ULYSSES' FRIEZES

Before the hippos were boiled in their tanks

2011-02-11T10:43:00.002-05:00

The Modern Age

2011-02-02T12:39:00.001-05:00

Edmund Wilson in Talcottville

2011-01-31T21:49:00.002-05:00

For many years I'd annually drive from Ithaca or Aurora to Talcottville, New York, to put myself in the proximal harmonies of Edmund Wilson's stone house, chiefly because Fred Exley had recommended this in the second volume of his trilogy. As an expedient in re-generating enthusiasm for literary criticism, it was invaluable and faultless. I've not been there in a few years now. LUCIDITY FORCE EASE.

...and the chocolatier was baffled and just drove home

2011-01-06T11:17:00.003-05:00

Richard Farina in Paris

2010-12-31T18:46:00.004-05:00

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

Jean Seberg

2010-12-28T20:38:00.003-05:00

JFK Jr.'s Bianchi

2010-12-25T20:31:00.003-05:00

APOLOGIES TO THE IROQUOIS

2010-12-17T13:31:00.003-05:00

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?

Zelda Sayre

2010-11-11T13:43:00.004-05:00

not that she was naked,
but that she was beautiful

HOW DO WE KNOW WE WERE HERE?

2010-11-06T10:44:00.002-04:00

Virtuosity

2010-09-25T10:04:00.001-04:00

Sophie Crumb

NEXUS

2010-09-02T12:34:00.002-04:00

HERMES ON TWO WHEELS - Kevin Wehr

2010-08-15T14:41:00.001-04:00

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.

The Bridge of Sighs

2010-08-04T16:08:00.005-04:00

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?”

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

2010-07-30T10:58:00.002-04:00

Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, and Breathless (Godard)

Ulysses in Ithaca

2010-07-09T14:05:00.007-04:00

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 26^th, 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 16^th1953 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.

what the war was for

2010-06-22T17:15:00.004-04:00

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

Maya Deren in Ithaca

2010-06-21T14:38:00.004-04:00

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."

2010-06-15T12:14:00.001-04:00

Hart Crane in the Deeps

2010-06-06T09:55:00.008-04:00

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.

Hoagy

2010-05-25T11:14:00.002-04:00

My zen B.F. Skinner box

2010-05-20T11:06:00.002-04:00

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

The Contenders

2010-05-14T13:22:00.003-04:00

Colette and the chickens

2010-05-14T13:06:00.002-04:00

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

2010-05-14T10:29:00.002-04:00

Also Raleigh - 1960

2010-05-13T16:14:00.001-04:00

Proust in Raleigh

2010-04-27T10:01:00.007-04:00

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.

The Cleveland Clinic

2010-04-27T09:09:00.004-04:00

Several days were passed, late in November 2001, in the Cleveland Clinic. The duckdrop secret word of admittance, to the most esteemed cardiological Research Hospital in the world, was hypertrophic obstructive cardiomyopathy, and the only means of exit from that Sao Paolo favela of inter-connected buildings, was a myectomy, a procedure that had before then been performed only two hundred times. That act was described by the chief surgeon (a graduate of the University of Rochester) as carving away muscle from the walls of the heart (as with a grapefruit spoon?) to permit cardiologic function to resume and life to be allowed, against forecasted expectations, to continue.

After the operation and the early stages of recovery, there is astonishment out of measure, and gratitude out of measure, and heightened appreciation, out of measure, for two particular miracles: one that survival has been assured, and two, Ohio’s sunlight on the dust motes behind the blinds has turned them into actual diamonds.

Then the subject goes home.

Just before that, a number of legally exculpatory tests are “run,” including the simple matter of a chest X-ray, which is carried out in the dim basement of the grand and palatial Cleveland Clinic, in Radiology, evidently too déclassé an activity for prominent space in a facility that routinely welcomes potentates from Oman and Robin Williams, or his like, to its four-star, adjoining hotel.

Opiate derivatives play their part; family members act queerly as if they were stoned; nurses and technicians appear and disappear like non-speaking actors in some commedia del arte farce, (O! farce it is!) and of course there is a confrontation with the food tray, which contains what must seem to be joyous gustatory delights, but turn out to be the tricksters’ outward manifestation of what are really archived, period-area Civil War biscuits. These particular distortions are but croutons in the large vague vichyssoise that is the soul’s helen kellering through such strange lands as faith, and flammable rivers, and the ceaseless and reckless vacillation between utter hopelessness and paroxysms of a grand guignol Humoresque. That is to say, pensee, or its leftovers.

My conventional, miserable personal habits of distressed familiarity seemed to have returned, as I was wheeled (I believe it was in a looping bi-plane) to Radiology. There, I realized that I was and had never really not been a desiccated sponge, as I was immersed in water and watched myself from within and from the outside burst into a blue ducky. All credit to the Clinic supervisors and policy-makers who must have been confronted with this issue and had decided for the side of right and justice, to permit the technician called WENDY to make her appearance as she would, (in fabulous contradistinction to the many dozens of desiccated sponges with whom I had been passing my time) with her black lipstick, white powdered face, and dangling piercings depending from the patches of skin just below the eyes, where later in life lesser sufferers often develop dark bags. I cannot trust myself to rightly describe the magnificent ocean sunrise she threw upon me, with her scintillating happy nature, dance-prancing around the room, and light laughter.

She asked: “Where are you from?”

I answered: “Aurora, New York.”

This town, apparently, permitted her to ask: “Do you mind if I sing?”

Mind? I don’t think I mind?

During the preparations for the procedures, and during the procedures, she replicated the sound of (it was not mere singing) Marianne Faithfull’s “As Tears Go By,” a song I had first heard in 1964 while driving through the Everglades. That audition was an early occasion of one of Virginia Woolf’s “moments of being” in which time and consciousness merge harmonically. (A person is limited to seven of these in a lifetime.) Another was hearing in an Iowa City record store in 1970, Joshua Rifkin playing Scott Joplin. Another was napping and then sleeping through the Met’s Pelleas and Melisande in 1978 in Raleigh, which is probably the only way to really understand Maeterlinck and DeBussy. Another was watching Paris and its environs pass by from the top floor of an RER car. You will have noticed that all of these epiphanic perceptions depend for their effect and focusing energy on juxtaposition, which is the bête noire I have for years been trying to eradicate from the structuralist interpretive folly of my ungrand, ununified undercooked half-theory. (Books are not life, but then, what is?) Prior to satire, juxtaposition was all men knew of comedy, and even now, in the twenty-first century, much of our work is perfecting our patience with those persons who prefer not to be dragged past 1726 (about when Swift published Gulliver’s Travels) and who actually can convince themselves that Falstaff and his heirs were doing something that was truly funny. If you must know, I walk around Ithaca in a state of almost perpetual annoyance due to the fact that here, in a college town, so many people teach and so many people believe that what some of the early Roman writers were up to was satire, which is wrong, wrong, wrong. Someday, somebody’s going to make a movie of Mrs. Dalloway that actually depicts what Virginia Stephen was thinking, with that long neck of hers and her kind-versus-pitying eyes. Relativism accounts for so little, really, don’t you think? The difference between atheism and anti-theism is important here, or at the least extremely helpful. Perhaps we can’t ask for more than that. Though demanding some final resting place, for our ashes or for our last flickering opinion, may be the single most useful expedient for determining when our homeland has been recovered. I had done what I could, by moving from city to city, and I had tried to call the attention of my fellow citizens to the trench battles of the First World War. I have worked in various mills, and trudged across the plains. I ate in Vicksburg, grits on a hot dog sausage. The belief settled upon me, finally, that I was going to ship out with both Ishmael and Herman Melville, and that in our little pica type of a lifeboat we were going to reach our homeland port, and there abide with our people. Two people, in my case: one of them was real and symbolic and has been described accurately (I have avoided the word ‘goth’ in reference to Wendy, but that may suit you better). And the other is presently finding that after the late Victorians and chasing precisions, playing Brubeck on the Steinway is her Crow’s Nest in Gloucester.

Mlle Vogdes advises me that her career as a lexicographer may result in our moving to Beijing for three to five years, where three hundred square feet of putrid air might contrast in the sharpest manner with, here, an acre of lush grass, raspberry bushes, a brook, saplings and oaks, and a pink-blossomed apple tree. If we do not move there - if that doesn’t happen - if that doesn’t eventuate - you will find me here until the end, where I started, near the lake and among the gorges and ravines of Ithaca, where nothing is out of context, and everything is in its original position.

Clarksdale, Ithaca, Geneseo

2010-04-19T19:35:00.003-04:00

Sentiments rise with the sun and vanish with the moon, similar to the way in which a river port moors for a night or two boats which then float away. “They All Go,” wrote Randall Jarrell. But I am presently bound to the deepest sort of impression that the only two geographies in which I have ever felt naturally-born, are the lakes and hills of upstate New York, and the Mississippi Delta. Port Gibson was declared “the town too beautiful to burn” in the Civil War, but that might equally have applied to Greenville. (One day I must drive from Cayuga Lake to Cayuga, Mississippi – this would be straight through – in Mississippi via the Natchez Trace.) The Civil War made one million persons dead out of the thirty million who then lived in the United States (Ten million in today’s dollars.) The moneyed people in the North deceived and suborned those fellaheen with no hope to engage militantly with the fellaheen with no hope in the South on behalf of the Confederacy’s moneyed people. The latter fellows supplanted their having been reduced to beasts of burden and wage slaves before the war with the entirely factitious Homeric and Tennysonian ideals of the glory of perpetuating slavery by reason of melanin.

According to some sources, Shakespeare rusticated-within-disguise and spent several months in Virginia, where he wrote a play (extant) that he willed to have produced on the 400^th anniversary of his death date, (which is to say, 2016). It is little-known that Henry James spent the summer of 1912 in Vermont, reading Proust in manuscript, and a long kept secret was the fact that Matisse passed most of 1952 at the eminently vulgar Fountainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach, which he pronounced the most pleasant place on earth. Dvorak summered in Spillville, Iowa. You may wish to look this up, too. Greenville, Mississippi is also known for its unraveling of statistical probability by salubriously hearthing an unusually large number of authors, among them Walker Percy, Shelby Foote, and Tennessee Williams (though the latter spent more time at the Cutrer Mansion in Clarksdale, also a soul’s balm village). Greenville, Port Gibson, Vicksburg, Clarksdale; (Bourbon, Rosedale, Anguilla, Le Tourneau, Roxie, Redwood, Satartia, Nitta Yuma, Panther Burn, Hushpuckena, Alligator, Dubbs, and Bobo). This trip I will take in a convertible Saab, dark green.

Twenty years after souls had been freed from Auschwitz, which is to say, twenty years after souls had turn to melting and sparkling radium-fire in Nagasaki, some of us had retreated from battle engagement, and, except for a few skirmishes in the outlands, encamped mid the dusty lawns and copses of the Genesee Valley – a place in which, incidentally, despite my four years of residence, I never learned the cardinal compass points or ever felt topographically at home. The year before we had daily gathered round the chuckwagon in a place called Mary Jemison (a white girl raised among the native people, not so uncommon an occasion, as it turns out) and the next year for rations we stumbled over the lawns toward Letchworth, named for the nearby river gape. We did not bear weapons or memory; a peacetime army declines to attend muster. There was much mystification, and it seemed that nothing was not seen as through an opaque veil. Near Geneseo, there was a small park near a wandering stream, where we gathered in period costumes for afternoon charivaris and stupidly, recklessly, and pointlessly rode bareback the wild horses of our innocent and incipient wills. A monument there remembered the ignoble passings of Boyd and Parker, scouts of General Washington’s murderous and genocidal Sullivan Expedition. We used to picnic there (Alice B. Toklas Brownies, LSD, vodka-spiked lemonade, and cheeseburgers), by the tree around which by their intestines were those soldiers tied, run in circles, and finally fileted.

Someone had stolen her umbrella one rainy day, and afterwards she left at the coat rack scene of that purloining a note of the most sophisticated kind of sarcasm, well before that literary form had been by forty years corrupted with writhing pain and literal tears. I had not known that one might use English to fling the very wryest imprecations into the darkness of undifferentiated malfeasance, and the feat amazed me. After two martinis I place myself before my computer’s keyboard and swing lassos, fling javelins, sail down ocean swells at thirty knots. When I do this, or when I sit for hours reading or writing, I have in mind the girl who left a note intended to provoke the emotional disruption of the umbrella thief. She was the same person, I later learned, I had been secretly espying every day, and by whom I was fatally intrigued. She would come and go on the gentle hillside of the Genesee Valley, and by her I confected (as one will) a transubstantiation involving meat wrappings and wispy daydreams. She occasionally wore flowered, colored-print stockings. I think they depicted orchids or magnolias, but now I see them as Charleston dogwoods, hothouse bougainvillaea, tropical dahlias, tormenting daffodils, calla lilies, red red peonies, pornographic oleander, jazz gardenias, fen hibiscus, titillating hyacinths, amatory fuchsia, and sweaty hydrangea. Or maybe lotus flowers. Eventually she and I married and lived in Ithaca, but that didn’t work out well. There, in the hills by the lake, the only topography of which I was aware, was the cold and mean moonscape that her dazzling luminosity had made of my heart.

prose fiction

2010-04-19T19:30:00.003-04:00

In relative terms - and those are the only terms there are - New York City can very efficiently swamp a person’s innate sense of isolation and being at the center of all things perceived, by way of crowding crowds, refuse in the streets, and rackets, whether it is the last few months of the 1760s or the last few months of the 1860s or the last few months of the 1960s. Arthur Polk was a contemplative man, who, though but a function in an office space behind a back office on Wall Street, felt that he might have actually, beneath it all, been aspiring, in twilight hours or when dead asleep, to better things. Arthur did not know if the medium of these things was artistic, or religious, or in some undesignated way metamystical, but he allowed himself to feel fairly certain that it was in that general vicinity of the process that mingles the restless heart and the wandering mind without regard to lucre.

Several misfortunes constellated upon, or around, or above, or within him one humid August Wednesday afternoon, among them an inevitable but nonetheless stomach-dropping amatory collapse, his insight that his manager, Simon Legree, would for many years to come retard Arthur’s any advancement in the firm, and a certain vague presentiment of broadly generalized, and lethal, hopeless desperation. These tribulations in very short order had built themselves into a vision of what he could only assume would be the signal catastrophe of his entire lived-out life. He had then, in that obscure state of numb intoxication, barely known what was the reason he fetched from beneath his cot the rucksack that had gone entirely unused since he had departed Richmond, Virginia for New York City four years before, and that four years before that, wandering the Blue Ridge Mountains, had delivered to him what he did not know then were to be his last feelings of exultation and true Arthurness. Into the pack he placed implements of personal hygiene, a book, and stuffs of clothing. He wore canvas-and-leather shoes, and these he rode north like a hawk on a zephyr, hard by the Hudson. As the moon began to rise and the sun began to set, he glimpsed behind him the physical location of the grand bubbling hub of the New York political and neighborhood jurisdictions, and ahead of him his eyes and blood and heart embraced several million trees.

In a way, his goal was Port Oswego, on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, for there his dear sister had gone to reside as the superintendent of an orphanage. Arthur presumed that his skill at living off the land was off-form, and that a week or ten days of forage and sleeping in hayricks or on piles of grass would tire him onto vexatious exhaustion, and repose with Sister Sissy was bound to be necessary. He foresaw there staring out at the watery horizon towards where Canada lay, and confecting out of the free blown clouds, the useful plots and rollicks that would compose the next spell of his life.

This walk then, this pilgrimage, was a time for foraging in the wide open spaces of his mind and soul, for personally clarifying the messes he disliked calling values, and on the first three days following streams and hollows into the Catskills, as a tethered bird freed, he daydreamed riotously, becoming dizzy with liberty and drunk on chlorophyll. The widest expanses of possibility and self raged and sang, the sun and stars above offered him the keys to the Arthurian kingdom and realm. This reign, he realized, was mapped out as the whole State of New York.

Across the meadows, brambling through the woodstands, hopping little chops of creeks. Before he had decided for himself conclusively that it was a broad and penetrating sound, the force that lay itself upon him like a fog, and wrapped him in a subtle counterpane of the most delicate form of pressure, had put him in mind of something from the city. So vague - it might have been an aroma; the highly sensitive taste buds at the tip of his tongue, and some technically imperceptible sway of the follicles. If he was not mistaken, the topsoil and the leaves of yesteryear were conveying to some of his internal nerves, a distant disturbance, one that might have resembled a thousand Apache hooves gathering far out of hearing.

And so he paused for contemplation and consideration, perhaps too aware that he hadna time for such conditional reveries in the city, where moving hurriedly from spot to spot was compelled by gritty white men unknown. South of the city of New York, there is a beach that looks out over the ocean, and on Sundays men and women and children made weary and mean by Capital’s cheese-grating of Labor, imagine that the long horizon of the sea has in some way caused them to elude their mortal fate as dust. If a person possesses a fabulous and monumental courage, or idiopathic recklessness, or has fallen under the swoon of opium or the sort of nervous mad herding that impelled the characters of the monstrous dying called the Children’s Crusade (1212 AD, legendary version), he may as Polk, eschevvie himself to that plage, and Wednesday noontime sink into the warm sun’s sleep of distant dreaming make-believe. Of such a mind Arthur now partook, assaying the distant clues of that impression, and that weakened force of substance he had not yet been able to identify.

Polk slept. Dusk was coming, and he believed that he would not spend the night in this copse. He rose himself and gathered his leather shoulder satchel, and pulled his felt cap around hard down his ears and brows, and would leave the distant bass drums behind, forever a movement of beef hooves or slipping of techtonic plates, or perhaps the overflowing of a far river ‘pon a swamp unknown. Had it been starlings to make this thrush of beating noise, he reckoned that there would have had to be two million wings.

Hardtack is made by bakers accidentally, in the course of their daily toil, and in the city he often had fairly sustained himself on the giveaways breadman Pieta left inside a vase for his seizing and a fashion of delectation. A last obdurate biscuit warmed in his closed palm, and sweat and creekwater in a cup made for him the repast that would carry him quite cheerfully to sunrise, to a robin’s egg, perhaps, or – these events were not uncommon – a egg of a chicken.

He located blackberries, and thought his path through clamor and woe had been finally justified, when his lips made a little skipping into a smile as he recognized the “wild cherries.”

When Polk crested a certain hilltop, leaving behind him the queer distant tumult became impossible, as he placed in the fixed point of his internal compass’ walking track for a very distant horizon, what he should have called the source of the afternoon’s gentle obscurity. It was a cloud of dust he saw, half-lit in resolution, half-banked ‘gainst rainclouds, but it could portend nothing else but a community of persons, of an unprecedented scale for such sylvan vales and pasture fields as these.

The most efficacious objective correlative for depicting the will-crushed aftermath of those persons surviving the Civil War remains the scene of the straggle of worn and tattered soldiers broken apart from and trailing a group that may have formed to head back together horseless to their hometown. These soldiers of woe were often either exhausted from despoliation or injury, or so mentally advanced onto ruination, that all that remained of their conscious mind was the half-ability to drag along behind the path of their fellows. Upon such Polk came: the dusty and the muddy, ill-shod for earth mid the wildlife, and arrived too late for the whole playing of the bands. And when eighteen souls in pairs or small groups had grown into fifty or more of what he realized were now not soldiers but variegated mountebanks on their way to some strangeness-jamboree or fiesta (Morris Dancers, maybe?) Polk realized consequentially and simultaneously that exactly half these col porteurs were women; girls, rather.

In an act of quite unusual independence, Mary had followed Polk to New York from Richmond, and though they had taken separate rooms, and she had found a position serving food in a middle-earth establishment in the Bowerij, off Houston Street, she was as attached to him as an electron. Her devotion and attraction to Polk were quite conventional, and in a nervous, religious way she had concluded that she just couldn’t live without him, but as the days turned into weeks turned into months turned into years, she began to achieve relations with certain of the people who are correctly and habitually best described as “denizens”; relations that shifted like the seasons themselves truly past the joshing where it had naturally begun towards the affectionate and strangely mutually-dependent, she had found it necessary from a heathen and dark, yet humane place within her, to succor tramps and brothel workers with hours of port or sherry by a candle in the darkest corner of her rooms off Houston Street. And these relations drew the pale of the Ephysians down upon anything in Polk that she might have thought he had there to give. These fondnesses and succursuses for the bowered bums evolved into intimacies which neither frightened nor surprised her, in ways no magic of her mind may have before conceived, and thus made confident by being for the first time in her life a “natural,” (than which there is in most estimations no grander soaring of the blood) she gripped to her midnight-to-dawn hours with the falling angels, noticing but not troubled by the realization that her representative communion by way of her friends’ customs had become for her juice and kef, more properly perceived as alcoholism and opiate-addiction. Her relief was also free, and she pictured and much-loved herself as an otter hoopling through the thickets and brambles of Richmond, but gliding and slithering into the ponds of New York and swimming gracefully and silently out of sight.

Otherwise was it seen by Arthur Polk, whose imagination in the stars of his dreaming bore more than similar traces to his culture’s general approval of piety and churchy decency. But this difference of opinion about Mary’s habit (and expressions of this were sometimes convivial and concupiscent) had not occurred to him for two years, that is, until he one day espied an exchange of greasy bills between her and a friend he otherwise had occasion to know was a trollop-for-hire. Thereafter the gulf between them was broadened by suspicion and doubt, daily, until in wrenching and grievous pain, in his jaws and brain he burst in exasperation, as she dispassionately and coolly said the equivalent of “Okay then, well, take care of yourself, Arthur” turned away and found his visage and patterns of behavior wholly vanquished and, apparently forever, vacated from her mind.

It then took but the slightest looking-away during what had been conversation for Legree’s detachment to mirror the whole of Polk’s life in its future as barren and misguided, and the woes and griefs of any aspiration Arthur ever may have had, to gape out before and below him like the Grand Canyon he had never known towards which he had been walking. He relived this now in the darkling woods and fields of straw, and remembered that he had gathered his roughened-up valise in a sort of stupor, and had found himself four days awalk toward Lake Ontario, nearing Iroquois rivers and longhouses. His mind was racing with peace, if there is such a thing.

The faces of the road-girls glowed, mostly with sweat, and their countenances were brightening as they all together approached the din, which coalesced into what he finally recognized were tunes, each note of which was transfigured as through a bolt of lightning. As he topped a hillock he looked down upon the impossible, an encampment of legions; a pungency of smoking campfires; an harmonic sway waved across the headtops as over a field of grain. For Polk, apperception existed out of time, as it will indeed tend to do in catastrophic and instantaneous events, the exhilaration of sexual deliverance, and supernatural revelation. His arms stretched out into an open geometry of salutation and the relief aspects of discharge, opening as to commit ingestion.

Yet his head felt cleaved by that lightning, and unsensed by the thunder, and a moment of illumination receded as a pinprick of Venus at dawn. It was raining. He was, he realized, in a happy state of mind; and then his feet recommenced their familiar gait, and near the edges of the swarm he picked a jagged route across, until he slipped into the woods and, never looking back, let, behind him, the babel groan its peaceful way into the arms of its mother.

During that night, he might have said that he had dreamed about the large boulders and rocks on the southern shore of Lake Ontario, for he knew that sunsets there behaved in a way he had not known in the countryside around Richmond, or in the angled shades of the city of New York, with its tall buildings and smudge fires from the many rooftop coalstove-like modern devices. Rays came from the sinister side, the western expanse of gathering evening clouds, and something in this obliquity made the environment of dream feel like home at last gained. In two days time he broached across the salt flats outside Syracuse, and the next day’s traverse of drumlin and dale showed before him the lakeside browns of the village by which his sister had grown bored, but whose people had come to know her as among the core solids of the mass.

Four years of supporting finance in the hubbub had unfit him for the wood mill into which he slipped as a junior sawyer, yet even this much seeing and feeling filled him with as much inspiration as fatigue. September and October in a hovel seemed like grace, and though he would take a room at the inn for the maelstroms of snow time, the setting of the whole removed him from the unrest of the metropolis hard by the ocean and the Hudson River. It was, by contrast, another figure that roused him to the keenest peek, and he formed in his mind the conceit, if conceit it was, that it appeared to him that everyone in this town rode a horse. Polk in tremens saw the sloughing off of his skins of memory, and a book of history he had picked up seemed to suggest to him that the concept of the Renaissance may have felt tangible even to those who were experiencing it; and it was rather precisely this fashion that permitted nations of persons to imagine that persons had at about the same time briefly inhabited the moon above, in its cold, singular, and only-imagined majesty. Souls in a massive boogie, rustling the very air above them into sweeps and clouds of motion and harmony, emerged in his vision as he graded wood and ate venison jerky, as he crawled out of a burrow to greet the innkeeper’s raven-haired daughter with the most timid of futile chirps and cheeps. Around his memory of his tramping exodus, a glow of golden vibration had formed, which included a mighty chorus of approval and participation; and for the accident of egress he had developed the gratitude and fondness one might have for a departed benefactor’s unexpectedly generous testamentary bequeathment. It would even have been presumed that he was astonished by his own genial fellowship inside tavern windows that lit a patch of the ice and cold and black, black street out of doors.

In this town thereafter, he married, he fathered, he died, still a quite young man. If those who in peace and darling sweetness would have taken the measure of his soul’s passage, and could both reweave the carpet and see the figure in the design, and even beyond that play back the internal voice of his transcriptive and narrating inner recitation, they would revisit another day a year or two on, when he sat by the shore, and realized that he had heard sprechen between the swells of those cacophonous melodies in the meadow of clamor, and that a caller had been leading the people in a vast folk dance, a vernacular waltz of communion, and that the caller’s rasp had signaled a yasgur. By this iteration clarified, Polk would have been unfazed, for he knew of Iago’s brother Iazgu, nothing.

Reep

2010-04-19T19:15:00.002-04:00

Mark Reep: art and writing, here

Some years ago I spent a long, hot, blue day sailing on Cayuga Lake with a new friend. After taking the measure of the loveliness of the lake and after adjusting our perspective to the horizon and the line of hilltops, and after the third beer and second sandwich extracted from the icebox, we found that we didn’t really have that much in common, and our conversation slipped into argumentation, which was then, as now, his chief dialectic, and which was then, the act I performed, or found myself performing, when I realized that the person with whom I was speaking was just too easily assuming that he was going to be able to get the better of me; in his opinion, in all matters.
I will always maintain that he is a good man, if for no other reason than having a son with a woman eighteen years older than he, and seeing that child through to college, another eighteen years after the parental relationship had foundered. Stout fellow! But his idea of proving his point (he worked in Cuban sugar cane fields in the 1980s, and formed cells of radicals all over central New York State whose worked hovered just below militant vandalism) consisted in the main of shrieking: “You mean you don’t think America is also a dictatorship?” In return, I would begin to analyze by means of spurious accusations, aloud and somewhat belligerently, that his motives in all his activism lay in Freudian sumps within himself, remarks that preceded, for both of us, those long minutes of silent brooding and painfully trying to eke out the killer retort.
There are those who will say that sailing washes away all sins.
The boat cut long reaches and vectors up and down the lake. One napped, the other reclined desultorily at the tiller.
The sun began its fall toward the western horizon, and we pointed the bow toward our port, as the wind began to fall.
Now there was less splash against the hull, and no fluttering of the mainsail. We dropped the jib.
I have always found it difficult to explain the tenderness inherent in rapprochement, as it seems to be one of those inflections of the human will that is sustained by the natural goodness of people who are not naturally cruel, or invidious, and who are through no credit of their own, the fruits of cultures that have settled around the very pole of benignity (after eons of anguish and rage). Perhaps Vincent and I merely thought that we did not care to witness the trashing of our acquaintance without further, more conclusive evidence of antipathy. Though it came to nothing and we met only one or two times more, the last hour of our conversation was an odd thing: constructive.
We worked together, in language and by fair trade, to conclude that it is a beneficial strategy to adhere to a salty execration of those persons with whom we disagreed, and never forgive them their trespasses, though under normal conditions they could blithely get away with all kinds of shit, uncontested. The corollary of this was that we excuse ourselves from meeting standards to which we hold others accountable, and it is in this way that I graft myself as stripling to sapling, to the idea that there is only one cardinal rule about good writing, and there is nothing I can do within my soul that will ever allow me to approximate that imperative.
Vincent and I declared that we would rather be certain (and badly-behaved), than polite (and pusillanimous).
Somerset Maugham famously remarked that there are only three rules to writing a novel, but nobody knows what they are. I have misunderstood this for forty-five years, for what he was really saying was that there are three rules; there are exactly three; and whatever they are, there is not one less or one more than three.

Cit: Good writing has lucidity, force, and ease. (Edmund Wilson, upstate New Yorker.)

With which compare: The rich, euphuistic satire by which sentences resemble brambles tying knots in brambles (this, is my pond).

We matured out of the time we realized we were of the language, or literary, or the bookish sort, into those who formed opinions to wield against feeling vanquished in nowheresville. With brutish book reviewers and literary critics like me I would board a sailing ship and hound white whales, but I don’t believe I’d share toast and jam with those of whom I am egregiously suspicious, those who offer comment on prose fictions without mentioning their own stakes. Reviews are about reviewers.

Nor was I born to kingly manners, or to play left at Wrigley. By character and habit I gathereth hordes and embrace mosaic stars. I choose environments in which there are fugues and flourishes, a thousand miles on the road, and thunderstorms.

Mark Reep makes constructs. Prose gem-boxes, by which I mean to commend them at the highest order. Conventions of elegant structure are acquitted purely (the selection of detail is unexpected and wise; the energy form is like breeze on pond; basic verities sculpt one another in a candy bowl) but these are the least of his accomplishments. A reader is granted access by detecting in her or his soul the sound of natural language, and before we deform English with artifice, its conveyance in our heart runs alongside a panther in the sunshine, and it is transparent, and it has the suppleness of a dancer, and no element of it is hard-driven or ridden, bandied or bopped: hence, lucidity, force and ease. The heart beats the rhythm of illumination; equivocation falls away, and we take this stuff personally.
Intelligibility is not a value any more than paraphrasability, or the knack of reducing an episode of “I Love Lucy” to fifteen words for TV Guide. The single point of access to Mark’s vignettes lives in the shadows, the spaces between the landmarks. It is there our sentiments of memory and association can thrive, not limited to but enhanced along the self-evident axis of the story line. His is the aesthetic of the glimpse. Ezra Pound’s haiku, “In a Station of the Metro”

The apparition of these faces,
Petals on a wet black bough

may tell you more about the Paris underground railway in 1912 than any extensive transliteration. In a sense, Reep’s prose is imagist in nature, but instead of being divorced from journalistic scene descriptions, it actually thrives in stories that can be elucidated by those with a pure grasp of expository prose. There’s a great trick in this, almost as if the author is asking you to look at horizontal and vertical black and white patterns, yet see with your inner heart’s eye, the colors and textures that are implied within. There is quite a long history of trusting the sensibility of the artist to reveal truth within, that may rest apart from intention, if intent was ever there in the first place. Mary Shelley, writing Frankenstein, knew she was plumbing aspects of the soul that no one could rightly understand until Freud and Jung and Marx came along to provide their coherent explications, and in the early 1960s Dylan told Baez he didn’t know what this shit means [his lyrics] but eventually somebody would figure it out. Nothing is so mysterious as the plain truth directly stated.
And so again the contradiction, aptly expressed by His Grouchoness, declining acceptance by standards that would embrace himself: this imagist writing defies the deconstruction literary theory with which I fuck the stars, and presents instead, without the bramble pits in which I tangle, the point of the exercise, which I will call for the moment, time-travel. Maybe a horse dies, maybe a girl drives a car, but a reader will have taken himself or herself to a place he or she may seem to have remembered, to a place that exists only in their deepest self-actualization: in their hands the gift of being able to understand yes, or to be able to understand no, the sensitivities that one writer has offered. The clarity of the truth (perception and expression inextricably one, and kind-hearted) should not be obscured by limpidity of prose, though that too has a value with which one may confront the rabble of crowds. The residing place of the works’ sensibility is in our assumption that a magnetic resonance imaging machine would reveal in the prose elements of kindness, and a sympathetic heart, without which it could not exist. With which compare the black evil beast of Paul Auster, for whom storyline alone is assumed to be enough to capture a walnut he has found and wishes to place in our (obeisant, obsequious) hand. Reep’s prose pieces convey so much more from the underwater: fishes, kelp beds, currents, and other evidence that craftsmanship here means what it did for many artisans in the 16th Century: this axe is meant to last my lifetime, and contains everything I know about form, expression, and function. This woodsman’s mentor is here, his wisdom and something that came to be known in later centuries as pride, a sentiment of which he had no knowledge at all. This axe was to be complete, and it could be nothing less than comprehensive; that is, it was rich with the inferences associated with his deepest memory of learning axecraft from men who had in turn derived the skill of axe-making from generations before. The Modern Age taught men shortcuts, and firms and companies and consortiums and rafts of wage-slaves made axes that barely eked themselves inside the definition, and the appearance of axehood was all that was required (hence Auster).
I happen to live in the satire of euphuistic embroidery, but what I admire more truly, is the Wilsonian prose Reep writes. Lucidity reveals the generous soul within, as well as the more fundamental truth behind the storyline; it also divulges the essential goodness of a writer who is making a gentle offering of a peek inside the Grail cup rather than scurrying legions of comedians around a picnic table. Force bespeaks the sinuous, natural beauty of a ballet dancer or a second baseman, for whom excessive movements or contemplation create only falls and outs. Ease is the vibrating tone that rhymes a true story with the beneficent hum of natural, human and stellar harmonics.

Bartleby the Scrivener

2010-03-29T21:06:00.004-04:00

Some years ago I attended a piano concert at Wells College in Aurora, New York. There were eight pianos on the stage. Elsewhere in the history of musical performance and theatrical circus-mongering, there have been numerous occasions when such concerts have been held (oftener in the eighteenth century); sometimes there are twelve pianos, and sometimes there are eighteen. These concerts are called “monsters.”

Some of the keyboards endure four hands, and the warm-armed bodies of page-turners and the principal persons themselves populate the stage with something that might resemble a throng, if not a rabble. Inevitably, the music as a whole seems to exist entirely for the rousing. This is a not entirely involuntary kayaking down fabulous whitewater cascades. One may be forgiven for leaving the concert hall seeming to possess the feeling of complete inclusivity and fulfillment.

I am suggesting that it is a useful, if ultimately an indefensibly pointless exercise, to finally press one’s sensibility and view of literature to the point of making a form of declaration in which is identified what might be called the seminal American work of writing. Normally, if I am drinking martinis on the rattaned-deck of a motor schooner on a bright blue day in the Mediterranean with a spontaneous cluster of blowsy and fun graduates of Oxford University, and graduate students from the University of Toronto Department of Comparative Literature and Media Studies, and University of Paris literature dropouts who have decided that busking on the boulevards is, as we learned to say in 1968, more relevant, I proffer and foment upon them Gatsby, than which nothing more beautiful, lyrical, and knowing has ever been found (ever I quoth). But I am uncomfortable thereby neglecting all of American literature that existed prior to the country’s headlong fall into usury and cinema, and in a more thoughtful milieu (sherries) will mention "Bartleby the Scrivener," who saw what was coming, and preferred not to be any part of it.

Fugues and crescendos, torrents and floods, starbursts and comets, tender kisses and ‘round the worlds, Benito Cereno and Billy Budd, Queequeg and Starbuck, Pierre or the Ambiguities and Isabel, pi and om, Herman Melville contained multitudes too, and made for us the concordance of ubiquity, of sentiment, and of martial execrations that leads us out of the perplexing bramble of thickets into which we are all born dumb.

One of the benefits of becoming walking-lost in a large city about which you have no geographically-orienting knowledge, is that wandering loose vectors perhaps in the direction of your chief known (hotel) landmark, you may see blossom before you an expanse of park, and that may have been the last thing on your mind as you sought to mouse-trail the canyon streets, or gain a useful vista from the middle of a large intersection crosswalk. These parks (speckled throughout Paris, riverside in New Orleans, and curious lowlands in New York) may have been institutionally landscaped, but botanical growth and neglect can have formed bowers and groves that equal the hyper-designated installations in formal estate gardens, and, perhaps overwhelmed by outbursts of chlorophyll and moist shades from the sun, a wanderer may swing and swoon in the delusions of the American counterpart of Roman Fever (Daisy Miller, always and forever our Beatrice). If one has been thinking of Melville, then, these swings and swoons will include transcendentalism, gender politics, spurious redemptions, cetology, discontinuity and partially overlapping non-simultaneous events, revenge and orality, factitious familiality, black despair, the art of violence, Quichottism, ontology, boats and fishing, ordeal, galvanization, Orion, and the world as an orphanage. Then everybody dies, except for the one wise orphan: thyself.

West Ham United has lost six in a row (27 March 2010) and shudders towards relegation. One of the ways in which I feel myself related to Pierre, or the Ambiguities, and Ishmael (yclept), and the dying scrivener, is that they have joined me on the island off the coast of Chile, while all the other persons whose spirit resides in novels have been unable to sustain my love, and have perished in the wreckage of the ship. Becky Thatcher – and, let’s face it, she is Dolores Haze, and Pia Zadora, and Buddy on the ABC show “Family” – never really unbridles the boys’ from their scampish delinquency; there is a single muffled kiss in PORTRAIT OF A LADY; and Candace “Caddy” Compson, felt by Faulkner to be the sole source spring of THE SOUND AND THE FURY, never quite steps into the light, as I so wanted her to do. Banished, punished, all but forgotten: relegated. All that remains are Billy Budd the beautiful and the soul under the counterpane, but even these cool cats retain a fervid glimpse of aspiration and will bale the bilges. Bartleby alone abdicates from personality, function, and partiality, and adheres to a humanitas uncorrupted by intentionality. He is as pure as a gem-like flame.

Perhaps, in 1978, We Should Have Been Listening More Closely to Tommy Goldsmith

2010-03-29T20:16:00.005-04:00

Custard Pies at Ten Paces

2010-03-11T11:26:00.002-05:00

I used to believe that I’d mature out of my peevish resentment of those devotees of DeLillo, Paul Auster, and the many other writers whose work I find gutless, overwhittled, and small.
(While holding onto my devotion to Exley and Edmund Wilson.)

I’ll regard it as good fortune that I find I am maintaining my opinion that those writers are weaklings and effete connoisseurs who huddle together in the muddling puddle of gathering what strength they may by reciprocating to one another attestations of value and quality, like chameleons on a mirror.
(While I lead the audacious and harum-scarum imperial guards into peppy brothels and salacious bars.)

In academic and institutional settings I have always tipped toward whistle-blowing rather than the expedient and gentler suggestions that might lead to a quieter and collegial remediation of problems.
In the literary wars I find that I have decided to plant my feet in my own particular trench, and in a churlish, indiscriminate, and clamorous way continue without contrition to fling brickbats at the people I shall forever call the scrawny chickens of the literary barnyard.

To whom I say: get the hell out of Dodge.

JOHN ENGLAR OF TORONTO

2010-03-05T12:23:00.008-05:00

Photo credit, Kevin Konnyu

Interviewer: We’re speaking today with the editor of Ulysses’ Friezes. This is part of a series of interviews with the writers of literary weblogs who were born shortly after World War II.

PM: Hi there Jack.

Int: I suppose it’s safe to say, finally, that you’re in a position to look back and evaluate your literary life. Any outstanding regrets?

PM: To put it in proper context, I should mention that I feel thirty-one, but I guess it’s not altogether foolish to review one’s life at the age of sixty-three. But regrets? No. To have been twenty-one in 1968, and to have gone to graduate school in 1969, I’m of the era of people who were role-oriented rather than goal-oriented, as McLuhan said, and we learned from Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday that regrets are strictly for rubes.

Int: Well then, if no regrets, how about bad mistakes?

PM: No, not really. It should be obvious that persons I have wronged would cite numerous examples that will contradict me. Cultural anthropologists realize that significant advances in the human psyche are made only after times of trial, in those latter years or decades of calm and repose. It’s then that people have the disposition and leisure to acculturate their feelings, conclusions, and creative expressions.

Int: I’m not sure I understand that.

PM: Well, you’re prejudiced in favor of comprehension.

Int: Is that why most people find your writing obscure and dense?

PM: Those descriptions’ll do. There is also rarefied, muddled, lotus-eating, ostentatious, and sick. I can write a sentence that’s as straight as a ramrod, but I’m really only feeling full of beans and truly part of the human comedy when I’m writing on a reckless wing. It’s kind of like driving drunk. It’s stupid, sure, but if you find yourself in a Porsche on the roads high over the lakes and vineyards of upstate New York on a sunny summer day, you’d have to be a real shitstick to drive safely.

Int: Okay, I get that. But what if you hit a deer, or God forbid, a child?

PM: Drunk drivers also miss children.

Int: I don’t get that.

PM: Well, we’ll have to agree to disagree, and I’ll go further than that and agree with myself that you’re kind of a sissy.

Int: You write a lot about sissies, and the lack of courage.

PM: It’s a topic that sustains me. Sort of like food.

Int: So, you have no regrets, and haven’t made any mistakes?

PM: I think I said that I haven’t, but the sorts of people you’d feel safer trusting could list lots of mistakes. I will give you this, though. For the past few years I’ve had a faint but unpleasant sense that I’ve forgotten to do something. Normally, at this point, women will say “I forgot to have children!” and men might say “I could have been a contender” but in my case, I am starting to develop a clearer sense that I might have failed to go a bridge too far in journalism, and I now think I could have written a biographical appreciation that might have flown on to the pages of The New Yorker, or even some lesser pub. I still work at, desultorily.

Int: What would that be?

PM: Well, I hate to say it, but I don’t think you’re really interested.

Int: Excuse me?

PM: You seem to be treading water, waiting for me to contradict myself so you can drill me. Which, by the way, wouldn’t be particularly hard to do.

Int: Hmm. I probably shouldn’t have let you come to that conclusion. Unprofessional of me. I guess I was annoyed by your calling me a sissy.

PM: Have you not been afraid of stuff in your life?

Int: Snakes, cancer, that sort of thing?

PM: No, more having yourself for deep company when you’re at the moment of your death.

Int: I don’t think about that very much, except in terms of leaving an inadequate level of security for the two kids I have in college now.

PM: I’ll take a wild guess here. I expect you’d be shit-pooping afraid to arrive in Sao Paolo after midnight and have to find a safe hotel, but wouldn’t give a thought to going up Omaha Beach in 1944.

Int: Hmm. Let me ask you about your journalism again.

PM: Shoot.

Int: What were you going to write about, but seem to have abandoned?

PM: It was a biographical appreciation.

Int: And?

PM: I’m not specifically reluctant to talk about it; the narrative is very interesting. But I would have to layer it quite profusely with a sort of remorse relating to my trepidation about doing the subject justice.

Int: Isn’t that a regret, per se?

PM: Let me leave that to you to decide. Where do your kids go to college?

Int: Colby, and the University of Rochester.

PM: You couldn’t find any more expensive schools?

Int: Even if it’s not exactly a regret, would you mind telling us about your biography?

PM: Biographical appreciation.

Int: Right.

PM: There are two parts to the preface: one addresses the fact that I never seem to really get going on this writing, and the other concerns the central figure, who seems to have done something almost impossible, something that opposes all my understanding about the process of aspiration. The former says something unflattering about me and my soul, and the latter renders a pigment of fantasy upon the narrative that I’d prefer it didn’t have. I’m not sure you’re going to care for my treatment.

Int: Okay. Who is the “central figure”?

PM: It is a person named John Englar. He is from Toronto, which explains more than I expect you would allow it to. I met him in 1987 in France, and we spent ten straight hours together. Then I never saw him again.

Int: How old were you in 1987? What were you doing in France?

PM: Englar would have been in his early twenties. I was forty. We met during the Paris-Brest-Paris bicycle event, a randonnee, which is 750 miles. It is ridden within ninety hours, straight through three nights, in the rain, with no sleep, and in an exalted state of very considerable enervation. We rode together up and down the hills of Brittany. At one point we stopped at a café for some coffee. The young fellow working alone in the café was very bored, without necessarily being sullen. The lattes tasted – let me say this now - absolutely heavenly to me, but for Englar, his had been inadequately scalded. He carried his cup back to the fellow, who re-prepared it properly, exposing I would guess a bit of chagrin for having been caught trying to foist a second rate beverage on what he took to be a couple of undiscerning barbarians. Englar’s insouciance doing that had impressed me deeply, and made me feel a better man for having simply shared his company. You might say I admired him breathlessly. We sat a while at the table; he told me he was going to Ireland after Paris to study for three weeks at a prestigious confectionary college in Dublin. When we were riding again, he said he was going to open a coffee shop in Toronto. I think I said something along the lines of “oh, that’s nice,” and then he gently and generously corrected me “no, it’ll be a special coffee shop.” Then he described visions. Were you there when that little kid in Portugal saw the Virgin Mary? I was.

Int: So then he opened a coffee shop in Toronto?

PM: First, let me settle upon you my most withering look. There, now I feel better. No, nothing so trite as that. Open a coffee shop in Toronto is one of the things he did, but his chief accomplishment – unique in my experience – was to take each element of the vision he had articulated, and bring it to exhaustive fruition, making an impact on the zeitgeist, defining a culture of freethinkers, and resurrecting an aura the modern world assumed it had lost forever, from the days when Zelda Fitzgerald jumped into the fountain, and Dean Moriarty sped down the two-lanes, when Mark Rothko discovered balance, and when Shakespeare wrote the twentieth sonnet.

Int: I have to say, you’re making it pretty hard to believe. This is a young kid on a bike with an idea that’s not even particularly original.

PM: I understand that. It takes a bit of research. And I’ll provide your editor with some resources that will illustrate what I’m trying to describe. When the mosaic is taken as a whole, you’re looking, not only at a unique character, but standing in awe at the sheer impossibility of dreams that have been actualized. We’re not used to that. His vision of “special” contravenes just about every square inch of land upon which you stand.

Int: So he opened a coffee shop.

PM: Ufff. I’m going to go get a beer.

PM: Okay then. In part: He sponsors a bicycle racing team that has achieved notable success and some comical notoriety. Some years ago he created a figure 8 velodrome in Toronto and Vancouver that has as much legendary allure for cyclists as we might suppose Harry’s Bar in Venice has for nascent authors. He is by many people credited with inventing the Alleycat Scramble, which is an affair of lunacy now held in many of the major cities in the world. He has made a place where bike couriers’ half-mad culture is churchy. He has feared nothing, which doesn’t sound unusual except that he’s the only person I’ve ever met for whom that is true. He has fulfilled his destiny by assuming responsibility for every bit of his innate charisma. The only other person who has done that, Eddy Zieba, is also a cyclist, imagine that. But the reason an extensive biographical appreciation needs to be written – and I happen to lack the vigor to do so – has to do with his iteration of these details, and more, and his describing the ambiance that now exists, twenty years before they came into full existence. In precise detail. It is raining, and we’re riding between Loudeac and Carhaix. And he speaks the very words that will be written twenty years later by culture critics, restaurant reviewers, bicycle journalists, and Sunday newspaper feature writers. He describes a place that photographers will later document, in chilling, exquisite detail. Actually, it was more like this. We’re riding along together over the terrain that was the territory of those strange creatures, the Breton Celts.

Int: France.

PM: Look at this photograph. It’s a great photograph, yes?

Int: It’s nice.

PM: This young woman is reading the newspaper in a Toronto Coffee Shop. Jet Fuel Coffee on Parliament Street. She has found a place where she can have a coffee, read the paper, maybe smoke a cigarette, and be herself alone. You might even say, there are no boyfriends around to distort her. A photographer takes her picture from the street, through the glass window of the shop. Just a second before she realizes the photographer is a friend of hers, Kevin Konnyu by name, she lays a scornful look on whoever it was that was interrupting her; whoever it was who slashed a rip into her privacy.

Int: And?

PM: This is what John told me in the rain near Carhaix. Bike couriers will hang out there, the Apaches of Metro Toronto; it’s an art gallery; the music is immersive and vaguely anamnetic. Jack, listen to me now: he used these very words. Women can go there and read the paper in private. John says: “I would found an institution where any strong, independent woman could read the newspaper and drink her coffee and not be messed with.”

Int: He said “I would found an institution”? That’s fairly impressive, and I completely doubt it. Though don’t you think some people will conclude that maybe it’s your memory that has filled in the blanks, and makes you remember things that he didn’t actually say, based on the things you’ve read years afterward?

PM: I’m quite sure some people have hearts void of faith and minds lacking the ability to believe in intuition, or in the mystery of art.

Int: But it wasn’t an artwork, which allows those things, it was the factual occasion of two guys riding bikes. And, come to think of it, it wasn’t the vision of the Virgin Mary, either.

PM: You’re sure about that?

Int: My business has as its principle tenets, corroboration, the laws of physics, an examination of motive, and paraphrasability.

PM: No room for the mystic?

Int: But you’re not saying Englar was a mystic. You’re saying, basically, that he foretold the future.

PM: I am saying that John Englar foretold the future. Yes.

Int: Maybe he just had a dream and got lucky and it came pretty nearly true? Doesn’t that describe a hundred coffee shops in North America?

PM: Maybe you need to look a little more closely at the picture of the woman with the newspaper. Who do you suppose provided her with the cathedral of such an eminent place in which to be private? Private.

Int: I think you’re getting a pretty long way from the intention of this interview, which was, I thought I had understood, to ask you about your thoughts looking backward; to give you a chance to describe your regrets, or what you’ve learned.

PM: I am looking back. I see that I’ve been surrounded by weaklings and cowards and by profoundly insipid people. When I look for heroes, if that’s a word we can use, I see only five or six souls who have followed a flight path like the goddamned swallows of Capistrano, from vision through to achievement. Paul Campbell is one. Stacy Schiff. Jim Jarmusch. If Englar had foreseen himself as a theatrical impresario, we would now be experiencing the moral thrills that we have had to pretend we’re getting at Stratford, or the O’Neill Theatre, or the Old Vic. If he had wanted to make the perfect cupcake, people would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars and fight wars for his cupcakes, the way the Dutch in 1637 went absolutely batshit for tulips. If he had...

Int: Okay, okay. But the fact remains, he opened a coffee shop, and the one he described in 1987 and the one he owns now in 2010 are not the same, provably, except in your recollection.

PM: Provably. Well, that’s not where the charismatic live, is it? Alice B. Toklas said that when she met Gertrude Stein for the very first time, a bell went off, signifying genius. Nobody else in the room heard that bell. So there was no bell, eh?

Int: All we know for sure is that Alice Toklas claimed there was a bell.

PM: And I am reporting to you that John was describing the coffee shop that was going to exist with all the verisimilitude of describing a coffee shop that might have existed back in 1955 in Greenwich Village. I have made the mistake of sharing with you my feelings of having missed something, which is as close as I was going to get for you to your “regrets” or “mistakes.” People tell me I’m getting older. I missed the opportunity to become a trans-ocean sailor, and I erred in failing to play squash racquets all my life. I missed the opportunity to watch John Englar cleave through the semi-bohemian culture of Toronto like a saint, and to write about him in a way that might give people a little more courage, and an increased tolerance for the sheer beauty of recklessness.

Int: Well, our time is at an end. Thank you for speaking with me today.

PM: Oh heck, I’ve got more time.

Int: Well I have another appointment, so I’ll be saying goodbye now.

PM: You don’t seem to have been able to suppress your skepticism about John Englar.

Int: My feelings don’t have any bearing on what you have to say.

PM: Yeah, that’s the idea, but you’re skepticism is kind of callous, isn’t it? Englar represents many of the things that seem to frighten you: liberty, transgressive daring, and good-nature.

Int: Oh whatever!

PM: Isn’t your job to elucidate information, not pass judgment?

Int: You’re dissatisfied with our conversation?

PM: I’m dissatisfied with your hidebound lack of imagination.

Int: Is the interview over?

PM: Fucking right it is.

NOTES:

Jet Fuel Coffee website

Photographic tour of Jet Fuel

Enjoy the work of photographer Kevin Konnyu

(it's amazing)

from various Toronto newspapers (attributis perdutis)

Founding owner John Englar (known to regulars as Johnny JetFuel) holds culinary, pastry and chocolatier papers but limits his wares to coffees, lemonade, and home-baked muffins and danishes. (The Cabbagetown landmark is patterned after the original Parisian coffee stands that sold only strong lemonade and even stronger coffee.) Order your drink hot or cold.
...
Check out the elegant vintage Italian coffee machine, the art exhibited on the walls and the jerseys of Englar's bicycle racing team, the first pro outfit in Canada . No surprise, then, that the regulars include a robust blend of bike messengers, along with writers (including Michael Ondaatje), artists and dancers who derive equal kicks from the company and the caffeine.
John Englar, the small, skinny, unshaven guy behind the bar, wouldn't want it any other way.Nor, it seems, would his motley mix of customers, who've been coming here to Parliament Street, just north of Carlton, for nearly a dozen years.

John Englar, the owner of Jetfuel, is an avid cyclist himself and has played an active part in the cycling community of Toronto.In 1986 he started the Alleycat Scramble streetracing series with a friend, which attracted qualifying cyclists from around the world.John also designed the world's only portable velodrome figure-8 racetrack where the Human Powered Rollercoaster and Alleycat races were held in Toronto and Vancouver.

John Englar, now owner of the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop in Cabbagetown but then an ex-courier living on the Toronto Islands, was seeking to enhance the local winter carnival.
He started by clearing a figure-eight track on one of the frozen coves, then challenged bike couriers to race there.Thirty showed up.

If you’re serious about your coffee, then it’s time you steered your attention toward the next bike courier you see, and follow him - over rough terrain, avoiding oncoming traffic, through bank lobbies - to his unofficial headquarters. It’s a given that you’ll wind up - perhaps not right away, but eventually - on Parliament Street, just south of Carlton.

Now, a coffee shop has to be superlative for us to suggest it's worth stalking a messenger over, but the now-classic Jet Fuel Coffee makes the recommendation easy, especially if you're not afraid of coffee with attitude.

"Do one thing and do it well" could be the mantra of Jet Fuel. The high-voltage experience begins right at the doorway, where clusters of smokers hang loose, lattes in hand, bantering at a feverish pitch. Step into the raw coffee shop and you’re greeted with a small, pumping art-gallery-ish space, offering simple, quality coffee, and not much more. You can get a Jet Fuel coffee (a latte), read the papers (there's plenty of room), and just chill. It's the brainchild of John Englar, whose aim is to pare things down and to have a little fun on top of it.

Jet Fuel wasn't born overnight. Jet Fuel started life in the late eighties as a sandwich truck, servicing the film industry. It was the film crews that named Johnny-Jet Fuel-Englar. Later, Englar’s first coffee bar location (that didn’t bear license plates) would be a 200 square-foot coffee bar within a bike store. The size of a postage stamp with two monstrous speakers on each wall. "It was like walking into a set of headphones!" says Englar.

When Jet Fuel opened in the current location in ë92, it was instantly a cool place to hang out, sanctioned by local couriers that made it their unofficial headquarters. But you didn't have to be a messenger to enjoy the nonconformist ambiance, good caffeine; at here, the emphasis was on slackerism and customers who knew each other’s regular time-slot.

There remains a strong connection between coffee and cycling: Years ago, Englar and his cycling friends (soon to become a cycling team) started what was basically a series of illegal rally-cat night races. An all-out no-rules series of races, that grew out of proportion to the extent that Dunhill Tobacco sponsored the races on a national level. Tracks were built for a figure-eight velodrome, and the entire track would be shipped to the next race destination.

Over the next six years, the Jet Fuel cycling team would develop, and become pro. In fact, this weekend, the team takes on the Wall Street Criterium; Jet Fuel was one of the eight teams of riders invited to race down Wall Street at break-neck speeds, taking hairpin turns "with a cobblestone curve". Taking place on a course laid out on New York City’s Wall Street, the weekend’s Criterium has Wall and Water transformed into a daylong festival of pro-racing attractions.

Jet Fuel (the racing team) is indeed headed for bigger competitive action. Team captain, Andrew Randall (the guy making your latte), was a previous national champion, taking the Jet Fuel team to the Pro Road Race in San Francisco - headquarters to Lance Armstrong’s team.

Closer to home, the plaudit-heaped Jet Fuel (the coffee shop) continues to be a standard on top-ten cafe lists. The messenger harmony doesn't trouble the friendly groups of coworkers that come to relax their highly-caffeinated selves. Music depends on who’s manning the shop. But even though it’s Jet Fuel - and not Un-leaded - you will not feel self-conscious here if Rancid isn't in your iPod shuffle. - D.E.

The cities of the world today are filled with two kinds of people, bike couriers and everyone else: Those who spend their lives trying to avoid danger and those who actively devote theirs to seeking it out. Those who pedal and those who drive. Or worse still, walk.

Couriers aren't alone in their dedication to living on the edge, but risking life and limb - theirs and ours - to deliver a parcel?

Maybe in the beginning they were a bunch of pedestrian-hating, car-eating psychos, but couriers have flourished in the pandemonium of postmodernity. Surfing the city and its traffic instead of waves, they are uniquely adapted to the discontinuity and chaos of the urban landscape..

So perhaps it isn't surprising that corporate culture has discovered courier culture; outlaws and bandits, each using the other for its own purposes..

In this case that means the Dunhill Alley-Cats Scramble, a winner-take-all bike race that will be run tomorrow and Saturday at 1401 Yonge St., on a figure-eight track designed and constructed especially for the occasion.

But the Scramble is more than just a race - it's the most visible and best financed celebration of courier culture ever held in Toronto. In addition to the main event, there will be a lineup of messenger bands - see Club Crawl column, below - and what organizers affectionately call ``the Mini-Nightmare Trade Show.'''

``Bikes, bands and beer,'' declares Alley-Cats founder and driving force, former courier and pastry chef, John Englar, 33. ``Plus, we have a cigarette sponsor. Can't get much worse than that. But really Dunhill's been f---ing great. They haven't bothered us at all.

``Of course, some people think we've sold out. We have. We're just trying to take this thing to the next level.''

In fact, Scrambles have been held in cities across Europe and North America for a decade. The difference is that most were illegal. But not this time. No racing through the streets, shooting the holes and running the lights. This time it'll be indoors, safely hidden from nervous middle-class eyes.. And stop signs..

From a messenger's point of view, this is a mixed blessing: ``Playing in traffic is what it's all about,''' Englar observes. ``Being a pro-floater. You don't follow any line of traffic. You shoot the diagonal.. That's the rush, going for the super-run. It can be very amusing and totally fun, or turn you into a complete mother------.'''

These days, however, Englar definitely seems to be having fun. Five years ago he opened the Jet Fuel Coffee Shop at 519 Parliament St., and the less aggressive existence suits him fine. Besides, his cafe is a gathering place for couriers, which means he can stay in touch with his buddies..

At the corner of Aberdeen Ave. and Parliament St., opposite John Englar's diehard Jet Fuel Coffee Shop, Starbucks is expected to open in March. It may anger Jet Fuel regulars who think cultivated rudeness is a vital part of the coffee experience, but it is a bit of stable ordinariness the street could use. Certainly Starbucks won't threaten Jet Fuel, the street's incumbent coffee shop king, with its art shows, occasional readings and backyard parties that are part of the its eclectic identity.

Now I've known owner John Englar since about 1992, when he first opened (across the street, south of Carlton, upstairs, with four stools and coffee for two bucks). I may not be precisely a regular, but I have been drifting in there on and off for more than 15 years; for the six years or so when I lived in Cabbagetown I was there a lot. And I would still say the service can range from "quizzical to withering" (as I wrote in a little Enroute magazine piece about it). So I don't know who qualifies for kid-glove treatment, and I don't really care.

I like the coffee in the tall glasses with the tall spoons kept in the glass Barbicide jar on the counter, and the art shows, and John's deadly sense of industrial design and all things stainless steel. I like the loose newspapers lying around. I love the lemonade. I enjoy being able to run into a certain sort of friend (dancers, cyclists, Islanders, Cabbagetowners, journalists, activists). I find it comforting that it obstinately stays the same, like my beloved Chalet Bar.B.Q. on Sherbrooke Street in Montreal that was so much part of our family life for 35 years that we held my brother's funeral there.

Nobody has to love Jet Fuel. If you don't, the east end has a wealth of great coffee shops to patronize instead. But I cherish the element of ritual and familiarity, and if the barista doesn't know who I am, well that's okay. I know where I am, and that's enough.

519 Parliament, at Winchester, 416-968-9982. John Englar’s long-running cycle-savvy java joint has a reputation for serving attitude alongside its joltin’ cups of joe. But who cares, when an expertly executed espresso goes for a buck? Bonus: since it sponsors a road racing team, it also sells Jet Fuel cycling jerseys.

John Englar of Jet Fuel Cafe on Parliament Street. He started with four chairs, selling $2 coffees. Now he has a whole bunch of chairs and sells $3 coffees.

PLUS: silent auction of original art by John Englar made out of the boards from the Human Powered Rollercoaster with treatment of misfit bike parts. John will deliver the art to your door the next day. Bring your chequebooks!

Tim Krabbe - THE RIDER

2010-03-01T11:17:00.006-05:00

Bobbling in the seiche of immanent pigments

Tim Krabbé’s book THE RIDER suspends a reader’s disbelief that prose can believably convey the characteristics of a chiefly physical experience – hard cycling, in this case – that is the orchestration of breath, blood, and biochemicals. This is achieved mainly by reducing to a minimum the technical references to bicycling in the book, and by lowering a dense and obscure cloud of interior connectivity upon a reader that makes the text seem like a personal dream one may have had. There are just enough referential details in the prose (race tactics, gearing, colorful descriptions of pain) to allow familiarity with the bicycle race frame from which the fuller sense depends (gnostic querying, Spinozan/Cartesian ontology, reciprocating S/M, drowning in the mind’s daisy-chaining objective correlatives, parallel half-truths, time-travel, and the ever-dissimulating metaphors of processional memory. Striating through this soup are strands of the purest Krabbétry, masqueraded and zippy-mutagenetic, that will perforce remember his novel HET GOUDEN EI (film title: Spoorloos). This may not immediately invoke the international title of the movie that contained the most horrible horror of any cinematic depiction, The Vanishing, in which bicyclists are finally able to convey the real last thoughts of excruciation accompanying the scaling of Mount Ventoux, iterating both being buried alive and the scalping one’s soul takes when trampled by an entirely insouciant and bored Jose Raul Capablanca.

Peter Cummings’ god (in his book BICYCLE CONSCIOUSNESS) renders the cyclist’s blood pink in Denmark and imposes upon mortals the promise of essentiality, but like all other gods, delivers instead a pathetic foundering on the shoals of eternal equivocation. Those who love bicycles are perfectly amenable to the idea of taking their velos into Henry Miller’s café and conversing in such a hearty and gay timbre as his (MY BIKE AND OTHER FRIENDS). Even Krabbé in DE RENNER omits the souplesse that forms the formal redemption of the unhappiness one has inflicted upon innocent paramours, the swing of which oarsmen speak, the endorphistical cocaine bliss of elevating the heroes and knights of the blood’s chemicals, the met him pike hoses of sleep-deprivation, the moments of otherness that accompany the transition from living to dead, and the harmony of rhythm and materiality in the nuptials of cadence and will. Also absent, after a cruel ride, is the animation that is vampire-bled from the rest of the world and its people, paths, and sad ways. A three-dimensional game of memoir (as in the future) will send falling forth the fundamental figures that emerge from abstractions (William Morris’ chrysanthemums), pavements of molasses, waterfalls to climb, or lawn mowers that will not start. Such mirthful departures are the books I eat, moistening the pulp with, let us say, the coffee possessing such a love almost as grand as Audrey had identified in Agent Cooper: Markson, Henry James, Richard Price, Nick Tosches. Eight young Vermont scouts ramble toward a skirmish with eight Georgian scouts in a hayfield outside Vicksburg. Some years after riding Paris-Brest-Paris in 1987 in eighty-seven hours, I finished eleventh in a subsequent edition of the event, a position with which I was surprised and pleased, as I had supposed I might have been fiftieth or seventy-fifth, some two thousand positions better than the 1987 placing, in the dream from which I often like to prefer I have not waked. People process everything that is not oneself, and the imposition for which I feel a probably-confected tenderness speckles across Brittany the semantic and rhetorical character gravities that reside most particularly in novels of Francescan wile. Not least, Andree from Balbec, who leaped across and humiliated the entirety of human history, one lovely summer day, launched as never to land, in quite the way one dreams of flight. English-language bookshops and bookstalls in Paris are rabbitholes. To mothers are we born; archers to remote affectation, the flatted fifth, celestial greens, to woes diseased. Cadence quondam, cadence futuris, the topography and geology of the glacial lakes of upstate New York.

Tim Krabbé immerses himself in a entirely conditional interiority from which Kafka and Poe prohibit his escape. His escape is also prevented by Degas and Brubeck, and the very idea of escape is barred by his selfsame soul ringing at its very best. Riding the Tour de Mont Aigoual in the Cevennes, which is to say, riding in what is sometimes called training, which is to say, riding on any day meaning to go faster, he might have been gliding toward memory or fear, though which it was he could not surely tell. There was no pain beyond the col and no dread or joy he had not known before; all that differentiated time from place was this new melody of hating loves, and the bond a scrap of pavement bore from the sun. He could have been a wheel, and how hath execration come to mimic a vitamin deficiency slaked? Advanced velocity is a choir of exultation that resides in the veins and arteries. Perfect pitch, hissing tires and air disturbed chorally by spokes, calling out to one's receptive mind like a loon on a dark lake.

Innate systems position themselves globally (in some birds), creating the one true church that implicitly obeys, simulates, and becomes northness within. An extra Y chromosome and eight nurses perish in Chicago, and Nicole Barrett becomes by concrete attribution a genuine femme fatale in a Utah convenience store restroom. 1) Some persons integrate only a portion of all available technological advancement, 2) seek a taste of environmental variance chasing elk across the plains and river valleys, 3) hurt themselves just to assure themselves that they’re alive, and 4) kill an elk in some imaginative representative way to astound the girls back at the cave by the fire. A well-named blog notes that STEAMBOATS ARE RUINING EVERYTHING. People move west like lemmings, until they are finally proceeding toward the east. Hunger pangs, sunset dew, and a sore butt rescue reverie from madness by way of induced physicality. They give us chocolate doughnuts, repair for the damage of our vanities, and supply tender buttons. The current saints of the bicycle are the urban punk bike messengers, for whom their velocipede defies materialism and boats them ‘cross raging torrents. A half day’s ride dips into the Pleistocene, Mongols, zootropic discrepancy, thermal conductivity, and aquatic manifestations and facades. Walker Percy: the only treatment for angelism, that is, excessive abstraction of the self from itself, is recovery of the self through ordeal. Let us say: lactic acid, depletion, and wear. How do we know we were here? Because we deposit authority in the only people who can clone our cowardice and give it one more try to mend its feverish and chickenly ways. Bicycles make it possible to be a fundamentalist in a closed universe, for an explicit period of time, in a benign autocracy, without ever quite lapsing into our darksome taste for hegemony. Without the burden of getting out of our skin, the foreign prison cell was damp and mean, and Jean Seberg gave us a Trib and joined me for coffee (then whiskeys) on Avenue Foch. Hydration and respiration make of me a merry jingle. And Das Ewig-Weibliche Zieht uns hinan, and Robert Briffault’s matrilineal source pot. Tim Krabbé mines the vortex of Tim Krabbétry, skipping along elements of the Cevennes, a mortal fig leaf of water, immortally beloved. Literature is fiction, but nothing is not metaphor.

In the memoir THE RIDER, two forces militate against one another. As any cyclist knows, rides of any length have a beginning, middle, and end. Anti-spiritualists like Krabbé also know that rides of any length consist of an only putative duration, during which blends, loops, inversions, and ballparks conspire to fuck time, immersing it mostly in dove sta memora, but also in madeleines, furtive kisses, and aspiration of a fabulous number of stripes. Just past the bars, and just past the forwardmost curve of the front wheel, a periphery of limelight contains all ye shall ever know of the days of your life, and the thing to which it might have seemed you were paying the very most attention – the unraveling of the race – is the first to recede, curated then by instincts too immanent to usefully discuss with oneself. The rider’s calculations were formed in earlier eras, when, not invited to a party, or having heard your pallie tell you she was seen speaking with the chappie stronger and cooler and smarter than yourself, their survival was more awful and consequential than the subsequent years of despair and mediocrity had ever permitted it to forget. Since penny farthings and diamond frames, cycling has defied binary conclusions. Liberty was vaunted, and for the first time, horses’ wills were nullified. Bicyclists could roll down roads into valleys, parallel the rivers, and ride the roads pushed along by gales blowing in one’s own direction, in the same way one remembers a beautiful dream.

Brenda Kahn must make more music

2010-02-26T20:17:00.002-05:00

and I would live on the Brooklyn side if I could look out my windows through the metal neon lines of the fifty foot Domino Sugar sign hangs over Brooklyn like a cross on a hill and the tragic Miss with the pout and the beer desperately trying to make sex look sincere is ignoring my friends who are too drunk to fear and the band still sweating a sardonic sneer and I know that I'm going but am I going anywhere
copyright/visit Brenda Kahn

Original sin

2010-02-24T18:11:00.003-05:00

Prior to my buying the farm, I thought it might be useful, as part of the effort of disillusioning my survivors that my intersection with their lives should be taken as anything other than a cup of coffee and a kruller, to declare what I have learned to be original sin. A useful exercise, no? I (only) concluded that adequating one’s behavior or beliefs to anyone or anything else is fatal folly; one must despise all inheritance, and never obey somebody else’s dictates, however helpful and right they might seem.

Well, that’s not a particularly original conclusion, nor, as a former paramour used to say, pithy, but then I realized that this couldn’t have always been the single true original sin, and so I devised this chart, I presume to prove to myself that my path has lacked originality, when I occasionally trick myself and consequently do myself the harm of believing otherwise. You’re welcome.

Landmark: let us now praise Slim Whitman

2010-02-16T13:40:00.005-05:00

I am wishing and I am always wishing that it was compulsory for young people to say Fuck You to their elders, and to those who believe they might have something wise to impart.
Still, I wonder how young persons are ever going to come into contact with the pure eminence of greatness, in any of its forms, that preceded their childhood.
Greatness? Jonathan Swift, Maria Callas, Pele, Arnaut Daniel. There are always only ten. Of one's choosing.
Blessed quietude of purpose, equanimity, and place.
Singing: Slim Whitman.

JUMPCUT - three texts

2010-02-10T19:07:00.003-05:00

Mark Calkins writes, in the wonderful resource tempsperdu.com: "In Philosophy as Fiction: Self, Deception, and Knowledge in Proust, Joshua Landy presents a chronology based on a very close reading of the text that, while it does not give dates, ingeniously indicates that the Narrator has begun writing a novel about Swann and Odette long before his fall on the uneven paving-stones. In fact, Landy's introductory chapter convincingly shows that the Narrator is writing (or will write) three separate texts: a memoir, a fictionalized autobiography, and a novel."
In the early 1960s we pretended that we believed that it was possible that Ernest Hemingway had died by gun accident. We pretended that we believed that it was possible that Sonny Liston had been, in Lewiston, actually knocked to the canvas.
It came as an enormous relief when I realized the full import of Proust's revelation that memory is a process, not a kind of log.
Recently I read and reread Nick Tosches' The Devil and Sonny Liston. The book manufactures courage where there had been none.
Tosches: indifferent to the heart of darkness: (The Last Opium Den.)
In lucid dreaming, the roads go up and down, around lakes and ravines, in memoir and in fictionalized autobiography and as in a novel.

TOPOGRAPHY

2010-02-08T20:45:00.008-05:00

Patricia Hampl was a bright and noble friend for the two years we each lived out in the green plains just west of the Mississippi River. Her work since then has earned truly its many devotees, and her understanding of memoir has withstood distortion and contamination by the hot vogue of its adjacent cousins, genealogy and blatant self-reflection. I vex myself by saying that she is the wittiest woman I have ever known, thus revealing latent gender prejudices, but other than the writing of Dorothy Parker, the band of literary wits is gentle men.

A Romantic Education was published in 1981, an era when my feverish reading of Pound, Henry James, and Briffault had wholly given way to feverish reading of bicycling manuals, bicycling catalogs, and tales of sailing. My rustication was quite fine, yet hermetic. Since my MFA thesis at Iowa had concerned itself with the Cayuga Iroquois who had not so long before fished the very waters upon which I sailed and rowed, and the long thesis poem had ventured fanciful semantic fantasies about their linguistic interpretation of our topography, I could not avoid presuming that Pat’s “sometimes in fake and unconvincing ways” was remembering my poetastical presumptions. But I’d had about the same reaction then as I later had when in a book Brock Yates lifted without attribution a phrase from a letter I’d written him, and when Stacy Schiff had lavishly and embarrassingly overlauded me in the credits to her Pulitzer Prize winning book in 2000: it was only pleasant to be inside a joke.

But I regard the Cayuga who grew peaches in Chonodote (Aurora) and netted graylings in the gorge creeks at the south end of the lake principally as persons like myself who regard this glacial topography as the immanent form in which all ideas and perceptions – and all poems too – are born and flourish. People who live and write in Ithaca listen to the torrents of spring, and are deafened-to-trance by this second source of thunder; they throw fifteen-year-old virgins off 215 foot waterfalls; we never thought it was necessarily amusing that Daisy Miller came from a blunt place called Schenectady, and George Washington camped on West Hill, just up from the wayward inlet that one day would be called the Rhine, and his colonels couldn’t always get his attention because he would spend hours tossing a ball back and forth with some of his young soldiers. You may wish to look this up. I rode the city buses listening to girls have conversations that sounded like Roman declamations; the land shall submit to floodwaters, and east shore towns shall have constant dawns, the sun rising and obscured by long hills. It is natural that green knee socks gain a quarter inch of supple sinew from climbing slopes and steps. There seem to be currents on the water, rippling cross the garden party bits of conversation heaving breasts, and clefts take bits from the horizon, cool wet walkways did they secret themselves within, eddies turn the story round; and we are always climbing, fountains sunsets creeks. They were not braves here, and we let the Tuscarora in later on because in Carolina their talk had become barbarbar. Keeping fire; the Iroquois were matrilineal; Apaches sought their democratic counsel. It is useful to remember that the Iroquois had no word or use for mythology. There is a small triangular park up Elm Street, upon which fifty years ago I sat for centuries benumbed with wonder that there was no noticeable difference between what I thought of as the past and what I thought of as the future. Now I go there with a bottle of sherry in a paper bag and a good cigar and take the measure of the certainty that this is where George played ball, and where, if it came to that, I would chase and prepare bunnies for my evening meal. Poetically.

Dark nights in Arles

2010-02-05T12:47:00.004-05:00

My new friends in Brittany, AC Brestois, defeated Arles-Avignon a few days ago (3-1) extending their heartening string of wins in Ligue 2, French football, marching toward promotion to the bigs. [video from Brest, here] Have we not always thought warmly of Arles, where Vincent van Gogh painted raw darkness and embraced love’s remourse? The city’s Roman amphitheatre on a warm evening pulls the skiff in which we’re reposing into the most gracious aspects of antiquity. Guillem de Cabestanh flourished between 1181 and 1196, a troubadour with whom is associated the most mournful story of romantic loss.
De Cabestanh was presumably more Catalan than Provençal, though the troubadours‘ sort of dharma-bum wandering and seeking of ever-more interesting inamorata and remunerative favor rendered them a key part of the tableau of sea and hills. Contemporary Arlesiennes hover at the hatch of heaven by smoking cigarettes and drinking in backstreet cafes, speaking with one another in the language of love, the closest approximation to which we read as Provençal, the language of the troubadours.

L'aur' amara fa.ls bruels brancutz
clarzir que. l dons espeys' ab fuelhs,
e. ls letz becxs dels auzels ramencx
te balbs e mutz pars e non pars.
per qu'ieu m'esfortz de far e dir plazers
A manhs? per ley qui m'a virat has d'aut,
don tern morir si. ls afans no.m asoma.
Arnaut Daniel

"The bitter breeze makes light the bosky boughs which the gentle breeze makes thick with leaves, and the joyous beaks of the birds in the branches it keeps silent and dumb, paired and not paired. Wherefore do I strive to say and do what is pleasing to many? For her, who has cast me down from on high, for which I fear to die, if she does not end the sorrow for me."

Graduate school in Chapel Hill, Romance Language, did not erase or much contradict the impression I had discovered-by-moonlight while earlier living by the lake in Aurora, New York, that the troubadours had painted the first rosy fingers of dawn of literary Modernism (and the music they embraced was the purest satire – somewhat in the manner of PDQ Bach) though neither form of art would be entirely revanched until June 16, 1904.
The lord of Rousillon had, in a manner the probable shady ways of which are not recorded, secured a wife: Seremonda. Pursuing the only kind of amor that means anything, Guillem de Cabestanh and she aerated the blood of their veins and dreams with the magical mad oxygen of illicit and fervent allure. The lord of Rousillon, brutish and mighty, employed lauzengers (spies, and invidious malfeasant assholes) to unveil the currency of the affaire de cœur, and thereafter murdered Guillem. An epitome seemed to develop when he cut the heart out of Guillem, and caused it to be roasted and peppered and served to Seremonda. I have done insufficient research about the culinary arts at the very end of the Twelfth Century in the south of France, but I should think that peppering was the very least of the disguising. Fennel, flavoring wines, suave sauces; piquant near fruits, sherries, kef.

Seremonda’s delectation was divine. It is remarked that the expression that rests upon the visage of a person who is sublimely delighted by some crème brulees or other mimics pain, but this is something of a red herring, and was made so especially when Rousillon revealed that she had been eating and rather extravagantly enjoying the very heart of her lover. She did take a moment to swoon away, according to the many versions that tell this story in song or sestina, but she claimed as her own the monumental and essential timelessness of the story by articulating a punchline in the form it must have, transforming it into the metaphorical brilliance of language:

then I shall never again eat a more delicious meal.

Time Indefinite Sublime

2010-01-24T11:55:00.005-05:00

One of the ways in which we, the cleverest monkeys, are fortified against a totally debilitating and final remorse and woe is that we have been enabled to recognize those to whom is attached the obscure meta-denominativity of charismatic allure. Two of their gambits include the ability to remove us from the present time, and to connote death.
In 1978 my friend Paul and I rode our bicycles from Raleigh to Chapel Hill, some twenty-four miles, to attend what would be the penultimate performance of The Contenders, a talented group of musicians to whom were devoted earnest and mature admirers. The more evident elements of the band’s work included virtuosity, suppleness, and friendship.
Paul and I had dinner (I’m inclined to say it was at Pyewacket, though I may be confusing that evening with another in which I behaved selfishly and miserably with Margaret, an innocent paramour from Romance Languages at the University). There was no opening act at Cat’s Cradle, and Paul and I secured the front row center table, at which we drank pitchers of beer and smoked Wee Willem cigars late into the night.
There were four musicians in the band that night; Walt Hyatt, one of the founders, had gone awandering to look for slightly new sounds; Steve Runkle was a friend of Paul’s, and at halftime, we visited with him for a while and he unwittingly inhaled deeply one of my cigars; the other knights were Jimbeau Walsh; Tommy Goldsmith; and desChamps Hood. The performance was excellent; there was stomping and dancing and shouting of course, but also a forlorning sort of enjoyment from the fans.
At 2AM Paul and I pushed off and began our ride back to Raleigh; it was still very warm, humid, and very dark. In the morning he was taking some kids out to Umstead Park for a nature hike, so he slept for an hour in a chair in my house. That night we saw the band again, in Raleigh, their last performance.
Some years later Jimbeau became seriously ill with a heart affliction, moved to Hawaii, and became a sort of minister. Tommy Goldsmith became a newspaper reporter in Nashville and Raleigh; Steve’s life ended with lung cancer in 2001; Walt boarded the Valujet that crashed into the Everglades in 1996; and Champ became an enormously respected fiddler working with Lyle Lovett and Toni Price in Austin, before dying of cancer in 2001.
The devotion they invoked preceded the melancholic account of their demises, and there are people today who continue to regard The Contenders as magnificent, and as good as any of the bands that achieved a broader sort of fame. Put another way, one may wonder if the future, vivid, dramatic grief accounts for the lyrical force of their compelling presence years ago in North Carolina. Intuitively ad wisely, Lauren Elkin, MAITRESSE, in Paris, appears to be locating the same savor of allure in Charlotte Gainsbourg. I would say, in reverse, but the essence of their charismatic force of appeal exists outside of time, and therefore does not proceed, and does not revert, and is not to be thought of as in the past.

done because we are too menny

2010-01-24T11:08:00.003-05:00

I walk in wonderment
along seashores, streets, and
city boulevards;
among crowds at sporting or theatrical events
puzzling how it is
that the minds and hearts and souls
of the people I there see
are not asweep with the awareness
that Sue,
in Jude the Obscure,
contained more sexual longing
than had
any previous character
in world literature.

Some men build

2010-01-21T13:06:00.003-05:00

I haven’t seen Richard Miles for nearly forty years, since we were students together at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 1969-1971. One winter evening he hosted a social event at the house in which he lived. As I recall, he had been preparing, masterfully, a beef stew with a connoisseur’s wealth of strange ingredients; he had had it on the stove for three days. He served martinis. He had picked us up in his BMW 2002. The thirty or so persons present shifted into pairs and groups throughout the rooms, and included not just students and faculty from the Workshop, but various characters from around Iowa City: doctors, lawyers, neighbors. That evening was the occasion of my initial underestimation of both the excessive influence and splendor of martinis.
There were too few pieces of tableware. The person to whom I was then married and I ate stew together from a handled pot, and we’d had to share a spoon; we drank martinis from jelly jars.
At other times, I found peyote quite amusing; sleep deprivation is a magnificent sort of trans-departure; and a few years ago during three episodes of cardiac arrest and the associated blows of ‘otherness’ that is sometimes connected with metaphysical transition, I was an eagle awing. These differentiated swoons had their only precedent that night in Iowa, when the bits of conversation I overheard sounded like Fitzgerald talking to himself while writing GATSBY, and felt like what Stravinsky may have been integrating while pre-composing his first notions of THE RITE OF SPRING. When Dick drove us back to our quonset married-student housing borghetto near the stadium, the appearance of the lights of the city and the flickering light-ripples on the late-night river suggested a welding of two types of imagination and one form of practicality from which ever since my concept of the surety of metaphor has derived.
It has been noted before, probably many times, that the more accomplished and ambitious writers at Iowa were sluiced into careers as millworkers at colleges all over America and that they supped with an unsavory eagerness at the troughs of publishers’ fancies. Other persons who lived in Iowa City for two years, and who merely regarded the enterprise as a free, two-year opportunity to attend a rich banquet with very smart, temporary lovers, or an immersion in literary criticism rather than creative writing, proceeded to madhouses, or genuinely unique callings, or they subjected themselves to courageous or dangerous paths: Reza Aslan, David Milch, and many others now safely outside the Tupperware of Writing.
[But Iowa City was grand; I loved it. I sat on the bench for Manchester United!]
Dick had gracious manners. Very Vermont. It was evident that he was up to something else. Kathleen Fraser told me she thought he might be “into stocks and bonds.”
A brief biographical note states:
Richard Miles was born in Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania in 1945 and moved with his family to Arlington, Vermont in 1949.He attended The Hotchkiss School and graduated from The University of Vermont with a B.A. in English and from the University of Iowa with an M.F.A. in Poetry. In the summer of 1975 Mr. Miles started the Aspen Writer's Conference and Workshop with two friends, Peter Sears and Kurt Brown. In 1979 Mr. Miles stopped teaching to publish The Evener, a draft horse magazine. At this time he also took up commercial stonework. On moving to the coast of Maine in 1997 and building a studio, he was able to concentrate the sculptural essence of his walls and chimneys into smaller outdoor pieces. Mr. Miles continues to teach poetry at The University of Maine Machias. He feels that the stones, too, have a voice if not consciousness.

VOW

2010-01-20T21:47:00.004-05:00

In the unnecessarily neglected second volume of his trilogy, Fred Exley imagines his obituary: “His companion, Mrs. Mary Pcolar of West Leyden, related it had been a horrible death and that Mr. Exley had not died well.”
I am the age where I do not proudly describe the narratives all around me, but have found that many stories are telling me: viz, cancers of various sorts, cardiac arrests, and accidents have reaped several of my coevals, friends, and amoureux. I do not know the tenor of their last six weeks, but I am pleased to know very well the kind of life that was led by my uncle Dick. He built the boat shown here, aport in Buffalo, in 1957. He was on a cruise from Ithaca, through the Erie Canal, and out to the far western waters of Lake Erie. I believe he had no specific destination in mind, and I like to imagine him vaguely following winds and currents in Pigeon Bay, Ontario Province. He was not well enough to sail alone, so he took a companion, the hale and obviously considerate buddy in the dark hat. The trip involved much heroic and excessive drinking, ceaseless smoking, and doubtless women enticed in boatyard bars along the way. He actually had a slot machine on the boat to amuse his guests on his many parties. [Dick’s tell: when the boat was launched, he’d had his girlfriend christen the boat with a bottle of champagne; that is to say, not his wife, who doubtless somewhere in the far boathouse skulked.] He returned to Ithaca around Labor Day, and died a couple of weeks later.
It is quite natural to prefer a leave-taking of such robust, reckless, and insouciant spirit, to his several brothers’ bedbound inebriations of pharmaceuticals with cancer, pneumonia, and dementia. The latter were good men in their own way, and did a good enough job too, with their dying. In any case, few of us have the opportunity or courage to make a real choice in the matter of our going, but I do believe it is important to delude ourselves that we would punch our vanity in its nose, and die well.
Michael Jordan, a basketball player, capitalist, and sometime piece of shit, preferred not to speak on matters of race, or to diminish the burden of his brothers by, let us say, investing other than nominally in that community; he was usually uncomfortable in speaking on behalf of his race, and has been indicted as having a somewhat imperfect record in this regard. And in a somewhat similar way, bakers from Cleveland and carpenters from Boston were "uncomfortable" hopping off the transport boats at Omaha Beach, though they managed quite well enough to obscure their conceits in the face of urgency.
Pusillanimity and timidity scum the waters in which we all swim.
When I have the feeling that I am beneath the underdog, gasping with the blues, I can make bluebirds twitter and sunbeams dance by recalling that in 1970, George C. Scott rejected an Oscar and called “the whole thing is a goddamn meat parade.”
I now self-medicate by recalling that George C. Scott called most awards and therefore the vanities of gutless men, basically a meat parade.

Stade Brestois 0 Metz 0 (19 JAN 2010)

2010-01-19T16:50:00.004-05:00

Some years ago, a set of odd circumstances allowed me to walk through Carl Sagan's house, about which there is much to be said. It was beautiful, and is famously situated at the precipice of one of Ithaca's more frightening gorges. When people were expressing frustration that the sky in Mars was not blue, as so it had first seemed, Carl said: “What I would urge on you is an increased tolerance for ambiguity.”
Similarly, we must all somehow learn to love scoreless ties.
AC Brest retains it strong hold on second place in the second division, and cranes its neck toward 'promotion.'
3 questions à Bruno Grougi
Jeudi soir, le Stade Brestois a parfaitement démarré l'année 2010 en s'imposant face au Havre signant ainsi sa cinquième victoire consécutive. Un succès auquel Bruno Grougi a largement contribué en inscrivant le but égalisateur et en offrant, sur corner, le deuxième à Nolan Roux. Mais le vainqueur du trophée UNFP du meilleur joueur de décembre apprécie avant tout la prestation collective de l'équipe et l'état d'esprit du groupe qui font que Brest est second aujourd'hui et peut nourrir des ambitions légitimes pour la poule retour...

Delmore Schwartz

2010-01-18T21:42:00.003-05:00

It was formerly so that merit and grace could be estimated in short fiction by the reader’s experiencing the prose with a full memory of every element in the story: character, character names, characterizations; the path, the scene, the savors: the whole effect. At some point after a war – let us say that it was ninety years ago and in the 1960s – the author replaced cuddling his or her writing with fucking his or her writing; it was observed that there was something intriguing and beautiful about the implosion of the language cathedral; and immanent in every text was a thesaurus, a concordance, the New York Review of Books, and a cocktail party bully. Literature became a chameleon on a mirror.
Thereafter fiction became a wobbling pivot, and a vortex of profusional prospects.

No one wrote better than Delmore Schwartz, before his several-decades of parlous decline, or wiser spies of Gotham made:
IN DREAMS BEGIN RESPONSIBILITIES
THE WORLD IS A WEDDING
A DREAM OF WHITMAN PARAPHRASED, RECOGNIZED,
AND MADE MORE VIVID BY RENOIR
but Schwartz had foreseen such literary congresses, implosions, and monumental reflexivities. Ever we tend to or must heap upon the broad ashlands the visionaries who undermine our temples. If we cannot recognize ourselves in his 1930s failures and persons who sell themselves snake oil, perhaps all we deserve is the blanked rubbing alcohol of Carver and the Carveroids, who play at junior high hops.

The Celtic Bretons

2010-01-14T21:01:00.005-05:00

Brest 2 – Le Havre 1
14 January 2010. Today, in large measure thanks to the chevalier effusif Bruno Grougi (my main man), Brest defeated Havre AC in Ligue 2 football; the cordial boys are now tied for first in the division with Caen (38 points) assuring themselves of promotion to Ligue 1 next year, as Grenoble and Boulogne seem fated to relegation back down to Ligue 2. Relegation is a word of terrible beauty, and I often wish I had the power to relegate certain vain people to the monkey league.
Brest (Breizh, Breton, Brittany) is a beautiful oceanside city. In 1945 my father boarded a ship in Brest, at the conclusion of the war, bound westward across an again-benign Atlantic. In Paris he and a buddy had stolen an abandoned German motorcycle and had joyridden up and down the boulevards. I do not know if one can steal an unowned motorcycle; perhaps he was the just first of his platoon to realize he could easily abscond with it. Later he bumped into Marlene Dietrich shopping in a store, and she signed a program he happened to be carrying. She vanished, and he returned to Ithaca, where he resumed his craft as a printer, stole no motorcycles, and never even considered watching a Dietrich movie. But he did discover boats.
Much of Kerouac’s book SATORI IN PARIS takes place in Brest, where Jack had gone to find his people. He did not go the village of Kerr’och (as I did), and he did not learn that his ancestors had lived in and departed a town very near Brest for North America. Kerouac: house on a hill.
When I was in Brest in 1991 I took a nap in the park quite near the bay, and I spent a few vague and sleepy moments regarding the very beautiful Plougastel Bridge. The English call them boatyards, the French call them marinas. My feelings about that are mixed.
Breizh was one of the six Celtic nations of antiquity, and the Celts had a skewed way of looking at and doing things; they made much of brass, and built a fabulously complex, allusive language; their architecture was stout, and their seafaring was undomesticated. The Breton Celts tried to make large circles in the earth with stones (cromlechs!) where pi equaled three point zero. That endeavor was naive and poetic and pure, and one might prefer to live in a world where they had actually succeeded, and had rendered a hale song people in Wales and Romania and the Mississippi delta could now understand.

August Macke

2010-01-12T21:09:00.002-05:00

August Macke 1887-1914
Lady in a Green Jacket

When we were young, our embryonic critical acumen attributed to some of our art-making friends qualities they did not really possess or would ever realize. The monstrous harvest of the First World War culled artists whose early work we regard with especial grief (Gaudier-Brzeska, Macke). Artists who lived many years, Matisse and Braque are two, voyaged through periods and stages and styles, almost to appear to have become different persons.

August Macke presumes he’ll live for decades, and that on the other side of his many years of painting he may become an actor, or a wanderer, or a playwright. But here his spirit and gut clench, fearing that she will be run headlong into a subservient role, hobbled by weak men, and bound fatally to the cowardice that has been imposed upon her blood. In Tunisia he saw a street beggar, a girl of fourteen, pick the pocket of a British tourist, then swing the wallet in front of the victim’s eyes with a gay hoot, before scampering out of sight. In Lyon, Tsiganes rambled in packs, as on the high seas seeking sluggish clippers, rolling the drunks, in this way: with choral songs of pleasure and accomplishment. The breadbaker’s shop is burned to the ground by his one moment of negligence, after which he hies his family to Paris, where he learns pastries of the most delicate kind, destined only for the bellies of the plutocrats. In mines and pits souls wither into grease, scriveners rot, men pound rocks to gravel, women desiccate. August Macke brings the mallet down, beats a rhythm of forgiveness and betrayal, and frees the vassals, feet in the boulevards dance, the bellows of the throng can from a distance sound only like song. In 1913, August Macke foresaw Paris in May of 1968. He added the enzyme luciferase (from fireflies) to pigments, and,
so that girls could say to the boys in bars
who fan their feathers,
perm their hair,
glisten their muscles,
and swell their codpiece:
fuck you!,
August Macke invented green.

French football

2010-01-11T12:05:00.003-05:00

Oddly, I was waking from peaceful dreams, in Ithaca, last week, and found that I had been turned into a zealous fan of European football, and since then have become warmly attached to the Fox Soccer Channel, on which I can watch numerous live and recorded matches from England, Italy, and throughout the world. I had been thinking that all I cared about was the New York Mets (since 1962), European cycling, and ocean sailing, so I had not expected that my enthusiasm would so quickly turn into that queer sort of dependence I have for the three other sports - if "sports" is what they are.
It then became what some people call incumbent upon me to establish a "side" with which I could park my aspirations for greatness and invest my remotest and least expressible strains of romantic energy. French, that would be; and a town in which I have spent some time. Paris, to me, means Metro exhaust and riding on the top level of RERs (I saw a baseball game being played in the Bois de Boulogne, but no football) and Fougeres, Tintineac, Carhaix, Villaines la Juhel, Mortagne au Perche, Belleme, and Nogent le Roi have teams too minor. Loudeac (my Onhava, my Ithaca) is too beautiful, just altogether too beautiful. Therefore Brest, a Second Division team with nice-looking boys with strange names, a town with exquisite bridges, and presently residing in a strong second place.
Now I feel safe.

Daisy Miller for our time

2010-01-10T16:31:00.002-05:00

SOLVEIG DOMMARTIN

Charley is my darling....

2010-01-10T15:51:00.001-05:00

One morning, as Gregor Samsa was waking up from anxious dreams, he discovered that in his bed he had been changed into a monstrous verminous bug. If they were dreams, he was being chased by small, vile men who were sneering and barking and dripping bile from holes. He then realized that he was even smaller than they, and that all the margins of his bearings were locked in hopeless, oily quicksand. From a window above, a rayshaft of dim light upon his eyes descended. Into it he imagined that he climbed. As the last remnant of dream-awareness was lost, he lay upon his armour-hard back and saw, as he lifted his head up a little, his brown, arched abdomen divided into rigid bow-like sections. From this height the blanket, just about ready to slide off completely, could hardly stay in place. His numerous legs, pitifully thin in comparison to the rest of his circumference, flickered helplessly before his eyes.

John Marino Open 1984

2010-01-09T17:01:00.004-05:00

Exposed cables, toe clips, Bell helmets. 1984.
From the Far East we'd ventured to Hemet California to race in the John Marino Open, an 800 mile straight-through event. This image reveals the secret of my career: I am wee second in the draft, as often I was with Dan and David, gigantic Canada Geese first in the vee.

Geneseo 1966

2010-01-09T16:16:00.003-05:00

KRYS POWELL, CATHERINE PREZZANO, BOB MOORE, and unidentified
Installed trees, raw landscaping, building without character.
Present tense.
Pre-cancerous.
Never afterward bored.

Kate

2010-01-09T15:45:00.007-05:00

AKIBA, NADIA, and MIRIAM: Battery Park, NYC

I have mentioned that my friend Kate has been sending me long letters and emails for over 35 years. By these I have felt privileged.
Some years ago, she had taken some of her schoolkids on a field trip to the New York Stock Exchange, and afterward in Battery Park they came upon a model who was taking a break in the Park.

Yesterday, she made epical remarks that portrayed her being in the world, which she is, in about the way I imagine Neruda observing Santiago from the back of a taxi.

Pannonica THE JAZZ BARONESS

2010-01-04T20:30:00.003-05:00

When wandering half-lost around the lakes of upstate New York in my familiar reverie, I imagine structures of thought that incontrovertibly, for the moment, explain the way in which Pannonica’s motivation and devotion form no part of the reasons that found her crossing the Atlantic for New York City and her confirmation with Thelonius Monk. Shucking Rothschild, boarding the lifeboat, the caravansary wended through Bohemia and Persia, she sat alone at a table near the stage in the Raffles bar.
The lakes are long, and narrow, and very deep, similar to the shape of that group of souls who adore Proust. Shore roads dip into ravines and bend around vineyards and woodlots and fields of corn and hay, but taken on the whole length, are long and straight. Taverns situate themselves along the routes, attracting those persons with a couple of hours to spend, smoking and drinking and regarding the grapefields sloping down almost to the water. Many people who work in cities almost never have a day in which they may so idle.
It would not have been called courage.
I would never have quite expected that a small expatriate community of louche hedonists, deeply bored, would have found themselves over a matter of years coming together in a decommissioned 19th century resort hotel in Rose Hill, New York, Onondaga County, similar to tuberculosis sanitaria in Lake Placid, Saranac, or elsewhere in the Adirondacks. I had been by there a few times over the years, and was impressed by the stillness of the buildings on the hilltop road: tennis courts abandoned, bandstand gray. On a summer day they would gather a few of their number and drive the couple of miles to an inn overlooking Skaneateles Lake, to spend the long hours of the warm afternoon occupying a table or two at the corner of the patio deck that had the least view of the blue lake below. There they would drink wine and cocktails to cloud the edges of the cocaine and opiate derivatives that were their chief means of conveyance. I could not see that they ever very much extended their conversations past half-observations and notions and wry, satirical remarks. They were there in the off-season as well, within, quite near the fireplace; in different combinations, dressed in their slovens, having, I could only imagine, the same epically obtuse conversations, in shadows and in fogs, year after year.
For I had repeated my visits there, over many years. In the late 1980s it was on my bicycle. Later I drove a friend’s borrowed Alfa. Alone, as I was all but a few times, I would sit at the bar on the other side of the eight-foot length of extravagantly polished bowling lane, and extract bits of information from the owner, the host, who seemed indifferent to my presence there – though there were two canvas-sling high stools there, presumably for that purpose – about the group at the obscured table or near the fireplace. Over the times I would take a nod from one or two of them, meeting in the men’s room or at the bar, but no more. They were mostly from Canada, the expansive highway of literary critics and satirists; one or two were from France, or perhaps Denmark. Something had collected them. One fellow was barefoot, brownskinned, and his clothes, only lightly different from the scruffs worn by them all, was made entirely of deerskin: he was a disaffected Mohawk. He read Marx.
The cell was extremely thick and tightly closed. For a few years, I had learned from Sam, they had developed a whole-foods cooperative, and had distributed flours and ciders to small groups all around the lakes. They apparently had not foreseen or noticed that it was becoming an enterprise, but when that evidence was unmistakable, they had closed the business, and had cleared out the stock and staples.
Eight miles up the lake from this isolated, hilltop inn, Skaneateles village lay clean. It is a town of some wealth, with grand, well-tended houses; photographers, jewelers, musicians, restaurants. The town had welcomed a social-religious commune in 1843, and erected a school for fugitive slaves. But something of a vogue was started there, too, after the Second World War; matriarchs and patricians would rent or lend an attic apartment or room to writers and scholars, musicians and artists who were off-tune, oblique, or afflicted with languid impermanence. There these souls would knit and unknit equations, or trill their autisms of a phrase that would not coalesce into a sonata. They would stroll around the town streets or by the lake, whither they might gather in single pairs. They might take a job, briefly, before their practical incompetence washed over them and hied them back to their room.
But what did the tribal, static vagrants in Rose Hill unfurl with the hours of their lives? Certainly they slept and made meals; there were expansive porch discussions with coffee and toast; there was reading until dawn in single rooms. They perfected indolence; they were practitioners of this facility with a fabulous virtuosity. Had they ever sought to name the thing, they might have said the making of nothing was the very purest form of peace.
Among the musicians there was ceaseless chatter, good-natured or sharp, and Manhattan was a warren of lives and souls and isles of shoals, rooms that sealed out moonlight. Her cats were intoxicated with catnip, and her veterinarian bills were mountainous. Among them all she showed her smile of surpassing authenticity, but in the way that only those who have lost freedom know the way in which it fills the heart and lungs, only those without courage know the fits and starts of blood that does not smoothly flow. Abjuring the whole continent of Rothschild, Pannonica’s moral aspiration was freed to inhabit a fine world, where originality was one’s own, by having found the right place to be: near the perfect, and present at the creation.

Saul Bellow THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH

2010-01-04T20:25:00.001-05:00

Jarmusch, Amis, & Hitchens has been for twenty-five years the firm on which I steadily rely to defend myself against the institutional morals offenses and crimes against nature that scour my ship of speed and grace with vicious barnacles, so that I have to wonder why the elder two principals pressed themselves to an uncharacteristic declamation christening Bellow’s book the Great American Novel, a overwrought attribution without which I could have done. The unimpeachable lyric greatness of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH cannot be absolute though, because its howlers and breaches roil the still waters. The unimpeachable lyric greatness of THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH does not contravene one of my favorite opinionated assumptions, that like remarks, “invention” is not literature. Novels are authors, and novelists are (only) conning when they place an awful rut in the dark mudded road bearing down upon which a carriage carrying a fleeing bride portentously hurtles. Published versions of this number in the millions-upon-millions, obscuring the sun, and in some novels, Vienna sausages in their can convey the chance artfulness has of setting the hot dogs rolling down hillsides, pell-mell, screaming with delight at (imagine!) a Beethoven Tenth Symphony. Cat runs away.
Bellow’s growlers and imperfect structure have no analogue in the pristine latter novels of Henry James, which admit no brute awakening from the granite-hard dream of literature.
Bellow’s pastiches, ornamentations, and vignettes elude the pine telegraph poles from which their progress must depend; his tone poems and impressionistic pastel clouds pair a reader with zephyrs and carousels; the human heart is unfurled and delaminated, warm flames of flickering fires rest the sentiments in contented apposition. Augie’s brother Simon is hanged from trees, and holds up signs; with the skill of a burglar he fashions himself a veterinarian and rids Chicago of its plaguing cats; the sordid vanities harked upon our betters thread through his apostles in Cleveland; Augie is rent and gouged, flensed and fellated by rapacious birds; yon bistro reserves the table ronde for his streams of workers exiting cold factories where no mirths form. An electric train anticipates the wild colors that develop out of watching a hundred shades of grey emerge from the ablurring house and factory structures along the way. In the cemetery jesters and fools spangle tombstones with kites and kite tails and kite strings. Remove to Mexican arroyos or even Callisto? Nothing simpler. I had a drug store send her up some breakfast. The poles moor clouds of grace an author has confected, it is true. But that way puppetry lay, as well as the more basic equations of construction.

Christina Stead THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN

2010-01-04T20:17:00.004-05:00

The Arcadia in which I folded into my warm and willing arms the unearthing bloom of mescaline and Eros and transfiguring language was a small leafy green village in upstate New York, 1965-1969, yclept Geneseo. It was peopled by numerous wiggling, unidentified phantoms, and by my particular band of allies, a variety of hot house flowers born months after the Second World War, picking up the flavor of the Beats, observing the inchoate affectations of the hippies, and foretasting the dark age of morbid untime that characterized the 1970s, and then the Eighties. And then the decade preceding the millennium, followed by the ten years that found themselves both flatulent and anesthetized subsequent to the millennium.
Before the freeze at Kent State, among us it was compulsory to carry around certain books (though not in backpacks – then how? and ourselves, were we completely unhydrated?). These were to show themselves to be most-evidently outside the curriculum, cool, and to possess or at least imply the grandest (though putative) transpondences. Chief among these were McLuhan, Malcolm X, CALL IT SLEEP, and Robert E. Morrison’s PRIMITIVE EXISTENTIALISM. But it had not been evident to us that professors of literature also carried (in briefcases) certain books from which their serial years of library scholarship precluded a native, and personal, and true excitement. Professor Dante Thomas (yclept, dismayingly, by his colleagues, “Dan,”) was enthralled by and occasionally mentioned Christina Stead’s THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN. That novel had appeared in 1940 and had immediately hidden itself under the bushes of backwaters and remaindered lists. But: in 1955/1965 Randall Jarrell wrote an essay and introduction: Heinrich Schliemann! Lord Thomas Bruce, the 7th Earl of Elgin! Howard Carter!
I had not known that such other deaths had undone so many books I now must remember with diminished affection.
The secret heart of greatness of such books obscured and created my pesky wondering – before I had recognized it as such – about where the novel can be said to be truly located.
It gives me more satisfaction than perhaps it should that I found that this core-place was where I first thought it was, and where any author should put it: in the gently swaying tone that emits from the admixture of the dimmest evocations of diction and lexicography, the heartbeat rhythm of nerves and blood in harmonic bop dancing, and the lullabification effected by senses swooned in the jazzing of bits of many beauties. People fall off bridges or espy assurance in the face of their beloved or behated, but those storylines have never moved me, or ever seemed anything but scriptwriting (monkey-with-typewriter). Flames and bits of light and distant thunders accrue, in paragraphs and sentences and chapters, until half-reading and half-sleeping you feel what Stead was up to, and it rests in your hand like a weightsome brass charm, the thing she has confected: the location of any group’s adhesion is the Apache language. Persons belonging to the one group presented in the book will go on each to join another cluster, or even a sweep of bands, but an author has devised a bit of craft to fix in time and tongue the moving x-ray he or she will title and proffer for kin-readers. The motif-strains of Stead’s literary arrangement dominate characterization, eventualities, time, and bookish notions of actually existing, so beautifully and thoroughly, that one thinks of the most elegant writers of all, recalling that their brilliance usually resides in digressions and an attribution of lyricism. Eschewing the like of Pollitry is an unbreakable code described as if it were our pre-freudian memory, that occurred usually before the age of four, as oceanic feelings of immensity, planets coming together slowly, suppressing all the familiar senses: the oceania of life and death described by oneself and simultaneously by proxy.
Lyricism is the infinite chord left over from the making of the stars. We rhyme with Stardust, a song composed by Hoagy Carmichael with lyrics by Mitchell Parish. As Burgess says in a foreword to TITUS GROAN: context is everything.

Paul McComas UNPLUGGED

2010-01-04T20:09:00.002-05:00

Dayna Clay slowly becomes aware of her responsibility as the arranging sensibility in Paul McComas’ novel UNPLUGGED, but has been afforded, let us say, perhaps a slight insufficiency of tools, for she otherwise possesses the wit to realize that the single significant sweep of equanimity toward which she aspires can be achieved only by integrating far-flung genres and dissimilar media; but she must for the moment be coaxed like a beef cattle along the single corral gates of story. It is her loss, as a character-entity, that the book’s resolution follows the last page of text with the white page of the face of the good Paul McComas; yet this is not at all deleterious effect, since McComas’s goal has been advanced and achieved, and he has had much to say. The argillaceous prose-fiction Dayna-entity is unfortunately deprived of her own afterflowering, and is severed from McComas’ subsequent night-thoughts. Still, one will wonder why Dayna was given a savant’s precision and wisdom, if she was only going to take two steps across the room, when she might have sailed to Byzantium, and wandered cross Patagonia, rusticated in a Venice café, and encouraged Matisse to use a little more white pigment.
One step across the room is doubtless the primary necessary expedient if it prevents the principal from trembling the trigger bar that alerts the bullet meant for one’s head, but the broad life promised her is stunted by her believing that the rest of her life - when she could be appreciating that memory is a process – is a monkey replacing one story with another.
To his great credit and in fulfillment of the promise he has made to us to unleash in the form of a novel the James within him, McComas has made Dayna Clay an artist, whereas the sniggling Paul Auster has simply and nominally declared that some character or other is an artist and by means of that endorsement, he expects us to jump on his fucking smelly trolley of a novel.
Auster arranges sentences in exactly the same way I would suppose he has violently swung a razor-sharp, mountainman’s axe to cut in half a Milky Way: with thundering declaration that the meaning of a sentence can be no more than the sum of the meaning of its words. Build a model of the Taj Mahal with uncooked spaghetti. At age fifteen, he stuffed a green pepper with ground beef, onion, tomatoes, rice and cheese, in just the way he had, the night before, for the first time, approximated coitus. This is a world without color or people of color. What do boxes in a closed warehouse do when no one is around? They defy their own destiny and besmirch the glory of their far-bound treasures, by having convinced themselves that everything will be okay as long as Regent Auster comes along and makes of themselves smug little piles and other similar, consequential, and bloodless boxes. Auster’s redemption is always only effected by paraphrase, which is not the land of wisdom, art, love, health, multiplicity, the human senses, assurance, courage, rebellion, the glories, the graces, intuition, or metaphor. Paraphrase is some old shit-chestnut you got from one of your credentialed elders. Result: Flaubert, Mailer, and Faulkner fling themselves hand-in-hand off a high cliff, supplying by picture a joke that hath ne’er been before told.
As aspects of the whole of his work, these campfire tales, McComas’ DUBLINERS, will have the warmth we locate in our family members, which we have held close to our hearts prior to our having set our own course for Yoknapatawpha, Paris, or Ramsdale. These are the places where englysshe swirls clouds and thunder into song and rhapsody-waltzes. Sincere independence of spirit is always detectable only in the implications and the digressions, as it must be, and its means reside in semiotic, implicit harmonies. McComas’ real (and next?) work is Molly’s ULYSSES, the popular music starlet who matured her accessions by means of the most austere privacy, and was perceived generally by many people as an artist who invented a field.

Edmund Wilson

2009-12-27T21:26:00.003-05:00

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

2009-12-23T12:58:00.002-05:00

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

2009-12-16T21:56:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-30T20:32:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-28T21:34:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-26T20:56:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-26T20:44:00.005-05:00

This boy read an Auster novel.

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

Jaymay

2009-11-23T22:08:00.003-05:00

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.

2009-11-21T19:54:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-18T15:50:00.000-05:00

Mervyn Peake -- TITUS GROAN

2009-11-18T00:27:00.002-05:00

2009-11-17T20:23:00.001-05:00

Frederick Reuss

2009-11-11T11:32:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-11T11:29:00.002-05:00

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.

2009-11-08T20:39:00.001-05:00

^{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,

not

in your element.

Mount Ventoux

2009-10-29T19:39:00.005-04:00

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

2009-10-29T14:41:00.007-04:00

ULYSSES' FRIEZES

Before the hippos were boiled in their tanks

The Modern Age

Edmund Wilson in Talcottville

...and the chocolatier was baffled and just drove home

Richard Farina in Paris

Jean Seberg

JFK Jr.'s Bianchi

APOLOGIES TO THE IROQUOIS

Zelda Sayre

HOW DO WE KNOW WE WERE HERE?

Virtuosity

NEXUS

HERMES ON TWO WHEELS - Kevin Wehr

The Bridge of Sighs

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

Ulysses in Ithaca

what the war was for

Maya Deren in Ithaca

Hart Crane in the Deeps

Hoagy

My zen B.F. Skinner box

The Contenders

Colette and the chickens

Wyndham Lewis

Also Raleigh - 1960

Proust in Raleigh

The Cleveland Clinic

Clarksdale, Ithaca, Geneseo

prose fiction

Reep

Bartleby the Scrivener

Perhaps, in 1978, We Should Have Been Listening More Closely to Tommy Goldsmith

Custard Pies at Ten Paces

***JOHN ENGLAR OF TORONTO***

Tim Krabbe - THE RIDER

Brenda Kahn must make more music

Original sin

Landmark: let us now praise Slim Whitman

JUMPCUT - three texts

TOPOGRAPHY

Dark nights in Arles

Time Indefinite Sublime

done because we are too menny

Some men build

VOW

Stade Brestois 0 Metz 0 (19 JAN 2010)

Delmore Schwartz

The Celtic Bretons

August Macke

French football

Daisy Miller for our time

Charley is my darling....

John Marino Open 1984

Geneseo 1966

Kate

Pannonica THE JAZZ BARONESS

Saul Bellow THE ADVENTURES OF AUGIE MARCH

Christina Stead THE MAN WHO LOVED CHILDREN

Paul McComas UNPLUGGED

Edmund Wilson

Robert Briffault and the woe of foetid inheritance

Episodes of Sublime Transubstantiation by Means of Prose

Mark Reep - Il Miglior Fabbro

Frederick Reuss

Artist: Dan Bacich

Two ways to read Paul Auster

Jaymay

Juxtaposition stopped being funny in 1968

Mervyn Peake -- TITUS GROAN

Frederick Reuss

after postmodernism

Mount Ventoux

William Harmon: One Bagatelle for a Dead Friend

JOHN ENGLAR OF TORONTO