31 December 2010

Richard Farina in Paris

Peter Kahn (David Grun), Jim McConkey, Gnossos Papadopoulos, Richard Farina.
If survival can be accomplished...
Before London and Paris, there was Ithaca.


28 December 2010

Jean Seberg

25 December 2010

17 December 2010

APOLOGIES TO THE IROQUOIS

Devotees of satire and parody, and their current manifestations, fame and media, appreciate when those fundaments of culture-interpretation are stilled without equivocation. In the late 1950s, Edmund Wilson visited the longhouse at the Onondaga Nation Territory (then referred to as the Onondaga Reservation, or, with some distain, “the Res”) he saw in their most raw forms, the key elements of the Nations of the Iroquois Confederacy: democracy, matriarchy, natural law, peacemaking, and linguistic differentiation. Beyond that view, however, Wilson, (fondly but now quite distantly referred to as the “pre-eminent literary critic of the Twentieth Century”) saw that each of those characteristics were in a devolving latter stage, a twilight of the god-form in which democracy was being wrenched into victim-capital, matriarchy was supplanted by a caste system based on privilege, natural law was contravened by plutocracy, greed-wars erased the commonweal, and today’s Mohican and Onondaga languages are stultified only on blackboards.

In the early 1970s the Everson Museum in Syracuse calculated to venture that they would exhibit the feckless notions of Yoko Ono, who was then a New York City artoid. I find it disturbingly possible to imagine that John Lennon, unaccustomed to escort status and suffocating at any rate with his unseemly uxoriousness, needed to find his own space to reassume the center of the floor. At the Syracuse Jazz Festival last summer I had a long talk with an Onondaga woman who told me about Lennon’s visit to the place she called, without prejudice, “the Res.” Understanding the Nation’s 6100 acres to be a poor shambles – not so far from the truth - Lennon had carried down there gifts of music, and had met with braves and mothers and kids at the Longhouse.

My jazz festival friend said there are photographs of the meeting, and the impromptu party held to signify the Nation’s audience with the celebrated moptop. She spoke of the event with a sparkle of uncritical admiration for the star’s presence and his act of munificence.

Unencumbered by actually having seen these photographs, I imagine the countenances on the faces of the elder Onondaga gentlemen in the company of the benefactor from Liverpool – though the latter was doubtless sincerely generous and even self-effacing in the company of a truer genealogical line to the Thirteenth Century than his own on the war-mongering and imperialistic sceptered isle - and there I might see the pitying yet age-wearied tolerance of strong and natural men forced to accept irrelevant alms from the representative of the clumpy schmucks who had abused their land, perverted their bravery with brutal brutish force, poisoned their waters, and banished their heritage to the disgrace of desiccation.

But ah well, the kids wanted a used guitar, don’t you know?



11 November 2010

Zelda Sayre

not that she was naked,
but that she was beautiful

06 November 2010

25 September 2010

Virtuosity

Sophie Crumb

02 September 2010

NEXUS

15 August 2010

HERMES ON TWO WHEELS - Kevin Wehr

Cassandra Castillo

My friend Kate (Our Kate) has lived in Manhattan for thirty years, to which I attribute her ceaseless migraines and her myriad and metastasizing allergies, but she has a thousand friends and a thousand people love her, and soon she’ll come into a retirement package, so for the present, she leaves the Great City only on the weekends, for bucolic settings in Connecticut, most particularly, the exquisite milieu of Stonington.

She is the sort of person who will have honestly come by her right to contemn and execrate the bicycle couriers who have suddenly frightened her many times and have run over her sweet toes, but I recall that as a college student, she loved to see the scruffy kids in Ithaca cadging coins on the Commons, and even the bums picking up discarded butts, as signifiers of autochthonous and transgressive liberty (intuitively aware that her colleagues being milled through the university were forfeiting their qualifications for even an approximation of true bohemianism).

Kevin Wehr is a professor of Sociology and a former bicycle messenger who has intelligently explicated the culture of urban couriers, relating particularly to their oppositionalism, outlaw status, risk-taking, tribalism, punk-formalism, and general remove from the social arrangement. Wehr claims for himself a few especially elucidating words, including “effervescence,” “liminal,” and “valorization.” These imputations elevate the grungy couriers to a level of virtuosity that the proficiency of their cycling demands. One might sociologically analogize couriers to Paris Apaches or gypsies, who are expert at minimizing the visible manifestation of their malfeasance.

Those with eyes to see will detect within their deep memory a numinous recognition of the messenger’s allure, a form of metaphor that can remind them that if they were not quite altogether capable of repudiating their 44th floor monotony and buying a fixie, they were among the few who were at least capable of appreciating truly the seductive spell and charisma of the wild and rebellious cyclists.

Empathy, like memory, can be perfected, with practice, training, and sublimely heightened intention. Many Ithacans will have savored the no-longer-strange grocery store frisson of turning over the tomatoes to see which might be bruised while standing next to a monk from the Dalai Lama’s Namgyal Monastery (a Victorian house on North Aurora Street.) He stands, a placid, voiceless, and bald Tibetan in flowing carmine robes (handing over his store-discount card). And in his breath-cloud and presence one presumes a sense that your tomato neighbor spends hours in the very deepest of repose and concentration; unlike, shall we say, thyself. There are reflective persons in New York City who, on their errands, like the colporteurs of medieval eras who paused atop a mountain pass to experience stillness, stand in one spot and watch New York and its bits and pieces swirl in its hurricane. Yet exceeding even those ferocious winds are the bike messengers, each become alive as “locomotion” and savage ferocity itself. The cyclists look like big black trains steaming across the 19th Century far mid-western American plains, storming through the oceans of grazing buffalos.

In transcendental universalism, observing the bike-messenger pictured above, the accomplished empath and intrinsic dharma-bum experiences time-travel and transubstantiation, converts the fleeting aperçu into the alchemy of blood nerves and breath, and becomes (for a time) the iron horse.

04 August 2010

The Bridge of Sighs

When he is considered at all, Ford Madox Ford suffers the partially correct repute of having written one of the most memorable first lines in modern fiction: This is the saddest story I have ever heard,” from THE GOOD SOLDIER. Ford is usually considered an impressionist writer, and it is useful to remember that his other books include PROVENCE, LADIES WHOSE BRIGHT EYES, IT WAS THE NIGHTINGALE, and the novels of his masterwork tetralogy, SOME DO NOT, NO MORE PARADES, A MAN COULD STAND UP, and THE LAST POST. Ford had great faith in the power of the evocative title.

Six years ago I spent a few days driving along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, and stopped in a café bar on Boca Grande, an island thick with giant banyans and a strictly imposed milieu (there are no gas stations or motels, and golf carts rule the streets). Behind the bar a very large woman in her late forties told me that I would be ordering a cheeseburger and a beer. I felt compelled to contradict her, and ordered a steak sandwich and a vodka tonic, but that only made her laugh. We talked for half an hour, by the end of which she was more confidential than I might have expected, and reported that she had had her boyfriend leave her recently, after eighteen years living together. I gave her a look I hoped would express chagrin and sympathy, but she had something more with which to beguile me.

“And he left me for an older woman. Isn’t that the sorriest goddamned story you’ve ever heard?”



30 July 2010

HOW DO WE KNOW WE WERE HERE? first in a series


Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, and Breathless (Godard)

09 July 2010

Ulysses in Ithaca


1952. Seven years after Nagasaki, and before we sailed for Nausicaa and Charybdus, some of us were aggregated in a large room on the south end of a building on West Hill, in Ithaca, New York. Between this building’s oaky and elmy grounds, and the Nineteenth Century house to which I was carried from a birthing hospital in 1947, there is a quite small, triangular park, which features a brace of forsythia, a sloping lawn, and one enormous oak. Under this oak I now go to sit – to pass an oneiric afternoon – with a carafe of martinis, a cigar, and from within my taking the measure of the difference between time-indefinite and the réchauffé of memory’s scenes d’art. I usually take with me my dog Hellhound, whose long memory permits her to sleep in complete peace for the three hours we together each melt into our sentimental reveries. “We shall but be silt,“ quoth Hellie and I.

Eight months after Nagasaki, young verrenkt men had with eager haste returned to North America bursting with the impression that children would accelerate the forgetting, which it rather did. And so in some unison they impregnated the women they had perhaps suddenly married prior to departing for the ETO or the PTO. If twenty-nine of us fry had all taken a field trip to cross the bridge at San Luis Rey, in medias res, on a certain day, you and I would not have met like this.

Demographic actuarial statisticians employed by departments of education seemed to have fixed in their minds the casual pace of procreation and rate of infancy-survival that had preceded World War II, but in fact they had nervously to deal with teeming human surpluses that forced them to herd young people like lambs into new buildings and old annexes.

The room held one group of persons in the morning, and another in the afternoon. Names and the intertwining narrative paths associated with them jingled in my time-at-sea for many years afterward, all embraced within my arms as scoundrels, sailors, and coquettes.

Years later, on Eddy Street in Ithaca, hard by Cornell University, I spoke with Ephim Fogel (progenitor of the President of the University of Vermont), and I believe that it was Vladimir Nabokov (by then resident of Saint Petersburg, Berlin, Paris, Cannes, and Prague) of whom he spoke, describing the novelist’s asking the ten year old daughter of a colleague how she liked living in a small town. She didn’t know, she said: she’d never lived in a small town. When wee Rachel Kahn appealed to her father that her allowance might be a bit raised, she did so to the “Father of Airline Deregulation.” He was working in the White House as the “Inflation Czar” at the same time my brother was lunching there with Carter, as the EPA “Sunset Law” czar. My brother has concluded that he must have been a particularly sadistic Sixteenth Century Inquisitor, and is consequently my-brother-for-his-sins. When Laura Shill met me in 1967, she yelped “so you’re the guy who hates clichés” for which, in leafy green Geneseo, I had made myself famous and risible, such was my life-long fear-of-snakes abhorrence of canned language. When I rusticate now on sultry July and August afternoons at the little triangular park, I often read a few pages of IN THE SHADOW OF YOUNG GIRLS IN FLOWER or FINDING TIME AGAIN to abet the vodka’s roasting of my ­reminiscentia-strands entwining back. Brief moments later, in another kind of kitchen, not far from the oak and forsythia, aswoon in the present tense, before she has written THINKING IN TIME: AN INTRODUCTION TO HENRY BERGSON, or THE IMPERSONAL SUBLIME: HUGO, BAUDELAIRE, LAUTREAMONT, or VISUAL DUST: PROUST AND PHOTOGRAPHY, I stood in the breath and by the personal flesh of Suzanne Guerlac, a Haze, black-clad, pre-transgressive not-yet-beaten nik by whom I had been long-mystified and entranced, and who loped through the expansive Sargasso penels of semiotext(e), rhizome/surface tropes, and deconstructed intertextuality, and which will base the novel she will write in the American Vorticist prose that had lately led me to Hart Crane.

A few short months after 1952, Rachel Kahn met the President of the University of Vermont; they immediately ran off together to Ouagadougou Burkina Faso, and affirmed a relationship that is now spanning fifty years. Half a decade after they met, and during the time they were forging that bond, I had one conversation with the President, on the odd occasion of my knowing something that he did not. His eyes looked at me with a startling, or perhaps disarming clarity, one that was so unlike the wise-guy scowls of the sullen and the misshaped, my collegial peers. A person of reckless imagination might confect the notion that in her blossoming greensickness, it was Rachel Kahn herself who infected the President and me with a fantastical devotion to Henry James (much later on to manifest itself as his founding the Henry James­­­ Review and the Henry James Society with its fine scholarship, and as my paralleling the Jamesian, sirenic, and romantic gnarlies by living out really horrible approximations of what Charlotte and the Prince might have done had they been given to “Urban Cowboy” sorts of emotional explosions of anger and remorse). I unstopped my ears and subjected myself to fabulous Densheric and Ververian tortures of the heart. My Henry differed from the President’s, just as they were the same.

On the first day of that spell of mornings in the room at the south end of a building on Chestnut Street, Chuckie Srnka and I walked across Elm Street and entered the building together. We felt comfortable doing that, and every morning thereafter we walked to school together (though later we drove Volkswagens and Chevies) until the very last day, thirteen years later in 1965, of our indoctrination as capitalists, imperialists, appeasers, suborners, chauvinists, and egocentrists. Cancer: 2007, wife and daughters at his side.

Nick Adams (R.M. refers to his mother, an earlier social crime that was reluctant to speak its name: the embarrassment of a divorced woman) was acutely aware of the gaping force across the valley on East Hill, Cornbell University. I once had dinner with Nicky and his mother, who had invited a Brit visiting scholar. Liver was served. Shortly after that, the three of them decamped for Oggsford, and I suppose Nick became an Oggsford man.

Barbie Hodes lived across the street from the trangular park, on Chestnut Street. In 1964 every element of her dazzling mien proposed and assured that she was preparing herself for and directing her life to Fifth Avenue, among the very metaphorical starlights of Society, as if she had a secret foreknowledge of founding Barbara Hodes Ltd. on 39th, and her marrying Michael Gross, who wrote ROGUES' GALLERY: The Secret Story of the Lust, Lies, Greed and Betrayals That Made the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Barbie boarded a train in 1964, a TGV, that flew like an arrow from Ithaca to Manhattan. Before her calmative marriage, she was a sidekick of Lou Reed, a glory and pain that will have demanded much exposure to the elements.

Ithaca’s “Rhine” district is difficult to define, but the impression it leaves is quite clear, of bums, hovels, and transients. Chronological and geographical distinctions are easily disproved, but the sentiment and effects of the Rhine can be confused with no other element of the city’s societies or culture-bands. My father (1917-1993) was, and I am life-long a resident of West Hill. The odd numbered houses of Elm Street perch above a very steep bank, a cliff, overlooking Floral Avenue. The boatyards in which he and I spent many years of our lives are adjacent to the swamplands that, before Flood Control, formed some of the dark and doubtful homes and haunts of the Rhiners. In the 1930s my father and the bolder of his many brothers would hop down the bank to the wetlands below, to socialize (that is to say, play) with the young Rhiners, not excluding the ‘coloreds’ and the many doomed transient hobo kids strung along there by a feckless and drunken parent. It was fishing and fistfights, mostly; but either activity would be followed by some congenial hanging about, until the West Hill kids would scamper up to homes and chores and dinner, and the Rhiners would disappear into their hovels and camps, and vanish from consciousness. “They never came up to play with us,” said my father. “Dad would have skinned us alive.”

Nate was a Rhiner who had “settled in.” He lived-rough in a leaky, tattered boatshack a few yards north of the Buffalo Street bridge, and had in his possession a motored skiff that sometimes ran and always listed due to the sloshing bilges. He was toothless and greasy, and made rather an impression on me in the 1950s. My father would always hail him, and they’d talk, though they doubtless had never been introduced or exchanged anything more than their voices. His boat must once have been rather a dashing craft – sleek, many years before – but it had degenerated into a heap, with flecking paint, loose decking, gashes, wounds, and much creek scumdirt. CCC workers had failed to eradicate the squalors in the 1930s, but waterflow Reconstruction in the 1960s erased any trace of Nate’s life in Ithaca. Nate was born ten years after Antietam; he told us his father had no hands.

Throughout the Rhine era, notions of its crime and poverty were often exaggerated into attributions of a dangerous kind of unwholesomeness and depravity. Socio-economic eugenics supplied enough of a gulf between its people and those of us on West Hill or Fall Creek or South Hill, but democratic educationalization began to integrate persons who otherwise had no occasion to mingle. I became aware of Joe Simon in 1960, at Boynton Junior High on Buffalo Street. He was a Rhiner in all ways. I believe he lived on Cherry Street, in execrable conditions, and his share of life was a desecration. He wore the same clothes every day; and I never knew him to own a winter coat. He was undernourished, small and weak. Despite these afflictions, Joe had classroom friends, and was included in the joshing and jokes, though he too probably never was invited home. One day after school I saw him on the street; he’d secured a one-serving bag of potato chips, and just as he opened it a Creeker came along and needled him into sharing his chips. It is possible to imagine that those chips were the most nutritious meal he was going to have all day. As he palmed the open bag to the other boy, several more Creekers came by, each dipping their hand in for a chip. Joe could only smile, and let all the chips go, with a sort of bemused exasperation that might have suggested he’d rather have the amiable attention of those boys than the chips.

Later that winter Joe and his cousin were walking on the railing of the State Street bridge near today’s “Jungle,” which is presently rather an innocuous area for transient and lifer outdoor sleepers compared to the much severer privation from which it is sometimes said to derive. The other boy slipped and fell into the ice and creek below. I don’t imagine either of them could swim anyway, and certainly not flailing in icy water. Joe, of course, immediately jumped in to try to help his cousin. Death by drowning, both.

Those of us whose parents were reasonably proficient at moving things around according to the little marks on special paper, or those of us who might even have ourselves flourished at moving things around according to the little marks on special paper, will have Ithaca fixed in our memory as a benign and healthy place in which to have matured with other persons who grew up safely too, but it is unlikely that our lives lived out in the second half of the Twentieth Century and curling into the Twenty First Century will have ever demanded taking the measure of that within us which might have forced us to fling ourselves into cold water heedless. I have afforded myself the privilege, and honor, of calling this particular element of instinctive behavior “courage,” and if I cannot quite see it in myself or in others, I can always see when in other people it is not present at all.

Sandra Bowlsby and I ate crackers together. There are Bowlsbys living in the Jungle in 2010. George E. Bowlsby, Sandra’s younger brother, later to occupy the room that Chuckie and Rachel and I did, lived in the Jungle for forty years. He was found drowned, a few weeks ago, in the creek by which he had lived. That would be May 26th, 2010.

Abraham, Isaac and Jacob branched Sephardim and Ashkenazi and let us also say Anastasi; there was a diaspora, and dispersion, expulsion, migration, exiles, pogroms, Nobel prizes, Shoah, homeland-seeking; there was the business of mitochondrial DNA, ancestry-lineage markers and signifiers, and there was parenting. Thus appeared Judy Hamilton. At various times in my life, she has been the only ghost-figure (reified) that featured in the subtile reaches of my own mythmaking. She was always at my side, I realized much later. For six years at the building on Chestnut Street I was consistently measured as the fastest runner, a fact in which, year repeating year, I took much pride. (A stopwatch would reveal that I was the fastest except for Judy, but that never counted because she was only regstered on the girls‘ ledger.) Among us all, because of her true true smile, she was the only knight pure enough to be capable of peering into the grail cup, while Bors and Parzival and Lancelot were finding other excuses to fail, and errants such as myself just went burbling down with the Pequod. Diabetes.

We departed Ithaca in twenty-nine stout ships, bound for Castile. We each in our various cabins circumnavigated the Fifteenth Century world, and harbored in Capetown jails, on Iroquois trek-tramp trudges, and deep within the Age of Innocence; some of the voyages were vivid, bloody and gai, and some were brutally wearying by any standard, yet most of the sailors led lives of quiet desperation and went to the grave with the song still in them. “Quiet desperation” refers to those who (cravenly) sailed too close to the rocky shore, whereupon giant cannibals threw rocks down upon them and sank many ships, and ate the sailors alive as they were drowning.

Harry the Truman looked down upon our soft-edged pine blocks from a large glassed frame. Our naps were opiated. There was much hopping, some skipping, and bunching up in smaller groups. There were indemnities and there was cringing.

Bruce Bryant, pickled with LSD, sledded down Libe Slope. Rosie Wertz, a Rhiner, dressed in rags. Do not think that I am very much impressed with that as a colorful way of describing the habiliments of persons from that slough of poverty, for what she dressed in was rags. Her eyes were crusty, and her face was a sheencake of dirt. Quo vadis my Rosie? Surely not half so easefully onto death and dissipation? One married a Viennese prince; one disappeared into the hollow far plains of west Texas.

Some of us are homers. Albert Smith made the sort of difference that can usefully be called “real” by founding the deli in town that has pleased countless thousands of souls by replicating the perfect enjoyment of taste that is implied in the title of Edmund Wilson’s collection of short writings: “This Room and This Gin and These Sandwiches.” A thousand, thousand sandwiches have been perfect in execution and fulfillment, by measure in excess of the pleasure delivered by William Shakespeare, Milton S. Hershey, or that malevolent Malvolio of a Melvillean Confidence Man, Diane Disney’s pap Walter (another Laestrygonian). Albert’s deli stands. If there ever was an abiding in Ithaca, other than the gorgeous one, it was the sandwiches.

There were fathers. I have held firmly to the image of Sammy Panato firing from the deck of a battleship, an anti-aircraft gun (bob pop bob pop pop, ta,ta,ta,ta,ta) but I also believe that Darlene displayed in a later classroom a swastika flag he’d captured in Europe. John Vasse was shipboard near the Philippines, and he would have been the wisest guy on the boat, unimpressed with rank, and able with the most facile wit to unflate the boneheaded lies and soulless encouragement coming from the captain’s jerk of toadies. My father entered Paris soon after it was possible to do so, gathered up an abandoned German motorcycle and breezed with a friend up and down the long, opened-air spaces of the boulevards. He bumped into Marlene Dietrich in a store; she was searching for nylons. His father had voyaged from Kansas in a prairie schooner back east, to these ravines and lakes of Upstate. Earl flew over Sugarloaf full of bombs, and came home to never say a word about the dead. My uncle Paul is at the bottom of the North Atlantic, in the form of silt.

Ithacans vow pen is champ, and Trojans are material bearers. Mike played ball, but failed to make the Majors. Leon carried a purse, it made us mad. Ricky was from the very beginning, napping on our floor throws, an accomplished gay rights advocate in San Francisco. Ronnie taught us everything we would ever know of cerebral palsy, and there were polio receivers in the building. Sam wondered what made the white kids think they could just go ahead and play. Daedalus had four matrimonial adventures and has regarded himself as a bicyclist. Warriors died. Pete Smith, alcohol. We had cancers, we had strokes. I had thought that Noni Korf was the coolest person I have ever known, though lately I have realized that it is her daughter Maia Vidal who may save us. In other mills, where the breeding of nuclei transpired against different intentions, Ithaca bred actresses, just imagine: Amy Rosoff and Mary McDonnell and others, to walk among whom, as to trip in skipping among Rosie, Barbie, and Rachel in the early fomentation of their wills - was to be flying as if in a dream. I clasp your hand, topic sentence, we used to say; a semiotic and textual present tense. Following the reduction of lighthouses to irrefutable registers, I bicycle through the night ‘til dawn, and read about Passchendaele and Verdun, where boys jumped heedless into icy water.

Eventually, signal June 16th 1953 came along, and shortly thereafter we each deliquesced like butterfly wings into our summertime yaws of even vaguer negative being. Less than half of us remain. One day there will be but one left, and after that last passing, there will remain for other Ithacans, after the last ship has disappeared below the waves, the heart of the heart of the sort of Daisy Miller one can see well beyond the petulance and poofy vanity James has laid upon her: that would be the vision of Judy Hamilton smiling and laughing, susurrant in the trees with the voices of the Iroquois kids who played here six hundred years before us, as they dazzled one another with beauty and promise and their accomplished hunting of bunnies and cunning angling for the plentiful fish in the creeks and lake in the flatlands at the bottom of the hills, as we, after the late war, built our inextricable mazes.

22 June 2010

what the war was for

We might collectively resent such factitious linkages as the one that strikes me now, as I read Geoff Dyer's THE MISSING OF THE SOMME and breeze away a fabulous summer afternoon in the high hills overlooking the lake, but it is true that following wars in which millions and millions of deaths occur, the consequent massive amnesia takes two forms: a blanding of the sharp appreciation of life (domestication, materialism, family-life: let us suggest this for 99% of the population) and some form of bohemian reformation (usually associated with the arts: for the rest).

From Verdun:

yielding Screamin' Jay Hawkins: you may hear him here

21 June 2010

Maya Deren in Ithaca

Wendy Haslem writes about Maya Deren in senses of cinema.

In 1935, Deren, then named
Eleanora Derenkowsky, was living, off and on, near Onondaga Lake in central New York State. Extraordinary rains lay over the hills and lakes a counterpane of torrents, standing water, and new scapes. She had understood that in Ithaca, at the foot of Cayuga Lake, the lowest of all the Finger Lakes, the water-level was covering much of the lowland area of the city. Fall Creek and Cascadilla Creek added to the burying; many houses were lost, and eleven persons died.
One wants badly to believe that Maya Deren filmed the area of town in which she would have been most interested, the Rhine, but her cinematic visualization more likely existed only in her imagination.
But as Ford Madox Ford wrote: "that is quite enough on which to go."

15 June 2010

06 June 2010

Hart Crane in the Deeps

Hart Crane’s poetry is usually thought of as dense and obfuscating, and stands before readers like a colossus, an immense Eiffel bridge, on the other side of which huddle a quite small, and strange group of persons who understand him truly. Harold Bloom, Edmund Wilson, Jack Kerouac.

On this side of the bridge, however, we do a different kind of huddling – much less joyous – in which we register biographical recollections of his painful and extreme alcoholism, his dramaturgical, suicide-hop from the stern of a ship ("Goodbye, everybody!“ he called out), and perhaps his relation with Harry and Caresse Crosby, who first published “The Bridge” in their Black Sun Press.

Caresse was bred as a plutocrat, bound in the culture of east coast stricture, but several thousand dollars allowed her to obverse her life and live as a comfortable bourgeois bohemian in Paris. Early bobo. Harry had set a suicide date but contravened it some years earlier than the day he had long-specified. Caresse died in 1970, after another vivid career as a peace activist; the cause was pneumonia related to heart disease. Her autobiography is called The Passionate Years, and the tone suggests that it was written in the quieter hours of her life.

Biographical appreciations of Crane can only decay gravitationally, like satellite orbits, into the remarkable events of his painful life: the suicide, and the obscurity and condensed structure of his writing. The deduction is often made that we, as an English-speaking people, will one day come to read Crane as we do Shakespeare. Perhaps that’s true, but those days seem far off, as we gather round the morbid and depraved campfires of our acculturated, televised lives. Still, one may read of Hamnet’s father’s land holdings, his diet, and his grieving, and in such a way the best access to Crane one presently possesses, is an ability to picture him at the war games maneuvers of his chief avocation. That was croquet, a sport as brutal, noble, and epiphanic as any other, despite its associations with a choked gentility.

Hart would practice alone in the rain, and he would practice alone at 4:00 AM.

The nature and form of croquet wends back in time to various earthlands and young nations where the distinction between leisure and decadence was blurring and then becoming lost. Many of these demographies used peculiar descriptive titling names, often, to us now, vague and evocative and romantic (paille maille, pall mall, trucco, beugelen, klosbaan, jeu de mail, crookey, het kolven, ground billiards, and the madness-inducing and bellicose cross-country game mail a la chicane). Waves of races descended from the hills or washed up on the Breton and Norman beaches over the course of two thousand years, yet no people setting their own cultural references upon the land could eradicate from the soul of whatever denizens the terre was presently habitating, the metaphor upon the beaches of stones and crooks and hoops. These were the same peoples who fashioned cromlechs and henges, and who built circles of stone in which pi equaled three point zero. Versions and inflected iterations of the game, worldwide, appeared and withdrew from common knowledge; today there are over thirty forms of the game extant, a map of which traces the trampling imperialism of the most warmongering nation over the past seven hundred years, Great Britain.

Like the species of bluebird that can hear a tugboat’s low-timbred horn forty miles from the harbor, Crane looked deep into croquet and saw each stage of its evolution, and he felt the differentiated and generalized sentiments that players of the game at its highest level associate with good play. He imagined but could never see the defining and nominative skeleton at work in the bridge or the sea; but he broke the code of croquet‘s chemistry, and articulated the equations of quantum mathematics lying in the non-simultaneous, only partially overlapping transformational events submerged deep within each match. Crane was a devoted reader of Izaak Walton (The Compleat Angler) and Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy, What it is: With all the Kinds, Causes, Symptomes, Prognostickes, and Several Cures of it. In Three Maine Partitions with their several Sections, Members, and Subsections. Philosophically, Medicinally, Historically, Opened and Cut Up) and also of John Ruskin (Præterita:). He was an intense and worried reader of these liturgical texts; he praised and enucleated the exigeticists‘ explicatory pilgrimage crusades, and he became, for a while, rudderless and mute as he tried and failed in misery to understand the essence of translation. When the habitual form of his personality expressions were tossing and turning in what was probably a factitious thrall to Peggy Cowley, he undermined that romance with his ceaseless chittering, to her, about William Conrad Röntgen, whose work Crane had recently studied, and who, he said, hanged the very moon by discovering and naming the new christ, x-rays. His close friends swaddled him in the counterpane of their love and respect, and the debt he owed them referred to their bestowals of money, food, shelter, publication, and places to spend the weekend, but nothing seems ever to have removed their society from the aspect of their internal meaning he needed to pierce and vivisect. Then in 1932 the brick tower he had built of thousands of discrete units of possibility became compressed and destabilized, and he jumped into the only sea that would have him.

He developed an obsession with croquet, and played with an intensity that troubled his friends. With the constant flushing of alcohol plumbing him, his attention to minimizing the number of knocks of the mallet resembled, or stood in for, an addiction. During the game, and also during his frantic practice, he was totally free of his allergies and his vexations. These hours represented the false dawn of his private Renaissance, and were a time when men and women gamboled in the garden, though in Crane’s particular case, they were also limitless hours and eras of anguish and suffering. He investigated the totality of the ballpaths, and visited wicked vengeance upon the malevolent loopwires of possibility. When forced to the sidelines to towel his sweated forearms or quench himself with iced and spiked lemonade, he looked back with the bitterest scorn upon the set-up, eager to storm again the heart of the affray, and crush whoever had summoned the courage or indifference to contest his possession of yon grassland pitch. As a point of research, you may wish to examine the elaborate and extensive rules of croquet, as well as the cant idioms associated with the game, to more fully appreciate that the poet had entered into a nefarious Bibliothèque Nationale of iteration, assay, and inductive evocation. Within the complexities and subtleties of the game, the hero is but a bunny lost in vast brambles, and the only egress is victory, and that victory must cause another bunny to wither and rot in the bayou morass of having failed and of then definitely being a failure. A loser.

The ancestral ur-game engaged on the Brittany beaches required extremely long, arching whacks of the ball that played against the constant wind and formed archéd rainbows upon the flat sloping sands as the ball followed what seemed to be its instinctual forces back toward the surf. Two iron hoops were placed on the sand, one near the grasslands at the top of the beach, and the other, netted, was near the wet sand of the intermittent waves. This demanded over its one hundred metres or more, a practioners’s sense of slope and wind as a long convexity was drawn upon the seashore coastline. Boys and girls were dispatched to chase and fetch the countless errant attempts, their emotional disposition about this is unknown. Much of the charm was watching as in an awe the vast curl, tracing in the heart the lift and the momentum; it may have seemed like music. Days would pass before an arc passed center-on beneath, and through each hoop, which was the merriness that replaced pothering to see the face of Jesus, and was after all the heart of the matter.

There is a manner by which you and I may project our opinions and derived impressions beyond our time and place, and take everything we might have known about, construed, or misconstrued relating to Hart Crane, and nestle ourselves in what we might take to be the sentiments of his consciousness, at any one point in time, and become ourselves sympathetic with those, his torrents, as when he is practicing croquet in the dimness of the setting moonlight, aching and numb from the ebb tide of alcohol, and awash in the seiche between bitterness and the vain, failed glimmer of having accomplished the forging out of jumbling English, the poetically nuanced line – as to his glorying satisfaction. The heart of the matter is the heart of darkness, as the exhausted Crane attempted vectors and trailhead along the inherited scripts of the sad, sad gloaming. Inside the house his dozing friends heard the click of wooden balls, and the only pattern to be discerned was its seeming endlessness. Meridians without syntax, a Poe-like knocking in the distant gathering dew; the impression of continuance without fulfillment; the hollows and the dusk. Such futility we might feel as longing, or the gnawing hungers of exstressing intransigence, the striving for love’s labor lost, the certainty of predestined ruination, Crane unleavened by fellowship, or the virgin dawn of discovering that merry metaphor, wine and sweet biscuits are the natural language of the humane and earthy Bretons who rejected puny doctrines or papal decrees, in favor of sex, wit, and play. He thought of golf and tennis and Pétanque Marseillaise and Boule Lyonnaise; late Dodgers and late Phillies and late Giants and late Cubbies and late Cardinals gathered like Druids in his conjecture, and clustered round the fire of his fizzling intuition. The mallet in his palms mocked his style; something like evil original sin dwelled in the lords of manors pale, who vanished in jungles black and foul, there to disinherit the children of generative syntax, and poison the well with sub-standard grammars and rotted vernaculars, tides of just words twisted-infelicitous.

American vorticist prose was the rampaging beast within Hart’s chest, a utility (electricity and plumbing) incapacious and inadequate for the job. The multiple swirling whirlpools spun in thunderclouds beyond his ability to merge or market pools of words within, so as to find or express the grace of “swing“ of which oarsmen speak, the coordinated rhythm of simultaneity and rhyming forces. Instead, Crane surrendered his chaos to the Lucian, accelerating pies, and showed us only the often compelling wreckage to which he could not cling, and from which he could never swim, as to a raft, or an island, or the manned skiff that was quite nearby.

The court in the yard of the home of his hosts for the long summer weekend constricted and deformed the fabulous arcs that a vestigial part of an incipient poem in Hart’s mind remembered, in the bright, sunny, airy, and delightful seashore in the Dark Ages, the Breton coast of La Manche. ("Mor Breizh," he whispered; Armorica.“) The arch was the first magickal wonderment of architecture, mirroring something natural in the human body’s blood arcs; the ball thwacked on the hard sand rolled like a sailing, straining against and for moments exceeding the expectation; a flying buttress, and falconry’s elliptical swoop and flight. Celts in Brittany loved oscillation (the seesaw was first a fad on the far western coast of the Realm of the Francs) and dimensionality is an obvious element in its sport, its heathen celebration, and its miscegenated cuisine. Breton cannabis too contains a singular pharmaceutical that replicates looping flight, and like the peyote in far Apache dunes, creates within the artist arrows peaking near the sun, and the riding of gusts and clouds back to earth. In the dark or in the rain, his friends could not quite see Hart dance, or the crescendo within his whitewater language. Posts and wickets, mallets; this bastardization of gravity’s rainbows. Peenemunde? Mount Saint Michel? Crane read all of Proust twice, and will have imagined that the girls on the beach at Balbec may have played, or may have seen played, arc sur plage. Marcel omits mention.

There are persons who had accustomed themselves to playing croquet with Hart – those of superior equanimity and pity for him – and there are craven persons who played against him only once. The scent of victory, mistaking itself for bravery, erases genteel accord about games played in soft, unprejudiced ways, and, filtered through the maelstroms of Crane’s comprehensive mind, created in him a viscious manner in which he saw no guerdon on top of the mountain but having exploded the vanity of the loser, and becoming himself the chief of all the grail knights quondam and all the grail knights futurus.

Hart Crane’s zeroing in on croquet was the edge of a burning, gem-like flame cut into the heart of the game, where meditations and hypnosis form the pivot of the lonely self, yogic and unalloyed. The ego cult comes to mind. Also the oceanic immensity of intergalactic space.

...into the silver mines, into the vortex, and into the deep deep sea.

But perhaps Crane wasn’t a visionary; his obsessive attention to moving x-rays may only have been the manifestation of the utterest extension of his petulance and megalomania. If that were so, one might have wanted to cry: "Hart! C’mon! The whole world is just a goddamned musée sans murs! Hart! It’s all just a cheap theatre diorama under the Proscenium!" This wish, and this appeal, however, would have forgotten that deep within the genetic soul of man lay the supreme force of desire to blast an opponent’s wooden ball into the far next yard, or perhaps even forever lost into a grim, boggy, and snaky gully.


25 May 2010

Hoagy


20 May 2010

My zen B.F. Skinner box

previously, a mural.
the room, walls and ceiling.

14 May 2010

The Contenders

Colette and the chickens



Let us now execrate the famous chickens
we are.
Afraid of:
ambiguity
&
jumps from high cliffs
and the thousand thousand parables
of our bugbears.

Do not say no
to love
in any of its forms.

Wyndham Lewis

13 May 2010

Also Raleigh - 1960

27 April 2010

Proust in Raleigh


It is not widely known that Marcel Proust spent the war year of 1913 in Raleigh, North Carolina. Perhaps the place seemed - somewhat peculiar to him? So far as is known, the epically expansive writer and belletrist committed to paper not a single line describing his experiences there, or its unique functional ability to recapture some past or other. The feeling I have long-harbored in some backwater of my literary memory – relating to the fact that no Proust scholar or literary historian has ever made much of his passage there in the Carolina piedmont - is one of amazement. His genteel abode in Raleigh is well-known now, and it is a simple matter to imagine gracious teas on the veranda, caressed by the fragrances of jonquils and dogwoods.

You will forgive me for interrupting? Have you ever heard Victor Sangiorgio play Stravinsky’s Tango, For Piano? When you finish your Belgian waffle and café, you may wish to go into the Music Room and proceed to delight yourself immeasurably by playing the piece - on vinyl.

One might compile a list of painterly scenes from In Search of Lost Time that have never made their way onto film, foremost the Balbec beach scamp who both rudely and stylishly hopped over an old man in repose, and the following scene from Swann’s Way, as translated in turn by Scott Moncrieff and Lydia Davis.


“Marcel” has been matured by years of his close reading of what it felt like to realize he was becoming a writer, and by the eminent victory of Capital over Labor that had quite recently taken the form of the millions and millions of persons brought to death by the Great War. It is subsequent to these events that he is writing as if he were the boy subsumed into the electric zipzap that the scene describes, his marvelous conversion into the pure energy of ardor, self, and consciousness. (Predicate: Gilberte.) 3300 pages, over two thousand named characters. Have we not been too distracted by the author’s discovery that gender identity is merely one more means to rebuild emotional constructs in new and improved form?

Proust in Raleigh will have heard the trains at night. Night trains began their run in Philadelphia, and are on their way to the darkest pit of Minus-hell. Even as a neurasthenic who rarely left Oakwood, he will have remarked the black faces ubiquitous, and the midsummer humidity he can only have called opressif. Doubtless he had carried with him his habit of trying to retire to sleep shortly after sunrise. For a long time [in his life] he had a hard time falling asleep. There are thousands of oaks in Oakwood, Raleigh: massive botanical engines doing what they will with oxygen and nitrogen and hydrogen and other sorts of chemistry and material ghosts. The long quiet period before dawn is the moistest hour, conducive of mental and emotional stillness, a sort of manufactory of sole-self-soul, as the undifferentiated mind plays its peaceable games with its own infinitely fecund memory-maker.

Far from Paris, he will have been able to suppose that I arrived in Raleigh in 1977, after my thirty years of lakes and hills Upstate. After Cazenovia and Skaneateles and Aurora and Cooperstown, we had not known so many houses could be made of red brick, or that the earth itself was sand and clay unbound. Peace and Person. In the late autumn, oak leaves accumulate and gather like oceanside sand dunes. Brown snowdrifts of leaves, so unlike the indiscriminate congregations of leaves in the Bois, which he cannot have failed to see. I often spent the night with my girlfriend, at her home across from the Oakwood Cemetery; a little brook formed the path of the side-winding street. I worked at Rex Hospital, then on Wade Avenue – I was doing my residency there in Pulmonology, or I was a parking lot attendant – and I had to be at work at 6 A.M. [My specialty was hemoptysis, which, crazily, ten years later I was to suffer halfway to easeful death; these rhythmic rhymes used to be known as “coincidences”; sometimes parking patrons would emerge from the hospital utterly wracked with weeping, in the first new moments of having been tortured by the devastation that they have lost their beloved spouse of forty years, or child of seven years of age, and we would charge them 35 cents an hour for the time they on our prized homeland had parked their car.] I rode my bicycle everywhere those years, and did not own a car until my third year in town. In the dripping darkness of the streetlamps, five o’clock in the morning, there was nothing so smooth as the sound of my bike tires on the pavement of the streets. Many writers have done very good jobs describing this darkling aura of gloomy otherness and charm, and it would probably be useful for you to look up some of these writings, to bathe in the wonderment of those delicious imageries. A quite-isolated yellow-bulb porch light beacons no ship or soul; these moments precede even the squirrels and the first cheepy birdies, and the aroma in which one swims as a fish in a pool, is devoid of automobile emissions, and deeply reminiscent. On an occasion or two, I would see a person walking silently on the sidewalks, and I could only presume the shadow was a colored maid or cook directing herself or himself toward some sleeping plutocrat’s kitchen; but even these other human forms (other than my own, which swooped and sailed on my Bianchi) seemed more a part of the dim scene than a reminder of the teeming mobs that would soon enough trample dear Raleigh with tens of thousands of feet of woe. The silence was curiously amplified by the awareness that a large number of nearby citizens were making no noise at all, and the hush lay on me as heavily as the dark, dark dew. It put me in mind of lush instrumentation or complex orchestration, DeBussyian or Chopinesque ­­­, though it was the silences in the nocturne that my placid heart was hearing; the gentle aubade, the serenade. If my admiring and still dreamy thoughts ventured anywhere idiomatic or unusual, it was not until I had rather enjoyed the process of the conventional observation in this setting, that the scene was mystical and magical, profoundly dear, certainly precious, and evocative of balmy reveries I may once have had waking in Clichy (Henry Miller’s Paris), riding my bicycle to Longchamps, and then dawdling on the Champs Élysées. The Raleigh pre-dawn was an essence of loneliness, cats must have been home and warm and asleep, and I was glad to be, for those few years, far from home.

Apparently, Walter Ralegh did not spell his name as did the city that was attributed to his local investment, and my Jewish girlfriend pronounced it “Rolly.” Thirty years later I can but treasure the mise en scene of Oakwood, and of and Peace and Person, where the lights of the Krispy Kreme suggested fresh coffee and murderously beautiful and dangerously delicious doughnuts, (and krullers too, though in that part of the South they are known as “madlins,” pronounced “mallenz” or [ˈmælənʒ]: etymology unknown and spurious, if such a thing is lexigraphically possible). The gleaming milieu shining like a lone star in the night’s obscurity also seemed to promise pastry-waitresses whose pink gossamer-rayon costumes implied breasts like those of Tess of the D’Ubervilles, or Sue in Jude the Obscure, and whose insouciance and coquetterie signified a plain, singularly Southern ravishability, the actual prospect of which, by definition, resided somewhere between likely and certain. Vance Bourjaily has a chapter in his novel Now Playing at Canterbury in which he imagines the meek Scott Fitzgerald attending one of his fiction seminars at the Writers’ Workshop. On the author’s behalf, Bourjaily experienced the oxymoronic conjunction of “excruciating cringing,” as the workshoppies flensed Fitzgerald’s short story, the chosen subject of that day’s ritual lynching. It was that sort of mortal shame I experienced on Peace and Person, feeling the warm flood of indignity and dishonor within me as I sat at the linoleumed doughnut bar with my coffee and kruller, realizing that I was unable to say even one word of non-risible seduction to the woman behind the counter, because I was – it can only have been too obvious - such a craven worm of a man. Anyway, I doubt she would have much enjoyed the itinerary I had been unable to propose, that wild and opulent six-week shipboard romance around the intriguing back alley bars of several Mediterranean ports of call.