Time Indefinite Sublime

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

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

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

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)

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

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

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.