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)