Edmund Wilson

LUCIDITY FORCE EASE
The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour of the harp and the violin – some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.

Ce devait être quelque vieux refrain de comédie musicale datant de mes années d’université; ses échos douceâtres avec de temps en temps la note un peu aigre d’une harpe ou d’un violin semblaient, même avec cet écho faux et iréel, avoir conservé plus d’humanité et de charme que la musique de danse le plus moderne n’en pouvait suggérer. Je jetai un coup d’oeil à Daisy – elle regardait maintenant comme une gentille petite fille la rive qui défilait – et je tombai dans une rêverie sentimentale.

Les souches mince d'une douceur liée, avec de temps en temps une note frailly sure de la harpe et le violon - certaines musiques old-tune comédie Je me souvenais de mes années de collège - me semblait même dans ce échos parasites et de lutins de conserver une plus ce qui était humain et plus charmante que le rythme de la musique de danse plus récente avait jamais permis de posséder, et comme je l'ai regardé à Daisy, regardant comme un enfant charmant bonhomme, à des sites de la côte en passant, j'ai été touché par sentimentale rêverie.

Robert Briffault and the woe of foetid inheritance

But rebellion may be, after all, one of our most desirable traits. In his ground-breaking work The Mothers, British anthropologist Robert Briffault found that Western children are indeed rebellious by nature. Briffault argued that it is only when we are able to "shake off the dead hand of traditional heredity" that we reach our highest potential.

Episodes of Sublime Transubstantiation by Means of Prose

It is possible to safely and faithfully say that over the last thirty years I have recited to myself, three hundred times, often aloud, a passage from the vastly under-appreciated novel of Edmund Wilson
I THOUGHT OF DAISY:
The thin strains of linkéd sweetness, with now and then a note frailly sour of the harp and the violin – some old musical-comedy tune I remembered from my college days - seemed to me even in this false and elfin echo to keep more that was human and charming than the pace of the newer dance music had ever allowed it to possess; and as I glanced at Daisy, gazing out like a charming good-natured child, at the sights of the passing shore, I was touched with sentimental revery.
Call it sleep, call it praying; a peace mantra.
From Robert Craft's AN IMPROBABLE LIFE:
What I learned in the hospital is that the time between heartbeats varies in healthy hearts, but not in diseased ones on the verge of failure. Thus a perfectly steady heartbeat is more likely to be found in elderly, rigid bodies than in flexible young ones. The corollary of this is that fractal patterns of considerable complexity are linked to healthy heart functioning, and that when the complexity disappears, sudden death may follow.

Mark Reep - Il Miglior Fabbro

Mark Reep -- blog and art.
In the Thirteenth century, on the northern shore of the Mediterranean, a stonemason was a poet and a diarist, and he made pictures so that he could be inside their making.
Let us say that he lay under plane trees and ate a peach and a sheaf of flat bread, and long-contemplated the forms with which he construed spirits' paths.
This he did without permission, and without an agent, and the curator of the gallery in which he presented his works, was a red deer, that wandered by.

Frederick Reuss

Frederick Reuss – HORACE AFOOT
The prose fiction construct Horace Afoot portrays a male personal character having willfully located himself in, shall we say, the Midwest: he drinks fine wine, abjures travel by automobile; and means himself to as complete a disaffection as is practicable: vines curl about the hovel. He is a particular swirl of relational facets, by which a reader will and can be admiring and intrigued. In Ohio and Indiana and Illinois souls are nominally grey and have been planed down to a thin verso of negligible expectation, pared to a point where the only move sich pawns have left to make: is to surprise. Naturally and consequently, it is the latter who lend water and soil to the former, an exchange whose explication by sweet narrative materializes by the hand of Reuss with considerable grace of form.
Here, of this we can be sure: billions of persons daily rot in hunger, and several broad patterns of pain fester parts of the earth we can all call jewels. Some of us have been sheltered from the non-feasance of souls by capitalism and lethal greeds of other portly fashions. Those who deliquesce in measures of the unwobbling pivot by reading aloud passages from THE GREAT GATSBY can feel safe bedding down in the cold desert night, or rocked in a lifeboat by bleak waves at sea. We are all, always alone. All hypnosis is self-hypnosis, and Yogananda sees only ourselves being ourselves; no one is ever out of character. So that: but: yet still is there the grand-sky immeasurable in the alchemy of delightful Reuss’s writing; the naturally-decided chemical combinations which produce liquidity and sunrises in language-form.
Walking around Enfield Glen and Lucifer Falls, a five mile CCC path rocked and stepped and carved, glaciology rampante, I imagine that these first Reuss novels came like meteorites, each in its own way perfectly formed, quite like the lyrical reflections in Gatsby: the first few days of a transatlantic voyage by sail. And the future book that he is in fact promising us, and for which we will be duly grateful, will possess that which the first few, shining and amiably composed, did, and will also have the grandeur of telling us how we read.

Artist: Dan Bacich

The work of our noble friend Dan Bacich, upstate New York - particularly the assemblages - defy the darkest night.
My gift to you outright.

Two ways to read Paul Auster

This boy read an Auster novel.



HERE! James Wood unmasks the man who writes TV Guide synopses. (It's in The New Yorker.)

Jaymay

On some occasions it is possible to indisputably identify in art and music the quite precise source of the operating process by which a work's virtue causes the truest recognition in a viewer's or listener's heart. In Jaymay, that source is the point equidistant between the march and the waltz, with drollery.

appreci: Sara Midda

There is the abhorrence of bad manners
the manners that are called bad,
the common behavior that bears traits of
indifference to suffering
and even the palest forms of cruelty.
There is disdain for crude language
and much sadness for the ways of humankind’s
turning blossoms into mush
at the bottom of the bin.

One form of rainstorm appears so:
without wind at all, late at night,
soon pouring off the eaves and sealing
within:
gentility.
And the end of remorse
for the boors.

Juxtaposition stopped being funny in 1968

Mervyn Peake -- TITUS GROAN

Frederick Reuss

HENRY OF ATLANTIC CITY

1. Reuss’ saint-boy is never not assessing his relation to the evident world by way of an endless loop of the Gnostic Gospels, and is situated within the prose fiction in such a way that a reader may always be on the verge of realizing that the cops returning him to one of the few stable waves with which he is familiar, may not quite be the imperial guards his expressionist (Reuss) allows us to briefly suppose they might be, in full, to Henry.
2. Excepting Berkeleyan Henry, all the character figures in the novel effectively simulate both characters in a novel, and the sorts of personality-forms among whom readers will spend their day. But Henry’s voice is confined (almost entirely) within the good and affectionate Reuss, and dwells there cupped in the warm hands of our faith.
3. Longue durée has been excused from the breadth of Henry’s acuity; there are no invisible elisions, and he appears before and regards each of his subsequent idiomatic set-pieces in a state of free autism that is moderated only by the kindnesses and needs of those who are presented to us in such a way that they appear to be regarding him as being a breathing boy.
4. Those readers who injudiciously regard Atlantic City casinos and culture as depraved and morbid may have difficulty participating in Henry’s apperception that theirs is a holiness equivalent to all others, including warm naps in a hammock in the fiercely lovely Fairmount, Indiana, or squatting in a dumpster that might put us in mind of a penetrating vile heartlessness.
5. The McMurray&Beck production of the book is most pleasing. Shall we not remember that we read hundreds of books by dozens of publishers who imagine that we are only grimy and wallet-mongering monkeys, who do not respond with gladsome hearts to fine binding, exquisite typeface, and excellent clarity? Lose not thy most human of convictions, our noble Greg Michalson!
6. The arrangement I have made with Frederick Reuss allows the confection (mine own) of a few hundred pages of manuscript draft situated somewhere in the middle of the book, in which Henry’s cosmology is unfolded (context is everything) and flowers like ten thousand pink peony bushes. Perhaps there are typescripts or diskettes lying fallow in a desk, stacked under magazines or in the vertical arrearage of plastic cases, rejected or never considered, which I can pretend would have allowed the Henry construct a native semantic being unmediated by Reuss or me.
7. There is the noting that no transubstantiating doggy canine dog renders Henry peaceably extra-literate, though perhaps the author allows this in other books, which I’m eager to read, for this story told round the campfire gave me much delight and satisfaction.
8. I should very probably have preferred not to be brusquely touched upon my brow that Henry discovers Buddhist conciliation when the author and I break off our engagement, as I always am puzzled and dismayed by the convention that prose fictions shall ere have denouements, but it is hard to shuck off the delights that usually obtain from stories in which descriptions of young people learning the ways of the world illumine the insecure margins and ever-shifting boundaries of both our strongest and most faint confidences.

after postmodernism

In 1976 I was caught out in Lake Ontario in a very small boat, in rolling and tumbling waves far larger than any I had experienced on even the roughest days on Cayuga Lake. When I found land, my fingers were bleeding from grasping the gunwales, and my muscles were locked in something I might have called a death grip. Reaching the harbor and tying up at the dock – to the astonishment of those persons in the boatyard wiser than to venture out on such a day – was a moment I later came to recognize as an authoritative experience, in which there was nothing rhetorical, ironic, or satiric, about finding safe harbor.
I feel that way about Henry James. I had not imagined that anything could challenge the finite, unassailable core of Daisy and Isabel and Kate and Charlotte, until the last couple of years when I read In Search of Lost Time and had the many obscure months afterward to site the stars, and locate my one true path back to James through Proust.
Pound had presciently and famously recognized Joyce’s Ulysses as an end, not a beginning. Until literary greatness is thrust upon us once again, we will seek to find a new thinker futilely. Richard Price, especially in Lush Life, is returning to the quay of Henry James, permitting the next insurgency, which we may have difficulty recognizing.

^{Night ferry crosses still river}

Southern Mississippi.

Last leaves of lights from the passing shore

flicker on forearms rested on the railing,

and the dim cries of birds

and the fragrance of unknown trees

enfold the dreamer like a counterpane

of beneficence and peace

and is-at-home.

Such manners appeal redemption,

as a child evades execration,

the well-read searcher the woe

that from such wisps obtain.

No story provisions tribulation.

... drift to remembrance

that obscure object of desire

and the impression that bohemian village life

was not what it seemed;

the fabulous raspberries

were a temporal conveyance;

the waltz was streaked with shades of sweat,

and the place where you are,

breathing in the mossy and swampy smell of the

riverbank,

is

not

in your element.

Mount Ventoux

The years pass by, four seasons each, and much of the time we might as well be fearing tigers jumping out of the shadows.

In a vague way, I have imagined that I would never get myself more sophisticated than to have a deep and dreamy appreciation of the astrolabe, the sextant, the binnacle, the octant; but at the age of 31 I bought a bicycle (Raleigh, North Carolina) and for three years it was the total expression for me, of transportation. Urban bike courier without a message. (Plato.)
Later, 600km rides became a frequent means of being, during which elevated levels of opiates within the bloodrush provided the structure by which I could evade every tiger's slashing teeth and horrible gutturals.
Petrarch climbed Mount Ventoux in 1336, and much has been made of this by humanists, Morris Bishop (who one day crossed paths with Richard Farina, Vladimir Nabokov, Noni Korf, Barbie Hodes, and me), various philosophers of the modern, and many inchoate or primitive existentialists. The poet climbing doubtless considered the ways of the soul and the ways of the world, yet may also have sweated and strained, and breathed shallow breaths near where Tom Simpson, in 1967, encountered the mystifying and dense "otherness" that some of us experience during sudden cardiac arrest (unfinished). Petrarch's opiates made a grand dance of coordinates with reference to stars and sun, transformation, and gravity, on Ventoux.

Sometimes the heart
beats to the rhythm
of the derailleur.

William Harmon: One Bagatelle for a Dead Friend

Randall Jarrell: renaissance pending

It is not inconceivable that American literary criticism will come to its senses and encourage scholars and readers to pay attention, if not obeisance, to Jarrell. Rereading PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION, I had not before realized that he is one of those few writers for whom each sentence reads like a short story, with grace, direction, and balance within. Edmund Wilson, in other words. Doubtless there are studies explaining why balanced sentences marching along de-tum, de-tum, de-tum, can surprise us by being beautiful and elegant. Wilson's "The Author at Sixty" presses wee tears from squeezed eyelids, so soft and soothing are the lyrics of his reflection. Jarrell was known for enjoying a diverse palette of pleasures (sports cars, cats, football, opera; then: manners, a syntax of many forms of music, dissimulation of pompous boors, celestial navigation). There is nothing in PICTURES FROM AN INSTITUTION that denotes 1954, the year of its publication. We will wish that critics could explain why that is; perhaps cadence is the machine that produces time-travel? I have never known why I was born (in 1947) with a vein of disapproval and disgust deep within me for the work of Karl Shapiro, but I am just now learning that it was he (after all, and wisely) who asked persons to be reminded by Jarrell, of Rilke.
In some Vienna cafe, 2009, a man and a woman talk to one another over a table, into the night, coming and going (in love) and speaking of the shade tree that holds in its warm shadows the enrapturing counterpane of

Randall Jarrell + Marcel Proust
as one

Erie Canal: sentiments journey

We shut off the Evinrude. Our boat drifts, but there is no breeze at all to move the boat in any direction.
Canvas chairs on the rear deck.
Over-iced white russians; sweet biscuits with a mash of strawberries.
"Very interesting work has been done with both the bass saxophone and the soprano saxophone: Sidney Bechet, Steve Lacy, Morphine, much lamented."
"As solo instruments?"
"That, yes; also with violin. And piano."
We are smelling the wet woods and fields; the sun in the haze of sky toasts the water and the earth nearby, as if clouds of smoke were, shall we say, wrapping us in counterpanes of oak and affection.

"Nick got up. He was all right."

David Markson, Fred Exley

I missed the book-review volleying that will have taken place relating to David Markson’s private-eye novel, EPITAPH FOR A TRAMP. Many wags have tried to write “the world’s longest haiku” and I think of them when I imagine that Markson was trying to write the coolest character in all of literature. The tribe of persons who (freely) allow themselves the intoxicating delusion that Greenwich Village in the late 1950s was the innermost chamber of the heart of cool will doubtless have read the book wondering if Markson was writing a detective novel to garner some of the cash that is falsely called ‘quick,’ or if he was writing the true book, his Gatsby; the secret sharer, the purloined letter.
I don’t recall reading a book (coffee, a sandwich, it’s raining all month in Ithaca, New York this year) with such sun-beating presence of auctorus; you and I spy through the costume parade, and no one is ever out of character, Chaucer is the neediest pilgrim, who, in Canterbury, regretted, celebrated, and swam with the beguiled.
Buoyed in restless seas, treading between the emperor’s new clothes and "le musée sans murs."
Harry Fannin: Bartleby drinking champagne.

Oh, it was a real castle!

Richard Yates

George Starbuck suggested I might want to try a fiction course, perhaps to relieve myself of the regular quartering I’d endured for the first year in the poetry workshops (Jane Delynn, Norman Dubie, and other banks of jagged teeth). Seymour Krim bullied that his course would take prose as a guerrilla form, and so I turned to Richard Yates’ seminars.

I don’t remember who was in the class, by name, but the querulous presence later called Milch was much in evidence. But he was beautiful too; and debated Yates about prosody and Django Reinhardt. We’re here in the Majors.

Dick was talking about Gatsby. It was lyrical; his esteem for Fitzgerald’s writing was rhapsodic. And his love looked just like remorse.

Claude Levi-Strauss and Memory’s Meridians

When Henri Gaudier-Brzeska was killed at Neuville-St.-Vaast (Great War, 1914-1918) Gulpilil’s shoulder into the beached craft did not surrender to easeful death, a form and genre bent to cautious stargarzing, and I touched with the tip of my finger, a spot on my face below my eye and a few centimeters toward the front of the ear.

Time on the Erie Canal

The Erie Canal was completed in 1825, and improved westward transit in a dramatic fashion that can today can only be expressed by imagining the simultaneous introduction of stagecraft, Freudian playwrighting, Method acting, Romanticism, the invention of the pathetic fallacy and the suspension of disbelief, and Shakespeare.
Its glory was brief.
Above, the Canal in downtown Syracuse.
For soon trains became faster and cheaper, and the Canal’s utility was diminished, and only the stout hearts of mad dreamers held that the vision of truth resided in the pace of bicycles, skiffs, and canal boats.

Persons who have always lived by canals have become accustomed to the visual ruse by which in the wooded horizontal scene shows the top half of a boat gracefully plying a canal the water of which is completely invisible and about which one had, while bagging dogshit or composing the first intuitive fragment of a poem, or placing oneself in one’s home environment of fishgates and bridges and fish ladders and outlets and inlets and feeder streams, altogether forgotten. Yet that abiding and ultimate familiarity also attunes one to the overgenerous beauty and wonder of boats on canals, which ply at their own speed – which is slow, slowness is beauty quoth Binyon– apart from the pattern of the housy streets and according exclusively to turmoiled hydraulics or runoff’s erosion or an engineer’s digplan, and provides a nerve-deep orientation to what may be felt as a pastoral and idyllic milieu of one’s own, one’s very own.

Frederic Moreau’s epiphany embraces and suffuses his moist skin and lyric memory while his feet are balanced against the subtlest gravity of a dear hull tipping in the seiche of canalriver water; trees perform a gracewalk past him at six miles per hour; the marvel and savor of the cucumber sandwiches and the gin drinks catch the delicious brack of water reeds and fishy excresis, and also a breeze that has cradled the aroma of lavender crops and cabbage leaves crossing summery flanderen fields. [Freshwater fish should be accused of breathing, each scale is the lung of a bellicose tyrant, a javelin flung toward the faces of the common man, those children who affect to be discomfited by malodorous wafts.]

Frederic Moreau’s revelation believes, as so must he, that the obscure object of his affection is experiencing correlative swoons, or even more than absolute, should such a thing be possible, swoons that are his very own, and therefore the channels or canals of synaesthetic sympathy are open to the most mad torrents of his any devising, as packets or barges pass in the opposite direction and wake a brief instability in her legs and his, only to rectify as not on solid earth to the identical bouyance and two-step challenged by the packet or barge boring someplace.

People on the shore are mudders, snipers, axolotls; wage-slaves, malefactors, underfed; meat, bearers, doormen. The very air I breathe adeck is charmed and pickled with my glory. In college many of my professors eventually allowed that it was I who taught them this book or that. A thousand ashrams are called Phil.

There is a place vaguely located in the soul of the body that responds to the passion that is sometimes called headlong just as herding dogs respond to a disorganized scramble of disorderly lambs, and that place is located vaguely mid the torso and the abdominal generality, with fluid pipes gushing chemicals inward and jetting pleural fluids outwards, with tides of the body’s organs’ liquors tinged with panic and longing harmonizing with the salt of the moon and the gravity of the surges of the seas, and in that place the very same too was flung upon the vortex the shambling soul of my Hart Crane.

If you are pleasure crafting from Syracuse to Rome, New York, sailing singlehanded includes time to leave the rudder and make coffee, maybe time enough for a nap, or for reading a chapter. There are long miles of the Erie Canal along which you will not see either another boat or a campcottage. This is where the cows often come down in the summer to stand to their elbows in the shoreyard. A narrow two-lane bridge crosses overhead. [Yon ago with time sedated to a mortuary state by fifty years, isolated by blood in the family ferry, other voices and other rooms will have been saying that I grew up on the Erie Canal and the lakes of sylvan New York, the dearest upstate valley lakes.] This incidence of perplexing non-interruption is less possible by several measures in France and Holland, where canals are treated with the royal respect of a pre-Revolutionary era. In Paris with my benighted cycling friends (despite picnics at the Musee d’Orsay, and long dinners mid sumptuous wicker and exquisite waitress-devils from Shanghai) I was unable to coerce them to join me on a cruise up the Canal St. Martin, murderous regrets they must now bear like benighted burros. Long leagues and shallow fathoms of the Erie Canal south of and west of Rochester are peaceful and farmy; yachtspersons hold to an opinion that nears the quixotic, and so they have been historically there displeased. And the stone locks hold mute and indifferent as the epochs came and the epochs went.

This summer has brought my band of opaque appreciations the warmth of radium, with the sunlights and rainshowers of the melancholy of farewell, and I have fired two thousand tiles bound for wally tile art murals, eternity, and the piquant twist of the memory for those addressing a lover standing in front of my Alfred Sisley, my Auguste Macke, my Tamara de Lempicka. I do not recall when exactly it was that I became aware of and interested in the sword in the stone of the futur anterieur, but thereafter holding close my dear Swiss guard chickens in its regard, I felt myself finally safe in the stalwart stone bosom of unassailable self-assurance, masked and basked in the sound of Miles Davis, blue and cool, certain William Carlos Williams poems, Merce Cunningham’s revelation of movement, together fundamentally in the topography and elevation of our water table. In a manner of rustication, in a manner of repose, I am soon verily to have taken a week to drive along and sleep by the canal, the Erie Canal extant, the Barge Canal not less hushed, reading and drinking coffee in canalside sidewalk cafes until the sun goes down, then eating and reading in canalside restaurants and bars, and then lingering with cocktails until there will have been the finding oneself tipping a view over the edge of the embankment toward the surge of the currents, the eight or ten hours before waking in sunlight in the camper van, and finding a café where I can taste coffee, and read, and watch the boats go by, and such current as there is, an almost imperceptible drift.

Ken Chowder - DELICATE GEOMETRY

artwork (c) Anthony Falbo reproduced with appreciation

There are streets in Portland, Oregon - neighborhoods under the rainy trees, houses, sidewalks - where the utterest peace resides. Equanimous folk, in love with dogs, nurse-cradled by certain forms of music, rendered ablissed by certain wines and fulsome conversation. Add as one may: currant spreads and morning toast, a quiet half hour with coffee and newspaper, the sound of rain and the light of sunbeams. Here live Carrie and Evan and Rice. Napping in a hammock.
From cracks in the flooring seep:
invidiousness,
hate,
blackmail,
inheritance,
desecration,
and slaughter.
so that unusual love is murdered once again.

It would therefore appear that Ken Chowder has stopped writing novels.

War dead

I have mentioned that one of my successes-of-intuition (I call it that, but I feel it within me more as a liberating triumph) was to drive to Mississippi as a reaction/personal solution to 9/11. There my bearings were my own, in the dizzying delight that comes from finding oneself in a place where no one knows your name (Shamrock Texas, Mount Tamalpais, the second deck of an RER train leaving Paris) and I could breathe the air of Clarksdale and Strayhorn, Savage, Sarah, Sledge, Falcon, Darling, Jackson, Tupelo, Hattiesburg, and Greenville indifferent to the ways in which the state was declared repulsive by outlanders, and immune to the ways in which the Civil War was wrung bloodless with sentimentality.

In the Great War, The Battle of Verdun resulted in a quarter-million deaths, with perhaps another 200,000 “missing.” At The Battle of the Somme, also in 1916, on the first day, 19,000 British soldiers were killed. The Battle cost well over 300,000 British German and French lives. There were three engagements at Ypres, a small Belgian town near the coast, the third of which included the Battle of Passchendaele; 600,000 men died.
There are today 137 British cemeteries in the Ypres vicinity.
Beyond these interments, 90,000 bodies were never found.

Ezra Cornell’s brother was a Union soldier. I visited the ravine in Vicksburg he had described. Earlier, in Ithaca, he had fished in the gorges that formed the southern and northern boundaries of his brother’s farm, that is to say, Cornell University, where, one hundred years later, Pynchon, Farina, and Nabokov acted out theatrical exuberances or chased butterflies.

Daniel wrote:
"I received my wound on the 19th of May at the first charge on the works in the rear of Vicksburg, our Brigade charged on what was called Fort Hill. my position was colour bearer and I had to go down a small ravine which was in the hillside. I was struck directly under and about 3/4 of an inch from my left eye --I did not fall, nor did the colours go down. I then went and lay down behind a fallen tree expecting to bleed to death. the ball had apparently struck the limb of a tree and was comeing diagonaly down as it passed through my hat rim over my left temple, it passed through the roof of my mouth cutting an ugly gash on the inside of my right cheek and lodged at the angle of my jaw shattering it severely."

In addition to Thoreau's "Most men lead lives of quiet desperation and go to the grave with the song still in them" the thousands of war dead - boys, mostly, inexperienced, never in love, stillborn, and jetsam - lead to the inevitable conclusion that some persons require long lives to tell their whole story, but many hundreds of thousands of them dying young had no story or song at all, and long life would only have rewritten many times over their epitaph as a neglected wage-slave and brute, loved by no one save their family, which in many cases, was in name only.

Art tile murals

Loudeac Tile Studio - Ithaca
me fecit
artwork by Jo Dunnick, Oregon USA

Έκανα αυτό το
Gaudi

我在此
Rothko

John Singer Sargent

My Marxist friends see in the Sargent the homicide of millions kept from the leisure work of the arts and sciences. My Freudian friends recall the tidal forces trumping all others, not failing to conjecture that she has chosen to be eternally powerful. Dancers faint away with delicious envy for her slenderness and lines. Pigment canvas colorant memory sunbeams. Offal, sweat tangs, boils, necropsy, sewage, grime, muck, scat, compost, mildewed yeasts, screeches, horses’ neighs of excruciation, children’s howls of execration.

In college, L and I would visit and talk after midnight. It seemed useful to declare that we would talk until exactly 1:00 AM or exactly 2:15 AM, so difficult did it seem to part at what we did not then really know were a thousand roses blooming. Often 4:30 and 5:00 would come. Later we were reading THE GOLDEN BOWL at the same time, though in far cities on the Erie Canal, and were also feeling the way in which as yet unknowable forces were presenting themselves to our various senses as the person to whom he was married was becoming the person to whom I would come to be married. During those times the three of us would sit at the dinner table with gin long after the plates were filling with stubbed cigarettes, waves of awful and fleshy sentiment wafting through and among and around us. To prevent our asphyxiation, we would try to lighten a few moments by book reviewing James.
Though he thereafter stultified his life for thirty years trying to lift trainloads of iron ore from the bottom of a dark pit in a high school in yet another village on the Erie Canal, I returned to Aurora and Ithaca on Cayuga Lake and for thirty years sublimely awing sailed with the ethereal spirits of prose fiction. Soon it will be forty years since the ice cubes in the gin melted in the August heat, yet I am unchanged in the fashion of believing that he would see more that was human and charming in the Sargent than I.

Jordan Baker

It is not Gatsby’s book, it is a Nick Carraway’s book.
Often so - they often say.
Yet the only truly still center is Jordan Baker, whose eyes see plainly the doomed space between Jay and Daisy.
Whose eyes peer in steel about the trashlands of Long Island, near enough to the thing we have traditionally called omniscience.
And it is she who makes and quits the scene,
she who pities Nick his rube’s erudition.
Jordan is Fitzgerald’s only confidante, whose story it is, and she is more than he aloof, detached, cool.
Wiser than Scott?
Willing to dance mid flames.
Jordan is in the wings, as we (readers) frittel and pombel our chere bloopers in gluttonous manes of musical chairs:
on our stage and on our stages,
in our despoiled and pathetic present tense.

More Chowder, Ken

BLACKBIRD DAYS is a beautifully-patterned language machine that immerses our memory in pools of anomie and acedia, the shadows of ambiguity, and the eccentric humor of Buster Keaton, as three brothers walk blindly through minefields of their own devising and the more normal sloughs of complexing parents, half-wrenched romantic-emotional situation comedies, and the damnable absence of an unwavering pivot. In matters of craft, the book has welcomed into the conspiracy we build with Chowder: bright lights of felicitous syntax, new movie locations and sets, and a Giotto of harmony (by way of rhetorical taleteller person shifts, happy tropes, and a significant enhancement of the world’s prose literature art). We are thanking Ken, tankards swinging recklessly above our heads to the choppy and catchy music!
In the earlier birdscenes of the book, it is suggested that we, like the boys, can take our cues from things, positions, shades, stations, perspectives, shapes, and from hue and light, speculating that the ways things only look and appear, really are the touchstones of the deepest meanings of our life; as if at any moment the feng shui of the things in the aquarium, in which we endlessly circle, is going to animate, to speak, to direct us as might a square dance caller, to form the patterns of our living lives in acceptable, desirable, and anguish-free ways.
Where resides the soul?
“The brush of artifice.”
“Deliberate delusions.”
“Time lost.”
“More to life than can be despaired of.”

Then: a true inflection towards equanimity appears, a slowly materializing rosy dawn: there is the allowance and possibility that Will‘s backyard picnic with reading Lucy and gamboling Sarah will include an eminently peaceful nap in a hammock, and a potato salad that does not include some neighbor’s or friend’s wildly estranging ‘extra ingredient;’ Delsey and Neal will laugh simultaneously at a joke that is nothing like Neal’s; and Howard abandons his profession and writes language philosophy based on his discovery of synonym paragraphs, those fluid bridge-tunnels dwelling in the space between metaphor and denotation. All of this is by way of our extended afternoon of café beers with amiable Chowder, though “a more objective chronicler” might have made us drear along the way.

Bonus punt:
A lot of guys might wish that the boys had been able to take to their heart the Karenin sections of UNBEARABLE LIGHTNESS OF BEING. KC’s unwavering faith in narrative (circa 1979-1980: typed) may be quaint, but a few barks and ruffs and woofs might have sprung the diffuse woes into the stick chased to exhaustion and the drooling, lapping tongue.

Two Briffault venues

One is the Breakfast Room at the Meurice Hotel, Paris.
Another, from THE NEW LIFE OF MR. MARTIN
The kasbah stood on the brow of the mountsain. At a distance below could be seen, above a screen of foliage, the palm groves fringing a sprawling wad'. Beyond the plain was a great spur of mountains, rugged in outline and red in hue; and beyond them again, a pale rose haze - the desert - misting into the violent violet-blue of the sky.
Dream or awakening, her surroundings invited Sheila to bask in their pleasantness and luxury. The windows of the room opened upon a fairy garden, Moorish beyond mistake, with raised green-tiled paths, a fountain with square basin, sunken beds of exquisite and strange exotic flowers, and peaceful cypresses.
When later they took coffee in the garden, above which a bright crescent glittered in the turquoise sky, Sid Harun returned to the mood that had been evoked. "Do you know the Arabic word horm?" he asked.
"It means something like 'sacred' or 'tabu,' does it not? The approaches to a mosque are horm, protected against desecration," Sheila replied.
"Excellent!" he exclaimed with pleased laughter. "You are, I see, a genuine student. But the connotation extends, as with many Arabic words, much farther than can be expressed in translation. Every person also has his or her horm - privacies, that is, of life and mind, rather than, as with us, of the body, which are acknowledged and respected. One great virtue the Islamic barbarians have: politeness. We laugh at the florid formulas of Oriental civility. They are, we hold, but hollow conventions. Those verbal ramparts extend to the privacies and intimacies of life. All this may seem ludicrous, but it preserves each human horm inviolate. The flowery politeness is, to my thinking, less barbaric than the heartiness which claps you on the back and calls you Charlie."

Reynolds Price and Theresa Duncan

I had been reading Reynolds Price novels years before we became email acquaintances; we call each other "cousin" based on a shared middle name. (He had ordered a tile of the Chandos Shakespeare. Guillaume Jacque's Pere might have believed that his grandfather came from Loudeac or Carhaix or Fougeres or Paris.)
Before her death, Theresa Duncan's culture blog assumed rich and dear value in a day in which I would chase sticks with Hellhound the sheepdog, eat apples and oranges, make tiles, read books, and pass an hour or two concentrating on marveling that pharmaceuticals had altogether expunged from my life delusional paranoia and spatial hallucinations, and that technicians at the Cleveland Clinic had fiddled their knives in some judicious carving along the contours of the muscles of my heart. For some years prior to these revelations, I had wage-slaved in archives and historical repositories, and had consequently come to form rather strong feelings of pity and derision for those otherwise kind persons who preferred to find in what they erroneously called genealogy values they might be able to detect in themselves. A dispassionate observation of such self-replicating sketches reflexively formed in me the opinion that all that truly could be drawn from the outlines of the lives of one's progenitors was a dim genetic recollection of the stories that attached themselves to those pre-folk, which might as well have been told by a wine-sloshed but good-natured goof sitting around a campfire. My paternal grandfather was born in Jewel, Kansas in 1876, and then traveled by prairie schooner to Kansas City, and by train to upstate New York. My nerves and breath did something else.
One of Theresa's last posts quoted Price:

"A need to tell and hear stories is essential to the species Homo sapiens--second in necessity apparently after nourishment and before love and shelter. Millions survive without love or home, almost none in silence; the opposite of silence leads quickly to narrative, and the sound of story is the dominant sound of our lives, from the small accounts of our day's events to the vast incommunicable constructs of psychopaths."

Bill Callahan

Until the very fine day when Amy Goodman assumes her rightful space at NPR, we shall be grateful that the organization possesses the wisdom to employ the staffperson whose quite grand idea it was to lay before us the eminent Bill Callahan.
I have elsewhere remarked my admiration for Bill's work, and became so attached to a previous album, that it obscured for a moment the greatness of his current.
He is presently touring with Bachelorette, to the usual incisive and dedicated reviews.
Cheers to Drag City, label of saints.

Kangxi Dictionary Conference and Seminar

Inamorata La Vogdesa is presently attending the Kangxi Lexicography Conference in what is currently called "China." (Is there anything worse than presenting your paper on the third day of a five-day conference?)
The organizers appear to have felt that a few images of a previous conference would assuage any fears newcomers might have. Conferences always have that factitious aura of too-intentional creepiness, but these images fill me with relief that I am remaining in Ithaca, where the scene is altogether, and quite naturally, more informal. I do not imagine that V, as I think I do, has the need to contravene the order! being imposed on the conference's guests by shifting the chairs out of their symmetries, for while I catch myself still and forever expecting individualization to somehow squeak out of any regimented personality, she long ago learned to "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."

Excerpt 2: THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT

Robert Stephen Briffault (1876-1948), British anthropologist and novelist, was born in London and educated privately in Florence, Italy. He later studied medicine at the University of London. After World War I, Briffault began to establish his reputation as an anthropologist. His most notable anthropological work is The Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions (1927), a controversial attempt to prove that all simply structured cultures are basically matriarchal. Briffault's other anthropological writings include The Making of Humanity (1919; revised, Rational Evolution, 1930) and Sin and Sex (1931).
Robert Briffault is also the author of The Decline and Fall of the British Empire; Breakdown: The Collapse of Traditional Civilization; Mothers: A Study of the Origins of Sentiments and Institutions; Europa: The Days of Ignorance (novel); Europa in Limbo (novel); Marriage Past and Present; and Troubadors.
Briffault served as a physician at Gallipoli and Passchendaele (Ypres 3rd)

THE BIOGRAPHY OF ROBERT BRIFFAULT is an iambic dramatic radio play by the current editor of Ulysses' Friezes.
An excerpt:

O! might Callisto pine, and ever hight the microline!
the sheets are washed and washed again, once again, and once again,
to enwrap displacèd gores, misshapen skins,
the flaming rags and bones,
the farting heart which flat plops still,
while other boys wait for the dawning of dawn’s first light,
by which means of transport this one will perish and this one will see supper,
and this one will only know of living throbbing and grief
and the surest grasp of absent clemency,
three sorts of souls afried and poached,
and slurried off the table meal.

The songs came up from Spain,
in which crucible of contested courts of love
black gentlemen pled to sing of blackbirds and blooms,
the merry delights of unsophisticated gathering,
drinking, singing, and joys unnamed.
Night for days, festal feast of visions, bread and wine,
a russeted claret, the croissant,
crescented barged across the Mediterranean Sea.
Now the season leans to dimming,
and the leaves scape to earth;
the slanted sun steals light from sported vespers,
gloom hushes birdsong song and whistles,
we can but rest,
we can but convalesce,
we can but wake to snowy bullets raining.
We muse in gape and stupor,
that they have arms enough and man for drawing to the maelstrom,
for falling in the tempest,
and for laying out the casks of bleaching ire,
wrapped embalming,
bitt’rest blood.

1955: the antepenultimate present tense

Photograph of Miles Davis in Montreal,
achieved by Anton Corbijn (b. 1955)
for which we are all grateful

In 1955 a not particularly unprecedented yet stunning concordance of starlit events occurred. (The next timespan that would have such luminosity and present tense was 1968-1969, and there has not been one since: date 2009.)
In 1955 Charlie Parker and James Dean and Wallace Stevens died, and Emmett Till was murdered.
At that time it struck me that motor racing drivers possessed transcendental glows; Bill Vukovich and Alberto Ascari were killed. Later I got to know John Fitch who was Pierre Levegh‘s co-driver at Le Mans when Levegh’s crash killed himself and 86 spectators.
We lined up for Salk vaccine, reverently led to believe that God was touching us.
Berners-Lee and Jobs were born.
Lolita was published, in Paris.
Miles Davis played at Newport and heard the wide expanse of his future.
In Ithaca, there was the probability that on one afternoon within a few stonesthrow of each other passed Vladimir Nabokov, Thomas Pynchon, Richard Farina, Suzanne Guerlac, Barbara Hodes, Paul Fucking Wolfowitz, Judy Hamilton, Vicki Boynton, and me.
In Greenwich Village, scuffling in dusty streets and dim flats and bars of breathtaking possibility and animation, artists and writers plotted the ways in which they could portray that the next years would roll over the safe cave of freedom the mighty mossy stone of crushing derivatives and the foetid holocaust of received ideas and inheritance.

Henry James' unborn women

Alice's shallower and vainer brothers

Daisy, Kate, Isabel, Catherine, Maria, Charlotte. Henry James' women (many from upstate New York, many possessing the means of imagination to write for the New York Review of Books, or to solo circumnavigate the oceans, or to dance with complete and intuitive appreciation for Sergei Pavlovich Diaghilev) stand half-lost among the stars at the dawn of Modernism, yet too long before the challenges to governance and inheritance that took the form of blurring and then challenging gender-assignment roles, and in this way they portray themselves portraying themselves, never quite saying, held back from acting out, stillborn dreams of that thing that is sometimes called Post-Modernism (with which, I have no quarrel, for in that spinning weave of beauty and beast toil and sing those who implicitly believe in the Iroquois dreams or the Aboriginal dreamtime, though perhaps I am getting away from myself, after a fashion, teleporting myself into their company, those frozen elfs and stilled wraiths, the wisps of promise and might and wisdom that call themselves Daisy and Kate). Breath and blood essences out of time, crafted from the shapes of the night's clouds, perhaps even with some small measure of debt to Henry, and yearning to hear the "swing" of which oarsmen speak, yearning to feel the "souplesse" that cyclists seek, or yearning to complacently fix tea in the cabin of a canalboat driftsting and boobling along almost nameless canals in golden-gulled Provence. A commonplace for us to have learned: that instead, they hauled bolts of dust-catching cotton around like longshoremen, mummified themselves with scriptures of many make, and pickled themselves with the burps and poops of Alice's shallower and vainer brothers.
Until you get to Nicole Diver.

High regard for Helen Miranda Wilson

I will expect and do quite fear an urgent e-bulletin:

Helen Miranda Wilson regrets that she cannot tolerate extravagant appreciations from persons unknown to her.

Nonetheless...
(note: images and text used with appreciation and without permission)

At the end of Terrence Malick’s Days of Heaven, the pugnacious urchin Linda rejects the promise of treasures she has inherited (stultification in a grim boarding school, and the possible flushing of the liberty of her own life down into the sewers of social respectability and security) and instead walks off into a more dangerous unknown, in the company of an even more pugnacious girl... let us say to rough out the years remaining to her in rowdy cities, with alcohol, jazz music, petty crimes, and a beat trail to Hollywood, where she writes stories and scripts for movies that will not be published or produced until their visionary truth is recognized, many years after she succumbs to the various ravages of life lived as misadventure.

Which is to say: independence. So difficult to muster.

A fashion of an autobiographical note by HMW:
I used to live in New York City. Now, I live in Wellfleet, MA, the town I grew up in. I paint. I draw. I show. Sometimes it sells. My parents are dead. I have no children. I own the house I grew up in. I don't have a mortgage. I am a public servant, specializing in land use. In the last nine years, I have served on the Zoning Board of Appeals, the Planning Board, the Water Issues Advisory Committee, the Housing Authority, two Affordable Housing Task Forces, the Shellfish Advisory Board and the Selectboard, all in Wellfleet. I am a beekeeper, with five colonies. I keep chickens. I grow a lot of our vegetables and fruits. I am a member of the International Magnolia Society. I like to spend time reading in bed with cats. I have enough money to go to the movies, anytime I want and to buy as many tree peonies as I want. This was not always the case. I have good fortune. My mother loved me but she died in 1979. Her kindness informs my life. Half my family, on her side, is Russian or German. She grew up in Europe. She painted when she was young but then she stopped. Studied with Hans Hoffman in Munich when she was 17. b. 1948

Some reviews:
New York Times
By JOHN RUSSELL
Published: February 11, 1983

THE evident speciality of Helen Miranda Wilson, whose new paintings can be seen through Feb. 26 at the Monique Knowlton Gallery, 19 East 71st Street, is the small domestic interior. To be more precise, it is the very small domestic interior - the size of a jumbo postcard, a paperback novel or the pocket of a country coat.
But ''small'' in this instance is not a disparagement. Miss Wilson does not think small. She thinks big, and condenses. There is more to her tiny paintings than to most of the huge, rambling, overblown ''realist'' paintings in which we can count the stitches on the rug and read the small print on the telephone bill.
To begin with, she is a consummate editor. Nothing is there that doesn't need to be there. Next, she is very good indeed at what is now called miniaturization. With just a patch of color and a nicely judged contour she can tell us something important about where people live and how. We know who lives alone, who is expecting a lover, who is fanatical about the placing of every least object in the room and who is letting things drift for a while.
The sense of place is particularly exact in the metropolitan scenes. Miss Wilson is great on the distant industrial views that New York has to offer in profusion. Even if they are sometimes hideous in themselves, those views are ennobled by the scale, the light and the almost palpable irritability of Nature as she tries out one kind of weather after another and can't make up her mind which one to stick with.
In the country, Miss Wilson's touch seems to be not quite so sure. Possibly it is because the subject of the New Yorker set free for the summer has been so well and so often treated by others. Possibly it is because she is so absolutely right about metropolitan life that we rather begrudge the change of scene. Possibly it is because her figures - so exact and tender when encountered in the city - get a little stiff and emblematic when she puts them out of doors.
Be that as it may, her interiors are a continual delight - for her precise and unrhetorical way with the brush, her subtlety of color and her command of complicated psychological situations for which there is no one easy resolution. Imagine early Vuillard distilled and clarified by an understated but fearless imagination, and you will not be too far from the impact of these little paintings.

Helen Miranda Wilson at DC Moore - New York
Art in America, Dec, 2002 by Joe Fyfe
There's something almost medieval about Helen Miranda Wilson's small, carefully detailed paintings of the contemporary world. The human presence seems momentarily silenced by God's vast works, whether evidenced in distant vistas or in humble objects. Wilson anoints these moments: how the sky looked on a particular day (Clouds, Early Afternoon, July 1999, oil on wood, 11 by 14 inches), what was on her desk on another (Tooth, November 1999) or what it's like at the town dump (At the Transfer Station, Wellfleet, Ma., 1999). This diaristic exhibition, a gathering of improvised and sustained projects, included interior still lifes oppressively framed in glossy black wood as well as a series of sumi ink drawings of nasturtiums and honeysuckle, and some pencil drawings that seem to be studies for parts of paintings. Then there were the landscapes, which seem to communicate Wilson's vision of the world most directly. These unframed outdoor scenes of Cape Cod and rural New York State reveal a kind of tremulously peaceable kingdom.
One aspect of many of the inland scenes recalls Martin Johnson Heade, the 19th-century American artist who specialized in landscapes poised ahead of approaching rain. Wild Apple, from the Top of Mt. Rascal, Argyle, N. Y., an 11-by-11-inch oil-on-wood painting, for example, depicts an apple tree in the foreground of rolling mountainside fields interrupted by lines of dark green trees. The deep blue sky above is heavy with weather, and the distant mountains are almost completely obscured by moisture-laden air. The view feels simultaneously antique and immediate, as if you were looking at the distant landscape in a Brueghel and recognized the Catskills. There is also remarkable depth to Wilson's painted skies, and from a few feet away they almost seem to come alive.
Being the daughter of the novelist and literary critic Edmund Wilson may account for her seemingly innate trust in the power of description, the area where the visual and the verbal most comfortably overlap. Unlike her poetic-realist contemporaries, Wilson doesn't appear to require a specific psychological manner.


Helen Miranda Wilson
by John Yau
In these paintings Wilson moves into a territory that is all her own. The paintings are color sensations in which a complex range of feelings and possible readings are evoked. It used to be, or so some people claim, that when a painter did something new and different, others would notice it. Except in the case of very few artists, this hasn’t been the case in years. Wilson doesn’t care, and that is to her credit. She has persistently gone her own way for nearly forty years, and never made a single concession to the marketplace or to stylistic trends. That, to me, is heroic.

Unrhetorical? Consummate editor? Lucidity, force, ease.

Art in Review; Helen Miranda Wilson
By GRACE GLUECK
Published: October 21, 2005
DC Moore Gallery
724 Fifth Avenue, at 57th Street
Through Nov. 5

In what seems like a radical departure from her previous painting, which focused recognizably on the natural world, Helen Miranda Wilson shows oil-on-panel geometrical abstractions composed entirely of small colored squares, rectangles and parts thereof. Each of these ''calendar paintings'' refers to events in her life about the time they were painted; each unit of color represents a day.
The switch in her work to this kind of shorthand, she explains, has occurred because of a busier life. Having moved back to the Cape Cod town where she grew up, she has become an elected official and a beekeeper. So the patches of color, neatly laid out but with a handmade look -- edges that bleed slightly, drips of primer material -- represent a diminution in her desire ''to work from observation.''
Although there is no recognizable subject matter in the panels, they do have titles, like ''Tom's Salad, Thanksgiving Day,'' in which the patches, not uniformly aligned and occurring in intense colors modified by silvery grays and blacks, could conceivably celebrate a salad blitz made for a large company. And some have dates for titles, one being ''February 19, 2004,'' in which a bright red rectangle (a red letter day?) stands out among more sedate hues. Other visual stimuli include flags, quilts and honeycombs.
The softness and eccentric placement of the patches leavens the severity of their geometrics, giving the panels a folksy quality that reminds me of the painter Al Jensen's garrulous (and far more complex) schemes, minus their philosophical underpinning.


Observations of her father:
From THE FIFTIES
1952 In New York she developed a tummy-ache one morning in a way that suggested she did not want to go to school. Later she ate a large candy, and when they said they thought she was sick, she answered, “That piece of candy was weeping to be eaten.”
1953 Helen – about to play in a mud puddle: Mud is my heart’s desire.
When I asked her to pick things up: Am I the housemaid? We couldn’t make out where she had heard of housemaids.
July 1953. Helen was ill and had to go to bed just before the 4th of July. She said, “Put an ad in the paper and say, ‘No fireworks till the little girl is well.’”
Helen at Talcottville: “Little girls like lemon drops, and fathers understand, because they like lemon drops too – but mothers resist lemon drops.”
At Flat Rock, paddling – sitting around in the shallow water: “Oh, this is so enjoyable!”
1955 Helen has learned a little German. She likes to say “Genung!” and makes a quite mature gesture with her hand when the waiter is helping her to something
Talcottville: Helen, dictating a letter, wanted to say it was “very dull here”: when I remonstrated with her a little, she said, “Well, make it dullish.”
Helen said, as she was leaving for school: “I want to come back to a warm house, permeated with the smell of cookies.”
1956 Helen, when she wakes up in the morning, tells her mother her dreams. This morning, she said that she had dreamed that she had become very small, so that the cats were much bigger than she was: There were those great furry things, and I was quite tiny! Light Ginger had begun to claw at her, and she had said to her, Stop that! I’m still your mistress. Then she added to her mother: This is partly fiction.