Hemingway THE GARDEN OF EDEN

Every few years or so I try to read some stories by Carver or Auster or Tom Wolfe or John Gardner so that, upon closing the paperback, I may fling it from the outdoor porch of my home, where I read in good weather, and watch it sail across the lawn where I take pleasure in knowing that it will have there flopped and would remain through several rainshowers. Those boys represent Crusade's legions of writers who stick their faith to the notion that criticism before or after the danse of inheritance-shucking (that which follows the criticism that is called post-modern) has something to say. In THE GARDEN OF EDEN I revel in the epistemology of haircuts and the grace of driving a Bugatti in Provence, and the way a woman demonstrates souplesse riding a bicycle. Of a fashion for which one might have not dared hope, a certain haircut is described as like a Bugatti.

Most stars form no agreed-upon constellation

I was back east when Gary Snyder visited friends of mine in Iowa City who were staying at my house. As a courtesy, he left behind for my absented hospitality an autographed SIX SECTIONS, which one day a few years later in an exchange more gentle than it sounds was given to a poet friend who left behind for me a Bill Puka LP. The friend in Iowa City had preceded me there by a year; two years before I had returned to my leafy green upstate New York undergraduate college from a summer in Ithaca to find that she had made a rather frightening erotic impression on two of my friends who did not then know each other; each told about the same tale of fearsome realization that this new force would be inflecting our dinners and lives and coquetteries throughout our last year in the village. As so surely she did. After leaving Iowa she changed her name to Kathy Krishna, and then to Shivanii. My friend Allan is a professor of botany in Israel, and he has lately remarked to me that, though he is a most sensitive reader of poetry, he didn't ever naturally have feelings for what everyone else recognizes as what we shall call the awful depth and peaceful wonder in Snyder. In Philip Whalen's exceptionally rich novel YOU DIDN'T EVEN TRY, some of the characters have for one another the same sort of respectful and intrigued fear that my friends had for Kathy, and from which I have never - but to look - wholly escaped. In the way that Pound called ULYSSES an end, not a beginning, so Snyder's work might be understood to embody a last farewell to the possibility that the earth might have survived the variegated pestilences of people, parallel to the spirit of man that was forever broken in the trenches of Verdun and Passchendaele, and the invention, sometime in the 1920s, of a range of literatures and musics that perfected our vision of a sky filled with stars only clowns and deadbeats could convince their minds dead with boredom hid little bears and dopey crosses. What are the things I have to pretend to be to make her spend the night with me?

David Markson SPRINGER'S PROGRESS

It would have been useful, thought some of the crafters of stone circles not far from Loudeac, in Brittany, if Pi were exactly 3, instead of the cumbersome 3.14 insisted upon by more pragmatic Celts. So these adventurers tried to make circles that were perfectly round, yet with a Pi of 3. Some of these imperfect perfect circles remain.
Markson's prose fictions have a Pi of 3, and among such wiggly coils of stones the reader who takes the author into his heart will have a merry afternoon.
Markson never perjures, never dupes; never tricks his reader. The novels repose before the reader and the reading sentiment like compleat anglers, perfect jewels of typewritten manuscripts, unmediated, authentic prose. There will be delicious potato salad with relish, lush green grapes; turkey sandwiches, vodka and lemonade, luscious crisps, pagan discussion, naps, much tongueful kissing, and dreamy vistas of the golden glowing sylvan horizon. Context is everything. We are safe here. Lucien has gathered breath from the books he's read, and hears the trumbling course of his veinblood purr within his memory, a willing victim of the fairs, every glass is in its place in this bar, motes in the slanting sunbeams ring, singing out his faith, the true calling of Lucien reciting aloud, declaiming lyrics from the book that was written before he put pen to paper, and had he worked straight through, there's springer sauntering through the wilderness of this world, beasts and bugs tamed by the melody of prose made by Markson.

Blackbird 14a

We walk by Cayuga Lake.
Vogdesa sees a grackle.
It appears before her, on this much she and I will agree, but for her it becomes a referent on a four-dimensional axis of time and memory, heartbreakingly in search of denotation, which becomes one of the forms of a moving x-ray striking a chord on a Bechstein. The pall of ardor diffuses planes of surface and sounds, seeking place in the spectrum, and longing for a sense of belonging, either simplified or swollen like a river, and altogether separated from the world’s murders or joined with its dignified and reposeful angelism. The bird plays upon the homonyms, her imposition of a patterned weaving, a harmony-chiming paraphrase of her reading. Bergson comes to mind. Spinoza comes to mind. Dymaxion fluxion. The thing we all used to locate between being and consciousness trembles and wobbles and contravenes the gyroscope (dictionary), then seiches from object to subject and commutes once more, the transubstantiating mersion. A vulgate spake d’antan the tonguewords of more fluid playwrights, those inventing metaphor and by their rhymes rebuffing the deist’s black moll. It is Chaucer’s grackle! and consequently one sunbeam’s momentary flash of illusory fix (Gottschalks hath it so). Vogdesa is unable to lie for freedom. Before the round is done, another round begins: a noble, esoteric, sublime and calculated indifference to botany, zoology, migrations, deeding, conference, faith, (suborning of course), and hegemony. E’en Ithaca’s hilltop copses vanish! Apprehension of the grackle so:

Moddel fikt de bottel crackle
Frins die ocher shacken nackle
Briss auf fridog thor unt frackal
Poppel pindt die uben grackel.

Of meanings’ planes which vie and parry, feint, shudder, and vibrate, rays and waves appear and emit undifferentiated hues and (aural) tones, a minor synaesthetic pression, the suggestive surfaces fade and inflect themselves; they grid like moving x-ray plates, each twinkle a shimmering of recollections, deliquescence, and variance. The overlord is untempered, yet still a cyclone breaks upon the shore, possibilities of consequence in tidal waves. Birds are intricate.
Yet at some point the humming hums evolve into a tale, a tale that is peopled with happy gnomes and merry elves and blind giants and buzzy gnats, which romanced prose presses into the clay of remorse, which shares its home with glee and light. And for a while it vaunts its dominion, and may even invent some cheery dance steps, unencumbered by historical perspective, dances danced in gracious gardens, say. Amalgamated aggregated inquiries and woes arch the stones of Beckett and Ruskin, benighted Crusoe’s Sisyphean beating back against the ravaging storms on an island off the coast of Chile, say. Such of her foraging yields barely sufficient scraps of fruit and weed, forming from the grackle’s gift outright of wondrous keys and contradictions, the quantum sums reciprocal and mounting, the synoptic grains, the Sargassoed sea of nutrients and sharp prickly kelps, a lofting jellyfish grand and bright, the matrix of points, the topic sentence glimpsed and blent, the maelstrom of epigraphs, a hailstorm of puffs, a fashion of adumbrated grammar peeked, a rhetoric of memory, a smoke ring foehned away and into parts,

yet remains the syntax of the holding heart,
the necessary angel,
and the lucid dream of creativity:
a poem, say, or rhapsody adreamed.

Art tiles

It has often been pointed out that V. Nabokov killed and impaled the most beautiful things in his life - tender butterflies tenaciously stalked and smothered all over the wide wide world. La Vogdesa and I make our living by locating beautiful images and transforming them through media and by fire to ceramic tile and botticino stone. At the last moment the pieces are reassigned by a wee act of commerce, and are then bound for backsplashes, murals, tabletops, lacquerbox inlays, framed wall art, poem-folio, and finger-and-hand-tangible bridges to Rembrandt, Tamara de Lempicka, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dan Bacich, and several dozen artists who are insufficiently published.
Readers may wish to wing their hearts to our anticamera.

Stolen kisses.

My Dinner with Chowder

bakst

The noble and wonderful Chowder wonders why I am reading JADIS. A re-read, actually, though it is one of those books one is never quite not reading, so persuasive and so new are the visions. I am reading several novels just now that obey my primary rule of art, that the novel sits before one as a novel, and does not show itself trying to become a novel. (I do not know where this leaves Proust.) In another such work, Robert Briffault's NEW LIFE OF MR. MARTIN, one finds the epigraph by Arthur Symons: "We have no longer the mental attitude of those to whom a story was but a story." Lucidity, force, ease. Briffault's Martin lives among the Moors, another culture one can speculate as displaying the first twinkle of satire. I'll keep looking.

Ken Chowder JADIS

Edvard Munch

In his novel JADIS, Ken Chowder does exactly what I imagine all novelists and moviemakers should do: cease the progression of story and plot at about the halfway mark of the work, and let the rest of the novel or movie, having provided you with enough mooring, lay before you an author's explication of character and sentiment, which is the only location in which aesthetic sense resides. That Jadis lights Egg's way to Tory in the very last few paragraphs of the book only happens to postscript Chowder's having already suffused you with integral, rhyming counterpanes of evolution and what is often called soul. The only true rockmark is imaginary. The browner skins are shortcuts. Annie dispenses with children on page 25, else we would be children.