The Best American Poetry

Tom Clark, Reverdy, and Pere-Lachaise in the fog [by David Lehman]

The redoubtable Tom Clark continues to post for Vanitas, where last night appeared a poem with a hard-to-resist title, "One More Saturday Night (for Reverdy's Ghost)," and this ravishing photograph (by Lothar Streidle, 2004) of Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris,

One More Saturday Night (for Reverdy’s Ghost)

Through the night
It snows on the
Sierras as it does
On the grave of
Apollinaire in the
Cemetery of Père
Lachaise
And on
The radio I get
Truck music from
San Jose:
“Want to make it to
Amarillo by
Morning…”
“...Just
Because you ask me to.”

The green oak
Burns weakly
In the grate
And as I write
In the window
Of the loft
The light
Turns blue.

– Tom Clark

The late Donald Hall said that "Tom Clark was the best student I ever had.” It was Donald Hall, who taught Clark at the University of Michigan. Hall, The Paris Review's longtime poetry editor, passed the torch to Clark, who chose the poems for the magazine in the late 1960s. It was a brilliant run. -- DL

Tom Clark: Try to look upon death as a friend (Terence Winch)

No one who knew Tom Clark would ever deny that he was irascible, brilliant, generous, difficult, funny, erudite.  He was also immensely prolific—even in old age, he published his blog, Beyond the Pale, on a daily basis. BTP was a relentless illustrated catalogue—with scores of photos spanning the globe—usually revealing world’s woes and conflicts, often complemented with various texts he admired. He also wrote and published dozens of books of poetry and prose. His illustrious literary career is outlined here.

I felt really shaken by the news of his death yesterday: he was hit by a car near his house in Berkeley and died several hours later in the hospital.

We had met in person only once, back in April of 1978, when he came to DC to read in Doug Lang’s Folio Bookstore reading series. I have a distinct memory of taking him somewhere on the DC Metro.

We got to know each much better in recent years, mostly through emails. He liked my work and posted poems of mine from time to time in Beyond the Pale.  We had many exchanges about poetry, music, our shared Irish heritage, etc.  I am haunted today by his occasional references to the perilous streets of his neighborhood, where pedestrians had to risk their lives to take a walk. Indeed, he had been injured in an earlier accident some years ago. 

Here is what he wrote me in June on this very subject:

“Admire your getaroundability. Could never ride on any airplanes nevermore no!! Cannot lift right leg off ground. Get on bus impossible. Cross street a prayer every time, plus plenty straight out hate speech outa me, unheard by robo drivers on software cruise control. They never talk back. I set up in shooter stance w metal cane pointed like assault weapon, they smile and laugh and roar past w/o stopping @alleged pedestrian crosswalk!

Little known fact you probably won't believe or care why should you, but the stop lights here are "smart" - that is, have sensors to detect approaching vehicle, stay green for same, but green goes to yellow in 2 seconds (literally), if you're a ped, and if there is a more unliveable country on earth, defining living as having a soul, I want to go there, just to comparison shop - but I've never owned a credit card or a cell phone, have no i.d. and indeed no idea how to shop, so there might be a problem there, but no worries.”                    email from Tom Clark, June 2018

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Tom will be missed and mourned by his many friends and colleagues. My deepest condolences to Angelica Clark, his wife of 50 years.

Here are two recent poems of Tom’s that I especially like:

Nocturnal Resolutions

Be opaque

Have no memory

Make no attempt to be understood

Stop suffering fools

Be kind to animals no matter what

Listen to the angel

Try to look upon death as a friend

Accept pain as the condition

Be more patient

Don’t turn on the light

 

The Edge of the Forest

Poems ought to have memories.

They should remember other poems.

At this moment the noisy city

has fallen quiet, and the edge

of the forest is abuzz with voices,

the voices of poems beneath the old trees

talking quietly about the poems that were

once here but are not here any longer,

remembering each other.

 

both poems from Truth Game (BlazeVOX, 2013)

 

ONE WEDDING AND A FUNERAL: HOW THE SHOW MUST GO ON [by Jeanne McCulloch]

(Ed note: Earlier in the week we announced publication of Jeanne McCulloch's memoir All Happy Families. Here's an essay with more of the backstory to Jeanne's fine memoir. sdl)

In the spring of 1983, I was a 25-year-old graduate student in the department of English literature at Columbia University. I wrote my masters thesis on a story by Katharine Mansfield titled “The Garden Party,” in which the Sheridan family in rural England prepares for their annual garden party, a grand affair, when down the street a young man driving a livery cart is killed when his horse shies and he is thrown, breaking his neck. The central tension is the simultaneity of life and death, of celebration and mourning, as seen through the eyes of one of the Sheridan daughters, Laura. In “The Garden Party” there is an exchange between Laura and her mother, in which she asks how they can possibly go ahead with their party, with a man lying dead down the street. “You’re being absurd,” her mother tells her, brushing aside any suggestion that the party would be delayed or cancelled. I understood that, because my own mother had much the same attitude, we got through everything “with style and grace, even if it killed us.”

When I received my degree, I marched in a blue cap and gown. My mother was there, and my sisters, but not my father. My father had been barred from coming by my mother, who was sparing us, she thought, the spectacle that would very probably occur if my father came. Chances were good he’d be drunk, and possibly he’d pass out during the ceremony, even collapse theatrically on the green. At 74, he had a track record of this kind of behavior. So, he stayed home, and later that night he came to a little family gathering at my apartment down the street from Columbia, where I lived with my fiancé Dean. I still remember the sight of him that evening, unfocused and sad, indisputably in a stupor. His tie was loose, his jaw was slack, his jacket fell oafish off his shoulders, as he both watched and didn’t watch the party take place both with and without him. We pretended it was all okay, but of course it was not. In the cycle of my father in those days, he was more reliably drunk than he was sober, and so this occasion, which would have meant so much to him had he been present to participate, was lost to him, and to me, as I’d always thought it would make him so proud and happy, he a scholar in his own right, with numerous advanced degrees and a fluency in 14 languages, to see his daughter get a graduate degree.

Continue reading here. 

"Molly's Folly" [by Molly Arden]

Humans are the species that love
the sexual organs of the opposite sex.
Some of us are nervous wrecks.
You did not bend to pick up my glove.

The difference between masculine and feminine
is slender but not as much as it has been.

-- Molly Arden

[Titian's "Venus and Adonis"]

Elio Schneeman: An Unsung Hero of the NY School [by David Lehman]

 

 

 

Born in Italy during JFK's first year in office, Elio Schneeman (left, as depicted by Pamela Lawton), grew up in  New York City, the son of George and Katie Schneeman, and his youth was spent among the grown-up poets and painters of the New York School's so-called Second Generation. George Schneeman's paintings grace numerous books and journals by NY Schoolers.

Elio has a poem "For Ted," and it conjures up Ted Berrigan "high on heroin," whose memory is honored: "Now and then / you whisper a line or two to me /  from a bearded cypress tree." I quote this poem not only to locate the poet on the map ("E. 9th Street") but because the pace of the lines, the casual stance, the understated last line are all characteristic of the New York School style at its best. 

Schneeman's posthumous collection, "A Found Life" (Telephone Books, 2000) is impressive also for the poet's brand of "minimalism" (to use the term as exemplified by Elaine Equi). Here is the whole of "New Year Reflection" 

With all this air
in my pockets,

once again,

I'm still facing
the dark blue pool
where I drowned. 

Look how much the poet accomplishes in six lines plus two stanza-breaks. This is a poetry of concentration blessedly free of claustrophobia: there is "all this air" around the last-second revelation, which requires no elaboration. 

In its spareness, Schneeman has something vitally in common with Joseph Ceravolo. The deep religiosity of this poet -- he addresses the Lord on intimate terms in "Summer Soup" and "Prayer" -- is a second link to Ceravolo. But the personal sadness, the apprehension of imminent disaster, is especially pronounced in Elio Schneeman's poetry, and so is the tender sensuality: ("I passed by her  bathtub / late in the afternoon") and the gift of describing things as they are ("a faint hammering  / was heard, a few choice / words understood," by a speaker who identifies himself as "a resident of hell" riding the underground. The epiphany that ends the poem does so with gravity and grace: "Who can deny / the simple, undiluted / pleasures of morning?" 

If I worked for Copper Canyon Press I would apply for permission to quote the conclusion of Schneeman's beautiful "Primavera": 

You follow me
through invisible streets

I turn the corner
into a copper canyon.

The sonnets, such as "After Spenser," show a remarkable facility at energizing the Renaissance form with a new idiom:

In the morning I wake with a start,
Silently my love has flown the coop, 
Leaving nothing but her volume of Descartes,
I walk from room to room a total dupe.

Vincent Katz is right: Schneeman's poetry is difficult to categorize. It is often a "poetry of nothingness which is not Zen," but there is also something very rare: the love poem that manages to avoid exaggeration and saccharine and to achieve genuineness. Consider the ending of "Downtown Insomnia," dedicated to the woman whom he loved, a painter:

But now, miles downtown,
I toss
on a sheet of flame

With only your name
on my lips

Your dreams
are paintings

that tell us
of reflected things.,

if only we would listen.

This remarkable young poet with the soul of a prophet died at the age of thirty-five on August 17, 1997.

-- David Lehman

The Chance to Choose a Subject - Daniel Brown

This post is different from my preceding four. It's an excerpt from a book in progress. (If any publishers or agents would like to know more about the book, they can reach me via the contact page on my website.) The post is also longer than the others, so before you plunge in (if you do), I want to thank a couple of folks up front for the privilege and pleasure of guest-bogging on BAP this week: this blog's Managing Editor, Stacey Harwood-Lehman, for her kind encouragement and her help with the mechanics of posting; and--not to forget him--the person who invited me to post. This latter individual's prolificness, talent, and versatility moves me to an assertion that only sounds hyperbolic: Schubert is almost as unaccountable a phenomenon as David Lehman.

...

Before I wanted to write poems, I wanted to write music: a calling for which I had, talent excepted, all the necessary equipment.  In the years since, I’ve asked myself more than once if I wouldn’t rather have composed, had I been able to, than written poetry (or at least what tries to be).  An answer that sometimes comes to mind takes the form of another question: wouldn’t anyone rather compose than write poetry? (Wagner looked forward every morning to sitting down at what he called “the incredible loom.”) But sometimes I’m fine with being a poet rather than a composer. On a good day, I can even feel fortunate that this is how things turned out. If there's a central reason why, it’s because writing poetry gives me the chance to choose a poem’s subject. 

In what follows, I’m going to assume that a poet who works with subjects carries around, in his head or on paper, a list of possible ones. I say “assume” advisedly. I’m personally acquainted with a subject-oriented poet—a good one—who not only doesn’t have such a list, but says he’s incapable of having one. He tells me that when he sits down to write, he has—in fact he needs to have—nothing whatsoever in mind (unless you count the knowledge that he’s sitting down to write).  If he’s lucky, some words will emerge from this void. If he’s doubly lucky, a subject will emerge from these words. If he’s lucky cubed, he’ll find the subject worth pursuing—at which point he’ll have an incipient poem on, and in, his hands.

But since I’ve also spoken with poets who do maintain a list of subjects…You’re looking at your list, trying to choose which subject to take up in your next poem. On what basis are you going to make this choice? Quite possibly on a basis one hesitates to even call a basis. I suspect I’m far from alone in tending to select, from my own list of prospective subjects, simply the most recently added one.  This is the one, after all, that will be most freshly charged with the excitement of discovery. Or, in a move that’s almost as mindless, I might choose a subject from my list simply because it differs markedly from the last one I chose. Here again, the driver is excitement, in this case not of discovery but of variety. On rare occasions, we may choose a subject not because it’s different from the last one we chose, but because it’s different from all the subjects we’ve ever chosen. Here we’re motivated not merely by variety but by growth. (Yeats offers a look inside such a development in “The Circus Animals’ Desertion,” where he speaks of his need to find a theme not among the “masterful images” of his prior work—“Those stilted boys, that burnished chariot, / Lion and woman and the Lord knows what”—but in the source of those images, “the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.”) Note that in all of the above scenarios, the choice of subject is made with the poet’s own pleasures and concerns primarily in mind. It’s of course assumed that benefit will accrue to the reader as well, but as a by-product of benefit to the poet. 

A subject may also be chosen, however, with the reader’s benefit principally in mind: chosen mainly in order to intrigue the reader and/or inform the reader and/or amuse the reader and/or move the reader and/or heal—not to forget provoke or hurt (since who couldn't use a poke or some pain at times?)—the reader. Readers being people (for now, anyway), a reader-centric choice of subject is best made in cognizance of human experience. To take a for-instance, would a given subject be expected to intrigue? Any answer worth paying attention to will be informed by an inside knowledge of life. (A lack of such knowledge is what makes passing—not to say acing—the Turing test, or writing a deeply meaningful poem, so hard, if not impossible, for a computer.)

The need—and the opportunity—to consult life in choosing a poem’s subject is the main reason I feel fine—sometimes even better than fine—about writing poetry instead of music. Assessing a subject in light of life, after all, calls upon every faculty we have: intellectual, moral, spiritual—and, yes, aesthetic, to the extent (not always very great these days) that we want our subjects to underwrite poems whose virtues include beauty. This call for all we have, that we might offer all we can—to what other summons would one feel more eager or privileged to respond?

Which leaves my old feeling of being called to composition…where?  I remember being shocked to hear myself say, in speaking with a music-loving literary critic, that I thought music was “thin soup” compared to poetry. What I meant (which she understood all too instantly and perfectly) was that the “matter” of poetry—life, language, and the physical world these inhabit—was richer—“thicker”—than the tones and interrelations thereof that constitute music. She was graciously willing to leave it to her face to express her discomfort (to put it mildly) with this view, but I can imagine only too clearly the terms in which she might have objected to it: that the “grain” of music is finer than that of poetry (she might have adduced Mendelssohn’s marvelous assertion that the meanings of music are not too vague but too precise for words); and that, considerations of “thickness” or “thinness" to the side, music affords access to emotional and spiritual depths that would otherwise be not merely un-plumbable but, for the likes of mere us, effectively non-existent.

I wouldn't want to dispute these views outright (not least because part of me participates in them so wholly), but perhaps I might offer a couple of counter-considerations. I was taught music theory in college by a professor with the most extraordinary ear for, and knowledge of, music. He’d studied performance (on the viola) and composition at one of the great conservatories. In a pensive mood one day, he told me that, as thoroughgoing as those studies were, and as indebted as he was to them as a person and an artist, he regretted their having left him without the broader knowledge that a liberal arts education would have provided. (He’d been trying over the years, in a wide-ranging, self-directed course of reading, to make up this deficit.) To go by his feeling of inadequacy in this regard, this good man's lifelong immersion in music might have especially equipped him to understand, and even sympathize with, a view of music as being “thinner” than poetry. Or (Take--or Tack--Two) maybe music and poetry can be seen, to borrow a concept from mathematics, as “different orders of infinity,” with poetry being the larger one (as the infinity of “real numbers” is larger, in being more densely populated, than the infinity of integers).

Someone once told the wonderful choreographer Mark Morris that he seemed more passionate about music than dance. Morris’s response was that “Music is more interesting than dance.” (After all, he went on, “there are only so many things a dancer can do.”) I don’t see how my own love of music could be greater than it is, and yet—and if I were a practicing composer instead of a failed one, this might not be the case—I can at least imagine myself saying (when Bach isn’t listening) that poetry is more interesting than music.

". . but the look that leaves you real shook is the look of love" . . .so. . . marry me

Dear Stacey: Will you marry me? David

 

"Inch Worm" (or The Other Kind of Counterpoint) - Daniel Brown

When we think of counterpoint, we’re usually thinking of the "imitative" kind, where melodies (or bits of them) echo one another.  This is certainly the kind most of us encounter first, when we learn as kids to sing “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” or “Frere Jacques” as a round. It’s also the kind we encounter most often: sometimes on a cell phone these days, whose ringtone may well be the opening of Bach’s Two-Part Invention in F. (Click on the "Play" symbol in the upper left of the score to hear it.)

But there’s also a non-imitative kind of counterpoint, a kind where different (often very different) melodies are made to fit together. Maybe the most familiar example of this sort of counterpoint is also found in Bach: his setting of the “Wachet Auf” chorale (again, click on the the "Play" symbol to hear it), in which he overlays a stirring Lutheran hymn with an almost ostentatiously dissimilar melody–one of the all-time ear worms, as it happens–of his own invention.  (Think this trick is simple? You try writing a tune-for-the-ages that has to work contrapuntally with an existing one.)

My first encounter with non-imitative counterpoint was a revelation (not that I was old enough to have called it that). One day the director of our grade school chorus introduced us to a pretty little song called “Inch Worm”  (music and lyrics by the great Frank [Guys and Dolls] Loesser: it's in his score for the movie musical Hans Christian Andersen). Our director divided the chorus in half, and taught one half the song's main melody ("Inch worm, inch worm...", sung by Danny Kaye in the clip) and the other half the song's haunting countermelody (which you hear first in the clip, sung by the class of children: “Two and two are four…” etc.).  The sinuous combination of melody and countermelody still gives me the beauty-chills.

It was only many years later that I realized Loesser’s full brilliance in contriving this counterpoint of differing melodies.  The overall meter of the song is 3/4 (i.e., waltz tempo), into which the lyric of the main melody fits perfectly: “Inch worm __, inch worm __, measuring the marigolds...”.  But the lyric of the countermelody doesn’t fit into 3/4, at least not comfortably; the meter leads to unnatural stresses: “Two and two ARE four __ , four and four ARE eight __ , eight and eight ARE sixteen, sixteen and sixTEEN are thirty two…”). But the lyric of the countermelody (along with the countermelody itself) works perfectly in 2/4 (alternating stressed with unstressed syllables): "Two and two are four __ , four and four are eight __ , eight and eight are sixteen, sixteen and sixteen are thirty-two…". Which is to say that this seemingly innocent ditty is not only polyphonic but polymetric! But here’s the real kicker: what is the lyric of the (2/4) countermelody talking about but measuring marigolds by multiples of two!  The mind-boggling musico-verbal wit of this connection--a duplicity (not to say duple-icity) of the benignest kind--reduces one to saying of Loesser, as a certain Schumann said in announcing his first acquaintance with the music of a certain Chopin, “Hats off, gentlemen: a genius.” (As if one didn’t think this of Loesser already.)

On the Road to the prison of La Santé: even Gallimard's new translation of 1984 can’t conjure lit from boilerplate [by Tracy Danison]

“Oranges and lemons say the bells of Saint Clements … Here comes a grinding machine to grind down your head!” The iconography has changed a lot since the 40s – 50s. The older edition of Orwell’s dystopian farce features a naked man (who somehow seems to wear leotards) confronted with a giant cog-thing that suggests a machine. In those days, when many felt machine culture would smooth off all the angles that made us us, “Where do I fit and how do I fit there?” was the question to answer. Sometimes, I wish those grinding machines had succeeded, don’t you?

I was on my way to see Karine for lunch for the first time in quite some time.

I am arhythmically tapping my foot to the soundless poprock of my Apple-brand Walkman, twitching nervously through the throwaway newspaper.

I appreciate the horoscope and read the one for each of the people I love who love me plus two for me – believe me, not many, so I have time for the squibs before my stop, Glacière – “icebox”, the stop for la Santé, the legendary prison, which is just up the way from the establishment where she sometimes works.

By the way, the design of the original la Sante building is based on Bentham’s Panopticon: its architecture is meant to aid inmate rehabilitation by keeping them in solitary confinement and under continuous surveillance, a Utilitarian conceit called the “Philadelphia System”.

In May, a squib cried, Gallimard, the legendary French-language literary publisher, would bring out a new, updated edition of George Orwell’s 1984, translated by Josée Kamoun. The squib cited changes such as “neoparler” for “novlangue” for “newspeak” and other new neologisms for Orwell’s coinages, as well as use of the present tense instead of the literary-narrative imparfait.

I got the impression that, somehow or another, the new publication, at 14€ Kindle, had used translation to “update” the text, like, say, a new English translation might throw light on some facet of Proust’s dense humorous prose; after all, reading Henry James in French is like reading a fresh-baked James, a pain au chocolat at coffee, topping off a strawberry jam-smeared muffin at breakfast.

Alas, my electronic reader does not yet even read my books for me, let alone compare and analyze them, so I can make only a weakly and partial assessment; ultimate judgment is still up to me.

So, although Kamoun has a finer sense of farce and is a better writer than the historic translator,  Amélie Audiberti, she, Kamoun, has not been able to raise up an updated, new or improved 1984 from the timber of la langue de Proust.

The new 1984 is just a same-old same-old translation with the great fault of all translation everywhere: since the translator can never have the original author’s knowledge and experience or his or her sense of lexical nuance, it’s never really anything more than a distorted mirror of the original.

So, for example, in this Kamoun version, as in the historic one, Orwell’s “memory hole” coinage is rendered as trou de mémoire (a hole in the memory), missing the point entirely, at least on the surface.  As far as I can tell, trou de mémoire – “Attends, attends, j’ai un trou!” –  is so rooted in everyday speech as never likely to mean anything other than “lapse in memory”, whereas “memory hole” was an entirely new usage, since become part of everyday English language usage.

As I get out at Glacière, an elevated station, I pull my jacket close and bend into a sudden blustery wind shot with cold, narrow drops of rain; it’s a toss-up as to whether were going to end the world in fire or ice. Today, I sure wish the world would make up its mind.

I clop down the irons steps – it’s all in heavy iron plate, thickly painted in grey.

It occurs to me that the failure of this new 1984 isn’t in the translation but in the original.

1984 isn’t really satire, isn’t really literature.

The difference is that the book is about words rather than people, about words rather even than about ideas. 1984 is just political boilerplate, farce. Good boiler plate, maybe, but boilerplate. So unlike, say, Brave New World, which is about people, 1984 isn’t worth a second shot; nothing was left out the first time.

First off, 1984 is not well thought through. Though really funny, Winston Smith’s petty bourgeois disdain for the lack of creature comforts in Airstrip One (misleadingly translated as the Zone in the new translation) in the proletarian world in which he has grown up is, to say the least, strange (Orwell even tries later in the book to explain it away); Orwell’s 20^th-century intellectual’s hatred for them and for (female – “harridan”) gym teachers is a neat joke, it’s a commonplace; the portrayal of the emotional tissue of Oceania as woven of male frustration sur fond de dyke-femme sexual hysteria might say something about the social-psychology of the mid-20^th century but is still just depressingly silly period-pop-psych. In the end, if there’s humor, apart from the striking word coinage, there’s nothing else to 1984.

As to translating to achieve a new perspective… The title, 1984, is a monumental impediment to interpretation since a translator is helpless before it. Worse is the content connected to that Moloch-like title. Supposedly all about political manipulation of time’s relativity and the fragility of human consciousness, the book begins with Winston scratching in the “uncertain” date “April 4^th, 1984”.

Willy-nilly, the translator is faced, like the English-reading public is faced, with a socialist totalitarian regime run by an avuncular tout puissant Big Brother whose party has for a slogan “who controls the present controls the future, who controls the past controls the present”, which has kept the Christian calendar in place! Godsbones, even the bourgeois revolutionaries of 1789 thought of imposing a new calendar, along with thought control backed up by the latest in murder technology.

As I turn up the rue de la Santé – the prison by the way is called “Health” because, they say, some ancient despot had once put a hospital on the spot.

To tell the truth, I am dragging my feet here, the one swollen, the other all-too eager.

I want to see her, of course. But since I am an integral part of what I know already to be the unhappy conclusion of the apparently pointless friendly meeting with her …  without even taking account of her looking with a secret glumness at me during a meal lasting an hour through.

And, all through this repast of the love-dead, I, and probably her, shall remember, we shall, and remember and remember we shall that the best meal I ever ate was with her looking at me and looking at her.

Yet there go I.

In my mind’s I see her listlessly picking up, dropping, picking up her tiny tools and fine implements with a toothy, embarrassed smile, marking her conflict in her way, too, in that way she has.

With a sudden lurch, I trip into one of those little dusty morning-to-midday-only bars that serve wine, beer and shots and, after 11, with warmed-up food from a central cafeteria some place in the city.

The barman’s eyes involuntarily flick away from the TV screen as I jerk in the door. Those eyes cross mine, so, with no ado, I call out for a café serré, a ristretto.

I belly up to the bar. Our eyeballs both flick up to the screen before he measures coffee into the pressure thingamabob. 

“’Beep!’ says the dumb-guy default on the microwave … Here comes Facebook to put together a personalized video of your life. Just for you!” The cover of the new edition of 1984 features a chic retro TV screen with a big eye in the middle. The image feels as out of date as Orwell’s glib story of discomfort, privation and forced conformity. We now live in a world of casual surveillance, material abundance and longing for conformity. We are only just starting to grapple with a fragmented media that amplifies the diffuse anger, incoherent fear and know-nothing politics of every hysteric with electricity.

The raw, uncensored truth is that no French publisher has bothered with another translation of 1984 until now because the book’s just a lot of ordinary human dilemmas thoughtlessly shoe-horned into the duckspeak of half-baked political boilerplate. Even more likely to be true is that the members of the project committee noted, as they year after year dropped the 1984 translation project into the dustbin, that Orwell’s intellectual outlook is, like that of many journalists, scientistic, tainted by scientism, the handsomer fraternal twin of conspiracism. Scientism, like conspiracism, is a habit of mind that uses a few “established facts” to launch a narrow logical analysis that inevitably reaches tendentious but satisfyingly clear conclusions about its target:

• She did get drunk on the welfare payment, didn’t she?

Well, yes, but…

• Then it is true that people are using this money for drink!

There’s no denying truth, is there?

Orwell was not just a clever journalist, he was an educated one, an Eton boy, I believe, whose insults are rooted in basic human realities.

But. Galimard’s project committee members know that scientistic analysis such as Orwell’s is entirely out of date within 15 minutes of publication – good for newspapers but not suitable for books unless a celebrity is involved. True. Orwell is a celebrity. But this story… Also, the members know, when looking back, scientistic analysis often is seen to be plain stupid. In itself stupidity even being seen to be stupid is not an impediment to a successful print run but I should think would usually block an investment in a second translation: a simple re-issue would lessen the risk of a loss. But a re-issue will not attract attention…

Fingers tap the shiny faux-walnut table.

What the hell. There are always other factors, some obscure and unprovable, even to the members of the committee themselves.

I imagine a possible scene: the 2017 committee straggles into the salle de réunion at around 11.45, serves itself a round of gin shots and, after some quick, guilty glances among them, hoarsely toast, “An effort, comrades! Four-legs good! Two legs bad! It made money for Penguin! Didn’t it?”

A bit over-dressed for what is now the weather and with a damned cramp in my foot to boot, I blow my nose for the nteenth time today – in the same way that my heart refuses to acknowledge plain truth in regard to her, my upper respiratory system has not yet grasped that I long ago quit smoking.

As the barman stares into the silent TV screen, I stand uneasily at the bar, glancing at the screen, staring into the coffee: Does it wish to be gulped or sipped? What can the jowly talking head be saying?

I am longing for a cigarette –  though I hate the very name of Tobacco and curse the demon Nicotine, I feel an almost unbearable attraction to both, to the gesture and the rush of high.

I gulp down the serré, order another.

As I have suggested, Orwell had a genius for couching insult in hi-falutin phrase and intelligent-sounding coinages. I’ll bet that 1984 has done more to embarrass and flummox political discussion than almost any censorship law. And this with much less intellectual effort than might ordinarily be necessary for insulting an opponent into silence: Orwell’s durable coinages have an aura of pithy psychological analysis, largely because they are based on common human frailty.

An effective insult is always as closely associated as possible with a human’s real qualities, if possible, her most fundamental and endearing ones. The “thoughtcrime” insult, for instance, takes its force from the human propensity for sticking to beliefs and wanting to be loved. Essentially an older, more elegant, form of today’s “political correctness” insult, thoughtcrime originally applied ironically and meant “spontaneous independent thinking”. But so excellent is its insult-integument that thoughtcrime now denotes those who actively resist spontaneous and independent thinking; a self-accusation of “thoughtcrime” enables a claim of victimization by a “thought police”.

In addition to promoting resistance to spontaneous and independent thought, as a locution “thoughtcrime” has had an especially happy career helping people of all political colorations prop up the off-putting arrogance so essential to a thriving culture of insult. The dead hand of Orwell’s rhetorical brilliance is clearly visible in the influential composer and musician Frank Zappa’s famous song “Who are the Brain Police?”. “… A lot of  [other] people police their own brains…,” Zappa remarked, “I've seen [other] people who will willingly arrest, try and punish their own brains… You don't even need to blame it on a central brain police agency [when you can say they have only themselves to blame] …” .

An accusation of “doublethink” has a special force both because of the fragility of our psychic mechanism for stocking and using the contradictory facts, emotions and perceptions of dynamic reality and because it implies that entertaining contradiction is a vice very like hypocrisy. Sometimes, as Hamlet classically demonstrates, the process gives poor, or no good, results, even in the face of deadly danger. But even if Hamlet does tend to go on and on, we’ve told ourselves, nervously, uncertainly, for the last 500-odd years, it’s hard to see how he could do differently. Isn’t it? Am I right?

After all, 1984 just doesn’t make the running as literature. Literature, I think, is about life, the science of humanity and expressing it in writing and 1984 is a farce about a dead political controversy. Over the long term, nobody can take insults, even such good ones as thoughtcrime and doublethink, for serious talk about life. Nobody can mistake political scientism for the science of humanity. Nobody can take a knack for pithy neologism for originality of written expression. Nobody can mistake Du côté de chez Swann, Portnoy’s Complaint, Voyage au bout de la nuit by the criminal political psychotic Louis Ferdinand Céline, or Lucky Jim for 1984. Gallimard can go ahead and make new translations of these books and so many others and we can argue about whether they make better or worse reading in French of English or German or Chinese or whatever, but as far as 1984 is concerned, the adage about sows’ ears and silk purses applies.

I am stood here at a bar in the shadows of a notorious prison a justified sinner.

I am not just comforting contradictory ideas, impulses, thoughts and facts, but steeling myself to act upon them: having drunk two espressos that burn my entrails, longing for a cigarette I don’t want, destined for a pleasure that is not even exquisitely painful, all in an exercise of persistent love for her and of her for him that not only is no longer but nor will ever be again in the life scenarios of me or her.

We’ll each pay half for the lunch and glad to do it, too.

I crashed my car into the bridge, I watched, I let it burn
I threw your shit into a bag and pushed it down the stairs …

I don't care, I love it, I don't care

                                                        - “I Love It” Icona Pop

I put a two euro fifty cent on the counter.

The weather’s changed so I yank off my hoody and sling it over my shoulder.

I left the bar, bought 1984 when I got home.

Impudent Prophetic Plagiarism: 2 - Daniel Brown

In yesterday's post we saw Mozart focusing his Futurescope forty years forward, into the sound-world of Schubert. As it turns out, this gizmo had a range substantially greater still.

If you're a nostalgist and/or a New Yorker old enough to remember Joe Franklin's long-running talk-show on WOR-TV, you might recall the show's theme song, "Twelfth Street Rag." (The first 40 seconds of this clip of the song are all you need to hear for present purposes, but feel free to follow this ear-worm further down memory lane.) As will be more than obvious, the gist of the song is a descending three-note figure repeated (and repeated) in syncopation over a four-square beat. I don't know where Mozart heard this number, but it clearly made a dent in him.

The finale of his last string quartet, K. 590, is a brilliant mix of joie de vivre and contrapuntal complexity. This wasn't the Mozart piece that moved Beethoven to exclaim "Why can't I write music like that?", but it might as well have been. (The piece that drew these words from Beethoven was a wind quintet being played in the street outside his window.)  I encourage you to hear, enjoy, and marvel at the whole K. 590 finale (which begins at 19:03 in this clip), but would call your attention here to the catchy little tune that ends the movement's first section (at 20:55 in the clip). If it makes you laugh out loud, you’re forgiven: the syncopated, dizzying repetitions of its descending three-note figure whisk us ahead a hundred years-plus to an age when "Twelfth Street Rag" and its ilk roamed the earth. (The bluesy alternation of major and minor chords beneath the repetitions of the figure is prescience squared.) Mozart himself knew he’d happened on a remarkable, and remarkably winning, thing in this tune--as shown by the fact that he works its three-note figure non-stop for almost the entire central “development” section of the movement (which goes from  21:07 to 21:50). This look-ahead to jazz had no precedent in Mozart (or anywhere else), and was not to be repeated by him. (Not that it had much time to be: K 590 was written only a year and half before his tragically untimely death at thirty-five  in 1791.)

But jazz did receive a return visit 30 years later--from Beethoven. His last piano sonata, the Opus 111 (1821-22), has only two movements rather than the customary three or four, but it’s safe to say that no one has ever felt shortchanged by the work.  The second movement, in particular, is, to adopt a phrase sometimes applied to Schubert, of a “heavenly length:” a theme and variations, marked Adagio molto ("very slow"), that lasts at least fifteen minutes, and often a good deal more, in performance.  (It starts at 9:22 in this clip.) While the movement’s glacial tempo never changes, things seem to speed up from variation to variation in the first few of them, as Beethoven packs the same capacious beats with progressively more (hence progressively faster) notes.

It's in the third variation that things get prophetic. When I first heard it (beginning at 15:56 in the clip), I could hardly believe my ears: who knew there were honky-tonks in 1820’s Vienna? Not that Beethoven ever re-visited them; it’s as though, having happened on an entirely new world we call jazz, he left the exploration of it, as Mozart had, to a later age. Of course, Beethoven himself didn't hear the writing in this variation as “jazzy”–just powerfully syncopated. Can we forget our experience of jazz, and hear Beethoven’s variation in all 19th-century innocence of music's future? Not easily, but that doesn’t mean that, as a mind-stretching exercise of our historical imagination, it isn’t worth a try.

"The Inventors" [by Jim Dolot]

The man who invented spitting,
Archimandrus of Boeotia,
Was otherwise undistinguished,
And tends to be underrated and overlooked
Because of his contemporary, Thespis,
Who invented the drama, and Gogulus,
Who invented existentialism.
This is how it happened.
There was a drought, and everyone
Was too weak even to throw
A stone into the well to hear how
Far below the water was for hoisting, when
Archimandrus, crawling to the well wall
And lifting himself to the ledge,
Spat downward.  After two seconds plus change
There was a tinkle, and three minutes
Later, as if on cue, the rains came,
A downpour.  All of the Hellenes
Were ecstatic, carrying him on
Their shoulders to the Macropolis
Where they did the first spitting dance.
The more they spat, the more it rained.
Two weeks later, Gorgiolos of Argos
Invented sighing; and most
Experts concur that it was within
The same decade that Eugokrates
Of Komia invented slapping people,
Good and hard, in their stupid
Faces, when they get too smart-alecky
        For their own good.

– Jim Dolot

Next Line, Please: Checkmate in 10 Moves [by Virginia Valenzuela]

This week on Next Line, Please, quizmaster Lehman has provided a new prompt: a game of poetry chess in which the first and last moves are already determined, and you, the writer, have 10 moves to connect them. Who will be the first to take on this challenge and win by check mate?

Here are the lines:

Line one:  “It is impossible to love the same person twice.”

Last line:  “A thought is as real a thing as a cannonball.”

Here are the rules:

—You do not have to agree with either of the statements given, and your poem may begin with a dissent.

—You may put either or both of the statements in quote marks.

—You may rhyme but you’re not obliged to do so.

—You may give your poem a title.

Visit the American Scholar's page to read the full post (with more details) and to enter your candidate!

Impudent Prophetic Plagiarism: 1 - Daniel Brown

I once heard a lecture by the late great critic and pianist (or, as he would have said, pianist and critic) Charles Rosen on two strands of Romanticism: a backward-looking "classicizing" one (exemplified by Mendelssohn and Brahms) and a forward-looking “advanced” one (exemplified by Schumann and Chopin–and later, of course, Wagner).  In a Q & A period that followed, I asked Rosen where Schubert fit into this scheme. I was expecting Rosen to say that Schubert combined elements of both strands of Romanticism, but he surprised and intrigued me by suggesting that the case of Schubert was even more special still: that Schubert stood off to his own, inimitable side of the 'classicizing'/'advanced' dichotomy, though he was also the recipient of a direct, intravenous magic-drip from from Mozart.  (I’d say Schubert’s early symphonies also indicate receipt of a healthy dose of Haydn–but then what composer of the time wasn’t hugely influenced by Haydn? Beethoven actually took composition lessons from Haydn for a while, but then dropped them, grumbling that the elder master had "nothing to teach me." Ironic, since Beethoven had already learned the better part--in a couple of senses--of what he knew about music from, if not Haydn's lessons, Haydn's works.)

Rosen was surely onto something when he said that Schubert was Mozart-infused, but there’s at least one case in which the influence seems to run the other way. I’m thinking of a remarkable passage in the slow movement of the Mozart’s G Minor String Quintet.

At the risk of telling you what you may well already know, the last three of Mozart’s four string quintets, in G minor, D major, and E-flat major respectively, are among his great works in any genre.  (Not that his first string quintet, an early work in B-flat major, isn't considerable and--especially in its minuet--cherishable itself.) The slow movement of the G Minor (beginning at 16:23 in this clip) has its share of wonders, but one of them stands out, in its sheer unaccountability, not only in this quintet but in Mozart's work as a whole. At 18:49 in the clip, a theme enters whose simple, “oom-chuck” accompaniment and surpassing lyricism make it sound like an emissary from another world.  The world in question is the future: in particular the province of it where Schubert lived. It’s as though Mozart saw what music would be forty years on, and demonstrated that he could not only envision it but produce an unbeatable example of it. (I'm not sure even Schubert could have conceived the impossibly beautiful echo with which Mozart dance-partners his theme at 19:03.) Having brought off this unparalleled bit of time-travel, Mozart returns his movement from the nineteenth century to the eighteenth as though nothing out of the ordinary had happened. (He may have visited the future, but apparently had no inclination to move there.)

The late great critic Donald Tovey once accused Haydn, in an immortal phrase, of “impudent prophetic plagiarism.” (The bit Haydn had pilfered was a spot in Brahms.) If this charge applies anywhere else in music, it would be to Mozart's shameless appropriation of Schubert.

The Old Grumpus Wumpus: V.S. Naipaul, 1932-2018 (by Mitch Sisskind)

They called him the old grumpus wumpus
But why? Why? Can you please explain that
To me? Would you be so kind? Did I miss
Something? I must have missed something
Because for the life of me I can’t understand
Why they called him the old grumpus wumpus.
What got into them? What purpose could it
Possibly serve? Is there some ulterior motive?
Could you please take a moment out of your 
Busy schedule to enlighten me about this?
Doesn’t it seem awfully mysterious to you?
Everything was fine and then a minute later
They called him the old gumpus wumpus.
Oh, for Christ’s sake! Jesus Christ almighty!

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/12/opinion/vs-naipaul-my-wonderful-cruel-friend.html

Poems and Notes by John Tranter on Hitchcock (and Noir) on Hitch's Birthday

<<<
Hamlet does not utter the words North by Northwest (a compass direction that does not exist.). He does say "I am but mad north-north-west. When the wind is southerly, I know a hawk from a handsaw."

“Shadow of a Doubt” was Hitchcock’s favorite of his movies: in it the young teenage girl is named Charlie, after her handsome uncle, played by Joseph Cotten, who (yes) is also named "Charlie”. 

 

See these poems in my book Starlight: “Boy in Mirror”, about Hitchcock’s Vertigo and its companion piece, the double acrostic poem “Girl in Water”, can be found in the “At the Movies” section of Urban Myths

 

The film (“Vertigo”) is based upon the novel D’Entre les Morts (From Among the Dead) which was written specifically for Alfred Hitchcock by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac. A version is now available as Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac, Vertigo [Entre Deux Morts] (Between Two Deaths), London: Bloomsbury, 1997. — J.T

 

Here is the Santa Rosa house used by Hitchcock for the movie Shadow of a Doubt: 

 

 

 

From Urban Myths by John Tranter

 

Shadow of a Doubt

Handsome Uncle Charlie, burdened by crime. 
He laughs and scatters gifts, but he looks 
unwell – no, he’s fine – the man playing cards 
looks sick – he has a full hand of spades, 
but then, he gets to tell the story about 
how the ace of spades leads the pack. 
Suspicion follows you like a snake in the grass, 
so the story is torn up. But destroying the evidence 
points to the evidence. Sleeping dogs lie. 
Now, should a girl tell on the bad man? 
It would kill Mother. But Uncle Charlie 
has been killing plenty of those, it seems, 
the fat, lazy, greedy widows eating cake 
and wasting money – they deserve to die. 
Now those two men are here to see you, 
again – something about a survey, 
counting all the happy American families 
and listening closely to their apple-pie opinions 
as they look down from a high window through 
shade-dappled branches at a pair of neighbours 
pausing for a gossip in the sun. On the busy street 
the old traffic cop can’t help the girl, he’s 
avuncular and normal, and he has a job to do. 
Now everything falls to pieces 
and a killer pleads for his life. Traffic 
everywhere, an engine running and leaking gas, 
then back on the train again, the train 
that takes you out into the horrible world. 

The man with all the cards is here, somewhere, 
behind the viewfinder, watching everything, 
a resident alien with a point of view. 

Uncle Charlie has to die, we all knew that, 
it just took a while to fall into place 
in front of a speeding black locomotive 
somewhere out of town, and far away. 



North by Northwest

A hero breasts Manhattan traffic, always
ready to stop off at a tourist destination. 
A blunder with a telegram and Mother – 
a demon never seen, only hinted at 
in her distant, comfortable castle – 
will lose her little boy, who quickly 
plunges into an irritating adventure 
in the picaresque mode – leaping 
to conclusions as the scenery reels past, 
into bed and out again, dodging and weaving 
across a landscape more deadly and bucolic 
with each passing trick of the light. 
Of course it’s post-postmodern to have the hero 
an advertising man rather than a policeman-detective 
tough-guy action type, and the crop-dusting plane scene 
is funny and priceless. Perhaps the Master was trying to 
lighten up after Vertigo. There’s no fun there, just 
descending levels of madness and sadness. 
The blonde, unlike his sainted Mother, 
is very good and also devious and wicked, 
and so roller coaster morals are the norm 
and in fact this unravelling storm of incidents 
and grief is the painful future due to us 
when we stumble blinking into the light, 
for this sequence of parables was built 
by its huge crew of many talents to be seen 
and heard in the crowded dark, the wicked 
are found out and trampled on, another 
train, another bed, good night. 


Dark Passage 

Poor Vincent Parry: he rolls out of a garbage can 
and stumbles through a valley of coincidences, 
falling into the lap of a blonde. 

Poor Vincent: we are locked inside his head, 
seeing everything, feeling nothing but vertigo 
as the screen swoops and wobbles with his weaving 
and ducking to avoid his fate. He can’t 
have a drink, we would get splashed, 
he dare not look in a mirror, because 
we would be there gawking, dismayed… 

Poor Vincent: he gets disfigured by a man with a towel 
and a razor, and wakes up tied to the bed. 
Madge calls, and whispers, and goes away, 
and calls back again, spying, sneaking a drink, and 
every fragment of conversation ends with Madge 
who, if she can’t have what she wants, 
kills it. Vincent gets punched around 
and a pal gets it, beaten to death with a trumpet. 
Madge, fatal Madge, fallen Madge, 
defenestrated Madge on the sidewalk. 

Ah, Vincent: he used to look handsome 
with a pencil-thin moustache, then he woke up 
looking like some movie star. He wants to 
call out in his bad dream: Untie me! 
Set me free! But he will not be free 
until he takes the bus to distant Peru 
alongside a boring couple of jerks 
who have just stumbled over each other 
in a bus station of all places. 

Vincent dreams that he sits in a white jacket 
sipping a drink by the moonlit beach in Peru, 
feeling anxious until the music changes 
and a blonde appears: Well, tie me down, 
and start me dancing. 



Girl in Water 
                                                                           (Vertigo)

Waiting to meet a pretty girl – any pretty girl – 
hot summer day in 1958, beach crowd, emotional algebra,
also list and remember: makeup, perfume, lipstick, talc, 
telephone passion – no, a soda fountain, a pizza. 

Do they dream of mystery and adventure, women?
or do girls want to drown in literature? No, stupid. I 
bet she’d like a fragrant pizza topped with mozzarella, 
or is that just me? A movie: Item: Kim Novak. A drive-in –  

yes, more subtle and powerful appetites litter the sand. 
So become that detective, wounded, pitiful; so 
learn to love and fail in love in the back row at the Bijou, 
in parked cars, or snug among sandhills… your spyglass a nib, 

keyhole secrets memorised and filed away, until 
eternity comes calling at the foot of a staircase. 
After that ending, another climb, another cliff 
beyond which something awful awaits: love  

or falling in love or into love or falling into death, a
uniform and dizzying and swift descent 
that leaves you breathless, leaves you  
very unsteady like a cork in the water, 

effervescent and febrile and emotionally labile,
ready for almost anything. 
That conscious pilot spoke: scripsi quod scripsi: 
I have written what? I have written for 

girl in water ‘girl in water’, girl 
or woman in waves of water. I, 
keen to find behind mirrors, wavering echoes, burn 
in plots and complex narratives to draw 

many clues out, threads of meaning. A 
new insight into the convoluted plot 
of good and evil I can look for, where good men whine, 
villains struggle to prevail and bluster 

against ordinary background noise and hubbub: 
kaleidoscopes of criminality and subtle fiscal judo  
scam and prosper, and some ordinary guy 
will win and lose everything. I 

owe more than money. The key will turn: 
nervous ex-detectives afraid of causing harm 
drop into floods of anxiety, plunge into semi-
enervating doubt; whirlpools of suspicion, and later 

refuse help from well-meaning friends or  
from glum old girl-friends, dawdling, doodling, who 
understand too well their weaknesses, their 
lack of manly self-respect, who know how hypnotic 

those doubled mysteries within a mystery are. You reach
into a maelstrom of neurosis. Beyond bodily desire, 
these complex chess-like fantasies are the true romantic
scenes in your life: the most ludic acrostic paradises: click!

 

-- John Tranter

>>>

Beethoven Bites Off the End of a Bottle - Daniel Brown

Beethoven was facing an especially tough compositional problem. He’d just brought off one of the most singular coups in music.  The problem was how to repeat it.

A little context: The third movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony is that mischievous descendant of the minuet known as a scherzo (Italian for "joke"); the symphony's fourth movement is a rousing finale. This sequence of symphonic movements is entirely conventional (Haydn had patented it decades earlier). But in the course of the 5th's scherzo, some strangeness starts seeping in. The movement begins with a quiet theme, followed by a loud one whose da-da-da-DAH rhythm echoes the famous “fate” motive that opens the symphony. (This stentorian theme comes in at 0:21 in this clip.) In a typical scherzo, these themes would, after an intervening episode, be literally repeated. Sure enough, the quiet theme does return (at 3:14), but–the first hint that something unusual is up–after a few measures, Beethoven reorchestrates it (bowed notes become plucked ones). And when the loud theme returns as expected (at 3:35), it isn’t loud: it’s as quiet as the quiet theme–and also reorchestrated (stated not by the horns of its first appearance, but by more plucked notes in the strings ).

As if these departures from the norm weren't peculiar enough, at the point where the movement should end, it doesn’t. It’s suspensively prolonged (starting at 4:46) by a sustained low note which is soon joined by wisps of the scherzo's "quiet" theme.  Things are clearly hanging some sort of fire…until without warning a rapid build begins, a breathless crescendo that climaxes in the fortissimo opening theme–all golden trumpets and sun-resplendent C major–of the fourth movement (at–not that you could miss it–5:07). This glorious outburst, we realize in retrospect, is what Beethoven has been setting up with all the unwonted quiet that's been preceeding it.

So far, so stupendous. We're now into the symphony’s final movement. This movement is in a classical finale's usual “sonata form.” An all-but-mandatory feature of a sonata-form movement is a return, part-way through, of its opening theme. And with this requirement comes Beethoven’s above-mentioned problem. After all, the original statement of the finale's opening theme was so stunning that its return will almost have to be a letdown. But what made this theme’s original statement so stunning? The suspensive buildup to it. Of course that buildup, being a feature of the preceding movement, is now history... Whereupon Beethoven issues one of the great “So what?”‘s in the history of the arts. If the buildup to the finale's opening theme was essential to that theme’s impact, then let's bring the buildup back! Let's just forklift the whole bleeping buildup out of third movement into the fourth! Which Beethoven goes ahead and does (at 8:39)--resulting in a return of the finale's opening theme (at 9:21) that has all the splendor of its original appearance. The boldness, even ruthlessness, of this solution reminds me of a method suggested, when all else fails, for dealing with a bottle of beer that's proving hard to open: bite the end off it.

Daniel Brown, Guest Author August 13-17

This week we welcome Daniel Brown as our guest author. Daniel’s poems have appeared in Poetry, Raritan, PN Review, Parnassus, and other journals, as well as in a number of anthologies including Poetry 180  and The Swallow Anthology of New American Poets. His most recent collections are Taking the Occasion (winner of the New Criterion Poetry Prize) and What More?. Brown’s criticism has appeared in The Harvard Book Review, The New Criterion, The Hopkins Review and other journals. His audio-visual e-books Why Bach?  and Bach, Beethoven, Bartok are available at Amazon.com. Brown holds a Masters in Musicology from Cornell University, and taught music history and theory at Cornell and Dartmouth College.

Welcome, Daniel.

-- sdl

Summer Reading: Jeanne McCulloch's Debut Memoir "All Happy Families" [by Stacey Lehman]

 

 Two days before Jeanne McCulloch was to marry, her father John suffered a massive stroke and lay in a coma from which he would not emerge. Patricia McCulloch, Jeanne's formidable mother, insisted that the celebration proceed at the family's beachfront East Hampton estate as planned.

So begins All Happy Families, Jeanne McCulloch's absorbing memoir of growing up in Manhattan's Upper East Side and on Long Island. The timing of its publication couldn't be better. Orchestrated by the wedding planner and complete with bagpipes, a guest list drawn from the Social Register, lilies of the valley, and the ocean as backdrop, Jeanne's nuptials, took place on August 13, 1983. You can take All Happy Families to the beach and thanks to McCulloch's sharp observations and imagine you are among the guests.

August 13, 1983. Jeanne McCulloch on her wedding day

Here's what Vogue writer has to say about All Happy Families: 

[McCulloch]  is by turns piercingly vivid and and devastatingly amusing nonetheless, evoking the smell of her siblings’ take-out food in a hospital room where her father lies comatose, her husband summarizing their relationship in a gesture of leaves falling from a tree, and tour de force period pieces, such as the below description of her mother and her girlfriends:

“Nancy and Mu regularly came with their husbands to visit us at the house by the sea, and the three women would do exercise classes together on the lawn, poking their pedicured pink toes into the air for a few minutes to tone their legs, then breaking for a cigarette.” Talking of cigarettes, the special emphatic language her mother has developed around smoking is skewered to perfection by the author. “This was cigarette smoking in ‘I just had to call and vent’ mode, the indignant inhale, the agitated exhale. . . . There was busy smoking—economic quick puffs in rapid succession, or busy with no hands free—speaking on the phone and writing, say, or sorting through place cards for a party, in which the cigarette was held in a clench between her lips. Then there was brooding smoking, the deep inhales and the long, whooshing exhales.”

There is much to enjoy here and much to think about. The most ritualistic and defining of family occasions—a wedding, a death, Christmas—are pulled apart and held up to the light. McCulloch shows all the pieces in turn and the past that led to now. In the midst of all these fragments straining for togetherness, there is, in fact, nuance and grace.

You can read the complete review here. 

Read an excerpt of All Happy Families here. 

-- sdl 

A Tarot Reading for David Lehman [by Benebell Wen]

On January 30, the eve of a New Moon, housed in Aquarius, I read tarot for Best American Poetry’s very own David Lehman. The King of Swords was selected for his signifier card. In tarot, a signifier card anchors the deck around a singular energetic frequency, and the selection of the signifier identifies that frequency as the subject that the tarot is to be read for.

From the King of Swords, we can extrapolate some of David’s personality traits. In his essence, he is Air, the cardinal element governing the suit of Swords. He is an intellectual. Compare: Men of Water have spirituality, the emotive, and the creative. They ask the question, “Who?” Men of Earth are resourceful and pragmatic. They ask, “What?” Men of Fire have their bodies, their passion, and innovation. They want to know, “How?”  Now men of Air, like David, are analytical, rational, and learned. They are the ones who ask, “Why?” From French playing card tradition, the King of Swords is said to correspond with the righteous and fair warrior-king, King David of Judeo-Christian mythos.

Hmm. Same name, too.

To start, I borrow from Golden Dawn traditions and cut the deck into four piles, right to left. The four piles correspond with the four Hebrew letters that spell out the Telegrammaton, or the name of God, and represent the key to accessing the collective unconscious, the infinite and the supreme unity, which is understood by the framework of its four corners—the spiritual-theoretical elements Fire, Water, Air, and Earth.

Diagrams from Wen’s forthcoming book Holistic Tarot (North Atlantic Books, 2014).

David’s signifier, the King of Swords, appeared in the Y pile, which indicates matters of work, career, or health and wellness. Y is about our labors and our own two hands. It is governed by Fire energy, such as ambition, passion, leadership, and vitality.

Fire is also the area related to creativity and innovation. Perhaps David has been mulling over another project that he would like to materialize. If so, the cards here affirm that he should go forward at full vigor. It could also be a caution to watch his health. The H-Love pile would tell us to focus on our family and relationships. The V-Community pile is about our contributions to society. The final H-Economy pile is about our net worth, our property and assets, our financial health. At present, it is David himself that he must focus on. Y-Work is about the self. David has given much to the world around him already and now is the time in his life to care after his own body with the devotion he gave to others before.

Now we proceed to the heart of the reading. To limit the length of this posting, I will draw 4 cards only.

 

The Knight of Wands in David’s past indicates a fiery, impetuous character who has thrived on stirring conflict and challenging others (including himself). The Knight of Wands is a visionary, though has trouble finishing what he starts. There is also immaturity in the Knight of Wands, mostly because when he has thought up an idea, he charges forward to implement that idea, well before he has thought through the consequences. Fortunately for David, that impetuous nature has worked to his advantage in the past and by luck, he has been successful. Therefore, perhaps, it is a lesson he never quite learned, and so that same fiery charge continues to this day. That confidence from past successes is the subconscious influence on his present.

The High Priestess explores what is below the surface of his consciousness and indicates a deeply intuitive and perceptive individual. The High Priestess is an intellectual, a mystic, is educated, but also possesses knowledge that cannot be taught. She is a personal metaphor for David’s greater spiritual role as a keeper of knowledge and wisdom, a keeper of the arts. The card, further confirmed by the strength of presence of a Major Arcanum here, speaks to the greater role he serves to his society. It seems also that his work is not finished yet. There is more for him to do and more greatness to come from him. However, the High Priestess is also a guardian of secrets, and so David is advised to keep his ideas secret for now. Do not tell others yet. Wait, David. Wait until that idea has matured some before sharing with others.

The Emperor is manifested in David’s external sphere. It is the card of authority and paternity. It is symbolic of an iron will. To others, David’s world appears to be one under great order, under control. Note that the landscape behind The Emperor in the card shows a stern, severe nature. Yet the Emperor is also about dominance and superiority in work and career realms. Whatever he pursues, he will conquer and succeed. However, what is it that he has conquered? In The Emperor card, the kingdom behind him is parched. The dryness of the imagery represents thirst, a thirst for a different kind of sovereignty than the one he has attained.

I liken the golden orb that The Emperor holds to the story of King Midas, the king who could turn everything he touched into gold, but ultimately died of hunger because when his lips touched food, it would turn to gold and gold cannot nourish. That myth might resonate with David. There is still thirst in him, in spite of all he has accomplished, because to date, he feels he still has not attained what would truly nourish him.

The final card gives us a sense of where David is going. The Three of Pentacles is one of those cards that frequently appears in spreads for artists and writers. Here, it appears in reverse, which hints at a deeply rooted fear of mediocrity. There is a motivation generated by that fear of mediocrity and it is that motivation that seems to be driving David’s current movements forward. The Three of Pentacles in reverse might also be seen as an indication that David’s current approach isn’t the optimal one. There is a better way to accomplish what it is he is striving for at the moment, and he may need to reevaluate his current movements.

The Three of Pentacles in reverse may also hint at difficulties with friends and those in his current social circle. There is a sense of displacement here that may be the theme of his struggle. On the current trajectory he’s intent to be on, the outcome will be that of someone who is outside looking in. There is some connection here between the Three of Pentacles in reverse and The Emperor. The one at the top is the one alone. Being an outlier is lonely business. That is his inner conflict. He fears mediocrity and strives for greatness. Yet greatness does not nourish him. Going forward, there is his struggle: The Emperor versus the Three of Pentacles reversed. His answer, of course, is given right there in the spread, in his unconscious: it is The High Priestess.

[this insightful and prescient reading was originally posted February 6, 2014]

Liszt, Grant, Dostoevsky -- 1/3 (By Mitch Sisskind)

Liszt

You’re buying a can of tuna fish
As you’ve done so many times
Over the years but this is today,
This is the exact can of tuna fish
You’re buying now, it’s different
From all other cans on the shelf,  
This is the Chicken of the Sea
Light Chunk tuna fish in water
You’re buying at this moment
And you’re thinking of Liszt and
Lina Schmalhusen as you buy it,
The name of Lina Schmalhusen
Echoing in your mind, ricocheting
Around in your brain as you buy
this tuna fish -- Lina Schmalhusen,
Lina Schmalhusen -- and her rivalry
With Dori Petersen, both of them
Students in Liszt’s master classes
For piano performance and the
Rivalry getting worse and worse
Until Liszt himself had to compose
A stern letter to Dori Petersen and
This is the precise can of tuna fish
You buy on this day and you take it
Home in your car in a paper bag.

You’re making a tuna melt as you have
Often done in your life but never this one
That you’re making at this exact moment
In this kitchen with this can of tuna fish
That you put in the sink and on the counter
Beside the sink you place a bowl, a spoon,
A spatula, a knife, a can opener, a lemon,
A bottle of mayonnaise, a white onion,
A pack of pre-sliced cheddar cheese,
And two pieces of rye bread. Meanwhile
Liszt is still on your mind -- Liszt, Liszt –
And Lina Schmalhusen’s rivalry with
Dori Petersen in 1883 when Liszt was
Drinking absinthe and Achille Colonello,
His manservant was powerless to stop him.
You slice off a section of the onion and
You dice it on a plastic cutting board,
And you use the knife to sweep it off
The board into the bowl as you return
Your attention to the can of tuna fish
In the sink and then you open the can
With the can opener and then, without
Removing the lid, you press down
On the lid with your thumbs to drain
Water from the opened can of tuna fish.

Has almost all of the water been drained
From the can of tuna fish in the sink?
You lift the top of the can for a moment
And if too much water seems to remain
You replace the top and -- with the can
Still in the sink -- you press down again
Even harder than before, after which 
You remove the top, discard it, and
With the knife as your tool you transfer
The tuna to the bowl where the onion is.
Liszt suspended Dori Petersen from
His master classes with that letter
Stating that ‘this whole intrigue was
‘Initiated by you in a mean-spirited way.’
But then Lina Schmalhusen was caught
Shoplifting so that Liszt, after assuring
Himself of her innocence, felt obligated
While the matter proceeded to trial
To engage the judge and convince him
To drop the charges. Now you place 
A skillet on a burner of the kitchen stove
And turn on the flame to heat the skillet
Even before the sandwich is actually
Placed on the skillet and you do this
For reasons that will be made clear.

You open the bottle of mayonnaise and
Use the spoon to scoop out a dollop
Of the mayonnaise which then goes into
The bowl with the onion and the tuna,
And all the while the skillet is heating.
Still using the spoon, you amalgamate
The contents of the bowl and then,
Using the knife, you slice the lemon
In half and drip some lemon juice
Into the bowl. Moving quickly now,
You distribute spoonfuls of the tuna
Mixture onto a slice of the rye bread
And when this is done you remove
A slice of the cheddar cheese from
Its package, spread the cheese on top
Of the tuna, and cover it with the other
Slice of bread to make a sandwich upon
Which, using your full weight, you press
Your hands down onto the sandwich
So that, more often than not, some tuna
Extrudes from the sides of the sandwich.
This is tuna that you can replace beneath
The top piece of the rye bread, or you can
Ignore this tuna or discard this tuna which
Is sometimes called orphaned tuna.

Why was it important to heat the skillet
Even before the sandwich was finished?
Why did Liszt exert himself on behalf of
Lina Schmalhausen against Dori Petersen
And for what reason did he do it again
With Lina Schmalhausen’s shoplifting?
Were the skillet not well-heated before
Receiving the sandwich, then the side of the
Sandwich that was heated first would heat
Slower than the other side of the sandwich
When the sandwich was turned over onto
The now-hotter skillet, which could be
Bothersome if the poorly heated side
Were the side closest to the cheese
And there would also be a tedious
Turning over of the sandwich until both
Sides were more or less evenly heated.
Liszt’s concern for Lina Schmalhausen
Likely arose from her introduction to Liszt
By Empress Augusta of Prussia, to whom
An indifference toward Lina Schmalhausen
Would have seemed like a slap in the face.
Liszt was now 73, in the twilight of his years.
Lina accompanied him from town to town
And generally made his life more bearable.