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.