Oh Forbidden

I read Jill Alexander Essbaum's Oh Forbidden (Pecan Grove Press, 2005) on the bus yesterday. It was a striking experience: the book is a series of sonnets that pretty much all describe sex in extremely explicit ways. So it's not the kind of thing one usually reads on a bus.

And the sonnets provide dozens of different perspectives on sex. Before, during, after; in serious relationships or in one-night (or one-hour) stands; full of new lust or already burned out. It's dizzying enough to read it in one sitting—imagine doing it on a bus! (No, as far as I remember, there is no sonnet here about doing it on a bus.)

This was my favorite, perhaps for its variations on Erica Jong's old "zipless fuck":

I'm lost, lusting, last to leave. You've gone
already, and the party's done. But I'm
drunk as all disaster from the ragtime
waltz we danced. It ended as it had begun:
me, droopy in your arms and woebegone
over what bright, blue eyes you have, my Lamb,
my wooly Woo. We tipped to the doorjamb,
trippingly, your hand at my bra clasp, my thumb
in the band of your briefs. We did it
in the master bath, pressed against the sink.
We were quick, but very quiet. You came
like Christ, as a thief in the night; I split
into halves, a crimson sweet. You polished the wink
of my wet, wistful eye. Then you went home.

There's another poem from the book here.

Poetry and Symbols

Jonathan Mayhew often puts thing wonderfully succinctly. Here's a recent comment of his that I can wholeheartedly affirm, from a post on Lorca and "symbols":

"I don't see poetry as a process of encoding ideas in symbols that the reader then must decode. I understand why anyone who is taught that this is what poetry is might grow up to hate poetry."

As I quoted Lorca a few days ago: "I'll let you know what I see there. Just don't ask me to explain it."

A Book of Lives

I pour the amber
of a poem over it.

"1955, A Recollection"

*

No matter how beautiful that image is, it may imply a poetry that is static and reminiscent—and that is not at all what the poems in Edwin Morgan's A Book of Lives are. A long sequence called "Planet Wave," beginning with "In the Beginning (20 Billion BC)" and concluding with "On the Way to Barnard's Star (2300 AD)" bursts into splendid moments over and over again:

The earth dreams like a dog in a basket,
twitching, it likes to show it is alive.

"The Lisbon Earthquake (1755 AD)"

And look, a finch on the back of a tortoise
as if it had been listening
lifts its beak and begins a singing
so piercing it gives no end to that beginning.

"Darwin in the Galapagos (1835 AD)"

When Hendrix plucked, it was the mane of a lion.

"Woodstock (1969 AD)" [which concludes with a stunning poetic evocation of the fracturings of Hendrix's version of "The Star Spangled Banner"]

*

Long sequences seem to be where Morgan really comes into his own. "Gorgo and Beau" is a dialogue between two cells, one cancerous and one normal. Morgan gives the cruel "Gorgo" the stronger voice (à la Paradise Lost):

"Nothing is more boring than a well-made body."

Beau, the normal cell, is less biting but still beautiful:

"Each one of us is a world, and when its light goes out
It is right to mourn."

"Love and a Life" is a sequence of thirty-odd poems with a striking form: seven lines, the first four and the last relatively long (and varying in length), the fifth and sixth shorter, with an AAAABBA rhyme scheme. It works powerfully, and with enough variety to carry one through the whole sequence, which involves often extremely explicit recollections of (mostly?) gay love affairs. The most striking involves a man who talks Scots and does not want to leave his wife:

"'Ah love ma wife an ma weans. Ah don't go aroon thinkin aboot you day an night.
Ah wahnt tae come in yir mooth, an see thee teeth a yours—see they don't bite!
Ah like ye right enough, but aw that lovey-dovey stuff is pure shite."

Look We Have Coming to Dover!

Daljit Nagra's debut, Look We Have Coming to Dover! (Faber and Faber, 2007), deserves the attention it has been getting. Nagra "do the people in different voices": the sheer variety of varieties of English here is astonishing. By the end of the book, I found myself slipping into my cheap imitation of Indian English effortlessly, and it usually requires a huge amount of concentration on my part to get into that delightful rhythm.

That said, the two poems that struck me most as individual poems are both in "standard" English: "Parade's End" and "Sajid Naqvi." "Parade's End" memorably describes a "champagne-gold Granada" that belongs to the speaker's father and that is vandalized with acid, while "Sajid Naqvi" describes a young student (a fan of The Smiths) who dies of a "freak heart attack" and is then buried by his family in a ceremony at a mosque, where the only music is "endless hymns from the Koran."

American Lit Professorship in Basel

Here's the official English text of a job ad at the University of Basel, for various professorships, actually, but the one I care about most is the North American Literature job (which is in the department where I am an English-language, the English Seminar). So get out your resumes, all you people with Ph.D.s who might be interested in moving to Switzerland!

*

The Philosophical-Historical Faculty of the University of Basel has four openings for professors of Linguistics and Literature, to be filled as soon as possible:

Medieval French and General Literature
North American and General Literature
Slavic and General Literature
German Medieval Studies in a European Context

We are looking for people who both teach and do research in these areas and can demonstrate an appropriate breadth and theoretical-methodological variety or the potential necessary for such breadth.

The future strategy of the University of Basel plans to increasingly organize and emphasize research into "Culture" in interdisciplinary terms. Thus, the applicants are expected, beyond their work within their individual institutes and teaching programs, to be willing to do a great deal of interdisciplinary work, to participate in the existing interphilological program "General Literature;" and to be capable of working in a team.

We expect the following specialties from the individual professors:

— Medieval French and General Literature: a historical emphasis on French and European literature of the Early Modern Period.

— North American Literatures and Cultures and General Literature: an emphasis on the methods and theories of Cultural Studies and Literary Theory that have emerged in the United States.

— Slavic and General Literature: an emphasis on Russian should be complemented by expertise in at least one other Slavic culture, preferably Czech.

— German Medieval Studies in a European Context: Emphases on Historical Anthropology, General Literature (Literary Theory and Comparative Literature), and History of Language / Historical Linguistics.

The individual chairs will be filled as "Ordinariat" (Full Professor), "Extraordinariat" (Associate Professor), or tenure-track Assistant Professor, according to the qualifications of the candidates to whom offers are made. In French and English, all teaching is done in the language of study. The University's administrative language is German.

The University of Basel is committed to increasing the number of women among its professors. Applications from women are thus especially welcome.

The University of Basel offers excellent working conditions, modern infrastructure, and an exciting scholarly environment in a relatively small-scale setting (www.unibas.ch). As an autonomous university, the University of Basel depends on the participation of professors in the University administration.

Contact addresses: Applicants with Habilitationen or equivalent qualifications are asked to submit the usual documents (CV, list of publications—without writing samples, list of courses offered, current and planned projects) to the Dekanat der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel, Bernoullistrasse 28, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland, by December 31, 2007. Further information is available from the Dean, Prof. Ueli Mäder (Tel. 0041 (0)61 267 34 09).

Animal Bar

Party Shuffle gave me "Animal Bar," by the Red Hot Chili Peppers (from Stadium Arcadium)—what is it with songwriters these days, suddenly including references to "great" novelists? (See also my post on Bright Eyes, "Gold Mine Gutted")

never 21 when everyone's a sailor
coming up strong with the animal bar
ever loving more with mr. norman mailer
turn another page at the animal bar
and it wont be long
no it wont be long
no it wont be long
because it can't be long

The extra touch of irony here, of course, is that Mailer died last week.

Tricked Out Like a Poet

"I'll let you know what I see there. Just don't ask me to explain it." ("In the Forest of the Lunar Grapefruits")

*

Clock Echo

I sat down
in a clearing in time.
It was a pool of silence.
White silence.
Incredible ring
where the bright stars collide
with a dozen floating
black numbers.

*

Might as well say star
as orange.
Riverbed as sky.

("South")

*

By day, the farmhand's
guitar,
by night, Pierrot's
mandolin.

("Three Crepuscular Poems II")

*

And so the boat stops.
There's a rhythmless peace
& I scamper on deck
tricked out like a poet.

("Dreams")

Federico Garcia Lorca, Suites, tr. Jerome Rothenberg, Green Integer, 2001

Jacob and Trintignant

Sam of the Ten Thousand Things posted a stunning still of Irène Jacob from Kieslowski's Rouge. Here's one of Jacob and Jean-Louis Trintigant from the same movie:

What a beautiful movie. I must watch it again soon.

Homeopathy

One thing that drives me nuts is when someone says, "All I know is, I get better with homeopathy."

If that drives you nuts to, you need this: Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" post about homeopathy.

The extra twist to the article is that Goldacre provides a clear, concise introduction to the contemporary medical application of the scientific method.

There's also a short version of the same thing here (which Goldacre published in Lancet this week).

Here's the beginning of the Lancet piece:

"Five large meta-analyses of homoeopathy trials have been done. All have had the same result: after excluding methodologically inadequate trials and accounting for publication bias, homoeopathy produced no statistically significant benefit over placebo.[1–5] And yet homoeopathy can still be clinically useful."

("[1-5]": that is a footnote in the original.)

Ingredients

Editorial Anonymous is a blog written by a children's book editor (I was tipped off to it by Brian Campbell). This is from a post about what to say in cover letters:

"Showing me that you are aware of the ingredients of a good manuscript rather than simply your reaction to it sets you apart."

That seems to me to nicely capture an important distinction: between one's understanding of how a work of art works and one's response to the work.

To this day, I cannot stand the movie Blue Velvet. But at least I confronted it once (in a class on American films) and now understand both what makes it so powerful and what makes it so disturbing.

Editorial Anonymous continues with a lovely metaphor:

"You know, most people enjoy any cake that is pretty and palatable, and that's about all they can say about it. Other bakers, though, can tell that this one has a good crumb and a touch of nutmeg and that the type of icing is a good match for the texture and sugar content of the cake."

You heard the man you love

I am not much of a Margaret Atwood fan. I have read several of her novels (Surfacing and The Handmaid's Tale, as well as at least one other one, I'm pretty sure), but without being thrilled by them, and I have never been that excited about her poetry, either.

But I like this one, on Poetry Daily today.

He wasn't singing for you, or about you.
He had some other source of joy

Love in the Time of Cholera

One of my favorite books has been made into a movie. David Denby was not very impressed by the movie (in his review in the New Yorker), but he wrote a beautiful description of the book, Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Love in the Time of Cholera:

"The book, moving toward its triumphant conclusion, is a wonder. The long, magnificently adorned sentences—a stately river depositing alluvial riches of Colombian culture, décor, sexuality, humor, and manners into the reader’s heart—are as intoxicating a literary experience as any available to us."

A wonder indeed. One of the most beautiful books I have ever read. "Forever," he said: that is the last line, and I would read it forever if it just kept going.

Sacks

A friend of mine sent me a link to an interview with Oliver Sacks about his new book Musicophilia. After I wrote an email to my friend about my (admittedly limited) reading of Sacks, I thought I'd post the comments here.

I've avoided Sacks's books in the past because I have read quite a few of his articles in the New Yorker and have often had a somewhat irritated feeling about them. For example, in his article about an autistic boy who drew spectacularly detailed pen-and-ink drawings of buildings from memory, OS's representation of the case seemed distorted to me because he kept obsessing on the issue of whether such aesthetically successful works could mean anything when they were so clearly not examples of "artistic expression" (given that, OS argued, the autistic boy was not "expressing" himself through his drawings).

That said, I must also admit that I would not care as much about that slight but persistent irritation if I did not otherwise enjoy OS's essays so much.

Inspired Notes

These two paragraphs were in a post at Contest Central, where they are linked to a set of quotations about poetry at a site called fieralingue. Transtrømer's comments (translated by my old friend Judith Moffett, whose science-fiction novels The Ragged World and Time, Like an Ever-Rolling Stream I highly recommend) nicely disrupt ideas of how poetry ought to "matter" by giving us poetry people a powerful image to describe what we are doing: passing "inspired notes" to each other, under the radar of "official life."

"In my civilization it's customary to describe poetry as discarded, almost moribund, an all-too-exclusive art form, without power to break through. And the poets try to push themselves upon the world of the mass media, to get a few crumbs of attention. I think it is time to emphasize that poetry--in spite of all the bad poets and bad readers -- starts from an advantageous position. A piece of paper, some words: it's simple and practical. It gives independence. Poetry requires no heavy, vulnerable apparatus that has to be lugged around, it isn't dependent on temperamental performers, dictatorial directors, bright producers with irresistible ideas. No big money is at stake. A poem doesn't come in one copy that somebody buys and locks up in a storeroom waiting for its market value to go up; it can't be stolen from a museum or become currency in the buying and selling of narcotics, or get burned up by a vandal.

When I started writing, at 16, I had a couple of like-minded school friends. Sometimes, when the lessons seemed more than usually trying, we would pass notes to each other between our desks--poems and aphorisms, which would come back with the more or less enthusiastic comments of the recipient. What an impression those scribblings would make! There is the fundamental situation of poetry. The lesson of official life goes rumbling on. We send inspired notes to one another."

— Tomas Transtrømer. Translated by Judith Moffett. from "Answer to Uj Iras." Ironwood 13 (1979): 38-9.

The Nomoi

if you are sleepy and forget a verse
it is the song that dozed,
if you rush the ending
the melody was impatient . . .

D. Nurkse, "The Nomoi," The Hudson Review
Autumn 2007

Bad Science

I have been riveted recently by Ben Goldacre's "Bad Science" site. Today's object of deflation is a machine that supposedly provides more energy than it uses. As Goldacre so wonderfully puts it as he goes about dissecting the claim: "Stick with me, science is fun when you’re making people look stupid."

Rereading in England; rereading Eugenides

Others can say whatever they like about these survey results; I'm going to say this: it is fantastic that three of the top ten re-read books in the survey of readers in Britain are Pride and Prejudice, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights. Let's hear it for Jane and the Brontës, authors of some of the greatest novels ever written. Admittedly, I re-read Jane regularly, but I hope to get to Wuthering Heights again sometime soon (which I have read at least twice), and someday I will re-read Jane Eyre as well.

Right now, though, I am re-reading Middlesex, by Jeffrey Eugenides, a book I was hugely impressed by when I first read it a few years ago. Here's what I wrote back then in an email recommending the book to friends:

"A book for Deadheads, hermaphrodites, runaways, people born in Detroit, people of Greek descent, San Franciscans, hitchhikers, lovers of silk, owners of Cadillacs, people who went to private schools, smugglers of bootleg liquor, sexologists, anyone who has ever declared bankruptcy, directors of horror movies, Ted Kennedy, future actresses, owners of topless bars, clarinetists, Stanford grads, Berliners, installation artists, career diplomats, anyone nervous about second dates, signalmen, people who were finally able to beat their Dads at ping pong, would-be kidnappers, obscure objects of desire, and everyone who has ever used a thermometer to try to influence the sex of a baby."

It's still all true, but it's not a great second read: the plot is not rich enough to drive the book on a second read (that is, JE's plotting does not stand up to Rowling's), and the proliferating details, so hugely entertaining on a first read, just seem like distractions on a second read. On a second read, in other words, JE's project of combining mainstream fiction with sophisticated post-modern fiction does not seem to come off as well as it did the first time around.

That said, I will finish it, since I have to mark a thesis on it that a student is handing in at the beginning of next month!

The Gore Administration

... the clearer nostalgia for what never happened:
Februaries in Rio, blind tropical sweethearts,
the last few treaties of the Gore Administration.

Rodney Jones, "Deathly"

Return to Calm

One of my favorite poets is Jacques Réda, whose work I have been translating for a few years now. A new volume of his work has just been published in English, a complete translation of his 1989 book Retour au calme, translated by Aaron Prevots as Return to Calm and published by Host Publications (Austin) in September. I have not had a chance to read the book yet, but Réda is a wonderful poet, and I recommend his work highly.

Two of my own Réda translations are among those that I have provided links for in the "Translations" section on the right-hand side of this blog.

Just before I was going to posting the above, it crossed my mind that I ought to mention the other volume of Réda translations currently available in English: Treading Lightly: Selected Poems 1961-1975, translated by Jennie Feldman and published by Anvil Press in England.

Luna Park

I recently read Luna Park, by the Austrian poet Franzobel, some of whose more recent, as yet unpublished work I translated earlier this year. Here's one of my favorites from the book:

GERÄTSCHAFT. EIN LIED

Stell dir einmal vor, du bist ein Fußballtor,
so maschig, breit und dick, das wäre nicht sehr schick,
denke dir jetzt nur, du wärst eine Springschnur,
so ach wie lang und dünn, auch das ist nicht so schön,
jetzt glaube erst einmal, du bist so ein Turnsaal,
hölzern, groß und mit Geruch, das wäre doch ein Huch,
da lobe ich mir doch, das Holz aus dem ich Stoff,
gerne bin ich also weiter, die Latte einer Sprossenleiter.

Brian Turner reading

Thanks to Allen Taylor for putting this one on his blog, which I like enough to do the same thing myself:

Jandl's "sonett"

Sarahjane mentioned that Ernst Jandl is hard to translate, which led me to mention Jandl's "sonett," which is pretty easy to translate. I did it by copying and pasting. :-)

In fact, I don't think you need to speak German to understand this poem! :-)

sonett

das a das e das i das o das u
das u das a das e das i das o
das u das a das e das i das o
das a das e das i das o das u

das a das e das i das o das u
das u das a das e das i das o
das u das a das e das i das o
das a das e das i das o das u

das o das u das a das e das i
das i das o das u das a das e
das e das i das o das u das a

das o das u das a das e das i
das i das o das u das a das e
das e das i das o das u das a

*

I turned Jandl's "fünfter sein" into a song to sing to my children, first in German and then later in English. The children's book with the poem and superb illustrations by Norman Junge has been translated into English, but the translation, well, did not really take the special qualities of Jandl's poem into account. Here's the German:

fünfter sein

tür auf
einer raus
einer rein
vierter sein

tür auf
einer raus
einer rein
dritter sein

tür auf
einer raus
einer rein
zweiter sein

tür auf
einer raus
einer rein
nächster sein

tür auf
einer raus
selber rein
tagherrdoktor

And my English:

fifth in line

door opens
one out
one in
fourth in line

door opens
one out
one in
third in line

door opens
one out
one in
second in line

door opens
one out
one in
next in line

door opens
one out
go in
hello doctor

Szirtes on Lessing

George Szirtes has just posted an excellent comment on Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child, one of my all-time favorite books. 40 pages of my dissertation were on that book!

Lasting Achievement

Sometimes people remain obscure even if they did something that ought to have made them "household names." For an example, first answer this question if you can: "Who was Larry LaPrise?" Then check out this poem by Bob Hicok, "A Celebration of Lasting Achievement." Put your left foot in!

And then it turns out that Larry LaPrise probably did not do what he is credited with doing! And I also learned that this whole topic has a connection to Virginia Tech, where Hicok teaches!

Household Names

Simon Armitage provides a wonderfully funny definition of "household names" in his article on war poetry in the Times:

"Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon are still household names (that is, the answers to questions in the earlier rounds of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?) ..."

Try watching "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" in a country that you did not grow up in. For you, the hardest questions will be the early ones about idioms and common cultural references in that country. Even if you speak the language very well, you'll still regularly struggle with an idiom or two! A "household name" in one country is completely obscure in another. (Try talking about baseball players with the Swiss!)

Wondermark

A while back, some blogger posted a link to Wondermark, an online comic strip, and since then I have been a dedicated reader. Every Tuesday and Friday, David Malki ! (that's how he spells his name) posts a new comic, and just now I decided to use the "random comic" link to check out a couple old ones, and I got this wonderfully hilarious one. Check him out regularly!

David Nalbandian

David Nalbandian is the man to watch in men's tennis in 2008. Here's what Rafael Nadal said after losing to him in Paris today, 6-4, 6-0 (!):

"Today I played against one who is playing better than me and than the rest of the players, too."

You heard it from Rafa first: Nalbandian is playing better than anybody. If he can start the year in the same zone, then watch out, Federer, Nadal, and Djokovic!

Mazes

If you like to do mazes, or if you have a child who likes to do mazes, then there are more mazes than you will ever be able to do in your whole life at One Billion Mazes. Miles is having a blast with them.

Nadal

Rafael Nadal when he's a break down:

Oh, you're a break up, are you?
Think you're rolling, do you?
Well, how about this?
And this?
And this?
And this?
Shake hands.
Good match.

I wrote that, in an email to a friend, after Nadal beat Andy Murray in Madrid two weeks ago. But he just did it again to Marcos Baghdatis in Paris, and I've seen him do it to my man Roger Federer a couple of times, as well as to the Swiss number two, Stanislas Wawrinka.

And I recited my little tennis poem to my son Miles, who thought it was so funny he made me recite it to him a whole bunch of times, and since then he sometimes says, out of the blue, "Shake hands. Good match." Giggle. :-)

Wind; bonobos; Las Vegas

In his article "Swingers," in the July 30 issue of the New Yorker, Ian Parker describes someone he met while researching the article: "I spoke to a tall man in his forties who went by the single name Wind, and who had driven from his home in North Carolina to sing at the event."

I like to think I met that guy once, back in 1984. I was in Las Vegas for a Dead show (April 6, for those keeping track, a show full of set-list oddities), and after the show, I went out to the car of the folks I was supposed to be driving to Irvine with. Nobody there. I was wearing a T-shirt, and the night was cool.

At the next car was a guy who was also waiting for the one with the keys. He saw that I was shivering, so he gave me a blanket to drape over my shoulders. We fell to chatting, and I asked him his name. "Wind," he said, "like what's making you cold." "No," I answered, "Wind is keeping me warm."

*

That, by the way, was the only Dead show I ever flew to. And before the show, I won a few dollars on slot machines, so except for the plane ticket and the concert tickets, the whole trip cost me nothing.

There's also the story of the drive to Irvine, and then the drive home with some other folks, but I'll save those for some other day.

"An Open Letter"

"eternally stressed semanticist" posted a hysterical "open letter" (actually, a form letter with blanks to fill in) for anyone with expertise who does not have their expertise accepted by laymen.

In the followup post, the semanticist writes:

'Please, folks, I beg you, when an expert says "you have to believe me 'cause I'm all experty", maintain a healthy skepticism. But when an expert says "Here's what I think, based on my expertise, with supporting arguments formed with the facts and methods that I learned in the pursuit of this expertise": that's when you should please-I-beg-you listen.'

As always, I like to think about this in terms of poetry: how should one respond when a non-reader of contemporary poetry makes broad generalizations about the subject? I'd like to think I have some expertise on the subject (based on my large collection of poetry books, many of which I have actually read), and I want to tell people they are missing something (especially if said people are voracious readers of novels), but in the end, they never go off to read any contemporary poetry (or at least they never tell me they have).

By the way, I found this "open letter" because of Language Log, one of my favorite sites to read (although it is often far too busy for me to keep up with!). Interested in what linguists might say about language? Check it out!

Everwine; Idling

I liked this poem, "Aubade in Autumn," by Peter Everwine, in the October 15, 2007, issue of The New Yorker. They've got something going about handymen right now (as with Cornelius Eady's "Handymen"). Alice Quinn's farewell theme? :-)

*

The same issue contained a "Talk of the Town" item about letting your car idle, "Idle Hands." It includes a reference to car-engine idling in Switzerland (or the supposed lack thereof):

'“In Switzerland you have to turn your engine off if you’re more than four cars behind the stoplight,” Rebecca Kalin, the group’s founder, said the other day. “Idling is rude there. It’s like burping—you just don’t do it.”'

Well, actually, idling is not illegal in Basel-Stadt, the canton I live in. But it is in Geneva, which is why Irène Jacob turns off her car at the stoplight in Kieslowski's "Red."

But I turn off the car whenever I am at a stoplight. For reasons, check here and here and here. And before you say, "But you should only turn it off if you are going to be idling for ten seconds or more," here's my response to that: I might have the engine off for less than 10 seconds once in a while, but considering how often I am at a stoplight for a minute or two, my turnoff time averages to well over 10 seconds per time I turn my engine off.

Art and Jan Svenungsson

"In art, no problems are ever eliminated." (Jan Svenungsson, An Artist's Text Book, forthcoming)

I once wrote an essay on Jan's work, "Abstract Reception." Here is the opening paragraph:

'For me, Jan Svenungsson's work is "abstract" in the etymological sense: it has been withdrawn from me (Latin abstractus, from abstrahere, to withdraw, to draw away). When I suggested to Jan that I write something about his work, he immediately forbade me to look at any of his works until I had done so. This would be an interesting project: the obstacles faced by a writer discussing an artist's work from memory are worth addressing. However, I have never seen Jan's work (nor met him in person); I have only read texts about it ...'

Halloween 1971

It's always fun on Halloween to listen to an old Halloween show by the Grateful Dead. I am particularly fond of October 31, 1984, at the Berkeley Community Theatre (the fourth of a wonderful six-show set, including the spectacular November 2 show), but this evening I have chosen Halloween 1971, part of which was released as Dick's Picks, Volume 2, with its rivetingly beautiful "Dark Star" (with no second verse) surprisingly seguing (out of a passage of steadily increasing dissonance) into "Sugar Magnolia" instead of "Saint Stephen" (which then comes after "Sugar Magnolia").

Addendum: And then there's the stunning segue out of the first part of "Not Fade Away" into "Going Down the Road Feeling Bad"—again, a jamming climax that suddenly and smoothly shifts gears into another song, as Garcia shifts from rapid flourishes to pretty melody lines in a matter of seconds.

Television and Imagination

A student wrote an essay about the effects of television on children. At one point, she argued that, because every story on television is presented with already determined images, television "leaves no room for one's imagination."

This is a point I have heard before (mostly with respect to differences between books and movies), but I have never quite believed it. The idea seems to be that when you read, you spontaneously generate images in your head, and that such spontaneous image generation is what imagination is. But surely imagination is much more than just image generation!

Miles and Luisa (and I) have been getting into "Shaun the Sheep." They often start acting out scenes from their favorite episodes. Isn't that imagination, too? (For clips of Shaun, go here.)

Flicker

Not the photos, but the birds, in "Weak Strong," by Gary Gildner, up on Verse Daily today.

like a drummer so deep into the gig
he can't ever stop

Predicting Paris tennis

Tennis fans who want to have a little fun should go to British Tennis to participate in their competition predicting the results of this week's Masters Series tournament in Paris. I participated in their competitions for the US Open and the Madrid tournament, and it was lots of fun.

The deadline to enter is 10 am UK time (i.e. 10.00 GMT / 11.00 CET / 05.00 US EST) on Monday 29 October. As of this writing (at 1:30 p.m. CET on Sunday), the qualifiers have not yet been added to the draw; they should be added by this evening.

Have fun! Go Roger! :-)

(Here's hoping Federer feels fit enough after reaching finals the past two weeks to still participate!)

The State of Classical Music

I was originally led to "The Musical Mystique," Richard Taruskin's New Republic article about classical music, by Robert Archambeau. Now Kyle Gann has also posted a response to Taruskin, too. The article, and both responses, are well worth a look for anyone interested in classical music, but they are also worth consideration by those who are interested in the state of poetry today (or jazz or other aesthetic interests somewhat out of step with the mainstream), mutatis mutandis, of course (I hope I'm getting the Latin right there).

I'll quote two bits from Taruskin here:

1. "To cast aesthetic preferences as moral choices at the dawn of the twenty-first century is an obscenity." No holds barred there! (I wish my students were willing to take bold positions like that—yes, I am spending the weekend marking student essays.)

2. The books he reviews end up being "unlikely to help solve classical music's most pressing problem, which is the problem of audience renewal." A question: is that also poetry's "most pressing problem?"

Kyle Gann downplays his paraphrase of Taruskin, but he also says something worth quoting at length:

"In my callow youth I was a proponent of the view Taruskin attacks, a real Adorno-ite, art-is-good-for-you, pop-music-dismisser. I'm stubborn as hell, and yet I got over it: why can't other people? One of my best assets, I think, is a strong sense of musical reality, which I attribute to having been deeply exposed to music before I could talk. And even though I grew up rather shockingly distant from my generation's beloved rock 'n' roll, my sense of reality told me fairly early on that there was nowhere to draw a line between the pleasure I got from listening to, say, Bruckner or Feldman, and the pleasure that I got from the occasional Brian Eno or Residents song that I was driven to listen to over and over again. And I slowly realized that I didn't get that pleasure from listening to, oh, Schoenberg's Piano Concerto, or Carter's Second Quartet, which I did out of a rather pious sense of duty and a feeling that they would build character. And then, of course, the new music, or Downtown music, or experimental music, or whatever delicate euphemism you terminophobes want to apply to the music that I wrote about at the Village Voice for 19 years, was a repertoire dedicated to plastering in the gigantic crack between pop and classical. Some of that music was more conventionally entertaining than other pieces, but there was no way to deeply appreciate that music and pretend that art and entertainment were separate human activities. I can boast a virtuoso range of ways to be entertained, but any music I'm not entertained by I quit listening to, no matter how highly ranked it is in the history books."

"A virtuoso range of ways to be entertained": something to aspire to. — In poetry's terms, both those who call for accessibility and those who call for difficulty (each to the exclusion of the other) obscure what they have in common: that each group is looking for entertainment. The accessibility people want to be entertained in one way, the difficulty people in another, quite different way—but they share their desire to be entertained by poetry.

Brad Mehldau, Basel, October 26, 2007

For his second encore last night in Basel, Brad Mehldau began with some playing that sounded like "Mehldau does stride piano," his left hand managing to get into a stride rhythm while still doing what it does best: arpeggiating chords in rapid swirls of notes, rather than playing all the notes of the chord at once, as a standard stride rhythm would do. (Is there a term for that? Playing a chord "normally," so to speak, rather than with arpeggios?) Then out came the head: "Monk's Dream." And what a version followed: solo piano, first developing the bluesy stride playing, then becoming more like a ballad before moving into the swirling kaleidoscope of sound that is Mehldau's specialty.

That was one of the highlights for me. As Mehldau did not announce any of the tunes, there were only two other tunes I was sure about: Billy Joel's "New York State of Mind" (stately and elegant) and the final encore, "Mother Nature's Son," moving from beautiful highlighting of the melody to vary playful soloing. I was pretty sure I heard Radiohead's "Exit Music" in there, too.

Mehldau in Basel tomorrow night

As I mentioned a few months ago, I'll be getting to see Brad Mehldau solo in Basel tomorrow night. Here's Brad solo, the only video of him on youtube without either his trio or Pat Metheny! Unfortunately, this cuts off rather abruptly. Oh well.



"Dear Prudence" is a tune that also always makes me think of Jerry Garcia, who used to play such soaring versions of it with the Jerry Garcia Band.

Perhaps I should also mention that the duo CD Mehldau recorded with Metheny is beautiful.

Hedges plays Bach

Here's Michael Hedges again, this time playing the prelude to the first Bach cello suite, one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard (and one I played on classical guitar at my daughter Sara's baptism last year).

It's so sad that Michael talks about driving safely after the concert, given that he died in a car accident. Drive safely, folks.

Hurray for Pete Stark

Let's hear it for Pete Stark:

"But President Bush’s statements about children’s health shouldn’t be taken any more seriously than his lies about the war in Iraq. The truth is that Bush just likes to blow things up. In Iraq, in the United States and in Congress." (Thanks to Dan Savage for this.)

Ornette Coleman Anthology

Back in May, I made a list of my favorite jazz compositions, and in it, discussing Thelonious Monk's "Epistrophy," I mentioned Alexander von Schlippenbach's triple CD Monk's Casino, the only recording I know of that includes every known Monk composition. It's a brilliant CD, released by the wonderful Zurich label Intakt Records.

I have now just received a similarly wonderful recording on Intakt, an Ornette Coleman Anthology recorded by pianist Aki Takase and saxophonist Silke Eberhard. It's not the complete Coleman (I think he has been more prolific than Monk was), but it is a brilliant collection of superbly arranged tunes that, stripped down to piano and horn, really highlight just how compelling Ornette's music is. Highly recommended!

(Disclaimer: I translated the liner notes of both these CDs.)

(And here is a bit of Takase on piano ... with Schlippenbach!)

(And while I am at it, I was also overwhelmed by von Schlippenbach's recent solo piano releases, Twelve Tone Tales, in two volumes, also on Intakt.)

An evolutionary defense of empiricism

In "More Than Meets the I," her vigorous and entertaining omnibus review in the October 07 issue of Poetry, Ange Mlinko uses Jay Wright to present a form of philosophical skepticism:

'... science tells us that “our sense data are primarily symbols,” translated to the brain via nerve impulses and reassembled in the frontal cortex [...]. Appearances are deceiving. What we see is just an interface.'

The problem with the conclusion here is that Mlinko, like so many others, fails to recognize the explanatory power of evolution: if the "symbolic sense data" of "appearances" are false, then the human brain would be poorly adapted to the physical world, and the human species would die out if its brain did not adapt to that physical world.

Here's another way to put the point: any human brain (or brain of any species, for that matter) that does not produce a relatively precise image of the world around it is less likely to survive and successfully reproduce than a brain with a more precise image of the world around it. So "our sense data" may be "primarily symbols," but there is every reason to believe that those symbols are accurate (at least for those with healthy brains).

So here's a third way to put the point: rejection of empiricism entails rejection of evolution.

*

To be fair to Mlinko, I should refer to the whole passage I cited from above:

Quoting Suzanne Langer in Elaine's Book (collected in Transfigurations), [Jay] Wright lays claim to her insight: “and the triumph of empiricism is jeopardized by the surprising truth that our sense data are primarily symbols.” For poets of this tendency, the world is occult, and poetry's attentiveness helps tease out the hidden reality:

What we call
our own might only be
the first stroke upon
a stellar
clock, an instant shift
of center, a notion

the Cusan could
propose and stir
unfaithfulness
in the atom.
—From Equation Three

Nicolas of Cusa posited the existence of an intellect comprising more than that which sense data and reason tell us. Now that science tells us that “our sense data are primarily symbols,” translated to the brain via nerve impulses and reassembled in the frontal cortex, the Cusan's truth is confirmed. Appearances are deceiving. What we see is just an interface. The very building blocks of matter are in flux.

The Sensation of Writing

George Szirtes has some interesting thoughts on the "sensation of writing" (partly in response to Don Paterson's essay on "the lyric principle" in the latest Poetry Review). At the end of his post, GS writes:

"I would like to open this line of thought to others and invite any poets reading this to send me their account of the sensation of writing. Keep it honest, keep it simple. As simple as it will go, at any rate."

So I thought I'd spread the word on GS's interesting call for ideas.

Here's my take on it, at least today's. It involves three quotations:

1. In a profile in the New Yorker back in the 1990s, David Mamet said something like this: "Writing is the only thing that stops the thinking, you know. It's the only way to turn off all that dreadful noise in there." I've always loved that line, as it perfectly captures one sensation I have when writing: that it fully occupies my otherwise utterly restless mind, turning off even the almost endless musical soundtrack that plays in the back of my head (picking up on whatever I happen to have heard most recently, whether it be the music of a commercial, the theme song to a children's program I watched with my kids, or Thelonious Monk). [If anybody who reads this has the complete New Yorker in electronic form, can you try to find that profile of Mamet for me and check his precise words?)

2. One of my touchstones for a long time has been Jorge Luis Borges's "Borges and I": "I shall remain in Borges, not in myself (if it is true that I am someone), but I recognize myself less in his books than in many others or in the laborious strumming of a guitar." I recognize myself less in my own writing than in the writing of others (as all these quotations suggest), but in the act of writing, there is even a third person present: not the one who will later have written, and not the name that attaches itself to what that one will later have written, but the one who is writing. The one whose mind is quiet?

3. In Anna Karenina, Levin mows: "The longer Levin mowed, the oftener he experienced those moments of oblivion when it was not his arms which swung the scythe but the scythe which seemed to mow of itself, a body full of life and consciousness of its own, as though by magic, without a thought being given to it, the work did itself regularly and carefully. Those were the most blessed moments." The "most blessed moments" in creative work are those moments when the mind is quiet, the self disappears, and the work does itself, "regularly and carefully."

Okay, I did not "keep it simple," George, but it is honest! :-)

Addendum:

And then there is the sensation of not-writing, or between-writing:

AFTERMATH

Another journey underway,
the painter on the foredeck of
the overloaded ferryboat
sees, past the sea wall and out
over the straits, the aftermath
of sunlight from behind the clouds,
a brighter form of rain. The harbor
opposite moves from blur into focus
as the ferry moves, its wake
first spray in the painter's face.
Light and cloud and mist: what is
to be captured on canvas. He'll hold
the brush in the air the way the ship,
sailing without a sail, hangs
before it falls again down on
the waves. Behind him, every stroke
he's ever painted; the unpainted
before him, this passage from one harbor
to another, the ferry rolling,
with every breaker, deeper down
in what is, what will have been.

(The Reader 16; Cabinet d'Amateur)

Lyrikline update

I just received the latest newsletter from the wonderful lyrikline site. There are new translations into English of Klaus Rifbjerg (Denmark), Lars Gustafsson (Sweden), Norbert Hummelt (Germany), Vladas Braziūnas (Lithuania), and Steffen Popp (Germany). The latest English-language poet to be added is Gerald Stern.

If you have never checked out lyrikline, do so: a huge stock of recordings of poems in a tremendous variety of languages (46 and counting!).

From Underture to Aerial Boundaries

Miles has been getting into The Who, which is okay by me. He especially likes "Behind Blue Eyes" and "Baba O'Reilly" from Who's Next, as well as "Overture" and "Pinball Wizard" from Tommy. My favorite bits of Tommy are "Sparks" and "Underture."

So I remember watching Michael Hedges play "Underture" at the Varsity in Palo Alto back in the eighties. He described how he used to sit on his back porch listening to Tommy, which is a rock opera, and how he thought that was very cool, a rock opera, and that operas have overtures, which Tommy does, too, but that Tommy has an "Underture," which he thought was very cool. Then he leapt across the stage and began "Underture" with a big, swinging power chord that would have made Pete Townshend proud.

Remembering all this, I checked whether there's a video of Michael playing "Underture" on youtube. No luck. So here's "Aerial Boundaries" instead, making me all nostalgic for all those times I had the joy and privilege of hearing Michael play, back at the Varsity in Palo Alto.

Gestapo tactics

'Our humanity has been compromised by those who use Gestapo tactics in our war. The longer we stand idly by while they do so, the more we resemble those “good Germans” who professed ignorance of their own Gestapo.' (Frank Rich, "The 'Good Germans' among Us," New York Times, October 14, 2007)

Or as Katherine Anne Porter said about Sacco and Vanzetti (as quoted in the New Yorker of October 8, 2007): "Life felt very grubby and mean, as if we were all of us soiled and disgraced and would never in this world live it down."

(Note that Sacco and Vanzetti were executed on my birthday, August 23.)

Spoon River Anthology

One book I picked up in the U.S. this summer was Spoon River Anthology, by Edgar Lee Masters. I found the book quite surprising: for some reason, I had always assumed that it was a collection of idyllic poems without a dark side, but that is completely wrong. Masters is almost entirely interested in the dark side of small-town life: the pettiness, the tyranny, all the things that make people want to run away to the big city.

Further, quotation of single poems from the book misrepresents it, no matter how good the individual poems may be. For it is in the tensions between pairs of poems (or among sets of poems) that the book really comes to life. Each poem is spoken by one dead person in the Spoon River cemetery, and when the speakers' stories contradict each other, things get exciting.

But instead of quoting several to show you what I mean, I'll just quote one that I like a few lines of—perhaps it's the musician in me that especially likes this one:

BLIND JACK

I had fiddled all day at the county fair.
But driving home “Butch” Weldy and Jack McGuire,
Who were roaring full, made me fiddle and fiddle
To the song of Susie Skinner, while whipping the horses
Till they ran away. Blind as I was, I tried to get out
As the carriage fell in the ditch,
And was caught in the wheels and killed.
There’s a blind man here with a brow
As big and white as a cloud.
And all we fiddlers, from highest to lowest,
Writers of music and tellers of stories
Sit at his feet,
And hear him sing of the fall of Troy.

Rule of Law

More from Glenn Greenwald:

'In a 1998 essay in Foreign Affairs entitled "The Rule of Law Revival," Thomas Carothers of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace wrote optimistically that the "rule of law" has now become the centerpiece, the prime consensus, for most international relations and has been recognized as the linchpin for third-world countries developing into functioning democracies. Here is how he defined the basic principles of "the rule of law":

LEGAL BEDROCK

THE RULE of law can be defined as a system in which the laws are public knowledge, are clear in meaning, and apply equally to everyone. They enshrine and uphold the political and civil liberties that have gained status as universal human rights over the last half-century. . . . Perhaps most important, the government is embedded in a comprehensive legal framework, its officials accept that the law will be applied to their own conduct, and the government seeks to be law-abiding.

What is happening now in Washington is -- in every respect -- the exact opposite of this. Already, it was revealed that our highest government officials, including the President, broke the law deliberately and for years by spying on Americans without the warrants required by the laws we enacted, and all of official Washington immediately agreed that nothing should happen as a result. And nothing did happen.'

Greenwald's essays are so long I can rarely read them all, but there are always bits like this (and the one I quoted on Friday) that nicely cut through the nonsense of the chattering classes.

Playing the Game

Nicholas Manning observes that Doris Lessing has a Myspace page.

She's also probably the first Nobel Prize winner to have published a graphic novel, Playing the Game.

And thanks to Nicholas for this wonderful clip of Doris in action:

Shortwave

"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." (Brian Phillips, "Poetry and the Problem of Taste," Poetry, September 2007)

Shortwave radios: that sounds pretty cool to me.

Here's a less metaphorical approach to the same issue from later in the article:

"Another sign that subjective taste has weakened in poetry is the very obsession of the activists, who feel that poetry has become a subculture catering entirely to its own needs. This idea has prompted a long train of bullet-point-riddled essays advocating various means by which poetry could be rescued from its subcultural ghetto and restored to the culture at large. But poetry is not, and never has been, a subculture; at the moment it more exactly resembles something that tried to become a subculture and failed. One of the defining characteristics of a functioning subculture—one, that is, which is successfully satisfying the needs for which its participants turn to it—is that its members are indifferent to, possibly even embrace, its lack of popularity. We see this in every field; in the anxiety of the indie-rock audience when a cult band signs with a major record label, for instance. It is only when a subculture fails to satisfy the needs of its members that, like a fringe political movement, it begins to covet adoption by the outside world, as though this could provide a meaning that it is incapable of generating for itself." (boldface added by me)

Poetry as a failed subculture—not even a subculture, perhaps, but "just" a hobby?

Years ago, when my wife taught German in Poitiers, in France, I talked to a class of hers about poetry. One of the students asked her beforehand if poetry was my "hobby"—I was actually a bit offended. But a hobby can be a very honorable thing, can't it? :-)

On hypocrisy

Larry Craig, writes Hendrik Hertzberg, "is like the many politicians who have smoked marijuana themselves but oppose legalizing it even for medical use. Hypocritical? Yes. But, in both cases, the fundamental moral problem is not the inconsistency between private actions and professed beliefs. The problem is the professed beliefs." (New Yorker, September 17, 2007)

The Bill of Rights is the Far Left

From Glenn Greenwald:

'Bill O'Reilly devoted the beginning of his show last night to warning Americans about the dangerous radicalism of John Edwards, proclaiming that "John Edwards has no chance to become president because he's simply too far-left for most Americans." After highlighting all the scary, fringe positions Edwards holds, O'Reilly summarized what the Far-Left America would look like once John Edwards got done with it:

[W]ould you support President John Edwards? Remember, no coerced interrogation, civilian lawyers in courts for captured overseas terrorists, no branding the Iranian guards terrorists, and no phone surveillance without a specific warrant.

Who could even fathom an America plagued by habeas corpus, search warrants, and a military that fails to beat, freeze and mock-execute its detainees? And nothing is more sacred to core American values than branding other countries' armies as "Terrorists" ("The [Revolutionary] Guard is the SS of Iran"). O'Reilly has aptly highlighted here the new ideological divide in our political culture -- one is now on the "Left," usually the "Far Left," if one supports what were previously the defining attributes of basic American liberties, while one is "Serious" and "Responsible" and "Centrist/Right" only if one is too sophisticated and "tough" to actually think that such effete and abstract things matter.'

Put me on the Far Left, and proud of it.

Read more here.

Harlot

Let's hear it for American poets in Switzerland who publish books—in this case, Jill Alexander Essbaum, with her new Harlot. (And, of course, a tip of the hat to Reb Livingston, too, for all her efforts to publish poetry and support poets.)

Campfire watercolor

Today, Luisa wanted to do some watercolors with the coloring pages from the "Sendung mit der Maus."

I knew she would want me to paint with/for her, but she paints much better than I do, so I started my own painting, of a campfire, on the page I had written a few lines on last night.


I wrote the lines in my head first (following Jonathan Mayhew's "Complete Sentence Game," but adding in that each sentence was supposed to be iambic pentameter), but even then, I made some mistakes writing them down.

I wrote the last two sentences in my head last night and did not write them down. But I remembered them this morning.

I think my desire to paint on my draft was also influenced by the Best American Poetry cartoons here.

Doris Lessing!

Well, I never would have thought I would be so excited that Doris Lessing finally won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but I guess that having written part of my dissertation on her work left more of a trace on my emotions than I thought it did. (Ph. D. in Comp. Lit., 1995: "Observing Women: Doris Lessing, Christa Wolf, and Marguerite Duras.")

I've been pondering re-reading a bunch of Lessing for a year or so now, and I know that when I do, I will start with the first book of hers I ever read — not The Golden Notebook, sprawling and "important," but the deceptively small and utterly overpowering The Fifth Child, which is what I recommend (as highly as I possibly can) for anyone who has not read her work before (in fact, for anyone who has never read it; it's a mindboggling book). [But do NOT go on to read the abysmally bad sequel, Ben in the World!)

At almost 88, she might respond as Jaroslav Seifert supposedly did in 1984: "What good does it do me now?" :-)

Age of Iron

"He heard me out civilly. I was entitled to my opinion, he said. I did not change his mind.

"But now I ask myself: what right do I have to opinions about comradeship or anything else? ... To have opinions in a vacuum, opinions that touch no one, is, it seems to me, nothing. Opinions must be heard by others, heard and weighed, not just listened to out of politeness. And to be weighed they must have weight."

(J. M. Coetzee, Age of Iron)

1. The speaker, Mrs. Curren, is the narrator of the book, a white South African woman, around 70, dying of cancer, in the mid-to-late 1980s. A black man, Mr. Thabane, responded to her remarks earlier in the book by saying, "You are entitled to your opinion." It struck me how nasty that statement is. It means something like this: "Your opinion is utter and complete nonsense, but it is beneath me to argue with you about it."

2. Mrs. Curren argues that opinions have to be put on the line in order to be at all valid. In fact, she ends up implying that, as long as she is not willing to get out into the world and argue with people about her opinions, she is not entitled to her opinions.

3. This moment is important in Coetzee's work as a whole. In Elizabeth Costello, the title character argues that realism in fiction requires ideas to be embodied in characters. Mrs. Curren makes the same point in a more indirect way: ideas by themselves are nothing; there must be a person to back them up.

4. In Diary of a Bad Year, the narrator presents his "strong opinions," because he has been asked to do so by a German publishing house that is going to publish a collection of the "strong opinions" of various writers. The interactions between the narrator, his typist, and the typist's boyfriend provide the context of resistance to those strong opinions that entitle the narrator to them, in Mrs. Curren's sense.

The Sidewinder

I picked up Lee Morgan's The Sidewinder, with its unforgettable title cut, and listened to it for the first time in years. It's as brilliant as I remember it, back when I used to play it on KZSU all the time in my student-DJ days back at Stanford in the 80s.

I had forgotten that Joe Henderson is the tenor player, wonderfully contrasting with Morgan's trumpet, and that Billy Higgins is the drummer. But the latter does not surprise me: since almost everything Higgins ever played on danced lightly even in ballads and in hard-bop, it's no wonder that this was long Blue Note's biggest hit. Somebody should write a complete Wikipedia page about him!

Addendum: I also picked up Joe Henderson's Page One, another recording I have not heard for ages. Kenny Dorham's "Blue Bossa," the opening track, is just as exquisite as "The Sidewinder." And McCoy Tyner is brilliant on piano.

I don't think I played "Blue Bossa" as often as "The Sidewinder" back in my radio days, but I also understand why "Blue Bossa" really deserves to be called a "jazz standard," in a way that "The Sidewinder" does not. "Blue Bossa" is just a perfect tune; in my few attempts to actually play jazz (and not just fake it), it was one of the tunes I learned a lot from: relatively simple, but with huge amounts of space in it for soloists and accompanists to move around in.

Publications

Today, in a new experience for me, my mailbox contained not one but two journals that contain poems of mine.

The latest issue (number 27) of "The Reader" contains two of my poems, "Wind" and "September." Nice company: for example, R. S. Thomas and Tom Paulin. "Wind" is on-line as a song I recorded back around 2000.

The latest issue (number 141, Summer 2007) of "Orbis" (the only literary magazine without a website?) contains my poem "Go Ogle" (and the issue even, honor of honors, has my name on the cover!). The poem has already been commented on as "a take on obituaries which is very funny in places"; the commenter (Tony Williams) has two poems in the issue as well. There's also a review of John Ash's latest by Rob Mackenzie.

If anyone who reads the issue of "Orbis" and my poem wants to tell me what they think the poem is about (as I was delighted to hear that it is "a take on obituaries"), I'd love to hear your ideas. I wonder what people might make of it.

I also recently had a poem in "Cadenza" (issue 17): "Fever," which can also be heard at the link for "Wind" above. If you get a look at the issue, don't look in the poetry section for my poem, which is well hidden.

Obvious

"Nothing is so obvious that it’s obvious. When someone says that something is obvious, it seems almost certain that it is anything but obvious – even to them. The use of the word 'obvious' indicates the absence of a logical argument – an attempt to convince the reader by asserting the truth of something by saying it a little louder."

That's Errol Morris, from an interesting piece on his New York Times blog.

Wombles

Seth Abramson posted this on his blog with a wonderful comment. Here's what I wrote as a comment on his post:

I lived in Leamington Spa, England, for a year when I was nine years old. It was 1973-74 ... so my parents, my sisters, and I missed the end of Nixon's presidency (although I'm sure my parents were playing close attention).

In return, we got to watch the Wombles. Thanks for posting this! It's so good I'm going to post it on my blog, too.

Adam and Eady

A few weeks ago I commented on a funny little poem by Les Murray in the New Yorker, as well as on the other poem in the same issue, by Joni Mitchell (!).

I just saw the links for the two poems in the latest issue, so I thought I would check them out to see if the current issue looks any better, poem-wise.

One is by Adam Zagajewski, "Karmelicka" (translated by Clare Cavanagh); the other is by Cornelius Eady, "Handymen."

A much better pair (though still not brilliant) than the quite funny but quite flimsy Murray poem and the lyric by Joni.

By the way, the issue is, as far as I know, still under the aegis of poetry editor Alice Quinn (and not yet a playground for Paul Muldoon).

Lucille

Marc Krebs writes a weekly column in the Basler Zeitung called "Pop von gestern auf dem iPod von heute" ("Yesterday's Pop on Today's iPod"; the column is unfortunately not available for free on the paper's website), in which he glosses a song from the Swiss hit parade from a while back. Today's gloss is about Donna Summer's "I Feel Love," but the column always includes the rest of the top 5 from the week in question, and one spot ahead of Summer at number 4 from October 8, 1977, is Kenny Rogers with "Lucille."

That was the time when I first began to seriously listen to the radio, and not knowing better, I listened to Top 40 radio (not that there was much else available in Toledo, Ohio, in those years). And the fact that Rogers sings about "a bar in Toledo" in "Lucille" got my attention.

Not that I ever bought the single or an album by Rogers, but I can still sing you the first couple lines if you want me to (as well as, of course, the unforgettable — but still not very good — chorus).

It probably helps that my cousin John knew a parody in the voice of a trucker. Its chorus went "You picked a fine time to leave me, loose wheel." :-)

Birthday coincidence

Listening to Brad Mehldau this morning ("How Long Has This Been Going On?" from Art of the Trio, Volume 5: Progression), with Larry Grenadier and Jorge Rossy. I'm looking forward to his solo concert in Basel on October 26.

Last.fm is tracking what I listen to, and I was trying to fix something with the last.fm window, and I noticed that Mehldau was born on August 23, 1970—not the same year as me, but the same day.

Meaningless, of course, but no less touching in its own peculiar way.

"Im Verlauf meiner weiteren Beschäftigung mit den Skizzenbüchern und dem Leben Turners bin ich dann auf die an sich völlig bedeutungslose, mich aber nichtsdestoweniger eigenartig berührende Tatsache gestoßen, dass er, Turner, im Jahr 1798, auf einer Landfahrt durch Wales, auch an der Mündung des Mawddach gewesen ist und dass er zu jener Zeit genauso alt war wie ich bei dem Begräbnis von Cutiau." (W. G. Sebald, Austerlitz)

Miles plays the Beatles

Miles and I had a session yesterday with his drum teacher, Lorenz Hunziker (of Mañana), as part of the Drum School Basel's Open House (Tag der offenen Tür). Lorenz is on keyboards here, since Miles is on drums.

This was Miles's first truly public performance (the previous one was only semi-public, at a wedding), and this time it was on his real instrument (drum set), rather than on bongos. I think he looks right at home. :-)

Schönste Lieder

Wie waren dies Nächte und innig die Augen, sie glänzten, es streiften und zärtlich die Hände, sie atmeten leise, und zitternd und nah war es ein Flüstern, als lägen bald offen, bald lächelnd verschleiert wie Lippen die Blätter, die Arme, der Fluss.

Michael Donhauser, Schönste Lieder

This is from Michael Donhauser's latest book, a collection of intensely rhythmic prose pieces featuring three striking characteristics that make them stand out in their feel from much other poetry in German these days (and also in English):

1. An open acknowledgment of Hölderlin's syntactical inventiveness ("es streiften und zärtlich die Hände).

2. Use of the dummy "es" to great effect (the same phrase again), along with more referential uses ("nah war es ein Flüstern").

3. Extremely strict meter in prose (here, I think it has to called "amphibrachic": a stressed syllable between two unstressed ones).

I love Donhauser's Sarganserland, and his Venedig: Oktober (with its "half-sonnets"). There's some Donhauser in English from Shearsman here.

Gold Mine Gutted

A friend of mine (guitarist in the Swiss band Mañana) gave me some stuff by Bright Eyes. Several tunes have caught my attention while I work and listen to the music in the background, the most recent one being "Gold Mine Gutted," with its wonderful opening lines:

It was Don Delillo, whiskey neat,
And a blinking midnight clock

For me, right now, it's Bright Eyes, Ardbeg neat, and a computer screen.

Imaginary Prosody

"It's like arguing about the prosody of poem that may or may not exist ..." is the beginning of a striking post by Jonathan Mayhew. It may sound like literary theory, but it turns out to be an allegory of ... theology.

Check it out, and feel free to tell me (and him) what you think.

Gebirtig

Here's something for people in the Basel area: Gebirtig, a "fairy tale with music," by Joshua Sobol, based on the poetry of Mordechai Gebirtig. This production premieres in Weil am Rhein on September 20, with music by the wondrous Baith Jaffe Klezmer Orchestra (featuring Andreas Wäldele, my excellent but unfortunately erstwhile mandolin teacher—I simply don't have time to practice enough!).

Dylan as poetry 2

In their comments on my post on Dylan as poetry, Don Brown emphasized the element of performance as essential to the poetic quality of Dylan's lyrics, while Brian Campbell pointed out the absurdity of the apparent literary-critical assumption that evaluation of lyrics as poetry means that one should ignore the music when considering the "poetic quality" of a lyric. In his second comment, Brian quoted the comments on his blog by R. W. Watkins, who did not dispute that songs can be evaluated as poetry, but argued that Dylan is not the best example (Nick Cave and Tom Waits, among others, being better).

Several responses:

— Anyone listing people who are at least as good as Dylan should go and listen to a whole bunch of Greg Brown. (Do I proselytize? Yes, I proselytize. I am large, I contain multitudes.)

— Don and Brian's comments mesh nicely: the performance of the music is essential to a great lyric. This has some implications about how the songwriter's goals are different than the poet's. When writing a song, I am extremely focused on how the words feel in my mouth when sung, as it were. Further, listeners to songs want to sing along, and that has an immense influence on what constitutes a good lyric. When I read poetry, which I do so quite passionately, I am looking for many things, but I don't think that "singing along" is what I am looking for, either literally or figuratively.

— The pragmatist in me says that I should stop discussing Dylan as poetry hypothetically and look at a lyric and a poem. So here's "All Along the Watchtower" (words copied from bobdylan.com):

"There must be some way out of here," said the joker to the thief,
"There's too much confusion, I can't get no relief.
Businessmen, they drink my wine, plowmen dig my earth,
None of them along the line know what any of it is worth."

"No reason to get excited," the thief, he kindly spoke,
"There are many here among us who feel that life is but a joke.
But you and I, we've been through that, and this is not our fate,
So let us not talk falsely now, the hour is getting late."

All along the watchtower, princes kept the view
While all the women came and went, barefoot servants, too.

Outside in the distance a wildcat did growl,
Two riders were approaching, the wind began to howl.

To have something to compare this to, I used some random-number generation (and a bit of hedging) to pull a book out of my poetry collection and find a poem with a similar structure. I ended up with Philip Larkin:

Who called love conquering,
When its sweet flower
So easily dries among the sour
Lanes of the living?

Flowerless demonstrative weeds
Selfishly spread,
The white bride drowns in her bed
And tiny curled greeds

Grapple the sun down
By three o’clock
When the dire cloak of dark
Stiffens the town.

— I won't go into an analysis of the differences between the two, and of their relative quality. But one thing is quite clear here that I have long noticed as a significant difference between songs and poems: enjambment is rare in songs, or even completely absent (due to the conventions, I guess, of melodic phrasing), while it is an essential tool of the poet, whether in formal verse or in free verse.

If anyone would like to comment on these two texts, I'd love to hear what you have to say.

Stella Blue

I have never doubted that Jerry Garcia wrote some absolutely gorgeous ballads (with Robert Hunter's words, of course), but if you have ever doubted Garcia's songwriting, then check out Willie Nelson's version of Garcia-Hunter's "Stella Blue" on Willie's CD "Songbird" (the title cut of which is a version of the Fleetwood Mac song). The extra twist of the CD is that Willie uses Ryan Adams and the Cardinals as a backing band.

Hicok afterwards

Thanks to C. Dale Young for the link to "So I Know," by Bob Hicok, who, as you can gather from the poem, was one of the Virginia Tech killer's creative writing teachers.

I am trying to mean more than I did
when I started writing this poem, too soon
people will say, so what. This is what I do.

Schneiden

SCHNEIDEN

(im Andenken an meine Schwiegermutter Anna Delpho, 25 Nov. 1929-12 Sept. 2007)

1
Ein Mädchen saß in der Küche ihres Elternhauses
und schnitt Gemüse mit ihrem Vater,
der wegen seiner Kriegsverletzung
auf dem Feld nicht arbeitete.

Was sagten sie sich, das jüngste Kind
und der auf Krücken Gehende?
Ich weiß es nicht, aber eins ist sicher:
sie schnitten alles in der Hand.

2
Ich stand in der Küche meiner Schwiegereltern
und schnitt Gemüse auf einem großen Brett,
und meine Schwiegermutter stellte sich
neben mich, Kräuter schneidend, in der Hand.

Ich machte Platz auf meinem Brett,
dass sie die Kräuter hinlegen konnte.
"Nein, Andrew", sagte sie, "danke, aber
ich bin kein Brettschneider."

3
Aus der Schublade hole ich das große Brett,
lege daneben eine Zwiebel, eine Karotte,
einen Paprika, zwei Kartoffeln, eine Zucchini.
In die Pfanne gieß ich etwas Olivenöl.
Den Herd stelle ich an. Ich schneide die Zwiebel,
schiebe die Stücke von dem Brett
in die Pfanne, schneide weiter, die Zucchini
in Scheiben, dass mein Sohn sie herauspicken kann.
Salz und Pfeffer gebe ich dazu.

Handschneider, hast du Kräuter? Ich bin Brettschneider,
schneidest du sie für mich, in der Hand?

Zawinul, Shorter

The other Zawinul composition (besides "Birdland") that I turned to this morning was "In a Silent Way," from the Miles Davis album of the same name. And here's a video of Zawinul and Shorter doing "In a Silent Way" in 1991. It's called "Miles Davis and Friends," but Miles just stands there!

When listening to "Birdland" last night, I found a note about Zawinul's death that said he died of cancer. As my mother-in-law (two years older than JZ) is also dying of cancer right now, I found myself sobbing in front of the computer, while scatting along with the tune.

Joe Zawinul

Joe Zawinul died today at 75. Here's Weather Report doing "Birdland", the song that immediately started singing through my mind, live in Germany in 1978.

Funny Les

Here's a funny little poem by Les Murray, from the latest New Yorker.

The issue also contains a poem by Joni Mitchell. It shows that, while song lyrics are poems, they are not automatically good poems ...

Stones

I recently got copies of "Bridges to Babylon" (1997) and "Voodoo Lounge" (1994), by the Rolling Stones. My sense of the public reception of the Stones is that people think that no album they have released since "Tattoo You" (1981) has been worth bothering with.

Having listened to these two CDs now, I think that's unfair. Many bands would kill to make CDs this good.

Interestingly, though, I do have the sense that the individual songs are not that striking. It's just the overall feel of the CDs that is good.

Temporary Single Parent

My wife has been out of town since last Thursday, so I have been a single parent with three children (7, 3, and 1).

Such experiences give me only the greatest respect for anyone who is actually raising children alone ...

Review of Diary of a Bad Year

Here's the first review I have seen of J. M. Coetzee's new book, Diary of a Bad Year. Warning: spoiler! But of course Coetzee is not really about the plot.

The reviewer, Christopher Tayler, is right on target about two things: the book is more openly funny than anything JMC has written before, and it ends up being moving in a surprisingly new way for JMC. By which I mean that it is not moving because it is harrowing (as Disgrace so brilliantly is), but because it is touching.

Dylan as poetry

I posted this comment on Matt Merrill's post about Dylan. Matt was responding to this piece (which I have not read yet).

*

First of all, it's a little hard to test Dylan's lyrics as poetry, since his best texts are ones that one is mostly already familiar with. Perhaps Andrew Motion (and you and I) should have read the lyrics to all the songs on "Modern Times" before listening to the CD. An experiment for his next album?

Secondly, I'm a little unsure about the idea of "depending for effects on the music"? It's hard to separate the music and the text, of course, but just because the music provides effects does not mean the text could not stand alone. To use your example of RT: "1952 Vincent Black Lightning" is a wondrous text. I can't imagine without the music, because I know RT's version too well, as well as Greg Brown's superb cover of it on his "The Live One," but the text is still flawless.

Finally, I have a collection of Greg Brown's live covers of Dylan that is fantastic. I can send you a copy if you like.

Diary of a Bad Year

I started my project of reading and re-reading books by J. M. Coetzee (see all the recent posts with "J. M. Coetzee" as a label) in anticipation of the publication of his new book, Diary of a Bad Year. Now I have the book, and I have read it. But I intentionally read it without taking any notes—I wanted to just read it for the sheer pleasure of it. Well, since I am one of only two people I know who liked his previous novel, Slow Man (which I cannot reread because my copy is somewhere in a still unpacked box of books, almost one year after we moved), you should take this with a grain of salt: Diary of a Bad Year is a fascinating book. I'll be re-reading it soon, and will post comments on it when I do so. (Before then, I'll be posting a comment on Age of Iron that I have not had time to type up.)

Setlist

Well, Miles and I played at the wedding of our friends Mark and Tanja this evening, Miles on bongos, me on guitar and vocals. Two great songs for weddings by Sir Paul himself:

1. Things We Said Today
2. With a Little Help from My Friends

Federer-Isner

Two comments on the match between Roger Federer and John Isner at the U.S. Open today (6-7, 6-2, 6-4 for Federer):

Long-term: Watch out for John Isner. I'm not sure whether he'll be in the top 10, but top 30 by next summer.

Short-term: If Federer keeps playing this well (0 unforced errors in the second and third sets), then the only player left in the draw who has any chance of beating him now is Djokovic.