Music: Two

Brenda Kahn. Epiphany in Brooklyn was released in 1992, a glimpse of dawn before first light, and occupying the spaces between and among the fortresses of insipidity - those out there trying to make albums, trying to make music, trying to make songs.
As against which, she stands foursquare 'gainst gales, and lays upon your placesetting the wholly aloof cat. That this gift was heavened and feathered before us seventeen years ago will suggest how rare are the benefices of the good intentionalities.

and you find that your life is a frustrated vision
of Gauguins, Rodins and excellent diction
mint juleps and needles don't add up to wisdom
you've cracked you've gone mad
it makes me so sad
that I like you better than most of the men
I've had

Richard Farina's decease

Wolf Kahn

My third reading of BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME (Richard Farina) happened forty-one years after my second. After shaking off the wonderment of considering what I must have thought I had been thinking during the first two readings, brightened by the light of my confidence that this third reading knoweth all, the pain of the novel's foreboding and death, and the tenderness of the romance in its soon-to-be dissimulated form have reminded me of an occasion in 1968 when too, in two ways, I had not known or may not have known how closely I was waxwinging toward the sun. (O sourest oblivion!) In Croton-on-Hudson I was staying overnight in the room of a friend of a girlfriend. As he slept, as was his habit, the radio loudly played WBAI, keeping me from sleep until 3 AM, when I asked him to turn it down. "Sure."
(The noise that bothered me surely was the sound of blood beating through the veins of the 1960s, had I ears to hear. Just as Catherine and I the year before had taken the train into the Village, and, when it rained, stepped into a diner for coffee and pie, instead of into the White Horse for beers.) But before the my Croton fellow host slept we had talked about Farina's death. He had been taking guitar lessons in the City from the person who had just a few years earlier given Farina guitar lessons. The teacher was convinced that (as the novel was being published) Richard had foreseen something awful - shall we not call it a certain kind of monkey? - and that he had reached forward and yanked the bars of the motorcycle, pitching himself into the utterest canyon of unknown possibility which some people call suicide [or] escape from suicide. Not long before he died, I had been speaking with Peter Kahn (David Grun) about the tepidity and the pallid surrender of, at least in groups, Cornell's students in 1996. It caused Peter to say a few words about Farina (he pronounced it Fa-reena) in 1958, but I missed the chance to ask him what he thought of the guitar teacher's belief. And Peter, a visionary, would have known.
Richard with Ruth Kahn

Obama, Muslims, Moors, Briffault

Alvar Sunol

Walker Percy, in THE MOVIEGOER, describes an experience of time-and-place/being dislocation (not unpleasant) familiar to many persons. Binx Bolling sits in a theater watching a movie the setting of which is the theater's neighborhood in New Orleans. Our art gallery (Magpie, child of Loudeac Tile Studio) is on Dryad Road, Athene (near Acadamae Avenue), perhaps twenty steps from Guido's Grill, in the book I was reading, there, today. BEEN DOWN SO LONG IT LOOKS LIKE UP TO ME - Richard Farina, Ithaca, Johnny's Big Red Grill, et seq. Today, young Obama extolled in Egypt the merits and glory of the Muslim world, a point that Robert Briffault made ceaselessly ceaselessly ceaselessly in his career as a cultural anthropologist, novelist, and scholar. If there were a thousand souls listening to my thoughts, they would, over the years, have heard me aching and trying to quote Briffault:

It was under the influence of the Arabian and Moorish revival of culture, and not in the fifteenth century, that the real Renaissance took place. Spain, not Italy, was the cradle of the rebirth of Europe. After steadily sinking lower and lower into barbarism, it had reached the darkest depths of ignorance and degradation when the cities of the Saracenic world, Baghdad, Cairo, Córdoba, Toledo, were growing centres of civilization and intellectual activity. It was there that the new life arose which was to grow into a new phase of human evolution. From the time when the influence of their culture made itself felt, began the stirring of a new life.

The Birth of the Cool

I once asked Professor Donald Kennedy at the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill if there was any satire in Malory. He thought not. (Thoughtfully; quizzically.) For the last forty years I have thought of Milton generally along the lines of Ezra Pound: "Dante's god is an ineffable divinity; Milton's god is a fussy old man with a hobby." This probably began in a leafy green upstate New York college where, second semester of my senior year, my friend Louis V. and I were asked to leave Professor Orwen's Milton class due to excessive disruptive giggling in the back of the classroom (the tower at Wads Aud). Grade for class: F. The vogue by which we are washed over just now, elucidating Milton's prescience and hipness, naturally enough, intimidates me, and I should seek out as might in the 19th century West, a scout for annoyed Native People, the bit of a moment in his work when he peeked into our times and saw the difference between those who believed resolutely in the inviolability of the present tense, and those who drifted freely, and quite merrily, as rudderless sailboats, with

in the galley,
the morning aromas on the water,
of coffee, eggs, and bacon.

Frieze: 1

The author in 1969, Iowa City

In the era of this photograph, I was not asking: "How do we know we were here?"
Which now, I do.
It was taken in the present tense.
Everything smelled like smoke.

in the dooryard bloomed

Ms. Ulysses and I live in a hollow, a moderate ravine, a gap in the hills overlooking Ithaca. 350 years ago Cayugas lived here, in a village of longhouses on a spot chosen doubtless for the same reason later was built a mill and a covered bridge extant.
In the dooryard (pictographic form, above) eighty years ago, a family domesticated the scene. The house on the site was built just after 1865. When Hellhound the sheepdog and I go out to chase sticks and look down the valley half-lost in dreamy contemplation, roughened features pop up their heads through the years. Arrowheads, an apple tree, a blackberry bush, a raspberry bush, a chicken coop, granite boundary markers, a community of voles, forsythia, pine trees, a huge oak and the rotting stump of another oak that must have been enormous, bees, a creek, a rowstand of pines, a lilac bush. It is a frieze. An outbuilding houses my studio, where I produce art tiles (woodstove, electricity, church-like silence). In the house, the roof leaks; the chimney is doubtful; there is a 1903 Steinway on which La Vogdessa plays Gottschalk, Brahms, and Rhapsody in Blue, and another woodstove. In 1779 George Washington commanded John Sullivan to My Lai the persons living in this hollow; I have elsewhere seen the text translated from the English using the word "mischief."

But you will not by any means listen to any overture of peace before the total ruinment of their settlements is effected. Our future security will be in their inability to injure us and in the terror with which the severity of the chastisement they receive will inspire them.

There's a fish in the percolator

David Foster Wallace (b. Ith, incidentally) understood Markson's book well.
As do those who achieve book-epiphany with their first howl of merry mirth.
Or perhaps that is a peal.
One ripples and knows currents of bubbles just below the surface of the water.
Ulysses' dog features in Wittgenstein's Mistress.

So I think of David Lynch.
Particularly Twin Peaks.