September 17, 2010. Friday.
Situation: When I wake up this morning Moi tells me there was a tornado (or at least very high winds) in Queens ; we’re still waiting to hear from the Boy. Last night when I came home it was with a stuffed nose and much sneezing – I could tell this cold was coming. I have to work tonight, and the cold will undoubtedly affect my job performance, but there’s nothing I can do about that. I have to leave about 4:00. Fortunately I finished up my rush job yesterday, and have no outside work to do during the day, so I should be able to take Mway for a walk sometime today. Indeed I just talked to Moi – she hasn’t yet taken Mway for a morning walk (in fact I don’t think she’s been taking Mway for a morning walk for months now), so I’m going to take Mway out now – it’s 9:20 – and get the walk out of the way.
State of the Path: I stuff my workshirt pocket with some toilet paper, grab both the birch branch and my old walking stick. A breeze blows some yellow leaves from the black walnuts. There’s drops of rain on the weeds, but my socks only get damp, my pants only spotted with water. The main path is quite clogged with briars and goldenrod, and with the birch branch in one hand, the walking stick in the other, I parry back the weeds on either side of me. My eyes fall helplessly on the stubbornly rounded flowers of Moi’s “smartweed.” I hear crows in the field across the creek. Along the creek I hear another bird whose call I’ve heard many times before – man, I should know what it is, but I can’t even remember it now well enough to transcribe the sound. I see two birds flying through the locust trees – God, I should know what these are too: they’re the birds I always want to call mourning doves, but I’m not sure that’s what they are. I find the yellow daisy-like wildflower on the opposite bank of the creek and stare at it for a long time to try to burn its image into my brain, its six-petaled flowers with darker pistils, its long lanceolate, toothed leaves – but I don’t find anything right now in the Audubon that quite looks like it. The ironweed flowers have now crinkled up brown; most of the boneset is turning gray. On the other side of the ridge, the New York or New England asters have spread quite a bit, and there I notice for the first time this year some seed pods on the touch-me-nots, and, at last, when I touch them they explode between my fingertips
State of the Creek: The rain basically has just kept the last of the puddles from drying up. The vinyl siding is about a yard from the puddle that’s next to it. The driveway still contains more water than the creek.
The Fetch: Up at the clearing, I notice that, where I’m standing to throw the stick, the ground is pretty much worn away to dirt, so I stand more in the weeds, near some ragweed, so that Mway when spinning around will wear down a new area.. She fetches the stick more times than I bother to count, and after we play “Put it down” once or twice, I’m sure she would fetch it many more times, but I turn around, telling her “Good enough.”
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Moi’s been working Red Cross all week, helping in town. The restaurant where we work Saturday nights is still closed because of the flood. It’s been awfully quiet on this blog.
Since making my last post on December 24, 2011, I’ve been re-reading through this blog, and at the same time I’ve been re-reading some of the books on my shelves, not only to make some use of them, but also to try to figure out what MM may or may not have read, in light of her comments and other actions pertaining to this blog. I realize I can’t always tell exactly what she may or may not have looked at, but if a book appears well worn it’s almost a sure bet she’s poked her nose into it. Of all my books, Ulysses, of course, is the most tattered, but I’ve lately noticed that many of the pages of a two volume edition of the Norton Anthology of English Literature copyright 1962 and 1968 (actually the anthology is Moi’s from her college days, but I’ve been keeping it in my office) are quite worn, particularly the middle pages of the second volume, which presents writings from the Romantic through the Modernist period. If you crack open this book, it most often opens up randomly onto something written by Tennyson or Matthew Arnold, and indeed the page on which Dover Beach appears is one of the most ragged of the volume. I now wish I hadn’t cut MM short on her interview for Part ? of her Doggie Reading Development treatise, for I probably would have learned something about her encounter with this poem. I can only guess now that she must have found the poem, with its lucid and varying development of syntax (“The sea is calm tonight. The tide is full, the moon lies fair upon the straits—on the French coast the light gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand, glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay. Come to the window, sweet is the night air!”), to be an invaluable primer in learning to read – I wonder what she thought when, immediately after these opening lines, the syntax, like sloshing ocean waves, becomes somewhat jumbled, and who knows what she made of the poem’s closing sentiments. Anyway, toward the end of the volume, appearing before selections by Lawrence, T. S. Eliot, Dylan Thomas, Woolf, and others (including a scene from Beckett’s Endgame), are the Proteus and Lestrygonians chapters of Ulysses, as well as the Anna Livia Plurabelle section of Finnegans Wake. These pages are well worn too. Again I wish I hadn’t curtailed my interview with her – I can now only imagine MM for weeks calmly smelling the page on which Dover Beach appears, then upon her discovery of the Joyce selections, sniffing furiously at those pages, until one day making a mad lunge for my full copy of Ulysses.
A couple shelves above Moi’s old Norton Anthology is another Norton Anthology, this one called Postmodern American Poety: A Norton Anthology, which I picked up a few years ago on a trip, necessarily of some distance, to a fairly well-stocked bookstore. Unlike the other anthology, this one appears unmarred by a dog’s paws and nose – and I’m not sure what to make of this. On the one hand, her apparent unfamiliarity with this book seems consistent with some of her opinions on writing, but, given some of her other opinions, and considering what happens toward the end of this blog, I’m not so sure. (Incidentally, the book as a whole, and the introduction in particular, will give anyone interested -- I’m not addressing anyone in particular -- a better understanding of “postmodernism” than I give in my cursory, mostly wikipedia-copied explanation earlier in this blog.) In this book you’ll find things written after the last things you find in the other Norton Anthology, written in light of such precursors as Williams, Stevens, Stein, and Tzara -- after the Joyce/Beckett maelstrom. You’ll find Cage and Mac Low (“fingers Petal’d frOm pUrple olibaNum’s wrappeD floating,” “Then after doing some waiting,/ he disgusts someone/ & names things”), the Black Mountain Poets (“In cold hell, in thicket, how,” “never wholly/ remembered,/ as if a bird’s wing had/ flashed sideways/ in the sunlight/ to prove us earthbound”), the Beats (“I am waiting for my case to come up/ and I am waiting/ for a rebirth of wonder….and I am waiting/ for forests and animals/ to reclaim the earth as theirs”), the New York School (“The leaves were already on the trees, the fruit blossoms/ White and not ruined and pink and not ruined and we/ Were riding in a boat over the water in which there was a sea/ Hiding the meanings of all our salty words”), Performance Poets (“by the time you heard the word “i” you might intend something else someone else who do you mean by “i” “i” is who?”), Deep Image Poets (“Blue herons fly overhead./ Blue paint cracks in my/ arteries and sends titanium/ floating into my bones”), Language Poets (“Animals eat words,/ exorcize this great and glassy news./ The end of the road a walking flower/ as in any direction, another”) and poets of the Blank Generation (“It is almost time to grow up/ I eat my TV dinner and watch/ Nancy Sinatra in 1966/ All boots and thick blonde hair”) -- which goes to show that to be fully literate these days you have to watch at least a little TV.
But, for my purposes here, I’d like to quote two more things from the New York School; first, Frank O’Hara: “It is 12:20 in New York a Friday three days after Bastille day, yes it is 1959 and I go get a shoeshine because I will get off the 4:19 in Easthampton at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner and I don’t know the people who will feed me”; and second, Ted Berrigan: “Dear Margie, hello. It is 5:15 a.m. dear Berrigan. He died Back to books. I read It’s 8:30 p.m. in New York and I’ve been running around all day” – which two passages are clearly literary precedents for the style of writing and perspective I adopt in my journal. Although now that I point this out – to no one in particular – I suddenly realize I’m writing in such a style 30 to 50 years too late. I should have written like this back in 1979, when I was living on East 3rd St. next to the Hell’s Angel’s headquarters, probably near where Berrigan was living, around the corner from my friend Marion, where Moi was frequently visiting me from Upstate: “It’s 6:30 pm Moi drenched with rain just in the door her battery died in Herald Square.” For a while, not only was Moi shacking up with me, but I had two other friends staying with me in my tiny apartment, George, who was later hospitalized for paranoid schizophrenia, and Jerry, who eventually fled to Berlin. Instead of writing something practical and possible under those conditions (I was certainly aware of O’Hara and Berrigan at the time), I was probably trying to work on my stupid story about Ammrrrrrghhrlgblahbleh (no wonder it was taking me so long) – and as for reading, at the time I was stupidly fixed upon falling asleep over Henry James, that great master, between Flaubert and Beckett, on writing about nothing. That would have been okay to do if I had had the sense to, say, write through his novel Washington Square, Kathy-Acker-like (she might have even been in the neighborhood the same time): “During a portion of the second half of the last century, and more particularly during the middle part of it, there flourished and practised in the city of New York a thousand boom boxes in Washington Sq. Park blaring WE ARE FAM-I-LEE I GOT ALL MY SISTERS WITH ME WE ARE FAM-I-LEE GET UP EV’RYBODY AND SING
George and the Country Boy saved up their money to go see Dewey Redman at the Tin Palace. They were so excited beforehand they swigged up the rusty cans of a whole case of Iron City Beer they’d picked up for $2 somewhere. Country Boy remembers nothing about the night except a spinning room and making a pest of himself to a lady they shared a table with. Country Boy struggled playing Scrapple from the Apple with his super down in the building’s basement. He auditioned on keyboard for the new wave band John Katz and the Cats. He would have gotten hired, and maybe have played at CBGB’s, but he was told he played his chords too syncopatedly and with too many blue notes. “Didn’t you ever read Chapter Six of the driver’s manual?” Vinnie the Angel laughing at Country Boy, before giving a refresher course on how to parallel park Moi’s Chevy Monza on the street.
Also in the Postmodern Anthology there are a couple of poems by Harry Matthews (“Tina and Seth met in the midst of an overcrowded militarism. ‘Like a drink?’ he asked her. ‘They make great Alexanders over at the Marxism-Leninism.’”). I’ve been aware of Matthews for decades, ever since Marion reviewed the novel Cigarettes in the New York Times, but, except for the two poems here, I don’t remember having the chance to read anything he wrote, although I’ve long wanted to. In the bio on Matthews in the anthology I’m fascinated and disturbed to discover that in 1988 Matthews came out with a book called, of all things, Twenty Lines a Day. Googling this intriguing title I find that the book is available at www.barnesandnoble.com and is selling in paperback for $10.95 or in marketplace (new and used) for $2.95. I wish I knew what “marketplace” means in this context, because I’d snap this up for $2.95, but I’ve never bought anything online before (at least no kind of dry good). Anyway, it’s pertinent here to copy/paste the website’s overview and product details on the book:
20 Lines a Day, Harry Matthews, Dalkey Archive Press (1997)
For a period of just over a year, Harry Mathews set about following Stendhal's dictum for writers of "twenty lines a day, genius or not." What resulted is a book that is part journal, parts writer's manual, and part genius. First undertaken as a kind of discipline, the work molds itself into a penetrating reflection on daily events in Mathews's life, his friends, himself, and the act of writing.
"I cannot express the extent of my admiration for Harry Mathews, which is well-nigh evangelical. There are now, here and there, other zephyrs blowing—John Barth, Susan Sontag, Donald Barthelme, Thomas Pynchon—but none so strong as this." (Thomas Disch)
"20 Lines a Day might be considered an exercise in constrictive form. . . . Though written in the self-preoccupied, matter-of-fact voice of everyday mulling, it has the irony and symmetry of a parable." (San Francisco Chronicle 8-28-88)
"Weighted by sadness, 20 Lines is caliginous, edgy, and worrisome. . . . Mathews frequently is wise, as when he peers inward at the fluttery life of his own mind. Out of the pattern of one's routines comes clues to how life might best be lived." (George Myers, Jr., American Book Review March-April 89)
"We all may see moments of ourselves here, as well as many revealing glimpses of Mathews' day-to-day life, but what we can only get a feel for—and . . . get it here as nowhere else—is how a man, living a day like any of us, can generate wild, mysterious fictions in the midst of it all. We are carried beyond telephone, through letter, past thought, to sensibility, all at the easy pace of 20 Lines a Day." (Bill Bamberger, New Pages #14)
"Despite the fact that these lines are exercises, they are more than simple jottings. They offer the reflections of genius; they will be read (and reread) for more than one day, for more than one year. They are 'lasting.'" (Irving Malin, Hollins Critic 2-89)
In his introduction to Postmodern American Poetry, poet/editor Paul Hoover (“We want poems we can understand. We want a god to lead us, renaming the flowers and trees, color-coding the scene”) brings up Frederic Jameson, “America’s most noted Marxist intellectual” (to quote amazon.com) and an authority on postmodernism. Whereas Hoover feels that postmodern poetry represents a “resistance to mainstream ideology,” Jameson, as Hoover acknowledges, sees all this stuff as just a symptom of late multinational capitalism: simulacra and pastiche, depthless images and imitations of dead styles, mere fashionable commodities produced for a group of captured consumers (see Bill Readings, The University in Ruins) that are trivial compared to the “’high seriousness’ of the great modernisms” – is this a view that MM herself would share? I don’t know. One curious thing I’d like to point out, though. In reading what I can find online of Jameson’s Postmodernism, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Verso (1991) (the book came out at a time when it was felt, by those powerful enough to have a voice and speak for everyone else, that history was at an end (see Francis Fukuyama) and that everybody in the world had nothing more to do for the rest of human history but shop til they dropped), I was struck by the language where Jameson suggests an alternative to postmodernism -- this would amount it seems to one of the kinds of post-postmodernisms that I copy/pasted from the wikipedia article in a comment earlier. What follows is from Chapter VI, found at http://xroads.virginia.edu/~DRBR/JAMESON/jameson.html or http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/us/jameson.htm, and it’s in reponse, I guess, to a disorienting and stultifying stay at the Westin Bonventure Hotel in downtown LA, where apparently Jameson, after getting confused in the entranceways and on the elevators, found some good bargains at the hotel’s boutiques but couldn’t find his way back to pick up a few more items (for my purposes here, the phrase “in the traditional city” should be replaced with “on one’s own private property” and “reconquest” replaced with – “getting” I suppose will do):
The cultural model I will propose similarly foregrounds the cognitive and pedagogical dimensions of political art and culture, dimensions stressed in very different ways by both Lukacs and Brecht (for the distinct moments of realism and modernism, respectively).
We cannot, however, return to aesthetic practices elaborated on the basis of historical situations and dilemmas which are no longer ours. Meanwhile, the conception of space that has been developed here suggests that a model of political culture appropriate to our own situation will necessarily have to raise spatial issues as its fundamental organising concern. I will therefore provisionally define the aesthetic of this new (and hypothetical) cultural form as an aesthetic of cognitive mapping.
In a classic work, The Image of the City, Kevin Lynch taught us that the alienated city is above all a space in which people are unable to map (in their minds) either their own positions or the urban totality in which they find themselves: grids such as those of Jersey City, in which none of the traditional markers (monuments, nodes, natural boundaries, built perspectives) obtain, are the most obvious examples. Disalienation in the traditional city, then, involves the practical reconquest of a sense of place and the construction or reconstruction of an articulated ensemble which can be retained in memory and which the individual subject can map and remap along the moments of mobile, alternative trajectories.
Speaking of “watching a little TV,” as I do above, Moi made the comment last night that, since the Boy went off to NYC to work for the broadcast division of CBS, we’ve been watching a little bit of that network, at least the evening news with Scott Pelly during supper time on those few days a week when Moi has to make a meal at home. The Boy works with those people responsible for making sure that all the programs and commercials appear in the right time slots, without any black space appearing on screen. So as we watch the TV go smoothly from news stories about troubles in the Middle East to commercials for pharmaceuticals without any glitches, we have a chance to keep in touch with the Boy and know he’s doing okay.
In reading what I’ve written in response to re-reading this blog since my last post on December 24, 2011, it occurs to me today that if I can consider this blog to be anything other than just a nice hobby to occupy my time, perhaps I can call it (even better than a poor jazz performance) a kind of performance art – indeed, a performance novel -- in that it’s been largely, if not entirely, written under the duress of prescribed periods of time and derives its material (excepting certain notable passages) from something like Marcel Duchamp’s “ready-mades,” that is, events pre-manufactured by reality – although I hesitate to say this because, although I’ve been somewhat familiar with the notion of performance art since the 70’s (probably from reading the New York Times), I can’t think of anytime I actually witnessed such art, unless you count Philippe Petit’s sidewalk performances, which Moi and I used to run into when she came down to visit me in the city. (I’ve hinted at this notion of performance art before, when I mentioned the influence of Cage, but I can’t think of any Cage performance that I ever went to either, except for my own). Since I’m hardly an expert then, I refer anyone who’s reading this to wikipedia, where you can read all about people like Yves Klein, Chris Burden, Yoko Ono, and Carolee Schneemann. I would, however, like to cite the following passage from the wikipedia article: “Performance art activity is not confined to European or American art traditions; notable practitioners can be found in Asia and Latin America. Performance artists and theorists point to different traditions and histories, ranging from tribal to sporting and ritual or religious events. In an episode of In our time broadcast on Thu, 20 Oct 2005, 21:30 on BBC Radio 4, Angie Hobbs, Lecturer in Philosophy, University of Warwick; Miriam Griffin, Fellow of Somerville College, Oxford; and John Moles, Professor of Latin, University of Newcastle discussed with Melvyn Bragg the idea that Antisthenes and Diogenes in ancient Greece practiced a form of performance art and that they acquired the epithet of cynic which means "dog" due to Diogenes behaving repeatedly like a dog in his performances.”
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