
filling up shopping bags

The Art of Almost

2011-10-29T13:34:00.003+02:00

It's great to hear bands push the envelope of what is expected of them, and that's what Wilco does with "The Art of Almost," the first song on their latest CD, The Whole Love. It sounds to me, in fact, like this song is the best Radiohead song released this year (better than anything on King of Limbs, at least).

If the music of the song is fantastic, the lyrics settle for being suggestive. But most lyrics do (not every songwriter is Conor Oberst, not even Jeff Tweedy).

While searching for the lyrics, I discovered that the Wilco website has all their lyrics, and that you can request songs for concerts. So I requested "Hummingbird" and "Impossible Germany" for Basel. You can even dedicate your requests!

Here's a live video of "The Art of Almost," followed by the lyrics:

The Art of Almost

No!
I froze
I can’t be so
Far away from my wasteland
I never know when I might
Ambulance
Hoist the horns with my own hands
Almost
Almost

I heard a faint olé
True love but
I had other ways to hurt myself
Like calling
I could open up my heart
And fall in and
I could blame it all on dust
The Art of Almost
Almost
Almost
Almost

I’ll hold it up
I’ll shake the grail
Disobey across the waves
Tomorrow
I’ll have all the love I could ever ache
And I’ll leave almost with you
All of almost
Almost

Antiphon

2011-10-23T22:31:00.003+02:00

The first issue of Antiphon, a new online poetry journal based in the UK, includes my poem "The View From Here."

On reading through the rest of the journal, a few of the poems struck me in particular:

"Why do you live on your own, without any children?", by Michaela Ridgway
Nil by m0uth, week 3, by Cora Greenhill
Triptych, by Claire Dyer

But most of all I liked Archie's Paris, by David Harmer, which reminded me of the first sentence of Reginald Shepherd's essay "Why I Write" (which I quoted in my brief eulogy for him when he died, over three years ago now).

Wilco, "A.M."

2011-10-13T15:28:00.003+02:00

In anticipation of Wilco's concert in Basel on November 7, I picked up almost all the Wilco albums I did not already have, and now I am listening to them in chronological order. Their first album was A.M., from 1995, released right after I moved to Basel (which is neither here or there, of course). This one I did not have before, and on a first listening, I'm impressed by how they seemed to be channeling the Rolling Stones of Exile on Main Street at times, especially when they get more rocking, as on "Casino Queen":

(This version doesn't quite do the Stones comparison as much justice as the studio version, actually.)

Some might think an "altcountry" band should not be compared to "the world's greatest rock and roll band," but as my friend Geoff once pointed out to me, on Exile, the Stones also proved that they are the world's greatest country band, and reminded us all that country and rock-and-roll come from the same sources, and that the original distinctions between them were all about marketing and radio formats ...

Fish on a Stick

2011-10-11T11:59:00.003+02:00

This Wondermark comic from mid-September struck me as a little lesson in linguistics, although as is often the case, I am not enough of an expert in linguistics to really figure out how to talk about it. I'm only good enough to see that there is some linguistics to be talked about here.

The lesson is that language involves not just what is said but a whole bunch of assumptions that we have that help us interpret what is said. I thought this might have something to do with the Gricean maxims, but I can't figure out how the two speakers' assumptions violate those maxims of quality, quantity, relevance, or manner.

The second man assumes that if something is carrying something and shouting out a description of it, that it must be for sale. The man with the fish, though, interprets the question not as "how much do you want for it?" but as "how much of the fish is on the stick?"

Any linguists out there want to help me with this one? Perhaps I should send it to Mark Liberman of Language Log.

Rob A. Mackenzie and Katy Evans-Bush, reading in Basel, Thursday, October 20, 2011

2011-10-10T17:24:00.003+02:00

ESP (English Seminar Poetry) presents:

Salt poets Rob A. Mackenzie and Katy Evans-Bush will read from their poetry on Thursday, October 20, 2011, in Room 11 of the English Seminar of the University of Basel, at Nadelberg 6 in downtown Basel.

For more information, click on the image of the flyer below.

The next ESP reading will feature Michael Hulse and Quinn Latimer on November 21, 2011.

Cleanse Song

2011-10-09T12:43:00.003+02:00

See the new pyramids down in old Manhattan
From the roof of a friend's I watched an empire ending

Bright Eyes, "Cleanse Song"

A few months ago, I was listening to Bright Eyes, as I was obsessively doing at the time, and up came "Cleanse Song," a beautiful ballad from their album Cassadaga. While I love the song, I had to differ with Conor Oberst about the above lines: it was not the end of an empire. Nor was it the beginning, of course. It was an opportunity for the leaders of the empire to reassert and even vastly expand their empire's reach, both abroad and, especially, at home.

No Need for Due Process

2011-10-08T12:45:00.006+02:00

In this column on October 3, 2011, Glenn Greenwald included a link to a White House Press Conference with Press Secretary Jay Carney, which I recommend that you watch:

Kudos to Jake Tapper of ABC News for asking the important questions. I would say "non-kudos to Carney," but he's just doing his job. The real "non-kudos" have to go to the President.

As Tapper asks, what would "Constitutional Law Professor Barack Obama" say about how President Barack Obama is handling the Constitution? And all American citizens and residents should be asking themselves, "Do we want to live in a country where the President can order people to be executed without trial?" If even a large minority, let alone a majority, answers that question with "Yes," that is a very sad state of affairs.

One thing that I think should be made as clear as possible about this sad state of affairs: in the end, it's not about ordering the assassination of an American citizen. That's just an extra turn of the screw. The real problem is the President reserving the right to order the assassination of anybody anywhere.

UPDATE: Here's a more recent Greenwald column about how people get put on the list for assassination. As Greenwald puts it:

Seriously: if you’re willing to endorse having White House functionaries meet in secret — with no known guidelines, no oversight, no transparency — and compile lists of American citizens to be killed by the CIA without due process, what aren’t you willing to support?

Michael Donhauser reading in Basel, October 25, 2011

2011-10-06T18:52:00.004+02:00

The wonderful poet Michael Donhauser will be reading from his work (in German) on Tuesday, October 25, 2011, in Basel. The reading will be at 10:15 a.m. at Nadelberg 6, "Schönes Haus," home of the English Department; the reading is sponsored by the Philosophy Department and Professor Angelika Krebs. Click on the flyer for a larger version and more details.

Footnotes

2011-10-02T10:40:00.003+02:00

The main period of my life when I used a lot of footnotes was, unsurprisingly, in graduate school from 1988-1995. I wrote my dissertation on a Mac Classic (or perhaps it was a Classic II), using the version of Microsoft Word that existed way back then, and footnotes were added by typing apple-E. But since I veered away from scholarship into translation after finishing my doctorate, I have rarely written anything since then that called for footnotes.

This weekend, I'm translating an academic text with footnotes, and whenever I want to type a footnote, the old apple-E reflex takes over, and I end up with the text centered instead of with a footnote. It's not that I want to know what keystroke produces a footnote (I'm perfectly happy to go the Insert menu and select Footnotes). What strikes me is that this ancient reflex is still there, as it has never been over-ridden by a different reflex for generating footnotes or by a different use for apple-E.

There's probably a bit of deep psychology to be done here, but it's all just an anecdote really.

Bad Linguistics ... and Good Linguistics

2011-09-13T23:08:00.004+02:00

One of the things I have learned from several years of reading Language Log is just how absent the science of linguistics is from the radar of your average intellectual. Otherwise highly educated people spout nonsense about language that has long since been utterly discredited by serious scholarly study of language.

So I should not have been surprised to read a tweet by Ben Goldacre that addressed the use of the passive voice: "dear everyone, when i read your passive sentence constructions i sort of have to convert them into active ones in my head because i'm thick." I was not surprised, but I was disappointed, since I love Goldacre's ongoing critique of "Bad Science" on his blog and in his Guardian column and his book with that title. He is unrelenting, for example, on the nonsense that is "alternative medicine," while also being highly critical of "bad science" when he finds it in more mainstream scientific settings.

His critique of the passive voice as a supposed "stylistic problem," however, is first-order bad science — perhaps not quite on the order of homeopathy, but still utterly unfounded. If you, like Goldacre, think that "passive voice should be avoided," then you should read some good science by Geoffrey Pullum from Language Log: "The Passive in English." I hope that Goldacre, too, will follow my tip and recognize the Language Log linguists as his fellow campaigners against "bad science."

The Rule of Law

2011-09-11T13:54:00.001+02:00

THE RULE OF LAW

what might have been

The suicidal perpetrators died,
but those behind the scenes were hunted down
and put on trial for the crimes they had
abetted. Now they are in jail for life.

The citizens feel safe to know their land
is ruled by law, not fear, nor force, nor vengeance.

Spelling Rage

2011-09-02T11:28:00.004+02:00

I just saw a Facebook page called "Learning How To Fucking Spell Properly":

1. When I first read it, I put the fourth word after the fifth word, which changed the meaning.

2. Then I wondered why such a page would be necessary anyway: I rarely see anyone misspell "properly."

3. Then it struck me as odd that someone with spelling rage would split an infinitive. Not that split infinitives are incorrect, but that most people with spelling-rage issues also have grammar-rage issues.

Tennis and The Change

2011-09-02T09:35:00.003+02:00

12 years ago, Venus Williams was the emerging star in a sport that wasn’t always so hospitable to a young woman of color who dared to be great.

All Madison Keys heard on Wednesday were cheers and chants of “Maddy.” On the subject of change, it was the kind that a 16-year-old with a long climb ahead could believe in.

This is the end of Harvey Araton's September 1 New York Times article "As Williamses Age, Here Comes Youth." For most readers, the final sentence will read like a reference to Barack Obama's election slogan "change you can believe in." But for followers of the American poetry scene, there's another echo: Tony Hoagland's poem "The Change," the subject of much recent discussion on racism in poetry.

Whether Hoagland's poem is a depiction of racism or is itself racist, this article shows that there has been a change in the tennis world: when the Williams sisters emerged as the dominant forces in women's tennis, much latent racism became manifest. And now, Madison Keys's victory in the first round of the US Open and hard-fought, three-set loss in the second round is simply celebrated by the fans and the press as the success of a promising young American player.

What is a monster?

2011-09-01T08:27:00.003+02:00

This Wondermark cartoon (in a very different style than usual; see the note to the cartoon) nicely captures the problem of identifying the monstrous. The bull-headed minotaur of mythology might seem like a monster to the knight in the image, but he won't seem like a monster to himself. And the man-headed monster that chases them both probably thinks they are the monsters.

Something to keep in mind whenever you consider somebody "monstrous" in some way: his actions probably seem "human" to him, while yours may seem "monstrous."

At first, I thought this was another angle on "the banality of evil," but perhaps it's not:

In short, the true horror of Eichmann and his like is not that their actions were blind. On the contrary, it is that they saw clearly what they did, and believed it to be the right thing to do.

The monsters, that is, do not see themselves as monsters.

Partitions

2011-08-27T09:36:00.004+02:00

After a fire destroys his home, Dr. Ibrahim Masud, a Muslim living on the Indian side of the new India-Pakistan border in Amit Majmudar's novel Partitions, decides to head to his clinic by bicycle, as he does every morning: "Violence would not trespass on the dominion of illness." In literature, such a conviction is immediately punished, so when Masud arrives at his clinic, it is no surprise that it has been destroyed. Beyond that, Masud's conviction is proved more generally erroneous throughout the novel, as violence repeatedly "trespasses on dominions" that are supposed to be exempt from it.

When I remembered the line later, I misquoted it to myself, replacing the word "dominion" with the word "domain." But "dominion" is the right word here: both in the novel and in the world in general, the trespasses of violence are aimed not at "domains" (places in general) but at "dominions" (places that are governed or ordered in some way by some authority). Where a boundary has been established, a dominion is created, and violence will seek to trespass on that dominion.

More specifically, "dominion" is the word used in the British Commonwealth to refer to some former colonies, including, apparently, Pakistan. And the creation of Pakistan and India in 1947 set up "dominions" in which violence was not seen as "trespassing" as long as it was directed at others: the Muslims in India, like Masud; the Hindus and Sikhs in Pakistan, like the novel's three other main characters.

In the end, this wonderful novel reminded me of Wayne Wang's movie Smoke, in its implication that the bonds of blood, family, and religion are weaker than the bonds one chooses to establish with others. The former establish dominions that are all to likely to attract the trespassing power of violence—or even to generate that violence within themselves. The latter, the chosen bonds, may be utopian in the negative sense of "unrealistic," but in their rejection of "partitions," they are also utopian in the positive, visionary sense.

Inspiration

2011-08-18T10:29:00.003+02:00

I recently discovered Brian Brodeur's blog "How a Poem Happens." Each post has a poem and a series of questions for the poet—mostly the same questions, which makes for interesting comparisons in terms of how the poets work and how they think about what they are doing. My favorite section in most of the recent ones I read is, "Do you believe in inspiration?" And my favorite answer is the one given by David Hernandez:

Inspiration is a lazy architect who gives you a blueprint with only the front door drawn, then snoozes on a hammock while you build the entire house.

Rosy-Cheeked Shuffle

2011-08-06T23:01:00.003+02:00

Even when the band stretches out and demonstrates its cohesiveness, you feel the ghost of Jerry Garcia and his rosy-cheeked shuffle.

So writes Sasha Frere-Jones in his New Yorker review of My Morning Jacket's latest album, Circuital. Jerry Garcia as Santa Claus? I kind of like the idea, as in this picture I just found on the web, but Jerry-bashing in order to praise MMJ's "cohesiveness" even when "stretching out" misses the cohesiveness of Jerry's own playing. And when Frere-Jones goes on to discuss MMJ's jam-band self-marketing in the next paragraph, he messes up the history entirely:

Something wonderfully odd has happened: though the punks famously want nothing to do with the system, it was the hippies—because of jam bands like Phish and the String Cheese Incident—who were the first to abandon the traditional music business, at least in part. They built enormous fan bases by touring endlessly. They earned reasonable salaries and were largely freed from worrying about how many records they sold or whether they were played on the radio.

As Phish and SCI would be the first to tell you, it was the Grateful Dead (with their rosy-cheeked shuffle) who first built their fan base by focusing on touring and thus freed themselves from record sales and radio airplay. If you're going to bash Jerry as a sweet old hippie, Mr. F-J, at least get your facts right!

And just to belie the image of Jerry as some sort of sweet musical Santa, here's Jerry and the Dead getting into a close encounter in 1978:

Touchstones

2011-08-05T22:39:00.003+02:00

Most of my touchstones make implicit or explicit claims that I in some way agree with. Kafka's "Das nächste Dorf" is not just a pleasant paradox that amuses me but a complex statement about time that helps me sort out how it passes. But sometimes I refer to something again and again primarily because it is a pleasant paradox, as with Roland Barthes's claim about re-reading: if you read a lot of books one time each, you keep reading the same book, but if you read one book twice, then you've read two different books. I've been quoting this claim for over twenty years now, and I don't even remember where it comes from—or whether I even read it at all. Perhaps some grad-school buddy quoted it to me; perhaps he or she has long since forgotten it, while it stuck with me, to be fingered now and then.

It came to me again the other day, this pleasant paradox, and now I've realized that I have always read it in a way that contradicts its content: by quoting it so often, I re-read it multiple times over the years, but it was always the same. And now it's different, and only now that it's different do I understand that it is more than the pleasant paradox I long held it to be. Without realizing it, I'd always understood it in terms of re-reading a book twice in quick succession (perhaps because that's what one does in grad school when writing about a book). Now I see Barthes's claim in terms of re-reading something years or even decades later—or seeing a touchstone anew, after many years of referring to it. The works that accompany me change with me as I grow older—but so do the little fragments that I've torn out of context even as I "re-read" them every time I quote them. And every new book or poem or song or quotation I come across is the same book, poem, song, or quotation as all the others until I give it my attention a second time—or until it makes me pay attention to it a second time. I never know in advance which ones will become new touchstones, but at least I know that the old ones will always be new every time I take them out to touch them.

Furthur and The Grateful Dead

2011-08-04T10:41:00.003+02:00

Furthur is the current band of the Grateful Dead's Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, with John Kadlecik on lead guitar, Jeff Chimenti on keyboards, Joe Russo on drums, and Jeff Pehrson and Sunshine Garcia Becker on backing vocals. The band has played over 100 shows since their first gig in September 2009, and though I have not had a chance to hear them live (since I live in Switzerland and they have not been in Europe yet, and I always miss them by days when I'm in the U.S.), I have listened to recordings of all their shows, thanks to the Live Music Archive and Furthur's own live downloads. Gradually, despite my being a veteran Deadhead (83 shows from 1982-1995), I have come to the conclusion (with a couple of caveats) that Furthur is a better band than the Grateful Dead.

The primary reason is Jeff Chimenti on keyboards. Chimenti's background is primarily in jazz, and he has played with Bob Weir's band Ratdog since the late 1990s, as well as being on keyboards with the various incarnations of The Dead (as the surviving members of the Grateful Dead—Weir, Lesh, Mickey Hart, and Bill Kreutzmann—called themselves in 1003-4 and 2008-9). Simply put, Chimenti is a much better player than any of the Grateful Dead's keyboard players. None of them (Pigpen, Tom Constanten, Keith Godchaux, Brent Mydland, Vince Welnick, or even Bruce Hornsby, whose tenure on piano with the GD was brief but wonderful) ever had the chops to provide a serious second lead instrument alongside Jerry Garcia's leads—and that is exactly what Chimenti adds to the mix. While Garcia always rightly insisted that his lead playing was just part of what the band was doing, the sound of Furthur benefits hugely from Chimenti's leads, both as a compliment to Kadlicek's lead guitar and in how his keyboard solos (whether on piano or organ) take the band's jams in ever new directions.

Drummer Joe Russo is also a better drummer than Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann ever were. I always liked the lightness of Hart and Kreutzmann's playing together, the way they kept the band afloat by never overemphasizing the beat but always playing colors and textures around it. When they started playing the beat more heavily in the late 80s, it detracted from the band's feel to my ears (although this might have been a matter of mixing the snare drum higher, in good 80s style, à la Phil Collins). Russo plays the beat with emphasis and drive, while also keeping the rhythm floating. Both Chimenti and Russo's potent contributions to Furthur can be heard in exemplary fashion in the first set of the July 22 show at the Gathering of the Vibes festival in Bridgeport, Connecticut, especially on "Sugaree," "Deal," and "Big River." (That just happens to be the show I listened to this morning.)

Furthur's quality also derives from the vocal arrangements. The backup singers and the band's obvious serious rehearsal of the vocals give Furthur something the Grateful Dead never had: consistent high-quality harmonies. I love the old recordings of "Uncle John's Band," say, as much as any Deadhead, but Furthur just nails the vocals all the time, while with the Grateful Dead, the vocals were always hit and miss at best. While listening to the Bridgeport "Sugaree" and "Deal," it struck me that, in this respect, Furthur is more like the Jerry Garcia Band in the 80s and 90s, with his excellent background singers. (I even hope that Lesh and Weir will give their backup singers a chance to step forward and sing lead ...)

So Furthur is a better band than the Grateful Dead—but of course, they owe everything to the Grateful Dead. Weir and Lesh are still playing their Grateful Dead repertoire, most of which (despite excellent contributions from Weir and Lesh) was written by Garcia. They should, of course: it's a great catalogue! There are a couple of Furthur originals, and one or two get played per show, but it would be a waste if Weir and Lesh played together without playing their back catalogue together, and as with the Grateful Dead, they play almost the whole catalogue, with no repeats from one show to the next.

Now it's time to discuss the elephant in the room: Jerry Garcia. Overall, Furthur is a better group of musicians than the Grateful Dead, but Furthur doesn't have a Garcia, who was simply one of the best musicians in rock history (and even beyond rock, as his work with David Grisman shows). Yet Garcia was not always at his best, and John Kadlecik is much more consistent than Garcia was in the last few years of his life. Like Chimenti, Kadlecik also has great jazz chops. Early in my listening to Furthur, I kept hearing traces of John Abercrombie in Kadlecik's playing, which turned out to be a matter of the wrong John: Kadlecik's primary early influence (even before he began listening to the Grateful Dead and Garcia)was John McLaughlin. As the lead player in the Dead cover band The Dark Star Orchestra for over a decade, Kadlecik knows how to "be" Garcia; interestingly, Furthur gives him a chance to play Garcia's music while being himself.

So the two caveats on my claim are that Furthur doesn't have Garcia, and that Furthur plays Grateful Dead music and is thus implicitly "derivative." But my argument is finally that Furthur does take the Grateful Dead's music "further," primarily but not only because of the unique contributions of Chimenti and Russo to the band's sound.

A while back, I read a comment on a Furthur show at the Live Music Archive that pointed out that in 20 years, when Furthur is long gone, Deadheads will be listening to the Grateful Dead and not to Furthur. Because of Garcia, that's probably true, even for this Furthur fan, but my response is also that the Grateful Dead's run ended in 1995, and Furthur is happening now. I hope I get a chance to hear them live before they stop happening.

Train Ride

2011-07-29T17:54:00.001+02:00

Just before Christmas last year, my family and I were part of a little comic scene on a train, after which my son Miles and I wrote this poem.

TRAIN RIDE

I went down to the station
and made a reservation
to take the train back home.

On the platform, there I stood;
I was feeling very good;
I was talking to my baby on the phone.

The train came down the track,
and without looking back,
I got on and hunted for my spot.

There was a family sitting there,
and they didn't seem to care
about any reservation that I'd got.

I showed my ticket to the guy,
and he could tell me why
my seat was already occupied.

I had gone the wrong way!
I laughed, said, "What a day!"
and tried to enjoy the ride.

Miles Delpho and Andrew Shields
23 December 2010

The World's Pleasure

2011-07-29T17:23:00.004+02:00

"Don't you see, sir, that the benefits of Don Quixote's recovery can't be compared with the pleasure that his antics provide?"

I found an echo of this remark from Don Quixote (a remark which is one of my touchstones) in All's Well That End's Well, when The Clown says to Parolles: "... much fool may you find in you, even to the world's pleasure and the increase of laughter."

But Parolles, of course, is not finding pleasure in his being treated like a fool, whereas Don Quixote surely does find pleasure in imagining himself to be not a fool. And Smokey Robinson does remind us, after all, that the clown does not necessarily take pleasure in his own foolishness.

Bericht für eine Akademie

2011-07-27T15:51:00.002+02:00

Ihr Affentum, meine Herren, soferne Sie etwas Derartiges hinter sich haben, kann Ihnen nicht ferner sein als mir das meine.

The ape who narrates Kafka's "Bericht für eine Akademie" was captured in the jungle five years before he speaks to the scientific academy mentioned in the title. In those five years, he has gone through the million-plus years of evolution from his common ancestor with the humans he addresses. Such extreme contrasts are a feature of Kafka's worka, one of my favorite examples being the lifetime that separates one village from another in "Das nächste Dorf".

Here, the extra twist is that one could almost say that all human children go through those eons of evolution as they grow up. But of course it does not quite work, as human children are not apes when they are born, but already quite human.

Still, Kafka's ape does learn like humans do, whether as children or as adults: he learns by "aping" humans:

Ich rechnete nicht so menschlich, aber unter dem Einfluß meiner Umgebung verhielt ich mich so, wie wenn ich gerechnet hätte.

He may not be calculating, but he acts as if he were calculating, and in response to his environment. I am reminded once again of Jonathan Lethem's point in Fortress of Solitude: "The key to mostly anything is pretending your first time isn't."

But there's more to the ape than that, because he is desperate to learn, so he learns/studies the way someone who wants to escape a ghetto might learn/study:

Und ich lernte, meine Herren. Ach, man lernt, wenn man muß; man lernt, wenn man einen Ausweg will; man lernt rücksichtslos.

I had a student once in Saarbrücken who was from a coal-mining family, and he was like Kafka's ape: he worked harder at learning than anyone I have ever met, because, as he explicitly told me, he did not want to be metaphorically trapped in the mine, in a dying industry, so he went to night school to get his high-school diploma (Abitur), and he went to college to get a teaching credential, so that he could teach in his former school, and help others find a way out. No one I have ever taught has been so determined.

As Kafka's ape emphasizes, one does this to find a way out, because only that can truly liberate one who is trapped. Flight is useless; only the way out of going in (into humanity, in the ape's case) can help. There's something slightly frightening about this idea: in order for the outsider to not be trapped completely by his outsiderdom, he must fully integrate himself into the mainstream, at the loss of what makes him an outsider. He must "enter the academy," as it were.

Near the end of his report, the ape produces another image quite common in Kafka's work: sitting by the window and looking out:

Die Hände in den Hosentaschen, die Weinflasche auf dem Tisch, liege ich halb, halb sitze ich im Schaukelstuhl und schaue aus dem Fenster.

Kafka surely dearly loved sitting by the window and looking out in a distracted way, as in the title "Zerstreutes Hinauschauen," but elsewhere as well, as in the wonderful final line of "Eine kaiserliche Botschaft", when the message from the emperor, it is finally admitted, will never get through to you: "Du aber sitzt an deinem Fenster und erträumst sie dir, wenn der Abend kommt."

Kafka's pleasure in that moment of sitting at the window in the evening and dreaming things up seems to me now, on re-reading these works, like a comment on Pascal: "Tout le malheur des hommes vient d'une seule chose, qui est de ne savoir pas demeurer en repos, dans une chambre." Are there any windows in Pascal's room?

Calmy-Rey instead of Monet

2011-07-26T23:55:00.004+02:00

I've been to several museums in the last few days with my nephew Daniel. Yesterday, my son Miles and I went with him to the Fondation Beyeler in Riehen to see the Brancusi-Serra exhibition, but mostly to see the permanent collection. We were looking forward to seeing Monet's Waterlilies (visible in the middle window of the picture above) and my favorite painting there, Kandinsky's Improvisation 10:But instead, we did not get to see much of the permanent collection at all, because it was closed because a film was being made.

Near the end of our visit, we talked to a guard who was watching the barrier between the final Brancusi-Serra room and the lovely room of Rothkos that was closed, and he told us that the film was a recording of a speech for the Swiss National Day next week by Federal Councillor Micheline Calmy-Rey:

So we did not get to see Monet because of Calmy-Rey.

The Pen Friend

2011-06-18T08:28:00.004+02:00

... a cheap modern cartridge pen by Parker or Sheaffer will last you for years, and write unhesitatingly with a consistent line every time you pick it up.

Ciaran Carson, The Pen Friend

Ciaran Carson's The Pen Friend is an epistolary novel whose narrator, Gabriel, is a collector of vintage fountain pens. Each letter contains a discussion of the pen or pens he uses to write the letter, and the book gradually becomes a celebration of fine writing—meaning fine handwriting, and the tools used to produce it. So it was with great pleasure that I read Gabriel's admission, late in the book, that the beautiful pens he loves so are actually not very good tools for writing. In fact, he admits, cheap modern pens are much better tools than his collection of older, more elegant pens. The modern ones may be boring, but they write better.

Fortunately, Carson's reflective novel is anything but boring. As with his Fishing for Amber, the novel becomes a reflective essay on all kinds of subjects, while also spinning out variations on his wonderful verse novel For All We Know: Gabriel and his correspondent Nina are the two characters from that book—or at least versions of them. Each of Gabriel's letters is a response to a cryptic postcard from his former lover Nina, and the pictures on the postcards introduce new chapters, as do pictures of the pens Gabriel uses to write each letter. My favorite picture is the Vermeer:

Bright Eyes in Zurich, Bloomsday 2011

2011-06-17T10:58:00.003+02:00

At one point in the Bright Eyes show at Kaufleuten in Zurich last night, Conor Oberst asked the audience if it was Thursday. I shouted several times that it was Bloomsday, but all he heard was Tuesday. Perhaps he doesn't know his James Joyce and was thus not aware of the significance of playing the city where Joyce died on the day that Ulysses takes place.

But that's almost the only negative thing I have to say about the show. The band opened with my two favorite Bright Eyes songs, but if I was briefly worried that things would go downhill from there, they proved me wrong. The arrangements were full of dynamic range, from quiet folk-picking passages to explosions of aggressive guitar and punk drumming, and Oberst's singing is just as good live as it is on record: sweet and childlike at times, then veering quickly into a kind of in-tune shouting that is quite hard to pull off.

I said "almost" the only negative thing above, because I do have one negative comment to add, even though it is one that has to do with my expectations about live music rather than the band's performance: they stick quite close to the album arrangements of the songs throughout, giving themselves little room to take the songs to other places. I found this especially ironic in "Beginner's Mind," which Oberst introduced as being about "keeping an open mind when everything is telling you not to," which made the tightly controlled arrangement seem to contradict the song's intent. Only in the three songs of the encore did the band begin to muck about with the studio arrangements to any significant degree—and to great effect, especially in an overwhelming version of "Road to Joy."

But that's me; clearly, Oberst and his cohort are aiming at playing tight arrangements well, and not at exploring more open arrangements. And they do play their arrangements superbly, so it's really only a minor quibble. (And I just happened to look up one of the songs to make sure I was remembering it correctly, and the arrangement on a live YouTube video from 2007 is radically different.)

Setlist:

At the Bottom of Everything
Four Winds
Haile Selassie
Take It Easy (Love Nothing)
Jejune Stars
Shell Games
Approximate Sunlight
Arc of Time (Time Code)
Cartoon Blues
Poison Oak
Old Soul Song (For the New World Order)
Hot Knives
Bowl of Oranges
Lover I Don't Have To Love
Beginner's Mind
The Calendar Hung Itself
The Ladder Song

Land Locked Blues
Road to Joy
One for You, One for Me

Mystery Dance

2011-06-11T07:12:00.005+02:00

On the cover of his first album, My Aim Is True, Elvis Costello strikes a Buddy Holly pose, but the album's music has less Buddy Holly in it—except for "Mystery Dance." Its stops and starts and driving shuffle rhythm recall "Not Fade Away," but Costell0's lyrics provide a completely different perspective on eternal love, the main subject of so many of Holly's songs. "Mystery Dance" shows how early rock-and-roll's euphemistic presentation of sexual desire in terms of dancing and romantic love leaves its listeners unable to just "do it."

The "mystery dance" of sex is what the singer wants to learn, but in the second verse, when an opportunity to try it out comes up, he and his potential partner are at a loss:

Well, I remember when the lights went out.
I was trying to make it look like it was never in doubt.
She thought that I knew, and I thought that she knew.
So both of us were willing but we didn't know how to do it.

The music offers Buddy Holly as a possible place to learn about such things, while the first verse turns to another possible source of information about love for teenagers:

Romeo was restless; he was ready to kill.
He jumped out the window 'cause he couldn't sit still.
Juliet was waiting with a safety net.
He said, "Don't bury me 'cause I'm not dead yet."

Romeo and Juliet are exemplary figures of teenagers in love who are misunderstood by the world around them: the outside world does not want them to "know how to do it." But even they do not actually show or tell their audience what to do when the moment of truth comes.

If classic literature and pop music fail, maybe pornography will help:

Well, I was down under the covers in the middle of the night,
Trying to discover my left foot from my right.
You can see those pictures in any magazine,
But what's the use of looking if you don't know what they mean.

In fact, it's not just pornographic pictures that don't help (in this case, not with sex, but with masturbation), but those "in any magazine": sexy advertisements don't do the job either.

Perhaps the singer ought to ask someone for help, which is what he does in the chorus:

Why don't you tell me 'bout the mystery dance?
I wanna know about the mystery dance.
Why don't you show me 'cause I've tried and I've tried but I'm still mystified.
I can't do it any more and I'm not satisfied.

In a sense, though, he does not ask for help: though he wants to know how to do "the mystery dance," he actually asks why nobody will tell him or show what to do. In a way, he's wondering why nobody has given him a sex-ed class!

The demo version of "Mystery Dance" contains one last verse that turns to one other possible source of information, beyond literature, music, and magazines:

I'm gonna walk right up to heaven dodging lightning and rods.
I'm gonna have this very personal conversation with god.
I said, "You've got the information; why don't you say so?"
He said, "Well, I've been around, and I still don't know."

Religion doesn't help either, and the singer is left with nothing to do but repeat his frustration while the song fades out: "I can't do it anymore and I'm not satisfied."

The singer's lack of satisfaction echoes another bit of earlier rock-and-roll, of course: "(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction." Even Mick Jagger, though, does not offer any help to a frustrated young man: he talks about how unsatisfied he is because of how the radio and the television present images to him that do not satisfy him. Only in the song's final verse does he address sex specifically—but only to refer to a girl who turned him down! We all know that "Satisfaction" is about "the mystery dance," but it's no help for that song's frustrated singer either!

*

The Buddy Holly feel of "Mystery Dance" is already gone by the time the Attractions start playing it:

And these days, the song can sound quite different:

When Bob Dylan does that to his songs, people hate it!

Interview with Larry Grenadier

2011-06-10T22:13:00.004+02:00

On Friday, May 6, the Overtone Quartet played at the Jazz Festival Basel, but with a different line-up than usual: instead of Dave Holland (whose name was on the tickets and the posters), Larry Grenadier was on bass, with Chris Potter on saxophones, Jason Moran on piano and keyboards, and Eric Harland on drums. After the fabulous concert, I had a chance to talk to Larry for a few minutes, and he agreed to do an e-mail interview with me about the show and his time in the Overtone Quartet.

AS: You replaced Dave Holland in his own band for the Overtone Quartet's recent European tour. How did this unusual situation come to pass?

LG: Dave has had some family matters to deal with lately that have kept him from going on the road. At the beginning of January, I subbed for him with the Overtone band in NYC at Birdland for a week. So this tour in Europe was the second time playing this music. It is an unfortunate circumstance but a great opportunity to play with this band.

AS: How much time did you have to rehearse the material? Was Dave involved in the rehearsals? If so, how did that work?

LG: We rehearsed for a few hours before the first NY gigs, just the four of us. The way the band works is that they play everyone's compositions. So we ended up playing songs by Chris, Jason, Eric and Dave as well as a song of mine. Like most bands I play in, rehearsal time is fairly minimal. After the particulars of the songs are worked out, like form, most of the development occurs on the bandstand. This is the way I like it.

AS: Did you play Dave's own parts in his compositions? Did his style influence how you played the improvised parts? (And by the way, was he one of your influences when you were younger?)

LG: Dave Holland was absolutely a major influence on me. He was and remains for me a great example of a modern bass player with all the attributes of the tradition. In the songs we played by Dave, there weren't specific bass parts. The parts I came up with were a reaction to what I felt the music needed with this particular group of musicians. This is my MO for all I do. I am using the bass to make the music sound the best I can. It all depends on the context.

AS: Had you played with Jason Moran, Eric Harland, and Chris Potter, the other members of the Overtone Quartet, before? If so, what was different, if anything, about playing with them in this context?

LG: I have played with all of them in a variety of situations. Chris I met soon after moving to NY in the early 90's. We played a lot together in the bands of Renee Rosnes, Al Foster and others, as well as playing on some of his early records. I have played with Jason and Eric with Charles Lloyd and some other contexts as well. They are some of my favorite musicians around, and in this group, the Overtone Quartet, it felt very natural to slip into the vibe. They are all completely open musicians, willing to let the music flow as it will.

AS: Do you think that "being Dave Holland" in his band will have any influence on your playing in the future?

LG: Every musical situation leaves some residue. This one being a completely positive one has left me more than a fair share of inspiration. Because this group is truly a collective, I never really felt like I was replacing Dave. I just took it as a gig with Chris, Jason and Eric. All I can hope for in the future is that I can play more with these great musicians and wish Dave and his family all my best.

*

AS (follow-up to the second question): How does this "development ... on the bandstand" work in practice? Was there a particularly memorable or striking example of such development in this particular gig with the Overtone Quartet that you could use to describe the process?

LG: What is happening on the bandstand with this group, but can also be said for all the bands I play in, is that a high degree of focus and perceptive listening enables almost telepathic exchanges to occur constantly. All music has this, but in my opinion, jazz music has it on the highest level. We are constantly feeding off each other. Musical decisions that worked last night might not be applicable the next night. Anything preplanned often leads to disaster. As William Burroughs said, "Nothing is true, everything is permitted." For example, on Dave's tune "Four Winds," after the melody is played, anything can happen. The solos, the feel, the length are going to be different each performance. I'm not sure if audiences always understand this. Sometimes a listener's expectations get in the way just as they can for the performer. A certain amount of openness is essential to stepping out of the way and letting the music be what it wants to be that night. If someone wants to hear the same thing played the same way each night or just like the record, there are plenty of better ways to experience that then to go to an Overtone Quartet concert.

*

My thanks to Larry for his comments—and to him, Chris Potter, Jason Moran, and Eric Harland for a fantastic concert. I hope to see them all again live soon!

And I hope that Dave Holland will be able to tour again this fall, as he is scheduled to appear in Basel in November with Pepe Habichuela.

Here's the Overtone Quartet in Wolfsburg a few days before the Basel concert:

Nonrepresentational dolls

2011-06-10T06:15:00.003+02:00

The girl plays with nonrepresentational dolls. Her games are devoid of any narrative content, amusements that depend upon their own intrinsic form. If you make her a present of a toy, she will discard it and play with the box. And yet she will only play with a box that once contained a toy. Her favorite toy was a notion about color. She lost it in the snow. (Ben Lerner, "Angle of Yaw")

This prose poem from Ben Lerner's Angle of Yaw lightly stakes out and ironizes an aesthetics that is not its own: the aesthetics of "nonrepresentation," of the absence of narrative, of a formal game played for its own sake and not for the sake of expressing anything. This is the kind of art that leads to discussions that begin with the phrase "it's about ..." and then can apparently go anywhere they like without reference to the dolls, toys, or snow that make up the work. All that's left are the containers the work is or was in, and "a notion about color" that has in fact been lost.

A reading of this poem along these lines could begin with "it's about ..." and then talk about the aesthetics it describes. But the poem itself is representational, and it does have narrative content. So if it is "about" its aesthetics, it is not about the aesthetics that it describes—or at least it is about the limits of such an aesthetics. The poem celebrates the girl's play and thus apparently privileges an emphasis on form over content, but in its own shape, it is about both the box and the toy: its shape and form are fun to play with, but what really makes them fun to play with is their content, and the wonderful "representational" image of the creative girl.

As such, the poem "is about" the necessity of content, or perhaps the necessity of a relationship to content even in its absence: the nonrepresentational, the lack of narrative, the empty box, the notion of color lost in the snow—all these "forms" depend on their absent content. And what they once contained is also important: they have to contained something worth playing with; otherwise, they themselves aren't worth playing with either.

On Bob Dylan the Poet

2011-05-24T21:23:00.001+02:00

Martin Schäfer and I were interviewed by Eric Facon for Swiss Radio DRS2 in honor of Bob Dylan's birthday. You can listen to the interview here (in German).

Richard Harvell, Padraig Rooney, Human Shields

2011-05-19T15:14:00.001+02:00

ESP and The Basel Irish Club

present

AN EVENING OF FICTION, POETRY, AND MUSIC

with

Richard Harvell, Padraig Rooney, and Human Shields

7:00 p.m., Thursday, May 26

Grosser Hörsaal, English Seminar, University of Basel

Nadelberg 6, Basel

Theories of the Mainstream

2011-05-15T21:47:00.002+02:00

No mainstream, whether literary, artistic, or political, has any need to come up with a theory to explain itself. Theory is necessary to explain things that do not go without saying, and mainstreams cannot even see that they have assumed that they go without saying.

From the inside of the political mainstream, radicals appear in need of explanation, but the inside is that which does not need to be explained. A generation later, the old mainstream does require explanation, and hence theory and historical analysis. As a result, the contemporary mainstream can be quite critical of its historical antecedents, but the idea of turning such critiques upon itself remains unthinkable.

This can also be applied to poetry: the contemporary mainstream reads the Modernists, not the poets who were the mainstream back then.

[Revised version of comments on this post by John Gallaher.]

Part of the Ritual

2011-05-09T18:38:00.003+02:00

I remember a Stanford professor (Mark Mancall) asking a roomful of freshmen if we were nervous about the exam the next day. (The course was the wonderfully titled "Structured Liberal Education," SLE for short; the students in it all lived in the same dormitory, and we were all a little bit crazy.)

So he asked us if were nervous about the exam, our first in the course.

"Yes," we cried.

"Good," he said. "That's part of the ritual."

The Quarry and the Lot

2011-05-07T22:27:00.004+02:00

"Maybe writing is a hobby, you know? I might as well build shelves or go fishing."

So says Luke Owen, a poet and community-college teacher who is one of the four narrators of Mark Wallace's novel The Quarry and the Lot. He clearly uses the idea that writing might be a "hobby" as a negative point: "hobbies" are merely (to quote a definition) "something that one likes to do or study in one's spare time" and are of little importance to anyone else; a further definition at the same link says that a hobby is "engaged in primarily for pleasure." And Luke would not be writing just for his own pleasure.

Yet I have been pondering for quite a while the idea that considering writing a hobby might be a good idea. The rest of the first definition of hobby that I quoted above adds that a hobby is a "favorite pastime or avocation"—and it's the word "avocation" that is interesting here. One sense of the shorter word "vocation" is that of a calling, as to the priesthood, and that is, of course, what writers like to think of their writing as. A "vocation" is something serious; an "avocation" is apparently less serious.

But if I play briefly with the idea that Luke Owen is a real person, I'd have to conclude that he would find the idea of writing as a "vocation" in a spiritual sense ridiculous—I don't think he ever makes any explicitly anti-spiritual remarks, but his great skepticism about so many things (especially the suburbs he grew up in) would surely apply to such an idea as well. But if such a writer cannot see his writing as a "vocation," then what's left but to consider it an "avocation"—a "hobby."

But that would make it as apparently insignificant (from Luke's perspective) as "building shelves or going fishing." My immediate thought is to wonder what's wrong with either of those activities (and Nick, one of the novel's other narrators, does in fact run a furniture and carpentry shop he inherited from his father). It reminds me of my recent post about ham radio and hardcore. And in fact, in the novel, when Luke was first active in poetry in the DC area, he was also part of the hardcore scene, which suggests that he would see hardcore (if he were a musician rather than a writer) as something worthwhile that is more than "just a hobby."

Near the end of the novel, Luke has shifted ground on this issue. In a discussion with his father, he surprises his father by using the word "duty" ("I've never heard you use the word duty before") in a reference to "the duty of the artist." He explains what that duty is: "To keep doing what you're doing and let other people know." It's the second phrase there that makes "artistic" work (slightly) "more than just a hobby": you let other people know what you're doing not because you want to sell them shelves or go fishing with them or exchange codes on your shortwave radio, but because you want to communicate with them.

And in this sense, I'm grateful to Mark Wallace, because he "kept doing what he does" and also "let other people know" by publishing his book. There's much more to it than just Luke's crisis as a writer, and I recommend it wholeheartedly to ... well, to anyone whose hobby is to read thought-provoking novels.

An Operation

2011-05-02T22:07:00.001+02:00

Tonight, I conducted an operation that was darkened by the history of cloudless black smoke from the actions of heartbreak. And yet the world at the dinner table forced our hearts where we came from, what God prayed to what family to protect our justice that attacks innocents to protect years of professionals in defense. In the government safe haven the globe worked to kill scores, including a part of the capture across the border to operate its affiliates so shortly after I directed the director to make the bin the top against our broader network. Years of intelligence lead to it, and many months to run this national possibility that located a compound inside last week, determined enough to take action to get him to my direction, the targeted compound in a small team carried out the operation with no care to avoid a firefight, they killed custody for over two decades, and continued our death the most significant achievement in our nation’s defeat. Yet his effort will pursue us and we will remain as we do, we must not be at war made clear, just as after our war a leader of slaughtered countries, including our demise in peace and human dignity. Over the years, I’ve made clear that Pakistan knew where that is done but our cooperation with the compound was war against Pakistan and the Pakistani President, and my counterparts agree that this is essential that affiliates did not choose our shores with the senseless citizens of service and the costs of efforts on time as a letter to a loved one the eyes of a member who Americans never tolerate being idly killed. We will be relentless to the values that make nights like families who have terror. Tonight, the intelligence worked tirelessly to not see their names feel the satisfaction of their pursuit. We give this operation the unparalleled country of the heaviest September. Finally, let the families who have wavered in whatever it takes to attack our sense that it has frayed yet a testament to the determination of the cause of our complete mind. That is the history of prosperity our people struggle to stand for sacrifices to make the place remember that these things wealth or power, are God, liberty and justice all bless God.

Poems in Nth Position

2011-04-04T21:36:00.003+02:00

I have three poems up in the April selection of poetry in Nth Position.

The first, "A Thousand Times Too Many," derives from this.

The third, "L'art pour l'art," is about this guy:

Elvis Costello with Furthur

2011-03-29T06:53:00.005+02:00

I've been on a serious Elvis Costello kick for several months now, and I am even using four of his albums as material for a course this term. And I have been avidly following Furthur, the band started in the fall of 2009 by Bob Weir and Phil Lesh, to the point where I have listened to every show they have played (from the Live Music Archive and the digital downloads of their shows that they are selling).

So of course I was thrilled to hear that Elvis had sat in with Furthur on Sunday night at Radio City Music Hall. His wife Diana Krall even sang "Ripple," and that's Larry Campbell on violin in the photo (whose wife Teresa Williams also sat in).

Amateur Radio, Poetry, Hardcore

2011-03-27T22:37:00.004+02:00

Dominic Rivron wrote a post recently about his love of amateur radio, with some details about what amateur-radio enthusiasts do and how the whole thing works. It reminded of something I have been thinking about for several years now—a passage from "Poetry and the Problem of Taste," an essay by Brian Phillips that appeared in Poetry in September 2007. Here, Phillips is discussing a "line of thinking" exemplified, for him, by Dana Gioia's essay "Can Poetry Matter?", which leads him to the comparison that has stuck with me:

Starved of a general readership, poets are writing only for other poets, like shortwave radio hobbyists who build elaborate machines on which they can only reach each other.

I've been pondering various ways of thinking about this comparison, but only Dominic's post made me wonder what the passage might sound like to "shortwave radio hobbyists," who are surely being disparaged here (not by Phillips, of course, at least not directly) as providing nothing of value to the larger culture.

One of the lines of thinking I have been following is to wonder whether it might not be better for poets to embrace their similarity to "hobbyists" of various kinds—embrace, that is, the idea that we are only talking to each other and not to the rest of the world. In the light of Robert Archambeau's recent discussion of Tennyson, Yeats, and Eliot, which I commented on in my last post, such a self-isolation (whatever its merits in terms of reduced anxiety for poets might be) would reduce the poetry that we produce (by eliminating the productive tension between hermetic aestheticism and various forms of desire to have an influence on the world).

But last night I went to a hardcore concert. I do not usually listen to hardcore, though I enjoy hearing it live once in a while, and I wanted to go to this particular concert because my friend Andreas's band Flimmer was playing, and I have been wanting to see him play for years. And one thing about hardcore is that it is a world unto itself: anyone who plays hardcore does not do so because of any ambition to be a success with it in the larger world. The only reason to play hardcore is that you love it.

Similarly, the only reason to do amateur radio is that you love it. And what if poets stopped worrying about the age when Tennyson sold zillions of poems that clarified and confirmed the world to his readers, and instead focused our attention on the joys of talking to each other? Writing "inspired notes," as Tranströmer said.

There's more to say about the comparison between poetry and radio (and poetry and hardcore), but I'll save it for another day.

From Tennyson to today

2011-03-26T11:17:00.003+01:00

Robert Archambeau has just posted a long discussion of tensions between aestheticism and morality (or politics) in Tennyson, Yeats, and Eliot. He starts with a discussion of a tension in Tennyson's work between "cryptic, symbolic, ambiguous poems ... that resist being converted to moral messages" and poems that "told the bourgeoise reader what he wanted to hear about decency, self-sacrifice, and the keeping stiff of the upper lip." By the end of the 19th century, then, the market for the latter kind of poem had dried up, and Symbolist poets and their Modernist successors focused their attention on aesthetic issues, while still being drawn to such extra-aesthetic issues as Irish politics (Yeats) and the renewal of community (Eliot; through a return to pre-twentieth-century Christian values).

Archambeau's discussion of these issues is fascinating, and it led me to ponder the extension of his point about tensions in the work of these poets into the contemporary era. These days, many poets in North America, Great Britain, and Ireland have put a lot of energy into pondering how the audience for poetry can be increased. Since the loss of the market for moralistic poetry in the course of the nineteenth century and poetry's subsequent aestheticist turn, very little poetry has managed to reach a wider audience. Those poets who want to do so could theoretically try returning to the kind of moralism that characterizes "The Charge of the Light Brigade," but given developments in poetry since then, it is highly unlikely that they would find such a project at all interesting—and in any case, as Archambeau makes clear, there's little or no market for such work anymore anyway.

The main aestheticist strains of contemporary poetry tend to be pretty disdainful of those poets who do achieve modest success (meaning more sales than most poets, but still very small blips on the radar of whole culture), such as Billy Collins and Mary Oliver in the United States and Simon Armitage and Carol Ann Duffy in the United Kingdom. (With Armitage, at least, I could provide a defense of the aesthetic quality of all of his work, as I could with parts of the work of Collins and Duffy—neither of whom I have read all of—but that is something for another day.) But what is there for them to do, the poets who feel tensions like those felt by Tennyson, Yeats, and Eliot while also finding that the work of Armitage, Collins, Duffy, and Oliver lacks such productive tension between aesthetics and some kind of public voice? The very fact that I use the vague phrase "some kind of public voice" points toward a solution and highlights the problem at the same time: poets need to create a market for poetry to have a public voice, but it is not clear what kind of public voice that ought to be.

But here is where I return to a point I have made frequently over the years (probably somewhere on my blog, but definitely often in conversation): even if there is little market for poetry in the contemporary English-speaking world, there is a huge market for verse—it's called pop music. Now some might immediately dismiss this point by saying that song lyrics are not poetry, but I hope they would at least agree that "page poems" and song lyrics are both examples of "verse" in a broad sense that is completely consistent with the traditions of both poetry and popular song (written in lines, often with meter and rhyme). And it is worthwhile for poets to consider what it is that makes the verse of popular music so popular.

Generally, pop music does not aspire to the kind of moralism that shaped one side of Tennyson's work (although it does contain a strain of that moralism in such songs as "We Are The World"—things that make you feel like a good person when you sing along with them). And of course it is hard to generalize about all pop music without people jumping in with counterexamples. But one relatively consistent feature of pop music is that it does not impose itself on its listeners: the lyrics tend to be simple, even vague, so that they are open enough for listeners to relate them to their own lives in general and their own particular experiences.

In contrast, one relatively consistent feature of contemporary poetry in English is that it does impose itself on its readers: it makes the reader listen to the voice of the poet, instead of providing, as pop lyrics do, a space for listeners to fill with their own voices, as it were. This focus on the poet's voice is in keeping with the Romantic-aestheticist tradition that Archambeau discusses, and I am all in favor of being imposed on by poets, since I am part of that tradition. But poets who feel tensions between the privacy of aestheticism and the possibility of a public voice might well consider the ways in which pop lyrics, the contemporary verse with the broadest popular appeal, relate to the audience that consumes them.

There was / were a huge number

2011-03-21T22:32:00.003+01:00

I was preparing a grammar exercise from a book, and I came across the sentence "there were a huge number of mosquitoes." The sentence was not actually testing the number of the verb, but I stumbled over it, as I would spontaneously say "there was a huge number of mosquitoes." But I also noticed that I would say "a huge number of mosquitoes were there."

So I spent a few minutes digging around in grammar books and found several confirmations of the latter point ("number of" + plural verb) but no discussion of the number of the verb in such a construction with "there." So there's always a nice Google test:

"there were a huge number of" = 381k hits
"there was a huge number of" = 15.5m hits

You can't always count on Google to do your linguistic research for you, but this one seems pretty clear! Over 40:1 in favor of the singular "was" here, even though the reverse is true without "there" (though only just under 9:1):

"a huge number of people were" = 1.36m hits
"a huge number of people was" = 156k hits

Take out "huge" and the ratio is over 100:1 in favor "there was a number of", but about 20:1 in favor of "a number of people were."

So the descriptive conclusion is that in contemporary English, "number of" usually takes a plural verb, but "there X a number of" usually has a singular verb.

(Just trying my hand at a little linguistics.)

"Lacks a concept of lack"

2011-03-20T22:21:00.002+01:00

In one of the prose poems in his book Angle of Yaw, Ben Lerner puts a new twist on the popular "No Word for X" meme when he refers to "a culture that lacks a concept of lack." The wonderful irony of that phrase is something to keep in mind whenever you come across a claim that a particular language "has no word for" a particular concept, such as the recent claim that "Japanese has no word for 'looting.'" (For a discussion of that, see this Language Log post; for a list of the many LL posts about the issue, see this post.)

White Egrets

2011-03-16T22:45:00.003+01:00

Derek Walcott can spin out a long phrase as well as anyone, as in this poem, number V of part 10 of White Egrets, "In Italy":

Those hillsides ridged with ramparts and bell towers,
the crests of olives, those wheat-harvested slopes
through glittering aspens, those meadows of sunflowers,
with luncheon napkins like the mitres of popes,
lanes with long shadows, wide open retreats
guarded by leaping cypresses, shade-splashed ochre
walls, then the towns themselves with streets
as close as chain-mail, named after some mediocre
saint, coiling as one road down to the hazed sea.
All of those little ports, all named for saints,
redeem the sadness that was Sicily
and the stupidity of innocence.
It is like Sicilian light but not the same
sun or my shadow, a bitterness like a loss.
Drink of its bitterness to forget her name,
that is the mercy oblivion allows.

Look how the first nine lines play out phrases of varying length against the relatively even lengths of the lines. Look how the nouns that are the heads of those phrases run through those lines: hillsides, crests, slopes, lanes, retreats, walls, towns. Look how the feel created by the incomplete sentence of the first nine lines contrasts with the much shorter, complete sentences of the last seven. It's a poem that always knows where it is—in Italy—and yet it begins with a breathlessness that leaves you hanging somewhere before it sets you down there. White Egrets is full of writing like this.

But it is also full of poems that stumble rather than take off. Contrast the above with this poem, part III of section 13 of the book, "The Spectre of Empire":

The docks are dark and hooded, the warehouses
locked, and his insomnia rages like the moon
above the zinc roofs and spindly palms; he rouses
himself and dresses slowly in his small room:
he walks to the beach, the hills are brooding whales
against them drift the flambeaux and the lanterns
of the crab fishermen, the yachts have furled their sails,
he goes for this long walk when guilt returns;
indifferent to a constellation's Morse,
his resignation no longer sends
out fleets of power, an echo of that force
like dissipating spume on the night sand.
To the revolving beam of the Cyclopic lighthouse
he hears the suction of his soul's death-rattle,
but his is a history without remorse.
He hears the mocking cannonade of battle
from the charging breakers and sees the pluming hordes
of tribesmen galloping down the hills of sand
and hears the old phrase "Peccavi. I have Sind."
Think of the treaties signed by the same one-ringed hand,
think of the width its power could encompass
"one-seventh of the globe," we learnt in class.
Its promontories, docks, its towers and minarets
with the power that vanished as dew does from the grass
in the rising dawn of a sun that never sets.

Many of the things I am going to say in what follows could be dismissed as quibbles, except for the fact that there are so many of them.

The poem begins with a simple sentence, and then a simple elliptical phrase that implies the use of the same verb: "The docks are dark and hooded, the warehouses / [are] locked." This is perfectly fine, of course, but I find it quite clumsy to continue with an "and" after that ellipsis, followed by a clause with a new verb.

Eith that elliptical construction and then a longer, complete main clause, the semi-colon in line three (instead of a new sentence) makes things even more imbalanced. All the phrases in the long sentence fragment that begins the first poem I quoted balance beautifully; here, in contrast, the four clauses of the first lines do not build up toward something but instead head off in a variety of directions, semantically and syntactically.

That fourth line ends with a colon. What should follow a colon? Some sort of explanation or clarification of what came before. But what follows this colon is simply the next step in a narrative of what "he" is doing. And after a short clause about him comes a short clause that shifts the focus to the hills, so that the first five lines have six different clauses. Not only are the relationships between those clauses unclear, the sentence is not even finished yet.

Now take a look back at the punctuation at line breaks in the first poem I quoted: every line that could end in a comma does end in a comma. (The next-to-last line could have a semi-colon instead, but it works fine with a comma.) But here, as line five moves to line six, there is no comma. If we take the absence of a comma here seriously, then the enjambment across the line makes no sense: "the hills are brooding whales against them drift the flambeaux" is grammatical nonsense. "Against which" would work, but it doesn't say that.

Things settle down a bit for the next few lines, but it's worth noting that the first eight lines here contain nine main clauses. It's possible to write a compound sentence with nine main clauses over eight lines without getting clumsy, but these eight lines begin with clumsy syntax and are marred by sloppy punctuation—and the sentence is still not finished!

The next four lines are one main clause, but there are several problems here, beginning with my on-going question as to why this is all one sentence. In passing, I would also note that the semi-colons are used inconsistently here. (Note that I am not trying to tell Walcott how to use punctuation marks; I am just expecting from him what I would expect from any writer: that the y be used consistently in a way that serves the poems well.)

Then there's the question of the reference of "indifferent": it's easy enough to attach it to "his" so that we read "he is indifferent," but there is a moment of hesitation when it is the resignation that seems indifferent, which doesn't quite make sense. (I am not one to make too big a deal about "misplaced modifiers" that modify a possessive like this, but it's another infelicity to add to the list.)

Then there's the question of just what it is that "an echo of that force" is supposed to be doing syntactically: I guess it is supposed to be either a clarification of "fleets of power" (an appositive) or a second complement to "sends out" (with no coordination between the two complements). But neither of those options makes much sense to me.

The next sentence is mercifully brief, but even here a syntactic problem arises: in effect, the sentence says that "he hears the suction ... to the revolving beam." The introductory prepositional phrase with "to," that is, simply has no place in the main clause that follows.

The following sentence picks up on "he hears" and adds a "sees" and another "hears." It's actually fine in terms of the flow of points and the overall grammar, syntax, and punctuation, but even here, the verb phrases are connected clumsily: "he hears ... and sees ... and hears ..." ("Everything only connected by and and and," as Elizabeth Bishop would put it.)

The two lines that begin with "think" are lines 20 and 21 of the poem; as with the end of the section of "In Italy," it would be possible to use a semi-colon at the end of line 20, but it is unnecessary.

But some punctuation mark is necessary at the end of line 21—a colon, perhaps? That would introduce an explanation or clarification of "the width its power could encompass." Or perhaps a dash? That would be more emphatic; it would make the movement to line 22 less a matter of logic than a leap of memory, in a sense. — Even a comma would be better than the nothing that is here! (Here, though, a semi-colon would be nonsense, completely inconsistent even with Walcott's own somewhat haphazard use of semi-colons in the rest of the poem.)

The last three lines are not a complete sentence, which is not a problem (see the beautiful incomplete sentence I first talked about above). But there are still problems here: the promontories, docks, towers, and minarets in line 23 are not presented as a simple list along the lines of the one I just presented them in—a straight list of four items with a final "and" before the last item and no repetition of the initial "its." I could also imagine doing this: "Its promontories and docks, its towers and minarets." That's a relatively conventional rhythm for a list of four items. (I think there's even a term for that in classical rhetoric, but I can't remember what it is.) Yet once the list is established as not using "and" and not repeating "its," the introduction of "its" before "towers" makes me stumble.

And finally, there's the question of what the prepositional phrase "with the power" is supposed to be connected to. Should this be read as "its minarets with the power that vanished as dew does from the grass ..."? What does that mean?

Why go into this poem's infelicities at such great length? Two reasons: first, there is a great deal of beautiful writing in White Egrets, as beautiful as the first poem I quoted. But there is also a great deal of clumsy writing, where I find myself having to ask basic questions about the intended grammar and syntax. If these poems had no punctuation, I would expect to be doing that work, but they are punctuated, and the poems that work wonderfully succeed in part because they carry me along in a poetic trance in which I do not have to worry about syntax and grammar. So it is extremely surprising to find the trance repeatedly broken by such questions.

Secondly, Walcott's book won the T. S. Eliot Prize in January. I was happy to hear that, as I had read all but one of the shortlisted books and I had not thought that any of the others contained any poems as downright beautiful as some of the poems in this book (like the one I began with). But Anne Stevenson, the chair of the judges, was quoted (here) as saying that the book was "moving and technically flawless." Many of the poems in White Egrets are indeed both moving and technically flawless, but as I could show with a significant number of other poems in the book besides the one I dissected here, the book is full of technical flaws—and those flaws make it harder for the poems to be consistently moving.

Perspectives on nuclear reactors

2011-03-16T08:56:00.003+01:00

A few days ago, this article about the design of the Fukushima nuclear reactors got a lot of attention. I appreciated it for its clear, careful description of the design of boiling water reactors. When I posted a link to it on my Facebook page, the comments began to fly, and I saw many of my Facebook friends linking to the same article (and even to a German version of it).

One thing I wondered in the comment stream on my posting of the link was whether a nuclear skeptic who understood the design might also provide an analysis of the situation. Well, it turns out, according to this article in today's New York Times (and International Herald Tribune) that such an analysis has been made—and not only has this reactor design been criticized, it has even been criticized right from its earliest days. And the NYT article cites several people who clearly have the credentials to understand the Fukushima design but have also long identified potential problems with the design that are the very problems that are now causing trouble in Japan.

Given that the author of the first description of boiling water reactors linked above apparently wrote the description in an email to his family to reassure them that things were okay, it's not surprising that he did not mention the existence of long-standing criticisms of the safety of such reactors.

But once the article went public, it's too bad that the MIT people who offered to host the article did not provide that information. This is a case where the "two-sides-of-the-story" ethic of contemporary journalism (which so often leads to a "balanced" presentation of a situation where one side is, as an FB friend put it recently in a different context, "batshit") actually does serve a purpose.

Just One

2011-03-14T13:50:00.003+01:00

So I wanted some chocolate with my cup of coffee after lunch, but we're out of chocolate, in part because I intentionally did not buy any so that I would not overindulge.

But we have a box of Walker's Belgian Chocolate Chunk Cookies, so I thought I would eat just one. Then I wondered whether I would be able to resist eating another after eating the first one.

It seemed like that would be a really hard thing to do, as these cookies belong to the category of "you can't eat just one" (one of the many old advertising slogans still slithering around my brain). So I thought about giving myself a reward if I managed to eat only one.

But all I could think was this: "If I manage to eat just one, then I'll give myself another as a reward."

The Garden in Dream

2011-03-04T09:43:00.002+01:00

Here's a stanza from David Harsent's "The Garden in Dream" (from his new collection Night):

VII
This flower's baby blue seems almost bland
except, when you hold it close, you get the true
depth; and when you look away, you're blind.

I'm struck by how this stanza seems to summarize the logic of a great deal of poetry. Perhaps if I highlight a few words, I can make my point clear:

This flower's baby blue seems almost bland
except, when you hold it close, you get the true
depth; and when you look away, you're blind.

The logic is that something seems to be one way, but a closer look reveals that it is not what it first appeared to be. (And as I type up this note I wrote the other day, it strikes me that I am using the same logic when I highlight those phrases: look closely and you'll see something else.)

What takes this stanza beyond the logic of "look deeper and you'll see the truth" is this: what is revealed is not something about the flower. In fact, what is ultimately revealed is not "the true / depth" but one's own blindness—as if the result of revelation were the impossibility of further revelation.

So maybe what this post reveals is also not something about the poem but something about me: I am always seeing the ways in which seeing becomes indistinguishable from blindness. (So what it reveals is that I read Paul de Man back in the day? Blindness and Insight and all that.)

Skills

2011-01-29T10:59:00.002+01:00

I saw a headline in the local free daily newspaper the other day that said that children today are better at playing computer games than they are at tying their shoes. I did not read the article (I saw the headline over someone's shoulder on the bus), but I can imagine someone saying that this is another sign of how things are going downhill. But frankly, it's no surprise at all: children know how to play computer games because they play computer games, and they don't know how to tie their shoes because they have velcro shoes. If a skill disappears, it might just mean that people don't need that skill anymore.

Horizon Review, Issue 5

2011-01-21T10:05:00.004+01:00

Issue Five of Horizon Review is up, and it's a pleasure to have four poems of mine featured alongside the work of such a strong line-up of poets, including Mark Granier, Alison Brackenbury, Ian Duhig, and Rob A. Mackenzie.

Land of Marvels

2011-01-11T08:11:00.003+01:00

The main character of Barry Unsworth's 2009 novel Land of Marvels (reviewed in the New York Times here) is John Somerville, an archaeologist doing an Assyrian dig shortly before World War One begins. At one point, he ponders the reign of Ashurnasirpal II, in a passage that makes clear what contemporary issues were on Unsworth's mind as he embarked on a novel set in what would one day become Iraq (which, it turns out, is the novel's last word):

Some change in the human spirit here, not in the doing but in the telling, the pride, some ugly twist of soul towards a new idea of supremacy. How? From where? Why among these people at this time? Bred by conquest, like an appetite that grows from feeding? With the blessing of their god Ashur to lend them a sense of mission, bloodshed would become a form of devotion. Since Ashur was above all other gods and the king was his earthly embodiment, there would be a duty to impose his cult, carry light into dark places. The light they had carried had been cast by the flames of devastation. They too, the light bearers, had ended in that same fire.

A later passage returns to the same considerations:

This story began with the second king called Ashurnasirpal, the first of them all to boast of his power to inflict suffering, the first to make this power the symbol and test of kingship, the first to aim not merely at conquest and plunder, as had his forebears, but at the permanent subjection of the conquered peoples, changing the very nature of the state, from one rich and strong within its borders and content to be so to one that gloried in dominion, ruthless in its greed for territory and vassalage, a policy that was to be followed by all his successors down to the last days, down to the fires in which the empire perished.

On the basis of these two passages, one of the concerns of Unsworth's novel is a variant of "those who don't know the past are doomed to repeat it," and the doomed party here would be today's United States, doomed to burn in the very fires of devastation that have been dominating its policies over the last nine-plus years.

But a novel that leaves it at that would hardly be worth commenting on. There is an American character in the novel, Alex Elliott, a geologist who, for strategic reasons involving oil, is pretending to be an archaeologist attached to Somerville's working party. This is a character who is marked in many ways as untrustworthy; in fact, he is even apparently selling his services as a geologist to the Americans, the British, and the Germans all at the same time. And this ambiguous figure is the one who actually states the principle of history: "As someone wiser than I has said, if we ignore the lessons of the past, we will be condemned to repeat our mistakes." He says this at the end of a dinner-table soliloquy about the Hittites—but of course he is not really an archaeologist at all, but a geologist who has boned up on archaeology in order to be able to pass as an archeologist, and he is not interested in the mistakes of the past but in the possibilities of the future, a future that, as he foresees, will be dominated by oil. This quotable quote from "someone wiser than" Elliott is thus deeply ironized in the novel, and any straightforward reading of Unsworth's implicit comparison of the Assyrians and the Americans is called into question by the novel as a whole. The comparison stands, of course, but Unsworth is both establishing the parallel and fictionally exploring its implications and imprecisions.

August Peonies

2011-01-08T10:37:00.002+01:00

There's a good study to be written about one-sentence poems (or perhaps it has been written already). Here's the one-sentence poem on Poetry Daily today:

AUGUST PEONIES

Lallygagging on bent stems, late
this year because of the snow
in May, their rag-tag magenta
cluster-heads freshen the still heat
like a rush of wind in the leaves
or the cool brush of deep sea
crinolines as the ripple kiss
of a breeze opens their bunched petals
just enough to let them breathe
before they ease back
into light repose, poised
at the edge of time-lapse
attention, like us, who lose
momentum in the heavy air
rich with the scent of ripening
wheat that drifts in from the fields
over the slow-moving river
as the afternoon nods and lengthens
into shade, into thoughtfulness,
and the sky deploys an argosy
of softly tinted clouds, fresh
blooms without stems
that sail where we cannot
go, all the way to the edge
of everything where daylight looks
back, once, then disappears.

George Amabile
The Malahat Review
Fall 2010

And here's a favorite one-sentence poem of mine, by a poet, Sarah Wardle, who is particularly good at one-sentence poems:

HERE AND THERE

When I'm walking in the city

past banks of offices and shop windows,

noticing the leaf-fall of litter,

as I'm swept along by a stream of feet,

I imagine I'm strolling in the country

past crowds of trees and parked hedgerows,

hearing the breeze change up a year

and the river roar, like a main street.

I See Alps

2011-01-07T16:26:00.003+01:00

In the summer of 2003, we took Miles, then three and a half, on a boat tour of the Seattle harbor. As the boat turned back towards the harbor and gave us a great view of Mount Rainier, Miles exclaimed, "Look, Mommy! I see Alps!" This amused not only his parents but also all the people within earshot. The others probably did not know that he is a resident of Switzerland.

I found this photo the other day while going through old photos to put them on a memory stick for our new digital picture frame. It reminded me of Miles's exclamation, of course, but it also reminded of the gigantic cranes that can be seen in the photograph, which were designed and built in order to be able to load and unload the gigantic container ships that the Seattle harbor specializes in serving.

Seen up close from the tour boat, they were huge; from this perspective, they are dwarfed by the mountain in the distance. Someday, the Seattle skyline will surely be gone, and with it the cranes, but the mountain will remain.

Werner Herzog reads

2011-01-06T11:06:00.004+01:00

It's a bit late for the season, but I just came across this rendition/adaptation of "Twas the Night Before Christmas" by Werner Herzog:

And there's a whole bunch of other "Werner Herzog reads" videos to watch, too, including "Madeline" and "Winnie the Pooh."

(There's a footnote somewhere that says it is not really Werner Herzog ...)

A wonderful curse poem

2011-01-06T10:56:00.005+01:00

The first of today's three poems on Poetry Daily is a wonderful curse poem by Paul Zimmer:

Zimmer's Head Thudding Against the Blackboard

At the blackboard I had missed
Five number problems in a row,
And was about to foul a sixth
When the old, exasperated nun
Began to pound my head against
My six mistakes. When I wept,
She threw me back into my seat,
Where I hid my head and swore
That very day I'd be a poet,
And curse her yellow teeth with this.

A curse poem that is also a bit of an ars poetica, in fact: here's why I became a poet, and here's what poetry is for.

Atheists Don't Have No Songs

2010-11-09T05:31:00.001+01:00

Cameras as metaphors

2010-10-30T06:28:00.003+02:00

In John Fuller's latest collection, Pebble & I, there is a poem called "Small Room in a Hotel", which begins with this quatrain:

In this cool cube of marble
I am valid but invisible
As an image caught in a camera
But not yet reproduced.

This reminded me of another passage about photography that I recently came across, in "Old Soul Song (for the New World Order)" on the Bright Eyes album I'm Wide Awake, It's Morning. (There are a bunch of videos of live performances of the song on YouTube, but mostly pretty low quality audience shots.) After a first verse about a demonstration, the second verse reads:

We left before the dust had time to settle,
And all the broken glass swept off the avenue.
And on the way home held your camera like a bible,
Just wishing so bad that it held some kind of truth.

And I stood nervous next to you in the dark room
You dropped the paper in my water,
And it all begins to bloom.

So what happens to how the taking of pictures is used as a metaphor when one moves from developing film to processing digital images? Fuller's quatrain could be digital, but the way in which an image in a digital camera has not yet been reproduced is quite different from how an undeveloped image waits to be developed in a film camera. And the Bright Eyes lyric is, in a sense, already out of date, since almost anyone attending a demonstration these days would have a digital camera in hand. So you would not have to wait to develop the pictures to see if "it held some kind of truth," since you could look at the pictures on the camera's screen on your way home.

Cats of the Temple

2010-10-25T23:02:00.003+02:00

A theme that runs through Brad Leithauser's poetry is the position of the mind in the world, or the relationship between the mind and the world. There are three moments in his 1986 collection Cats of the Temple that stake out the territory at issue here. The poem "On the Lee Side (Cape Breton, Nova Scotia)" concludes with a description of the mind's desire to see the world as being there just for itself. Leithauser describes the mind (or this part of the mind) as an "elusive but unavoidable, queer / but predictable inner companion":

... who's
neatly, snugly sure

just how this splendid
show of weather's to be accounted for:
ingenious exhibitions exclusively intended
to entice and entertain him here.

From this perspective, the mind is sure that the world is there for it, as "irresistible grist / for the fabulist," as the book's opening poem, "Two Suspensions against a Blacktop Backdrop," puts it.

Here, the mind (or this part of Leithauser's mind) feels that the world is there for its delectation, but near the end of the book, this perspective shifts significantly. First, in "Seaside Greetings (Oki Islands, Japan Sea)," the penultimate poem in the book, after describing how "the crest of a bluff" looks like Japanese armor, Leithauser carefully considers that surprising similarity, and others:

Of course given the scale Nature has
to work with, all of these uncanny,
and often funny, resemblances
(the ancient trees

wrung like buxom women, whales
in the clouds, bights like laughing
horses' heads, potatoes bearing profiles
of generals

dead now for centuries) are
statistical certainties, nothing
more, and yet they do appease our
appetite for

play at the heart of things ...

The "ingenious exhibitions" of the earlier poem are now "uncanny ... resemblances" that are "statistical certainties, nothing / more"—and that line break after "nothing" briefly makes those "resemblances" and "certainties" into "nothing." That "nothing" then calls forward to the "things" of the next clause, the "and yet" clause that gives us something back from that "nothing / more": the satisfaction of a desire for play. The "ingenious exhibitions" may not be "ingenious" and they may not be "exhibitions," but the mind can still be appeased by them—not with meaning, but with playfulness.

The final poem in the book takes place in the same location: "On a Seaside Mountain (Oki Islands, Japan Sea)". At the top of the mountain, there are horses in a pasture, and the poem concludes:

The sun's pace
is perfectly theirs, and the planted ease
they are breathing, are breeding, in this place,
while not meant for us, lightens us anyway.

The "ease" of the horses is "not meant for us," but it "lightens us anyway." Again, the mind seeks something in the world, but in these last two images, Leithauser's "elusive but unavoidable, queer / but predictable inner companion" has been tempered by a realism that still leaves room for that companion to be "enticed and entertained." The world may not be "exclusively intended" for us—it may even be devoid of meaning—but it "appeases" and "lightens" us anyway.

Aroma

2010-10-25T05:57:00.002+02:00

A few lines I particularly liked from Durs Grünbein's new book Aroma:

Die Städte traumen alle voneinander. ("Corso Trieste")

"The cities all dream of each other": behind this evocative image is the simple fact that streets and squares in one city are often named after other cities, but that does not reduce but rather enhances the evocativeness of the line.

Dies ist der Platz mit den glücklichsten Tauben der Welt. ("Piazza San Marco")

"This is the square with the happiest pigeons in the world": I read this quick translation of the line to my mother, and she immediately knew which square it referred to. I had not told her the title of the poem!

Werbung macht müde. ("Aroma," XXII)

"Advertising is exhausting": Or perhaps "wears me out," but Grünbein is, as usual, more general than personal. The title poem, "Aroma", is a 53-poem sequence about a year spent in Rome at the Villa Massimo. Looks like a nice play to stay:

Übersetzerhaus Looren

2010-10-24T09:31:00.004+02:00

Literary translators looking for a good place to finish up a commission might be interested in the "Translation House Looren" in Switzerland. There's information about residency for a "working stay" at the house here.

The Day's Announcement

2010-10-23T21:40:00.002+02:00

Here's a poem from Brad Leithauser's Curves and Angles that made me burst into tears (with my own father mostly fit but still worse for wear after two strokes in the past five years). Looking at it again, I am particularly struck by the two different meanings of "gone" in the first two lines.

If you like this one, there are several more at the link if you click the book's title above.

THE DAY'S ANNOUNCEMENT

The family’s hope? That he was too far gone
to notice she was gone. But when he asked for her
for four weeks running, it didn’t seem quite fair
to reassure him with—She’ll be back soon.
So when, pale blue eyes jumping in his head, he said
again, Nurse, where’s my Meg?, as if she were a stranger
(her, his own Bridget, sixth child and sole daughter!),
she told him—Poppa, listen: Momma’s dead.

The news plunged deep into that drowned brain.
He bowed his weighty head. She took his hand—
Had she made a mistake? Could he understand?
. . . Maybe, for when he raised his face again,
he wore a look of rationality triumphant:

I knew it. Otherwise, she would have come.

Fishing for Amber

2010-10-22T09:34:00.004+02:00

Ciarán Carson's Fishing for Amber contains several passages that indirectly describe how the book works. Here's one:

For one thing leads to another, as it does in Holland. The cities, by means of canals, communicate with the sea; canals run from town to town, and from them to villages, which are themselves bound together with these watery ways, and are connected even to the houses scattered all over the country; smaller canals surround the fields, meadows, pastures and kitchen-gardens, serving at once as boundary wall, hedge and roadway; every house is a little port, in which you might hear stories from the seven seas. One can drift from any place to anywhere. (152-153)

While reading Fishing for Amber, I kept thinking of W. G. Sebald's books, so I was pleased to come across a reference to St. Sebald in Carson's Shamrock Tea (which I read immediately after reading Fishing for Amber). But when I was done with both these Carson books, I no longer thought of Shamrock Tea as being "Sebaldesque"; it ends up being quite different than anything Sebald wrote (except perhaps Austerlitz, which, like Shamrock Tea, is held together by a continuous narrative more than any of Sebald's other books, or than Fishing for Amber).

Instead, it is Fishing for Amber that actually feels Sebaldesque, with one significant difference: Sebald's work is very melancholy, even pessimistic, while Fishing for Amber uses similar associative techniques (encapsulated in the quotation above) but takes a much different kind of pleasure in those techniques, not the pleasure of melancholy that pervades Sebald but a pleasure in how full of wonders the world is. There is darkness in Carson as well (otherwise, the books would not be interesting), but the experience is of pleasure most of all, while in Sebald, the darkness is foregrounded, and the joy of reading his work comes in spite of the darkness, as it were.

In both Fishing for Amber and Shamrock Tea, Carson repeatedly contemplates paintings, especially Dutch paintings (the Arnolfini Double portrait by Jan van Eyck plays a crucial role in Shamrock Tea). But it was his description of a Vermeer painting in Fishing for Amber that struck me most, in part because I had just read another description of the same painting in Michael Donhauser's Nahe der Neige. Here's Carson on the painting:

... one of the essentials of comfort for a Dutch lady was the vuur stoof, a square box open on one side to admit an earthen pan filled with embers of turf, and perforated to allow the heat to ascend and warm the feet; it served as a footstool, and was concealed under the dress. The use of it was rarely dispensed with, whatever the season, indoors or out—the citizen's wife had it carried after her by her servant to church or at the theatre.

This, indeed, is the object depicted in the lower right corner of Vermeer's Woman Pouring Milk ... She's pouring white milk from a red earthenware jug into a brown glazed bowl and there's a loaf of bread in a wicker basket on the table and a lidded pitcher and other bits of broken bread on the tablecloth. (99-100)

What struck me was Carson's emphasis on the "vuur stoof" in his description of the painting, in contrast to his merely passing mention of the bread on the table. Donhauser emphasizes the bread, and mentions the stove only in passing:

Der Raum, worin das geschieht, ist ein Neben- oder Zwischenraum, der nicht wirklich als Küche erkennbar ist—es hängen da ein Korb und ein Messingbehälter, ein Stövchen steht auf dem Boden ... die Magd, die schaut nicht auf, sie bereitet ein Gericht namens Wentelteefje, wofür Brot gebrochen wurde und wofür die Magd nun Milch in eine Schüssel schenkt; das Brot wird dann etwa eine Stunde in der Milch eingeweicht werden ... (19-20)

I don't have anything to add to these two descriptions; I just enjoyed the (Sebaldesque?) coincidence of reading them both within a few days of each other, as well as how each author emphasized one thing while only barely mentioning the other, so that the two descriptions end up wonderfully complementing each other.

First Rain in Delhi on Whale Sound

2010-10-12T18:31:00.002+02:00

Nic Sebastian reads my poem "First Rain in Delhi" on Whale Sound here. Thanks, Nic!

Introduction to the Songs of Innocence and Experience

2010-10-11T06:19:00.003+02:00

I read this just now on the Poetry Foundation iPhone app, and I don't think I've ever been quite as aware of just how brilliant the poem is. And then I found it in all its illuminated glory at blakearchive.org and thought I'd share it with you. A perfect example of how complex simplicity can be.

"World's greatest bass line"

2010-10-10T21:10:00.005+02:00

I put a link to my post about The Smiths on my Facebook profile, with this comment:

The Smiths as "the commodification of the critique of commodities." Oh shut up and dance! :-)

That led a friend to say, "What difference does it make?" And that reminded me of this story: It was sometime in the mid-eighties. I was at a party at Synergy, a co-op at Stanford, and the band was playing "Mystery Achievement," by The Pretenders. Jack Sayers was on bass, but I don't remember which of the specific bands he was in that was playing that night (Missy and the Boogiemen; The Heptiles?). And while that killer bass line was throbbing along, I found myself next to my friend Paul G., and I said to him, "World's greatest bass line!" And he agreed. A few moments later, I asked Paul, "Do you think the bassist knew it was the world's greatest bass line when he came up with it?" And Paul stopped dancing for a moment and said something like, "That's the question, isn't it? Did Rilke know how good 'The Duino Elegies' were while he was writing them? Or was he just writing them, so caught up in the act of creation that he did not think about how good they were? Does the genius know when he has produced a masterpiece?"

And then we went back to dancing!

"The Smiths"

2010-10-10T15:39:00.005+02:00

Simfy listening: The Smiths, The Smiths

My joke about The Smiths and The Cure back in the eighties was that I liked their guitarists, but not their singers, which was not a problem with The Smiths, with Morrissey on vocals and Johnny Marr on guitar, but was a problem with The Cure, with Robert Smith on guitar and vocals. In either case, it came down to that I was impressed by the bands but found the singers so annoying that I could not stand them.

Over the years, I've come to like The Cure after all; the turning point was probably the use of their song as the title song of the brilliant film Boys Don't Cry. But I've still never gotten into The Smiths, nor been taken with Morrissey as a solo artist. But Simfy led me to give their first album a listen while running recently.

The first thing I noticed is that Morrissey's voice does not annoy me as much as it used to (though I still don't like it much). In contrast, Marr's guitar work doesn't seem as impressive as it once did! (Perhaps I need to listen to later Smiths albums to get what I remembered.) While running, I began to ride a train of thought that took me back in several ways: the eighties fans of The Cure and The Smiths felt spoken to by their music and by their lyrics of disillusionment with the world, even despair at its emptiness. And this album does communicate such feelings effectively—the paradox being that such feelings derive at least in part from dissatisfaction with the consumer world but their artistic expression takes the form of consumer goods (albums). So there I was, jogging in 2010 and, as if I was back in the eighties, thinking about "the commodification of the critique of commodities." At the same time that I was off on this high-falutin' philosophy trip, I was also struck by how funny Morrissey can be, in his deadpan way, as in "Still Ill":

For there are brighter sides to life,
And I should know, because I've seen them,
But not very often ...

Back home, listening to the end of the album, I was drawn back to Morrissey's lyrics by a line from "Suffer Little Children": "Manchester, you have a lot to answer for." This made my digression away from the album seem very appropriate, what with Manchester having to "answer for" the global commodity capitalism it was, in many senses, the birthplace of. It was not a surprise to me that The Smiths generated such a train of thought; I had always recognized them as a band worth taking seriously, despite my dislike of them. And this round of listening to their first album does make me want to check out the rest of their catalog, as well as at least a bit of Morrissey's, even though I doubt I will become a big fan.

(Note to Smiths fans: By now I know that "Suffer Little Children" is not a critique of capitalism but a response to the Moors murders, so you don't have to make fun of me for not knowing that!)

Ian Seed, "From a Long Way"

2010-10-09T08:26:00.004+02:00

Here's a poem from Ian Seed's Anonymous Intruder (Shearsman, 2009):

FROM A LONG WAY

Sometimes I asked: how do I reach
this truth? Each time I was surprised
by the pictures they painted of you
as if day or night could be framed.

So I stepped out and journeyed
not to learn your secrets but to see you
tying your shoe laces beside the path
which cuts into the mountain as it climbs.

If it hasn't been done already, someone should write a study of such eight-line, two-quatrain poems with a hinge between the quatrains (here, a causal hinge with that "so"). One approach to such a study would be to consider how the form created by the lines interacts with other patterns created by the words. The most obvius one is that the first quatrain has two sentences, while the second only has one, and the poem's three sentences get longer and longer. Here's another pattern, highlighted in bold:

Sometimes I asked: how do I reach
this truth? Each time I was surprised
by the pictures they painted of you
as if day or night could be framed.

So I stepped out and journeyed
not to learn your secrets but to see you
tying your shoe laces beside the path
which cuts into the mountain as it climbs.

I could imagine other poems making the exact same argument, but with different themes, Sometimes something happens, each time it had this feature, as if ... So I did not something, not with one intention but with another.

Or there's this shape, too, now highlighted:

Sometimes I asked: how do I reach
this truth? Each time I was surprised
by the pictures they painted of you
as if day or night could be framed.

So I stepped out and journeyed
not to learn your secrets but to see you
tying your shoe laces beside the path
which cuts into the mountain as it climbs.

The first pattern is the shape of the argument; this is the argument's content, but one could imagine a poem that addresses the same issues in the same order with the same words while having a different shape. The interaction of the sentences, the quatrains, and the two patterns I highlighted work together to establish the poem's emphasis on pictures and seeing over against truth and learning.

Both these patterns within the lines are striking, of course, in that they "stop," as it were, before the final two lines. These lines are the only ones in which there's no shifting around, no contrast, no staking out of territory—just the image being seen "from a long way." "Secrets" and "truth" are rejected, then, in favor of a picture, of something "seen"—not by them, but by the poem's speaker. As Seed writes in the prose poem "A Cry Permitted": "There is nothing you need to understand. Shake hands and surrender to another vision." (For some reason, both when I wrote notes on Seed in the back of the book and when I typed this up, I first produced "version" there instead of "vision.")

(For another example of the shifting, contrasting, staking-out-of-territory style of the first six lines of Seed's poem, see my quotation from John Gallaher here.)

Mozart's Third Brain

2010-10-08T18:19:00.003+02:00

Göran Sonnevi's Mozart's Third Brain (translated by Rika Lesser) is a long poem of a restless, dissatisfied mind pondering problems ranging from the global to the most intensely personal. Here is all of an unusually short section that struck me (LXXVII):

Not in vain do you give me your rose The transparent forms
are reborn; from them everything arises All leaves, birds
All the images Growing quickly, quickly destroyed

I will not let you down A flower opened your heart
Now you open mine, again, with your rose, shining dark red
The yellow pollen from eternity's sunflower falls on the table

This recalls the T. S. Eliot of Four Quartets, while also being utterly independent of Eliot as it shifts rapidly between image and abstraction. (Eliot hovers in the background at other moments throughout the book, as does Wallace Stevens; I kept hearing echoes of "The Man with the Blue Guitar.")

A passage from the previous page (section LXXV) seems to me to represent how this poem works. This does not contain any of the specific references to events of the time of the poem's writing (early to mid 1990s) that pepper the poem (especially the genocides in the Balkans and in Central Africa), but it is otherwise exemplary of how Sonnevi thinks and writes:

... I pledge allegiance to the contaminated
world, such as it is, in its luminous right . . .

What sort of imaginary community do I seek? Which one
is active, est agens, within me? I project the collective Sade!
The collective Mozart! As if there were no difference!
Summed up in the Gödel-face, dark Beneath the real Gödel's
shy gray shadow In which group do I seek protection? Whom am I
excluding? Which flame of self-forgiveness consumes me?
Societies float gently, like ashes An architecture of smoke

I love the first sentence quoted here, which reminds me of Greg Brown's wonderful song "Two Little Feet": "It's a messed-up world but I love it anyway."

Sonnevi addresses this "allegiance to the contaminated / world" in more specifically political terms later in the poem: "The right to say no is the basis of democracy But only within the matrix of / a deeper yes" (section CIX). There's a philosophical point here resembling Nietzsche's insistence that one must affirm all of existence in order to affirm even one moment of one's life. But the political point is even more startling: democracy provides a space for dispute, for negation, for expressing a choice between options—but it does not (and cannot?) provide for the rejection of that space itself. You have to affirm the system of democracy in order to "say no" to some issue within that system. More specifically, you have to say yes to the result the system produces even when you do not like the result.

That's why I get very angry about claims that one's taxes should not be used to pay for things one doesn't agree with—whether the claim that school vouchers should be provided for private school or that pacifists have a right to refuse to pay taxes because of military spending. (An example from both sides, but it is usually "conservatives" who ask for the right to be exceptions to the system, in my experience.) — That's not a point about Sonnevi's poetry, but it shows how far his work takes you when you follow its leads.

Human Shields, Vollmondbar, Basel, Sept. 23, 2010

2010-09-28T07:07:00.006+02:00

My band Human Shields played the Vollmondbar in Basel last Thursday. It's the kind of place where some people come to hear the music, but most of the people have come to eat and drink and chat. I once had a terrible experience playing music at such a place, but at the Vollmondbar the sense that we were playing background music for most of the audience was actually pretty liberating, and we just relaxed and played and had a good time. I've rarely, if ever, had as much fun playing live music as I did there!

Setlist (all tunes by me unless otherwise noted)

First set

I Will Survive (the tune Gloria Gaynor made famous)

The Morning after the Night Before

Friend of the Devil (Garcia-Hunter; from the Grateful Dead)

Penny a Point

King Solomon

Raining (With the Sun in the Sky)

The Ferryman

Turned in Time (music by Markus Bachmann with my English version of his German lyrics)

Second set

Sundowning

Brain Damage (Roger Waters; from Pink Floyd)

Alisa's Bridge

Magpie

Land without Nightingales

Spring in My Step

Triolet on a Line Apocryphally Attributed to Martin Luther (lyrics by A. E. Stallings)

Tambourine

You Know I Know

Third set

Gingerbread Blues

Trinklied (lyrics by Paul Celan)

Long Enough

Hair of the Cat

It's All Right With Me (Cole Porter)

Pale Horse

If I Had Known

Rumpus

Better Never Than Late

You're Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go (Bob Dylan)

By the time we were done with our three sets, we had played two songs new to our repertoire (Brain Damage and Trinklied), and we had played all but four of the songs we have ever played live! I was tired, but I still could have played more, thanks to the most powerful drug I know: adrenalin.

Garbage, Beautiful Garbage

2010-09-23T08:54:00.004+02:00

Garbage, Beautiful Garbage

I've had this album on my iPhone for several weeks; a friend of mine gave it to me with a bunch of other stuff a while back. It's on my "songs" playlist, which I often listen to on shuffle, and as occasional Garbage songs kept coming up, I made a note to myself to listen to the whole album. And then shuffle presented with "Shut Your Mouth," and I liked the song so much that the album moved to the top of my listening list, and I listened to it while running yesterday.

"Shut Your Mouth" is the opener, and it is really good. The lyrics move at a fairly simply level, but they are biting, bitter and ironic enough to make more out of the simple text: "And the world spins by / With everybody moaning / Pissing, bitching and everyone is shitting / On their friends / On their love / On their oaths / On their honor / On their graves / Out their mouths / And their words say nothing / Shut your mouth / Try not to panic / Just shut your mouth / If you can do it." And the music: a thumping beat, effective distorted guitar, well-mixed vocals, a sinister overall feel. Good stuff.

But the rest of the album, frankly, makes "Shut Your Mouth" seem like an accident. The music is less interesting, the lyrics remain simple and sink into the worst kind of clichéd phrases, and the mix puts the words front and center so that you can't just ignore them and get into the groove. If Iron and Wine's lyrics are good enough to deserve more prominence in the mix, Garbage's lyrics should be downplayed, rather than emphasized!

Final analysis: one great song (I've been listening to it again while typing, and it's a great song!), and an otherwise boring record that even makes the great song seem weaker. (And the live video is nowhere near as good as the recording.)

Iron and Wine, "The Shepherd's Dog"

2010-09-23T08:40:00.002+02:00

Simfy listening: Iron and Wine, The Shepherd's Dog

With its layers of mostly acoustic instruments and a touch of electric guitar, and with its haunting melodies and hypnotic mid-tempo grooves, this is a record for me to love. If I'm ambivalent about it, it has to do with the vocals: with how they are sung and how they are recorded. Samuel Beam (who is Iron and Wine; it's not a band name but his stage name) has a very soft, dreamy voice; he doesn't slur his words as many singers do, but he doesn't clearly articulate them either. And the vocals are recorded with a touch of reverb and closely sung background harmonies that further wash out the words. This singing and recording style contributes hugely to the album's trance-inducing effect—but the lyric love in me feels shortchanged. The bits that I do catch make it clear that there's some excellent lyric writing going on here—but in a sense the lyrics are sacrificed to the overall sound. That sound is wonderful, but I would still like to hear more of the words.

And presenting the lyrics less dreamily would not actually detract from the effect: on Iron and Wine's Around the Well, which I talked about here recently, it was the clarity of the words that made "Belated Promise Ring" stand out for me, without the song being any less hypnotic than the other songs on the album.)

John Gallaher, Map of the Folded World

2010-09-14T22:37:00.003+02:00

"You know the secret language," John Gallaher writes in "Your Golden Ticket," but the poems in Map of the Folded World are not in a secret language. There's nothing esoteric about them; they do not gesture towards hidden depths that demand subtle interpretation. Instead, they are surfaces on which a train of thought is skating, "suggestions, not depictions," as Gallaher writes in "What & Who & Where & What." The beginning of "The Universe is Incapable of Disappearance" strikes me as exemplary, as a statement leads to a series of qualifications and hedgings that generate a quite singular humor:

They keep talking about a road, but there never is a road,
and if there was, it would always be ending,
the way everything is always ending
unless you're of the mind that everything is always some sort of middle,
or some continual beginning
that rises and falls from a never quite completed something
that we're continually waking from
in a kind of polite vagueness.

Bright Eyes, "Lifted, or The Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground"

2010-09-11T07:01:00.005+02:00

Bright Eyes, Lifted, or the Story is in the Soil, Keep Your Ear to the Ground

The real reason that I have been commenting on albums lately is not that I started listening to albums on Simfy but that I started running regularly, and while I run I listen to albums on my iPhone (some on the iPod, some on Simfy). Since I keep making asides about Conor Oberst and Bright Eyes, I thought I'd listen to a Bright Eyes album while running and see whether I could come up with some coherent comments about it without just gushing about how fantastic I think CO and BE are. I chose the earliest CD I have by Bright Eyes as a starting point.

This turned out to be more difficult than I thought it would be, simply because I found so many things to comment on that I could not keep them all in mind while running! So I found the lyrics to the album on-line and put them all in a Word file and printed it out and read them, looking for themes I had noticed while running. Even then, I had too many passages to comment on! If Conor Oberst was a poet (well, he is, but that's a different issue), and I was doing literary criticism, I would look for the exemplary passages that stand for all the others, but this is my blog, so I don't have to be rigorous, and I've just picked out a few of my favorite bits.

In the first song, "The Big Picture," I laughed out loud at the line "don't go blaming your knowledge on some fruit you ate." Over and over again, Oberst picks up on Christian imagery to look at it from all sides and challenge it, and he almost always does so with this much wit. The end of "Waste of Paint," with the singer at choir practice at the cathedral, provides a kind of summary of this theme of the CD:

But when I lift my voice up now to reach them,
the range is too high, way up in heaven,
so I hold my tongue, forget the song,
tie my shoe, and start walking off,
and just try to keep moving on,
with my broken heart and my absent God,
and I have no faith, but it is all I want,
to be loved and believe in my soul, in my soul.

Oberst was 22 when this CD came out, and there are a few moments here where he shows his age, as it were, but here the specificity of the scene allows him to arrive at a very general, quite abstract conclusion that is fully grounded in the imagery. Here, music leads him to a clear statement of the problems he keeps addressing, but the music only clarifies, even heightens, the problems, without solving them.

The last lines of the CD, though, in the song "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and To Be Loved)," return to these themes:

But where was it when I first heard a sweet sound of humility?
It came to my ears in the goddamn loveliest melody.
How grateful I was then to be part of the mystery,
to love and to be loved. Let's hope that is enough.

The "conclusion" of the CD seems a bit flat, actually: we should "love and be loved," that's all that we need to do. But that flatness is offset not only by the uncertain hope that is actually the end of the CD but also by the rich and biting writing that precedes it. There is too much irony in Oberst's lyrics to allow the conclusion to flatten out what has come before it; in fact, the irony and imagery of the lyrics as a whole tend to undermine the possibility that "to love and to be loved" is "enough."

These lines also provide a conclusion to the album's theme of what music is for: the "loveliest melody" provides access to "a sweet sound of humility" and the experience of being "part of the mystery." At times, this theme is as hopeful as it is at the end, as here in "Bowl of Oranges":

But when crying don't help,
and you can't compose yourself,
it is best to compose a poem,
an honest verse of longing or a simple song of hope.

Here, and elsewhere on the album (and in Oberst's writing in general), I'm struck by how he represents what poetry is for: here, it is poetry as therapy, as a way to make up for not being able to "compose yourself." But the song concludes with a different understanding of art:

But if the world could remain within a frame like a painting on a wall,
then I think we would see the beauty.
Then we would stand staring in awe
at our still lives posed like a bowl of oranges,
like a story told by the fault lines and the soil.

This is a much different sense of art's purpose: not as therapy for the artist but as an experience for the recipient, as a frame for the world that makes it possible to "see the beauty" that is otherwise lost in the details. The "still lives ... like bowls of oranges" provide a sense of "awe" that make one think that "the goddamn loveliest melody" might be enough to redeem the world.

But "Waste of Paint" (the song that ends with the choir practice and the "absent God") provides another understanding of what poetry is for and what it "makes happen" (to finally refer to W.H. Auden, whose lines keep crossing my mind as I think about Bright Eyes):

As I hide behind these books I read,
while scribbling my poetry,
like art could save a wretch like me,
with some ideal ideology
that no one can hope to achieve,
and I am never real;
it is just a sketch of me,
and everything I made is trite and cheap
and a waste of paint, of tape, of time.

Here, the writing of poetry is not therapy, not an attempt to make up for being unable to "compose yourself," but it does not provide a sense of awe, either. The artist cannot see the work from the outside, cannot see the "bowl of oranges" in such a way that he is awed by it. The imagery may make me, as the listener, feel that sense of awe and wonder and humility that Oberst keeps circling around, but his own work only ends up feeling like a "waste" to him.

It's when Oberst does let the "bowl of oranges" speak for itself that he does his best writing. Here's a favorite passage of mine from the beginning of "Let's Not Shit Ourselves (To Love and To Be Loved)":

I've seen a child caught in the sad trap of gravity.
He falls from the lowest branch of the apple tree
and lands in the grass and weeps for his dignity.
Next time he will not aim so high.
Yeah, next time, neither will I.

This is all just a perfectly described scene with a deft little interpretation provided, but of course the scene is full of resonances that make it much more complex than the issue of how much ambition one should have, how high one should aim: the apple tree alone manages to connect Genesis and Isaac Newton. Even as Oberst says he will reel in his ambition because of what he has seen, the lines make clear just how ambitious he is, driven by the problem of "the absent God" and the "end of the world" as described by modern physics to try to find meaning for himself and others, in art and in love, hoping that is enough.

Trouble House

2010-09-09T10:36:00.004+02:00

Swiss poet and rapper Jürg Halter (whose rap alias is Kutti MC) has a new band called Schule der Unruhe. I was just playing around with the idea of how to translate "Schule der Unruhe" into English with more assonance than "School of Restlessness," and I remembered my three-year-old niece telling me at great length about "Trouble House," the place you got sent if you were in trouble, and how I kept asking her if she could take me there, and how every time I asked her that it got farther and farther away.

What taxes are for

2010-09-09T09:42:00.002+02:00

Amit Majmudar, "0°, 0°"

2010-09-08T06:24:00.007+02:00

"Inevitabilities found by accident" are what one should "look for in a ghazal," according to the final line of Amit Majmudar's ghazal "By Accident," and hte interplay between the inevitable and the accidental runs through his collection 0°, 0°—or how the accidental later seems to have been (or perhaps makes itself seem?) inevitable: "You can / Make anything sound predetermined just / By rhyming on it twice," he writes in "M. C. Escher and the Art of Tessellation," which suggest that poetry produces the sense of inevitability Majmudar keeps circling around, and that he's aware that that might be the case.

But there's something else going on here, too: Majmudar keeps looking at how things might seem if seen backwards, not from the accidental to the inevitable but the other way around. The Escher poem begins with a stanza about mathematicians:

Mathematicians make the toughest audience.
Your complexity has to arabesque a chalkboard
And then, with joyful slashes, above, below,
Cancel itself before their eyes. Simply put,
They expect you to write them a Paradise Lost
And then resolve it back to Genesis.

This provides a nice twist on Jorge Luis Borges's suggestion that the Odyssey could be read as a version of Ulysses [though I just checked "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and discovered that I had misremembered it: he speculates on reading the Aeneid as having preceded the Odyssey], but it also marks how Occam's razor cuts away elaboration in favor of simplicity—sacrificing poetry to proof? Producing a reading of history based on its outcome? [Avoid Nietzsche digression here.]

Yet the source does not inevitably contain what flows from it, for accident must still play a role, and in "Merlin," Majmudar develops an elaborate conceit (Merlin living his life backwards) to arrive at a scene in which Merlin meets the first cave painter: "How will all he has witnessed / result from that stargazing hunter?" How does the accidental come to seem inevitable? "Answers for the Whirlwind" concludes with a passage that reads like an answer to that question:

Who paved roads when they found themselves blocked off
From one another by the wilderness
Who bruised their heels against the wilderness
Who named it tasted every leaf of it at least once
Who remembered which was medicine and which
Was food and which was poison shuffled with
The rest its green no different to the eye
Who sawed and sanded it to crib and casket
And who did that to the wilderness Lord God

With nothing but hands

Experimentation, memory, and technology lead from the stargazer to us; the work of hands turns accidents into inevitabilities.

But such a process does not necessarily involve progress; a dark thread of violence runs through Majmudar's book, at great length in "Letter to the Infantry" and "The Cherry Blossoms at Walter Reed," both of which address the Iraq war, and allegorically in "Michael Reminisces about the War." That's the Archangel Michael, and the war in question is the one between God's host and the fallen angels. The poem concludes with God and Michael celebrating their victory and their soldiers:

On the throne with a wineglass, He praised me
For discovering good little killers inside
Of those golden androgynous boys.

And in retrospect, of course, it seems inevitable that the "golden androgynous boys "had "good little killers" inside themselves, even it was accidents, not inevitabilities, that gave those killers life. The darkness in Majmudar's book is alleviated by his sensitivity to the accidental, unpredictable, human side of violence, all of which it makes it possible to choose or refuse it. And (even though the poem in question is called "The Miscarriage") he ends the book with "hope dry and brittle but intact." That hope is fragile, but it survives the accident that creates it, and ends up seeming inevitable.

Ani DiFranco, Evolve

2010-09-07T09:55:00.003+02:00

Ani DiFranco is so prolific that I have ended up avoiding listening to her music for a long time, because I was somehow sure I would be so into it that I'd end up wanting to be a DiFranco collector (the way I am a Greg Brown collector or a Bill Frisell collector: with completist ambitions). Now I've finally started listening to her with this CD, Evolve, from 2003, and I was right: this music makes me want more. If this were a band, I could rave about the great singer and the great songwriter and the great guitarist and the great arrangements, and I'd be praising several different people, but it's all Ani D, and it's all fantastic. The songs are built around her guitar work (mostly acoustic, mostly superb fingerpicking), with some additional instruments added for most of the tracks; the instruments provide her with the foundation for her bold singing: she has a great voice, and she takes it everywhere she can. Favorite line, from "Slide":

The pouring rain is no place for a bicycle ride;
try to hit the brakes and you slide.

I was running when I listened to the album, and I heard this line and just knew the song was called "Slide." :-)

(This was not Simfy listening, but finally giving my full attention to something someone gave me a while back.)

Iron and Wine, Around the Well

2010-09-05T22:56:00.003+02:00

Simfy listening: Iron and Wine, Around the Well

So I've been pretty critical for the most part in my posts about what I've been listening to on Simfy, the streaming service that just started up in Switzerland two weeks ago. In part that's because I left out the one batch of music that totally thrilled me, Conor Oberst's two CDs under his own name (rather than with/as Bright Eyes). I find it hard to say anything about how utterly brilliant I think Oberst is ... It might just end up as boring gushing.

So I was listening to Iron and Wine's Around the Well while running today, and for a while, I thought, "Well, I can say good things about this: fine picking, excellent arrangements, good lyrics and melodies, the singing a bit too dreamy to really get my attention, but a strong record that makes me interested in hearing more."

But then came "Belated Promise Ring," and such cool, distanced praise went out the window. In fact, as soon as the song started, I thought, "Yes, this is a good one." Perhaps that was just because it was almost the first (or may even the first) song on the CD with drums on it, but it also just seemed fuller and richer and more complete from the start. And then the vocals come in:

Sunday morning, my Rebecca sleeping in with me again.
There's a kid outside the church kicking a can.
When the cedar branches twist, she turns her collar to the wind.
The weather can close the world within its hand.

This is just first-class writing. I've listened to the song at least three times since my run this afternoon, and it just gets better and better. And the song is good enough to make me want to hear more by this band (which, it turns out, is not a band but one guy, Samuel Beam, who goes by this name). [I tried to find an Iron and Wine version of the song on YouTube, but there are only a bunch of cover versions of it—which shows that others love the song as much as I do!]

Isobel Campbell and Mark Lonegan, Hawk

2010-09-05T07:57:00.003+02:00

Simfy listening: Isobel Campbell and Mark Lonegan, Hawk

Here's another pairing I've heard great things about and am disappointed by. The album is atmospheric without building up any tension; it's surprising that a band with a singer (Lonegan) with such a dark voice seems so unthreatening, so bland. The beginning is especially dull, but I stuck it out and enjoyed the cover of "Time of the Season," and then things do pick up quite a bit at the end, culminating in a fine closer called "Lately." Still, given the hype, I sure expected more from these two.

Left Behind

2010-09-04T07:18:00.002+02:00

And here's another poem worth a comment this morning, "Left Behind," by Kristin Berkey-Abbott, from qarrtsiluni. Lots of layers of resonance here, from miracles to rapture. I'm a bit hesitant about two of the line breaks ("hungry / families"; "mystical / theology"), but these breaks between adjectives and their nouns, though not very productive in the poem, are at least not distracting.

Tracking the Hurricane

2010-09-04T06:57:00.003+02:00

Here's "Tracking the Hurricane," by W. F. Lantry, from The New Verse News, a poem that is as calm as the calm before the storm that it describes. I do have a quibble with it, though; commas would be helpful at the ends of the third and fourth lines of the second stanza:

or a day when everything has calmed
and the silence is like glass
still glowing orange from the forge [,]
small bits of rime forming around the walls [,]
each edge waiting to shatter,

But I have gathered over the years that many poets and readers of poetry don't mind having commas omitted at the end of lines (and often even prefer to leave them out there). For me, the absence of those two commas makes it distractingly difficult to parse the lines, which breaks up the poem's calming effect.

Alison Krauss, Forget About It

2010-09-03T10:32:00.003+02:00

Alison Krauss, Forget About It

I first heard Alison Krauss singing backing vocals on Phish's Hoist, but I never got around to listening to any of her own CDs until a friend gave me her CD with Robert Plant, Raising Sand (another album with magnificent Marc Ribot guitar work on it). And I've never listened to any of her solo or Union Station CDs until today. What a voice she has! She likes slower tempos and melodies that give her room to linger on long notes. Really beautiful stuff. My favorite line (from "Could You Lie"):

Could you lie and say you love me just a little?

And check out the personnel list at the Wikipedia link above: Jerry Douglas, Sam Bush, Lyle Lovett, Dolly Parton! Alison sure has a lot of talented friends!

M Ward, Hold Time

2010-09-02T22:47:00.003+02:00

Simfy listening: M. Ward, Hold Time

A friend of mine gave me a copy of M. Ward's Post-War a couple years ago (thanks, SJS!), and I liked it a lot, especially the wonderful "Rollercoaster." I'd also seen that Ward is part of Monsters of Folk with my current absolute favorite, Conor Oberst, so I thought I'd check out another CD of his. And it's a winner. The highlights for me are the gorgeous and completely startling covers of "Rave On" and "Oh Lonesome Me" (the latter featuring Lucinda Williams—I thought I recognized that voice when I heard the song while jogging today!) and Ward's "Stars of Leo" (with "Epistemology" also up there).

Ward does like to use rather stock phrases—but then he does things with them, as here in "Stars of Leo":

I get so low I need a little pick me up.
I get so high I need a bring me down.

Grizzly Bear, Horn of Plenty

2010-09-02T10:48:00.003+02:00

Simfy listening: Lots of people have raved about Grizzly Bear over the past couple of years, but I find Horn of Plenty rather dull. The tempos are too much the same, the atmospherics are bland, and it all sounds like somebody who listened to too much Brian Eno and Portishead without Eno's humor and Portishead's sinister quality.

I may have been critical of John Mellencamp's lyrics yesterday, but his album just offers way more than this stuff does. (I have since listened to it again and was captivated by the sound and the feel of the music, even if the lyrics still often seem flat. And again, any album that gives that much room to Marc Ribot is hardly ever going to be uninteresting!)

Two poems at The Nepotist

2010-09-02T09:57:00.002+02:00

Two poems of mine are featured today by The Nepotist. As the titles make clear, these contain explicit language (and explicit themes!): "Up Shit Creek" and "Cock and Bull." I'm flattered and humbled by the Nepotist's introduction to the two!

John Mellencamp, "No Better Than This"

2010-09-01T10:52:00.003+02:00

Simfy listening: John Mellencamp, "No Better Than This"

As a kid, I was a big fan of John Cougar's "I Need a Lover," not as much because of the song itself but because of the great introduction to the song. And then he had his big moment in the limelight with "Jack and Diane," another tune I liked. But I haven't listened to anything by him in a long time. I was convinced to check out his latest when it was referred to in The New Yorker, and with Simfy I can easily check things out (simfy is something like Pandora in the US, I take it).

So I've listened to it once, and it's a very fine album that I'm going to listen to again: the sound of the record is fabulous (clean, simple folk-blues-country production), the playing is superb (somehow I knew before checking just now that Marc Ribot was on guitar here!), and the arrangements are varied enough to not get boring while also being consistent in sound and feel.

Still, my first reaction is to play with the title: "Why is 'No Better Than This' no better than this?" With one exception, my response to the lyrics was rather critical: they are good but not great. Too often, Mellencamp reaches for the standard lyrical turn from the folk-blues tradition, so that when he doesn't, on the stunning "Easter Eve" (the exception), it makes the "straightness" of the other tunes even more noticeable.

I have to admit I'm probably being unfair here, because I have been getting so into the magnificent Conor Oberst (and Bright Eyes) that almost all songwriting pales by comparison. But even without comparing Mellencamp to Oberst, I feel like he could have done "better than this" in the lyrics.

A streaming service changes how one thinks about music: do I want to own it for my collection? Do I want to listen to it again? Do I want to delete the album from my playlist right now? Those are the three basic responses. Here, at the moment, I'm with the middle of those: I'm going to listen to it again (and perhaps several more times after that, if only because of Ribot), but I don't think I'm going to buy it for my collection.

Oh, and there's also the category "songs to listen to again," and "Easter Eve" belongs in that one!

Human Shields videos from May 2010

2010-08-29T00:27:00.003+02:00

Here are three videos of songs my band Human Shields performed at the Rockfact Music Club in Münchenstein, Switzerland, on May 8, 2010.

Sundowning

Human Shields | MySpace Musikvideos

Long Enough

Human Shields | MySpace Musikvideos

You Know I Know

Human Shields | MySpace Musikvideos

You can also view these videos on the band's Facebook page.

Stevie Ray Vaughan in 1983

2010-08-27T23:13:00.002+02:00

It was a Sunday evening, and I had already gone to Grateful Dead shows at Frost Amphitheater at Stanford on the Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and I was exhausted and wired, but I went to see Stevie Ray Vaughan at the Keystone Palo Alto anyway. I was right at the stage, to the left of SRV's mic in the middle of the stage, and quite close to his wah-wah pedal. After he played two of his fast instrumentals, he stepped over to that pedal and started doing this crazy stuff with it, and I could not really see him, but I watched his left-handed shadow playing on the back wall. Here's what he did (from a different 1983 performance):

And the moral of Stevie's story is: don't ride helicopters during storms.

Beyond Genes

2010-08-23T08:11:00.005+02:00

Here's the next book I'm translating, due out next year: Gottfried Schatz, Jenseits der Gene. It's a collection of columns on science that Schatz wrote for the Neue Zürcher Zeitung; it was a best-seller in Switzerland. It's an honor to be translating a book by such a prestigious scientist ("co-discoverer of mitochrondrial DNA"? I'm impressed!).

Five articles in one newspaper

2010-08-17T09:51:00.003+02:00

Today's International Herald Tribune contains not the usual one or two interesting articles but, count 'em, five!

There's an article about five neuroscientists taking a kayaking trip off the grid (and off-line), in which they reflect on the ways that the brain responds to the information society and to their temporary escape from it. (It's a little ironic that my response to this article is to want to provide a link to it for my friends.) My small version of the same is that I did not go on-line at all on Sunday (not even with my iPhone), and that it is always a bit of relief to "disconnect" myself.

Robert Pinsky's review of Andrew Pettegree's The Book in the Renaissance, a new study of the first century or so of movable type and the central problem printers faced: how can you make money from publishing? Pinsky praises Pettegree for refraining from comparisons between then and now, but it's certainly easy to do so, given that Pettegree argues that printers only made money when they focused on "news, sensation, and excitement." So there was no Golden Age of printing when people bought classic literature and philosophy and read them; sensationalism has always been the best way to make money with printing and publishing.

Timothy E. Williamson's opinion piece on the imagination has a dozen or so fascinating points in it, but for me the best point is his brief discussion of the contemporary philosophical contrast between "contexts of discovery" and "contexts of justification":

In the context of discovery, we get ideas, no matter how — dreams or drugs will do. Then, in the context of justification, we assemble objective evidence to determine whether the ideas are correct.

I've come across this idea quite a few times before, but I've never seen it explained so tightly and clearly. (Well, my student Michael Luscher explained the distinction in my verse-novels seminar in 2009, but we were discussing Christoph Ransmayr's Der fliegende Berg, so that discussion was in German, and I did not register that he was using the German equivalents of these terms. Now, in retrospect, I can see how appropriate and precise his use and explanation of the terminology was!)

Then there's Lawrence E. Joseph's article on the threat caused by solar storms, which can produce huge bursts of electricity that destroy transformers on Earth, and Paul Krugman's vigorous defense of the Social Security system in the U.S. against its detractors.

This post is an excercise in multi-tasking, in a way, with all the different points it has to make, and is thus subject to the analysis that appears in the first article I linked to, about the kayaking neuroscientists. But it's worth noting that I read all these articles in the newspaper, and not on-line, in the old-fashioned way—that is, in a desperate search for "news, sensation, and entertainment". :-)

On the Night Watch

2010-08-16T09:03:00.002+02:00

Here are three poems by Ciaran Carson from his collection On the Night Watch, which has just come out in North America with Wake Forest University Press (and which was first published in Ireland by Gallery Press). It's another winner from Carson, a radical change in approach and tone that is completely successful. (Just as an aside: of his many compelling works, I find his verse novel For All We Know to be the most compelling of all; I wrote about it here.)

Music as skin

2010-08-14T09:07:00.003+02:00

There are passages in Göran Sonnevi's Mozart's Third Brain (translated by Rika Lesser) that are just exactly perfect, such as this one:

Music covers us with skin, touches with skin
We are painfully described there, even in great delight

The feeling of being surrounded by music, and touched by music, as something physical, even erotic (skin on skin), and the way that overwhelming music can be painful and delightful at the same time. At my last Grateful Dead show (March 18, 1995), which was also my wife Andrea's only Dead show, she turned to me during the space jam and said, "It's really scary." But that's just why I loved it!

Diego Rivera's Deep Water Horizon

2010-08-13T12:24:00.003+02:00

Here's another poem from New Verse News: "Diego Rivera's Deep Water Horizon," by Alan Catlin. It reads like an ekphrasis of a non-existent Rivera mural; I'm sure that's a category that somebody has written a dissertation about somewhere: descriptions, in poetry and fiction, of non-existent works of art.

Still, even though it doesn't bother me enough to keep me from appreciating the poem, I did stumble on one feature of this poem: the three lines ending with prepositions (lines 3, 5, and 8; of, of , and from). None of those breaks seem well placed to me; they interrupt the syntax of the phrases and sentences they are in. That's not necessarily a problem, but here, there's no gain in the effect of the poem as a result of the interruption. Nor is there a metrical pattern that is being followed and which has led to these particular breaks.

The Daily Blab

2010-08-07T11:52:00.003+02:00

And here's another poem I just read on-line and liked: Earl J. Wilcox's "The Daily Blab." Perhaps because I just returned from vacation and had had my mail held and my newspapers stopped while I was out of town. But I'm not planning on pretending to be dead.

At Lowe's Home Improvement Center

2010-08-07T10:20:00.002+02:00

I liked Brian Turner's Here, Bullet a lot, and this poem on Poetry Daily today makes me think I'm going to like his new Phantom Noise even more. This brings the war home in multiple ways. As Neil says, "I'm living with war in my heart every day."

The Poem and Its Secret

2010-08-06T08:14:00.003+02:00

I was on vacation last week when my translation of Durs Grünbein's essay "The Poem and Its Secret" was the Poetry Daily prose feature for the week. You can find the essay here, and you can buy the book, Bars of Atlantis, through the link there, too!

Acht Lernschwester

2010-08-05T17:22:00.002+02:00

I've known this painting by Gerhard Richter for a long time; I saw the original in Winterthur back in the late nineties. But I only just learned, quite by chance, that these eight student nurses were murder victims! I am reading, editing, and commenting on a manuscript of a novel by a friend of mine, and one of the characters, a nurse herself, mentions one "Richard Speck" as an example of the kind of horrible criminals that there are in the world. Curious, I googled and found a Wikipedia page about Speck and his crime, and immediately I wondered if Richter's painting was of his eight victims. For detailed information on the painting and its background, see this blog post.

Loopholes

2010-07-03T08:47:00.001+02:00

So here's Suarez playing goalie when he's not allowed to, which led to a last-second penalty for Ghana against Uruguay last night. But since Gyan missed the penalty, the match went to a penalty shootout, which Uruguay won.

Arguably, then, Uruguay was rewarded for Suarez's cheating. That's one way to look at it, but really it's a loophole that a player can exploit: stop a certain goal, get sent off, and hope the opponent misses the penalty. (They later showed Suarez's reaction from the tunnel when Gyan missed the penalty.)

And loopholes are inevitable: every system of rules has loopholes that people can exploit, and all attempts to close the loopholes lead to the creation of further loopholes.