The Best American Poetry

Story, sensibility & sense: MC Hominal, dance real slow to dance good

“Taxi Dancers” makes waiting for … what? watchable, something reminiscent of Delacroix's harem but with a plain sour rather than saccharine  – Photo ©Gregory Batardon

I've been waiting up all night/But you never show/You said it'd be all right./But I just don't know/Can you teach me how to dance real slow?

                                                                                                                         “Up All Night” –  Oliver Tank

Tempo is the key, tempo is how the dancer or choreographer control the flicker of consciousness. Acting on “expression” or sensibility, tempo makes a dance in the same way it makes a song of the eight nouns and verbs among the 29 words of “Up All Night”.

It’s all relative, of course, and scored with caveat, but, basically, speed up the tempo too much and the sensibility sloshes away into the iffy septic pit of artistic failure. Slow tempo down too much and the spectators will be watching the exits with more restrained anxiety than paratroopers in heavy flak.

Get it just right, and people are putting you on their listening lists and Philip Chbeeb and René Kester are using your music as accompaniment for their video fables. Get the tempo just right and you’re Marie-Caroline Hominal and her “Taxi Dancers”.

As I’ve indicated previously, it was my unexpected discovery of Céline Le Tixérant, draughtswoman of color and painter of dancing, that set my mental gears rolling and ticking about why I like dance, what I think dance is made of and how it works.

Thought, even about something as important as dance, cannot be separated from ordinary life and feeling or experience. That said, I can now offer some explanation for why I so much enjoyed Hominal’s “Taxi Dancers” when I saw it first about two years ago.

It had been bothering me because my ex-squeeze, Karine – a very sophisticated admirer of contemporary dance, mind and very often a most welcome companion – spluttered about this piece for an hour together.

In waking that memory in me, what Hominal showed me comes down to something much better than learning, to that da-sein thing that is so good in a dance – Photo ©Gregory Batardon 

She (unjustly) accused me of taking her out to see any dumb ol’ thing because I just can’t sit still at home and just talk, for once. But, ‘though - as there always must be with such trash - there is some truth to all of this, such small truth does not justify one’s turning in one’s seat and hissing that I therefore have no esthetic discernment and that, in a way that no gentleman would ever do, allow Karine, herself, to be bored and uncomfortable because of, ahem, (unnamed) “eccentricities”. 

Despite all the parentheticality, underlining, italicizing and quotemarking, the plain fact is that Karine just didn’t like “Taxi Dancers”. Because the dancers hardly move for 45 minutes and she’s afraid to be uncool by admitting that she doesn’t bother to distinguish between what she likes in dance and what is good dance. I did/do like “Taxi Dancers”, a lot, and especially pleased with the dancers’ hardly moving for 45 minutes. I do distinguish between what I like and what is good dance; while I am sometimes bored, I am never disappointed. So there. I’ll bet Karine was even less pleased with these latter facts than with the former half-truths.

In the same way that some people think that singing is about the command of voice, melody and harmony – singing on key or off key and such – Karine, at bottom, thinks that dance is about agitating body parts well. Like fucking.

“Taxi Dancers” doesn’t move much, so it’s not much like the fucking I’ve been involved in.

All the same, it works: at 2% movement and 3% faint rustling and 95% expressed sensibility, “Taxi Dancers” makes 100% sense.

We saw it in Aubervilliers, just over the walls of 1871, above La Villette, where it featured as part of the program of Rencontres chorégraphiques internationales de Seine-Saint-Denis. The department of Seine-Saint-Denis, often called affectionately by its post-code “93” – neuf-trois – by its inhabitants, is an economically dynamic place with a lot of poorer young people trying to get ahead in it. Rencontres internationales uses the large number of good-quality performance spaces in the neuf-trois to feature solid contemporary dancing from Europe and outside Europe. For instance, last year in Montreuil, you could enjoy the lucid choreographer-scenographer Keren Levy from Israel. “Taxi Dancer” creator Hominal is from Switzerland.

Her performance rolls out within the story of “taxi dancing”, a commercial sex-substitute service half-way between prostitution and lonely-hearts, in its time, viewed as risqué but not taboo.

Taxi-dancing was popular in early- to mid-20th century America, when most courtship still included dancing and did not, theoretically, at least, go much beyond kissing and a feel. A “taxi dancer” sold what is erotically or sentimentally consoling in a dance in the same way a sex worker sells the customer an orgasm, or its subjective equivalent, in a sex act.

Taxi dancing is said to be still current in some parts of the world. They must be dull parts indeed.

It is clear that firm, professional, control of the flicker of consciousness is absolutely essential to any successful esthetic consideration of taxi dancing.

 

Counter-intuitively, the sense in the inevitable slow stickiness of taxi-dancing is best got at by slowing everything down – Photo ©Gregory Batardon 

Anything else would be anthropology, not dance. Watching an actual evening of it would be the entertainment equivalent of watching Karine eating a honey melon, for which she has a feral passion.

But Karine’s passion and manner of passionate eating, though much more interesting to me personally than the commercial allurements of taxi dancing or taxi dancers ever could be, is no more a work of art than any other passion or practice. Alas, Karine’s melon eating is just her, Karine, just as taxi dancers without Hominal’s intervention would be just themselves.

“So, Karine,” I might say to Karine, today, during a tense meeting someplace in town, and without a trace of bitterness, “Here’s why Hominal’s quasi-movementless ‘Taxi Dancers’ is good art and why your judgments are plain wrong and your treatment of me was scandalously unjust.”

I might or might not say this while looking her in the eye and add that I knew then that she was planning to dump me and just using the occasion to prepare the big push.

Your command of your melon-eating tempo, Karine, I’d continue, unlike Hominal’s command of her taxi-dancing, I’d say, is entirely determined by and inseparable from, your story of yourself. The melon passion is just a subsection of your way of eating anything you really like, ma chère, my dear ex-compagne: slow and steady she goes, look, lick, suck in, loll around, grind, swallow, long breath…  your body tension rises, your upper back, exquisitely between the sharp points of your shoulder blades, lightly heats and slightly wets, then, as the taste spreads through you, your tension slackens…

It’s gorgeous really, even now, Karine, it all makes me breathe hard, but it isn’t art, or, even, porno for poor sots.

It’s just you.

Love or passion for a story, a person or a thing, I’d continue to say, is often mistaken for esthetic appreciation, as esthetic emotion is often mistaken for love. But the only thing the two feelings share is the power to make you laugh or cry, move mountains or throw yourself from same.

While you might learn to control your tempo, Karine, as Hominal controls the tempo of her piece, and thus take power over the flicker of my consciousness, while you might learn, Karine, even, to instrumentalize your melon-eating passion in pursuit of some goal outside of yourself, it would be, precisely, for yourself, with your tempo matched to your sensibility and the needs of your ongoing story.

God, I wish I’d known this before.

Unlike the person Karine, the choreographer Hominal does use her control of tempo to alter my consciousness of the sensibilities framed within the suspended and circumscribed taxi-dancing story.

Counter-intuitively, the sense in the inevitable slow stickiness of taxi-dancing is best got at by slowing everything down to near motionless. 

To do the same as Hominal, Karine, I’d lecture, you’d have to make up a story called something like “Honey Melon Eater”, about a “Karine” that can never be the ongoing you.

Didn’t you once tell me, I’d say, pointedly, that I was doing just this, making you into a work of art and then treating you as my finished masterpiece? I might, at this point, wave my hand to order a beer, sitting quietly awhile, Hemingway-like, letting my thoughts develop.

The women of “Taxi Dancers”, even the fake ones, are as beautiful as they should be. How beautiful is that? – Photo ©Gregory Batardon

When the beer arrived, I might take a sip and continue that a loving observer might be able to enjoy watching your honey-melon eating, Karine, just as a client might enjoy looking at comely taxi-dancers. But since, like an actual working taxi dancer, you are simply expressing, being, yourself in a way I like or already understand, I am a just a voyeur, welcome or not, not a spectator enjoying a work of art.

You see, Karine, I’d conclude, perhaps clapping my hand to my contracting breast, ‘though my life is a path littered with error, I could never, ever, mistake you for a performance piece.

I might now take a long draught of my beer, then, abstractly slap my pockets for cigarettes – when I first knew her, I was smoking. Fifteen kilos less.

Emerging from my abstraction, I might tell Karine that controlling dance tempo is not without challenges for a spectator. “Predator species such as Hominins or Velociraptor,” I’d say, “use movement to identify edibles, including stories, sensibility and sense. So, slow or absent tempos, as Taxi Dancers features, require some self-discipline (and perhaps only eccentrics are capable of it).”

She would flinch guiltily at that, bless her heart.

But I would ignore her discomfort.

I might continue that once a spectator gets a little past his or her own ordinary savagery, he or she sees that the quasi-immobility of the “Taxi Dancers” performers enables the spectator, indeed, forces the spectator, to focus hard on the sensibility represented.

The sensibilities of the taxi dancing tableau, or of taxi dancers, are obscured behind a series of codified movements, gestures and expressions. Slowing it down, slowing them down, enables the spectator to consider them a little – a huge percentage of what goes into taxi-dancing or sex working, it seems to me, is attitude, posture and promise, not action.

So, Karine, I might say, decisively, bref, it is the non-movement part of the performance that makes “Taxi Dancers” a good contemporary dance piece.

“Finally,” I would tell her, raising my right index finger in the air, as if to poke it up God’s ass, “Taxi Dancers” is certainly art and certainly the art of dance, but even after seeing it, I can’t tell you specifically what the sex-equivalent consolation of taxi dancing might be.

True, as you know, I’ve read the Brothers Karamazov, more than once, too, and still don’t understand life, despite Zen meditation supplements.

Also, I still identify with Sade and Raskolnikov more than with Jesus and Buddha. 

So, Karine, I might say, maybe my inability to learn anything specific is no surprise.

Besides, should I learn anything?

“Taxi Dancers,” aside from being a good piece of dance and entertaining me into the bargain, reminded me that I do love a slow.

In waking that memory in me, what Hominal showed me comes down to something much better than learning, to that da-sein thing that is so good in a slow dance, whether it’s with you, Karine, I would like to say, or even with a certain Scotch floozy – Do you remember?

Do you remember when you pulled me off the couch to kiss me hard in the bay window while we danced Mylène Farmer’s “California”? 

Meditations on John Ashbery [by Vincent Katz]

Juan Martín del Potro is playing Rafael Nadal in the Semifinal at the U.S. Open, and suddenly I am thinking how John Ashbery could, had he been watching, turn all this — the court, the colors, the fans, the ball persons, the players and their ultimate struggle — into poetry, and that thought inspires me to want to write poetry.

John’s poetry was, and is, always so inspiring. From Some Trees to The Tennis Court Oath, Rivers and Mountains, The Double Dream of Spring, Three Poems, and Vermont Notebook — each book was a reinvention of what poetry can be, and what John could be as a person. He felt unlimited, and that was truly exciting, as exciting as his unpredictable word choices and combinations of language-types. It’s funny, in a way that makes total sense chronologically, that what these reinventions most remind of are the exciting swerves of some of my favorite rock and roll musicians — David Bowie primarily, but also the Beatles of the late 1960s, Lou Reed as well. John seemed to tap into the sense of the artist as, ultimately, a performer. He had a vast knowledge of music, of many varied aspects of culture, and he seemed to desire and be able to perform different versions of himself, different selves.

After Vermont Notebook, with the publication of Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror, John became the iconic international figure he has remained.

As he put it, in “As One Put Drunk into the Packet-Boat:

 

                                            …But the summer
Was well along, not yet past the mid-point
But full and dark with the promise of that fullness,
That time when one can no longer wander away
And even the least attentive fall silent
To watch the thing that is prepared to happen.

Thank you, John, for making it so clear that poetry can be so exciting.

Remembering Kate Millett [by Catharine R. Stimpson]

                 

Kate Millett, sculptor, author and feminist, on her booted stool by her useless piano, two-headed bed and bachelor chest at Judson Memorial Church in New York, March 1st, 1967. Photograph: Neal Boenzi/The New York Times

             Kate Millett died on September 6, 2017, in Paris, eight days before her 83^rd birthday. We met in the mid-1960s when we were doctoral students at Columbia University and part-time lecturers in English at Barnard College. For years, we were close friends, and then, without any quarrel, without any design, we met with less and less frequency. However, I never lost touch with my feelings of love, some concern, and respect. She was streaked with genius. Now, I must be one of her sorrowing mourners.

            The first time I heard her voice was over the phone in 1963 or 1964. I was living over an Irish bar in an apartment with a Pullman kitchen and a pink-tiled bathroom at 1254 Lexington Avenue in the Yorkville District of New York. I was experimenting with the contours of my adult life. I had begun teaching at Barnard. I was going through one of the transitions of that period, from a putative heterosexuality to a precarious bisexuality to a settled if partially secretive lesbianism. When a women’s sports magazine later satirically selected me for its Hall of Fame, my sport was “Hide and Seek.”

            That first conversation with Kate was professional and correct. She had been told to call me for advice because she was in a situation that was similar to mine. She had a B.A. from Oxford. I had one from Cambridge. She had gone to Japan for a while, but she was now back. She was entering the doctoral program at Columbia. I was already there. What was it like? I am, I said, truthfully, an indifferent and probably irritating graduate student, but here is how I managed the situation with credits from an English university. She also inquired about teaching at Barnard. The students are wonderful, I answered. .

            We ended up with adjacent desks, two of the four in an office on the 4^th floor of Barnard Hall. We were urgently earnest, enthusiastic teachers, who adored literature and learning, and who marked student papers with zeal. We once calculated that with our classes and our attention to student writing and our conferences, we were earning $.81 per hours. We seemed to understand each other, a balance of seriousness and irony. Soon we became known as the “two Kates.” All the pictures in her current obituaries, whether of the young or the aging Kate, show her with long hair, but in the office, her hair was in a bun, and she wore long skirts and shoes with wooden heels. She seemed to be emulating a stereotype of a female Oxford don. I, on the other hand, danced around in mini-skirts and ran my hands through my curly black locks.

            Soon I met Fumio Yoshimura, the artist, whom she had met in Japan. She had helped him through the death of his wife there. He came with her to America. Kate would say that they married because of immigration. She also murmured, muttered once about pleasing her family. But it was also a marriage of love, support, and shared devotion to making art. Sexual Politics is dedicated to him. Their marriage was no dash to City Hall, but in a church, albeit a progressive one. After the wedding dinner the night before, we were all hung over, but I could still notice that she was wearing a white bridal gown, and Fumio was ceremoniously dressed, and Kate’s brother-in-law walked her down the aisle. An officer in the military, he wore his dress uniform.

            Kate and Fumio were living on the Bowery, and Kate persuaded me to move downtown. I found my loft at 352 Bowery. We were neighbors at home and work. Then, in 1966, she walked in the office, holding a piece of mimeographed paper. “Stimps,” she said, I could be either Stimps or Stimpson, “there’s this meeting about a civil rights organization for women. We should check it out.” She was already a fervent supporter of black civil rights. The meeting took place in a church office on Morningside Heights, a few rows of folding metal chairs. Instantly, it made sense to be there. Like starfish, we suddenly grew back missing limbs. She became chair of the Education Committee, I of the Image Committee. Competition for these posts was minimal.

            In Changing the Subject: How the Women of Columbia Shaped the Way We Think of Sex and Politics (2004), Rosalind Rosenberg writes ably about these days on Morningside Heights. For Kate and me, moving back and forth from Downtown to uptown, from politics to scholarship, was a seamless journey. Sexual Politics, famously her doctoral dissertation, embodies this. I still remember, with some chagrin, sitting on a beach with Kate. She, Fumio, Ruby (my partner at the time), and I were on vacation. I was reading a draft passage about D.H. Lawrence. “Kate,” I said, “you can’t say that about Lawrence. He’s a great writer.” In the sun, on the sand, she was non-committal.

            Looming behind Sexual Politics, and perhaps insufficiently recognized, were two formidable intellectual forces: Simone de Beauvoir and the Second Sex, translated into English only a few years before, and Steven Marcus, the Columbia scholar who was her adviser. Kate was scrupulous about her intellectual debts. In her “Preface,” she writes, “I am particularly grateful to Steven Marcus who gave the manuscript the most careful reading and could always find time and patience to insist rhetoric give way to reason.”

            Kate was an artist. One of my most treasured possessions is her sculpture of a diner at a table, with fork and knife pointing in the wrong direction. I bought this representation of frustration, paying $15 per month for a period of two or three years. Kate had a passionate imagination. Yet, she was a scholar, a woman of research and reason. She was proud, legitimately, of her first at Oxford. Later, when we looked at each other, we saw paths not taken. We were, of course, mildly competitive, and I was wildly jealous of her portrait on the cover of Time magazine in 1970. In Flying, she gave me two names, Emerson and Morgan, both a sly reference to certain of my tastes. Was I the woman who lived downtown but who did not take up the rugged rigors of the artist’s life? As for Kate, she should have been a tenured professor of literature who wrote burning books and made art, an outlier in the profession who would have become an icon.

            As her obituaries point out, the Barnard English Department did not renew Kate’s contract, a terrible wound for her. It was not only her politics, not only her presence. Polite though she could be, her direct gaze could be discomforting. Some members of the Department, now dead, were narrow prigs. One woman thought a passage from Lawrence, on a syllabus, was too bald and bold for Barnard undergraduates. One man harrumped to me that she had not written him a thank-you note after she taught his course in Victorian literature when he was on leave. Kate did stay on at Barnard for a little while. Powerful members of the faculty, such as Mary Mothersill, then the chair of the Philosophy Department, helped to arrange a position as director of the Experimental College (new, of course). Perhaps, after Sexual Politics, Kate did not need the academy, but she would have been an astonishing professor.

            I have all of Kate’s books, including her early pamphlets, except for my inscribed first edition of Sexual Politics. I often wonder who nicked it. After I heard about her death, I ran my hand over them. I thought that I must write about them all, because her cultural reputation cannot be reduced to Sexual Politics. The books have a consistent spine. They are about the suffering of the powerless, about the hell into which the powerful cast the powerless. Kate urges us, forces us, to look into hell and then dares us to put out its fires. In her cosmology, ethics, sense of martyrdom, ferocious capacity for hard work, and anguish, she was, I believe, radically Roman Catholic, the rebuked church of her youth.

                  One headline in an obituary called Sexual Politics a “Bible of Feminism.” Another named her a “’high priestess’ of second-wave feminism.” Perhaps their writers knew more than they knew. I have imagined us together in Medieval times, before Protestants so rubbished women’s convents. We would have been in a convent, a place for women who relished holding books and manuscripts open before them. But, like some of those irrepressible and renegade saints, she would have been difficult. She would dispatched her disruptive messages, written in both impeccable Latin and in the vernacular, and she would have walked out into the countryside, perhaps in sandals, perhaps in her bare feet, founding new communities of yearning believers.

Dear Kate, I believe this fantasy would have amused you.

Catharine R. Stimpson is University Professor and Dean Emerita of the Graduate School of Arts and Science at New York University. Stimpson is a pioneer in the study of women and gender, a founder of feminist criticism, and is also known for her role as a public intellectual and her public service, which includes her wide-ranging writing on the humanities, liberal arts, and the university.

Remembering John Ashbery [by Jane Hammond]

 

The Female Form (by Mitch Sisskind)

                                         
                                        This is the female form.
                                                                --Whitman.
                                                      

Poking around the secessionist corpses

After a sharp engagement one of the boys

Whistled and said, ‘What have we here?’

A fine-looking dead rebel lass it was whose

Dishevelment teased out such crudity

In the boys that our captain, a puffed-up

College man, said, ‘This coarse ridicule

‘Of the female form and, what’s more,

‘Indifference to the tragedy of the girl’s

‘Death I hope is consequence of the war

‘And not some deep-seated inherent flaw

‘In your natures like half-wittedness or

‘Whatever shamefully cruel propensity.

‘Inter her with full ceremonial rites!’

 

"Tower Two" [by Kirsten Chen]

Tower Two

I have since imagined you--
      a thousand pounds ofpaper, escaping windows
      floating to safety
      from a hundred stories higher.

I have since spoken to you on the bathroom floor
where towel meets tile
where I sat while you washed
the subway off your scalp,
where I asked you, nightly, what you had for lunch
then told you about my day, my lunch,
buttered corn and mashed potatoes.
Every day like Thanksgiving.

I have since kept you in a rubber band
tied around my dollars,
and in other quirks and quiddities
inherited like skin.

And I have worn your book bag from the bombing
With my string braided bracelet in the zipper loop
until someone stole it at the gym.

But I have avoided your smoke-stained shirt
from that same prescient day, hanging lonesome
in the basement,
too much a symbol of the time
you got away.

"What's My Line?" (of 11 / 11 / 56) [by David Lehman]

Episode of November 11, 1956, "What's My Line?" moderated by the erudite John Daly, with panelists Arlene Francis, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Random House publisher (and Columbia grad) Bennett A. Cerf. And who's the mystery fourth panelists? One half of the reigning supreme comedy duo of Martin and Lewis that is about to dissolve after ten glorious years: Joey Lovich, I mean Jerry Lewis, in character. One guest with an odd occupation on that evening shortly afterr Election Day, a fellow named Nixon, albeit a Brit,, was "either a mindreader or pickpocket," as Kilgallen correctly guessed. Host Daly pointed out that Dorothy had scored a "double shot," since "the great Nixon's" son, a chap named Vic Perry, had appeared on the program a season earlier as a pickpocket -- "and took the watch off my wrist," Daly said..Notice the tiny amount of prize money. The blindfolded panel identified Walt Disney -- who gave his yes and no answers in French, Spanish, and German -- with no trouble.

Note the intelligence of panelists and host, their vocabulary, their syntax, their pronunciation of the language. As a high-school student I watched "What's My Line?" most Sunday nights. It went on, I believe, at 10:30 and lasted half an hour, so it was with a certain melancholy mixed with pleasure that i watched each week. I remember when Brooklyn-born Barbra Streisand, a big hit on Broadway, was the mystery guest whom the panelists, blindfolded, had to identify on the basis of ten yes-or-no questions. Possibly the best guest panelist ever was Groucho Marx. on a Sunday evening in 1959 when Claudette Colbert, then on Broadway, was the mystery guest. Groucho cracked up everyone, even the usually poker-faced Daly. The folks with peculiar occupations that evening included a prison warden with an amazing resemblance to Nikita Khrushchev and a stunning blonde from Florida who made her living as a professional wrestler.

I also love "What's My Line?" because of the colloquial meaning of "line" at the time. -- DL

I Saw IT (by Mitch Sisskind)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

After a very bad summer, Hollywood is looking to IT for a bailout. IT might 
work, we'll see. IT is a horror movie version of Steven Spielberg-style
romanticism: we meet children -- pre-pubescent children -- who are naturally
good and even wise. These dear beings are confronted by various "monsters," 
including real monsters, older bully adolescents, or adults, all of whom have
been transformed by something (time + sex) into malevolent grotesques.

IT can be understood as a commercialized and creatively compromised 
depiction of tweens painfully starting to engage what Michel Leiris
in his powerful book "Manhood" describes as the brutal hell of adult
sexuality. This is by no means a new story line. It's an extremely well-trod
path. 

What's less well-trod -- and what IT called to mind for me -- is what new
IT must be faced when we come out the other end of Leiris's sexual inferno.
Entering that "hell" was hard and scary. Leaving it might be all too easy
and for that reason even scarier. Well, as Hemingway wrote in one of his
own coming-of-age stories, "better not think about it." Or IT. Oy.
 

 

Remembering John Ashbery: "You were often delighted." [by Danielle Pafunda]

 

A photo I took of a newspaper clipping John Ashbery tore out for me (21 years ago, I can't believe the thing's still in one piece and among my oft moved belongings!)

I have an uninterrogated belief that all language is accessible to the dead. I have trouble conceiving of the afterlife, but of this I am sure: either retroactively or in their present state, the dead receive our transmissions. And though I ought to have written this letter earlier, it’s only now that I know what it contains. Dear John, last winter walking through the crowded AWP bookfair, I bumped into a writer I hadn’t seen in twenty years. In your fall 1996 poetry workshop, C and I sat across the table from each other. I remember C in ironic polo shirts, maybe a club vibe. I leaned thrift store and was bad at parties (I went to them, I acted weird). Here we were in 2017 looking like the middle-aged Gen X parents we are. We knew each other immediately and smiled. We’re friends on social media, of course, and I follow his writing, but I’d like to think we really remember each other from your heavy wooden seminar table in Olin Hall. We hugged, caught up. Mostly, we talked about you. How we channel you in our teaching, how we try to model your patience. You were so patient with us! As kids, we hadn’t read Moore or Bishop. Do you remember that? You didn’t judge us, unkempt readers, but the following week brought copious photocopies. My introduction to “The Fish.” Somehow I got it in my head that Moore and Bishop were buried in our little graveyard on the dirt road shortcut that connected North and South campus. Over time, I’d come to picture them holding hands. I imagined you’d told us that, until I one day said it aloud. My memory righted itself. You’d simply described the complex friendship that led me to imagine such an internment! You brought us translations and hoaxes and the first literary journals I’d ever held. When a student submitted a snide caricature of teen mothers at the mall, you weren’t unkind to her, but to my great relief duly firm in your critique. I would file away your articulate expressions—how to hold one’s gaze softly on a student or class, which, though generally beloved, has surprised even your seasoned self with something blunt and foolish. How to communicate happier surprise, lights flipping on behind the brow. How to simultaneously contain and communicate delight in the corners of one’s mouth. You were often delighted.

In my end-of-semester crit, you said “There is something almost Plath-like in the intensity she brings to poetry.” It was a warm ingot, your approval not just of me, but of her before she was de rigueur in the classroom. You might remember handing me a newspaper clipping, detail from a painting by de Kooning that you’d found in the Times. It reminded you of one of my poems. I’ve moved a dozen times since then, but I carry that with me. I carry the issue of our little campus journal Sui Generis to which you generously contributed. I carry that crit with your signature and the odd edges where your typewriter ribbon faltered.

Not unlike you—though I’d never imagine my memory quite so vast or precise—not unlike you, I remember everything. I remember my plaid flannel skirt the day I rushed in almost late having had lunch with my ex whom I still wasn’t over, but loving poetry more than enough to ditch him in the parking lot outside South Hall. I remember R’s poem that would get published in APR, the sestina including Mozart, breasts, elephants. I remember he was a Rhodes Scholar and I said something very naive in a conversation with him about Can Xue, which I’d still like to amend. I remember A whose hair reminded me of a rooster’s comb wrote a poem called Arcadia, and one about February I quite liked, or was that Z the Marxist who would pretend to have married the glamorous D senior year, but they were just having us on? I remember there were a lot of young straight white men in that class who admired you and sought your favor, but it neither softened nor hardened you toward them. I remember you were the advisor of a brilliant young woman whose gorgeous poems were nothing like yours. She wrote you a faintly psychedelic homage. I remember I trusted you to read us, read to us, and guide us. I remember how well I deserved that A-, too. A little minus for the half-semester it took me to gain purchase. Hard-won you said of my advances, and they were. I remember you had startling bright eyes, you know that, everyone knows that, and your voice was agile. You liked a good joke, you told a good joke. I would see you while I was in the city, I’d meet visual artists you worked with, and have teachers who studied you. I’d think of you as I walked past O’Hara’s residence. Later you would say of me, Danielle Pafunda, I remember her. And that would strike me very fine praise. I don’t talk a lot about having studied with you. I don’t know if it’s apparent in my work—certainly no one ever says so. What I do know is that when I later took my comprehensive exams, reading 300 books that year, writing off-the-cuff 9-page exams in 3-hours, speaking in a 3-hour blur for orals, coming out bruised and grinning and sure I could feel my brain’s neural pathways bloom, that was how it felt to read your work when I was young, and how it remains now that I’m middle.

Too many of my professors have passed out of the world, particularly too many from Bard, a strange and precious home. I took this one hard. I cried because the slippage of retrospect in which I know that without you I’d have been some other poet. So might every poet I know be some other poet. I cried wishing I’d stayed near home and spent more hours with you. I cried because you’d been the teacher of my teachers and my teachers themselves were grieving. I cried because I was so glad to cry over something warm and rich and wonderful when these past many months have been pulling from us quick, lean, salted sobs. My heart was inside out. My head, too, unfurled. Anyhow, thank you for everything, for every single thing you gave me, and the things you gave my friends and admireds. Thank you for writing poems I can reread until the end of poems which is never, and read aloud to my gentle 8-year-old who favors Schuyler and O’Hara, and now you, he says, hmmm that’s a very good poem, it’s calming and interesting. I wish you gentle passage, I send my love, I’ll hope to apprehend you when I'm too gone home to the light or whatever is next.

Danielle Pafunda is the author of eight books, including The Dead Girls Speak in Unison (Bloof Books 2017), Natural History Rape Museum (Bloof Books 2013), and the forthcoming Beshrew That Heart That Makes My Heart To Groan (Dusie Press Books). 

Art Tatum, "Tea for Two" [by David Lehman]

When Art Tatum played piano, God was in the house

 

JA Reads and Explains"These Lacustrine Cities" on Bruce Kawin's Radio Show (1966)

Jeff Hipsher has posted this excellent interview that Bruce Kawin conducted with John Ashbery in, I would guess, spring 1966. At the time Bruce hosted a half-hour radio show, "Literary Workshop," on WKCR, Columbia's radio station. (He was editor-in-chief of Columbia Review in my freshman year.) The interview begins with JA reading "These Lacustrine Cities," the opening poem in Rivers and Mountains, his 1965 collection. Far less reticent than in later years, JA -- then still in his 30s -- responds at length to questions and says he believes that all poetry must communicate and that he hopes his poems do. The line between "incomprehensible" and "obscure" must be drawn, he says. He patiently explains "These  Lacustrine Cities" line by line. The pronouns in his poems, he says, "can never be trusted to refer to any single person for any length of time," and illustrates with examples. The conversation with Kawin is meant to disprove that poetry is "incomprehensible."

 

After doing his best to illuminate "These Lacustrine Cities," John is asked to read the poem a second time, and he does. Then he reads the title poem of River and Mountains, "Civilization and Its Discontents," "The Ecclesiast," and others from the recently published volume, which had been nominated for the National Book Award. The show lasts about 27 minutes. -- DL

 

https://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Ashbery/Ashbery-John_Complete-Reading_Interview-Bruce-Kawin_WKCR_5-5-66.mp3

 

 painting by Fairfield Porter,John Ashbery (Argyle Socks), 1952

David Lehman, the series editor of The Best American Poetry, is also the editor of the Oxford Book of American Poetry. His newest book of poetry is Poems in the Manner Of. Other poetry books include New and Selected Poems, Yeshiva Boys, When a Woman Loves a Man, and The Daily Mirror. His most recent nonfiction book is Sinatra’s Century: One Hundred Notes on the Man and His World. He teaches at The New School and lives in New York City and Ithaca, New York. David Lehman has been writing “poems in the manner of” for years, in homage to the poems and people that have left an impression, experimenting with styles and voices that have lingered in his mind. He has gathered these pieces in a striking book of poems that channels poets from Walt Whitman to Sylvia Plath and also calls upon for inspiration jazz standards, Freudian questionnaires, and astrological profiles. 

Daniel Nester is an essayist, poet, journalist, editor, teacher, and Queen fan. He is the author most recently of Shader: 99 Notes on Car Washes, Making Out in Church, Grief, and Other Unlearnable Subjects. His previous books include How to Be Inappropriate (Soft Skull, 2010), God Save My Queen I and II, and The Incredible Sestina Anthology, which he edited. His writing has appeared or is forthcoming in the New York Times, Buzzfeed, The Atlantic, and American Poetry Review, and collected in Best American Poetry, Third Rail: The Poetry of Rock and Roll, and Now Write! Nonfiction. He is associate professor of English at The College of Saint Rose in Albany, NY. 

Susan Comninos is a freelance arts journalist and poet. Her book reviews, author profiles and trend stories have appeared in The Atlantic Online, The Boston Globe, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor and Jewish Daily Forward, among others. Her poetry’s most recently appeared in literary journals including Rattle, Harvard Review Online, Subtropics, TriQuarterly, Quarterly West, The Cortland Review, Nashville Review, The Common, Hobart and Southern Humanities Review. In 2010, she won the Yehuda Halevi Poetry Contest run by Tablet. Last year, she won a Tishman Review Staff Favorite prize, a VQR Writers’ Conference Scholarship award and a Poets Respond (to the news) contest run by Rattle. She has taught at The University of Michigan, RPI, Schenectady JCC, Temple Sinai in Saratoga and The Arts Center for the Capital Region.

I Bowled Like Shit (by Mitch Sisskind)

Smig, drinking at the Timber Lanes bar,

Makes a feeble dumbshow of his face

Toward whomever – myself and others,

For Smig is well loved there – he makes

A feeble dumbshow if anybody inquires

What his problem is or why does he look

So very sad just now as if his best friend

Died or he got laid off that day from his

Union plumbing job until at last Anika,

The female bartender, also well-loved,

Asks with a wary compassionate mien,

‘Has the cat got your tongue tonight

Or something?' and Smigelski answers

'I bowled like shit! Goddamn it! Fuck!'

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

What if poetry were something else entirely? Remembering John Ashbery (Terence Winch)

I met John Asbery in November of 1973 when I went with a group of friends to hear him read in DC. Maybe it was the Library of Congress. I can’t remember. Michael Lally had turned me on to John’s 1970 book, The Double Dream of Spring, which knocked me out.  This was poetry that was at once grand, symphonic, silly, profound, and comic all at once. His formal virtuosity and his mastery of language set a new standard for many of us young poets back then.

We stayed in touch over the years. John read in Washington with some regularity and would often put me on the guest list for pre- or post-reading get-togethers. He loved a good party, preferably one that included plenty of drink, dope, wit, and attractive young men. [photo at left by Allan Penn from the New York Times Magazine]

He was extraordinarily prolific. In his 60s, he published one of my favorite Ashbery books—the dazzling, monumental Flow Chart, a 216-page epic of the imagination that I regard as one of the most significant works of literature in English (“It’s my Sonata of Experience, and I wrote it for you”).  I count another 14 books after that (not including his essays, translations, and art criticism), an astonishing late-life output that continued up to 2016’s Commotion of the Birds.  It seemed like every 18 months or so, a new Ashbery book would show up. I waited for, bought, and read each one, hoping they would keep coming forever. John’s death yesterday, 3 September 2017, at age 90 brings that streak to an end. Though I hope a few more posthumous books will appear to help all his friends and readers adjust to a world that no longer includes him.

My deepest condolences to David Kermani, John’s spouse, friend, collaborator, and companion for the past 40 years or so.

This evening I read though Flow Chart. Here are a few excerpts that called out to me:

 

Words, however, are not the culprit. They are at worst a placebo,

leading nowhere (though nowhere, it must be added, can sometimes be a    cozy

place, preferable in many cases to somewhere)...        

◙

 

  

 

...Still, life is reasonably absorbing

and there’s lots of nice people around. Most are well fed

and relaxing, and one can improve one’s mind a little

by going out to a film or having a chat with that special friend; and before

you know it it’s time to brush your teeth and go to bed.”   

◙

So what’s

to feel nervous about? We all know that we have to live for a certain time and then

unfortunately we must die, and after that no one is sure what happens. Accounts vary.  

◙

...I have the feeling my voice is just for me,

that no one else has ever heard it, yet I keep mumbling the litany

of all that has ever happened to me, childish pranks included, and when the voluminous

sun sets, its bag full, one can question these and other endeavors silently:

how far wrong did I go?    

◙

I’m the experimental model of which mankind is still dreaming, though to myself

I’m full of unworked-out bugs and stagefright...     

◙

Any day now you must start to dwell in it,

the poetry, and for this, grave preparations must be made, the walks of sand

raked, the rubble wall picked clean of dead vine stems, but what

if poetry were something else entirely, not this purple weather

with the eye of a god attached, that sees

inward and outward? What if it were only a small, other way of living,

like being in the wind?    

◙

I must ask you now to leave. It seems we are fresh out of turnips.   

 

The Library of America pays tribute to John Ashbery

 

 

 

 

 

Geoffrey O'Brien, outgoing editor-in-chief of the Library of America, has put together this package of short reminiscences from writers on whom JA had a major influence.

Photo credit: Star Black (at Tibor de Nagy Gallery, 2008)

THE HISTORY OF MY LIFE

Once upon a time there were two brothers.
Then there was only one: myself.
 
I grew up very fast, before learning to drive,
even. There was I: a stinking adult.
 
I thought of developing interests
someone might take an interest in. No soap.
 
I became very weepy for what had seemed
like the pleasant early years. As I aged
 
increasingly, I also grew more charitable
with regard to my thoughts and ideas,
 
thinking them at least as good as the next man’s.
Then a great devouring cloud
 
came and loitered on the horizon, drinking
it up, for what seemed like months or years.

from Your Name Here (2000)

Is a market top on tap? "Noodles" weighs in [by David Lehman]

Everyone knows that stocks these days, especially US stocks, are overvalued. But picking a market top is no easy matter. David Aronson, former professor at Baruch College,now president of a research firm that develops methods to enhance stock market trading systems, says, "the process of topping out can take a really long period of time, evolving over a year or more." Aronson demonstrated his credentials as a two-armed economist when he told Mark Hulbert of the Wall Street Journal.that only time will tell whether the coming top will precede a major bear market or something less dire, something of merely "intermediate-term significance." (See The Myth of Stock-Market Tops," September 5, 2017, p. . R1). 

Admirers of Sergio Leone's masterpiece Once Upon a Time in America know that the character named David Aaronson, played by Robert de Niro (top left), bears the nickname "Noodles" from the time he and his buddy Maxie were the most notable personalities of a gang of Jewish teenagers in New York's Lower East Side in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Noodles remains "overweight" on emerging-market equities. as well as overweight in the old-fashioned sense, as befits a man of his mature years who has done his share of losing, done what he had to do and now finds it all so amusing to think he did all that . "All that"  includes knifing a vicious rival, for which act he serves time. He has fallen hopelessly in love with Deborah (played by Jennifer Connelly as a youth [top center] and by Elizabeth McGovern as a grown up [top right]). She is his one true love, yet, alas,he date rapes her in the back of a rented limousine. He has also smoked his share of opium with the song "Amapola" in his brain, cried in his sleep, carried on with Tuesday Weld, a decoy during a jewel heist, and teamed up with "Uncle" Maxie (James Woods) and buddies to smuggle booze during prohibition and run a fabulous speakeasy,

Thirty years have gone by in some remote upstate burg after his gang buddies are shot in one fatal last caper. During this time, and prior to mysterious letters that lead him to return to New York City and learn that he had been deceived and betrayed, David Aaranson has had the opportunity to make an independent study of stock market trends. In the book that made his academic reputation, Aaranson writes that "bottoms are easier to identify, in real time, than tops." When asked whether he had in mind either Jennifer Connelly or Elizabeth McGovern, Noodles just winked. 

The take-away: Major bull market tops are a process, not an event. The long-term topping process may have begun without anyone taking note. Many people have shunned the market since the 2008-09 collapse. Only when they start buying stocks will we know for sure that the long-awaited end has come. Will there be a correction -- or a crash? How painful will it be? The jury is still out..Meanwhile when they ask me what the market will do tomorrow, I always say: it will fluctuate -- DL

Memories of You: John Ashbery [by DL]

 

<<<
Waking skies at sunrise
Every sunset too
Seems to be bringing me
Memories of you. . .
>>>

JA's love of popular song has not been sufficiently documented. He adored the Gershwins' "Love Walked In," for example. Back in 1998, on my telephone answering machine I had Sinatra singing the opening of "It All Depends on You." JA left a message: "Hello, Old Blue Eyes." 

A year later on the machine I used the opening of "Accentuate the Positive" as sung by the song's lyricist, Johnny Mercer. JA's message: "This is Mr. In-Between."

In a restaurant in Hudson NY with an old-fashioned juke box, circa October 2000, JA sang along with Tex Beneke and the Glenn Mlller band's rendition of "I've Got a Gal in Kalamazoo. . .zoo . . zoo.  .zoo." That gal was "a real pipperoo." Another time, we did an impromptu duet of "Blues in the Night": "Hear that lonesome whistle / Blowin' across the trestle Hoowee! / A hoowee ta hoowee, clickety clack / It's echoing back the blues in the night." JA liked the "hoowee" line in articular.

There was one night, I think in 2009, when JA and David Kermani and some others -- Jim Cummins and David Schloss, Mark Bibbins and Brian Chambers -- came over for dinner. Stacey (who made bouillabaisse) had bought a CD of Charles Trenet,the French songwriter and performer whom my friend Roger Gilbert has described as "the French equivalent of Irving Berlin, except that he could also sing." (Trenet's "La Mer" became Bobby Darin's great "Beyond the Sea.)" A Trenet song, the title of which roughly translates as "don't park your horse in the coatroom," came on, and John got so excited he started dancing in his seat.  

I love Larry Rivers's picture of JA typing (circa 1975). He was writing "Pyrography" on a commission. Star Black took the picture on the lower right following a John Ashbery poetry forum I moderated at the New School in February 2011.-- DL

Fragments 90-102 from Selected Squibs [by Alan Ziegler]

90. In the freshman dining hall, a maraschino cherry tops most desserts. We save the cherry for last and ritually eat it simultaneously. One night, we see four industrial sized cans of maraschino cherries stacked in the hallway. We take one back to the dorm. After the third night, none of us will ever eat a maraschino cherry again.

91. Fall 1969. My girlfriend and I are riding with her photography teacher through the Vermont countryside. He pulls over to take pictures of the late-afternoon leaf collages and says, “Do me a favor and take off your clothes and walk up that path holding hands. I’ll only shoot from the back, no one will know it’s you.” She says yes, I say no, and we don’t. I wish I had said yes so now I could see our springtime asses descending into autumn.

92. Summer 1965. We eat even more quietly than usual. Halfway through, I sneak a piece of chicken under the table for Duke. He doesn’t take it. He’s old and feeble, maybe the nose is going on him, so I look down. He’s not there. My father turns away, and my mother says, “The less said the better.”

93. Spring 1965. During my road test, the examiner asks me to cross a six-lane highway. I get to the traffic island when I realize there’s an onslaught of cars coming from the right. I squeeze the brake pedal and hope everyone stays in their lanes. The examiner looks up from his clipboard and calmly asks: “Do you see where you are?” “Yes.” “Do you understand how you got here?” “Yes.” He makes a notation and clicks his pen shut.

94. Someone tells me that in 1961 he was walking through Harvard Yard when he overheard a drunken argument. “Stop it, Bobby!” “Aw come on, Joanie, come back here!” I repeat the story many times, to the great pleasure of my listeners, who choose, as I do, based on no evidence, to believe the voices belonged to Dylan and Baez. 

95. Bobby Kennedy, campaigning for the Senate, is standing up in the back of his convertible as it drives slowly alongside the cheering crowd. He waves and smiles as people reach to shake his hand. He leans over, as if levitating, clutching briefly hand after hand. I run around to the other side, and see an aide on the car floor, holding Bobby by his calves.

96. 1961. At the Woolworths lunch counter, my mother sits on my left and a classmate on my right. I am eating French fries, which I saved for last. My friend is done with his meal. He reaches over for one of the fries, then another and another. I am in distress. My mother says, “Let me see those fries,” and moves the plate closer to her. She takes the tiniest piece and says, “They’re good.” I resume eating, the plate out of my friend’s reach.

97. 1950s. Each year, the Village of Lynbrook sets up a crèche on the grass a few blocks from my house. Each year my friend and I rearrange the animals. We have no idea what any of it means.

98. The 1954 Ford Fairlane is two-tone, blue and white, and looks like no car I’ve ever seen. Shiny new, and somehow it’s ours. We drive aimlessly but with purpose around the neighborhood, staying a few seconds longer at stop signs so my father can bask in the smiles and points. It is his first new car, and it will be his last new car.

99. I play a tape of Doc and Merle Watson, the blind guitarist-folksinger and his son. Merle died a few weeks ago in a tractor accident. I play “Solid Gone” over and over, with Doc spicing Merle’s solo with “Pick it pretty now….Show me one more time….Just pick a little more.”

100. In the Paris fragrance store, Erin sniffs and tests. I pick up what looks like an after-shave, but the shopkeeper says it is not for men, then adds, “I did sell it to a man once, but he was not a man like you are a man.”

101. In college, leaning forward in the back seat of a car, talking to a guy I barely know in the front. He says, “You have nice eyes.” I ignore him, go on with the conversation. A decade later, a woman at a meeting responds to my doubt about being able to accomplish what she would like me to do: “You’ve got the talent and the blue eyes to do anything you want.” I ignore her and go on with the conversation. This morning, while shaving, I catch my eyes and linger there. Nice eyes!

102. 1980s. From the street nine flights down, always on Sunday but not every Sunday, a hand-rung bell and the call “Knife sharpening….Bring down your knives….knife sharpening.” I had no knives that merited professional sharpening. To this day I regret not buying one, just for him.

Remembering John Ashbery: "There is nothing that gives a more thrilling sense of Ashbery at work." [by Charles Bernstein]

John Ashbery and Charles Bernstein in 2008. Photo (c) Susan Bee,

Several years ago, David Kermani proposed that I work with John Ashbery and him on a big manuscript-focused digital project. David and I have been working on the PennSound archive of the audio and video John’s recordings. David and John were intrigued by the new digital version of The Waste Land that had just come out, but also unhappy with pirated digital editions of John’s work that, in addition to being unauthorized, were chock full of errors. I said I’d love to do something with “The Skaters.” David laughed. “I knew you would say that –– and you are the only one that would ask for that poem first.” David and John had liked my long essay on “The Skaters,” written for the celebration of John’s 80th birthday (recently collected in Pitch of Poetry).

            Some weeks later, David handed me two gigantic white binders that included two hand-corrected typescripts for the “The Skaters” (with many cancelled lines) and a raft of poems written at the same time but never published. I was ecstatic. I suggested to Robin Seguy, then a graduate student at the University of Pennsylvania, that he take on the project (digital editions were the focus of his research). Seguy scanned and transcribed everything in the notebook, creating code that provides novel ways of reading through and searching the poems, including quantitative date about the poem; a set of evocative grouping of textual features of the works, such a place names, personal names, pronouns foreign words, seasons, reference to color, light, and weather; plus a hypertext index to every word in “The Skaters.”  There is also a text-voice aligned version of Ashbery reading the poem and to the source text he used in writing it. 

There is nothing that gives a more thrilling sense of Ashbery at work. Many of the rejected lines are as good as the ones included — and the unpublished poems are endlessly appealing. 

The genetic, digital edition of “The Skaters” is here.  

Charles Bernstein is a poet, essayist, editor, and literary scholar. He is the author of 40 books of poetry and prose, including most recently Pitch of Poetry (University of Chicago Press, 2016).

À la mémoire de John Ashbery [par Olivier Brossard]

Mort de John Ashbery, poète américain
LE MONDE | 05.09.2017 à 11h31 • Mis à jour le 05.09.2017 à 12h26 | Par Olivier Brossard (maître de conférence à l'université Paris-Est-Marne-la-Vallée)

Figure majeure des lettres américaines, l’écrivain s’est éteint dimanche 3 septembre, à 90 ans.

 

Cette page-ci n’est seulement la fin de rien/Au sommet de cette autre », écrivait John Ashbery dans Fragment, son premier livre publié en France (Seuil, trad. Michel Couturier) en 1975. Pour le poète américain, l’écriture était ouverture, fuite ou fugue, le refus d’une identité ou d’un poème qui soient clos ou définis à jamais. L’écrivain, figure majeure des lettres américaines, est mort dimanche 3 septembre, à 90 ans, dans sa maison de Hudson (État de New York), auprès de son mari, David Kermani. Jusqu’à récemment, il aura continué à composer une œuvre monumentale : une trentaine de livres de poésie, des pièces de théâtre, un roman, des écrits sur l’art, un imposant corpus de traductions du français.

Après une enfance passée à la ferme familiale de Sodus, marquée par la figure de grands-parents érudits, John Ashbery intègre en 1945 l’université Harvard, où il rencontre les poètes Kenneth Koch et Frank O’Hara. Avec eux, installé à New York, il fréquente la galerie Tibor de Nagy, qui expose les œuvres de peintres comme Jane Freilicher et Larry Rivers. C’est en raison de leurs affinités et collaborations avec ces peintres de l’école de New York que ces jeunes auteurs se voient affublés du titre de « poètes de l’école de New York ». John Ashbery n’a jamais apprécié cette appellation qu’il jugeait artificielle, d’autant qu’il est parti vivre en France de 1955 à 1965, où il a rencontré son compagnon d’alors, l’écrivain et journaliste Pierre Martory.

Virtuose de la langue

A Paris, John Ashbery se prend de passion pour l’écrivain Raymond Roussel, qu’il commence à traduire. Alors critique d’art, il se lance aussi dans un vaste travail de traduction de poètes français (ses aînés comme ses contemporains), collaborant avec son ami écrivain Harry Mathews à la publication de la revue Locus Solus. Ashbery commence alors à explorer de nouvelles voies poétiques, dont celles du collage et de la disjonction, notamment dans The Tennis Court Oath en 1962 (Le serment du Jeu de paume, Corti, 2015). Par ses expérimentations verbales, ce livre marque la ­nouvelle génération de poètes américains, dont ceux du mouvement L = A = N = G = U = A = G = E.

continuez ici . .