Pearlblossom Highway

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 12 (Rainer Maria Rilke)

2012-02-01T08:53:00.000-05:00

Rilke, Rainer Maria
The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

I bought this towards the end of my senior year in college, but I am not sure where. Possibly at St. Mark's Bookshop, possibly elsewhere. I would say Rilke was the most read poet of my early twenties. I probably read something by him every day for a year. Sadly, I never learned enough German to read the original, but I've always liked Stephen Mitchell's translations.

I have a memory of one of my literary compadres of that time sneering at Rilke, mostly out of pure ignorance. He'd gotten very excited by a French Symbolism course he taken with a priest at Fordham and basically rejected any poet that had not been taught in that class. I didn't try to defend Rilke too adamantly, as he didn't seem to want to expand his world beyond the Symbolistes.

from The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke

The Spanish Dancer

As on all its sides a kitchen-match darts white
flickering tongues before it bursts into flame:
with the audience around her, quickened, hot,
her dance begins to flicker in the dark room.

And all at once it is completely fire.

One upward glance and she ignites her hair
and, whirling faster and faster, fans her dress
into passionate flames, till it becomes a furnace
from which, like startled rattlesnakes, the long
naked arms uncoil, aroused and clicking.

And then: as if the fire were too tight
around her body, she takes and flings it out
haughtily, with an imperious gesture,
and watches: it lies raging on the floor,
still blazing up, and the flames refuse to die–.
Till, moving with total confidence and a sweet
exultant smile, she looks up finally
and stamps it out with powerful small feet.

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 11 (Ishmael Reed)

2012-01-31T09:03:00.000-05:00

Reed, Ishmael
Mumbo Jumbo

I think I took this from my younger brother. It may have been one of his high school textbooks.

I've met Ishmael Reed a couple of times. He's from Buffalo and returns now and again for readings and so forth. Early on in my career at Just Buffalo, we brought him for a reading at the Langston Hughes institute. I remember he stayed at his mother's house over on the East Side and that I picked the two of them up on a Sunday morning and took them to breakfast at Denny's. I believe Ed Taylor, Just Buffalo's director at the time, was also there.

It was just after the no-smoking laws had passed in Buffalo. It wasn't yet the outright restaurant ban, but the completely ventilated separation of smokers from non became a requirement. I remember we sat in a booth next to the smoking room. We could see through a big window into a kind of hazy room full of people eating and smoking. A bit like looking into a dirty fishbowl.

I don't remember much of the conversation. I recall Reed being somewhat taciturn. He had a kind of skeptical look on his face, almost like he expected everything that came out of your mouth to be ill-considered at best and downright stupid at worst. But breakfast was pleasant enough. His mother was a sweet woman, I recall.

Later that day he gave a great reading. Hundreds of people came out. I think they even had to turn a few away. After he'd gone back to Oakland, which he describes as "Buffalo, with weather," I got an email from him asking about his per diem. We'd had a conversation earlier in which he'd said something about sending the per diem to his mother. I'd assumed he'd been joking, and that he wanted us to send it to him. He said no, he wasn't joking and sent us his mother's name and address, and we promptly cut Ishmael Reed's mother a check for fifty dollars and dropped in the mail.

from Mumbo Jumbo

A True Sport, the Mayor of New Orleans, spiffy in his patent-leather brown and white shoes, his plaid suit, the Rudolph Valentino parted-down-the-middle hair style, sits in his office. Sprawled upon his knees is Zuzu, local doo-wacka-doo and voo-do-dee-odo fizgig. A slatternly floozy, her green, sequined dress quivers.

Work has kept Your Honor late.

The Mayor passes the flask of bootlegged gin to Zuzu. She takes a sip and continues to spread sprawl and behave skittishly. Loose. She is inhaling from a Chesterfield cigarette in a shameless brazen fashion.

The telephone rings.

The Mayor removes his hand and picks up the receiver; he recognizes at once the voice of his poker pardner on the phone. Harry, you'd better get down here quick. What was once dormant is now a Creeping Thing. The Mayor stands up and Zuzu lands on the floor. Her posture reveals a small flask stuck in her garter as well as some healthily endowed gams.

What's wrong, Harry?

I gots to git down to the infirmary, Zuzu, something awful is happening, the Thing has stirred in its moorings. The Thing that my Grandfather Harry and his generation of Harrys had thought was nothing but a false alarm.

The Mayor, dragging the woman by the fox skins hanging from her neck, leaves city hall and jumps into his Stutz Bearcat parked at the curb. They drive until they reach St. Louis Cathedral where 19th-Century HooDoo Queen Marie Laveau was a frequent worshiper; its location was about 10 blocks from Place Congo. They walk up the steps and the door's Judas Eye swings open.

Joe Sent Me.

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 10 (Jacob A Riis)

2012-01-28T10:13:00.002-05:00

Riis, Jacob A.
How the Other Half Lives

Purchased at the late, lamented Niagara Falls Outlet Mall Discount Bookstore for $2.50. This is exactly the kind of book I miss buying at that long gone bookstore. I probably would never have bought this book at full price without some purpose, like taking a course or doing some research, but seeing it on the shelf for $2.50, brand new, it was easy to just toss it in my shopping cart and bring it home to peruse at my leisure.

I have a memory of lending this book out to someone for a very long period of time. It may have been to Isabelle Pellisier, but I am not sure.

I have another memory of reading about the iconic photo on the cover of this edition, the one with the three street urchins asleep on a heating grate in bare feet. I read that although the children in the photo were the genuine article, the photo itself was posed. Riis gathered the children into the alcove, posed them just so, and told them to pretend they were sleeping while he took his photo. It begs the question, I think, of documentary truth.

The picture is certainly representative of a societal problem Riis wishes to articulate. On the other hand, he is constructing an image that, while true to the concept, is misleading as a representation of factual or documentary evidence.

Erroll Morris has been writing all kinds of interesting essays on just these subjects over at the New York Times over the past few years, and I don't really have anything useful to add to the discussion other than to say that my discovery that this picture was posed certainly complicated my understanding of it.

I think I may have snuck this idea into a poem somewhere, but I don't remember which one. Hmmm....

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 9 (Laura (Riding) Jackson)

2012-01-27T10:07:00.001-05:00

Jackson, Laura (Riding)
The Poems of Laura Riding

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books, I think–most likely for a course with Charles Bernstein. I guess this should have been filed under "J" for Jackson. It's all very confusing. Sorry, Laura. In my library, you are Riding, at least for now.

I always think of Charles Bernstein when I think of Laura (Riding) Jackson. He was always a big promoter of her work. I also think of Carla Billiteri, briefly a classmate of mine in Buffalo, who wrote quite extensively on Jackson.

I never really think of the author or her poems, however.

I always associate them with someone else thinking or writing or talking about them. I read them in graduate school, but they never made a huge impression on me. I like a poem here and there, but for the most part I find them rigid and overly abstract.

I like this one, though.

Dear Possible

Dear possible, and if you drown
Nothing is lost, unless my empty hands
Claim the conjectured corpse
Of empty water–a legal vengeance
On my own earnestness.

Dear creature of event, and if I wait the clock,
And if the clock be punctual and you late,
Rail against me, my time, my clock,
And rightfully correct me
With wrong, lateness and ill-temper.

Dear Scholar of love,
If by your own formula
I open heaven to you
When you knock punctually at the door,
Then you are there, but I where I was.

And I mean that fate in the scales
Is up, down, even, trembling,
Right, wrong, weighing and unweighing,
And I mean that, dear possible,
That fate, that dear fate.

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 8 (Charles Reznikoff)

2012-01-26T08:56:00.003-05:00

Reznikoff, Charles
Poems 1918-1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

I remember first reading Reznikoff in the basement archive of the Segue Foundation in New York. I remember reading from a copy of the anthology The Other Side of the Century, edited by Douglas Messerli, which contained selections from Holocaust. I was profoundly moved by these poems.

On one of my first trips to Talking Leaves, my wallet stuffed with student loan cash, I bought this book. It was only after I brought it home that I discovered that the word "Complete" in the title was qualified by the fact that it excluded Holocaust, Testimony, and several other works by Reznikoff. I was disappointed, to say the least, because neither of those books were easily available outside the library.

I've since read them in there, but have never owned them.

Another memory is of discussing the famous image of the "girder, still itself among the rubbish" in a seminar with Charles Bernstein. I think we discussed it in the context of George Oppen, though, for whom the line was something of a talisman. Or maybe it was a lecture on the Objectivists. Not really sure. Anyhow...

from Poems 1918-1975: The Complete Poems of Charles Reznikoff

from Jerusalem the Golden

51

The dead tree at the corner

from the gray boughs of which bark has fallen

in places and all the twigs–

be thankful, you other trees,

that, bare and brown, are only leafless

in a winter of your lives.

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 7 (David S. Reynolds)

2012-01-25T09:04:00.000-05:00

Reynolds, David S.
Beneath the American Renaissance

Purchased online.

I actually did begin my dissertation before leaving graduate school, believe it or not. It was going to focus on American poets writing prose about history, with chapters on Olson, Emerson, Whitman, Susan Howe and William Carlos Williams. I wrote the Olson chapter and I was at work on the Emerson chapter when I decided to move in a different direction with my life. Thus, I must have purchased this while I was working on the Emerson chapter.

Emerson is such a blank wall in my mind. I read all of his writings, several critical works, and a biography. Yet, when I think of Emerson the ideas that become images in my mind tend toward a blankness I can't quite explain. It's not that I don't remember what I read, but that what I read does not lend itself to the kind of enduring image creation typical of most writers I've spent a lot of time with.

Oddly, the one image that pops into my head right now is of John Travolta in "perfect." He plays a hip Rolling Stone journalist writing an article about the exercise craze. In one scene he quotes "Self-Reliance" to Jamie Lee Curtis, an aerobics intructor, and suggests that the angle of his article will be that the new emphasis on fitness in American is actually a flowering of Emerson's thought.

Hmmm. Is this self-reliance? Or just a crotch-shot?

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 6.1 (Kenneth Rexroth)

2012-01-24T08:40:00.001-05:00

Rexroth, Kenneth
American Poetry in the Twentieth Century

Purchased used, either at Rust Belt Books or at 7th Street Books in NYC. I can't remember which. I am inclined to believe the latter, as I have a vague recollection of acquiring it before I left for Buffalo.

It's funny. I have an unusually clear view of path that Rexroth took into my consciousness and how my understanding of him clarified and changed over time.

I think I first read about him in a biography of Kerouac. In it he was described more as a Marxist political figure with many cultural interests. I think it said he was a translator. But he was definitely portrayed as being older than, outside of, and inferior to the Beats with which he surrounded himself.

I then remember reading about him as an important translator. I think I bought this book around that time and got to read some of his opinions on various poets.

Later still, in graduate school, I became aware of the central role he played among the Berkeley renaissance poets.

Still later I read about all the stuff with Creeley and so on and how this at first turned everyone against Creeley and then later turned those same people (Levertov and Duncan, especially) against Rexroth.

So the movement in my head is of a a marginal figure to a central figure to a marginal figure once again.

Ok...I have rush to work. Until next time, dear readers...

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 6 (Kenneth Rexroth)

2012-01-23T09:00:00.000-05:00

Rexroth, Kenneth
One Hundred Poems From The Japanese

I was about to write that I had purchased this at Talking Leaves, but now I am not so sure. A vague impression has crept into my mind of having held this book in my hands while standing in a Barnes & Noble somewhere, possibly Sarasota, Florida, where my mother lived for many years.

I do recall that we lived in our house in Black Rock at the time. I remember reading the book in bed in that house, and that I may have purchased it in the same spirit I bought all those books by Pam Rehm, that is, the poems in here are quite short and I did for a time study that form looking for useful models.

I may have bought this for another reason, though.

After reading Creeley's biography, followed by the Duncan/Levertov Correspondence, both of which spell out in great detail the affair between Creeley and Rexroth's wife, how they ran off together, even took the Rexroth children with them, and the terrible rift this caused, not just between Creeley and Rexroth, but between Creeley and Duncan and Levertov and Jess and the whole SF scene.

I may have bought it because I realized that I hadn't really read much Rexroth beyond a book of his literary essays.

I may have been thinking about all of this when I was standing in the poetry section of the B & N Sarasota. I may have said to myself, hunh, maybe I should read this.

I may then have stepped forward to counter, purchased the book, and driven back to my mother's house to read.

But this is all speculation.

from One Hundred Poems From The Japanese

I passed by the beach
At Tago and saw
The snow falling, pure white
High on the peak of Fuji.

Yamabe No Akahito

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 5.3 (Pam Rehm)

2012-01-22T09:40:00.002-05:00

Rehm, Pam
The Garment In Which No One Had Slept

If what I said yesterday is true, and I am not certain it is, then it is likely I bought this online around the same time I bought To Give It Up and, possibly, Gone to Earth, that I was reading a lot of "minimalist" writers six or seven years ago and discovered that I liked Rehm's work and so bought several of her books at the same time. It's all a bit of a blur. I have no competing narrative to counter this, so it must be true.

Though I did not mention it before, I seem to remember reading this book in the Segue archive at the same time I read some of her other work. This one was published by Burning Deck, which was one of what was then only a handful of small presses that printed the work of innovative writers in perfect bound editions. You probably could have counted them on two hands: Roof, Burning Deck, Sun & Moon, The Figures, O Books, Edge, etc.

That number has skyrocketed in the last decade. I could not begin to name all the presses working to get out this kind of work today. It's kind of amazing, especially given how few people actually read this stuff. It's as if the market has grown up in which the poet is both the producer of the work and the consumer of his or her own reputation. Or to put it another way: poetry is produced not to be read but to create some other form of cultural capital, i.e., reputation, status, etc.

Are we all cannibals, then?

from The Garment In Which No One Had Slept

The Multiplicities

Requiring that I submit no
absolute eye; not a
matter of amount, but effect to
form–in sleepless,
I know
not urge but pursuit
and the restraining

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 5.2 (Pam Rehm)

2012-01-21T11:36:00.000-05:00

Rehm, Pam
To Give It Up

I am not positive, but I think I bought this online. I have a vague recollection of having bought two or so books by Rehm after having been sent a review copy of Small Works. In fact, I think at the time I may have been working on my first book, which was comprised of all small work, and so was reading a lot of authors working in that vein.

As I mentioned the other day, I remember reading it in the basement offices of the Segue foundation in New York when I worked there as an archivist in the mid-nineties. I also remember how impressive it seemed that a young poet had a perfect bound book, had won the national poetry series, etc. There was a kind of aura around those books and authors then because there weren't so many of them.

It's hard to get that same feeling now because of the deluge of publications and prizes that have sprung up in the last decade or so. Not that I am complaining, just noting that some of the aura of being a "published" or "prize-winning" poet has worn off as a result. The words sound very different now.

from To Give It Up

For His Laments Upon A False Image

White upon white you knew him
ONly embarrassed, you questioned
His nobility for you had lost
All grip and radius from any
Center that you could not bow
Your head but faced him, asking
That he tell you exactly who he
Thought he was Oh how such
Pride tries a spirit's faith
The bloodless words that are
Couraged from pity will never find
A road to the City of Peace

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 5.1 (Pam Rehm)

2012-01-20T09:23:00.002-05:00

Rehm, Pam
Gone to Earth

Sent to me by the publisher.

There's a little bit of creasing to the back cover. Not sure how that happened. Then again, maybe I did not get this from the publisher. The word "Poetry" is written on the first leaf, followed halfway down the page by the number 389044. Maybe I bought this online somewhere.

I used to get review copies of all the new books from Flood Editions, and often I would write reviews of them in Artvoice. But then Artvoice told me they were sick of poetry reviews and that was the end of that. I still get review copies now and then, but not like I used to. I do get books from all the authors who come to town for Just Buffalo.

I'd say I acquired ten percent or so of my library for free.

from Gone to Earth

from Let Me Enter

After a night of hesitation
the snow has come

A slipping path

I can't decide what I need most

Revelations or rest

I just want to be stilled
by love

to such a depth
that I'm forgotten

Among the flowers

To die for what is not mine

Your meaning is upon me

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 5 (Pam Rehm)

2012-01-19T09:42:00.006-05:00

Rehm, Pam
Small Works

Sent to me by the publisher a few years back.

I saw Pam Rehm read in New York once. It was in 1997. I was just about to leave for Buffalo and I remember that Garrett Kalleberg introduced her at the Segue Foundation. In the weeks afterwards I browsed through her books in the basement of the building, where Segue kept it's archive. There were two books on the basement shelves: To Give It Up and a chapbook called Piecework.

I found a postcard in the back of this book with a black-and-white photo of the author. She has long, straight black hair and she is wearing a white, sleeveless button-down shirt with a floral pattern. She appears to be sitting in the cab of a tractor or a Bobcat or some such. She holds the controls of the machine in her hands and is staring straightforward into the camera, a very slight smile, almost a grin, breaking across her face.

from Small Works

Acts of Will

Let me open up
like morning down my spine

and find that I have found

no clear route
no evident map of destination

only a constant disappearing
into the days allowance

AIMLESS BLACKOUT

2012-01-18T09:16:00.002-05:00

Folks, Aimless Reading is shut down today to protest

the above named acts, which threaten internet freedom everywhere.

Contact your representatives in congress and tell them to stop

SOPA and PIPA.

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 4 (Salvador Redonet)

2012-01-17T09:36:00.002-05:00

Redonet, Salvador
El Ánfora Del Diablo

Acquired in Cuba a little over ten years ago -- maybe eleven, now, or, gulp, twelve. It was in 2000 or 2001. Time do fly, don't she? Anyhow, I don't recall if I met the author or not. The name does not ring a bell. He may have given it to me or I may have bought it off the table of Cuban books available at the festival. Running late today....see you tomorrow.

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 3 (Nicholas Ray)

2012-01-16T09:45:00.003-05:00

Ray Nicholas
I Was Interrupted: Nicholas Ray on Making Movies

Purchased in the Amazon Marketplace. I don't have much to say about this book. I never finished it. I think Ray expressed himself on film and in person in ways that don't always come across on paper. The book has some great moments, but not enough of them to keep me reading.

from I Was Interrupted

Say it's a rainy night. You're waiting on the street corner, for a guy or a gal. And the first thing you say when that person comes up is, "What time is it?" Do you realize how many ways you can say "What time is it?" Ask yourself: Am I reprimanding her? Am I blaming her? Am I putting her down? Am I tell her I am going to strangle her? Am I telling her she's done it again? That I'm fed up? That she's right on time, and we're going to have a ball? What am I saying? What am I really saying?

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 2.2 (Tom Raworth)

2012-01-15T09:50:00.000-05:00

Raworth, Tom
Clean & Well Lit: Selected Poems 1975-1995

Acquired when I worked at the Segue Foundation in NYC, publisher of Roof Books and thus this.

I wasn't sure if that was where I had obtained this until I opened it up and discovered inside a catalog from 1996 or 7. It also contains a photocopied excerpt from the October/November 1997 issue of the Poetry Project Newsletter that highlights a review of Clean & Well Lit and a title by Laura Moriarty. It was written by Chris Stroffolino.

Hmm...the date on that review, though, leads me to believe that my first impression was correct. I moved to Buffalo in August of 1997, which means this review did not actually appear until after my arrival. This leads me to conclude that I bought the book in Buffalo, sometime after the Fall of 1997. Probably 1998. As I mentioned the other day, I remember him reading in Buffalo around that time.

That said, I remember distinctly taking a copy of this book home when I did work at Segue. It's entirely possible that I simply borrowed it and then returned my copy after I'd read it. I never saw Tom read in New York, but everyone always referred to him as that poet who reads his poems really fast, as if that was all there was to it. I guess it's hard for people to think too far beyond their initial impressions of art or artists.

Anyhow, it looks like the catalog is from my time in NYC. Roof was about to publish the XUL reader. I remember this coming out while I was still living there. They were also about to publish We Speak Silent, by Hannah Wiener.

from Clean & Well Lit

Out of a Sudden

(Riva san Vitale, August 30 1995)

the alphabet wonders
what it should do
paper feels useless
colours lose hue

while all musical notes
perform only in blue

a lombardy poplar
shadows the ground
drifted with swansdown
muffling the sound

at the tip of the lake
of the road to the south

above in the night sky
scattered by chance
stars cease in heir motion
poppies don't dance

in the grass standing still
by the path no-one walks

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 2.1 (Tom Raworth)

2012-01-14T10:04:00.000-05:00

Raworth, Tom
Caller and Other Pieces

Given to me by the publisher, Rod Smith, during the first Buffalo Small Press Book Fair.

I remember wandering around the book fair all day, returning again and again to the table occupied by Edge Books, which was manned variously by Rod, Mel Nichols, Gary Sullivan and Nada Gordon, all of whom had arrived in town a couple of nights earlier to read at Big Orbit Gallery. Kevin Thurston had brought the whole group to town to do a Flarf performance the night before the fair.

I remember after the fair going to eat at India Gate restaurant. We commandeered a table that ran nearly the width of the room, with seating for about 30 people. I have photos of it. In one, you can see that I sit at one end of the table. You can only see the back of my head. Far in the background, at the other end of the table, you can see Rod, hair slightly gray, eyes glowing flashbulb red.

from Caller and Other Poems

Envoi
I could go on like this all day
Ti-tum ti-tum and doodly-ay
With every now and then a glance
To see if I've still on my pants
And if I have, if that stain' jism
Or just a trace of modernism.

For isn't this what poetry is?...
A raincoat over similes
You've seen before... Flash... look again
The same. No need to strain your brain
Simply recline on the chaise longue
And listen to the rhymes go bong.

And on like this ad-infinitum
With a metrical change or two to brighten
The gloomy rhythm of these stanzas
(Metaphor a Belgium for my Panzers).
Let those who think that piss is water
Sup deeply this insipid Porter.

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 2 (Tom Raworth)

2012-01-13T10:11:00.005-05:00

Raworth, Tom
Collected Poems

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books, I think. I am not one hundred percent certain.

I think I first met Tom Raworth at the Creeley's firehouse in Buffalo. My memory is of him giving a reading in the living room. He's been to Buffalo many times since I've been here. Once he read in the Steel Bar series. Another time he read for the Creeley celebration at Babeville. He may even have come back the following fall for the second of the Creeley celebrations. I saw him again last spring when he read for an Olson celebration put on by the University.

During one of his readings, which took place towards the beginning of the Afghan war, I remember he used a hand-cranked music box through which could be threaded sheets of paper with little "chads" poked through them, and that, when cranked through the box, would pluck musical notes, much like a player piano scroll.

He'd written out the names of U.S. military operations like "Enduring Freedom" on long, thin sheets of white paper, through which he'd punched holes along the lines and contours of the letters in each phrase. He then read the phrase aloud before running it through the music box, making actual music out of military double-speak.

from Collected Poems

No Music

to rise steadily with reduction
was the theme revealed
outside a circle of suburbs

incapable of different history
to produce a backfire
when small and tender

passed by, paused, into top gear
from a position far too close
to tolerate the fury of opulence

bones lie across the country
covered in rare mixed leaves
unable to keep them

to choose the surest gain

Aimless Reading: The P's: Stats

2012-01-12T09:11:00.001-05:00

The P's

I just realized that I put Claudia Rankine in the P's yesterday. I've made the correction. She is now number 1 under the R's. I also forgot to post the stats for the P's, which are as follows:

The P's

34 Authors
67 Volumes
67 Titles

Sorry for the crappy photo. My iPhone does not perform well in low light.

Aimless Reading: The R's, Part 1 (Claudia Rankine)

2012-01-11T08:57:00.003-05:00

Rankine, Claudia
Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Given to me by Sesshu Foster.

Sesshu came to town in, I think, 2005. He had this in his bag and had been reading it on the flight out. I think he finished reading it while staying in the guest room of our old house. I remember we were sitting on the couch in the living room and he asked if I had read it and I said no and he recommended it and gave me his copy. I remember we also talked about how much we both liked mole sauce. He told me there was a place in LA that made the best mole around. A week or two after he left we received to containers of Sesshu's favorite LA mole sauce.

from Don't Let Me Be Lonely

Every movie I saw while in the third grade compelled me to ask, Is he dead? Is she dead? Because the characters often live against all odds it is the actors whose mortality concerned me. If it were an old, black-and-white film, whoever was around would answer yes. Months later the actor would show up on some late-night talk show to promote his latest efforts. I would turn and say–on always turns to say–You said he was dead. And the misinformed would claim, I never said he was dead. Yes, you did. No, I didn't. Inevitably we get older; whoever is still with us says, Stop asking me that.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 46.3 (Thomas Pynchon)

2012-01-07T10:12:00.003-05:00

Pynchon, Thomas
The Crying of Lot 49

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books. This is not the copy I read, which I gave away or loaned to someone at some point and never saw again. A few years back, 2004, in fact, Lori was reading through Thomas Pynchon. She tried to start with Gravity's Rainbow, but, like many readers, quickly grew frustrated. I suggested she start with this and V. before moving on to that behemoth.

If I were to choose one Pynchon novel to read again, it would probably be this one. In fact, I am pretty sure that I have read it twice. I think I appreciate the fact that in comparison to the rest of Pynchon's novels this one is so concise. It has a certain level difficulty, takes a lot of detours, and is anything but straightforward, but there is something moving about Oedipa Maas and hear quest to find the meaning of the muted posthorn.

I can't say I ever cared much for Pynchon's on an emotional level. I did care about Oedipa. I also learned a lot of information about things like Maxwell's Demon, entropy, information theory, etc., all of which are quite useful things to know in the internet age.

from The Crying of Lot 49

One summer afternoon Mrs Oedipa Maas came home from a Tupperware party whose hostess had put perhaps too much kirsch in the fondue to find that she, Oedipa, had been named executor, or she supposed executrix, of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity, a California real estate mogul who had once lost two million dollars in his spare time but still had assets numerous and tangled enough to make the job of sorting it all out more than honorary. Oedipa stood in the living room, stared at by the greenish dead eye of the TV tube, spoke the name of God, tried to feel as drunk as possible. But this did not work. She thought of a hotel room in Mazatlan whose door had just been slammed, it seemed forever, waking up two hundred birds down in the lobby; a sunrise over the library slope at Cornell University that nobody out on it had seen because the slope faces west; a dry, disconsolate tune from the fourth movement of the Bartok Concerto for Orchestra; a whitewashed bust of Jay Gould that Pierce kept over the bed on a shelf so narrow for it she'd always had the hovering fear it would someday topple on them. Was that how he'd died, she wondered, among dreams, crushed by the only ikon in the house? That only made her laugh, out loud and helpless: You're so sick, Oedipa, she told herself, or the room, which knew.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 46.2 (Thomas Pynchon)

2012-01-06T10:25:00.000-05:00

Pynchon, Thomas
Slow Learner

I don't know where I bought this. I know I bought it when I was in college.

I went through a brief period where it seemed interesting to know more about Thomas Pynchon, quickly discovering that he was famously private. While trying to avoid studying for exams and the like, I can recall sifting through books on Pynchon in the basement stacks at the Fordham library.

There wasn't much to discover outside of his fiction. There was an essay on the Watts riots that appeared in a magazine, but other than that there was very little non-fiction and even less biographical information.

I stumbled upon this book at a bookstore somewhere and was happy to find that it contained a brief, introductory essay that revealed a bit about Pynchon's thinking on writing, politics, the beats, the fifties and sixties, etc. It's actually a great little essay.

One part that always stayed with me was this passage on death:

When we speak of "seriousness" in fiction ultimately we are talking abut an attitude toward death–how characters may act in its presence, for example, or how they handle it when it isn't so immediate. Everybody knows this, but the subject is hardly ever brought up with younger writers, possibly because given to anyone at the appropriate age, such advice is widely felt to be effort wasted.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 46.1 (Thomas Pynchon)

2012-01-05T08:58:00.000-05:00

Pynchon, Thomas
V.

Once again, I have no idea where I bought this. When I took it off the shelf this morning, I thought it was the copy I'd read in college, but it has a used price mark on the inside cover, which leads me to believe I may have bought it for Lori, who read through Pynchon a few years ago. It's possible, but highly unlikely, that I bought it used in college. I generally only purchased new books back then, unless I was buying textbooks.

Anyhow, I read V. in college. I think I read it the summer before my senior year. I definitely read it before reading Gravity's Rainbow. I remember feeling glad that I had read them in this order, as this felt like a warm-up for Gravity's Rainbow and probably would have been a less interesting read after having read that one first.

As with all of Pynchon, the frame of historical reference is so broad and my own at the time was so narrow that I have at various times in my life found myself referring back to this book as a point of departure. This usually occurs when I read something historical that refers to incidents or ideas that I first encountered in Pynchon's books.

It's kind of a strange phenomenon: much of what I remember in his work is my ignorance of the ideas and contexts the describes, yet I retained much of that information as a kind of place holder, waiting for me to return to make sense of it once I'd filled in certain gaps in my knowledge.

from V.

Christmas Eve, 1955, Benny Profane, wearing black levis, suede jacket, sneakers and big cowboy hat, happened to pass through Norfolk, Virginia. Given to sentimental impulses, he thought he'd look in on the Sailor's Grave, his old tin can's tavern on East Main Street. He got there by way of the Arcade, at the East Main end of which sat an old street singer with a guitar and an empty Sterno can for donations. Out in the street a chief yeoman was trying to urinate in the gas tank of a '54 Packard Patrician and five or six seamen apprentice were standing around giving encouragement. The old man was singing, in a fine, firm baritone:
Every night is Christmas Eve on old East Main,Sailors and their sweethearts all agree.Neon signs of red and greenShine upon the friendly scene,Welcoming you in from off the sea.Santa's bag is filled with all your dreams come true:Nickel beers that sparkle like champagne,Barmaids who all love to screw,All of them reminding youIt's Christmas Eve on old East Main.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 46 (Thomas Pynchon)

2012-01-04T10:35:00.002-05:00

Pynchon, Thomas
Gravity's Rainbow

I have no idea where I bought this.

It was during my final year in college. I spent the entire year trying and failing to get through it. Twice I read the first three hundred pages and put the book down. Part of this had to do with the book's interrupting my schoolwork, part of it with frustration. In between attempts I am pretty sure that I read V. and The Crying of Lot Forty-Nine as well as some literary criticism that gave me some context for the book.

At the time I really didn't have a strong sense of history, so I understood the book more within the context of literary history than I did in the context of the history of WWII and its aftermath. I remember reading a long essay about the physics of missile launches and how that related to the title of the book. I remember reading about the V-2 bomb, the bombing London, etc. I did not finish reading Gravity's Rainbow until the summer after I graduated.

The university had allowed me to keep my apartment over the summer in exchange for keeping an eye on the building -- I had worked as an RA to cover my living expenses in college and had been in charge of the small apartment building in the Bronx that I lived in, so this was really just an extension of the work I'd done during the school year.

I spent the summer applying for teaching jobs at private schools throughout New York City and spent the rest of the time reading, writing and playing guitar in my apartment on Belmont Ave. I once again began by reading the first three hundred pages and then setting it down. I had acquired a copy of On The Road, another book I had not yet read, and in the interim finished that. As soon as I did, I went back to Gravity's Rainbow and spent the rest of the summer working my way through it.

I remember being obsessed with the book to the point that when I conversed at parties I would inevitably recount some fascinating or grotesque scene from the novel, mostly to the boredom and chagrin of my friends. I think it took the whole summer to finish, during which time I found a job and an apartment in the East Village and moved downtown.

The book became so worn that the cover nearly tore off. A couple of years later, a friend, D, who I have written about extensively on this blog, had begun purchasing large quantities of paperback books off the dollar racks at places like The Strand. Most of them were in terrible shape, so so he bought a large amount of clear packing tape that he used to hold the covers of the books together long enough so that he could give them each a read.

One day, D came by my apartment and pulled Gravity's Rainbow off the shelf. He showed me that the cover had nearly separated from the book and offered to take the book home and tape it back together. I agreed. The book has since withstood another reading (by Lori) and nearly twenty years' worth of moves and shelf life. I guess he did a pretty good job.

I now have a strange feeling about this book. It was very important to me at a certain moment in my life. My ardor bordered on obsession. However, unlike, say, reading Proust or Melville, I always felt like the payoff was not there. There was no moment of recognition, no appearance of the white whale, etc., and so over time this book has come to mean less to me than others I have labored over.

from Gravity's Rainbow

It was very early morning. He stumbled out alone into a wet brick street. Southward the barrage balloons, surfriders on the combers of morning, were glowing, pink and pearl, in the sunrise.

They've cut Slothrop loose again, he's back on the street, shit, last chance for a Section 8 'n' he blew it...

Why didn't they keep him on at that nut ward for as long as they said they would - wasn't it supposed to be a few weeks? No explanation - just "Cheerio!" and the onionskin sending him back to that ACHTUNG. The Kenosha Kid, and that Crouchfield the Westwardman and his sidekick Whappo have been all his world for these recent days ... there were still problems to be worked out, adventures not yet completed, coercions and vast deals to be made on the order of the old woman's arrangement for getting her pig home over the stile. But now, rudely, here's that London again.

But something's different ... something's ... been changed ... don't mean to bitch, folks, but - well for instance he could almost swear he's being followed, or watched anyway. Some of the tails are pretty slick, but others he can spot, all right. Xmas shopping yesterday at that Woolworth's, he caught a certain pair of beady eyes in the toy section, past a heap of balsa-wood fighter planes and little-kid-size Enfields. A hint of constancy to what shows up in the rearview mirror of his Humber, no color or model he can pin down but something always present inside the tiny frame, has led him to start checking out other cars when he goes off on a morning's work. Things on his desk at ACHTUNG seem not to be where they were. Girls have found excuses not to keep appointments. He feels he's being gently separated from the life he lived before going into St. Veronica's. Even in movies there's always someone behind him being careful not to talk, rattle paper, laugh too loud : Slothrop's been to enough movies that he can pick up an anomaly like that right away.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 45 (J.H. Prynne)

2012-01-03T09:31:00.002-05:00

Prynne, J.H.
Poems

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books. According to the sticker, I bought this in May, 2006.

I love Prynne's poetry, but I find that I cannot sustain reading it in big chunks. I tried to read this book– quite a chunk itself at 590 pages–straight through once and made it only as far as page 18, which is where my bookmark rests.

The bookmark red. It advertises a fantasy book called Eldest. On the cover of the book depicted on one face a dragon's head twists out of a gray abyss. The caption reads, "The Epic Continues...Book Two in the Inheritance Trilogy."

I appreciate Prynne best when I read one poem, maybe two, then put the book down down again for a long period of time. When I return I am always rewarded, as I was this morning, when I opened the book and read the following.

Starvation/Dream

The fire still glides down
in the hearth, the pale season
and the leaky boat drops
slowly downstream. Like emeralds
the remote figure of a
remote capital gain: the case
of fire rests in a flicker, just
short of silence. So the dream
still curls in its horizon of
total theft, cooled by the misty
involvement of the dew, and at once
it is clear, finally, that this
is not our planet: we have come
to the wrong place. We steal
everything we have–why else
are we driven by starved passion
to the dishonour of force? The
Russian tick was to burn up
wads of banknotes, so as to
clear the imperial stain, the hedged
& tree-lined avenues of our desires.
And what we dream we want is
the whole computed sum of plants and
animals of this middle world, the
black lands called up by our
patient and careful visits. By any
ritual of purpose we extend the idea
of loan and we dream of it, the
payment of all our debts. But we
never shall, we have no single gain
apart from the disguise of how far
we say we earn. The ground out-
side mistily involves itself with its
contour, the leaky boat glides down
the morning flood, in this rival
dream all our enemies are with us
and the animals & plants shall
take nourishment from the same
silent and passionless table.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 44.5 (Marcel Proust)

2012-01-02T10:36:00.000-05:00

Proust, Marcel
Finding Time Again

Purchased at amazon.co.uk. I have to say I agree with the reviewer from the NY Review of Books who criticized the translation of the title. It makes it sound like someone is clearing their schedule or some other trivial act, whereas "Time Regained," though it alters the tense of the verb, sounds truer to the content of the book, and contains a Miltonic echo that rings through in the text itself. That said, it's a great translation and one of the most important reads of my life.

I think only one scene in another book that I have read achieves something similar to the effect of the ball scene in this one, and that is the appearance of the white whale in Moby-Dick. In the latter, one is forced to slog through chapter after chapter detailing the processing and storage of whale by-products. At various points these chapters threaten to derail the entire reading experience. But the reader who stays the course and pays attention is rewarded late in the book when the whale finally makes its appearance.

I remember feeling as if I had known everything there were to know about whales and then having everything I thought I had known exploded by the appearance of the beast itself.

SPOILER ALERT!

I experienced something similar, yet more emotionally profound, when reading the final volume of In Search of Lost Time. Having slogged, page after torturous page, through one tedious salon after another, I had been many times ready to give up on Proust. Unlike Moby-Dick, I felt as if all I were learning were how to experience monotony and misery in real-time. In fact, many of the salons unfold at a much slower pace than real time, so that a single evening of petty sniping among the elite is stretched into several weeks of actual bed-time reading reading experience.

And then we arrive at the final scene, in which Marcel sits in a study or library, awaiting entry into a ball. Again, he seems to wait forever, but then the doors open and we discover that while he waited, something like twenty years had passed, and that he and everyone else in attendance has grown old. Time, as we had experienced it throughout the novel, as slow, languorous tedium, has now concentrated itself to such an extent that we haven't realized how much of it has passed.

This is what I meant the other day when I talked about having experienced time in much the same way the protagonist does, as real, palpable duration, which expands and contracts in ways highly specific to age, habit, repetition and variation. I felt almost as if I, too, had suddenly grown old.

This is making me want to read it again! I wish I read French. I would love to read this in the original before I die.

from Finding Time Again

And it was not just these colours which filled me with joy, but a whole moment of my life which aroused them, which had probably been an aspiration towards them, which some sense of fatigue or of sadness had perhaps prevented me from enjoying at Balbec, and which now, freed of whatever was imperfect in the external perception, pure and disembodied, filled me with delight.

...for the only true paradise is the paradise that we have lost.

So many times in the course of my life reality has disappointed me because at the moment when I perceived it, my imagination, which was my only organ for the enjoyment of beauty, could not be applied to it, by virtue of the inevitable law which means that one can imagine only what is absent.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 44.4 (Marcel Proust)

2012-01-01T10:11:00.000-05:00

Proust, Marcel
The Prisoner & The Fugitive

Purchased on amazon.co.uk.

You may have noticed that this volume, containing books five and six of In Search of Lost Time, is housed in a different wrapper than its kin. I discovered while reading Proust yet another example of the absurdity of American copyright law. It turns out that the first four volumes of the original Moncrieff translation have expired, while the latter three volumes have not and will not for something like another decade.

I don't understand how a translation can hold other translations in check through a copyright, but then I guess I am not a lawyer or literary heir, am I?

I had to visit amazon.co.uk in order to get the last two volumes, which are published in the UK in cheaper, flimsier editions than they are here. That said, the cheaper editions are much more readable, lacking as they do the page-turn-frustrating deckled edge of the deluxe. On the other hand, they are already showing their wear, while the deluxe look almost brand new.

****

So, Happy New Year, everyone! I think I forgot to celebrate the anniversary of Aimless Reading back in December. The project is slightly more than three years old. Thus far, we've covered "A" through "O" and part of "P." I think it will take another year or so to complete the alphabet, at which time I'll return to some of the earlier excusions I made into the non-alphabetized portions of the library, like reference works, anthologies, literary magazines and art books. I might also go back and add to the existing alphabet the books that have arrived on the shelves since the project began, but not in time to be included in their particular letter. We'll see.

2011 was a pretty good year in terms of visitors. There were 8,608 of you. The most visited blog posts were my two posts on the Blazevox controversy. The first, with its provocative title, garnered the most visits of any post in the history of the blog, 1,856. The second post garnered another 631. I am happy to report that this post on Jackson Mac Low garnered the third most visits of any post, logging 87. That should give you a pretty good idea of how much of a spike in readership that controversy brought to Pearlblossom Highway.

Anyhow, I am still enjoying myself. I hope you are. I'd love to hear which posts you most enjoyed from 2011 in the comments section.

from The Fugitive

When, much later, he found at that Albertine had been living with me then and realized that I had been hiding her from everyone, he declared that he understood at last why, at that time in my life, I never wanted to go out. He was wrong. Very understandably so, since reality, even if it is inevitable, is not completely predictable; those who learn some correct detail about the life of another promptly jump to quite incorrect conclusions and see in the newly discovered fact the explanation for things which in truth are completely unrelated to it.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 44.3 (Marcel Proust)

2011-12-30T10:28:00.000-05:00

Proust, Marcel
Sodom and Gomorrah

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

Sorry for the week-long silence. I've been in Nashville for the past week visiting my mother. I'd never been to Music City before, so we spent most of the week taking in the various tourist attractions: The Opryland Hotel, the Grand Ole Opryhouse, the Ryman Auditorium (home of the original Opry until 1974), the Hermitage (Andrew Jackson's plantation), the Country Music Hall of Fame, and Nashville's aggregated concrete scale-recreation of the Parthenon.

I can't say I had a strong feeling for Nashville one way or the other. They have lots of nice tourist attractions, but I didn't get a good sense of the city itself or its people. My mother is a transient. She'll probably stay another year or two before moving back to winter-free Florida. She lives in a gated over-55 community twenty minutes outside the city. It feels like most of these kinds of communities. That is, it could be anywhere -- Nashville, Sarasota, Phoenix. The only way you can tell one from the other is by the weather and possibly the kinds of Flora that decorate the walking paths.

But they have lots to do for seventy-something singles like my mother. The clubhouse has a pool and a gym and a computer (my mother still doesn't have internet access at home) and each day's calendar is filled with free activities for community members.

She's happy, so I'm happy.

from Sodom and Gomorrah

As I was not in any hurry to arrive at the Guermantes soirée, to which I was not certain of having been invited, I whiled away the time outside; but the summer daylight seemed in no greater haste to move than I was. Although it was after nine o’clock, it was still the daylight that, on the Place de la Concorde, had given to the Luxor obelisk an appearance of pink nougat. Then it modified the tint and turned it into a metallic substance, with the result that the obelisk did not merely become more precious, but seemed thinner and almost flexible. You fancied that you might have been able to twist it, that this jewel had already been bent slightly out of true perhaps. The moon was in the sky now like a quarter of an orange, delicately peeled but with a small bite out of it. Later it would be made of the most resistant gold. Huddled all alone behind it, a poor little star was about to serve as the solitary moon’s one companion, while the latter, even as it shielded its friend, but more daring and going on ahead, would brandish, like an irresistible weapon, like a symbol of the Orient, its marvelous, ample golden cresent.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 44.2 (Marcel Proust)

2011-12-21T10:07:00.000-05:00

Proust, Marcel
The Guermantes Way

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

A few years ago, Lori and I drove across the country. It was a kind of working vacation, as the purpose of the trip was a series of readings I'd set up along the way. My book Human Scale had just come out, so it seemed like a good time to do some readings to support it. It was also a great excuse to visit the west coast, see some old friends, and visit some interesting places.

Our journey took us through Cleveland, where we visited some old friends from my NYC days, then down to Louisville, where we passed an uneventful night. We drove through Tennessee, skipping Nashville in favor of Memphis. My first reading was in Norman, OK, where I read with Charles Alexander. After Norman, we drove through the Texas panhandle down to Santa Fe, where we spent a couple of nights before heading to Tucson for my next reading with Tyrone Williams. The third reading on the trip took place in Los Angeles. Due to a late change of schedule, we ended up staying in Santa Monica for three or four days.

I hadn't spent much time there, so we were pretty open to just seeing as much as we could. All of my poet friends told us that in addition to visiting many of the standard tourist attractions we should visit the Museum of Jurassic Technology. There are entire books devoted to this out of the way museum in Culver City, so I'll let you read about it yourself in one of them.

The reason I bring it up today, under Proust, is that one of the attractions inside the museum was a device designed to help you experience Proust. Suspended behind a piece of glass are displayed a tea cup and a plate of petits madeleines, those iconic cookies that will forever be associated with Proust. I believe the ords from the book as also part of the display, either on the wall inside or on the glass itself (or possibly both).

Three black plastic discs across the front of the glass are connected to three plastic tubes that blow the scents of the madeleines & the tea into the nostrils of vistors, who lean forward and press them into a hole at the center of each disc. I am not sure why there are three tubes and not two. Perhaps one blends the two scents or something like that.

One of the charming things about the museum is that there are few explanations. Even when things are explained the explanations generally make things seem more opaque. A dream-logic pervades the place. Everything is terribly familiar and seems to make sense until you wake up and try to think it through with your conscious mind, at which point it makes no sense at all.

Earlier that year, in July I believe, Lori, Geoffrey Gatza, Donna White and I were invited to celebrate John Ashbery's 80th birthday near where he group up outside Rochester. The party took place at a the house of an old family friend and many of those in attendance were friends and relatives who had known John since he was a boy. One of the treats served at the party was a tray of madeleines. Geoffrey got so excited by this that he brought one home, preserved it, and set it into a frame that now hangs permanently on the wall in his apartment. I am not sure how he preserved it, but it hasn't aged a bit.

from The Guermantes Way

The early-morning twitter of the birds sounded tame to Frangoise. Every word from the maids' quarters made her jump; their every footstep bothered her, and she was constantly wondering what they were doing. All this was because we had moved. It is true that the servants in our former home had made quite as much stir in their quarters on the top floor, but they were servants she knew, and their comings and goings had become friendly presences to her. Now she even made silence the object of her painful scrutiny. And since the district to which we had moved appeared to be as quiet as the boulevard we had previously looked out upon was noisy, the sound of a man singing in the street as he passed (as feeble perhaps as an orchestral motif, yet quite clear even from a distance) brought tears to the eyes of the exiled Frangoise. And if I had made fun of her when she had been distressed at leaving an apartment building where we had been "so well thought of by everybody," weeping as she packed her trunks in accordance with the rituals of Combray and declaring that our former home was superior to any other imaginable, I, who found it as difficult to assimilate new surroundings as I found it easy to abandon old ones, nonetheless felt a close sympathy with our old servant when I realized that the move to abuilding where the concierge, who had not yet made our acquaintance, had not shown her the tokens of respect necessary to the nourishment of her good spirits had driven her to a state close to total decline.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 44.1 (Marcel Proust)

2011-12-20T09:09:00.003-05:00

Proust, Marcel
In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

It's difficult to describe how the experience of reading Proust altered my psyche. It might be useful to say that I experienced the book much as I feel like I experience life. As I moved from volume one to volume two, then onward through the rest, I began to feel that my memories of scenes in the book were actually memories of my own experience. That's not quite the way to say it. I did not simply identify with young Marcel and take his experiences as my own. It had more to do with the experience of time.

If you have ever read Proust, you know well that in order to get from the first book to the last, you have to slog through one long salon after another. And by long, I mean two, three, even four hundred pages of listening to vain, arrogant, petty, bitter aristocrats saying vain, arrogant, petty, bitter things to and about one another. The book is comprise of long periods of monotony and ennui punctuated by fleeting moments of passionate intensity and concentration. The payoff of reading comes through getting beyond the monotony and ennui to the moments of passionate intensity an concentration. Neither makes sense without the other to compare it to.

But there's something else about the long periods of monotony and ennui that begin to effect your brain. When I say that "I began to feel that my memories of scenes in the bok were actually memories of my own experience," I mean that my experience of time in the book is much like my experience of time in life. I began to feel a sense of duration. Not only did I identify with young Marcel's memories, but when he looked back on moments of his life, I could feel the same distance from his past experience as I might from my own.

In other words, I shared his experience of the passage of time in a way that felt very much as it does in "real" life.

from In the Shadow of Young Girls in Flower

When it was first suggested we invite M. de Norpois to dinner, my mother commented that it was a pity Professor Cottard was absent from Paris and that she herself had quite lost touch with Swann, either of whom the former ambassador would have been pleased to meet; to which my father replied that, although a guest as eminent as Cottard, a scientific man of some renown, would always be an asset at one's dinner table, the Marquis de Norpois would be bound to see Swann, with his showing off and his name-dropping, as nothing but a vulgar swank, "a rank outsider," as he would put it. This statement of my father's may require a few words of explanation, as there may be some who remember Cottard as a mediocrity and Swann as the soul of discretion and modesty in all things social. As regards Swann, it turns out that our old family friend was now no longer only "young Swann" and "Swann of the Jockey Club"; to these personalities he had added a new one, which was not to be his last, that of Odette's husband. Adapting to her humble ambitions all the flair, desires, and industry that he had always possessed, Swann had contrived to construct a new position for himself, albeit far below the one he had formerly occupied, but suited to the wife with whom he must now share it. And in this position he had turned into a new man.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 44 (Marcel Proust)

2011-12-19T09:35:00.001-05:00

Proust, Marcel
Swann's Way

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

For many people, the discovery phase of reading ends at some point between the ages of 12 and 21. All who love to read can recall the experience of picking up a book that permanently altered something within their psyches and sent them, like an addict after his first sniff of cocaine, on a permanent hunt after that first contact.

Unlike a cocaine high, the first pleasures of reading are in fact recoverable. Each book being its own kind of intoxicant, and their number and variety being practically infinite, the book addict can keep getting her fix throughout life. However, there is usually only a short window in adolescence when our minds are soft enough and our emotions wild and chaotic enough for us to have life-altering experiences with books. Most of us stop taking literature seriously after college anyhow.

Unless, of course, one happens upon a book whose feelings and ideas remain so sharp as to be able to penetrate the leather hide of the adult psyche to the quick of those buried adolescent passions, making psychic change not once again possible.

Such, anyhow, was my experience of reading Proust in my late thirties.

I'd read a review of this translation by Lydia Davis, and for a year or two after reading it the book kept jumping out at me every time I visited the bookstore. It felt like a challenge, in the same way that reading Joyce or Woolf or Eliot or Pound had felt like a challenge when I was in college.

I had more or less stopped reading fiction for the better part of a decade. During graduate school I read poetry and theory. Towards the end I became interested in history, and I continued reading quite a bit of it after leaving school. One day I picked this up and started reading. It was autumn. Suddenly I felt the same kind of awakening I'd felt when I was a teen reading J.D. Salinger or as an undergraduate reading Robert Creeley.

Initially I thought it was just a reawakening of my senses, long numbed to gauche pleasures such as character, setting, plot and so forth by the rigorous textual analysis demanded by graduate study. But as I spent the better part of the next six months reading through the entirety of In Search of Lost Time, I began to feel that things inside my head were actually changing, that my experience of the world from that point on was going to be different...

Ok, I have to get to work, so I'll continue this tomorrow...

from Swann's Way

For a long time, I went to bed early. Sometimes, my candle scarcely out, my eyes would close so quickly that I did not have time to say to myself: “I’m falling asleep.” And, half an hour later, the thought that it was time to try to sleep would wake me; I wanted to put down the book I thought I still had in my hands and blow out my light; I had not ceased while sleeping to form reflec-tions on what I had just read, but these reflections had taken a rather peculiar turn; it seemed to me that I myself was what the book was talking about: a church, a quartet, the rivalry between François I and Charles V. This belief lived on for a few seconds after my waking; it did not shock my reason but lay heavy like scales on my eyes and kept them from realizing that the candlestick was no longer lit. Then it began to grow unintelligible to me, as after metempsychosis do the thoughts of an earlier existence; the subject of the book detached itself from me, I was free to apply myself to it or not; immediately I recovered my sight and I was amazed to find a darkness around me soft and restful for my eyes, but perhaps even more so for my mind, to which it appeared a thing without cause, incomprehensible, a thing truly dark. I would ask myself what time it might be; I could hear the whistling of the trains which, remote or nearby, like the singing of a bird in a forest, plotting the distances, described to me the extent of the deserted countryside where the traveler hastens toward the nearest station; and the little road he is following will be engraved on his memory by the excitement he owes to new places, to unaccustomed ctivities, to the recent conversation and the farewells under the unfamiliar lamp that follow him still through the silence of the night, to the imminent sweetness of his return.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 43.4 (Ezra Pound)

2011-12-18T09:37:00.000-05:00

Pound, Ezra
Selected Prose 1909-1965

I think I may have bought this online. I have the vaguest of memories of buying it because I got a good deal on it. I have no idea when I bought it, though I it is likely this occurred while I was in graduate school. The book is in very good conditions, so it is possible I bought it at around the same time I bought the Cantos and ABC of Reading, around 2004, which would be after graduate school. All I can say for certain is that I bought it at some point since moving to Buffalo in 1997. I did not own the book in New York or before. How's that for exactitude?

from Selected Prose 1909-1956
from I Gather the Limbs of Osiris

When I bring into play what my late pastors and masters would term, in classic sweetness, my 'unmitigated gall', and by virtue of it venture to speak of a 'New Method in Scholarship', I do not imagine that I am speaking of a method by me discovered. I mean, merely, a method not of common practice, a method not yet clearly or consciously formulated, a method which has been intermittently used by all good scholars since the beginning of scholarship, the method of Luminous Detail, a method most vigorously hostile to the prevailing mode of today — that is, the method of multitudinous detail, and to the method of yesterday, the method of sentiment and generalisation. The letter is too inexact and the former too cumbersome to be of much use to the normal man wishing to live mentally active.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 43.3 (Ezra Pound)

2011-12-17T09:46:00.001-05:00

Pound, Ezra
Literary Essays of Ezra Pound

Purchased at the Fordham University Bookstore.

This book was used in the aforementioned course in Modernist Poetry I took as an undergraduate. My memory is a little clearer now of how Pound was taught. As I recall, we read a couple of brief poems from his Selected Poems, which I no longer own, and then utilized his essays as a way to read both his poems and the poems of the other modernists. Yes, that's it. Pound was posited as an important theorist, and someone good at discovering talent (Eliot, Hemingway, et al), but his poems were considered too difficult to bother with.

On the cover page is a list of words. My guess is that they are words I intended to look up. I used to make lists of all the words I did not understand and then look them up after I'd finished reading. If I could not understand what came after, I would look them up immediately. Otherwise, I'd make a list somewhere in the book or the notebook I was using at the time, like this one:

Simian
Uxorious
Ambergris
Crocus
Scur
Pinion
Twain
Weal

I must have written the definitions down elsewhere. The only word I can't say I remember the definition to is "scur." According to my dictionary app, it means "A distorted horn, regrown after the disbudding operation of a goat, sheep, or cow." Hmm.

I also marked the essays we were assigned for the course: "The Tradition," "Troubadours–Their Sorts and Conditions," "The Later Yeats," "Dr. Williams' Position," & "T.S. Eliot." Which reminds me that we did also read Yeats in our modernism class. That always struck me as an odd choice, given that his writing always seemed more like a final flowering of Victorianism than the initial stirrings of the modern.

But what do I know.

from The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound

from A Retrospect

I begin on the chord thus querulous, for I would much rather lie on what is left of Catullus' parlour floor and speculate the azure beneath it and the hills off Salo and Riva with their forgotten gods moving unhindered amongst them, than discuss any processes and theories of art whatsoever. I would rather play tennis.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 43.2 (Ezra Pound)

2011-12-16T09:22:00.001-05:00

Pound, Ezra
The Cantos of Ezra Pound

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

Like yesterday's book, it appears I bought this around 2004. I went for many years without actually owning a copy of the Cantos. I read selections or took out the whole from the library, but never went in for the whole thing. I still cant say I've read all of them. I have a vague recollection that I bought this with the intent of finally reading them straight through. I am pretty sure I did not.

There's a torn half of a bookmark on pages 510-511, so I did pretty well. Either that or I just skipped ahead to read The Pisan Cantos. The latter is the most likely. The book mark has a sepia-toned black and white photo of Richard Ford on one side, with the phrase "Vintage Ford" emblazoned across it. On the other side is a similarly-toned photo, in profile, of Langston Hughes. He, too, is "Vintage."

Here's where I left off:

from The Cantos
from LXXIX

This fruit has a fire within it
Pomona, Pmona
No glass is clearer than are the globes of this flame
what sea is clearer than the pomegranate body
holding the flame?
Pomona, Pomona

Lynx, keep watch on this orchard
That is named Melagrana
or the pomegranate field
The sea is not clearer in azure
Nor the heliads bringing light

Here are lynxes Here are lynxes,
Is there a sound in the forest
of pard or of bassarid
or crotale or of leaves moving?

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 43.1 (Ezra Pound)

2011-12-15T09:19:00.001-05:00

Pound, Ezra
ABC of Reading

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books. There's a sticker on the back inidicating it arrived in the store in June of 2004. I am trying to recall the occasion of its purchase, but I am drawing a blank. The book is in pristine condition. The pages are crisp and clean, the binding tight, there's nary a mark on the cover.

I left a bookmark on pages 112-113. It's made of thin plastic and it advertises the Chicago Manual of Style, 15th Edition and its website. The background is white, the borders and some of the text an orangish-red, the rest of the text black and white. Just below the midpoint, behind the words "15th edition", a large transparent "15" floats in a sea of white.

On page 112, Pound has the following to say:

Chaucer's work has been left us almost unsorted. The perspicacious reader will not fall to thinking it is all of equal value. Having felt the best, it is probably advisable simply to browse and read what one enjoys; there are parts he might have cut had he been used to the multiplication of books by the printing press; parts he could have rewritten had he thought it worth while. No good purpose is served by simply falling into an ecstasy over archaic forms of language.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 43 (Ezra Pound)

2011-12-14T09:27:00.003-05:00

Pound, Ezra
Poems & Translations

Purchased at the late, lamented discount bookstore at the outlet mall. I was actually out there over the weekend, looking for some winter shoes (no luck). It was depressing to see that the store had been replaced by a Levi's outlet.

I think I first read Pound as an undergraduate. As I recall, we read him during my final semester, in a course on Modernist Poetry. We read Eliot, Williams, Pound, Stevens, Marianne Moore. I am pretty sure that's all we read. We spent most of our time on Williams and Stevens, less time on Eliot, even less on Marianne Moore, and more or less dismissed Pound as being too difficult to bother with.

There are many reasons not to want to read Pound, his execrable politics being the number one reason, but to dismiss him as too difficult for a graduate level course in English should not be included among them. This happened again in graduate school. I was asked not to include him on one of my orals lists because the committee member overseeing that list did not want to engage with the Cantos.

Part of this resistance to the work (aside from the politics) has to do with the fact that everyone assumes the most important work Pound did was in the Cantos. This may be true, but the Cantos are certainly not the most pleasing of his works. His translations are readable, entertaining, profound even, and his lyric poems are dazzling in their rhythmic complexity.

Maybe it is because this work falls into a bit of an academic black hole. First, it's not allusive enough to send young scholars to the library to track down all the references. Second, much of it is drawn from non-western sources, so there are few American experts in the field to take an interest. And then, of course, there's the politics.

There's really no defending his politics, but there are plenty of reasons read the work.

from Poems and Translations

Old Zuk

This is the grave of old Zuk
who wasn't really a crook
but who died of persistance
in that non-existence
which consists in refusing to LOOK.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 42 (Popol Vuh)

2011-12-13T09:20:00.004-05:00

Popol Vuh
Tedlock, Dennis, Trans.

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

Dennis Tedlock was one of the core of professors in the Poetics Program when I was there. (He still is– the last of the core from back when I was there, Creeley, Bernstein and Howe having left). I never took a course with him, but I have worked with him on various projects. We collaborated with Jonathan Skinner to bring Gary Snyder to Buffalo back in the early aughts. He read at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery. There was a line from the front door all the way out to the street for that one.

Anyhow, I bought this book in 2003, just prior to a trip Lori and I took down to the Yucatan. I brought two books with me -- this one, and Olson's Selected Writings, edited by Creeley. I brought the latter because it contained the "Mayan Letters," which Olson had written to Creeley while on a fellowship down to the Yucatan. A couple of years later, I was surprised and happy to discover in Guatemala that almost all of the tourists shops in the country stocked copies of Dennis' Translation.

from Popol Vuh

This is the beginning of the Ancient Word, here in this place called Quiché. Here we shall inscribe, we shall implant the Ancient Word, the potential and source for everything done in the citadel of Quiché, in the nation of Quiché people.

And here we shall take up the demonstration, revelation, and account of how things were put in shadow and brought to light by

the Maker, Modeler,
named Bearer, Begetter,
Hunahpu Possum, Hunahpu Coyote,
Great White Peccary, Coati,
Sovereign Plumed Serpent,
Heart of the Lake, Heart of the Sea,
plate shaper, bowl shaper, as they are called,
also named, also described as
the midwife, matchmaker
named Xpiyacoc, Xmucane,
defender, protector,
twice a midwife, twice a matchmaker,

as is said in the words of Quiché. They accounted for everything -- and did it, too -- as enlightened beings, in enlightened words.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 41.1 (Francis Ponge)

2011-12-10T10:51:00.001-05:00

Ponge, Francis
Mute Objects of Expression

Purchased online, I think. Looks like I got as far as page 106. That's where my bookmark still sits. It is an advertisement for the Buffalo New Book Club, featuring the autobiography of Andre Agassi. I never read that one. I doubt I will.

I do remember, however, talking to his publicity person at Random House, who also happens to be the in-house booking agent for Edwidge Danticat. At one point last year she left me a message saying she would be unavailable for a couple of weeks while she went on tour with Andre to help promote his book.

from Mute Objects of Expression

And ﬁnally, for the rest of it, for a certain number of ﬁne attributes that I might have neglected to draw out, well, dear reader, be patient! Some ﬁne day a critic will surely happen along, perceptive enough to reproach me for this eruption into literature by my wasp in a manner that’s importunate, annoying, impetuous, and triﬂing all at once, to denounce the halting pace of these notes, their disorderly, zigzag presentation, to fret over the taste for brilliant discontinuity, for a sting without depth though not without danger, not without the venomous tail which they disclose – in short, with great arrogance, to call down upon my work all the epithets it merits.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 41 (Francis Ponge)

2011-12-09T08:42:00.001-05:00

Ponge, Francis
Selected Poems

Purchased online earlier this year.

Francis Ponge was the poet I spent the most time with in 2011. I bought this in January and kept it on my nightstand until we moved in July. It made me wish I had studied French a more closely. I can make out a lot in the original, but I cannot really read it.

About this time last year that the literary outlaw Richard Deming asked me for some prose poetry for a journal he was guest editing. I hadn't really been writing prose poems for a the past few years, but he asked me based on some I had written in the past that he had published in chapbook form.

I said I would try to come up with something.

In our emails on the subject, Richard brought up Francis Ponge as someone he thought of as a model for innovation in the form. I had read a poem or two, but did not own any of his work. I bought this and another book, hoping I might find some inspiration there, and I did, though I don't think it ultimately influenced the work I sent to Richard.

Hey, come to think of it, I still haven't seen that journal. I wonder when it's coming out. Richard?

from Selected Poems

Memorandum

Astonishing that I can forget, forget so easily and for so long every time, the only principle according to which interesting works can be written, and written well. This is doubtlessly because I’ve never been able to define it clearly to myself in a conclusively representative or memorable way.

From time to time it comes to my mind, not, to be sure, as an axiom or maxim, but like a sunny day after a thousand which have been cloudy – or, rather, because it is not so much a natural as an artificial event, or, still more precisely, an artificial development – like the sudden illumination of an electric lightbulb in a house hitherto lit by kerosene. . . . But the next day, you’ve forgotten wiring’s been installed and you start again painstakingly filling the lamps, changing wicks, scorching your fingers on the glass, and being badly lit. . . .

“You have first of all to side with your own spirit, and your own taste. Then take the time, and have the courage, to express all your thoughts on the subject at hand (not just keeping the expressions that seem brilliant or distinctive). Finally you have to say everything simply, not striving for charm, but conviction.”

Translated by C.K. Williams

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 40 (Gabriel Pomerand)

2011-12-08T09:45:00.001-05:00

Pomerand, Gabriel
Saint ghetto of the loans grimoire

Sent to me by the publisher, Ugly Duckling Presse.

This Lettrist work was translated and published as part of the Lost Literature Series, one of the many great imprints of UDP. I can remember reading about the Isidore Isou and the lettrists for the first time in Greil Marcus' Lipstrick Traces, which attempts create a lineage for early British punk rock by drawing a line backwards from the Sex Pistols through various avant garde movements including Situationism, Lettrism and Dada.

It was a somewhat frustrating book to read because at the time I read it, 1992 or so, almost nothing of these movements was in print. I found one book by Guy Debord, and Robert Motherwell's book on Dada, but nothing on Isou or the lettrists, and little or nothing on any of the other avant gardists Marcus mentions in the book. So for some years Marcus book was my only real source for information.

He must have sparked a lot of interest, however, as the last twenty years have seen more and more of these works into print.

from Saint ghetto of the loans grimoire

This book is unusual and immobile, yet orderly as a caste.
I'd love it if, in the future, the organic world showed such an icy face, impassive and tought.

We're the new Egyptians.
Everywhere, people are building pyramids.
I dream of a book of mysteries equal to the arrogance and serenity in faces carved on pharaoh's mummies.

I've dug out from nothingness each of the signs that make up this work, like one obliged to invent wisdom. Impassive Brahman, thus do I picture my potential future reader

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 39 (Polybius)

2011-12-07T08:40:00.001-05:00

Polybius
The Rise of the Roman Empire

Purchased either online or at Talking Leaves, not sure which.

This was an important book on my oral exam list in graduate school. This list, which Charles Bernstein oversaw, focused on important works of history throughout history. Polybius gave me some very useful insights about the origins of the concept of universality. He was a Greek living under the Roman Empire. His work, which is actually called his Universal History, in forty volumes, chronicles the one hundred or so year period from the Punic wars through the conquest of Greece, finally ending with the destruction of Carthage in 146 BCE.

At this time, Rome was becoming so powerful that the entire history of the Mediterranean was becoming Roman history. From this perspective then, as Rome was more or less everything, so it's history was becoming 'universal.'

It's interesting to think of universality from this perspective, as it reveals the kind of class biases inherent in the concept. If one knows about exceptions to the rule (or to one's rule, as it were), then it is difficult to make any true claim for the idea of the universal. Therefore, it follows that in order to establish universality, a single rule must first be established, in this case the Roman empire. There can be no "outside" if we are to believe in universality.

The idea, then, is one developed by the ruling class, or in this case, the ruling class of the ruling city, in order to justify its rule. If you rule everything, then your rule is universal, as is your worldview and your history. But what happens when history catches up with you? When the empire collapses, universality collapses with it, so was it every truly universal?

I'll leave you with that question this morning.

from The Rise of the Roman Empire

For what gives my work its peculiar quality, and what is most remarkable in the present age, is this. Fortune has guided almost all the affairs of the world in one direction and has forced them to incline towards one and the same end; a historian should likewise bring before his readers under one synoptical view the operations by which she has accomplished her general purpose.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 38.1 (Michael Pollan)

2011-12-06T08:46:00.001-05:00

Pollan, Michael
The Omnivore's Dilemma

This book belongs to Lori. I think I bought it for her at Talking Leaves. She has read it, I have not.

I remember her lending it for several months to our next door neighbor at the last house, L. She is an epidemiologist who works at a local college. Her husband is the chief curator of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery.

They have two daughters. Our houses were so close together that when we lay in bed in the morning we could here the little girls running up and down the staircase so clearly it was as if they were running up the stairs in our house.

When we got our dog, I began a morning routine of taking her for a walk around the block. I used to see L. walking her daughters to the bus stop or meeting up with another friend to fast-walk around the neighborhood. She subscribes to the Babel series and we often talked about what books we were reading and who she might like to see come read in the series.

She always seemed slightly afraid of the dog.

I have noticed since becoming a dog owner that there are three different kinds of people: dog-lovers, dog fearers, and those who are indifferent. Zelda is a strange mix of shyness and excitability. When we first got her, she liked to jump on people a lot. Dog lovers tend to welcome this. Dog fearers, on the other hand, tense up, which causes the dog to get more excited.

L. always became visibly tense when she saw Zeda, especially if the girls were with her. Her fear was so palpable that it made it difficult to get the dog to calm down around her. I always felt bad that she was afraid, but then it's hard to tell someone having a fear response to an animal that if they would just stop acting afraid there would be no problem.

I ran into her just the other morning. I had let Zelda off-leash to play with another dog in a little pocket park in the new neighborhood. I saw L. and her friend fast-walking over the path that bisects half the park before splitting again in two directions near where the dogs were playing. L. is nearly blind, so could not see me or Zelda, but when she heard the dogs, she immediately took the fork going the other way instead taking of the one that would have her pass near me and the dog.

I called her name. She stopped. Her friend recognized me and told her who I was. They came back down the other path and chatted for a while before continuing on their way.

from The Omnivore's Dilemma

Before I began working on this book, I never gave much thought to where my food came from. I didn't spend much time worrying about what I should and shouldn't eat. Food came from the supermarket and as long as it tasted good, I ate it.

Until, that is, I had the chance to peer behind the curtain of the modern American food chain. This came in 1998. I was working on an article about genetically modified food—food created by changing plant DNA in the laboratory. My reporting took me to the Magic Valley in Idaho, where most of the french fries you've ever eaten begin their life as Russet Burbank potatoes. There I visited a farm like no farm I'd ever seen or imagined.

It was fifteen thousand acres, divided into 135-acre crop circles. Each circle resembled the green face of a tremendous clock with a slowly rotating second hand. That sweeping second hand was the irrigation machine, a pipe more than a thousand feet long that delivered a steady rain of water, fertilizer, and pesticide to the potato plants. The whole farm was managed from a bank of computer monitors in a control room. Sitting in that room, the farmer could, at the flick of a switch, douse his crops with water or whatever chemical he thought they needed. One of these chemicals was a pesticide called Monitor, used to control bugs. The chemical is so toxic to the nervous system that no one is allowed in the field for five days after it is sprayed. Even if the irrigation machine breaks during that time, farmers won't send a worker out to fix it because the chemical is so dangerous. They'd rather let that whole 135-acres crop of potatoes dry up and die.

That wasn't all. During the growing season, some pesticides get inside the potato plant so that they will kill any bug that takes a bite. But these pesticides mean people can't eat the potatoes while they're growing, either. After the harvest, the potatoes are stored for six months in a gigantic shed. Here the chemicals gradually fade until the potatoes are safe to eat. Only then can they be turned into french fries. That's how we grow potatoes?

I had no idea.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 38 (Michael Pollan)

2011-12-05T08:40:00.001-05:00

Pollan, Michael
The Botany of Desire

This book belongs to Lori. I think I bought it for her at Talking Leaves, but I am not one hundred percent certain. I haven't read it myself, though, as ever, I intend to.

The discussion of a potential change to our diets began in earnest once Lori started reading Michael Pollan. I was a heavy carnivore my entire life. Lori says she rarely ate meat before she met me. Once we moved in together, she says her diet changed. For many years she made mention of this fact, but acceded to my dietary demands.

Then she read Michael Pollan. She began telling stories of the meat and corn industries and how eating meat every night was starting to disgust her. I am not sure how we got from there to deciding one night to stop eating meat and poultry.

Our last meal, so to speak, took place at an Ethiopian restaurant in Rochester. It was called Abyssinia. We ate there before going to see an insane Japanese haunted house film from the 60's called "Hausu," or "House," at the Dryden Theater. Donna White was with us, as was Gregg Biglieri. I am not sure if Geoffrey Gatza, Donna's partner, was there or not. Something tells me he wasn't. We shared small portions of all the meat and vegetable dishes on the menu.

After that night we stopped eating meat and poultry. Just like that. Very little discussion, no relapses. It's been about a year an a half, and neither of us really miss it, largely, I think, because Lori is such an incredible cook and is able to conjure meals each night tastier and more filling than most of the meat dishes we used to make.

For instance, last night she made this:

http://www.theppk.com/2011/11/seitan-roast-stuffed-with-shiitakes-and-leeks/

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 37.1 (Edgar Allan Poe)

2011-12-04T09:24:00.001-05:00

Poe, Edgar Allan
Essays and Reviews

Purchased at the Niagara Falls Outlet Mall Discount Book Store.

This book has one, thin, orange post-it index note that wraps around page 11 and onto page 12, suggesting I marked it. It seems to be marking off two paragraphs in which Poe is discussing poetry. Instead of writing anything myself, I'll just leave you this morning with these.

from Letter to B–

What is poetry?–Poetry! that Proteus-like idea, with as many appellations as the nine-titled Corcyra! Give me, I demanded of a scholar some time ago, give me a definition of poetry? "Tres-volontiers,"–and he proceeded to his library, brought me a Dr. Johnson, and overwhelmed me with a definition. Shade of the immortal Shakespeare! I imagined to myself the scowl of your spiritual eye upon the profanity of that scurrilous Ursa Major. Think of poetry, dear B–, think of poetry, and then think of–Dr. Samuel Johnson! Think of all that is airy and fairy-like, and then of all that is hideous and unwieldy; think of his huge bulk, the Elephant! and then–and then think of the Tempest–Midsummer Night's Dream–Prospero–Oberon–and Titania!

***

A poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure, being a poem only so far as the object is attained; romance presenting perceptible images with definite, poetry with indefinite sensations, to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception. Music, when combined with a pleasurable idea, is poetry; music without the idea is simply music; the idea without music is prose from its very definitiveness.

What was meant by the invective against him who had no music in his soul?

***

To sum up this long rigmarole, I have, dear B–, what you no doubt perceive, for the metaphysical poets, as poets, the most sovereign contempt. That they have followers proves nothing–

No Indian prince has to his palace
More followers than a thief to the gallows.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 37 (Edgar Allan Poe)

2011-12-03T11:44:00.001-05:00

Poe, Edgar Allan
The Collected Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

Purchase at Talking Leaves Books, I am pretty sure I bought this for a course with Susan Howe called, "Preface: Or Seen Again for the First Time." As I recall, we read "The Imp of the Perverse." I seem to also remember having read "The Gold Bug" around the same time, but that may have been for something else. A vague memory of talking about that story with my then-girlfriend, who may have written a paper on it, trembles at the edge of consciousness.

It's missing the dust-jacket because I generally like trying to read books with dust-jackets on them. I used to remove them immediately and throw them away. Later, I graduated to taking them off and putting them on the bookshelf until I'd finished reading the book, at which time I would replace it. Now, I can't really be bothered, I just suffer through the annoyance of having the dust-jacket slip and slide in my fingers as I attempt to hold the book steady enough to read.

from The Imp of the Perverse

IN THE consideration of the faculties and impulses-of the prima mobilia of the human soul, the phrenologists have failed to make room for a propensity which, although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment, has been equally overlooked by all the moralists who have preceded them. In the pure arrogance of the reason, we have all overlooked it. We have suffered its existence to escape our senses, solely through want of belief-of faith;-whether it be faith in Revelation, or faith in the Kabbala. The idea of it has never occurred to us, simply because of its supererogation. We saw no need of the impulse-for the propensity. We could not perceive its necessity. We could not understand, that is to say, we could not have understood, had the notion of this primum mobile ever obtruded itself;-we could not have understood in what manner it might be made to further the objects of humanity, either temporal or eternal. It cannot be denied that phrenology and, in great measure, all metaphysicianism have been concocted a priori. The intellectual or logical man, rather than the understanding or observant man, set himself to imagine designs-to dictate purposes to God. Having thus fathomed, to his satisfaction, the intentions of Jehovah, out of these intentions he built his innumerable systems of mind. In the matter of phrenology, for example, we first determined, naturally enough, that it was the design of the Deity that man should eat. We then assigned to man an organ of alimentiveness, and this organ is the scourge with which the Deity compels man, will-I nill-I, into eating. Secondly, having settled it to be God's will that man should continue his species, we discovered an organ of amativeness, forthwith. And so with combativeness, with ideality, with causality, with constructiveness,-so, in short, with every organ, whether representing a propensity, a moral sentiment, or a faculty of the pure intellect. And in these arrangements of the Principia of human action, the Spurzheimites, whether right or wrong, in part, or upon the whole, have but followed, in principle, the footsteps of their predecessors: deducing and establishing every thing from the preconceived destiny of man, and upon the ground of the objects of his Creator.

It would have been wiser, it would have been safer, to classify (if classify we must) upon the basis of what man usually or occasionally did, and was always occasionally doing, rather than upon the basis of what we took it for granted the Deity intended him to do. If we cannot comprehend God in his visible works, how then in his inconceivable thoughts, that call the works into being? If we cannot understand him in his objective creatures, how then in his substantive moods and phases of creation?

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 36.1 (Plutarch)

2011-12-02T09:13:00.001-05:00

Plutarch
Essays

No idea where I got this. It's in terrible shape, has highlighting all over it. I would never have bought it like this, and I would never have highlighted it so. This leads me to believe that I bought it online and that whoever sold it to me described it incorrectly. This might all be made up. I have no way to know.

from The Essays

from On the Eating of Flesh

You ask of me then for what reason it was that Pythagoras abstained from eating of flesh. I for my part do much wonder in what humor, with what soul or reason, the first man with his mouth touched slaughter, and reached to his lips the flesh of a dead animal, and having set before people courses of ghastly corpses and ghosts, could give those parts the names of meat and victuals, that but a little before lowed, cried, moved, and saw; how his sight could endure the blood of slaughtered, flayed, and mangled bodies; how his smell could bear their scent; and how the very nastiness happened not to offend the taste, while it chewed the sores of others, and participated of the saps and juices of deadly wounds.

Crept the raw hides, and with a bellowing sound
Roared the dead limbs; the burning entrails groaned.
(“Odyssey,” xii. 395.)

This indeed is but a fiction and fancy; but the fare itself is truly monstrous and prodigious,— that a man should have a stomach to creatures while they yet bellow, and that he should be giving directions which of things yet alive and speaking is fittest to make food of, and ordering the several kinds of the seasoning and dressing them and serving them up to tables. You ought rather, in my opinion, to have inquired who first began this practice, than who of late times left it off.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 36 (Plutarch)

2011-12-01T09:20:00.001-05:00

Plutarch
Lives of the Noble Romans

Purchased, I think, at Rust Belt Books. I think this was another potential candidate for my oral exam list. It did not make the cut, however. I think I may have read some of this book, but not a lot. I did make a note on the title page:

What are the texts that form the basis for the possibility of history?

Apparently I didn't think this was one of them. It also looks like I made a note to myself that became the first line of a future poem:

DFW told me I look like Greg Kinnear

I must have read this at around the time David Foster Wallace Came to town -- around 2000. I posted my memories of that visit, as well as the poem it produced here.

Finally, there are what look to be the name of an author and the titles of two works listed at the bottom of the same page:

Chaterjee
Script to Print
The Emergence of Prose

I don't think I read any of them.

from Lives of the Noble Romans

Some relate that an asp was brought in amongst those figs and covered with the leaves, and that Cleopatra had arranged that it might settle on her before she knew, but, when she took away some of the figs and saw it, she said, " So here it is," and held out her bare arm to be bitten. Others say that it was kept in a vase, and that she vexed and pricked it with a golden spindle till it seized her arm. But what really took place is known to no one. Since it was also said that she carried poison in a hollow bodkin, about which she wound her hair; yet there was not so much as a spot found, or any symptom of poison upon her body, nor was the asp seen within the monument; only something like the trail of it was said to have been noticed on the sand by the sea, on the part towards which the building faced and where the windows were.

Some relate that two faint puncture-marks were found on Cleopatra's arm, and to this account Caesar seems to have given credit; for in his triumph there was carried a figure of Cleopatra, with an asp clinging to her. Such are the various accounts. But Caesar, though much disappointed by her death, yet could not but admire the greatness of her spirit, and gave order that her body should be buried by Antony with royal splendor and magnificence. Her women, also, received honorable burial by his directions. Cleopatra had lived nine and thirty years, during twenty-two of which she had reigned as queen, and for fourteen had been Antony's partner in his empire.

Antony, according to some authorities, was fifty-three, according to others, fifty-six years old. His statues were all thrown down, but those of Cleopatra were left untouched; for Archibius, one of her friends, gave Caesar two thousand talents to save them from the fate of Antony's.

Translated by John Dryden

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 35 (Plotinus)

2011-11-30T09:33:00.001-05:00

Plotinus
The Enneads

Another purchase from the late, lamented discount bookstore in Niagara Falls. $3.50. Unread.

This is one of those books that I am sure came home in a sack with ten others that cost me a total of $50. I used to just pluck the books I thought I might like to read some day off the Penguin Classics shelves and drop them into my bag. I'd often run from the mall after that to make sure I didn't spend any more money on clothes or something else.

I rarely visit that mall now. No bookstore, and the strength of the Canadian dollar has meant that all the clothing prices have risen to a level comfortable to bargain-hunting Canadians, but somewhat less so to middle class Americans in a recession. Sigh.

Funny how the classical authors seem to cluster together around certain letters of the alphabet, sometimes falling right next to each other. This week we've had Plato, Pliny, Plotinus and, tomorrow Plutarch. This also occurred in the "A's" (Aristotle, Aristophanes) and also in the "H's" (Herodotus, Hesiod, Homer).

from The Enneads

It is the virtue of unity that beings are beings.

This is equally true o things whose existence is primal and of all that are in any degree to be numbered among beings. What could exist at all except as one thing? Deprived of unity, a thing ceases to be what it is called: no army unless as a unity: a chorus, a flock, must be one thing. Even house and ship demand unity, one house, one ship; unity gone, neither remains: thus even continuous magnitudes could not exist without an inherent unity; break them apart ad their very being is altered in the measure of the breach of unity.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 34 (Pliny the Elder)

2011-11-29T08:44:00.001-05:00

Pliny the Elder
Natural History: A Selection

Purchased at the late, lamented Niagara Falls Outlet Mall Discount Book Store. $3. I think I may have considered this as a possible text for my oral exam list in graduate school. I did not choose it and I am pretty sure I never read it. The pages and spine are as crisp as if they were new. It doesn't even have a remainder mark on the edge, like many of the other books I bought at that store.

Poor Pliny died in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 CE. This according to his nephew, Pliny the Younger. In case you were wondering, "Pliny" rhymes with "whinny." I used to think it rhymed with "whiny." But I was wrong.

from Natural History, A Selection

14. I think it is a sign of human weakness to try to find out the shape and form of God. Whoever God is–provided he does exist–and in whatever region he is, God is the complete embodiment of sense, sight, hearing, soul, mind and of himself. To believe in either an infinite number of deities corresponding to men's vices, as well as their virtues–like the goddesses of Chastity, Concord, Intelligence, Hope, Honour, Mercy, Faith–or, like Democritus, in only two, namely Punishment and Reward, plumbs an even greater depth of foolishness.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 33.4 (Plato)

2011-11-28T09:47:00.001-05:00

Plato
The Republic of Plato

Purchased at the Fordham University bookstore.

And yes, it was translated by that Allan Bloom, author of the infamous late-eighties culture-war manifesto, The Closing of the American Mind. That book seemed to crystallize the rage of its era. I remember it being everywhere at the time.

One of my roommates, P., had a copy on his bookshelf. I remember being tempted to read it, knowing full well it would piss me off. I finally pulled it off the shelf after staring at it for months. It didn't really anger me. It made me laugh a little and mostly made me sad that a person of such obvious intellect was so out of touch with reality.

My clearest memory is of his attack on feminism. I don't remember it perfectly, but his argument went something like this:

Men are insecure. They are especially insecure about their penises and by extension (no pun intended) their virility. It is important for the continuance of humanity that men feel confident in their sexual potency. Otherwise, they will not perform well in bed (or, by extension, in life) and humanity as we know it will die out.

Therefore, it is incumbent upon women to make sure that men feel secure in their virility.

Therefore, women should not be sexually liberated, should not have multiple partners, should not have sex before marriage because each of these things undermines a man's confidence in his virility and threaten the existence of the human race.

Therefore, it is important that women stay home, where they are less likely to be tempted by men other than their husbands and less likely to undermine their husbands' virility and threaten the existence of the human race.

Got that?

Kind of sad and funny and scary all at once.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 33.3 (Plato)

2011-11-27T08:38:00.000-05:00

Plato
Plato's Dialogue on Friendship

Purchased at the Fordham University bookstore. The title page bears a read stamp noting that the book arrived in the store in July of 1991 and cost $7.95. A quick search on Amazon reveals that the book is still in print and has more than tripled in price since then. It now costs $24.95. Good thing the student loan industrial complex has arisen to allow students to add several thousands of dollars to their student debt by paying exorbitant prices for textbooks.

This one was purchased for a graduate course I took as an undergraduate. Aside from the few remaining requirements I had to fulfill during my final year of college, I took a number of graduate seminars in English and one in political philosophy. I think I took the political philosophy course in the fall. My spring semester I took two or three graduate English seminars. I was testing the waters of graduate school. At the time they felt a little tepid.

I am not sure exactly which course I read this book for. I remember the teacher, Dr. Mary Nichols, who was a brilliant classicist that used everything from Plato to Shakespeare to teach political science. Her only drawback was that she was very conservative politically. I don't think I have ever had a teacher who heaped so much scorn on left-wing politics in such a learned and sarcastic way.

None which should suggest that I sympathized with her politics, but I admit that I am a sucker for biting wit from whatever quarter. If you can't laugh at yourself, then who can you laugh at? I took three or four courses with her, mostly, I guess, because of what I was explaining about Plato a couple of days ago. I have never been good at attacking a subject head on, especially in a classroom setting. I have always, found, however, that by approaching it from a different direction, especially through the medium of literature, I can get a pretty firm grasp on the thing at hand.

Nichols' classes functioned much like this. She allowed wide latitude in our approach. I once wrote a paper on Aristotle and the 'golden mean' that was an imitation of a Platonic dialogue. The central metaphor was a flexible canoe developed by the Aleut eskimos. It's flexibility allowed it to attack the choppy ocean waters much more aggressively than, say, a stiff boat made of rigid wood. I never would have been allowed to write such a thing in another class, but she accepted it and engaged the dialogue at the level of the ideas. A rare trait, indeed.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 33.2 (Plato)

2011-11-26T09:13:00.001-05:00

Plato
Early Socratic Dialogues

Once again I am uncertain where or even when I acquired this book. Probably in college. It has a kind college textbook feel to it, as if I had to buy this collection in order to read one dialogue not collected elsewhere. I seem to recall at some point being required to read Ion, so perhaps that is the case.

I have a memory of a break in my Platonic knowledge that occurred sometime during my undergraduate studies. My early memories of studying Plato involve a direct encounter with the arguments put forward in the dialogues, usually from the standpoint of ethics, as in the first book of the Republic, where the argument concerns the meaning of the term "justice."

Each interlocutor puts forward his definition of the term. They range from "to give to each what is owed" to "the will of the strong." Socrates deconstructs the definitions, revealing the contradictions inherent in each. Of course, he never puts forward his own, he simply forces everyone to question their own assumptions. This, we learned, is known as "The Socratic Method."

At some point in my studies the discussion changed. Professors began to talk about Plato in a more abstract, historicized manner. The jolt this gave me had to do with the fact that suddenly the professors were talking about things like "forms" as if there were a conversation going on that we, the students, had been a party to. I felt as if I had missed the party.

In graduate school another term was introduced: "aporia." I think Derrida popularized the term in academic circles. For a time it seemed as if every text we studied was in some way "aporetic."At the further reaches of these discussions we discovered that all texts were aporetic and we eternal Socrates', ferreting out the fundamental contradictions at the heart of our understanding of the world.

Or as Woody Allen so eloquently put it:

Socrates is a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore, all men are Socrates.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 33.1 (Plato)

2011-11-25T08:40:00.001-05:00

Plato
The Last Days of Socrates

I am not at all sure where this one came from. Possibly it's pilfered from my brother's high school books. Possibly it was a textbook in a course at some point. Possibly I purchased it because it had one dialogue or other I did not have formerly. It does have some green highlighting in it, which might argue towards it having belonged to my brother, several of whose high school books contain such highlighting. But there's no way of knowing for sure, is there?

All of which leaves me searching for a subject this morning. Perhaps there is no subject, just the blank wall that is my memory concerning this book. What kind of wall is it?

Let's say it's an old plaster wall with long cracks running this way and that in diagonals across the surface. Some of the cracks have begun to flake, leaving beneath the dull, eggshell-white paint pocks and divots of exposed plaster. Motes of plaster dust loosen and fall to the floor or cling to the wall on the way down. Some make their way into unsuspecting lungs, either directly or through the more circuitous route of first entering the heating ducts and then being blown airborne into the moist, palpitating cavity.

Perhaps they cause a one to cough. Perhaps the cough brings the mote or motes up in a gobbet of phlegm spat into a toilet. Perhaps the toilet is flushed and the gobbet containing the mote works its way through a combination of replacement PVC and cracked, rusted, cast-iron waste pipes down through the basement floor and out to the public sewer system, where the rain water mixes with the feculent flushes of a million other toilets on its journey towards the sea.

If it has not dissolved by now, our little mote inside our little gobbet now finds it self spinning and churning in a great vat housed in a large, nondescript, concrete structure. Chemicals of all kinds are added to suss out whatever unspoiled water is left. Impurities, our mote included, get sifted into an adjacent waterway, say the Niagara river, which is quite cold this time of year. A mile or so on the swift current becomes event swifter, and our little mote finds itself cresting and foaming over outcroppings of rock before suddenly making a death dive down the great wall of Niagara Falls.

There, it nearly escapes the trap of the downward force, which might have held it there for eternity, and escapes into the current, racing towards Lake Ontario. It scrapes along the bottom of the Maid of the Mist, but the current keeps it from clinging for very long. A great churning begins, much like the sewage vat, only this time it's a great natural whirlpool that sends the mote careening through a canyoned passage to its final destination, the Great Lake!

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 33 (Plato)

2011-11-24T09:31:00.001-05:00

Plato
The Dialogues of Plato

This book is old enough to have been my high school textbook, but I don't think it is. I feel like I may have picked this one up for a dollar somewhere in order to have a copy of one dialogue or another that I did not have in my collection. I have four or five different collections, but they all seem to be missing one essential thing. I guess I should have bought the big complete edition. But alas, I did not, which means we have several days of Plato ahead.

Plato was very important to me early on because he blended my two dominant sensibilities–the philosophical and the literary–into a single art form. Philosophy interested me from an early age, but my youthful inability to concentrate made it difficult for me to read most of it. I could listen to a good teacher lecture on philosophy, but I could not go home and read the texts themselves without great difficulty.

However, this was not the case with Plato. Plato's dialogues always read to me like novels or a dramas. I don't know if it was the fact that ideas were embodied in characters or that the conceit of ordinary speech made the work more accessible or that they had a hero, Socrates, on whom we could reliably expect to pin our hopes, but I was happy always to go home and read the dialogues.

Ok-- time for Thanksgiving to begin. Have a happy one.

from The Dialogues of Plato

from The Apologia

How you, O Athenians, have been affected by my accusers, I cannot tell; but I know that they almost made me forget who I was–so persuasively did they speak; and yet they have hardly uttered a word of the truth. But of the many falsehoods told by them, there was one which quite amazed me;–I mean when they said that you should be upon your guard and not allow yourself to be deceived by the force of my eloquence. To say this, when they were certain to be detected as soon as I opened my lips and proved myself to be anything but a great speaker, did indeed appear to me most shameless–unless by force of eloquence they mean the force of truth; for if such is their meaning, I admit that I am eloquent.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 32 (Sylvia Plath)

2011-11-23T09:10:00.001-05:00

Plath, Sylvia
The Collected Poems

Given to me as a Christmas gift in 1991, my last Christmas in College. Inscribed:

To our favorite
'Grandpa':
Merry Christmas! 1991
Love,
L.
R.
&
J.

As I recall, the 'Grandpa' was a a two-part joke. On one hand, I was at the time very fond of wearing a gray cardigan sweater, which my fashion-forward friends thought was just about the funniest thing they had ever seen. They used to say that I looked like someone's grandfather.

On the other, I was about two years' clean and sober at that point, which was a very odd place to be for a college kid. Early on in my sobriety, I decided that I did not want to limit myself to hanging around only sober people. L, R, & J were not sober people.

The three, two girls and a guy, lived in an apartment on the second floor of a ramshackle apartment house on Hoffman Ave in the Bronx, just south of 187th St. I actually looked it up on street view this morning to see if it was still there. It still is. It's got to be the ugliest building in New York. It's only three stories high, very boxy, with no architectural details at all, unless you consider white vinyl siding an architectural detail.

Their apartment was party central. You entered from the stairwell into the kitchen. Straight ahead was one bedroom. To the left, a little doorway led into the living room, which had about six levels of beer-, sweat- and semen- soaked carpeting on it. There were two bedrooms off the living room. I am not sure where the bathroom was. Possibly off the kitchen.

The three of them were my closest friends during my final year of college. I spent a lot of time at their apartment. I used to go to all their parties. My M.O. was to sit on a wing-backed chair in the corner by the window, chain-smoking Marlboros, saying nary a word as they and the other partygores got drunker and drunker and the music got louder and louder. One night I recall everyone writhing, half-naked, on the floor with the hot new albums Nevermind and Ritual de lo Habitual blaring from the stereo.

I never took part in these rituals. I just sat in the corner with my cigarettes and coke, observing, judging, trying to pretend I was comfortable. I wasn't of course, but you never would have known. The other part of the 'Grandpa' joke was, I am sure, directed at my always being at a remove from the 'kids' while they did their thing, drinking, dancing, getting high, etc. I could always be counted on to safely drive somewhere late at night to find something to eat.

I lost touch with all three of them within a few years. J. was first. He moved back to Boston, where he'd grown up. L. moved to SF for many years and we lost touch. R. got married and has since lived all over the world. I moved to Buffalo around the same time that L. and R. left NYC. Amazingly, I can find none of them on Facebook or anywhere on the internet. I did manage to discover that both R. and L. are back in NYC, but that's about all I could find.

Which is a bit ironic, as I was always the one who absolutely adored NYC, while they complained about it endlessly. C'est la vie, as they say.

from The Collected Poems

Edge

The woman is perfected.
Her dead

Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
The illusion of a Greek necessity

Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
Her bare

Feet seem to be saying:
We have come this far, it is over.

Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little

Pitcher of milk, now empty.
She has folded

Them back into her body as petals
Of a rose close when the garden

Stiffens and odors bleed
From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.

The moon has nothing to be sad about,
Staring from her hood of bone.

She is used to this sort of thing.
He blacks crackle and drag.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 31 (Pindar)

2011-11-22T09:31:00.001-05:00

Pindar
The Odes of Pindar

I am pretty sure I bought this in New York, but not of much else. A good bet would be the long-defunct 7th St. Books. On the other hand, it looks as if a price sticker has been torn from the upper righthand corner of the cover. This might indicate that I bought it at The Strand, possibly off the dollar racks on the sidewalk. No way of knowing, really.

Today is the 15th anniversary of my father's death. You may have noted that it is also the 48th anniversary of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. I can't say that I alway take note of my father's death on the anniversary.

Part of this has to do with not wanting to deal with the emotions that come with mourning. I think it has more to do with the fact that the anniversary always comes around Thanksgiving, which means we are often so busy traveling and stuffing our gullets with food that there is little time to actually take a minute to remember.

There's something kind of morbid about his sharing the anniversary of the Kennedy assassination. If I forget, I am almost sure to be reminded by the endless repetition of the Zapruder film on TV and the Internet. The two events have started to meld together in my mind. I'll turn on the TV and watch JFK's head explode and suddenly remember that its the anniversary of his death. It's a strange sensation.

This year's a little different, though, as I am writing with my 9.5 week-old daughter sleeping next to my desk, thinking about fatherhood, what kind of father I'd like to be, comparing myself to him, trying to take the best of him without repeating all the mistakes I felt he made.

I have to admit, though, that I was reminded once again of the anniversary because of a little video by Errol Morris called 'Umbrella Man,' which appeared on the NY Times site today. In it, Morris interviews the author of a book on the Kennedy assassination called something like Six Minutes in Dallas. He talks about noticing in the Zapruder and other films that at just the moment Kennedy is shot, a man standing by the side of the road opens a black umbrella.

Given that it is a warm, sunny day in Dallas, this struck him as odd. Many people imagined and propounded conspiracy theories suggesting everything from the umbrella serving as a marker for Oswald to its' being a stealth weapon that took part in the actual shooting. The author challenged the umbrella man to come forward and explain himself.

He did, going all the way to congress to testify, even bringing with him the umbrella in question to show that it was not in fact a weapon. Turned out he did it as a silent protest against Kennedy's father, Joseph, who the man believed was responsible for appeasing Hitler when he was ambassador to the UK. The umbrella, apparently, represented Neville Chamberlain.

In the background, Morris plays Für Alina by Arvo Pärt, a lovely, minimalist piece for piano and violin designed to instantly induce nostalgia, melancholy and depression, in that order. It's still ringing in the back of my mind as I remember the complex being that was my father.

from The Odes of Pindar

Rejoice in my songs, and in friendliness
Guide still their ancestral fields
For the generations to come.
Of what has been done
In right or against right
Not even Time, father of everything,
Can undo the accomplishment;
In good luck and fortune
Forgetfulness will come;
For in noble delights sorrow perishes
Angry but overwhelmed,
When God's fate tips the scale of happiness high.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 30.1 (Tom Pickard)

2011-11-21T08:30:00.001-05:00

Pickard, Tom
Tiepin Eros: New and Selected Poems

Purchased at Talking Leaves Books.

Robert Creeley brought Tom Pickard to read in Buffalo in, oh, about 1998. He read at the legendary gallery/performance space Cornershop, run by Anya Lewin.

I remember him as being in his fifties, with longish salt-and-pepper hair. He wore jeans and a button-down shirt that was open almost down to his stomach, revealing quite an extent of hairy-chested masculine real estate. He may also have been wearing a piece of jewelry around his neck, but this could be an embellishment on my part.

I don't remember much else. I don't think I even met him, which was odd, given that as students we usually met every poet who came to town. It may have been that Creeley brought him while Charles Bernstein was on sabbatical and thus not around to organize the students into a dinner or gathering of some sort.

I should also note that each time I have attempted to type the title of this book, which as you can see is a somewhat awkward pun on the phrase "Typing Errors," I have in fact made a typing error, the same one, in fact. Three times have I attempted to type the word "Tiepin" and three times have I typed it "Tipein."

I wonder if Tom made the same error or a different one.

from Tiepin Eros

Dedication

you took something
that wasn't mine to keep
or lose,

and that look
does not suit the inside
of my wallet

I'm always pinning
your pictures to the wall
or writing you a letter

slipped between sheets
and other readers

it's the only true place to be

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 30 (Tom Pickard)

2011-11-20T09:04:00.001-05:00

Pickard, Tom
The Ballad of Jamie Allan

Sent to me by the publisher. In a bit of a rush this morning, what with a guest in the house and the baby waking up, so I'll just post an excerpt and see you tomorrow.

from The Ballad of Jamie Allan

The Charm

you who make music
and music make
whose fingers fly
make of air a song
your breath be steady
and the tune be long

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 29.1 (Simon Pettet)

2011-11-19T10:03:00.001-05:00

Pettet, Simon
More Winnowed Fragments

I think I bought this at one of Simon's readings in Buffalo, but I am not sure. He may have sent it to me.

Lori and I had a brief, spirited discussion following yesterday's post, about whether or not we had actually first met Simon's Steel Bar Series reading. My recollection was that we had figured this out at some point and had at that time determined that we had met at someone else's reading. Unfortunately, I could not remember who the other poet might have been.

Thankfully, the internet exists so that we might settle these kinds of disputes. I looked on the EPC website and was able to find a list of Wednesdays @ 4 Plus event listings from the Spring of 2001. We met in late March of 2001. Our actual first date was on March 31, but we had met a week earlier at the Steel Bar. The Spring 2001 event listing has Julie Patton performing at Steel Bar on March 24. There is no mention of Simon Pettet as a co-reader.

We met at a reading by Julie Patton. That much is certain. Lori also remembers someone playing a didgeridoo. We both agreed that Simon was not playing the didgeridoo. Lori said she remembers seeing Simon read at Steel Bar early on in our relationship, so he must have read in the series sometime in '01 or '02.

My recollection is that I saw Simon read in that series on two separate occasions, but I cannot verify this at the moment.

WAIT! This just in:

Jonathan Skinner just emailed me the whole list of Steel Bar events. It does not include exact dates, but it appears that Simon gave the final Steel Bar reading, along with Brenda Coultas, in August of 2002, which would put it about a year and half after Lori and I met. Here's the list he sent me:

Steel Bar Events

Robert Kocik
TimDavis/ Chris Alexander
Miles Champion/ Brian Kim Stefans
Elevator Box Project
Brenda Coultas/ Michael Kelleher
Caroline Bergvall/Tammy McGovern
Eddie Berrigan/ Dan Machlin
Steve McCaffery/ Fiona Templeton
Julie Patton
“Poetry Across the Frontier”— 10 Poets from Canada,
Tom Raworth/ Nick Lawrence
Elevator Postcard Project
Simon Pettet/ Brenda Coultas
Buffalo, NY (May 2000 – August 2002)

This throws my recollection of seeing Simon read for the first time into question. I am almost sure I saw him read in Buffalo before 2002. He must have read somewhere else before then -- possibly at Rust Belt Books? Hard to be sure.

Simon's read for Just Buffalo on a couple of occasions, most recently in the Fall of 2009. He also read back in around '05 or '06. I remember he stayed at our house in Black Rock for a week or so. We stayed up late every night gossiping endlessly about the poetry world.

At the end of the trip, we drove him to Toronto for a reading, where we dropped him off at his brother's apartment (incidentally, I think he may have met his future wife at the reading he gave there). I don't think I have ever met two siblings who were so different from one another! His brother is an avid football (British meaning) fan with an abiding love for/obsession with obscure comedians and all things British.

Simon, well, he's a poet.

from More Winnowed Fragments

Poem ("send the endorphins to the foot please")

send the endorphins to the foot please
that's where the pain is

negotiating, I stumbled
and I fear I may have bruised something

tho' what is the Latin name for
that mysterious connective tissue

bless you—that we all possess?

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 29 (Simon Pettet)

2011-11-18T09:54:00.001-05:00

Pettet, Simon
Hearth

Sent to me by the author. Inscribed:

for Mike and Lori

much love always

Simon

The last time Simon read in Buffalo was about two years ago. He makes it a point to read here often. I first met him with Jonathan Skinner at a bar on Buffalo's West Side called The Rendezvous. It's an former speakeasy that used to be a frequent graduate student haunt. It's gone through several major ownership changes over the years, opening with a new menu and catering to grad student types one year, then changing the menu and catering to locals from the neighborhood the next. It shuts down for years at a time, then re-opens. It's hard to keep up with all the changes..

I remember getting a call from Jonathan late one night saying he was there with a poet named Simon Pettet and would I like to come out and meet him. I pulled myself away from my computer and drove over to the bar. I remember enjoying listening to Simon's stories about poets and others. Oddly, I don't think he was in town to read, or if he was it was to read in someone's class, maybe David Landrey. It wasn't until a few years later that I actually saw him read myself.

He read at Jonathan's Steel Bar series in the Tri-Main Center. It took place in the studio of Isabelle Pelissier, Jonathan's wife. As Simon read his short, tight, beautiful poems, I recall thinking to myself that he made frequent, almost excessive use of repetition. Not only was he repeating rhetorical figures, he was repeating whole stanzas in the same poem. I listened as he did this again and again. Finally, I figured out what was happening: he was reading each poem twice in succession.

It was as if he realized that the brevity of his poems lent itself to a half-hearted attention on the part of listener, one he intended to counteract by reading the poem again, in case the listener missed it the first time. After he finished reading a poem, he just read it again. The second time through he would change the pace, sometimes reading faster, sometimes slower, sometimes making variations occur line by line.

This continued until the final poem of the evening, which he read only once. After the reading, I approached him and asked why he didn't repeat the last poem. Well, he said in his British accent, I wouldn't want everyone to remember me only as The Poet Who Reads Every Poem Twice, would I?

from Hearth

Mevlana

Turning round to discover that
Though your feet are on the ground,
Naturally, your head's in the air.
Elongated your spine is
All the better to climb to heaven with.

Make of me Beauty a Ladder then
(It has already been granted)
Dissolving at every step.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 28 (Ricardo Alberto Pérez)

2011-11-17T09:09:00.001-05:00

Pérez, Ricardo Alberto
Nietzsche dibuja a Cósima Wagner

Purchased at the aforementioned poetry festival in Havana. I don't recall the name of the author, so I can't say for sure if I met him. I probably did, or, at the very least, I saw him read during the festival.

I am babysitting my two-month-old daughter today while Lori returns to work. Emily's asleep in a little vibrating disc-chair set atop an ottoman next to my desk. We were listening to Beethoven's 7th Symphony when she dozed off, her aquamarine binky still between her lips.

I started off calling the binky a pacifier, but she now smiles every time I use the word "binky," so it's taken, almost to the point of becoming a nickname for Emily herself. I start off asking if she wants her binky and then end up calling her "my little binky-boo."

Ain't that sweet?

from Nietzsche dibuja a Cósima Wagner

from Ciertos juegos con el tono de la luz (entre el amor y el afecto)

Es la flexión del ser, el movimiento circular y armónico: provoca lugares donde la semejanza acerca al cuerpo con su pobreza material, lo acerca y deposita, para otorgarle el senti de leves rayos, labios procedentes del retorno.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 27 (Ted Pelton)

2011-11-16T07:42:00.001-05:00

Pelton, Ted
Malcom & Jack and Other Famous American Criminals

Given to me by the author.

Not sure when I first met Ted Pelton, but I do remember hearing him read from this novel while he was writing it. Eventually our paths in the Buffalo literary world just crossed and we became friends. He's been an important presence on the literary scen here for a long time. An English Professor at Medaille College, he runs a reading series over there. But his biggest contribution has been his small press, Starcherone (that's pronounced "Start Your Own," in case you were wondering) Books. They publish innovative fiction and have been doing so for about a decade or so.

I remember when Lori and I bought our first house and were spending a good portion of each weekend at Home Depot. Ted was also working on a house with his then-partner. We used to run into him in the aisles there and talk about what we were each working on in our new homes. It was always a little strange, but also something of a relief, to find myself standing in the middle of a big box store talking about drywall with another writer.

from Malcom & Jack

New York City is a forties town.

Arriving from elsewhere, something happens, rare in an American city. Yes, New York sizzles with an electric current of the now; nonetheless, you find yourself transported back a lifetime ago, when things were wilder, more unsure in certain ways than they are today. To when war broadcasts came over the radio, silencing rooms where dancers had just been swinging to big band. The rumbling conga drums, an echo of blaring brass, a veneer of loud, innocent fun. Spiffed-up and shiny, disguising the fact that it could all come suddenly to a stop, that death could enter the apartment or ballroom at any moment.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 26.1 (Omar Pérez)

2011-11-15T07:28:00.001-05:00

Pérez, Omar
La perseverancia de un hombre oscuro

Given to me by the author in Havana in 2000. Inscribed. The inscription is actually a drawing of a some kind of bird -- not quite sure what kind, but it has longish legs and it feathers seem to be all fanned out. One leg is kicking up, as if it were dancing. It speaks: "Hey, Mike! Can I sing?"

If you read Ron Silliman's blog, you would Omar Pérez is also the son of Che Guevara. When I was in Cuba, everyone talked about this in hushed whispers and warned us not to mention it out loud. No one did, but it came out in the blogosphere a few years back, so I guess it is public knowledge now. This little whispering campaign forms an important part of my prose poem, Cuba.

Omar is an English language translator and he actually translated one of my more difficult poems into Spanish. It's a poem in my first collection, A Crowning, and it's built heavily on wordplay. He did an admirable job of translating it. I am not sure I even have a copy. I was given a photocopy from a small anthology of Buffalo poets published in Cuba after we left.

Ok...gotta run. Btw -- I noticed on my shelves this morning that I made a shelving error, putting Per before Pel, thus skipping my friend Ted Pelton. I'll get to him tomorrow.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 26 (Omar Pérez)

2011-11-14T09:34:00.001-05:00

Pérez, Omar
¿Oiste hablar del gato de pelea?

Given to me by the author. Inscribed (in English):

To Mike:

In memory of his marvelous mumbling.

Omar

The reference here is to a reading I gave in Havana in 2000. I used to always end my readings with a kind of showstopper. At the time, my favorite was a short prose poem called, "Democracy in America." I used to read it so fast you could barely understand the words a la Tom Raworth or Miles Champion.

At the reading in Havana, I only had one or two of my poems translated into Spanish, so I decided the best thing to do was read poems that lent themselves to performance. That way, at least, the sound could get across to those who did not speak English. I finished with the aforementioned poem, read at breakneck speed. Everybody cheered when it ended.

Afterwards, a friend who had been standing in back next to representatives of the Cuban government told me that they asked he why I read it so fast. Was he reading an anti-government message, they asked? She said no, that it was just the way I liked to read. I guess they left it at that, as they never asked me about it.

from ¿Oiste hablar del gato de pelea?

Extremo Espíritu

Eh, el espíritu
Eh, el elegido, ¡eh!
extenderlo en el hecho extremo eh
no tiene puntos cardinales

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 25 (Georges Perec)

2011-11-13T08:49:00.001-05:00

Perec, George
Life: A User's Manual

Purchased at St. Mark's Books in 1993.

Towards the end of my second year of teaching in New York, I took a trip to Paris. Two friends were working there as au pairs at the time, so off I went. I stayed with my friend, L., who had the worse of the two gigs. She worked near the Trocadero, on the Rue John F. Kennedy, in a classic Parisian apartment building. Her employer gave her a former chauffeur's quarters on the ground floor -- in the parking garage.

The room could not have measured more then twelve by six. It was tiny. A small shower stood in a corner next to a sink at the rear wall of the apartment. These took up the entire width of the apartment. I think there was a shared commode in the parking garage. She slept on a cot that stood against the left wall (looking in from the door) and had a small chest of drawers on the opposite wall. There may have been a small desk or wardrobe on the front wall.

We shared the bed, platonically, while I was there. It was kind of depressing. My other friend actually had a room in the apartment of the people she worked for, but it was not a situation that allowed for visitors. I did see the apartment one day. I remember using their super-automatic espresso maker and wondering why such things didn't exist in the U.S. (They do now. And I own one.)

The other friend, R., who I have mentioned previously, had a boyfriend she'd met in Paris. He was a young artist, just finishing his final year at Parsons Paris. He'd been born in New York, but his mother remarried and moved to Brussels when he was a boy and he'd grown up there. He was an avid reader and we had many long, excited discussions about literature in Paris and also later, after he'd moved to New York. He was the person who first introduced me to Paul Auster's work, as I recall.

He also recommended Georges Perec, especially this book, which he of course had read in the original language. I remember buying it when I returned to New York and spending a couple of months reading it. It's rare that I can remember a story as clearly as I remember one of the many stories that make this book. It goes something like this.

A man lives in a Parisian apartment house on a fairly generous inherited income. He decides to give meaning to his life by willing into existence a planned, purposeful direction involving several ten year plans. First, he decides to become a watercolorist. He spends the first ten years apprenticing himself to an artist and becomes a passable landscape painter.

He spends the next ten years traveling to one port after another, his travels spanning the entire globe. At each port, he paints a watercolor of that port. Now, there are several other tenants in the building who play a part in the plan after the first ten years. I think the artist who teaches him lives in the building, as does a box maker and a master jigsaw puzzle maker.

After he paints a port, he rolls the watercolor in a tube and ships it back to the puzzle maker, who glues the image to a piece of wood, lets it set, then cuts it into a jigsaw puzzle. He then gives the puzzle to the man who makes the wooden boxes. The man creates a box, numbers it, and places it in the man's apartment, awaiting his return.

He spends the third decade back in his apartment putting the puzzles together in the order in which they were created. After completing a puzzle, he gives it to another man in the apartment building who glues it together in such a way that the image fuses back into a whole. Once this is complete, he uses a special chemical that allows him to remove the newly intact paper from the wood. The image is then mailed to someone at the port where it was painted, where that person is charged with dipping the water color into a solution that makes the image disappear completely.

All this is going swimmingly, except for one little hitch. The puzzles are getting more and more difficult and time is running out. Further complicating the situation, the puzzle maker dies, which means the solutions to the puzzles dies with him, so there is no one to help the man, should he stumble. It is taking him longer and longer to complete each one. He approaches his deadline with mounting anxiety mixed with horror.

Ain't that somethin'?

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 24.2 (Ted Pearson)

2011-11-12T08:41:00.001-05:00

Pearson, Ted
Evidence: 1975-1989

Given to me by the author. Inscribed:

For Michael—

Thank you for your hospitality.
Keep up the good work.

Ted Pearson
Running short on time this morning, so here's your excerpt.

From Evidence

From The Grit
Somehow
it seems to destroy us

sun rock sea

these elements
at the edge
of a continent

windswept

there is a wearing down
there is a wearing away

there is a way

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 24.1 (Ted Pearson)

2011-11-11T10:10:00.001-05:00

Pearson, Ted
Songs Aside: 1992-2002Sent to me by the author. Inscribed:

For Michael,

With thanks for your poems.

Warm regards,

Ted

There's kind of an interesting anecdotal history of technology contained in my succession to Ted Pearson's position at Just Buffalo. Ted left me a very detailed check-list of things that needed to be accomplished prior to and during an author visit. It was originally a Word doc from the mid-nineties, and I have a distinct memory of having to convert it several times as we upgraded our technology. I stopped using it after a few of years, but I still have it. It's a fascinating snapshot of pre-internet operations. Most interesting to me is all the hardcopy involved, most of which has completely vanished.

I was going to print the whole checklist, but decided against it. Some interesting facts, though:

We used to keep an entire file cabinet of writer info, including individual folders for each writer containing typed bio, printed photograph, copies of contracts and correspondence, etc. Now all of that is electronic. Electronic photo, email, files. Everything is on the computer. I can remember a long painful period of trying to switch over. For many years it was impossible to get, for instance, a good photo of a writer unless they had enough fame that an agent or publisher had required a headshot. We had to get several copies of each photo, and we also tried to get more than one image of the author, in case one news outlet would not print the same photo as a another.

After that came the period of transition into electronic photos. For a time, some had them, some did not. For several years, people could not conceptualize the difference between a print-ready photo and an internet-ready photo. No one new what pixels were. No one knew the difference between jpeg and tiff. No one new what dpi meant, either. It's amazing to me how dramatically that has changed. Everyone uses electronic photos now. Most have several portraits of themselves available to send. Most know at least how to create a print-quality photo by setting their camera to the proper image quality.

Even more amazing is that it would be difficult for us to handle a printed photo now. We'd have to digitize it ourselves on a scanner, create different versions for web and print, and then we would probably throw away the original because we know longer keep hard-copy files on individual writers. They take up too much space!

Not to mention that we had no website, no domain name, no just buffalo email addresses, no internet service, no electronic communications of any kind. We were several years behind the curve. We did not have a proper website until 2001 or 2, and even then it took a few years to get one that was user-friendly and aesthetically pleasing.

I can't say I miss the days of hardcopy, to be honest. I miss writing and receiving letters, I guess, but that's really about all.

from Songs Aside: 1992-2002

from Hard Science

And so they came

to the shining city

the burning city
the entropic city

an arcanum devoted
to punishing choices

as ingress of fact
as desolation

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 24 (Ted Pearson)

2011-11-10T09:05:00.000-05:00

Pearson, Ted
Acoustic Masks

Sent to me by the author.

Ted Pearson is one of several people to whom I owe my current job. When I arrived in Buffalo in 1997, Ted had just left town for Detroit. He'd lived in Buffalo for five or so years prior to that with his partner, Sheila Lloyd, a professor in the English Department. During that time, Ted hosted a series at Just Buffalo called Writers at Work. It was a pretty well-heeled series sponsored by the Lannan Foundation. Ted would curate about ten events per year that featured two authors, usually an author from out of town and a local author. After their Sunday afternoon readings at Hallwalls, Ted would then take the writers out into community settings for different kinds of outreach.

When I arrived in Buffalo, it turned out that my first landlord was Debora Ott, who founded Just Buffalo Literary Center. After we'd known each other a few months, she told me that she was looking for someone to replace Ted's replacement, who wasn't able to commit to the job. I remember the offer was, "an average of ten hours per week, year-round, sometimes more than that during the season, sometimes much less, during the summer months, and the pay is $500 a month, year round." It was kind of an ideal situation for an impoverished graduate student. After being interviewed by the staff, they hired me to take over the series. I think I started in 1998, possibly in the spring, though I can't quite recall.

Ted and Debora had worked out a year's worth of events in advance, so all I needed to do was basically take care of the publicity and pick everyone up at the airport. I invited Ted back the following year to read in the series, which he did. He sent me this copy of his book in advance of that visit.

from Acoustic Masks

What words are
that others aren't

tracks per diem
prize quarks

modal predations
drawn to scale

a bootleg turn
at dawn

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 23 (Jan Patočka)

2011-11-09T08:30:00.000-05:00

Patočka, Jan
Heretical Essays in the Philsophy of History

Purchased at Talking Leaves Books for a graduate seminar with Rodolphe Gasché. I don't remember the specific name of the course, but it also included Hegel and Husserl. I read all three, I think, as part of my oral exam reading list on the philosophy of history, which Gasché moderated.

This is another of those books I have read thoroughly, even going so far as to underline text and mark pages to which I meant to return, yet I remember very little of it. Opening it now, I recall some of the opening sentences about defining the "natural world" but the gist of the thing is not coming back to me at all. Maybe I'll read it again some day.

Once again I am reminded that no matter how much I actually remember about my life, I have forgotten infinitely more.

from Heretical Essays in the Philsophy of History

At the dawn of history, Heraclitus of Ephesus formulated his idea of war as that divine law which sustains all human life. He did not mean thereby war as the expansion of "life" but as the preponderance of the Night, of the will to freedom of risk in the aristeia, holding one's own at the limit of human possibilities which the best choose when they opt for lasting fame in the memory of mortals in exchange for an ephemeral prolongation of the comfortable life. This war is the father of the laws of the polis as of all else: it shows some to be slaves and others to be free; yet even free human life still has a peak above it. War can show that among the free some are capable of becoming gods, of touching the divinity of that which forms the ultimate unity of being. Those, though, are the ones who understand that polemos is nothing one-sided, that it does not divide but unites, that adversaries are only seemingly whole, that in reality they belong to each other in the common shaking of the everyday, that they have thus touched that which lasts in everything and forever because it is the source of all being and is thus divine.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 22 (Kenneth Patchen)

2011-11-08T08:13:00.001-05:00

Patchen, Kenneth
Wonderings

Given to me by the sixth grade classes and teachers at Buffalo Elementary School of Technology (B.E.S.T.) in 2000. Inscribed:

Mr Kelleher,

You definitely brought out the very best in all of us. We will carry your words and our time with you in our hearts always! :)

Colleen Morris and Rm 105

Young minds
our future
understandably
receive from you
attitudes
towards
Excellente!

Thanks So Much, Carrie Myers

Thank you for your enlightening look at poetry. I will use your ideas next year. Jan Wasmund 107

I don't remember much of the residency itself, except that it was at a little school on the east side of Buffalo. I did so many back in the day that they all start to blur together. I don't think I ever received a sweeter gift from teachers, though -- how they decided to give me a book by Kenneth Patchen is beyond me!

It's a great little book, containing "Picture Poems," "Handwriting Poems,"and "Drawing Poems." As a project, it reminds me, at least in spirit, of William Blake. I can see now how my old friend Doug could make such a connection for the dissertation he wrote a few years back. He wrote it on Blake, Patchen, and bpNichol, and at the time, I was sort of like, "Hunh?" But now I am like, "Hunh!"

from Wonderings

(This is a handwriting poem, written in a gothic-looking script, framed in a black ink rectangle. There's about two inches between the first and second stanzas)

To Whomever
These village fires
stall have meaning

O may your own most secret
& most beautiful Animal of Light
Come safely to you

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 21 (Pier Paolo Pasolini)

2011-11-07T08:13:00.000-05:00

Pasolini, Pier Paolo
In Danger: A Pasolini Anthology

Given to me by Joshua Clover. Clover came to town around this time last year to read at Big Night and also to visit Kaplan Harris' class at St. Bonaventure. On the afternoon before his reading, I took him to Talking Leaves Books, where he bought a stack of books and passed this one along to me as gift for hosting. On page 85, there is a book mark. It is an unopened treat from a Cracker Jacks box, also given to me by Joshua. He has a thing for Cracker Jacks. Just ask him.

Eileen Myles was the first person who ever pointed out to me that Pasolini, in addition to being a major film auteur, also happened to be an important Italian poet. I remember her bringing another collection of Pasolini's poetry to class. I remember it having a white cover with red font. I am remembering it to look something like Althusser's Lenin and Philosophy. I also remember it looked like the old Leonard Cohen selected poems.

I have no way to confirm these memories, as I cannot find an image of the old cover on the internet, but that's how I remember it. I did find the Leonard Cohen cover, which looks nothing like my description. It has a faint, orange-yellow font over a black and white image depicting Cohen's face from three angles.

Anyhow, I remember feeling excited by the fact that Pasolini the filmmaker also wrote poetry. I was at the time studiously going through the Great European Director's shelves at Kim's video on Avenue A and had recently hit upon Pasolini. The first film I saw by him was one that is now exceedingly rare, Notes Toward an African Orestes, an astonishing work of filmic essay, very much in the tradition of Chris Marker and Bertolt Brecht.

I have to admit that I was a initially a bit disappointed to discover that most of Pasolini's films had a more traditional narrative structure, so it took me a number of years to return to his films. I have since seen quite a few of them, but I have never even seen that first one made available. I'd love to go back and see it again some time.

from In Danger

Ode to a Flower in Casarsa

Desert flower, flowers from the garland
of our houses where families
bicker in the pen air,

you browse the stones of the day,
simple, while field and sky
like sky and sea
appear all around.

Rustic desert flower,

no evening streaming with lights.

No shepherds drenched by dew,

slender fire of the hedges.

No marsh-marigold, bilberry, swamp-violet
or Florentine iris, or gentian, no angelica,
no Parnassian grass or march-myrtle.

You're Pieruti, Zuan
and tall Bepi with his walking-sticks of bone,
slim at the helm of his wagon,

pasture flower.

You become hay. Burn, burn,
sun of my town, little desert flower.

The years pass over you,
and so do I, with the shadow of the acacia tree,
with the sunflower, on this quiet day.

Translated by Jack Hirschman

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 20 (Blaise Pascal)

2011-11-06T08:55:00.000-05:00

Pascal, Blaise
Pensées

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

I remember once, on a visit home during college, after having studied Pascal in an Intro to Philosophy course, being struck by the thought that my mother had somewhere absorbed and believed in her own version of Pascal's "wager," which, I noted at the time, she had been trying to teach me since I first came home from church one Sunday and declared myself an atheist and therefore exempt from the torturous Sunday family ritual of attending mass at St. Mark's Catholic Church in Vienna, Virginia.

From the moment we woke each sunday, my parents would clean, brush, dress and cajole us with admonitions that if we were late we'd never be forgiven. Each Sunday included me getting dressed and coming downstairs, only to have my mother send me back to my room to change into something more appropriate. I would march back up to my bedroom and change one item of clothing, making sure to leave at least one part of me unkempt: a shirt untucked, a missing belt, a collar partly turned up, anything to maintain a modicum of freedom and autonomy.

Once suited up, we'd all go to church and sit as close to the front as possible on the hard-backed wooden pews. Throughout the service, both of my parents would correct our every movement. We were to stand up straight, hands at our sides. We were not to lean on the back of the pew before use. We were not to put our hands in our pockets. We were not to cross our arms (or our legs when sitting). When we knelt, we were not to rest our asses on the pew. We were to put the full weight of our bodies (and, I suppose, our shame) on our knees. We were to close our eyes when we prayed, so to have more intimate contact with God. Closing your eyes showed you were sincere. We were to say all the prayers and sing all the songs clearly and with feeling.

Most importantly, we were to believe that the communion wafer was actually the body of Christ and that the communion wine was actually his blood. This was not a metaphor, it was a true substantiation of the savior. We also had to go to CCD one night a week. And when I was old enough, I was forced to become an altar boy. They spared me Catholic school until high school, but I had no choice when the time came. Unfortunately for them, I chose the Jesuit school, which inculcated me with doubt and provided me with the aptitude to give that doubt a logically reasoned voice.

I remember telling my parents that I did not believe in God. My father, as was his habit, turned red and yelled at the top of his lungs, "What? What? Is that what we are paying those goddamn Jesuits five thousand dollars a year to teach you?" This was followed by a slap to the back of my head.

My mother took a different tack. Each time I repeated that I did not believe in God, she would say back to me, "Well, I'd rather wager that God exists than wager that he doesn't and be wrong." The implication being that you should hedge your bets, in case God does exist, lest you incur his wrath and be sent to hell. Sort of the opposite of Pascal's logic.

(I should note, so you get a clear view of my mother's theological universe, that a few years ago, after seeing the director's cut of The Exorcist, which struck me as a very interesting essay on the suppression of female sexuality, I told her that the thing that really struck about the film me was that...she interrupted me with what she thought was the end of my sentence, "That it could really happen!" Ah, dear mom.)

Which may or may not lead back to why I bought this book. About five or six years ago, the Criterion Collection released a box set of Eric Rohmer's "Moral Tales" on DVD. My favorite of the six films is My Night at Maud's, starring the great Jean-Louis Trintignant.

It's a testament to Rohmer's greatness that he could create a moving, beautiful film, about a bourgeois, anxious, uptight Catholic man struggling with guilt over his sexual desire, the main action of which involves extended conversations on the subject of Blaise Pascal.

It's one of my all-time favorite films. After having seen it, I went out and bought the Pensées, fully intending to read it again through the lens of Rohmer's crisp, black-and-white images.

Alas, I did not.

from Pensées

Part III, note 233

1. "God is, or He is not"

2. A Game is being played... where heads or tails will turn up.

3. According to reason, you can defend neither of the propositions.

4. You must wager. It is not optional.

5. Let us weigh the gain and the loss in wagering that God is. Let us estimate these two chances. If you gain, you gain all; if you lose, you lose nothing.

6. Wager, then, without hesitation that He is. (...) There is here an infinity of an infinitely happy life to gain, a chance of gain against a finite number of chances of loss, and what you stake is finite. And so our proposition is of infinite force, when there is the finite to stake in a game where there are equal risks of gain and of loss, and the infinite to gain.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 19 (Nicanor Parra)

2011-11-05T08:58:00.002-04:00

Parra, Nicanor
Poemas y antipoemas

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

My friend Gregg and I form a loose reading group. Very loose. In fact, we never choose books ahead of time and we never read the same book at the same time. We do, however, have similar interests, so what ends up happening is that we take long walks around Buffalo, usually on Sundays, and we talk about what books we're reading and what movies we've recently seen. Zelda, my Catahoula Leopard Dog, often joins us. She usually remains silent.

Both of us read Spanish, so for the past few years, many of our discussions have been about Spanish language authors. While I read Roberto Bolaño, Gregg read César Aira. Then I started reading some Aira while he started reading Bolaño. Then I started reading Javier Marías, and later he read some, too. And so on.

Eventually, we end up reading some of the same books, though sometimes months or even years apart. Both of us are such avid and independent readers that it would be difficult to do it any other way. It's more of an intellectual inquiry club, I guess. We share ideas, reading lists, and, most importantly, tangents we take in the course of our various readings.

For instance, I believe it was Gregg who read an essay by Bolaño in praise of Nicanor Parra. I bought this book, but Gregg did not, having read it already some years ago. I read it over the course of a few weeks last winter. I was also reading the newly "discovered" novel by Bolaño, El Tercer Reich, which disappointed me.

Currently, I am reading a steampunk book by China Miéville called Perdido Street Station, which Gregg had recommended. I think Gregg is reading Javier Marías Mañana en la batalla piensa en mi, which I read a couple of years ago. We've lot's to talk about if we can ever find the time to get together for a walk!

from Poemas y antipoemas

SINFONÍA DE CUNA

Una vez andando
Por un parque inglés
Con un angelorum
Sin querer me hallé.

Buenos días, dijo,
Yo le contesté,
Él en castellano,
Pero yo en francés.

Dites moi, don angel.
Comment va monsieur.

Él me dio la mano,
Yo le tomé el pie
¡Hay que ver, señores,
Cómo un ángel es!

Fatuo como el cisne,
Frío como un riel,
Gordo como un pavo,
Feo como usted.

Susto me dio un poco
Pero no arranqué.

Le busqué las plumas,
Plumas encontré,
Duras como el duro
Cascarón de un pez.

¡Buenas con que hubiera
Sido Lucifer!

Se enojó conmigo,
Me tiró un revés
Con su espada de oro,
Yo me le agaché.

Ángel más absurdo
Non volveré a ver.

Muerto de la risa
Dije good bye sir,
Siga su camino,
Que le vaya bien,
Que la pise el auto,
Que la mate el tren.

Ya se acabó el cuento,
Uno, dos y tres.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 18 (Francis Parkman, Jr.)

2011-11-04T08:57:00.002-04:00

Parkman, Jr., Francis
The Oregon Trail

Purchased at the late, lamented Niagara Falls Outlet Mall Discount Book Store. For $3, no less.

The part of my dissertation that I did actually write was a chapter on Charles Olson's Call Me Ishmael. From the get-go the book showers the reader in a flurry of allusions the dutiful scholar feels compelled to track down. Obviously, it is necessary to read Moby Dick, not to mention everything else by Melville.

But Olson makes reference to a lot of other interesting books, including this one, which I think he mentions in the first couple of paragraphs. He is talking about exploration being the first American story and notes that Parkman's book is the first of these stories.

If it weren't such an interesting book in its own right, I'd probably feel it necessary to put it in the Olson section. But Olson's shelf is pretty heavy at this point. It's even sagging a little, so I'll give him a break and leave Parkman to the P's.

from The Oregon Trail

Accordingly, our preparation being now complete, we attempted one fine morning to commence our journey. The first step was an unfortunate one. No sooner were our animals put in harness, than the shaft mule reared and plunged, burst ropes and straps, and nearly flung the cart into the Missouri. Finding her wholly uncontrollable, we exchanged her for another, with which we were furnished by our friend Mr. Boone of Westport, a grandson of Daniel Boone, the pioneer. This foretaste of prairie experience was very soon followed by another. Westport was scarcely out of sight, when we encountered a deep muddy gully, of a species that afterward became but too familiar to us; and here for the space of an hour or more the car stuck fast.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 17 (Ethan Paquin)

2011-11-03T08:44:00.000-04:00

Paquin, Ethan
The Violence

I think this was sent to me by the publisher. I am not one hundred percent sure.

Ethan was part of the Buffalo poetry crew of the early to mid-Aughts. I think I was at the tail-end of my grad school years when he arrived. He made an impact on the poetry scene immediately, starting, with Ted Pelton, a poetry/fiction series at Medaille college, where both taught, and also a small press conference.

I once gave a poetry reading in the attic of his home.

It was part of a series of readings put together by Kevin Thurston, another grizzled veteran of the mid-Aughts Buffalo poetry scene. He called the series "Panic in the Attic." At the time, Kevin owned a home with a classically huge Buffalo attic, as did Ethan, myself, Ted Pelton, and a few others. Kevin had the brilliant idea of throwing poetry readings in each of the attics during the warmer months.

I think mine was the only attic that didn't host one. Ethan probably had the best attic of all. It was the size of a large Manhattan apartment. Anyhow, I remember we had both bought our first homes at the time. In between poetry readings, we were both busy learning how to drywall, wire light switches, lay flooring and so on.

None of us live in those homes any longer. Kevin's marriage ended and he moved into an apartment and then to Korea, where he now looks quite happy. Ethan's marriage ended and he sold the house and moved to another before getting back with his family, having a third child and moving to New Hampshire, where he now looks quite happy. Ted's long-time relationship ended and he eventually got married, had a daughter and sold his house, and he now looks quite happy.

Me, well, I am still in the same great relationship, but I have since moved three times and have daughter. I'd imagine I look quite happy, too. And I am.

from The Violence

Punishment

You'll find sometime where rain rains daggers in
down to persuade you. Like the matter discharg-
éd all about me as I smash a lamp with your gold-
en name my bleeding hand which would murder me
again and again and cast the body into a super-
fluous sea full of tyrants with horns and wings but
God thou trac of evacuated skyline I want to pry a-
part, and piss on, and pummel my face.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 16.6 (Orhan Pamuk)

2011-11-02T08:23:00.004-04:00

Pamuk, Orhan
My Name Is Red

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

This is the book that everyone says is Pamuk's best. It was not my favorite. I don't think I even finished it. However, I will qualify this by saying, as I did yesterday, that I reached a moment of burnout reading Pamuk's books, so it is entirely possible that I just needed a break and never returned to it.

I am getting a little burned out again, I find. Luckily, this is the last of his books on my shelf. I haven't yet read his most recent novel, The Museum of Innocence. He had just finished writing it when he was in Buffalo. I think it came out a year or so after he was here. Maybe two. It's all a blur these days. Anyhow --

Instead of an excerpt, and in lieu of having something more to say, I'll invite you to my flicker page, where you can view my photo set of Pamuk's visit top Buffalo.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/michaelkelleher/sets/72157603030418934/

Aimless Reading: The P's, 16.5 (Orhan Pamuk)

2011-11-01T10:34:00.000-04:00

Pamuk, Orhan
Snow

Sent to me by the publisher.

This was the book we chose to encourage everyone in Buffalo to read when Orhan Pamuk came to Buffalo. If there had been money to do a big ad campaign, I had the clever idea to build it around the phrase "Snow in Buffalo." I picture billboards lining the highway, television ads, fake newscasts, you name it. Such is not the fate of non-profit ad campaigns.

This comes in at a close second to The Black Book as my favorite of Pamuk's novels. I tend to like stories that have political settings, especially in a place as foreign to me as eastern Turkey.

One of the pleasures of reading that I have re-discovered post-graduate school is the escapist element. While I do read non-fiction and so forth, I prefer fiction, especially fiction that forces me to imagine a place with which I am totally unfamiliar. I think this is what reading felt like as a kid. I think I lost that feeling as a graduate student, spending as much time as I did analyzing form, structures, meaning, and so on. The escape was beside the point and bordered on some kind of ethical lapse, like passive consumption.

I am lapsed in many areas of my life. I guess am okay with that.

from Snow

As soon as the bus set off, our traveler glued his eyes to the window next to him; perhaps hoping to see something new, he peered into the wretched little shops and bakeries and broken-down coffeehouses that lined the streets of Erzurum's outlying suburbs, and as he did it began to snow. It was heavier and thicker than the snow he'd seen between Istanbul and Erzurum. If he hadn't been so tired, if he'd paid a bit more attention to the snowflakes swirling out of the sky like feathers, he might have realized that he was traveling straight into a blizzard; he might have seen at the start that he was setting out on a journey that would change his life forever and chosen to turn back.

But the thought didn't even cross his mind. As evening fell, he lost himself in the light still lingering in the sky above; in the snowflakes whirling ever more wildly in the wind he saw nothing of the impending blizzard but rather a promise, a sign pointing the way back to the happiness and purity he had known, once, as a child. Our traveler had spent his years of happiness and childhood in Istanbul; he'd returned a week ago, for the first time in twelve years, to attend his mother's funeral, and having stayed there four days he decided to take this trip to Kars. Years later, he would still recall the extraordinary beauty of the snow that night; the happiness it brought him was far greater than any he'd known in Istanbul. He was a poet and, as he himself had written—in an early poem still largely unknown to Turkish readers—it snows only once in our dreams.

As he watched the snow fall outside his window, as slowly and silently as the snow in a dream, the traveler fell into a long-desired, long-awaited reverie; cleansed by memories of innocence and childhood, he succumbed to optimism and dared to believe himself at home in this world. Soon afterward, he felt something else that he had not known for quite a long time and fell asleep in his seat.

Aimless Reading: The O's, Part 16.4 (Orhan Pamuk)

2011-10-31T09:22:00.001-04:00

Pamuk, Orhan
The New Life

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books. I can't recall whether or not I read this one. I may have. Or I may have started but not finished it. I definitely reached a burnout point reading Pamuk. I read four or five of his books in succession. This may have been the one I stopped reading in the middle of it. I think I later started My Name is Red, but got distracted. I know for sure I didn't finish that one.

Anyhow...following the incident at the Central Terminal described in yesterday's post, I drove Pamuk through the entropic boulevards of Buffalo's East Side across town to the Darwin Martin House, a reconstructed Frank Lloyd Wright complex that has become a centerpiece of Buffalo's tourist industry.

It was snowing when we arrived, right at five o'clock. We had intended only to do a drive-by, as we were running a little late, but as soon as we pulled up to the corner, Pamuk said, I have to go in...surely we have a few more minutes? Before I could protest that we in fact did not have a few more minutes, he leapt from the car. I followed, naturally.

We entered through the gift shop. Pamuk had his Leica out and was furiously snapping photos. A woman approached and told us that the place was closed and that photos were not allowed. In this instance, I did think it would make a difference if I told them that this was a Nobel Prize Winner. It did make a difference. She not only showed us a little bit of the building we were in, but let Pamuk shoot as many photos as he wanted.

Membership does have its privileges, it seems.

from The New Life

I read a book one day and my whole life was changed. Even o the first page I was so affected by the book's intensity I felt my body sever itself and pull away from the chair where I sat reading the book that laye before me on the table. But even thought I felt my body disassociating, my entire being remained so concertedly at the table that the book worked its influence not only on my soul but on every aspect of my identity.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 16.3 (Orhan Pamuk)

2011-10-30T10:06:00.000-04:00

Pamuk, Orhan
The White Castle

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

I spent a whole day driving Orhan Pamuk around the Buffalo/Niagara region in 2007. We drove first to Niagara Falls, making a stop along the way at Saks Off 5th at the outlet mall so he could buy a warm hat. While wandering around the falls I asked him if he'd like to see some of Buffalo's architecture . He said he was interested in "the ruins of modernism." I said, "Friend, you've come to the right place!"

We drove south to look at the ruins of Buffalo's historic grain elevators, then east to the Central Terminal, Buffalo's great abandoned train station. It looks a little like someone dropped Grand Central Terminal in a field and left it to rot. As we pulled up, we noticed a tour group entering through a makeshift plywood door, so we snuck in behind them.

Pamuk had a little Leica point-and-shoot camera that he busily snapped photos with throughout the day. We ended up in a deep recess of the building, where it was kind of dark, except for a small amount of light coming in through broken windows. After a time, I became aware that the sounds of the tour group had subsided, so I told him I was going to look for them, just to make sure we didn't get locked in the building.

He wandered deeper into the darkness as I walked back into the main terminal looking for the tour group. I walked quickly toward the entrance. A small, stout man carrying a huge cluster of keys came jangling through the door. He started shouting at me immediately, telling me to get out, that he'd almost locked me in the building. I said I still had a friend inside and that I needed to go get him.

At that moment, Pamuk appeared with his camera, shooting the ceiling, the walls, the windows, any- and every- thing he could. The man started yelling at him, too. I asked myself for a moment if I should tell him that he was shouting at a Nobel prize winner, but decided against it. I don't think it would've made much difference.

from The White Castle

I found this manuscript in 1982 in that forgotten 'archive' attached to the governor's office in Gebze that I used to rummage through for a week each summer, at the bottom of a dusty chest stuffed to overflowing with imperial decrees, title deeds, court registers and tax rolls. The dreamlike blue of its delicate, marbled binding, its bright calligraphy, shining among the faded government documents, immediately caught my eye. I guessed from the difference in handwriting that someone other than the original calligrapher had later on, as if to arouse my interest further, penned a title on the first page of the book: 'The Quilter's Stepson.." There was no other heading. The margins and blank pages were filled with pictures of people with tiny heads dressed in costumes studded with buttons, all drawn in a childish hand. I read the book at once, with immense pleasure. Delighted, but too lazy to transcribe the manuscript, I stole it from the dump that even the young governor dared not call an 'archive', taking advantage of the trust of a custodian who was so deferential as to leave me unsupervised, and slipped it, in the twinkling of an eye, into my case.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 16.2 (Orhan Pamuk)

2011-10-29T10:32:00.003-04:00

Pamuk, Orhan
Istanbul

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books.

Amos Oz was in town this week for the Babel Series. We had everyone reading his excellent book, A Tale of Love and Darkness, onto which his American publisher tacked on the subtitle, A Memoir. Oz objected to this classification, saying he preferred instead the term he chose in the title, "Tale." The book is a memoir only in the sense that it openly acknowledges its debt to reality by keeping the names of actual people and places rather than change them, which act would carry it over into the realm of fiction.

Oz noted in his talk that in Hebrew there is no word for "fiction," a term he hates because it connotes lying. Instead, his fictional works are classified as "narrative prose" and this category would also include his memoir.

Which is a way of getting back to this book, Istanbul, which also has a subtitle, Memories and the City. Just as Oz's memoir is really a mostly factually accurate portrait of his family, in which Oz plays the part of narrator more than protagonist, so Istanbul is a mostly factually accurate portrait of the city he's spent his life in, wherein Pamuk plays the part of tour guide instead of the protagonist.

Both are excellent reads because of the prose and also because the portraits they render of specific times and places (and in Oz' case people) are as rich in detail as if they had sprung completely from the imagination. Usually memoirs and biographies and autobiographies and histories and so on are dull precisely because they attempt to be faithful to factual and chronological accuracy.

If one chooses to fictionalize a situation, then one can let the imagination run wild, but if one chooses to render it as non-fiction, then the expectation is that all the facts, times, places and dates will appear exactly as they occurred (another false notion is that this is even possible).

My other favorite book in this genre is Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude. All three are highly structured works of the imagination. That they allow reality to creep into the stories they tell is almost beside the point.

Here's a video of Pamuk reading from Istanbul:

http://www.nobelprize.org/mediaplayer/index.php?id=113

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 16.1 (Orhan Pamuk)

2011-10-26T10:52:00.000-04:00

Pamuk, Orhan
The Black Book

Purchased at Talking Leaves...Books. I honestly wasn't sure about this one. I thought I might have purchased it at Amazon, but then I thought that was unlikely, as I reserve most of my Amazon purchases to cheap used books in the marketplace. I buy most of my new books at Talking Leaves. Anyhow, I checked my 2007 Amazon purchase history and discovered that I did not purchase any Pamuk books there. Thus, I am relatively certain they were all purchased at TL.

I think this is my favorite of Pamuk's books. I am also fond of Snow and his memoir, Istanbul. Everyone goes gaga over My Name Is Red, but I never got through it. I think it was the last of several books of his I read and therefore I'd developed a little Pamuk fatigue at that point. I mean to give it another shot. Someday. Truly.

O, and I am 43 today. Ugh.

from The Black Book

Rüya was lying facedown on the bed, lost to the sweet warm darkness beneath the billowing folds of the blue-checked quilt. The first sounds of a winter morning seeped in from outside: the rumble of a passing car, the clatter of an old bus, the rattle of the copper kettles that the salep maker shared with the pastry cook, the whistle of the parking attendant at the dolmus stop. A cold leaden light filtered through the dark blue curtains. Languid with sleep, Galip gazed at his wife's head: Ruya's chin was nestling in the down pillow. The wondrous sights playing in her mind gave her an unearthly glow that pulled him toward her even as it suffused him with fear. Memory, Celâl had once written in a column, is a garden. Rüya's gardens, Rüya's gardens . . . Galip thought. Don't think, don't think, it will make you jealous! But as he gazed at his wife's forehead, he still let himself think.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 16 (Orhan Pamuk)

2011-10-25T10:44:00.006-04:00

Other Colors, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

Pamuk, Orhan
Other Colors

Sent to me by the publisher. Inscribed:

November 8, 2007

To Michael and Lory [sic]
and angry mama cat!
Friendly...

Orhan Pamuk

I am trying to remember the significance of this inscription, but I don't quite recall what it was. I'd spent the day driving him around town. At about five in the afternoon, with about an hour to kill before the reception, we were passing near our house in Black Rock when suggested we stop there for a cup of coffee.

I have a photo of Lori and Orhan standing next to each other in our kitchen. She's wearing a turquoise turtle neck, holding her arms behind her back. There's a couple of inches of space between the two of them. She's smiling a slightly awkward smile. He's standing, about a foot taller than she, in a black coat, white shirt, and green tie, an abstract smile on his bespectacled face.

I am suddenly reminded of how nice that house was, how warm the kitchen, the wood, the colors. Too bad we hated the neighborhood. Our cats, Mama and Baby, used to force their plump little bodies into two little shipping boxes on the floor. They would have been sitting just behind Pamuk in the photo. I am not sure whether Baby was still alive at that point. I think she had passed away, hence the reference to the one cat. I wonder if Mama hissed at him. She's gone now, too.

Anyhow, I don't always ask authors for their autographs, but in this case I did. He signed the book on our kitchen island -- ah, the beautiful granite kitchen island -- farewell!

from Other Colors
from "How I Got Rid of Some of My Books"

Because I fear "attachments" as much as I fear love, I welcome any pretext to get rid of books. But in the past ten years I've found a new excuse, something that never occurred to me before. The authors whose books I bought in my youth and kept and sometimes even read, because they were "our nations writers," and even quite a few of the writers I read in the years that followed--in recent years they have colluded to assemble proof of how bad my own books are. In the beginning I was happy they took me so seriously. But now I am glad to have a pretext even better than an earthquake for clearing them out of my library. This is how my Turkish literature shelves are quickly losing works by half-witted, mediocre, modestly successful, bald, male, degenerate writers between the ages of fifty and seventy.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 15.1 (Michael Palmer)

2011-10-24T10:26:00.004-04:00

Notes for Echo Lake, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

Palmer. Michael
Notes for Echo Lake

Purchased at Rust Belt Books.

The first poems I read of Michael Palmer's came from this book. They were anthologized in the Norton Anthology of Postmodern Poetry, which provided my first contact with American poetry written from 1945-1990. I think they are still my favorite poems of his.

Soon after I read them I saw Palmer read at the Dia Foundation in New York. He read with Jorie Graham. I mostly remember her reading. Not because it was special, but because she was so snotty. She asked if there was anyone in the audience that could not hear her. No one answered, indicating that no, there was no one that could not hear her. When no one answered the question, she angrily spoke into the mic, "Well, can you hear me or not?" She of course did not realize that the problem was not the audience, but the phrasing of her question. I've disliked her poetry ever since.

But we were talking about Michael Palmer, whose poetry I like a lot, and who I also liked a lot the one time I met him in person. I remember taking him to breakfast at Cybele's, a little cafe I used to love on Elmwood Ave. We gossiped a lot about poets, and I remember he told me a story of going to visit Charles Olson in Gloucester. He described Olson, who you may recall stood six feet, eight inches tall and was quite heavy at that, leaning on the top of the refrigerator, holding a bottle of whiskey in one hand. The refrigerator, Palmer said, looked like a toy, and the bottle in Olson's hands looked like one of those miniature bottles they give out on airplanes.

I remember he also told me about the younger Creeley, the one famous for hard drinking and a violent temper. He described a look that Creeley used to get once he'd had too much to drink. Palmer said he'd learned to recognize that look as a signal to exit the room, because it meant you had only a minute or two before he was likely to reach across the table and punch you in the face.

Afterwards, I drove him to the Albright-Knox Art Gallery and showed him the match stuck to the canvas of the Jackson Pollack painting. We stopped into the gallery bookstore. As a 'thank you' he bought me a lovely book of interviews with R.B. Kitaj, who we'd been discussing at some point. Mostly I remember him as being great company -- a good storyteller, a warm companion, a generous and appreciative guest.

from Notes for Echo Lake

from Seven Lines of Equal Length
5

Such words eyes will tell us what it was,
city as in sound—the voice
you hear is your own
caught in her throat—as in hills
rounded, lightly unexpectedly
full then lost among, might tell us
to be nowhere else. Such sevens as
sevens are. The continent drifts
from itself like memory's art
toward a window unhinged
by those forces memory alters.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 15 (Michael Palmer)

2011-10-22T11:11:00.003-04:00

The Lion Bridge, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

Palmer, Michael
The Lion Bridge: Selected Poems 1972-1995

Sent to me by the author. This book has all kids of interesting goodies in it.

Inside I found a slip of paper, folded in fours, with a handwritten note from Michael Palmer addressed to me. It reads:

25 Jan 1999

Dear Mike,

Here is everything except the reviews. My mother has just died, and I must leave town for her services, so I don't have time to get the [illegible]. I'll do that next week.

all best,

Michael Palmer

Just Buffalo brought Palmer to Buffalo to read at the opening celebration of "Robert Creeley's Collaborations," an exhibit of work by painters associated with Creeley that traveled from Buffalo in 1999-2000. He came to town for two or three days, which I spent taking him around town.

One evening, after the reading, I drove him to a party in Allentown. We parked a block or so away and then walked to the home of Elizabeth Licata and Alan Bigelow. While walking down the street, we stumbled upon a pair of polaroids that seemed to have been dropped on the sidewalk. I leaned over to pick them up.

To both of our surprise and amusement, they were lewd, if slightly obscure photos. One was of a penis and the other of a vagina. We laughed and wondered whether or not they had been dropped there deliberately. Maybe the owners of said organs were watching us right then and there!

Anyhow, we decided to each take one polaroid as a kind of souvenir. I gave him first dibs. He chose the penis, I took the vagina.

I tell this story because I still have the photo of the vagina inside Michael's book. I wonder if he still has the penis?

from The Lion Bridge

For L.Z.

A reasonable ear
in music, Bottom,
let's have it
out of tongs
and bones, was it
tongues? "To gather"
or "to ring";
and damp bones
below the stone
arches, a man's jaw
displayed on dark paper
as the bridge came down
following the song.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 14 (Gabriela Pais)

2011-10-21T10:35:00.002-04:00

Escapada de la forma ausente, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

Pais, Gabriela
Escapada de la forma ausente

Given to me by the author at a poetry festival in Havana in 2000. Pais is an Argentine poet who I hung out with briefly at a cafe along with two other Argentine poets, Daniel Muxica and another whose name I forget. If memory serves this meeting took place after the festival was over. My only memory is that she said I reminded her of Hugh Grant.

from Escapada de la forma ausente

Espacio de trampas

No hay luna ni juncos
en esta orilla,
cemento.
Algún residuo melancólico
guarda nombres en secreto,
criaturas de agua, cisnes heridos,
bailarinas;
insomnios subterráneos,
figuras quebradas por la luz
esconden su código
en el reverso de las nueces.

Es mejor no estar
en este espacio de trampas.
No es necesario el fuego
para encender la gran sala.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 2 (Elaine Pagels)

2011-10-20T10:48:00.002-04:00

The Gnostic Gospels, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

Pagels, Elaine
The Gnostic Gospels

Not sure about this one. It looks like something I would have bought for a high school or early college religion course (I went to Catholic high school and college, in case you're wondering). But I have no recollection of ever studying it in school. I do recall reading it at some point, possibly in New York, possibly in Ecuador.

I could have bought it for a high school religion class at my high school book store. My brother might have bought it for one of his high school classes and I could have taken it from him. It could have been my mother or father's. I might have taken it from the volunteer house library in Ecuador. Equally, I could have bought it in Ecuador or New York City.

There, that narrows it down.

from The Gnostic Gospels

Scholars investigating the Nag Hammadi find discovered that some of the texts tell the origin of the human race in terms very different from the usual reading of Genesis: the Testimony of Truth, for example, tells the story of the Garden of Eden from the viewpoint of the serpent! Here the serpent, long known to appear in Gnostic literature as the principle of divine wisdom, convinces Adam and Eve to partake of knowledge while "the Lord" threatens them with death, trying jealously to prevent them from attaining knowledge, and expelling them from Paradise when they achieve it. Another text, mysteriously entitled The Thunder, Perfect Mind, offers an extraordinary poem spoken in the voice of a feminine divine power:

For I am the first and the last. I am the honored one and the scorned one.
I am the whore and the holy one.
I am the wife and the virgin....
I am the barren one, and many are her sons....
I am the silence that is incomprehensible....
I am the utterance of my name.

These diverse texts range, then, from secret gospels, poems, and quasi-philosophic descriptions of the origin of the universe, to myths, magic, and instructions for mystical practice.

Why were these texts buried-and why have they remained virtually unknown for nearly 2,000 years? Their suppression as banned documents, and their burial on the cliff at Nag Hammadi, it turns out, were both part of a struggle critical for the formation of early Christianity.

Aimless Reading: The P's, Part 1 (Vance Packard)

2011-10-19T09:12:00.003-04:00

The Hidden Persuaders, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

Packard, Vance
The Hidden Persuaders

Purchased at Rust Belt Books. Not sure why I bought this, exactly, but here it is. I've flipped through it, but never read it.

Its argument about the use of principles of psychology and psychiatry in advertising and public relations is by now a familiar one. We take for granted, almost, the fact that we are being manipulated every which way we turn by advertisers, politicians, propagandists and so on.

I saw a great documentary a few years ago that traced the birth of public relations after the first world war to Edward Bernays, a nephew of Freud and the founder of modern PR. It follows the development of some of Freud's ideas of the subconscious and their use as "hidden persuaders" from WWI through the late nineties, ending with the political campaigns of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

Both were essentially market-driven PR efforts whose substance derived not from great ideas or even from ideology. Rather, they used massive call centers to poll voters' desires and then repeat them back as policy. It was a fascinating documentary, though its name slips my mind. I'll google it. Hold on a sec...

...The Century of the Self. Not sure if it is available on Netflix yet, but the last time I checked you could watch all four parts on the internet for free. Highly worth your time.

Reminds me also of a great cartoon I posted to my Facebook page yesterday. It shows Kermit the frog sitting opposite a doctor at a desk. The doctor is holding an x-ray of Kermit. He tells the frog, "What I am about to tell you is gonna change your life forever. Are you sure you want to know it?" The x-ray shows the skeletal hand of the puppeteer filling the inside of Kermit's body. I think the message of the Hidden Persuaders is the same. And no, I don't think we want to hear, thank you.

Aimless Reading: The O's: Stats

2011-10-18T09:15:00.001-04:00

The O's, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

14 Authors
64 Volumes
61 Titles

Aimless Reading: The O's, Part 14 (Richard Owens)

2011-10-18T09:06:00.002-04:00

Delaware Memoranda, a photo by Michael_Kelleher on Flickr.

Owens, Richard
Delaware Memoranda

Given to me by the author.

I met Richard a couple of years after he came to Buffalo for Graduate school. There was a period in 2007-2008 when I was very snap-happy with my new point-and-shoot camera. I took pictures every day, all day long. I took twenty photos of every poetry reading, and twenty more after the reading at the bar or wherever we ended up. During this time, Richard became one of my favorite subjects, partly because he always happened to be at the poetry readings, but mostly because I liked the way he photographed. His long sideburns and slicked-back pompadour make his face interesting from every angle.

He's also the end of the O's, which I feel like I've been writing about forever!

from Delaware Memoranda

Not to fetishize the fucking river
but to think through the transformation
—how we come—to be to mean
encountering others along the banks

to multiply in consciousness
the number of evenings
outlined against twilight waning

intellect inhabiting curious hollow
overlooking tide rushing under moon