Only until this cigarette is ended, A little moment at the end of all, While on the floor the quiet ashes fall, And in the firelight to a lance extended, Bizarrely with the jazzing music blended, The broken shadow dances on the wall, I will permit my memory to recall The vision of you, by all my dreams attended. And then adieu,—farewell!—the dream is done. Yours is a face of which I can forget The color and the features, every one, The words not ever, and the smiles not yet; But in your day this moment is the sun Upon a hill, after the sun has set.
Esthetically, Atelier de Paris most often chooses the intriguing performance over the done thing. Participating in the country-wide Season of Lithuania (and keeping an oar in culture exchange with east Europe over the long term) – featuring not just dance and performance but also visual arts – is doing the right thing. With its emphasis on un-narrative and immediate experience, intimacy and diversity of expression, dance performance is a powerful tool for cultural dialogue.
Atelier featured two premières by creators Lukas Karvelis, She dreamt of being washed away to the coast and Vilma Pitrinaitė, When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, who have been in residence since last year. In addition, Atelier’s Open Studio conference featured WIP by choreographers Liza Baliasnaja, Greta Grinevičiūtė and Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, all active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene.
Taken together, I couldn’t detect anything specifically “Lithuanian” about the work of these artists. But then, I think “nation” is a political framework built higgledy-piggledy around a human networking tic, something like the one that makes for that famous six degrees of separation or simultaneous language change and learning in widely separated groups.
As individuals, then, all five, it seems to me, are focused on the now and future of dance performance and society generally. Even more perhaps than in France these days, “identity” suggests individual, not “national”, identity; “diversity” suggests gender and LGBTQ+ inclusion more than “culture” diversity.
For instance, both She dreamt of being washed away to the coast, which according to the play notes, references a national folktale, and When you’re alone in your forest always remember you’re not alone, which references the Ukraine liberation struggle, suggest an intersection of national and personal identities. But performance experience drives the reference out of mind. Karvelis’ piece is an absolutely absorbing performer tour de force of leg-work and balance. Pitrinaitė’s is pure contemporary danse d’auteur: edgy, emotional… personal, personifying.
Presenting a new performance titled Chiaroscuro, on the social dynamics of fear, only Liza Baliasnaja’s biography – she has a Jewish heritage from parents who came from Russia to Lithuania at some point in the post-war period – suggests issues of national identity and belonging or historical trauma. Her broader issue is to explore how history, politics and social conditions shape contemporary identity; that certainly has resonance everywhere in the world, not just in her neck of the woods.
Baliasnaja is currently working on the “shield/protector” aspect of a “victim-shield/protector-victimizer” nexus for multi-part choreography. Though she may be referencing Lithuania’s history, her concept applies pretty neatly to recent American experience of populist grievance movements and I expect the piece is meant to have a more or less universal application. Otherwise, Baliasnaja is an ardent promoter of her country’s contemporary dance scene, complete with the Europe and international connections the Season of Lithuania is looking to strengthen: she’s an alumna of Theresa de Keersmaeker’s P.A.R.T.S dance performance school and currently works from Cologne, Germany.
Describing herself as an independent contemporary dance performer and choreographer, and certainly very Lithuania-centered in education and work, Agnietė Lisčkinaitė co-founded her BE COMPANY dance group with Greta Grinevičiūtė, a long-time friend and frequent work partner, also much present on the Lithuanian scene. Lisčkinaitė has been president of the Lithuania Contemporary Dance Association since 2020 and performs with the AIROS and Vilnius City Dance Theatre LOW AIR dance theaters. She is perhaps the most issues-oriented of the group, throwing herself into the local movements for gender and LGBTQ+ equality and democratic resistance in Belarus.
Still, I would like to say that Lisčkinaitė’s concerns are extensions of her focus on dance performance rather than the other way around. From first to last her remarks had body movement and use at its core; at one point she asked us to reflect on how raising the arms affected our bodies and later asked if we had observed how often “arms-high” (or “hands-in-the-air”) figures in protest?
Lisčkinaitė is performing Hands Up! at Théâtre de la Ville, ruminating the space between surrender and resistance in the same gesture and using it as a platform to ask how we should view protest: symbolic aggression or symbolic liberty?
The general universalist perspective of these artists, I think, finds its clearest expression in Greta Grinevičiūtė, who has a very ingenious approach to the experience and observation of the things of her immediate environment.
As already noted, Grinevičiūtė’s very active on the Lithuanian dance performance scene: in addition to co-founding BE COMPANY troupe with Agnietė Lisčkinaitė, she produces contemporary dance and interdisciplinary performance, notably, with Vytis Jankauskas Dance Company and the AIROS theater and she’s one of a collective of active creators at Vilnius City Theatre Art and Science Laboratory. Her WIP, which stretches back to 2018, explores the construction of memory (both experiential and genetic/generational) in her work, which consists of a human object/subject (such as a “parent”) and an (associated? transitional?) object from ordinary life.
Dance for a washing machine and a mother, produced at the Vilnius Art and Science Laboratory in 2020, is the second part of a (so far) four-part project which began with Dance for a vacuum cleaner and a father and will include currently WIP-pieces “Dance for and object and child” and “Dance for a cigarette and best friend”. Each piece envisions the sense and role of object/subject and object in “memory”. I suppose Grinevičiūtė should have got me thinking about a dance performer, but, instead, she got me thinking about musician Frank Zappa, his mix of erudite and ordinary and his interest in Erik Satie*: how does music fit into life, into the fabric of modern life? Zappa was one of those individuals who, by being themself, somehow represents everybody else. So is Greta Grinevičiūtė.
In Genesis 18 when God told Sarah She would have a baby she laughed Since she was an old lady (90!) and When she denied she had laughed God said, "No, honey, you did laugh," Because he wasn't angry about it;
However in Daniel 5:4 Belshazzar Mockingly laughed and a hand wrote
Mene mene tekel upharsin (?!?!?!) On the wall and Belshazzar's loins Were loosened (meaning what?) Followed by the attack of King Darius Who was sixty-two years of age. (But we don't care how old he was!)
<<< The Observer and the poet Lawrence Joseph, two Detroiters living in New York, were talking in a café in Battery Park City.
“You asked me about the connection between Detroit and New York,” Mr. Joseph said. “Detroit is the great modern city. And it becomes metaphorically the great industrial city. Céline writes about two cities when he comes to America in Journey to the End of the Night: New York and Detroit. Why? In 1932, when he writes perhaps the first great international novel of the 20th century, why does he choose New York and Detroit? What are your central metaphors internationally in 1932, when you’re going into a Depression? The center of the United States was Detroit and New York.” He slapped the table. “And I’m aware of that. Is Detroit still the center? It doesn’t matter. Detroiters will tell you that it is. And the world seems to think it’s pretty important.” >>> For the rest of this New York Observer interview, click here. From the archive, first posted September 28, 2011.
Poetry Forum: Lydia Davis, author of Varieties of Disturbance: Stories (Farrar, Straus & Giroux: finalist for the 2007 National Book Award), and Almost No Memory. Davis has won many of the major American writing awards, including a MacArthur Fellowship for fiction, and was named a Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters by the French government. She has translated Proust and others from the French and has written six collections of original work.
Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.
Best American Poetry 2008 edited by Charles Wright
Thursday, September 25
7:00 p.m., free
Tishman Auditorium, Johnson Building, 66 West 12th Street
David Lehman, series editor of The Best American Poetry and poetry coordinator of the New School’s MFA program, will introduce poets chosen by Charles Wright for the 2008 volume, the 21st edition of the acclaimed annual anthology. Readers include John Ashbery, Charles Bernstein, Ciaran Berry, Laura Cronk, Richard Howard, D. Nurkse and Meghan O'Rourke.
Monday, October 27
6:30 p.m., room 510. $5.
Poetry Forum: James Tate and Dara Wier
Pulitzer Prize-winner James Tate (who served as guest editor of the Best American Poetry 1997) is the author of a new book of poems, The Ghost Soldiers. Dara Wier’s most recent book is Remnants of Hannah. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.
Wednesday, November 5
6:30 p.m., room 510. $5.
Poetry Forum: Ed Ochester, author of Unreconstructed: Poems Selected and New, and editor of the anthology: American Poetry Now. Ochester is the long-time editor of the celebrated Pitt Poetry Series. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.
Wednesday, November 19
6:30 p.m., room 510. $5
Poetry Forum: Vincent Katz, author of Black Mountain College: An Experiment, is a poet, writer, art critic, and translator. Katz will read and comment on the poets of Black Mountain School, such as Charles Olson, Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan.
Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School’s MFA Writing Program.
Wednesday, December 10
6:30 p.m., room 510. $5
Poetry Forum: Andrey Gritsman is the author most recently of the book of poems Picese and is the editor and publisher of the on_line international poetry magazine Interpoezia. A native of Moscow, Gritsman lives in the New York City and works as a physician. Gritsman will read his translations of Pasternak, Akhmatova, Blok, and Tsvetaeva. He will also read Mayakovsky’s “Brooklyn Bridge” in the original and David Lehman will read his translation. Moderated by David Lehman, Poetry Coordinator, The New School Writing Program.
Yesterday Graywolf Press published Hold Everything by Dobby Gibson. When I first read the book’s title I thought it referenced the movie of the same name from the 1920s which featured one of my favorite songs ”You’re the Cream in My Coffee.”
While I was wrong, the book does have a wonderful coffee connection. The title poem is a stunning sonnet sequence, each of which was drafted during the time it took Gibson to finish a cup of coffee. There is a breeziness, a caffeinated energy, as the poet engages with the pandemic, the frightening world news, and the death of his friend Dean Young. The quick-witted voice never sacrifices the close attention to image, the wisdom in zooming out to see the big picture. Here’s an example:
A sudden blow: the great wings beating still Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill, He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.
How can those terrified vague fingers push The feathered glory from her loosening thighs? And how can body, laid in that white rush, But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?
A shudder in the loins engenders there The broken wall, the burning roof and tower And Agamemnon dead. Being so caught up, So mastered by the brute blood of the air, Did she put on his knowledge with his power Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?
Happy birthday, Lew! from "The Seven Most Meaningful Compositions That I Will Love Forever" by Lewis Saul (BAP blog,July 17, 2010):
<<< One day during my short stint at Juilliard, the composer Milton Babbitt came to guest lecture one of my composition classes.
Mr. Babbitt gave us all a nice lecture on 20th century music and how serial music (12-tone) was here to stay and it shouldn't be "our" problem if people don't enjoy it or "understand" how to react to it...
I recall that my friends and I were horrified at such elitism. Although I had learned a great deal of serial technique my senior year in high school at IAA, my own personal inclination led me to reason that music should always sound interesting and should completely engage an audience. Certainly, we all toyed around with trying to write "interesting" 12-tone music.
And then one day ...
**
I heard this piece. Actually, Berio was one of my professors, but alas, I had only one session with him and he barely spoke three words to me (he was still working on the Fifth Movement, which not completed at the premiere). I was only at Juilliard for 14 days before I was nearly killed by a drunk driver ... the premiere with the just-completed Fifth Movement was premiered eight days before my accident.
If you have been reading my previous posts, you will recall that I had the honor of performing Mahler's Second Symphony at IAA. So naturally, this piece had an extra added meaning for me:
**
Allen B. Ruch has written such a wonderful description of this piece ~ I could not do better. I hope you will read it.
Because the oversized score is so huge, it will not fit nicely into my scanner, I can only provide the first page (above).
Take a look at what the Swingle Swingers are singing! Just varied vowel-sounds -- pppp -- which quickly morphs into a frenetic text by the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss from Le cru et le cuit ("The Raw and the Cooked").
By the way, Berio (may he rest in peace) could be a real asshole:
"[Y]ou know that Berio used The Raw and the Cooked in his Sinfonia. A part of the text is recited, accompanied by the music. I admit that I did not grasp the reason for this choice. During an interview a musicologist asked me about it, and I answered that the book had just come out and the composer had probably used it because it was at hand. Now, a few months ago Berio, whom I don't know, sent me a very disgrunted letter. He had read the interview, several years after the fact, and assured me that the movement of this symphony offered the musical counterpart of the mythical transformation I was revealing. He included a book by a musicologist ... who had demonstrated the fact. I apologized for the misunderstanding, which was, I said, the result of my lack of musical training, but I'm still baffled." (Wikipedia article)
The Second Movement's text is simply a name, broken down into its tiniest components of vowel/consonant-sounds: MARTIN LUTHER KING.
The Third Movement is perhaps the reason why this piece achieved such universal acclaim. Berio did something so unique and interesting that it would be impossible not to simply sit back and admire it:
He re-orchestrates the Third Movement of the Mahler in his own style -- although it is clearly distinguishable amidst the sometimes cacophonous explosion of sound and fury which is layered in and around the Mahler quote.
In addition to the Mahler symphony, Berio has inserted "quotes" (reorchestrated and carefully and cleverly inserted into the flow):
Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, fourth movement (violent opening scale played by the brass)
A brief quotation of Mahler's Symphony No. 4 (Mahler) just before.....
Mahler's Resurrection Symphony, third movement (the only quotation that is ongoing)
Ravel's Daphnis et Chloé, flute solo from the Pantomime
Berlioz's idée fixe from the Symphonie Fantastique (played by the clarinets)
Ravel's La Valse (orchestra plays octave motif with piccolo playing a chromatic scale)
Stravinsky's Le Sacre du Printemps (the "Dance of the Earth" sequence at the end of the first tableux)
Stravinsky's Agon (upper oboe part from the "Double pas de quatre")
Richard Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier (one of the waltzes composed for the opera)
a chorale by Johann Sebastian Bach
Alban Berg's Wozzeck (the drowning scene late in the third act)
Beethoven's Pastorale Symphony, second movement (melody stated with the clarinets)
(Schoenberg segment quoted again)
Debussy's La Mer, second movement "Jeux de vagues"
Boulez's Pli Selon Pli, very first chord of the entire piece from the first movement ("Don")
Karlheinz Stockhausen's Gruppen for three orchestras (during the introductions of the vocalists near the end)
***
The eight vocalists are not soloists! They are meant to be integrated into the mix as Berio says: "a vocal group among instrumental groups" (score).
The Fourth (and later Fifth) are meant to be sort of codas to the earlier movements. They quote previous material, including bits of the First Movement and the whole-tone feel of the Second Movement.
***###
I am completely baffled as to why there is not a CD of the premiere recording, with Berio conducting the NY Phil. It is still available on vinyl (used).
I own every CD available of this piece. None compare to Berio's premiere, which I consider to be a major artistic tragedy. These two are pretty good, although I am astonished that Boulez failed to follow Berio's instructions regarding microphones and mixing. Much of the textual (and occasionally musical) details are either buried deep in this mix, barely audible, or missing entirely.
I actually attended a performance by this orchestra with Boulez conducting in Paris in 1972. It suffered from the same type of problems.
Boulez/Swingle Singers/Orchestre National de France
Eötvös/Göteborgs Symphony
Eötvös, on the other hand, gives a unique interp which is unusually intimate. Quite different from the Berio, but much more thoughtful than the Boulez...
**
Thank you, David Lehman, for giving me the opportunity to share these musical passions of mine. I enjoyed sharing my ideas and I hope some of you enjoyed some part of it.
Usually when a friend sends me a book in the mail, I pretend to be happy. I say, I can’t wait to read this! But I’m lying. I do wait. I let the book serve as a paper weight on my desk for who knows how long. Sometimes I have a little stack of gift books—an extra-large paper weight. I don’t like to admit this, but I am suspicious of books I don’t select from the local bookshop myself. Books that I didn’t open and flip through, read a few lines, and say, I want you. I’ll pay whatever you ask to spend time with you.
But recently, this book arrived in the mail by the poet, Tom C. Hunley, and I didn’t let it sit. Instead, I flipped it open and was immediately swept away. I read it once, and then, I read it again. I found so much to admire—from funny persona poems featuring rock, paper, and scissors to personal poems about aging and raising an autistic son to heart-breaking poems about adopting a teenage daughter . . .
I will post one here. I had a hard time choosing just one.
Adopting a Teenager Via Sate Foster Care by Tom C. Hunley
We want a daughter, we say. We have a girl, say the ladies with clipboards. She’s about to be hit by a bus. She’s been in many wrecks. She’s always got a break or a bruise.
She’s about to be hit by a bus? we echo. The ladies with clipboards point at the teen girl, arms outstretched towards an advancing bus.
We run to her. We wrap ourselves around her. We can’t stop the bus. It hits all three of us. We wake in the hospital. We’re your parents now, we smile.
I hate you, she says. That bus was my boyfriend. He buys me stuffed animals. He says he loves me and would never hurt me. He photoshopped our faces over a bride and groom and he’ll be sneaking into my window at night.
Cameron Barnett is a Pittsburgh poet, teacher. He’s the author of The Drowning Boy’s Guide to Water and Murmur, from Autumn House Press. His work explores the complexity of race, place, and relationships for Black people in America.
<<< “Remembering Peter Ferry: Author, teacher created lifelong relationships” Kallista Schneiderman, Lake Forest High School Editor September 26, 2024
photo: Peter Mundell Ferry, courtesy of Dignity Memorial
Mr. Peter Ferry, award-winning author of the novels "Travel Writing" and Old Heart," a beloved former English teacher of 27 years, passed away on Sept. 17. Colleagues, students, and friends remember his inspiring spirit and his abstract approach to teaching and living in the LFHS community that meant so much to him.
Ferry died after a 16-month battle with Merkel Cell cancer. He survived by his wife, Carolyn, and his children, Lizzie and Griffin.
In his years at LFHS, Ferry impacted many lives, including best selling author and LFHS alumnus Dave Eggers, who had a close relationship with Ferry. Eggers is known for his many books, including A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius and The Circle; he also founded McSweeny’s, a popular comedic literary website.
During his time at LFHS, Eggers says he was greatly influenced by Ferry’s teaching, in part because Ferry understood Eggers. Read more here >>>
Click here for Peter Ferry's account of how he and David Lehman struck up an enduring friendship in 1968.
The Best American Poetry 2009 gala launch reading on Thursday, September 24 featured prize-winning poets (such as John Ashbery, Billy Collins, Mark Doty, and Richard Howard), but it will also be remembered for the record-breaking number of readers, twenty-one poets in all, some traveling from as far as California, Seattle, Cincinnati, and Kalamazoo.
The New School's Tishman Auditorium in New York City was filled to capacity, and the standing-room-only audience responded most appreciatively and with no loss of attention from 7:15 when the proceedings began until it was Matthew Zapruder's turn to read at 8:50.
David Lehman, the anthology’s series editor, hosted the evening, and his introductory remarks surely resonated with writers of all genres. He imparted this advice to aspiring poets: “Don’t postpone writing the poem.” A renowned poet himself, Lehman cited a passage from Nicholson Baker’s new novel The Anthologist culminating in these sentences:
“Put it down, work on it, finish it. If you don't get on it now, somebody else will do something similar, and when you crack open next year's Best American Poetry and see it under somebody else's name you'll hate yourself.”
John Ashbery, the first featured poet, read “They Knew What They Wanted,” a poem comprised of movie titles that were brilliantly ordered, each beginning with "They." The audience guffawed when Ashbery recited, “They met in the dark./ They might be giants” (The Best American Poetry 2009, pp. 1-2) Mark Bibbins also had the audience in stitches as he chronicled the state-by-state oddities of America. “It is the custom in Maryland to honor the stegosaurus on Stegosaurus Day,” for example, and “Mississippi means gesundheit in esperanto.” Prior to reading his "Freud" sestina, James Cummins brought the house down by explaining that there was something the audience needed to know prior to hearing the poem. That something, Cummins said with perfect poker face, is that Freud was an influential psychologist who lived in Vienna.
In acts of generosity, Philip Levine read Kevin Young’s poem from the anthology and Billy Collins read Bruce Bond’s “Ringtone,” a chilling poem about the shootings at Virginia Tech. Mark Doty's poem concerned a recital of "Ozymandias," and he followed by reading Shelley's great sonnet. Princeton professor James Richardson had to cancel his appearance at the last minute, so Richard Howard read Richardson's poem before reading "Arthur Englander's Back in School," his own poem about a fifth grade class. It’s hard to imagine anyone capturing the voice and sentiment of a fifth grader as astutely as Howard. Martha Silano’s unexpected addendum to her paradoxical poem, “Love,” with its multiple iterations of the word hate, was her tremendous imitation of a seething espresso machine.
It is not possible to characterize all the many poets that graced the stage, but they will surely be remembered for their varied voices and themes ranging from religion and justice to the recent change in government in the United States. Hats off to guest editor David Wagoner and series editor David Lehman for compiling such a rich anthology and organizing a most memorable evening!
-- Liz Howort
Literary agents Glen Hartley and Lynn Chu hosted a post--launch cocktail party in their nearby loft. John Roode Catering provided gourmet food and poet Matthew Yeager served as the evening's expert mixologist. Poet Star Black shares these photos:
l to r Mark Strand, John Ashbery, David Schloss (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)
l-r BAP '09 contributors Tina Kelly, Billy Collins, and Susan Blackwell Ramsey (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)
BAP series editor David Lehman (second from left) with (l-r) Katie Freeman, Molly Peacock, Rachel Shukert, and Mark Stevens (Photo(c)2009 by Star Black)
L-R Paul Violi, George Green, and David Shapiro (Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black)
L-R Jill Alexander Essbaum, BAP '09 contributor Jim Cummins, and Stacey Harwood [Photo (c) 2009 by Star Black]
The cover art for BAP 2009 is a collage by John Ashbery.
William Shakespeare did not write the plays attributed to him. Who did? While it is fruitless to speculate or seek an individual who is but a name on a weathered gravestone, I doubt she was Emilia Bassano. Consider the envy of Iago, the female spite that takes over his characater. Or contrarily think of the male initiaive animating Lady Macbeth: “Come, you spirits / That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.”
Moreover, we know that the difference between the sexes is obscured by the very fact that all the players, including the women, are men in the plays that were played when they played them back then.
The play itself was the thing that, in an age devoid of photocopy machines, had only one copy and no one handling it thought to treat it as an archival treasure. Who knew what when, or who among the players wrote in the margin, are open questions, and if the women are often seen reading in the plays or showing off their intelligence as cross-dressing lawyers in stilleto heels, who get to punish the unfortunate but eloquent merchant and exonerate the poor improvident Venetian loser, that would be dismissed in court as cirumstantial evidence, for justice is blond and the real killer is unmasked only in the fifth act.
Nevertheless, the apotheosis is Cleopatra, top cat of an empire, or failing that, with her name changed to Gertrude, marrying the king or the brother who succeeds him on the throne, becuase love equals death or the sublime, and murder is just a name for overcoming rthe influence of anxiety.
Shakespeare was a woman. For surely the sublime. And the absence that precedes it, the belatedness of all action, the play having been composed before the chief actor could have come up with a prologue. Well, just imagine Marlon Brando as Hamlet in a production with songs written by Betty Comden and Adolph Green.
Shakespeare is God, I have long maintained, in the face of resistance from multiculturalists, nudists, feminists, poltically correct imbeciles, undersexed leftwing lunatics, bullshit artists, theorists, Dead-heads, pinball wizards, Marxists, neoconservatives and other non-traditionalists who resent the rich and sublimate their guilt into an identification with people who do what they cannot, such as kitchen patrol in boot camp, and working as a plumber.
You see, we only see what we see as Blake would say not with but through the eyes that reveal the arras behind which the pompous Prufrock is vanquished by the young hero. And the ayes have it. The phenomenon of what I have elsewhere called kenosis, an emptying of the vessel like that of a candidate for higher office. But only a woman could have done it -- inviisibly, of course, because it had to be a secret. Only a woman could have channeled the fire and air of masculinity into the earth and water of pre-Socratic femininity.
Who was she? We may wonder. For the sublime, which can kill us but disdains to do so, exists as a thrill, which you can feel in Milton and Goethe. But Shakespeare, who hits you with it hard in King Lear, also gave birth to the human, as only a woman can.
<<< The great Ernie Banks described what it was like to face Koufax. “It was frightening. He had that tremendous fastball that would rise, and a great curveball that started at the eyes and broke to the ankles. In the end you knew you were going to be embarrassed. You were either going to strike out or foul out.”1 Banks said, “He was the greatest pitcher I ever saw. Most of the time we knew what was coming. He held his hands closer to his head when he threw a curveball, but it didn’t matter.”2
Koufax’s build – huge back, long arms, and exceptionally long fingers – enabled him to put extra spin on his pitches. According to Dodgers catcher Norm Sherry, Koufax could “do things with a baseball nobody has been able to do before or since.”3 Pictures show that the baseball was as low as the top of his left ankle when he reached back to throw. He then propelled the ball with a fluid over-the-top delivery that utilized the weight and force of his body.4
Koufax believed his natural gifts required him to work hard at his job of winning games. His personal integrity was deep. It took six seasons for him to master his wildness, however, and his career was halted after the 1966 season by an arthritic left elbow. His decision to retire at the age of 30 after such a dominant run left many, both inside and outside of baseball, wondering why he would leave at the top of his game. Yet this too contributed to his aura. When he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 1972, he was just 36 years old – the youngest man ever inducted. Decades after his retirement, debate still stirs over Koufax’s dazzling peak vs. his career totals.
Two other factors fueled Koufax’s legend. As one of the greatest Jewish baseball players ever, he became a hero in that community, especially after refusing to pitch the opening game of the World Series in 1965 because it fell on the High Holy Day of Yom Kippur.5 The other was his deep sense of privacy. Koufax was, and still is, a greatly admired figure – yet he chose to make few public appearances. Remaining out of the spotlight gave Koufax sightings extra cachet. “Awestruck” is another word frequently attached to this man. Opponents and fans felt that way watching him on the mound, and he retained a unique personal presence. >>>
Little kids to the left of me, little kids to the right of me, little kids in front of me. In the unusual heat and humidity, Phia Ménard’s dressed in a heavy overcoat, wool cap and boots to my tee-shirt, cotton pants and practically new deck shoes. She’s fooling with a plastic sack. Not five minutes into her performance L'Après-midi d'un foehn Version 1, I am still as a mouse. Enchanted, just like the little kids.
Choreographer and performer Phia Ménard’s Après-midi Version 1 (the one made for kids – when I asked my friend Wang what the adult version was like, he took an ominous air and said, “Darker.”) was part of the Lafayette Anticipations’ annual Echelle Humaine dance performance program, billed in 2024 as a celebration of “artists and works at the frontiers of the imaginary and the real, of the tangible and intangible” … including, along with Phia Ménard’s and other performances, Delila Belaza’s Figures, testing out the possibility of a “universal rite” and Catol Teixeira’s La Peau entre les doigts(“The skin between the fingers”), dancing “an imaginary traditional dance sans origine ni territoirelinking the present to eternity”. I have to love it.
It came to me that Phia Ménard, whom I’ve seen more than once before with pleasure, is a “faiseur” – a “maker”. The French word has for me a connotation of magic without illusion, action that plucks an unnoticed reality out of ambient potential. So, ‘though there’s really nothing to choose between a magus and cheap jack magician, Phia Ménard is to me the former, not the latter.
In way of a doing successful performance, Ménard’s magus raised in me an un-remembered memory.
I have come into the dusty square of a tiny town in the woods. Scrunched against a pile of kindling is rabbi Ber, a barrel of a hirsute man. He’s amusing a little jumble of scrawny brats. With each lazy snap of big man’s thick finger against the belly of his thumb, a grey dove flicks, surprised then frantically flapping, into the bright air.
The kids ignore the doves.
Instead, as they would a map, they study the rabbi’s face. They know it’s a squint of mind, not magic, that makes miracles, so they study his smirk and squint. They want to find their way from there to the peculiar regard that lets the good Ber see doves on a roost where they now see only empty air. They want only to snap their fingers for unseen things to come to be.
That’s why “faiseur” came to mind: Phia Ménard has just rabbi Ber’s peculiar regard. I am following it as, kneeling at the top of a circle of floor fans, she pulls a pair of scissors from inside her coat, and slowly, carefully, cuts a pattern of a dolly in a little plastic bag. She slips the scissors back in her coat, and taking the whole room in her regard, rises and walks slowly around behind the fans, turning them all on, seeming to exercise great care.
When the final fan is running, she sits back in her place and patiently watches the plastic bag take shape and live, first in the music – L’Aprés midi d’un foehndoes reference Débussy’s breathy prelude involving a faun – then with the vitalized air. It’s an old trick, but in her regard it’s all new. She grows a crowd, who, it seems, solo, couples, trios, a ballet, take their cues the ones from the others, twirling and diving…
And they tire. Some drop out, looking for the bar, perhaps, or seeking a tryst. Then more and more begin to go, fall to the ground. And when its just the right number, just as the true god would, Phia Ménard’s regard reaches out her hands to tear them to shreds.
We know it’s all not true and none of us, kids or adults, has suspended belief, been hypnotized or tricked. We’ve just joined her regard for a bit. And we like it.
I was thinking of doing a series of comics on the things poets think but don't say. But then, I was reminded of this conversation that took place on an airplane between a surgeon and the much-loved, late poet Jack Myers. I love that Jack actually SAID that.
Earlier this year Norton/Liveright published Skip Tracer by Jive Poetic. I will admit my unhipness when I confess Jive Poetic was a new voice to me—I wasn’t even sure if he was one person or a collective! And while that admission is embarrassing, it also served me as I read this exciting book, a memoir-in-poems, as Jive Poetic “contain(s) multitudes” and explores identity/multiple identities. His book is formatted like a DJ’s set list. (Jive Poetic is also DJ…) Through sections that invoke cassettes, reels, turntables, 45s, and a bonus track, he invokes the poet’s family and ancestors, including his grandfather “Skip.” Jive Poetic writes in his introduction “there are beats when I am you and me, and we are all of us in the mix.” Now I can attest I’m a tiny bit hipper. Now I can attest I’m a fan. You can hear him reading the first poem “Go Home” from the collection here:
In an interview with the late Larry Rivers, Suzanne Blazek brought up Warren Butffett, saying, "Buffett, it is safe to say, has a different relationship to money than you and me. For us it's a means to an end. For him, it's a vocation. He is called to it. If it's for anything, it's for getting more of. The man is a collector. He just happens to collect dollars."
Well, Larry said, I don't know. It's "safe to say" -- a locution implying that saying the wrong thing will get you punched -- that the famous exchange between Fitzgerald ("the rich are different from you and me") and Hemingway ("yes, they have more money") floats behind the "different. . .than you and me" in the first sentence above. But I still have trouble figuring out who "we" are. Do you know anyone, even among the poor, for whom money is simply "a means to an end"? Doesn't money almost always stand for something besides money? Status, for example, or achievement. Or security: there's nothing like a million bucks in treasuries to give you a warm sense of security. Or shit (see Norman O. Brown). Or manners (see Proust). Seems to me that money is not only Buffett's vocation but his vacation as well. Then there's the idea of collecting. What is the difference between collecting dollars and collecting stamps, art, coins, fedoras, ashtrays? Aesthetics?
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later to the greatness of Teddy Wilson "After You've Gone" on the piano in the corner of the bedroom as I enter in the dark
Matthew Arnold.
