The Best American Poetry

Was "Strangers in the Night" Sinatra's best album of the 60s? Marc Myers thinks so [by DL]

Was "Strangers in the Night" Sinatra's best album of the 60s? Marc Myers thinks so.  In today's Wall Stret Journal Mr Myers has an excellent, informative,and thoughtful piece on the song, which rose to the top of the charts in 1966. You heard it everywhere that summer, and as Myers reports, this was most unlikely: it had been years since Sinatra reached the apex in sales. Not even Oscar winners "All the Way," "High Hopes," and "Call Me Irresponsible," had reached number one. This was the generation of Elvis and the Beatles, a generation allergic to the idea of a tuxedo and bow tie.

As to the album that Myers believes was FS's best of the decade, it is certainly underrated -- perhaps understandably so, for the title song, despite or because of its popularity has never been a critical favorite. The song on the flip side of the 45, "Summer Wind," with its Johnny Mercer lyric, is a better song and has had and a more charmed afterlife. It alone makes the album something special. Other highlights are "You're Driving Me Crazy" (despite a humorous lapse into Brooklynese) and "The Most Beautiful Girl in the World," the Rodgers and Hart standard that, as Myers notes, Sinatra sings at a "breakneck" tempo. But the album also has "Downtown," the Petula Clark song that FS seems to despise even as he sings it, and other okay songs that are not in the same league as such others highlights of the period as "My Kind of Town," "It Was a Very Good Year," and "Luck Be a Lady Tonight."

As an LP "Strangers in the Night" does not compare with "Sinatra's Sinatra" -- a kind of "best of the best" anthology in which, nearing 50, Sinatra sings some of his favorites, from "I've Got Under my Skin" and "In the Wee Small Hours of the Morning" to "Nancy" and "Put You Dreams Away." Because most of us prefer the originals (recorded under the Columbia or Capitol labels in the 40s and 50s), this album does not rank very high critically. But to newcomers it is an excellent introduction to the Voice in the mid-60s..

Myers has clever reasons for dismissing other contenders for the title of best album. But the argument that the albums with Basie are all swing, that "September of My Years" is darkened by moroseness, that the albums with Jobim are too much of a kind -- doesn't hold water. Using that criterion, you would eliminate "In the Wee Small Hours, "Only the Lonely," "Songs for Swinging Lovers," at al, from consideration for best album of the 50s.

To provoke such a discussion is a victory for the writer, and I look forward to reading more of his writings on jazz here: http://www.jazzwax.com/

-- DL

Listening to Jonathan Schwartz on the Radio [circa 2007-08] by David Lehman

           <<<
            At the moment [2007] I am listening to “Frank’s Place” on XM-Satellite Radio. Host Jonathan Schwartz just played a song written by his father, Arthur Schwartz: "I Guess I’ll Have to Change My Plan" from Sinatra’s A Swinging Affair, which he recorded in 1957, a year after Songs for Swinging Lovers. “Sinatra extended the life of this music by twenty-five years,” Jonathan says. Now he’s playing Rosemary Clooney singing Gershwin’s "Strike up the Band." And here's the Duke Ellington band with the maestro’s "Mood Indigo," very mellow, and here’s Sinatra in saloon mode with the same song.

           A year has gone by and the show is now called “High Standards.” I wonder why the change. Maybe the Sinatra estate threatened to sue over taking Frank’s name in vain. Anyway, here is Mel Torme, "Dancing in the Dark," and Nelson Riddle, "Out of My Dreams," and Lena Horne, "Out of Nowhere," and Stacey Kent, "Zing Went the Strings of My Heart," and Sarah Vaughan, "My Heart Stood Still." And here is the Sinatra of 1946 with "Sweet Lorraine" as arranged by Sy Oliver with Nat Cole at the piano, Johnny Hodges on alto sax, and Coleman Hawkins on tenor. Jonathan brings a lot of imagination to his playlists. I remember, though it happened seven or eight years ago, the day he advanced the thesis that three Hammerstein lyrics – "Make Believe" (from Show Boat), "People Will Say We’re in Love" (from Oklahoma) and "If I Loved You" (from Carousel) -- were versions of the same idea. Each arose as a solution to the problem of creating a theatrically persuasive love duet between two persons who had not yet met, barely knew each other, or were feuding. Each relied on a conditional premise, a supposition or, in the case of "Make Believe," a frank suspension of disbelief. And though I love the Kern song best of the three, I think Schwartz is right in saying that the three exist in a progression, that "If I Loved You" is – from the theatrical point of view -- the best of the three, and that the “bench scene” in which it figures is the consummate example of the Rodgers & Hammerstein strategy.

         In his autobiography Schwartz recalls the exact moment he became an ardent Frankophile. It was in the early 1950s and on a jukebox the young man heard Sinatra sing "The Birth of the Blues" (Buddy DeSylva, Lew Brown, and Ray Henderson). He says he played it a dozen times. And he's right, it is a fantastic performance, brilliant. Jonathan's fidelity to Sinatra is famous. One Sunday afternoon in December he plays a rare recording of Sinatra singing the Soliloquy from Carousel. It’s an unusually long, musically varied tear-jerker of a song in which the character, a ne’er-do-well carnival barker, imagines that the baby his wife is carrying will be a boy, enjoys the thought, realizes that it may be a girl, and finally vows to make or steal the money needed for the child’s upbringing, “or die.” Sinatra gives it all he has. It’s his birthday, December 12. He has been dead now for nine years. The song ends: “Or die.” There ensues a hush. Then Jonathan says, “I know you’re listening,” and I get the strong feeling that he is talking not to the radio audience but to Sinatra.

        In 1986 Schwartz won a Grammy for Best Album Notes, which he wrote for FS's The Voice -- The Columbia Years, 1942-1952. One recent afternoon Schwartz plays "Frenesi," "Perfidia," and "Amapola" back to back to back: three songs with one-word foreign titles. You remember "Amapola," don’t you? Years later it would serve Sergio Leone as a recurrent motif throughout his Jewish gangster epic, Once Upon a Time in America (1984), a cinematic masterpiece, with James Woods and Robert De Niro. When Sinatra went to the White House in the fall of 1944, the President asked Frankie what would be number one on the hit parade that week and promised he would keep it secret. “Amapola,” Frank said, and for an instant FDR looked a bit confused. Was the singer speaking Italian? Sinatra was so skinny that after he left Roosevelt chuckled. So that’s what the girls are going for these days. In my time they liked a little more flesh on the bone. You didn’t know Sinatra got invited to the White House? What’s more he had an audience with the pope. It was a year later, after the war, when Sinatra was making his first trip abroad to entertain the troops. He was traveling with Phil Silvers. Singing and dancing, the future Sergeant Ernie Bilko had supplied the comic relief to the romantic leads Gene Kelly and Rita Hayworth in Cover Girl (1944). I bet you didn’t know that Phil Silvers wrote the lyrics for the Sinatra standard "Nancy (with the Laughing Face)." Well, he was a great pal of Sinatra, and the two of them - so goes the story -- were on their way to see Pope Pius XII in the Vatican. “Wait till I see that Pope,” Sinatra said. He was going to give him a piece of his mind about Father Coughlin’s anti-Semitic rants in Detroit. Of course when he entered the papal presence he thought better of it, and when the pope asked him what he sang he replied earnestly with a list of song titles starting with "Ol’ Man River." Now it was the pope’s turn to look puzzled. By “what do you sing” he had meant to ask whether the singer was a tenor, a baritone, or a bass.
>>>>

          Happy birthday.. -- DL

On Composing a Poem About Orson Welles [by Laurence Goldstein]

What follows is a portion of a work in progress examining the way Orson Welles and his films have been appropriated and recast in poetry and fiction. This section focuses on my own experience of writing an unusual kind of elegy.

Finally, it was time to compose my farewell poem on Orson Welles. He had died on October 10, 1985, and public tributes had circulated for a brief period, including editorials, columns, and essays in the entertainment press and intellectual journals, cartoons of homage, and TV network spots featuring the opening scene of Citizen Kane in which the dying tycoon utters the word “rosebud” as he expires. Welles as actor excelled in giving up the ghost in his films, those he directed like Citizen Kane, Mr. Arkadin, Touch of Evil, Macbeth, Chimes at Midnight, Othello, King Lear, and those he graced solely as a performer—The Stranger, Tomorrow is Forever, Black Magic, The Third Man, Three Cases of Murder, A Man for All Seasons. Marlene Dietrich, as a fortuneteller reading her magical cards in Touch of Evil, delivers the death’s head, figuratively speaking, when she tells the doomed Sheriff portrayed by Welles, “Your future is all used up.” That epitaph before the fact haunts much of the posthumous discourse about Welles.

When the mass media swiftly turned their attention elsewhere, poets were obliged by their reputation as the world’s greatest elegists to continue the obsequies. Few did so, but I pledged myself to testify to Welles’s profound corpus of great works on the screen. I knew the conventions; I had written analyses of numerous memorial poems about people, places, and things. The tradition abounds with POV alternatives for speaking well (and ill) of the illustrious deceased. And yet, the key problem of all such testimonials oppressed me: the sense of apprehension, and timidity, at addressing the glorious, or at least worthy, object of one’s reverence. Who was I to approach the casket and declaim about this shape-shifter, this otherworldly being whose now-bloated body had been screened from me by the screens on which I had watched him move and speak? Why write redundant words of praise about his genius? Why not remain mute and let the reigning bards turn their eloquence in his direction?

   Who would that be, exactly? Archibald MacLeish, W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Muriel Rukeyser, Randall Jarrell, John Berryman, Robert Lowell—these had all served their generation as effective elegists, but all had died during the previous decade. Elizabeth Bishop may have been the first significant poet to speak in print, albeit in private, about Welles. In a letter dated September 29, 1936 she offered apologies to Marianne Moore for not including her in a group of friends on a New York outing: “I must tell you that we were going to the theatre that evening; we wanted to ask you to go with us, but it was a play just opening that we knew nothing about and hated to ask you to take the risk. It was so fortunate that we did not . . . because it was very bad, hardly endurable—Horse Eats Hat.” Welles and Edwin Denby had adapted this farce by Eugène Labiche in order to “giggle and make giggle” as Byron said of his work on Don Juan. It was the furthest thing from the somber plays of Nobel Prize-winning Eugene O’Neill they could contrive. Simon Callow reports that the play, directed by Welles, was “full of corny jokes, dadaist riffs, and schoolboy double entendres.” Bishop does not report in later letters that she saw any of Welles’s films. None impacted her, in any case, nor, for the most part, her generation of poets for whom Chaplin, Keaton, and the Marx Brothers remained the more compelling muse figures, yielding to Marilyn Monroe at generation’s end. (MM is still the most frequent subject of poems about the movies.)

   Following upon Welles’s first successes in the theater, months before the Invasion from Mars radio broadcast, TIME magazine placed his photo on the cover of their May 9, 1938 issue. He is disguised behind a large beard and his face is wrinkled into the grotesque visage of Captain Shotover from George Bernard Shaw’s play Heartbreak House. Welles loved to disguise himself as old men, a fact that bears on my comments further on. He was 22 years + 3 days old at the time, and you could not have chosen a more awesome archetype of the enfant terrible, already a major figure in New York theater and nationwide radio, with his sights clearly set on the cinema. The headnote for the Time article was “Marvelous Boy.”

   Two points need to be made. First, “marvelous Boy” is the telling phrase Wordsworth chose for Thomas Chatterton, poet and suicide at age 17, in his troubled and troubling poem “Resolution and Independence.” Wordsworth’s friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge had previously written a full-dress elegy on this self-thwarted genius, who had disguised his archaic-sounding poems as the work of a fictive 15^th-century poet, Thomas Rowley. In “Monody on the Death of Chatterton” the 18-year-old Coleridge plumbed the depths of self-pity in strained locutions as he brought to adolescent consciousness the corpse of Chatterton--as Henry Wallis would do in his famous painting in the next century.

            Fated to heave sad Disappointment’s sigh,
            To feel the Hope now rais’d, and now deprest,
            To feel the burnings of an injured breast,
               From all thy Fate’s deep sorrow keen
               In vain, O Youth, I turn th’affrighted eye;
               For powerful Fancy evernigh
            The hateful picture forces on my sight.

Chatterton had conspired to deceive the public and earn fame by putting on a mask, and his presumption appealed to the early Romantics. “I thought of Chatterton, the marvelous Boy, / The sleepless Soul that perished in his pride.” Wordsworth’s lament has the effect of a curse as well as a fragment of praise. It is the fate of many ambitious artists to become re-embodied in art works, often as victims. Wordsworth is thinking of himself, and Coleridge, and other aspiring authors likely to be denounced and cast aside by the cultural establishment for daring to re-invent themselves as young heroes of the imagination, immortal bards, “Prophets of Nature.” Time was cautioning the insurgent young Orson even as it was celebrating him.

   Second point. One of the likely readers of that issue of Time was F. Scott Fitzgerald, as he languished in Hollywood, tormented by nostalgia for his lost status as the Rising Sun of the Roaring Twenties. As Welles swiftly ascended like Apollo, Fitzgerald was entering middle age, laboring in 1938 as a rewrite man on dismal scripts unworthy of his talent. In his bitterness he published a short story, “Pat Hobby and Orson Welles,” in response to the news that Welles had negotiated a two-picture contract with RKO, with full control of each film down to the final cut. Pat Hobby, whom Fitzgerald regularly exhibited in issues of Esquire, is Fitzgerald’s comic double, a hack screenwriter working, or not working, at MGM Studios, who feels down to his toes the humiliation of the third-rate as he imagines being driven out of his profession by this marvelous boy sporting a beard to enhance his dignity. As Fitzgerald makes clear in the essays published posthumously as The Crack-Up, nothing, nothing, could replace for him the glory of those early years of upward mobility during the Jazz Age. In his droll story of Pat Hobby being mistaken on the studio lot for Orson Welles, because both are wearing a beard, Hobby dissolves into the same melancholy and jealousy that forced Coleridge’s “sad Disappointment’s sigh.” At story’s end Hobby, an embodiment of the superseded author, emerges as both a pathetic spectacle of ruin and, in the final antic scene, a trickster enjoying a momentary triumph.

   Contemplating this convergence of themes and figures, I stumbled upon the solution to the question of how to write my elegy for Orson Welles. I would compose a soliloquy in the spirit of fan fiction, borrowing Pat Hobby to front for me as a mourner of the great writer/director/actor. I would constrain the lyric impulse that might make my poem presumptuous—yet still forge a connection to the location and ambition I shared with the actors in this imaginary drama. I grew up in Culver City, home of MGM. On my paper route I had peddled William Randolph Hearst’s signature newspaper, the Los Angeles Herald-Express, in bars on Washington Boulevard including The Retake Room where Fitzgerald drank his way toward debility while trying to finish his novel based on the boy-genius producer at MGM, Irving Thalberg. Like Pat Hobby I had no masterpiece in my vita; he would be my stand-in and shadow. What if he had lived fifty years on, watching Welles’s exile from Hollywood just as he had (in my imagination) grown up watching his own spurned creator decline and fall dead in 1940 of a heart attack? I found the voice I needed in Fitzgerald’s pitch-perfect sequence of slang-filled stories about Pat Hobby, a raffish survivor. So here is the ensuing scenario of envy and identification, my full-throated lament for the makers.

First published in Literature/Film Quarterly in 1988; reprinted in Cold Reading (Copper Beech Press, 1995)

            I DOUBLED FOR ORSON WELLES

            My creator, the boy wonder
            who penned This Side of Paradise
            so young it brings sappy tears
            to my old jaundiced eyes. . .
            at least he never lived to see
            how Orson outsmarted himself,
            watch Hollywood’s toughest ham
            mug his way through fluff
            even I could have improved.
            Like me, he idled “between pictures”
            most of his posthumous career,
            like my author, too, shoring up
            self-respect a whole decade
            with my adventures, or worse,
            while glamorizing Kid Thalberg
            for his boffo comeback role.
            Previews of fading attraction—that’s us,
            my maker patching me into
            the continuity of the golden age
            like the “good man for structure” he was.

            I was good enough to survive
            thanks to Benzedrine and the races,
            good enough to pass, once,
            for an American original—
            but that insert was a lousy joke
            Scott made at my expense,
            one of his many jokes on me
            who all during deathwatch at the morgue
            kept sober reciting his sentences
            and touched his wrinkled hands
            in the Wordsworth Room, waiting
            for the next take or process shot
            to lift this ungreyed extra
            like Dracula out of his sleep.
            He was put to bed with a shovel
            and I lived half a century on.

            If living is what it was.
            The studio gates forever shut,
            I drowned my sorrows in The Retake Room,
            sponging from East Coast literati
            with memoirs of my great original.
            I made a pitch to young Orson
            but he had his own Gatsby in the can—
            a swell picture it was, too—
            and roller-coastered out of sight.
            Do you need to hear the rest?
            A script so full of coincidence,
            pathos, bravado, double-cross—
            a hack job credits to credits.
            And those young squirt producers!
            Buttered and served up by the Times
            as saviors of the industry,
            those overdressed callboys
            led him such a dog’s life. . .
            Once after some goofy rushes of
            The V.I.P.s we talked of Scott;
            I said “The poor son of a bitch.”
            Orson gazed off, soul-scratching,
            and said, “The poor son of a bitch.”

            Hollywood made and unmade me.
            I learned my craft from The Great
            Train Robbery, and I’ve seen all
            the classics down to F for Fake—
            my heart broke during that flick!
            “It’s about you!” I told Orson
            at a watering hole on Sunset.
            “They’re all about me,” he intoned.
            “What happened to heroes?” I shot back.
            “Show me a hero,” he smiled hugely,
            “and I’ll write you a tragedy.”
            I could never script the story I lived;
            Orson did, writing behind me,
            and that gave us cheer to the end.
            No, I didn’t visit his corpse;
            I was afraid, if I tottered in,
            swollen so fat on medication,
            gnarled with disappointments,
            I might shock the souvenir hunters.
            Like a scene I once wrote for the B’s,
            the living dead lurching into view,
            the bit players flailing their arms,
            gasping out a ghostly name—
            “Orson,” they’d cry, “Orson, Orson!”

Laurence Goldstein is Professor of English at the University of Michigan and the author of four books of poetry as well as The American Poet at the Movies: A Literary History (1995) and Poetry Los Angeles: Reading the Essential Poems of the City (2014).

RIP: Bill Berkson, poet, editor, mainstay of the NY School's second generation

I had this e-mail exchange with Bill Berkson, April 21-22, 2016, regarding a "a fact check for [his] portrait of Kenneth [Koch] in a book of memoirs [he was] putting together and that Coffee House promises to publish in 2017."

On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 5:24 PM, Bill Berkson <[email protected]> wrote:

Dear David

I’m trying to track down some hard facts about the poetry-and-jazz events that Kenneth Koch, Larry Rivers and other did at the Five Spot.

In your LAST AVANT-GARDE you write that Billie Holiday’s appearance (the one at which she called Kenneth’s poetry “weird,” occurred on [a] Monday night. I have understood that those events happened on successive afternoons.

Do you recall your source for that event taking place on a Monday night?

Thanks for any help you can provide.

As ever,
Bill

On Apr 21, 2016, at 3:49 PM, David Lehman wrote:

Dear Bill,

Kenneth told me the Billie Holiday (“weird, man") anecdote during one of the lengthy interviews with him I did in 1994. I understood him to be referring to a date in fall 1958.

But I am not certain where I got the idea that the readings with Larry Rivers took place on Monday evenings. I knew that Monday was Thelonious Monk's night off. (Monk performed with a quartet that included Johnny Griffin on tenor sax and Roy Haynes on drums.) Now did I just assume that poetry and jazz was a nighttime activity since nighttime was the right time for Monk and his crew -- and presumably for the patrons of the place? Or was there a definite reference to Monday evenings in my interviews with Larry and with Kenneth? To answer I'd need access to those papers, which I do not have at the moment.

Are you writing something? I'd be very interested in what you find out.

Just last night I was talking to a group of students and FOH's poetry came up -- "The eager note on my door," but also, less expectedly, "Pearl Harbor" and "On Rachmaninoff's Birthday."

Thank you for writing. I hope you are in good health.

David

On Thu, Apr 21, 2016 at 7:42 PM, bill berkson <[email protected]> wrote:

Thanks, David.

I’ve wanted for long time to get the Five Spot poetry/jazz story straight, but this is just a fact check for my portrait of Kenneth in a book of memoirs I’m putting together and that Coffee House promises to publish in 2017.

I’ll use the "Monday night” version for now. If I find out differently I’ll surely let you know.

Funny that you got Kenneth saying that Billie said “Man, your poetry is weird,” which what I heard from him too, but later he said she spoke differently. His revisionist account sounded off pitch to me, and I wondered why he was so inclined to spoil a good story.

Yes, good health with few annoyances here. (Just had a successful skin graft operation to replace cancerous scalp.)

I hope you’re well, as well.

Bill

 

On Apr 22, 2016, at 11:21 AM, David Lehman wrote:

<<

Funny that you got Kenneth saying that Billie said “Man, you’re poetry is weird,” which [is] what I heard from him too, but later he said she spoke differently. His revisionist account sounded off pitch to me, and I wondered why he was so inclined to spoil a good story.
>>

He did that more than once under the spirit of revisionism. In "serious" conversations we had, especially around the time of "The Last Avant-Garde," I felt that he deprecated the "comic" as a trait of his poetry -- as if the critics were right all along to denigrate the elements of humor, joy, laughter, surprise, and jest in his work and in poetry generally.

I am still recovering from the chemotherapy and then the radical surgery that I had to endure in 2015. There are aches and pains and then some, but I feel a little better every week. 

David

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: bill berkson <[email protected]>
Date: Fri, Apr 22, 2016 at 7:49 PM
Subject: Re: Five Spot Monday night
To: david lehman <[email protected]>

Dear David,

Kenneth’s humor never left him. He became gentler once he realized, with all his bouts with cancer, how his friends cared for, loved him. The poetry deepened over time, too. Poems like Paradiso and the whole of New Addresses, so wonderful to have. There should be more attention to his work, of course, more appreciation of its range and accomplishment.

Sorry to hear of your health trouble and aches and pains (alla Luke Appling, you will recall).

Here’s hoping the chemo does the trick, and whatever else the good doctors devise to keep David being David.

Cheers,

Bill

-----------------------

Please note my new email address is [email protected].  I am no longer checking the pacbell email address.  

Here is William Grimes's obituary in the New York Times:

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/22/arts/bill-berkson-poet-and-art-critic-of-60s-manhattan-in-crowd-dies-at-76.html?_r=0

A Few Last Words, Lines, and Octaves [by Amy Allara]

My week as guest author has come to a close, and it seems quite fitting to take my leave after leaving you with David Lehman's poem "Radio" to read and listen to. For such a short poem it accomplishes quite a lot.  Its brief lines read with ease and clarity and as an invitation of sorts---and somehow you end up right alongside the author as he enters a space filled with music and memory and perhaps a hint of something beyond the reach of language. 

When I asked David about the poem and how it came to be he said:  

I wrote it on a day in late May 2002 upon returning home from an outing to a book sale. I had left the radio on and the notes floated out of the darkness of the bedroom as I entered it. Key to the poem: title of the song: "After You've Gone." Great song from the 1920s. . . And the self-imposed limitation of three words per line.

 

 

Radio

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
                   

from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman

 

And to listen to:

http://www.pbs.org/newshour/poetry/weekly-poem-david-lehman-reads-radio/

 

Fallacious, pathetic phenomenon likely to shape French future

Karine and I met in a café where a giant, silenced television screen scrolls bits of catastrophe: Raaqua drone strike! US mass shooting beneath jerky images. This, near the rue de Rivoli, early in the morning, under the churning autumnal cloud of June 21^st.

The first day of summer. Day of the Fête de la musique.

In the Seine and in the gutters, the waters may have receded, but don’t bother sending out any doves. There is an abundance of vegetable matter right here and now. As Karine has not tired of pointing out these past few weeks, months, “O! It’s so green. Like Ireland!”

She’s never been to Ireland. It’s her way of staying sane. She means well. I can’t blame her. This doesn’t stop the spasmodic clutching of my fingers as I stare at her rain-smooth, moon-pale neck and bosom and hear the Ireland thing for the umpteenth time.

My own, well-rutted, way to sanity is to note the date in Unités d’automne universel or UAU, “Universal Fall Units”.

Thursday is Thursday, October 245^th, 2015 UAU.

Karine eyes me hard when I use the UAU system and after all this time, I am not fool enough to wonder what she’s thinking.

But my own eyes think back: I could also pretend to be from Down-Under, badly mime the accent and pretend to not to notice this désastre climatique.

Anyhow, Karine knows as well as anyone that none of this is my fault.

For years, I’ve strongly advocated sending all combustion phenomena and associated machinery to Mars. A warm, greening effect on that dry planet, indeed, any effect, would be a welcome change. But because they know neither to read nor to spell, they sent the nasty stuff to China instead, where the rulers are proud of it.

I long ago washed my hands of the affair.

As I scrutinize Karine across the table, her falsely delicate index and thumb pinch the tiny fluted handle of the little white espresso cup hard. I think, “There is something to the pathetic fallacy”.

How intolerable would the world be for me if, from time to time, at least, this woman’s glance did not light the Sun or her Hand recall Tenderness past and to come? It beats constructing gloomy ideas from the stuff scrolling beneath a video of impossibly wounded children in some overwhelmed hospital somewhere.

Karine does look good in her rain gear. Pathetically fallacious?  

What if this pathetic fallacy business is the other way round?

That is, the pathetic weather makes us fallacious, not we who fallaciously make the weather pathetic. That is, the breaking sunlight carves the smile from Karine’s pathetic rictus. That is, a warming breeze across my stiff back informs my fallacious adoration of an aging woman’s worry-gnarled claws.

Lately – I don’t read newspapers, so I don’t really know why – I have been interested in what a takeover of power by Know-nothing national-racial bully boys might be like. Sebastien Haffner, a man born in Germany in 1910, had the karmic privilege of getting his Aryan nose rubbed in Hitler’s shit from 1933 to 1938. He writes about this in a book called Defying Hitler.

Apparently, the experience is just as you might imagine and no fun at all.

Haffner intimates that the splendid weather of 1933 smoothed the path of “National coordination” – the set up of a general system of terrorization, intimidation, confiscation and institutional cooptation, with a special focus on selected groups, such as Jews.

Haffner describes, for example, a mid-May smooching idyll with a girlfriend in the Berlin Tiergarten.

Flopped in the sweet grass and in plain view, he says the anti-Semitic calumnies hooted by passing hikers touched the couple hardly at all. Partly, he says, they were already inured to gratuitous insult (after fewer than three months of bully-boy rule!). Partly, he says, it was the splendid weather.

His observation is that in making the whole natural world perfect, the weather made all the mean-spirited menace seem just, well, impossible. Shades of Wordsworth!

Remember, Haffner is writing before bits of catastrophe scrolling out an endless stream of constructible, shareable, delusion was a feature of every public place on earth!

The pathetic fallacy is true science: our pitiful human condition is contingent on the whims of weather phenomena. Frankly, I am glad to be quit of the responsibility.

In a digital age such as ours and with a googletruth at the tip of any finger, a test of the pathetic fallacy is surely in order!

It has stopped raining.

The bloated Venusian clouds continue to roil across the whited sky. When it peeks out, a hot sun can now sear away accumulated humidity.

According to the forecast, this state of affairs, punctuated by storms, is to continue indefinitely.

In these days, when my eyes open to luminous blue, I feel quite giddy. The light is like a puff of laughing gas right up a stuffy beezer: such contrast, such relief, makes me hilarious. I pull on a muscle shirt and soldier forward under Sol’s happy gaze.

Opening her own peepers to these same glowing heavens, Karine has no thought to put on her floofy skirt. This year it’s a sort of flaring thing, not-quite-below-the-knee, made of stiff material that I think of as “taffeta”, without actually knowing what “taffeta” might be, but it’s apparently sensitive to raindrops.

Karine has been cruelly climatically betrayed more than once these past weeks of June and May. A little morning sun isn’t going to dissipate weeks of quiet desperation. This is a solid enfant of the French working class: prim, cautious, tightlipped, risk-averse, pettifogging prudence is a Gallic birthright not rendered for the prospect of looking good in a floofy skirt on a late June afternoon.

She slips on a cotton dress from the resale shop.

Blessed silence will settle over the political nation from the 1^st of July, when vacation begins and our old friend Ricard reveals the wisdoms to cling to at the Rentrée, the first weeks of September.

Until then, the rolling strikes and demonstrations around the reform of the labor law (called the Loi El-Khomri, after the Labor Minister), which began in March, will continue under the un-summery sky; also the Brits vote on EU secession on Thursday, 245th. Who wins and who loses in the El-Khomri struggle will determine the balance of political power on the left and then through the whole political system in the next elections and looking forward. Hold your breaths. The result of the British EU exit referendum will determine European politics for the foreseeable future. Hold your breaths.

So, what will the pathetic fallacy phenomenon (it’s scientific now, so a “phenomenon”) do to the results of these human phenomena?

Will a giddy CGT flip flip to the right for a great melding of corporatist national socialists, agreeing to get in bed (bbbrrrrrr, shudder) with the egregious Marine Lepen? Or will a glass of commercially fermented anis seed, not too diluted, suffice such a pyrrhic political victory?

If the English push Britain out of the EU, will France and Germany take giddy revenge or demonstrate a wait-and-see prudence? Cotton dress from the resale shop? Floofy taffeta skirt flung hard from the 10^th floor window?

When the facts are in, you tell me what the weather is and I’ll predict something both pathetic and fallacious at only a small service charge, plus VAT.

The Language of Old Magazines: Part Two [by Amy Allara]

“Coming events cast their shadows before” wrote the English poet Thomas Campbell—and according to Alfred Lindsay Morgan in his March 1949 Etude article “Winter’s End Radio Programs At Their Height”, “Radio belies the frequently quoted line...to be sure coming events are anticipated, but the best are strengthened by what has gone before. We remember a program enjoyed and chalk it down in our memory.  How strong a part memory plays in the turning of the dials is proved by changing program ratings.  When remembered pleasures are not consistently substantiated in repetition of favorite broadcasts, disappointment is manifest.”

Disappointment is manifest.  It seems fitting that by chance I grabbed this particular issue and flipped through the pages landing on this article—given my previous posts which evoke a looking back of sorts, questioning whether we have forfeited more than we have profited from so-called progress.  But in truth, the first thing that came to mind when reading Morgan’s article was, and please don’t laugh (or please do), NETFLIX. 

Even in 1949 people were complaining about programming and demanding that their favorite shows be restored and put back on the air.  I imagine no matter the date or time or century, there has been a practice of recalling how it was done before, resurrecting memories of the good old days.  When it was better, easier, simpler. 

For some reason I immediately thought of House of Cards—a show I watched and looked forward to seeing again, and admittedly sooner rather than later.  But what I am recalling (vaguely) is one of its season's release dates had people up in arms and demanding it be released even sooner. A few characters shy of a social movement, it seemed.

Also, there is now another wonderful word to add to what I called in a previous post our “somewhat collective lexicon”—a showhole.  Amazon created an ad that explains the term with the visual of a woman curled up, wrapped in a blanket on her couch in a state of clinical despair as the final credits roll on her favorite show.  Then it cuts to her shoveling dirt on top of her TV, as in why bother having one if you can no longer watch your favorite series ad infinitum?

Though perhaps a troubling commentary on present day existence, it is actually very funny.

Here it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdj9k4jsw-c

But back to 1949 and Alfred Lindsay Morgan who was quite up in arms himself about how radio programming was going down the tubes.  In that first paragraph he writes, “One poor program can greatly alter audience appeal.  So, to paraphrase the poet’s line, in radio “Events that have cast their shadows before” are most eagerly awaited.  For him, he laments the “now defunct broadcasts of the Philadelphia, Boston and Cleveland Orchestras, and that inimitable Columbia musical offering of the past—“Invitation to Music.”   He continues:

“The lack of sponsors has removed too many fine programs…There is just reason for critic Virgil Thomson’s recent assertion in the New York Herald Tribune that radio, in general, ‘is gravely misusing its privileges with regard to serious music and skimping its obligations.’”

So, even over half a century ago good programming was being thwarted by lack of sponsors, or to get down to it, the thing that often trumps all—profit.  Are our favorite shows cancelled due to philosophical differences between the director and the executive producer?  Once in a while, maybe.

Lamentations aside, what were some of these fine programs listeners had the privilege to hear? 

Saturday broadcasts of the Metropolitan Opera, the NBC Symphony, and the New York Philharmonic. At least, says Morgan, these were still in place.

“Just when many of us were despairing that no programs in adult music education would be forthcoming this year, the National Broadcasting Company announced its seventeen-week “Pioneers of Music” series, new step in home-study phase of the “University of the Air.”

Again, it seems the showhole variety of despair can trace its roots to 1949—but instead of a vast inventory of shows and films streaming to appease the distraught viewer there was, among other programs, “Pioneers of Music”. A program that was arranged under the guidance of USC’s College of Music in an attempt to “provide organized education for people at home everywhere in the United States.” I am certainly not an historian, and have little knowledge of the radio’s history, but it still surprised me to learn that such home-study programs were in place mid-19^th century.  Today, of course, you can earn a doctoral degree with a few hundred clicks or taps.

The idea behind this series was “to trace the evolution of orchestral music from the beginning of the seventeenth century to the present.” It also included weekly study guides and other materials which would be submitted to USC and then returned to each student.

The cost was ten dollars for 17 weeks of music and study.  59 cents a week. 

The article ends with a description of other programs to come which included Toscanini conducting the NBC Symphony for a total of 8 concerts.  Turns out Toscanini “made his now legendary first appearance as conductor at the age of nineteen.”

It seems at the time he was a cellist with a touring Italian opera company that was performing in Rio de Janeiro, but due to a “temperamental conductor” who abandoned the company and a lack of replacement options, Toscanini was asked to take his place on the podium with baton in hand.

“He did, conducting the entire opera without opening the score.  His ovation was tremendous. This fortunate chance, for which the young musician was well prepared, launched him on his brilliant career.”

Pretty remarkable.

***

So, in bringing it all back home (Bob Dylan, 1965), I suppose it is only natural, at times, to mourn what has been lost, to sorely miss the ways things once were—but perhaps not an altogether bad idea to consider what great opportunities are still available to us that do not necessitate liking and clicking and tapping. 

Quite a few, I should think.

A June Afternoon - the Mets and Royals at Citi Field [by Greg Pattenaude]

I always enjoyed taking a day off from work in June to attend a Mets afternoon game. The schedule maker hasn't been as kind in recent years in making this event possible. And even though I'm now retired, it's still special when one of these opportunities pops up, like it did yesterday: the Mets versus the defending World Champions Kansas City Royals. And so I went, with wife, son and his friend by my side. After all, the lyrics to Meet the Mets tell me to "bring the kiddies; bring the wife". For what it's worth, the last time I saw the Royals was 40 years ago at Yankee Stadium, when young George Brett was making his mark and the road uniforms were powder-puff blue. But that game is a tale for another time.

The weather in Queens was nearly perfect, maybe a bit hot in the sun. But a gentle breeze and a parade of puffy cumulus clouds kept the sun at bay until our seats were shaded for the afternoon thanks to the small roof at the top of the ballpark. We sat directly above home plate, in the upper deck, although the marketing department for the Mets prefer we call it "the Promenade". The view nearly matched the same one I had 50 years ago for my first game at Shea, as I wrote about several weeks back.

The game was good, featuring starting pitchers Danny Duffy, a southpaw, for the Royals and Noah Syndergaard aka "Thor" for the Mets. The breeze provided a good showcase for Thor's long locks. It was a back and forth affair with the Mets taking the lead in the 4th, the Royals scoring 2 in the top of 5th, the Mets answering with 2 in the bottom of the 5th, the Royals tying it in the 6th, and the Mets going ahead for good in the bottom of the 6th on the first home run of Matt Reynolds' career. Mets closer Jeurys Familia nailed down the victory with a 1-2-3 9th inning, his 24th save in as many tries this season. Three years ago, I saw Familia in his visit to Troy (NY) to pitch one inning for the Brooklyn Cyclones against the Tri City Valleycats, whose stadium is 15 minutes from our home. I always remind folks that this was the turning point of his career. Well, at least in my mind it was.

Despite rush hour traffic that turned a normal three hour trip home into a nearly five-hour marathon, we declared the day a success and hope that the Mets season is back on track.

I have one other thought to share. Citi Field now has been the Mets home for eight seasons. I'm still getting used to it. There is a lot to like: wide concourses, wide aisles, wide seats, and lots of places to get food. We have sat in various sections and levels, seeing games from various angles. The last two games have been in the aforementioned "Promenade". I've concluded that I'd rather be higher up and near home plate then sit in a lower level 400 feet away from home plate in the outfield. Shea Stadium never had this problem. There were narrow concourses, narrow aisles, narrow seats, and fewer places to get food. But there were also fewer outfield seats since the stadium was open-ended, a wide expanse to Queens and beyond. Nearly everyone was seated between the foul lines. And I knew most nooks and crannies of the old place. So I ask myself, will Citi Field ever feel like "home"? I don't know, probably not. But a few more games like yesterday and seats in Section 515 Row 6 would help.

Letter from London: Life in the Referendum #3

"Now, what was it I had to do today?"

 Now, I haven't been out yet - kept awake half the night by last night's epic thunderstorm, which has incidentally flooded half of London and the Southeast - but when I got up my social media was full of people talking about their voting experiences, and I've taken, as fast as possible which isn't that fast,a little sampling of the more interesting ones. 

This may look one-sided. Very unfortunately, that is because I am not happy to relay the messages of the Leave side. Most of them just look like, if the person was talking to you, they'd be shouting in your face, turning red and spitting when they talk. And they just reel off these insane, incorrect 'facts'. Someone posted up an absurd leaflet that UKIP was circulating in Hemel Hempstead (a prosperous north London suburb):

So most of this is going to be more positive, like this:

 

Don't abstain
Despite the rain
Grab your brolly
And #VoteRemain

"Train conductor leans down. "I'll say this quietly" he says "but I like your badge" #Remain"

"I am off to vote for the first time in my life. Having been raised to believe in equality for all and helping my fellow man, woman and child, it seems my apathy has been overtaken by a desire not to let the LEAVE campaign win."

"I got a bit tearful in the voting booth. Feels so monumentally important."

"Voted and almost shaking as I posted the ballot paper through the ballot box. I voted Remain."

The poet Sean O'Brien on his trip to vote: 

"A polling station in a community centre in North Tyneside at about 8.15 am. Bright sunshine. The usual slow-but-steady traffick, mainly of older people who always vote.The usual atmosphere of helpful, slightly embarrassed good humour among the officials, as if the whole business of democracy is slightly implausible. The sort of scene Orwell might have included in his catalogue of English moments. And next to all the electoral documents, a copy of The Daily Mail. This is presumably entirely accidental and coincidental. On the way back I meet a couple of neighbours alarmed at the possibility of a vote to leave. One of them says despairingly of her friends, 'I never knew so many of them were just so...so STUPID.' Let's hope she's wrong."

George Monbiot, the green journalist:

"I went over my cross several times just to make sure. I've never done that before." 

A teacher: "The children at school all hugely energised by today's referendum and making cogent arguments for both sides - but the most compelling one of all was this:

Spain is in the EU.
Spain produces lots of strawberries.

Everyone loves strawberries.
Vote Remain."

 

 

"I voted at 7am. There was a stream of people as I left the estate where the polling place was. With 3-or-so-yards (sorry, metres) between them.
I then went shopping. I encouraged a woman worker in Sainsbury's to vote, even though she was going to vote Leave...
Mulling it all on the way back (the rain had almost stopped) I decided it the act of voting was more important than what you vote for. I think that should be sold big-time."

"After the gym I am going to try to help Labour campaign and redeem myself for having been so pathetic over the past months.
A first toe in the water."

An unnamed poet: "Off to vote LEAVE. No longer will this Proud Brit be shackled to the corpse of a tyrant bent on stealing our worglesnurfs." (Then: "Just breaking up the monotony of my newsfeed.") 

"I have heartburn." 

"[Hipster] Clapton is full of middle-class folks swanning about like they've taken the day off to vote."

"A friend's mother-in-law was leaning Leave but decided to poll her teenage grand-children and vote their wishes, as 'it's their world I'm voting on, I won't be living in it'."

A cartoon by Stephen Collins, not new but apt, illustrates the character of Michael Gove years before he made his now--famous remark last week that, "I think people in this country have had enough of experts." Used with permission; click for full size. 

 

 Editing in with two more stories:

"Conversation with Muslim owner behind the counter in the local shop: 'I'm voting leave,' he said.' You'll think a stupid reason. I don't like Turkey. I don't like Pakistan either. If Turkey joins they'll bomb England and and England throw out all the Muslims. And Pakistan, I don't like her, whatever her name is ... Wasi something?'

"I did say I didn't think Pakistan would be joining the EU anytime soon. I also said we shared intelligence about terrorists with the rest of Europe - which has prevented attacks - and it is almost impossible that the UK would decide to banish all our Muslims even after an attack. I said I was an immigrant and he said his father was an immigrant. He then announced very quickly that he'd changed his mind and he promised to vote Remain. But maybe he was just humouring me."

And a other friend says on the phone that as he left the polling station this morning, in leafy south London, he saw an elderly lady hobbling slowly along, shaking her head. As he went past her he could hear her, muttering over and over to herself: 'I still don't know if I've done the right thing...

Off out. More later. (And Sean O'Brien adds, just now: "I'm trying to spend the day working in order to stay calm, but I can feel another observation coming on.")

 

 

 

The Language of Old Magazines: Part One [by Amy Allara]

The next two posts pick up where I left off during a prior week as guest author.  I once again dug out my old Etude magazines and once again was not disappointed.  The language found in these older magazines is at once a quick and easy source of amusement but also fairly decent cultural food for thought in 2016, almost a century later.

“Why Not Give An Etude Radio Recital” read the title of an article in the January 1934 issue of The Etude music magazine.  Why not indeed?  Frankly, I became intrigued to read on just after seeing the words radio and recital in the piece’s title.  I am so often on some kind of unproductive tear about the shortage of letter writing, or any kind of writing by hand, and the sinking feeling that we are collectively being swallowed up by devices made of plastic, chips and batteries—that the idea of listening to a recital on the radio sounded novel and exciting. I realize the radio was a device of its own and a precursor to those that envelop us now, but the kind we are talking of here were not yet pocket-sized. Not yet, anyway. In many homes, during its Golden Age, the radio was the apparatus that connected listeners to the world-at-large whether through the broadcasting of news, musical programs, radio plays, poetry reading, talent shows, or the great wide world of sports.

The author of this piece, Theon La Marr, certainly does his very (though hardly subtle) best to convey just how exciting, enlightening, educational, practical, rewarding, essential, captivating and fun these radio recitals can be, for music teachers and pupils alike. It seems he also feels all of mankind should be tuning in.  Apparently, The Etude was offering regular programs on the radio, one of which La Marr describes in a section called “What Makes Radio Valuable”:

“Ladies and gentlemen of the radio audience.  We shall have the pleasure during the next period of listening to a recital of compositions taken from the Music Section of THE ETUDE MUSIC MAGAZINE for July, 1933, and played by pupils of Theon La Marr, who is making this announcement.  You who are listening over this marvel of marvels must realize that, if it were not for music, the charms of the radio would be reduced about ninety per cent.  The radio needs music just as much as the earth needs sunshine and rain.  It is difficult to imagine the radio without music.”

The article reveals that part of the program included the Album Leaf by Debussy, followed by more zealous commentary from La Marr.

“A happy frame of mind is a priceless possession and music possibly more than anything else tends to promote this condition.  Therefore, music and industry, music and life, should always go hand in hand.  Thousands have acclaimed THE ETUDE MUSIC MAGAZINE invaluable to them in helping to preserve this condition.  Are you among those who cannot get along without this magazine? If you are a lover of music or if you have children who are studying music you can ill afford not to have THE ETUDE in your home.”  (Here the music comes to an end.)”

No one could argue that La Marr was not a fan of The Etude and perhaps his certitude and hyperbolic style of speaking is a bit much.  And yet, even though people likely would have survived 1934 and the years to follow without monthly issues of The Etude, he delivers some valid notions about the importance of music, of industry, of a happy mindset (and music as a vehicle for this) and of radio (especially music on the radio).  Notions that I imagine were appreciated and applauded then by faithful readers, and perhaps too by modern day readers looking back to an era when a radio program very well could be the highlight of the week, or even month. 

This was also a time where receiving a magazine in the mail was cause for excitement, anticipating its arrival for weeks and eagerly flipping through its pages to see what was in the latest issue.  And long before the invasion of the box, otherwise known as the television, radio programs offered listeners something to look forward to each day, week, or month.  As much as I applaud his ardor for all things musical, it’s worth mentioning that La Marr might have been a tad biased in declaring that “if it were not for music, the charms of the radio would be reduced by ninety per cent.”  90 %? Listeners who were anxiously awaiting the next installment of The Green Hornet or The Lone Ranger might take issue with this.  For starters.

But back on point, which is the overwhelming volume of art, music, literature, reality TV, film, world news, YouTube videos of pets or intoxicated celebrities standing on their heads or brushing their teeth—of anything and everything.  Continuous exposure and access to this must have some impact on our level of excitement.  If something is always in hand, one tap away, one second away, where does the anticipation go, as well as its first cousin, patience?  The information and resources, musical, literary and otherwise that we now have more or less immediate access to, is, to be sure, a marvel of its own. And a formidable tool.  But I wonder what Mr. La Marr might think of this marvel compared to the marvel he writes of. 

In a section called “The Magic of Transmission” he writes this of the radio:

“First there is the mystery of the thing—how the sounds are shot out to the world over invisible channels.  This captivates the pupil’s imaginations. “

Mystery.  The mystery of the thing. Has that possibly fallen into the sinkhole too? Along with cursive writing, old school thank you notes (not thx on a text), anticipation, patience (waiting more than 3.5 minutes for someone to “like” your post on Facebook before becoming agitated) and dare I say it, curiosity? 

Or am I being as hyperbolic as Theon La Marr? I wonder, are we curious about the mystery of our current things? I admit I would be hard-pressed to intelligently, or unintelligently, explain how my smart phone works.  (I can picture my scientist father’s look of dismay.) I do, however, become rather curious when it stops working as it should, when icons suddenly disappear never to return, or when, God forbid, the screen goes blank.  “The Future Tense” written by Teddy Wayne is a wonderfully written monthly New York Times column that uniquely addresses “the anxieties over our cultural and technological evolutions”.

Figurative sinkholes and technology aside, a radio recital or even a good old-fashioned piano recital sounds good to me.  And thank God they still have those around, and I do have to wait to see Sir Andras Schiff, at least in person, and on an actual stage, in real time. This past October I sat in my seat at Carnegie Hall waiting with a child’s enthusiasm to hear the first measure of Schiff’s Haydn to be played. 

And, less enthusiastically, for the first phone to ring.

I’m happy to report that not one phone rang and Schiff responded to his admiring, non-phone ringing audience with a beautiful encore performance of the opening aria from the Goldberg Variations. Being physically able to attend this concert, for me, was meaningful for a host of reasons---and a reminder too that whether it is 1934 or 2015, an evening like this can be the highlight of one's day, month or year. All of the above in my book.

 

Letters from London: Life in the Referendum #2

'Twas the night before Brexit, and all through the house...

... we're not sure if we're waiting for Santa or Nosferatu.

Tonight, everything is hushed. Where I'm sitting in northeast London there's a lightning storm toying with us. I say toying because 1) everything else is toying with us, so why wouldn't it, and b) the first flashes and rumbles came before the rain. Everyone is still up, judging by my Facebook, writing little last-minute posts and trying to talk some sense into the situation. 

In fact, all anybody's been doing for weeks is trying to figure stuff out. Here's some if it: 

First, my own Top 10 Reasons to Stay in the EU. 

My old friend Ben changed his mind from Brexit to Remain. He's done it as gracefully and kindly, and modestly, as he does everything else. And he's explained it really well. 

In the aftermath of the awful shock of Jo Cox MP's murder last week by a neo-Nazi, people are beginning to re-examine the way both sides of the issue have been presented. It's clear that many Leavers are people from the parts of the country where Cameron and Osborne's cuts have done their worst. People feel dispossessed, and they buy into the rhetoric that this is some kind of war between 'the people' and the 'elite'. After eight years of austerity, shrinking incomes and zero-hours job contracts, vanishing safety nets and the creeping privatisation of the NHS, people want it to be that so desperately that they'll vote for anything that looks like a change. Suzanne Moore has been writing about this. The swingometer is swinging all over the place - no one can see how it's going to go on the day... 

Anybody who feels confused about the emotive way people are comparing the EU issue to the Second World War should read Patrick Stewart's powerfully moving article from last week.

And the poet Martin Figura summed it up pithily: 'OK people. Let's not saw off the branch we're sitting on.'

There's poetry: here's a letter my publisher's dad (Yay Dad!) sent to the newspaper: 

 

Some logic for voters in Wales to consider:

 

Wisdom from John Donne:

 

Wisdom from the Simpsons:

 

Which echoes the wisdom from the Economist: 

 

Facts from a disgruntled member of the public, who took out a full-page ad in the commuters' paper The Metro:

Ordinary people are also rallying round the memory of Jo Cox, who lost her life to this referendum: 

Persuasion and love in capitols around Europe. This one is the Palace of Culture in Warsaw - where, with their own far-right government to worry about, they have good reason to be afraid of the confidence a Brexit would give Putin...

... Which leads us neatly to perhaps the most compelling argument of all: 

And now, amid the thunder, lightning bolts and suspense, I am going to try and get some sleep before the morning. Will tomorrow be, as one newspaper has it, Independence Day? Or - as a Facebook friend predicts - the last day before the UK's Second Civil War?

Letters from London: Life in the Referendum #1

The Day Before the Referendum

Today is the day before the UK goes out to vote in a (thankfully) once-in-a-lifetime referendum on whether to leave the EU, or to remain in it. The atmosphere of the past few weeks has been toxic and growing more so, and it builds on certain types of toxicity that have been implanted in the national rhetoric throughout the tenure of the current government. The drift to the far right is not just America's problem; it's global. After a coalition government and then a brutal election campaign in 2010, in which the Conservative party tried to portray itself as caring, the rhetoric has drifted further and further to the right. The much-vaunted 'austerity' needed to get us over the crash of 2008 is still in place even though seemingly every economist in the world has said it won't work, can't work. But somehow, though people have even been dying as a result of its policies, the rich are getting richer and richer. And in the meantime, the rhetoric against immigrants has become somehow  actually mainstream.

The idea of leaving the EU (the so-called 'Euro-sceptic' movement) has been around for decades. Certainly it has been the fond fantasy of many a conservative politician, though they are always vague on what they would do after. The economists are more of less united in saying that even though we are the world's fifth-largest economy, this is largely because of the EU and the City of London, and that if e left we would be plunged into a new, ten-year recession. 

The country is becoming polarised in a way no one can remember since the darkest days of Margaret Thatcher: the Falklands War, the year-long miners' strike, the poll tax riots. 

I'll be talking a little about that over the next few days, but for now here is a little meditation on the idea of Europe as an entity in the modern world, seen through the medium of an unassuming little typewriter. The European Union was  begun after the Second World War as a way to keep European countries talking to each other, to create a shared purpose, enable cultural understanding, and prevent another war. Notwithstanding the wars that have admittedly raged round its edges in the Balkans, and the continuing heavy breathing of Russia, the bulk of the continent has had its first 70 consecutive years of peace since Ancient Rome. To that extent 'Europe' is a huge success. This first post can celebrate that. 

The plucky little pan-European typewriter I've typed this post on was made not in 1955, as I write below (I then checked), but in 1950 when the memory of the War was still raw. England still had rationing in 1950 (and we're now in our sixth year of 'austerity' once again). And I'll leave it there. Now, for its soothing, imprinted, fixed-space characters... 

Reporting from London: Katy Evans-Bush on the upcoming BREXIT vote!

We're focused on the upcoming BREXIT vote in the UK and are grateful that poet, teacher, all-around smart terrific writer Katy Evans-Bush will be reporting on the run-up and outcome.

Katy Evans-Bush is a New York-born poet and blogger who has spent most of her life in London. Author of two collections with Salt Publishing, her latest book is Forgive the Language, a collection of essays published by Penned in the Margins. Find her at baroqueinhackney.com

Thank you, Katy.

-- sdh

Selves in Air: Part Three [by Amy Allara]

October 6, 1960

I have an awful lot to tell you, I think, and yet actually no news except the first item.

Bishop writes this line to Lowell in 1960 in a letter that is unfinished and later picked up again.  It is a funny line in that it is a near-perfect characterization of their style of discourse.  Revealing news of the day and in the next sentence one’s deepest regret in life.  There is news, and then there is other material.  Many of Bishop’s letters wander from place to place, not unlike her physical self. She starts off with an item of news then enters into a discussion of Baudelaire’s translations, and a few paragraphs later reveals to Lowell when mentioning his daughter Harriet that:

…and that is my worst regret in life, although I would have been such a nervous, over-devoted mother probably.

The next paragraph begins immediately and with “Well----…” introducing a new subject entirely, a world away from the revelation of regretting not being a mother and the speculation that she likely would have made a bad one anyway.

Bishop tries to hide herself well, even after blurting out her deepest fears, regrets, and dreams, but masterfully brushes them off with self-effacing humor and abrupt shifting of topic. Back to the newsroom I suppose.

Another remarkable element I recognize in her exchanges with Lowell is that despite her tireless and witty dismissal of self and abilities as a writer and thinker and artist her work continues, perhaps at a slower pace (and with a much smaller output) than others, particularly Lowell.  Not only did it persist but it was printed and read and eventually the world was able to witness her talent as her dear friend did.  It isn’t hard to understand how Lowell could be so charmed by Bishop.  It is hard, however, to believe that he would have been drawn to one more puffed up writer mailing letters filled with self-exaltations and news of their latest achievement. No letters would exist if she wasn’t exactly who she was and he wasn’t exactly who he was. Perhaps their candor with one another from the start was key. And the rapport that formed so swiftly between the two brings to mind a line from Woody Allen’s Matchpoint.  His character Chloe strolls through Tate Modern with a friend who tells her of the dumb luck their mutual friends had after meeting during a traffic accident saying, “All their neuroses intertwine so perfectly, and it just works like a charm.”

Which brings me to humor.  This is a fundamental part of their letters’ architecture. A former teacher of mine once spoke of this subject in a poetry workshop.  He said something along the lines of:

Look everyone, don’t be afraid to be funny.  It’s okay to be funny.

I’m not sure if this was a reaction to our small group bringing in poems lined with gloom and doom and sturm und drang.  I’m also not sure if everyone understood what he had said or, moreover, how it possibly had anything to do with them.  I knew he wasn’t suggesting we morph into Woody Allen by next Thursday evening. What he was saying is that humor has its place in poems, in literature. In living.

Bishop clearly reserved a place for humor in her stanzas and her letters. 

In letter 222, she writes:

Dearest Cal:

The good news came yesterday and what wonderful lovely $$$$$, 7,000 of them for 2 years…It is all thanks to you, I know perfectly well…I’ve already written, to Mr. Harry K. Mansfield, who wrote me—it must be that I have a guilty conscience about all this because from his quite innocent and formal little letters I have drawn morbid conclusions that he doesn’t like me, personally; disapproves highly of my poetry; and probably thinks it should have gone to Donald Hall or somebody…

 

And in “One Art”:

—Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture 

I love) I shan’t have lied. It’s evident 

the art of losing’s not too hard to master 

though it may look like (Write it!) like disaster.

 

When Lowell died in 1977 it is hard to imagine Bishop being able to master this art of losing, not when it came to the loss of her longtime correspondent and devoted companion.  And yet, despite her unknowable grief, one wonders after 30 years of living apart yet residing constantly in one another’s minds if she was still writing to him.  Just not on paper.

Dear Cal, if you only knew how many imaginary conversations I have with you all the time…

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Selves in Air: Part Two [by Amy Allara]

Please never stop writing me letters―they always manage to make me feel like my higher self (I've been re-reading Emerson) for several days.

Bishop writes this to Lowell in 1960 after corresponding with him for over a dozen years and declares the value of their resolute letter-writing to one another.  It also reveals Bishop’s vulnerability, the kind we are all predisposed to have to varying degrees, appearing and disappearing throughout our lives.  Vulnerable in the sense of questioning who we are, what our purpose is, our worth, the caliber of our work, and so on.  So hoping that we do, indeed, possess a higher self, and that there is someone out there somewhere who trusts in this notion. There is urgency in her words.  Please never stop writing me letters…

Bishop was no stranger to the fine art of self-deprecation, and in a post I wrote about her a few years ago, I highlighted this skill in an excerpt from a letter written to another friend.  In reference to her paintings, she says, “They are Not Art, NOT AT ALL.”  Of course many of her friends who were recipients of her “NOT ART” had different ideas about her paintings. As do many others.

Lowell, too, was no stranger to this practice and had his own style of self-reproach.  In one of his first letters to Bishop he writes from Yaddo in August of 1947:

“P.S. Thanks for all the pleasant undeserved things you said in your letter.”

In reading many of her letters to Lowell, you witness a person who very easily slides into self-negating commentary, but also a poet and thinker who engages quite vigorously with another poet and thinker.  The act of writing and exchanging these letters was an affirming one—for both parties.  Lowell may have had more conventional success in comparison to Bishop (including a Pulitzer the same year they met) but he had his very own set of vulnerabilities, and during his lifelong struggle with bipolar disorder it is hard to imagine that the constancy of their friendship sustained by their words in air did not serve to ballast him during his more troubled and tenuous times.  After a particular manic episode in late April of 1959 Lowell was hospitalized and finally writes to Bishop in July saying:

Dearest Elizabeth:

I feel rather creepy and paltry writing now to announce that I am all healed and stable again.  So it is.  Five attacks in ten years make you feel rather a basket-case and it’s excruciating having Brazil snatched out of my gloating jaws…

The sun comes in the window.  We are really very happy and companionable.  I still click but can’t believe it…Let me get this scrappy, whistling little letter into the afternoon mail. I want to write you something with a little thought soon, but this is just to relieve your mind, and cheer your mind towards thoughts of that long-promised return trip to North America.

All our love,

Cal

These lines introduce something of consequence that these two were able to accomplish, however unknowingly—something psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow calls emotional dwelling and explains in these words, “In dwelling, one does not merely seek to understand the other’s emotional pain from the other’s perspective.  One does that, but much more.  In dwelling, one leans into the other’s emotional pain and participates in it, perhaps with the aid of one’s own analogous experience of pain.”

As Lowell writes apologetically (as he often would) after a protracted absence due to his illness, he reveals, however briefly, his pain despite his declaration of being “healed and stable again.” Part of emotional dwelling requires the willingness to say the unsayable.  Or to write it. There are other letters in which Lowell goes into far more detail about his episodes and subsequent hospitalizations.  What does Bishop do in return?  She continues to write, embracing Lowell, the good, the bad, and what he likely felt to be ugly.  In that same letter Lowell writes “but this is just to relieve your mind…” 

He knows that when he suffers, she suffers and he is quick to put her at ease.  And what is more, to “cheer” her mind, as he knows very well that she suffers her own troubles, quite independent of his.

Their communion was a long and uncommon one—but it doesn’t take 30 years of letters to locate affirmation, or even emotional dwelling. One solid note, even one sentence from someone can do the trick. I have a drawer filled with notes and letters saying (not in so many words) yes, you exist.  Yes, you have every right to put those lines down on a page and send them out into the world.

Saying, as Lou Reed does in the 1967 Velvet Underground song “I’ll be your mirror”, I see you. 

When you think the night has seen your mind/That inside you’re twisted and unkind/Let me stand to show that you are blind/Please put down your hands/’Cause I see you.

One of my own greatly prized notes of this ilk lives inside a book on a shelf in my library.  The book’s author signed his name and wrote these eight words on the title page:

For Amy…so convinced of your fine future.

You can certainly go through this collection of letters with a scholar’s fine-tooth comb placing them individually and in aggregate into an intriguing historical and literary context.  But you can also elect to view them as a fellow human being and see what was at the heart of the heart of this three-decade exchange.

They saw each other, liked each other, dwelled with one another despite often residing on different continents. Flaws, talents, foibles, awards, missteps, disasters, achievements, hospitalizations, publications et al. 

Lowell writes to Bishop in 1959, 12 years into their unconventional friendship, demonstrating how very imperative it was to him that their alliance would be sustained indefinitely:

Oh we won’t ever fall out, God help us!

The Precarious Cliffs of the Loveliest Collarbones: Dante Di Stefano Reviews Jamaal May’s The Big Book of Exit Strategies

The Big Book of Exit Strategies
Jamaal May
Alice James Books, 2016

Jamaal May’s second collection of poetry, The Big Book of Exit Strategies, continues the bighearted, artful, dialogue with his phobias and his hopes begun in his first collection, Hum.  Once again, Detroit ghosts through his lines, as May’s poems reconnoiter the culture of violence that circumscribes American life and U.S. foreign policy in the 21^st century.  While May’s debut collection writhed to life through the motif of the mechanistic purr, the hum of the god-engine in his second book takes the form of fire and ruin.  Amidst images of burning and breaking things, May’s poems turn inward, charting his own way of being in a hostile world, in order to extend outward as an embrace. Despite the hostility he probes, in open-mouthed requiem, May commits himself to the hard work of healing psychic ruptures and toppling crumbled walls. In the poem, “The Tendencies of Walls,” May notes: “My nostalgia is a pyromaniac/ I follow into a condemned barn.” Here, as everywhere in this book, May seeks egress from the paralyzing fears that come from living in a nation so schizophrenically privileged and impoverished, so beaconed and so broken, so hell-bent on following the way of the gun even as it anthems itself in hymns.

Throughout The Big Book of Exit Strategies, May resists the urge to draw easy parallels between injustices emblematized by a city like Detroit and repressions occurring overseas; in fact, a poem such as “There are Birds Here,” emphasizes the corrosive danger of emblematizing injustice, and the difficulty of transcending cliché:

            The birds are here
            to root around for bread
            the girl’s hands tear
            and toss like confetti. No,
            I don’t mean the bread is torn like cotton,
            I said confetti, and no

            not the confetti
            a tank can make out of a building.
            I mean the confetti
            a boy can’t stop smiling about
            and no his smile isn’t much
            like a skeleton at all. And no
            his neighborhood is not like
            a war zone. 

The stutter-step negations in these lines accrue into an aural subtext where confetti and cotton, skeleton and smiling boy, neighborhood and warzone, tank and building, bread and bird and girl, resolve themselves into taut uneasy correspondences.  These correspondences ultimately buckle and splinter like “the grown man growing out/ of a splintering boy’s body.” Splintered words yearn for a wholeness of utterance uniquely restored through poetry.

The overriding impulse in all of Jamaal May’s work is the restorative utterance. For all of the shards and the shrapnel embedded in his poems, May primarily admires uplift, albeit with a jagged edge. The end of the poem, “Conducting Ivy with the Girl Down the Street,” provides a characteristic example of the poet’s affinities:

            I break
                         into a broken
                                             little beatbox

            but she covers my mouth
            kisses the back of her hand
                                                    and begins

            to articulate
                                 the green

                    that just keeps rising out of us.

The belief in unremitting green springing from a child’s gesture of acceptance might be the only rejoinder to exit wound and torn cartilage. May chooses avowal over despair, the shape of the mouth kissing over a cupped formlessness.  The formal range of the poems in The Big Book of Exit Strategies is impressive; May leaps seamlessly from elegy to ode, from the interview in “FBI Questioning During the 2009 Presidential Inauguration” to a partial crown of sonnets in “The Whetting of Teeth.”   More impressive, however, is May’s fidelity to the simple truth that: “what matters most/ is not where I bend/ but where I am growing.” What matters most is not the grackle falling through smoke, not the house built from the skinny letters of your own name, not the “fire to stoke like rage and fill the sky with human remains.” Reading Jamaal May’s poetry you might find a map out of yourself, into the pistol-full avenues where love poems compose themselves on the precarious cliffs of the loveliest collarbones.

Dante Di Stefano's collection of poetry, Love Is a Stone Endlessly in Flight, is forthcoming from Brighthorse Books. His poetry and essays have appeared in The Writer's Chronicle, Obsidian, Shenandoah, Brilliant Corners, The Los Angeles Review, Iron Horse Literary Review, and elsewhere.

Selves in Air: Part One [by Amy Allara]

Back in 2010 I wrote “The Perils of Modern Correspondence” which in large part was a lamentation of the world’s decreasing population of letters—bona fide letters assembled with paragraphs and substantive content, and yes, even on occasion, those styled by one’s very own hand. The post began:

“Once upon a time, and in a time that predates the invention of the microprocessor, the telephone, and even the telegraph, people had the option of either addressing one another in person or via letter.  And when reading the biographies of various painters, writers, and musicians of the past few centuries one is immediately aware of, and can scarcely ignore, the significance of letter-writing—a vital part of remaining in touch with those close to us, and too a vital component of the progression of one’s particular craft.”

 At its conclusion:

“There are so many extraordinary books out there written about the correspondences of the past, some of which include: Words in Air, The Letters of Vincent Van Gogh, Letters on Cézanne, Flaubert—Sand, One Art, and of course, Chopin’s Letters.

But I am left wondering; fifty years from now, will there even be enough letters to produce this kind of book about those who have lived and worked in this new era of correspondence?

The day of the letter, of graciousness—is it gone?”

A few years later, these questions still stand; but in an era where our somewhat collective lexicon continues to include items such as #, thx, omg, lol, btw, brb, lmao and so on, it would be fair to say I remain dubious.

Still, I’d like to believe there is hope for the poor, ailing letter—and imagine, at the very least, messages of weight and consequence are still being written and read even if rarely on paper and mostly on screens of varying shapes and sizes.  So rather than lamenting once again, I chose to dive into (or get quite lost in) the extraordinary and voluminous correspondence between poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, one that spanned 30 years and yielded hundreds of letters and has been wonderfully documented and edited in the book Words in Air. (Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2008)

Lowell and Bishop met for the first time in 1947 in New York at a dinner party hosted by poet and critic Randall Jarrell and what followed was aptly described in the book’s introduction:

“Bishop and Lowell were poets preoccupied with loss and with the curious, indistinct borderline between public and private, fiction and fact. In studying each other’s lives and art while following their own “so different natures and destinies” each learned to expand his or her artistic reach across their common ground.  Their poetry would very likely have been different, if they had not met.”

And speaking of that which is dissimilar, their poetry was as dissimilar as could be.  In William Logan’s review in the New York Times he writes of their divergent styles, “His heavy-handed youthful verse, solemnly influenced by Allen Tate, laid down a metrical line like iron rail...Her whimsical eye and wry, worried poems condemned her to be a treated like a minor disciple of Marianne Moore.  Bishop for much of her life was a poet’s poet, which means a poet without an audience.”

They were, it seems, each other’s audience of one. The one that mattered the most, or, frankly, at all—and not only when it came to discussions of stanzas and meter and translation, of where one might teach in the year to come, of meeting with Pound or other notables, of whether to return to Yaddo yet again, but in all things, and through all things.

“Through wars, revolutions, breakdowns, brief quarrels, failed marriages and love affairs, and intense poetry-writing jags, the letters kept coming.”

459 letters in total.

“For each, personally as well as artistically, these letters became a part of their abidance: a part of that huge block of life they had lived together and apart over thirty years of witty and intimately confiding correspondence.”

Such a longstanding exchange certainly prompts me to consider what constitutes a life—what lends it meaning and how two people so unalike in some significant ways, living out their lives in wildly contrasting manners can find in and through each other novel ways of seeing and being and creating.  And how the very act of writing and exchanging letters, these words in air, could render one who is geographically so far so very near.

Ongoing study of letters and other personal writing such as the diary has led some to suggest both modes of writing as literary endeavors or even genres.  Historians, biographers, and other scholars regularly comb through texts considered to be of an intimate, private nature; and often what is found greatly augments their ability to construct a thorough portrait of a given life or subject. As to whether or not these intimate writing formats are artifacts, literature or otherwise—I will happily leave that to others to debate.  I am far less interested in the scholar’s categorization and far more curious about the psychology at hand.  And with these two poets, these two selves in air, there is plenty of that to go around.

In both letters and diaries, there is an assertion of self, even a construction of self.  Though a diary may appear to have no audience, many diarists write and have written as though someone is listening, as though someone is there (even if that someone is their own self).  Tolstoy is a great example of a diarist who defies commonplace assumptions of the format. He kept one from age 18 to age 82 and considered the practice a continuous experiment marked by endless self-inquiry and self-analysis:

1884

Why can’t I talk to the children: to Tanya? Seryozha is impossibly obtuse.  The same castrated mind that his mother has.  If you two should ever read this, forgive me; it hurts me terribly.

With the letter, and the presence of its addresser and addressee, it is implied that one’s words will be met by someone.  By someone else, by someone else’s mind.  And yet stamp or no stamp, the elasticity of both the diary and the letter permits substantial cross-over.  Virginia Woolf, a noted self-conscious diarist, called the diary a “capacious hold-all”—and the same could be said for the letter.

But back to the psychological underpinnings of whatever these two selves might have termed whatever it was they had doggedly pursued for 30 years.  Lowell and Bishop, two poets, two people with documented differences, were not without more than a few commonalities.  Perhaps of seminal importance are their early childhood experiences both marked by loss and trauma.  Whether the death of a parent, the absence of a secure bond with one, or being witness to nightly verbal discord between terribly mismatched parents, both learned at rather young ages that the world was not, by default, a safe, peaceful, and predictable residence.  Instead, the days of their youth involved something psychoanalyst Robert Stolorow articulates so well:

“…the existential meaning of emotional trauma lies in the shattering of what I call the absolutisms of everyday life—the system of illusory beliefs that allows us to function in the world.” 

As I look at three decades of interstate and intercontinental transmissions, in sickness and health, in sickness and sickness, I see the tenacious coupling of two psyches—and with and through each missive a confirmation that indeed the other was still there.  They did not abandon one another.  In the abstract of an article titled “’If someone is there’ On finding and knowing one’s own mind.”, the author writes, “…this paper suggests that the possession of memory and the feeling of having one’s own mind is a capacity that is developed in relational space; “if someone is there” (Winnicott).  In the absence of being able to feel the impact of one’s mind on others, memory will be dissociated.”

“…that the ability to feel ownership of one’s own mind, and to tell even the saddest memories, must arise in the understanding that one’s own mind matters to other people.” (Slavin, 2014)

By way of their letters they were confirming and reconfirming that indeed someone is there, and that their minds mattered to one another, profoundly so, and this was paramount.  For two scarred souls, it was everything.

I’ll write about the translation next time--- Heavens----I see you’re almost gone----I’ll write again though.

A simple last line from one of Bishop’s letters.  Of course, he was not gone, not yet anyway, and she wrote again. And again. And Lowell did the same.

 

Amy Allara Guest Author June 20-24

This week we welcome back Amy Allara as our guest author. Amy's poems, essays and book reviews have appeared in the following publications: Denver Quarterly, Psychoanalytic Perspectives, The New Review of Literature, OR: A Literary Tabloid, 26, Sycamore Review, and others. Her chapbook Variation was published by Highway 101 Press. She lives and writes in Pennsylvania. To learn more about her go to her website which can be found here.

Welcome back, Amy.

-- sdh

"fiercely loyal and full of appreciation and affection." Remembering Ted Greenwald (1942-2016) by Terence Winch

Ted Greenwald and I had been friends for more than 40 years. Around 1973, I saw a poem of his in a poetry magazine & loved it. I don’t remember the poem or the magazine. But I got in touch with him soon thereafter and we became lifelong friends. Ted would come to DC to do readings and hang out. And I would see him in New York on my visits back to my native city. He died earlier today and I will miss him greatly, as will his many other friends.

And he was a true friend and steadfast comrade. He was also a brilliant and stunningly productive poet. I believe that recognition of the significance of his achievement as a writer will only increase with the passage of time.

We talked---for the last time, as it turned out---last month. He had been sick for a number of years, but was doing better and sounded optimistic. And whatever the conditions of his life, he remained prolific to the end, with several new books out this year alone.

Ted was the most straightforward, no-bullshit person I’ve ever known. He told you exactly what he thought in a style that could sometimes be imperative, but which I always took delight in. He insisted, e.g., back in the ‘80s that I figure out quickly how to get a song I had written, which was very Irish and traditional-sounding and which Ted loved, to Frank Sinatra. He was convinced that Frank would jump at the chance to record my song. Ted dismissed my argument that this song didn’t really seem to be up Frank’s alley. He was like that as a friend---fiercely loyal and full of appreciation and affection.

Here’s an excerpt from a review I wrote of one of Ted’s books: “Ted Greenwald’s work has always been rooted in speech, street language, word of mouth. ...Greenwald often conjoins street talk and technical innovation. ...Ted Greenwald knows what real American talk sounds like, understands the rhythm and pulse of the language, and knows how to write poems that are built around that knowledge. He is one of America’s most ambitious and provocative poets.”

I want to pick up the phone right now and call him back to us.

No word was spoken

“Wartime, here as abroad, made everyone more eager for the civilized and peaceful excitement of ballet. More people could also afford tickets. And in wartime, the fact that no word was spoken on the stage was in itself a relief. Suddenly the theaters all over the country were packed.”

-- Edwin Denby (c. 1945)

-- sdh