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Just listen.
Haven't done half the things we wanted --
There's so much more embracing
still to be done, but time is racing
O well --
Never have seen you do the dishes --
Seeing you there without your make up --
O well, we'll catch up / some other time
Just when the fun is starting / Comes the time for parting --
But let's be glad / for what we've had / and what's to come --
O well --
we'll catch up
some
other
time
Byzantine Leads to Gothic
Sarcophagus, Byzantine, early 300s, gallery 300 Capital with Four Heads, Gothic, 1225–50, gallery 304
Just never saw it that way
1,000 years from the end of Rome to the Renaissance: the gigantic new Christian colloid of Rome, Greece, Persia, Scandinavia, England, Syria: no wonder I never saw the connections . . . and the imagery was a continuum of controversy.
“The human spirit cannot keep on floating in this infinity of formless ideas; they must be compiled for it into a definite picture after its own pattern.” - Montaigne
Break bitter furies of complexity,
Those images that yet
Fresh images beget
- “Byzantium”, William Butler Yeats
“As a living man does not have to give reasons for his breathing, he does not need to explain his beliefs.” - Montaigne
“It’s Byzantine”
Keystone from a Vaulted Ceiling, Germany, 1220-30, gallery 300
It’s too too complex is the consensus.
The Formats of Old Friends . . . The Storyboard
Ivory Altarpiece, ca. 1390–1400, Italy, gallery 306
Stories in units in framed cells. Time divided into sequence in space. Grids of progression. The DNA for films, graphic novels, cartoons, comics . . .
Stories in Light
Stained Glass Panels, 15th C., German, gallery 306
Q: How do you tell those biblical stories - Mary as Virgin, Queen, Bride, Mother, Intercessor - to a largely illiterate congregation?
A: Stained glass.
I have heard that the origin of the term kike comes from Jewish immigrants at Ellis Island who would not sign their names with crosses (X), and signed instead with small circles: kikel or kikeleh in Yiddish shortened to kike, i.e. the people who make little circles.
The Articles We “Know”
The Last Supper, ca. 1500–1530, German or South Netherlandish, gallery 305
Yes, of course. The Last Supper, The Apostles, The Annunciation, The Madonna, The Child, The Pieta . . . familiar, the stuff of Western Civ. Not “chapter and verse” to me, but by osmosis in school, by television, and my childhood neighbors on their way home from Catechism.
In Los Angeles I discovered all the freeways have articles; a Spanish influence. New Yorkers take 95 to 395. Angelenos take The 405 to The 101.
For I will Consider Your Dog Molly
David Lehman, "For I Will Consider Your Dog Molly" from Operation Memory (Princeton University Press, 1990)
-- sdl
Two lovely and intriguing painting exhibitions ongoing at Musée Maillol and Musée Marmottan Monet offer more than their titles suggest. Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du douanier rousseau à Séraphine at Musée Maillol debunks the notion of “naïf (primitive)” and does a great job of showing color, shape, form in daily life in France 1920-1940 by outsider painters. Mondrian Figuratif at Marmottan Monet uses some lovely figurative painting to anchor a well-made walk-through of Piet Mondrian’s painterly quest for Beauty.
What they see becomes visual lyric: intimate, even indiscrete, warm, colorful. Visitors will enjoy the little irony of tourist-targeted views of Montmartre by these often commercially struggling artists as well bigger and more recondite ironies such as Dominique Peyronnet’s slipping of the iconic La Femme à la Perle into the sharp symmetry of a modern urban landscape.
And there’s plenty more work by these marginal maîtres that just enables the eye to enjoy while the mind wanders: feathery flower bouquets by Séraphine Louis (which put me in mind of Shaker prints, even Jung drawings), Le Douanier Rousseau’s powerfully-imagined “exotic natural” scenes (which put me in mind of William Blake prints), René Rimbert’s bistro-inspired still lifes (which brought Cezanne’s to mind), the graded colors and perspectives of sea- and landscapes by André Bauchant and Ferdinand Desnos, or Camille Bombois’ good-tempered almost-porn.
And if Grands maîtres naïfs puts pay to the notion that modern “primitive” painting is anything more than a nasty little kick against painters of “marginal” social origins, Mondrian Figuratif puts in doubt the “Father of abstraction”’s parental role in that particular style.
Marmottan Monet’s exhibition in fact highlights Mondrian’s personal spiritual quest for beauty. I mean “Beauty”in a Neo-Platonic, 19th-century sense, with a capital B, the one that was supposed to exist with Love and Truth at the core of the universe and Christian society. “Mondrian figuratif”’s walk-through arrangement makes the visual case that painter Mondrian knows in his heart, like poet Keats, that Truth is Beauty and Beauty is Truth. This puts a lot of water between him and a painter like a Picasso, or Jasper John’s who knows who else in the modern era whose search is mostly for new and satisfactory expressive style(s).
In the entry way of the Mondrian Figuratif walk-through sits a ‘still life” of a “naturalist” dead hare in the Dutch Renaissance style, made by a 19-year old Mondrian. Next to it is the painter’s very first “abstract” painting. The hare’s ‘naturalism’ is on its head, subjected to the effect of light on a graded color and texture (the hare’s fur) while this first “abstract” work is clearly a study of the subtle line and color of tar and worn tiles in somebody’s floor.
Turning into the exhibition from there, some wonderful examples of Mondrian’s figurative work greets visitor eyes. But raise them, look right. There at the bottom of the exhibition is Mondrian’s 1921 Composition avec large plan rouge, jaune, noir, gris et bleu, which definitely isn’t somebody’s tile floor! But then, those colors, those lines! Why, of course, it’s the Beauty of all tile floors! Of all windmills! Then, catching their breath and looking back and forth, there certainly seems a relation between the capture of the exact chromatic quality of early moonlight in the 1906 Crépuscule and Large plan, between the swathes of horizontal color and “natural” geometry of the 1908 Moulin dans le crépuscule and Large plan… The walk-through between these paintings is a visual discussion of Mondrian becoming toward Beauty and, maybe, Truth: all we need to know.
Mondrian Figuratif runs at the Musée Marmottan Monet until 26 January 2020.
Les Grands maîtres naïfs: du Douanier Rousseau à Séraphine runs at Musée Maillol until 19 January 2020.
Name some striking lines of noir dialogue that stick with you?
Suzanne Lummis:
Some might see this coming, since it’s shown up a couple times--in my poem called “Venetian Blinds: Ghazal-like Noir” and in one my of my They Write by Night installments—maybe the one that featured you [David Lehman]. It’s in The Maltese Falcon, when Sam Spade opens the door and a thug comes through with a firearm. Spade just laughs, “My, my, my! Such a lot of guns around town and so few brains.” Immortal line, and truer now than ever. Every time I hear it I think, no freakin’ kidding. If I knew how to do needlework, I’d stitch that on a sampler. The rest of his line goes, “You know, you're the second guy I've met today that seems to think a gat in the hand means the world by the tail.” I love what it says, and I envy Spade’s cool in the face of danger. He’s got a gun on him but he’s cracking jokes. That’s some French Existentialism slipping in, though the Existentialists weren’t much good for laughs. But mix it with hardboiled American lingo…
And I like another one, not spoken as a line of dialogue but by a woman in life, outside of any movie script – but referencing one of the most famous films noir.
Rita Hayworth, married five times, talked about the difficulty of living up to the femme fatale fantasy and her most unforgettable character, “Men go to bed with Gilda but they wake up with me.” (It was either that, or “Every man I knew went to bed with Gilda and woke up with me,“ or “Men fall in love with Gilda but wake up with me,” depending on the biography or newspaper story.) It’s a snappy line but, also, there’s wisdom in it. And disappointment. A loneliness. And the savvy to sum up her life in one crackerjack line. Real life noir.
David Lehman:
From DOA, the two-word interrogative sentence that informs all film noir is spoken by Bigelow (Edmund O’Brien): “Why me?”
From Out of the Past
Kathie (Jane Greer): I think we deserve a break.
Jeff (Robert Mitchum): We deserve each other.
From Laura:
Clifton Webb as celebrity critic Waldo Lydecker: “I don't use a pen. I write with a goose quill dipped in venom.” And I don’t remember the exact words, but in a restaurant scene, doesn’t he tell Gene Tierney that she seems “to be completely disregarding something more important than her career.” What? “My lunch.”
Dana Andrews: “A dame in Washington Heights once got a fox fur out of me.”
From Double Indemnity:
Phyllis (Barbara Stanwyck): There’s a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff. Forty-five miles an hour.
Neff (Fred MacMurray): How fast was I going, officer?
Phyllis: I’d say about ninety.
Neff: Suppose you get down off your motorcycle and give me a ticket.
Phyllis: Suppose I let you off with a warning this time.
Neff: Suppose it doesn’t take.
Phyllis: Suppose I have to whack you over the knuckles.
Neff: Suppose I bust out crying and put my head on your shoulder.
Phyllis: Suppose you try putting it on my husband’s shoulder.
Neff: That tears it.
“Straight down the line.”
This is the thirteenth in a series of exchanges about noir. For previous posts, click here.
Marsh Hawk Press has sponsored the wonderful Chapter One project, brief memoirs "on becoming a poet," a new chapter each month, with contributions from Denise Duhamel, Phillip Lopate, Eileen Tabios, Jane Hirshfield, Burt Kimmelman, Sandy McIntosh, and other redoubtable writers. My own contribution is entitled "Opening Shot" and is the project's choice for October 2019. Section two of five bears the part title "A Pair of Odes," and follows:
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When I was seventeen, I wrote two poems that eventually were published. Both consisted of four lines. To both I gave the title “Ode.” I had never heard of Horace or Pindar and didn’t know what went into the making of an ode as composed by Jonson, Marvell, Gray, Shelley, or Keats. But the word was lovely and in the atmosphere of the 1960s it was okay to break rules, even to be ignorant of what they were.
The first of the odes to be written appeared in a broadsheet published by the poet John Fuller in Oxford, England, summer 1968:
I asked a fat man,
Do you enjoy being fat?
Yes, he said,
that is the only thing that I enjoy.
It pleased me that the last line of this simple poem scanned perfectly as iambic pentameter, as if to demonstrate that it is the natural flow of the English language – what we today might call the default meter.
The second ode made a hit with Columbia University radicals during the campus strike of spring 1968, perhaps because it made people laugh when I read it aloud:
As long as I live,
there shall never be
another Harry
Truman.
What made me break up the lines as I did? What made me think that these were poems? I don’t know the answer to these and other legitimate questions except to say that I let instinct guide me where it will, and in the end, instinct is what we have to fall back on.
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For more about the project, click here. For more of my own piece, for example the sections entitled "Whitman in the Eleventh Grade" and "Frankly. . . you're okay," click here. Photo credit: Catherine Arra.
-- as sung by Helen Merrill (1965)
1.
You’re my thrill,
my joint, my shot, my magic pill.
I dwell in that gaudy den
of smoke and mirrors where, when
you close my eyes,
I take a trip
to paradise:
a casino where I always win
as long as I’m within
the grip
of the labyrinthine dream I’m in.
I may never get wise,
may never disbelieve these lies.
Yet I know I must get high.
2.
Admit it. You’re one of us.
You didn’t miss the bus.
You need to get drunk
on wine or weed or stronger junk.
Maybe you’re addicted to kinky sex,
bouncing your checks,
blaming your ex,
imitating Oedipus Rex.
Or maybe you need a fix
of speed, acid, ecstasy, sin,
coke, angel dust, gin,
or the white magic of heroin.
“You’re my thrill. . .
Where’s my will?”
To you therefore I repeat
the sweet
immortal words of Charles Baudelaire,
and declare,
drink in hand, bidding you goodbye:
you must get high.
[from the Spring / Summer 2019 issue of Literary Matters]
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Born and raised in New York City, Ricky Mujica studied art at the High School of Art and Design, Parsons in Paris, and at Parsons School of Design.
The artwork of Ricky Mujica was initially influenced by the old masters and this connection has helped him achieve a high level of success as an illustrator. Before returning to his roots as a fine artist, Ricky Mujica created art for all the top publishing companies including Harper Collins, Harlequin, Bantam, and Scholastic. He has created art for major magazines including the New York Times Magazine and Ebony. His work has been seen in commercials for such products as Cherry 7-Up, on murals for Sony and Loews theaters, and on clothes for fashion designer Rachel Roy. His artwork has been represented at the Museum of American Illustration on several occasions
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Click here for a gallery of Ricky's figurative work, or go here for more about the artist http://rickymujica.com/home/index.html
Left: a self-portrait. Right: "Multitasking" (2012). About the latter, Ricky writes, "Multitasking is my homage to the working mom. My muses are my wife, Heather Joy Harlan and my daughter, Violet Mujica. But this painting is every mother who nurtures life. I painted it with love and admiration."
Maybe poets and literati should take a leaf from the libertine meet-up sites and start organizing everything according to preference group. Under a preference topic, say, sadomasochism, a libertine can access a wide range of apparently unrelated interests, say, voyeurism, spanking and humiliation. Libertines thus stay both focused and expansive, free to experiment. Access and experimentation are very important for poets and literati, too.
The preference group idea came to me when I visited the third annual Extra! “living literature” festival at Centre Pompidou. Created in 2017, Extra! features the visual and sound aspects of literary endeavor. It suddenly became clear, to me, anyway, that the genre called “literature” is about viable and useful a guiding descriptive as gender is for human beings and that a move to a preference group system is imperative.
The people participating in Extra! all seemed to have a marked preference for words, a preference shared by a wide range of people, including Poetical and just plain people who like to read a lot. So, under a preference group approach, word would take the place of literary. Extra! becomes a “living word” festival, with literature, performance and installations as specific festival offers.
With activities over several days in different locations around central Paris, the opening night of this new an intriguing annual living word festival at Centre Pompidou featured, among other installations and events, English-using poet Alain Arias Mission’s 60s era happenings around “concrete poetry”. The poet uses physical typography, (meta)political urban topography and partly spontaneous performance for effect. Mission’s show reminded me that “happenings” and “situation” are playing a strong part in dance performance creation these days.
Last June, for instance, choreographer Joanne Leighton situated a valedictory dance performance at the Musée de l’immigration to point the issue of rising anti-enlightenment political views; Nina Santes, who took up the residence at the Atelier de Paris that Leighton was capping with her in situ performance, creates or is searching to create (interactive) performance from the happening formats that opened out in the 60s, the time when Mission, among others, was bringing out situational, public, spontaneous poetry.
Mission’s concrete poetry exhibit was in echo with a hilariously cynical interactive game involving managing author-provocateur Michel Houellebecq’s future literary legacy, along with a projected compilation of iconic film images and talk-show-format discussions.
Extra! organizers capped the evening with the award of the Prix Bernard Heidsieck to polyglot sound and translingual poet Cia Rinne. Rinne has linguistic feet in Sweden, Finland and Germany, as well as in her translingual poetry, which, she told me, was suggested by ordinary conversation in the multilingual household where she grew up. Just as Nina Santes’ work reverberates with energies inherited from happenings, Rinne’s work winds around and binds together concepts exemplified by sound-tech poet pioneers such as Laurie Anderson and traditional, page-visual-Ogden-Nash-book-of -practical-cats-style poetry formats.
Prix Bernard Heidsieck, which rewards non-book word creation, memorializes poet Bernard Heidsieck (1928-2014), a French-language champion of multi-media literary endeavor.
What about film noir first appealed to you, and has that changed over the years? Or not?
Suzanne Lummis:
Initially, it wasn’t film noir that hooked me—it was classic crime fiction, the hardboiled stuff of the early years, particularly the poet of crime fiction, Raymond Chandler. That hard wit, both mocking and self-mocking, Chandler’s extraordinary eye for detail, and that voice, Philip Marlowe’s, stripped of all sentimentality and self-pity and yet deeply human—that’s what I loved. No writer in any language ever sounded like Raymond Chandler, except for his forebears, who had elements of his style but weren’t as good, and those who came after, his imitators, never as good.
I was a young poet studying at Fresno State (now CSU Fresno) and absorbing that sensibility and approach to poetry and language that’s now recognized as the Fresno signature style. And I liked that just fine, but it wasn’t quite…I don’t know. Enough? All that down-to-earthedness didn’t lend itself to mischief and dark humor. And mischief and dark humor was what I’d begun to feel. I found a model for that not in poetry but prose like this:
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The first sensation was that if anybody spoke harshly to me I should burst out crying….I rolled over gently and sat up and a rattling noise ended in a thump. What rattled and thumped was a knotted towel full of melting ice cubes. Someone who loved me very much had put them on the back of my head. Someone who loved me less had bashed in the back of my skull. It could’ve been the same person. People have moods.
[from Playback by Raymond Chandler]
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From there I found my way to the movies. That tone of detachment and, in some movies, a sort of offhand wit, together with the stark black and white patterns created with lowkey lighting, gave me what I needed to pull off certain challenging poems—poems that were at risk of being melodramatic or just plain predictable. I could not have pulled off “Letter to My Assailant” without the influence of crime fiction and film noir.
David Lehman:
In my senior year at Columbia, I went one night with David Anderson, a brilliant writer, to the old New Yorker theater on Broadway and 88th Street, to see a double bill of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep. That double-bill did it. The characters, the women, the "dingus" in the former and the real and fake bookstores in the latter, Joel Cairo and the Fat Man on the one hand, and the casino owner and hit man on the other. David gave me a book of Chandler's stories, "Trouble Is My Business," which was great.
A few months later, studying at Cambridge, England, homesick for New York, I read as many murder mysteries and saw as many noirs as possible. Every college in Cambridge had its own film society, and the Arts Cinema on Rose Crescent was also devoted to great movies of any era in any language. I saw Samuel Fuller’s Pickup on South Street, Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Wages of Fear, Dark Passage, Dick Powell as Philip Marlowe in Murder, My Sweet and Robert Montgomery in the role in The Lady in the Lake, Clint Eastwood and Lee J. Cobb in Coogan’s Bluff, and a bunch of Hitchocks, including Vertigo, Stage Fright, North by Northwest, Strangers on a Train, and Shadow of a Doubt. At the time, Vertigo was out of circulation, and I have no idea how the film society got their hands on a copy of this amazing movie.
In my second year at Cambridge, I decided to devote my master's thesis on Hammett and Chandler. This was at a time when detective novels were not considered literature worthy of study. Some of the dons wrote detective novels, really good ones like those of Michael Innes, but always under a pseudonym, to protect thereby their more serious selves. During that year four movies came out that fit in the category of murder mystery or crime story: The French Connection, Klute, Dirty Harry, and The Godfather.
Finishing my thesis did nothing to diminish my interest in murder mysteries, espionage, thrillers, and the movies based on them. It was only later that I made a proper study of the subject.
The effect of that double-bill of The Maltese Falcon and The Big Sleep was matched only when, two years later, a month before finishing up at Cambridge, I saw Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in Top Hat and Swing Time, another double-bill that changed my life. Leaving the theater that evening my friends Charlotte, Rob, and I danced on the pavement. It was the first time I heard those scores by Irving Berlin and Jerome Kern.
You must get drunk. That’s it: your sole imperative. To immunize yourself from the backbreaking, body-bending burdens of time, you must get drunk and stay that way.
But on what? On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, your choice. But get drunk.
And if sometimes, while on the steps of a palace, on the green grass beside a marsh, in the morning solitude of your room, you snap out of it, your drunkenness has worn off , has worn off entirely, then ask the wind, ask an ocean wave, a star, a bird, a clock, every evanescent thing, everything that flies, that groans, that rolls, that sings, that speaks, ask them what time it is; and the wind, the wave, the star, the bird, the clock, will tell you: “It’s time to get drunk! To avoid being the martyred slaves of time, get drunk, get drunk and stay that way. On wine, on poetry, or on virtue, your choice.”
-- trans. David Lehman
"Enivrez-vous" is one of the fifty prose poems that constitute "Petits Poemes en prose," also known as "Spleen de Paris," the book by Baudelaire [pictured above] that launched the prose poem as a genre (or a form.) This translation appeared in Alan Ziegler's excellent volume "Shorts" (Persea Books). I am working on a complete translation of "Paris Spleen," which is how I'd render the title. The poems have not been sdatisfactorily translated since Arthur Symons did it in the first decade of the twentieth century in Edwardian England. -- DL
who will read from
Playlist: a poem in 57 daily parts (U of Pittsburgh Press)
One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir (Cornell University Press)
&
The Best American Poetry 2019 (guest ed. Major Jackson; Scribner)
Thursday Sep 26, 2019
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm
POWERHOUSE @ the Archway
28 Adams Street (Corner of Adams & Water Street @ the Archway)
Brooklyn , NY 11201
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Since 1988, The Best American Poetry has been the leading anthology of contemporary American poetry. The Washington Post said of the 2017 edition, “The poems…have a wonderful cohesion and flow, as if each contributes to a larger narrative
about life today…While readers may question some of the selections—an annual sport with this series—most will find much that resonates, including the insightful author notes at the back of the anthology.”
The state of the world has inspired many to write poetry, and to read it—to share all the rage, beauty, and every other thing under the sun in the way that only poetry can. Now the foremost anthology of contemporary American poetry returns, guest edited by Major Jackson, the poet and editor who, “makes poems that rumble and rock” (poet Dorianne Laux). This brilliant 2019 edition includes some of the year’s most defining, striking, and innovative poems and poets.
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This is a free-access event — entrance will be on a first-come, first-served basis. Find more information here.
When I pulled a slim volume of poetry off the shelf and read the following description on the back, I knew I had to read it. “In Kim Dower’s fourth collection, Sunbathing on Tyrone Power’s Grave, death has never felt so alive!” How could I resist a death that feels alive? The first poem in the book that I flipped to was this:
Completion
We like to cross things off our lists.
The wedding gift has been shipped.
Groceries in the fridge. Book written.
Dying is the last item to be checked off the list.
I wish I could cross it off myself as I was
in the act. I’d insert a pink ink cartridge
in my special Pilot, draw a withering line
through the word die (maybe a smiley face?)
as my last breath left my lungs. Be there for me
if and when, as I might need you to hand me
my pen. Hand me my pen.
The poem surprised me, in part because I, too, have been putting death on a checklist, along with eggs, toilet paper, coffee, gardening, and calling Nicole. (I need to call Nicole!) But I don’t mean death exactly, not as Dower does, but rather, thinking about death. Because I’m trying to be a better Buddhist, and thinking about death is an important part of Buddhist practice. There’s even an app for this called WeCroak, which I downloaded two days ago. Now WeCroak dings me 5 times a day and reminds me that I will die. And each time it dings, I think about Claire Bateman’s poem, “LXI,” from her miraculously beautiful book, The Locals, that begins:
LXI
In this realm, most of the citizens have become aficionados of their own death scenes, traveling repeatedly into the future to
snap photographs from various angles, host parties, or engage in religious ceremonies, whether or not the dying version of any
particular self is still a believer.
But sometimes when I practice with WeCroak, I worry that I’m not doing it right. For Buddhists death is supposed to be an opportunity to transform from the proverbial caterpillar into a butterfly. So thinking about death should be a way of thinking about this transformation, just as Dower does in her lovely poem, “Confessions of a Butterfly.”
Confessions of a Butterfly
I stuffed myself with milkweed
in my adorable larva stage
making my wings large
bright orange. I’m desperate
for people to admire
my delicate beauty and believe
I bring them good luck.
With my life span as short
as a rose’s, I don’t waste my time
fluttering through the fields
mingling with the flowers.
I plan to follow the heat, echo
in its warmth, power straight
into the sun, feel each ray slash
my wings, burn them to powder,
light up the world.
After reading this poem, I tried and failed to imagine myself as a lowly being changing into a winged one, and then lighting up the world. I think I am lacking what Claire Bateman calls Epiphany Insurance. As she explains in her poem, "XXXI:"
XXXI
Question: What do the following inhabitants of this realm, strangers to one another, have in common?
a. the scholar shredding his dissertation
b. the scientist scowling at the printout of her test results
c. the songwriter unable to move past the first stanza
Answer: Each has neglected to maintain payments for the Individual Epiphany Insurance, allowing coverage to lapse. Thus, despite the severity of their woes, no one will offer them even the most perfunctory expression of sympathy.
Whatever the cause, I find it difficult to think of the dead as liberated beings. If the dead could talk, I imagine they'd tell me how much they wish they were still here, eating ice cream or making love or just shooting the breeze, as they do in this flash fiction story by Meg Pokrass, from her new book, The Dog Seated Next to Me:
What the Dead Want
There are so many dead people in her life, especially in this house. They float around and exaggerate. They want to see something sexy. That nightgown? they say. They miss eating berries. They’re sure she’ll be okay. They say wonderful things about what you might do here on earth. They should have taken more lovers, had more beach weekends, seen more foreign films. They ask for autographs from the living.
And there is also this engaging flash fiction piece by Pokrass, which is more about absence than death.
What Are You Doing, Friend?
His voice tender and sore. Not angry, like the photo. Not turning on this moment.
The woman lives in there still. What are you doing? she whispers, because he is not the him that can be spoken to.
This is surely a ghost. She walks around the house barefoot, looking at stacks of problems. Touching his absence.
What are you doing, friend? she might ask his light blue eyes that look like birds.
I love the mystical feel of that poem, and of all the poems I've mentioned here. I sometimes worry that I lack any mystical visions. That’s one of the reasons I’ve been taking classes in Buddhism. (I’m a repeat student—I never progress.) Last week, we had a guest-speaker from Tibet named Tenzin who tried to simplify his lesson by fitting Buddhist principles into the story of the three pigs. The three pigs, he said, represent the three steps one goes through when becoming enlightened.
The first pig, he said, is the piggy who becomes happy with himself after meditating. And he’s so happy being happy. He feels great. He can just sit there on his zafu, all blissed out. (Oh, to be the first piggy!)
But then, alas, one day he becomes the second piggy. This happens when he thinks of the other pigs, the other less happy pigs. He worries about them . . . Maybe his heart even aches for them. I’m not entirely sure what he does with his newfound awareness of the unhappy pigs in the world. I think he just sits there, dwelling on their condition. Maybe he writes poems about them.
But then, one day he turns into the third piggy, and he seeks to save all the other pigs. How he does this, I don’t know. Maybe he becomes a Buddha-pig. Or a Dalai Lama-pig. Maybe he teaches everyone to sit on his or her cushion and become a pig like piggy number 1.
Now that I reread what I have written, I don’t think I have the story right. I asked my friend, Anne, a fellow student and Buddhist practitioner, and she said that the third piggy is actually a transcendent pig. Because he’s free. He has no bodily limitations. He might even be a bodiless pig.
A bodiless pig? I give up. Now, all I can think of is Edson’s famous poem, “A Performance at Hog Theater.”
A Performance at Hog Theater
There was once a hog theater where hogs performed
as men, had men been hogs.
One hog said, I will be a hog in a field which has
found a mouse which is being eaten by the same hog
which is in the field and which has found the mouse,
which I am performing as my contribution to the
performer’s art.
Oh let’s just be hogs, cried an old hog.
And so the hogs streamed out of the theater crying,
only hogs, only
hogs . . .
In my farewell address, I warned against the military-industrial complex and made an allusion to "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning," by John Donne, whose moral compass I honor.
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Well, it had to happen. This is my last column as your ringleader. I know the news will surprise and perhaps disappoint many of you. It saddens me too, and I’ll miss the party. But it’s time. I’ve directed us since we started “Next Line, Please” back in May 2014, and I’ve always felt it is wiser to part a month early rather than a week late.
My next months are crowded with deadlines and occasions. They always are, but this season more so. One Hundred Autobiographies: A Memoir will be published in October, and I will be expected to promote it and my recently published books of poetry, Playlist and Poems in the Manner Of.
“Next Line, Please”—the brainchild of Robert Wilson, editor of The American Scholar—has been a great success by any criteria, including the quality of the writing; the enthusiasm and commitment of the participants; and the establishment of a community of very smart individuals who enjoy the free exchange of ideas and practical criticism, value civil discourse, and eschew the gratuitous meanness that one so often encounters on the Internet. Cornell University Press thought enough of our project to publish Next Line, Please: Prompts to Inspire Poets and Writers in 2018. Some of our more assiduous NLP regular are at work on an anthology of poems that will highlight some of our all-star performances.
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Read on, dear reader, here.
And I've been running away from the wise man in my head
And he says, go, go, go, go get lost in the wind
And I've been hearing some whispers on the wind
And they say, run, run, run, run away for your sins
Don't leave that fiery mind behind/ Take it along for the ride
Don't leave that fiery mind behind/ Take it along for the ride
“Fiery Heart, Fiery Mind”, Alice Phoebe Lou
Physical space and cultural project make Lafayette Anticipations distinct as an institution. Lodged in a building designed by the architect Rem Koolhaas, Anticipations enjoys a pretty-much entirely modular interior space. As a project, the institution explicitly links art, industry and technology in culture production.
Anticipations’ unique interior space practically calls up new visions of live performance; its exhibitions of themselves provoke – without provocation – conversation on where, how, by whom, with and for what culture is produced.
Opened to the public only in 2018 and blessed with its distinct potentialities in space and concept, Anticipations development as an institution is also an opportunity to look at how original intentions and potential can be deployed though time.
The opportunity to observe is why the appointment of Rebecca Lamarche-Vadel as managing director, seconding its founder president Guillaume Houzé, caught my eye. Lamarche-Vadel is 32, Houzé, 38. Lamarche-Vadel is said to have a strong interest in presentation and arrangement of culture production.
The Anticipations’ building is a work of art in a way that no building I can think of is, so the first thing to think about is: How interior space potential is understood in respect to fixed physical plant? In other words: What is the tail, what is the dog, the space potential or plant configuration? Then the question is: How is this understanding to be kneaded into Anticipations’ live performances and exhibitions?
Anticipation’s season-opening dance performance program Echelle Humaine makes me think that, as a work of art, the architecture immediately makes a single unit of “performer-performance-space”. This is because, in much the same way as certain contemporary movement artists seem to be pushing performers to localize within themselves not just performance but also place, Anticipations’ art-architecture strains to make itself performance and performer as well as place/space potential.
Anticipations’ art-architecture is like a choreographer: it’s not enough to hold a show there – there has to be the “show” and “show” has to be there. I’m thinking here of how such artists as Joanne Leighton shape perceived space by the potentials of movement or of how performers such as Bruno Canteteau shape-themselves-into-things-in-space-into-movement-into-poetry.
So, for me, until they tear the building down, Anticipations’ creative challenge will be to align, synthesize, the building-as-choreographer (or artist) with what goes on within it – a challenge that, it seems to me, requires management to take on an artist’s stance, as well as play the demanding stage manager, when it comes to performance.
An artist’s stance, involving an unusually close creative collaboration with (the other) creators must necessarily be the order of the day for Anticipations’ culture-project exhibitions, too.
Conceptually the exhibitions immediately provoke conversation about the intersections and possibilities in innovation, technology and esthetics. But the art-architecture immediately mounts the same challenge as for performance: Is the concept (seen as performer) kneaded into, synthesized with, the building (seen as a work of art) and exhibition (seen as performance)?
The recently wrapped-up exposition by textile designer Hella Jongerius is a concrete example of the challenge. Visitors could get their heads around a “3D” loom (on the model of a “3D” printer), see how computer-assisted weaving works and examine the texture and visual effect of a wide variety of fabric – touching upon technology, innovation, art.
But, as Jongerius intimated when she opened the project by calling for making fabric “helicopters and airplanes”, the exhibits were not separate parts of an endeavor. Rather, they pointed a whole – an overall, integrated, synthetic – vision of the possibilities of re-imagining textile as technology, as innovation, as art. For her exhibition it was Anticipations building as artist (choreographer) – again, a much more assertive, collaborative artist than is ever likely in other institutions – that pulled everything together, that actively called attention to the intersections of the different endeavors, pointed toward conceptual possibility.
In the end, then, Anticipation’s unique architecture demands that management take a strong creator stance as a collaborator among the others and reach, and be seen to be reaching, for synthesis of space potential with performers and performance and concept and exhibition.
If you go by the esthetic success of Yukio Hashimoto doing de Keersmaeker’s classic modern dance (2018) or of multimedia artist Simon Fujiwara playing up the mediatization of human personality (2018), neither performance nor exhibition seems a tough challenge… Until you consider that both conceptually lent themselves to the building’s default symmetries and perspectives. There is not that much work that does.
Most other institutions are their default setting. Anticipations is not. It is a work of art itself, with an independent potentiality. This means that getting the most out of performance and exhibition means, in a way that simply is not true for other institutions, both an assertive artist’s stance and intimate creative collaboration. Neither the one nor the other is simple or straightforward.
On the other hand, the need to take the challenge in hand means Aticipations will always be engaged in trying to unify performer-performance-place. That creative endeavor, “successful” and “unsuccessful” is really worth following.
Suddenly the ancient gods are part elephant (Cambodia) gallery 245, or have “groups” of arms (Myanmar) gallery 250, or are standing on a buffalo (Java) gallery 247. With so many cultures in close proximity, the differences are as surprising as the similarities.
The elephant Ganesh in Cambodia is the god for the removal of obstacles - an unusual power - guarding daily existence. Ganesh is a pan-Hindu “crossover” whose role changes in Buddhism and Hinduism throughout Asia. Today, Ganesh Tattoos are very popular.
“God sends the cold according to the coat.” - Montaigne
“What has become of the discs?”
In China, “Bi” - the notion of a covering sky (gaitian) that revolves around a central axis - is like an early form of the carpenter’s square. Often jade is the measure of the owner’s moral integrity.
The uses are many, and many uses, unknown.
Buddah Records first album was Safe as Milk by Captain Beefheart & His Magic Band.
CLEMO UTI – "THE WATER LILIES"
By Ring Lardner
CHARACTERS
PADRE, a priest.
SETHSO}
GETHSO} both twins.
WAYSHATTEN, a shepherd’s boy.
TWO CAPITALISTS 1
WAMA TAMMISCH, her daughter.
KLEMA, a janitor’s third daughter.
KEVELA, their mother, afterwards their aunt.
{TRANSLATOR’S NOTE: This show was written as if people were there to see it.}
1. NOTE: The two Capitalists don’t appear in this show.
ACT I
The Outskirts of a Parchesi Board. People are wondering what has become of the discs. They quit wondering and sing the following song.
CHORUS: What has become of the discs?
What has become of the discs?
We took them at our own risks,
But what has become of the discs?
(WAMA enters from an exclusive waffle parlor. She exits as if she had had waffles.)
ACTS II & III
(These two acts were thrown out because nothing seemed to happen.)
The Recumbent Pig
Pigs in Recumbent Position, China, 1st-2nd Century, Gallery 207 (top, bottom pigs not on view).
These recumbent pigs were often placed in the hands of the deceased to express the wish for wealth in the afterlife. If you got pigs (dead or alive), it’s good news . . . wealth, abundance, plenty.
Suzanne Lummis
For the chemistry between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart, as “Slim,” the drifter who’s been living by her wits and an occasional lifted wallet, and Harry “Steve” Morgan, expatriate American with a fishing boat for hire, and for their subtly charged exchanges, that’d be To Have and Have Not. And, of course, it includes perhaps the most sexually electric lines of dialog on film—certainly from that era—beautifully delivered by Bacall in her low, sly, silky voice: “You know you don’t have to act with me, Steve. You don’t have to say anything, you don’t have to do anything. Or, maybe just whistle. You know how to whistle, don’t you Steve…”
Director Howard Hawks, together with the writers, primarily Jules Furthman, William Faulkner, and some contributions from Papa himself, pulled apart and re-imagined Ernest Hemingway’s story, setting it in the French territory of Martinique during the Nazi occupation of France. So, in this 1944 movie the balmy island paradise becomes a microcosmic setting for the global battle between good and bottomless evil, while the evolution of the script involved a dance between the Production Code people and the writers. The censors curtailed what the movie-makers could show, and the writers kept striving to outwit them with smoky, sultry dialog. Amidst this battle, and this dance, Bacall, the young actress in her first role, and Bogart, by now a star, were falling in love. Does it come across on camera? Does it ever.
Small wonder that shortly after this movie wrapped, Bogart ended his fraught, unhappy marriage, and Bogart/Bacall became one of the most celebrated couples in Hollywood history.
If some know To Have and Have Not only from the "...you know how to whistle" line, c'mon now. Take the time to see the whole movie. Like Casablanca, it charts the evolution of a laissez-faire type of guy coming into his own sense of moral conscience. However, it includes some flavors Casablanca does not.
David Lehman
Many would say Out of the Past should get the award for sexual heat. Three reasons are Robert Mitchum, Jane Greer, and Kirk Douglas. Greer is as fatal as cyanide without the after odor of almonds, and the dialogue is hot. For example,
Kathie (Jane Greer): Did you miss me?
Jeff (Robert Mitchum): No more than I would miss my eyes.
While I would divide my own vote between Out of the Past and Double Indemnity, I would also register my admiration for the sexuality of Gun Crazy (1950). Joseph H. Lewis directed, and the script was written by MacKinlay Kantor and the blacklisted Dalton Trumbo. The leading characters, Bart (John Dall) and Laurie (Peggy Cummins), seem young and ordinary; they’re not stars on the magnitude of Mitchum or Barbara Stanwyck, and you can see in them younger versions of yourself. There’s all that phallic imagery, all the guns, and how comfortable she is handling one. It’s significant that Dahl is a pacifist before sharpshooter Cummins casts her spell over him. She is the “bad” one, and it is the power of the fatal female not only to corrupt her partner but to bring out the manly beast in him. The partnership between hero and heroine is a bond which they can’t dissolve, try as they might. They are in it till death do them part. They go on a robbery spree, though they know it will lead to a fatal end after, of course, one last job. They can’t help themselves. Their very desperation adds to the sexual energy between them.
This is the eleventh in a series on film noir. Click here to see the others.
Lists, lists, lists.... Any editor will tell you that lists are clickbait -- the stuff that drives web traffic. The 20 best bookstores in the world. The 30 essential jazz albums. The top ten places for American ex-pats to live. Thirty-seven pasta recipes that will change your life -- and your girth.
And just today the arts team and film critics at The Guardian have posted a doozy: The 100 best films of the 21st century. Why now, in 2019, I don't know, but how can you not look at this and think yup, that's right (Capernaum, A Prophet), and yes, good one (Sarah Polley's meta-documentary/family history, Stories We Tell) and the number one movie: Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood-- that might just be it.
But, inevitably, there are serious omissions here, as well as some laughable inclusions. (Comedy is always tricky, but putting Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (no. 70) and Ted (Mark Wahlberg and his potty-mouthed teddy bear-- no. 60) on the list at least allows us to pinpoint where the Guardian crits position themselves on the humor spectrum.
So here are my three biggest cries of "What, no...'s," the how-could-you-forget-about screams of injustice, my top 3 list of where The Guardian went wrong:
3) Into the Wild, the devastatingly sad, beautiful 2007 road movie, directed by Sean Penn, adapting the Jon Krakauer biographical novel.
2) Michael Clayton (also 2007), Tony Gilroy's taut, multi-layered legal thriller/existential drama, starring George Clooney.
and 1), the BIGGEST OMISSION OF ALL: Birdman, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s fierce, funny, breathless dive into the head of a movie star in the throes of mental, spiritual and professional crisis -- with Michael Keaton in a career-defining performance.
Birdman operates on a whole other plane of existence (I'm stealing from my Philadelphia Inquirer review, and here comes a statement right up there on the chutzpah scale akin to posting "The 100 best films of the 21st century" only 19 years into the century... ) Birdman, I wrote, "is exhilarating moviemaking, an out-of-the-blue masterwork that ranks as one of the best films of not just the year, but the decade, the century."
So there.
Radio
I left it
on when I
left the house
for the pleasure
of coming back
ten hours later
to the greatness
of Teddy Wilson
"After You've Gone"
on the piano
in the corner
of the bedroom
as I enter
in the dark
from New and Selected Poems by David Lehman
