convolutes

Allen Ginsberg, Julie & me

2010-09-20T15:54:00.001-05:00

(originally posted at onmilwaukee.com)

As I left the Union Theatre the other night after the LGBT Film Festival's presentation of "Howl," the mesmerizing love letter to poetry, free speech and Allen Ginsberg, I remembered that I'd once seen the man himself a few hundred yards away in the Union Ballroom.

He'd been invited to speak at Marquette, but at the last minute the invitation was pulled after pressure from philistines, so the reading was moved to UWM. Defiantly, hundreds of MU students marched up to the East Side to hear him, along with legions of UWM students and a scattering of high school hipsters.

It was 1967 and I was a junior at Riverside High School. Back then "East" was mainly a neighborhood school. Geography determined where you went, and the Riverside demographic pie split three ways:

1. Working class Black kids who generally lived east of 7th Street.
2. Working class white kids who generally lived east of the river to Maryland, and in what we later called Riverwest.
3. Middle (and higher) class kids, sons and daughters of professionals and intellectuals, who generally lived east of Maryland to the lake.

I was fairly anti-social in high school and I may not be the most reliable historian, but I believe these groups all got along reasonably well, with a fair amount of social leakage between them. In fact, Riverside in the late '60s was an excellent place to practice social mobility and to try on new identities. I was desperately sick of my given one.

Though I was solidly working class, my weird obsession with books and reading alienated me from my family at a young age. By 16, I aspired to brainy, more interesting "east of Maryland" status. But we lived in a flat on Bartlett, my father worked at Briggs & Stratton and there were no books or ideas in our home except the ones I smuggled in. I had a Milwaukee Sentinel paper route from age 12 and this gave me enough income to purchase a few accessories for my new avant garde life.

The antiwar and civil rights wave that was sweeping the nation also passed through Riverside. The epicenter was Julie Gibson, with whom I was deeply, secretly and hopelessly in love. Julie’s parents were English professors and published poets. They seemed caught between being outdated beatniks and premature hippies. At the time, I just thought of them as by far the most fascinating people in Milwaukee. Especially in comparison with my own parents.

Their home on the corner of Park and Maryland was a magnet for anarchists, writers, communists, activists and left-bankers of every sort. Julie’s mother Barbara was the opposite of my mother Betty in just about every way imaginable.

When called to the school because we refused to stop selling the underground newspaper, Kaleidoscope, on school grounds, or for passing out flyers accusing a despised gym teacher of being
a racist fascist or for a number of more Dadaist pranks, Mrs. Gibson would invariably side with us, and lecture the principal about the constitutional rights of students.

Mrs. Eklund, on the other hand, who had to take time off from her job at the La Rosa noodle factory on Holton Street, saw only incomprehensible mischief on the part of her son, and no violation of his rights. She was mystified by my new friends; to her it was as if I’d been invaded by body snatchers. The principal advised her that I had fallen under the influence of some bad actors. True, these were not juvenile delinquents, but the smartest kids in the school. It made no difference, they were troublemakers.

I shadowed Julie like a lovesick puppy, but I was always an extra in her show. Fiercely individual, she was in frequent hot water for her appearance -- one day a scandalously short skirt; the next, elaborately patterned old-womanish scarves and shawls covered with political buttons and armbands. Her tinkling chains, bells and rings made a little Julie soundtrack as she flowed through the halls between classes trailing clouds of patchouli.

She was passionate and political, and picked fights with teachers at every opportunity. The Vietnam War was a personal affront to Julie. A book had just been published by Doubleday called "Where is Vietnam: American Poets Respond," that included a grim entry from "Julie Gibson, age 14." It was
called "Typical Eve-of-Destruction-Type Poem Written by a Typically Frightened and Disgusted Person-to Him, to You, to Me and to Us." On the facing page was a poem by Allen Ginsberg.

Despite my somewhat marginal relationship to Julie-world, I spent a lot of time in it. There were afternoons we played hooky, hanging out in the Gibson’s living room, listening to Jefferson Airplane while her mother practiced yoga. There were lunch hours with fish sandwiches from East Side Foods or
French fries from Francesca’s. On one hilarious occasion Mrs. Gibson pretended to be my mother and called in sick for me so we could all attend an open housing rally.

Somehow the idea of asking Julie out on a date seemed too square, even if I hadn’t been shy to the point of catatonia. But there were times together that felt like dates, or potential ones. She’d say "You’re going to that be-in at Lake Park Sunday, right? Please say yes." I’d imagine us sort of floating through the park in a little private bubble, but instead we were quickly swarmed by the usual crowd of her other admirers.

Once we went to hear some folk singer she was excited about at the Avant Garde on Prospect. I ordered a plate of potato chips and two coffees but by the time they arrived we’d been joined by some college students she knew -- glib, smart, intimidating.

But despite all that, when she asked me one morning whether I wanted to go with her to hear Allen Ginsberg read at UWM, I agreed instantly. And imagined that this time it would be a date. "He’s staying at our house!" she noted. That should have been a warning. If the choice later that evening was to be between being entertained by Allen Ginsberg or John Eklund, I was in trouble.

I realized that I had nothing to wear to an Allen Ginsberg reading. Luckily, I had just done a round of collections from my paper route customers and had $30 in my pocket. I took a bus to Johnnie Walker’s on 3rd Street and selected a dark, oversize dress shirt with enormous white polka dots to go
with my burgundy bell bottoms and brown corduroy jacket. My parents were aghast as I left the house on the evening of the reading but my younger sister thought I looked cool.

We met at Julie’s house and waited for the Marquette marchers to come up Maryland. As they passed, we joined. We were alone for the rest of the walk, and when we got to the Ballroom the UWM students who were already seated gave the Marquette arrivals a rousing ovation. It seemed personal, like they were applauding Julie and me.

And Ginsberg? Oddly enough I barely remember anything about him. He looked a bit creepy. James Franco’s Ginsberg was a lot more adorable than Ginsberg’s Ginsberg. There were long poems that angrily bashed Lyndon Johnson. There were lots of theatrics -- incense, candles and chanting. There may
have been a squeezebox involved but I don’t remember whether Ginsberg played it. Julie watched it all in a kind of rapture. I watched her.

Afterward, as we stood outside the Union, friends of Julie and her parents gathered to talk. I tried to stay near her, which was easy at first when the interlopers were people I knew. But gradually the spreading cluster of grad students, professors and bohemians became mainly strangers, and somehow Julie slipped away. I was left standing with a group of people I didn’t know. Because I hadn’t really said hello I was too self-conscious to risk attention by saying goodbye and walking away. So I just
stood there silently for a very long time, listening to clever talk while becoming increasingly invisible.

Eventually, Allen Ginsberg emerged surrounded by an entourage, and our group drifted over to join that one. I turned west on Kenwood to walk home. It was nearly midnight and I had to do my route at 5 a.m.

Robert Walser on expectations

2010-09-19T13:26:00.002-05:00

As for me, I'm valiantly studying French, go to work each morning, come home insane in the evening, expect letters, don't write any myself but still expect, every evening, at the very least three letters. They should be lying there when I open the door, white, dazzlingly white, with the dear stamps upon them, the sweet postmarks and all the rest. And when there aren't any, I get perfectly stupid and can't work, and then I say to myself quite sensibly: you never write any letters, but you expect them! You blockhead!

It isn't precisely that I expect letters, but now I'm always expecting something as dear, as tender as a letter. Every evening there ought to be some uplifting little surprise for me, just like a letter.

But one can live quite well without excitements, can't one, only one ought to be endowed with a bit less poesie and the like, should one not? What a babbler I am, am I not, am I not?

- Robert Walser, a letter to his sister, 1898, from Microscripts.

Act of Kindness

2010-03-19T16:08:00.002-05:00

One blustery night during the winter of 1973 I was leaving a meeting at the Party office on W 26th street. This was during the time in which the Communist Party was under siege by Lyndon Larouche’s “Labor Committees.” They had singled out the Party for annihilation and suspected members were being assaulted on the street with baseball bats and numchucks.

In the tiny vestibule, one of the elderly volunteers who haunted the building was in the latter stages of steeling herself against the bitter wind. She had wrapped herself in several layers of clothing, and was struggling to tie a scarf around her neck. She moved slowly and with difficulty.

I didn’t recognize her, and I didn’t know whether she was one of the volunteers who actually worked- answering phones, stuffing envelopes, operating the mimeograph machine- or one of the legion of Party veterans who just enjoyed a chance to hang out all day in a comradely atmosphere. The latter would sit outside offices, trying to engage busy functionaries in conversation, like the old guys who hung around in barbershops without ever getting a haircut. But the Party always honored its own, and Gus Hall would never have stood for turning away these beloved old-timers.

“Would you walk this comrade to the bus stop?” someone asked me. I would. Her name was Rose and she said she’d been ‘working at the Center” since her husband died eight years ago. She took a bus down from the Bronx (why not the subway, I wondered) and left for the day only after being convinced that she wouldn’t be needed any more. She walked very slowly, and as we crept down 26th street toward 6th avenue I realized that she couldn’t see very well. I suddenly grasped how frail and vulnerable she was, and I wondered what I would do if we were jumped by Larouche thugs.

But the walk was uneventful. She talked about her work in the garment industry, and told a complicated story about how the union had once made a big mistake by electing a red-baiting secretary who “wrecked the Local.” I couldn’t tell whether these events had taken place recently, or decades ago, but the bitter injustice was vividly alive to her.

From time to time she asked me a question, mundane things along the lines of “What time is it?” The circumstances surrounding the comings and goings from the Center, even something as innocuous as “What brings you to New York?” or “Where are you from?” was not something into which a volunteer would inquire. And old timers, for all their insatiable quest for conversation, had little patience for idle chatter and social niceties. They had one big topical preoccupation: Their Story. And as far as Rose could tell I was just one more interchangeable young comrade who had kindly walked her to the bus stop.

I waited with her until the bus came. Once she was safely aboard, I walked uptown toward 43rd street, where I was to meet my friend Liz before another meeting. Snow was collecting in skittish little eddies, the cold was bone-chilling, and Rose had left my revolutionary credentials in tatters. I felt like a lame imposter.

Good Dog, Anne Carson

2010-03-11T14:12:00.000-06:00

I was waiting for you to get to work
‘A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island’
Frank O’Hara

1 You know the second person in the history of the world
the Sun chose to speak to personally was Frank O’Hara, the
first was Orpheus [me]. You are my Sweetheart said the
Sun. He was sitting on the hood of his truck. Somehow it
was menacing. I hardly knew what to say. I got into the
truck that strange autumn light sharpening all glass and
harm my hands fell off. The Sun got in beside me took my
hands one by one blew into each finger filling it with a
kind of sound. Gave my hands back to me. That was the
beginning of my being interesting

2 I had originally an idea to record the sound of skirts
moving on legs on the runway this blank verse. She was a
model when I first of course no one runs on a runway
but the skirts the legs are like pumas. Desire she said is not
harmful til lips spill it then be careful

3 Tell you a story about the best poem I ever wrote the one I
lost. That page was terrific it slid out of a dream about the
littorals above Europe and me looking down as. As on oh
oceans I had all the answers I was an answer! I was high as
day arising and truth shot out of me like a lark. Years ago.
These are tears I do not use. I lost the page again and again
found it again and again every time I moved finally
captured it in a plastic sleeve put it on top of the TV. A
scrap of paper torn and brownish now some words just
stain. What does it mean the littorals above Europe I never
found out. I look at it fast sometimes Hoping

4 Like any couple we’d sat silent in restaurants staring
opposite ways our pockets stuffed with useless summer
money doesn’t mean we were a pissed palindrome

5 Like any couple don’t whistle I’m not your good dog she’d
say I’d say swimming at this hour you must be mad

6 My fifteen minutes in hell I scarcely remember. I know it
was cold. I saw uncreated things seeping here and there
with roots for ears they hadn’t heard a voice in centuries. I
sang a bit. The very ghosts shed tears (Daily Mirror). Eurydice
limped over. Lawyers arrived reciting conditions. Soon
we were off down the hall me admiring the acoustics
wondering could I get a gig and What’s the phone number
down here I said starting to turn poof shall we say a sad
mischance. All my skin cried back all my wings beat once
and that was that. The story that she said nothing but Who?
is a lie

7 One thing about hell is the echo is fabulous. No sound
studio on earth can give you a transverse magnetisation
leak of less than zero. I stood in the black trees transfixed
and pulsing and her stroking off down the lake so strangely
slow

8 I was. I lost. I sang. I knew. I ever hope for that strange
autumn light again with the good dog again with the
thousands of years. Scrap of [me] off Eurydice torn. Her
number I lost her lark I shot and she a pulse. History never
looks so possible as when leaving a heart spilt among the
stones crying Don’t read it again it was perfect

The Bus Driver-- Hedi Kaddour

2010-02-08T11:29:00.002-06:00

What has gotten into the bus driver
Who has left his bus, who has sat down
On a curb on the Place de l'Opera
Where he slips into the ease of being
Nothing more than his own tears? The passersby
Who bend over such a shared and
Presentable sorrow would like him
To tell them that the wind used to know
How to come out of the woods toward a woman's dress,
Or that one day his brother said to him,
Even your shadow wants nothing to do with you.
His feet in a puddle, the bus driver
Can only repeat, This work is hard
And people aren't kind.

-- from A Walk in the City,
Treason (YUP 2010)
translated by Marilyn Hacker

A model short story sentence

2010-01-11T11:44:00.003-06:00

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing.

from "Nawabin Electrician" by Daniyal Mueenuddin
In Other Rooms, Other Wonders

Making Scenes, Rachel Wetzsteon (1967-2009)

2010-01-02T13:42:00.004-06:00

III.

Each view is threefold. There is the topmost
layer of things unequivocally seen: the man
in loud pants, the forlorn sidewalk cafe, and the
ever-present pigeon who gnaws a wrapper.
There is, beneath these things but glaring
as black at a wedding, a list of what they are not:
not a loved one spotted, not the locus
of a tryst, not a rare, significant seabird.
And onto these two pictures clamps a troublesome
third, through whose distorting surface
birds are half swan, half sparrow, and slumming kings
and their well-dressed subjects eat lunch together.
This last layer, a patchwork of givens and
engineering, shakes the first two until nothing is solid.

from Cat n' Mouse, Steven Millhauser

2009-12-09T14:57:00.002-06:00

The cat understands that the mouse will always outwit him, but this tormenting knowledge serves only to inflame his desire to catch the mouse. He will never give up. His life, in relation to the mouse, is one long failure, a monotonous succession of unspeakable humiliations; his unhappiness is relieved only by moments of delusional hope, during which he believes, despite doubts supported by a lifetime of bitter experience, that at last he will succeed. Although he knows that he will never catch the mouse, who will forever escape into his mousehole a half inch ahead of the reaching claw, he also knows that only if he catches the mouse will his wretched life be justified. He will be transformed. Is it therefore his own life that he seeks, when he lies awake plotting against the mouse? Is it, when all is said and done, himself that he is chasing? The cat frowns and scratches his nose.

One dozen 2009 favorites

2009-12-01T10:48:00.003-06:00

The three presses for whom I work- Harvard University Press, The MIT Press, and Yale University Press- published just over one thousand titles between them in 2009. Prompted by Tom Bielenberg at Micawber’s Books in St Paul, who wanted to know where my “annual holiday synopsis” is, I thought it would be fun (and easy) to create my personal best list from this year’s offerings.

Fun yes, easy no. As I thought about the books we’ve published this year, I was struck by what was missing: no makebooks trying to replicate last year’s fads; no vampires; no cheesy ghostwritten memoirs by crackpot politicians. In short, nothing to be embarrassed about representing.

Though I came up with a dozen standouts that I really loved, our publishing program as a whole is a thing of wonder: intellectually stimulating scholarship, rigorous standards, incredibly patient editors (one recent title was signed in the mid-seventies!), all aimed at the twin, sometimes mutually exclusive goals of pushing the research boundaries in the sciences and humanities, while making the results accessible to a general, well-informed readership.

We live in a time when the concept of holding a complex idea in one’s head is considered elitist, so representing these wonderful books often feels more like mission than job. The satisfaction in selling the works of big thinkers, with the hope that every potential new reader casts a small blow against those who would bring back the Dark Ages, is something booksellers and publishers have been doggedly doing since the Enlightenment. I can’t imagine a more important way to spend a working life.

But I digress. The books. Herewith my dozen favorites of the year from our lists, in no particular order. These are not necessarily the lead books or the tradeiest books or the most widely reviewed. They are just my favorites. And the other 990 authors I represented this year shouldn’t feel dissed, I was proud to push all of them.

Unpacking My Library: Architects and their Books asks what a person’s book collection says about the collector. The interviews with a dozen fascinating architects are great, but the real appeal of the book (helped along by the suave design) is that it’s so wonderfully snoopy. If you’re at a party in the home of a smart person, and you’re a wallflower like me, you may find yourself near the bookshelves, where there won’t be people. You scan the spines, studying them, head twisted painfully, while trying not to spill wine on the carpet. That’s the intimate, private experience afforded by this colorful little volume.

Continuing the eavesdropping theme, Talking with Sartre, edited and translated by John Gerassi, lets us in on some shockingly frank, never before published chit chat with the great man. Sartre’s godson and a family friend, Gerassi conducted hours of free-wheeling interviews between 1970 and 1974. There’s a lot of politics and history, but plenty of gossip and back-biting as well. One moment Sartre is on about DeGaulle (hated him) and the Algerian independence movement (for it), the next moment it’s on to mistresses and amphetamines (loved both).

With My Happiness Bears No Relation to Happiness: A Poet’s Life in the Palestinian Century, Adina Hoffman changed the way I look at the world. What more can you ask from a book? Taha Muhammad Ali is a renowned Palestinian poet, too little known in the US but with rock star status in his homeland. Hoffman, an accomplished, fascinating writer and translator herself, has used Taha’s life as window into the Palestinian predicament, and the idea of living in exile in your own home. Powerful, beautifully written, more than one bookseller has compared it to Reading Lolita in Tehran.

In another great biography from the spring list, Steven Zipperstein’s Rosenfeld’s Lives: Fame, Oblivion and the Furies of Writing uncovers the story of an all but forgotten Chicago writer, Isaac Rosenfeld. Saul Bellow’s best friend and gentle competitor, Rosenfeld died in the mid-fifties at 38. Beyond doing delayed justice to this great writer, Zipperstein really captures the wonderfully obsessive qualities of the writing life. Mesmerizing and contemplative, it reminded me of Alfred Kazin’s A Walker in the City.

A fantastic book about an artist I knew little about, Out of Now: The Lifeworks of Tehching Hsieh is a revelation. Hsieh is a practitioner of “durational work,” or “endurance art”- a genre that’s so new it doesn’t really have an agreed-upon name. His materials are time and his own body, and his practice consists of year-long physically demanding performance pieces, such as confining himself to a sealed cell and punching a time clock every hour on the hour (these obsessive documents go on for pages in the book). Or being tied by an eight-foot rope to Linda Montano, an artist who answered a classified ad, for one solid year. And so on. Scoffers have questioned whether this is art. That’s the point.

Hollis Frampton’s Circles of Confusion is one of the most highly sought after out of print titles (1983). Replacing and superseding that long unavailable collection, On the Camera Arts and Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton is a seductive hodge-podge of essays, interviews, film-scores, and experimental pieces reminiscent of Borges and Beckett. An avant-garde filmmaker, photographer, and digital artist who died in 1984, Frampton was also a funny and inventive writer. Yvonne Rainer aptly called the book “Offbeat Ways to Think about Everything” I was initially drawn to him because he was an autodidact and a provocateur, but now I’m hooked on the work. Check out his (nostalgia) and other video clips on youtube.

Among the many other intellectual accomplishments of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe was his notion that to know plants is to know the world. First published in 1790, his The Metamorphosis of Plants has influenced generations, and has never appeared in a more stunning edition. Photographer Gordon Miller re-shot plant specimens (mainly in the northwest) to match and illustrate Goethe’s numbered paragraphs. The book is a very desirable little physical object- paper over board, luscious color throughout. Even I, who know nothing from plants, was entranced.

Fascinating taxonomies like the Goethe are a signature MIT Press gift to the world, and here’s one of an entirely different sort: Asylum: Inside the Closed World of State Mental Hospitals. Photographer Christopher Payne noticed how many massive, abandoned mental institutions are still standing in nearly every state. These behemoths, little cities really, are often in a kind of limbo- too architecturally idiosyncratic for reuse, and yet too historic for demolition. He worked tirelessly to get permissions to enter and photograph these buildings, and he ended up spending six years in thirty states doing so. The result is a beautiful, moving, sometimes jaw-dropping, collection of images. And, as Oliver Sacks says in the introduction, “a tribute to a sort of public architecture that no longer exists.”

Though I have many bones to pick with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, they offer the kind of big thinking we so desperately need in Commonwealth, which completes the trilogy begun with Empire and followed by Multitude. (This one’s way more readable than those two.) The title refers to one of their pet themes, that wealth is something we hold not individually but in common. Indeed, the endless debate over “private” vs. “public” should be replaced with a focus on the common, they argue. With the collapse of both the private market economic model and the soviet statist one, H&N are looking for a third way, and every few pages I feel as if they’ve maybe found it. Our political discourse has gotten so cramped and narrow that it’s refreshing to come across writing that blasts out of that suffocating box.

I really enjoyed David Leavitt’s last novel, The Indian Clerk, the mysterious true life story of an Indian mathematician. Though nonfiction, Loren Graham and Jean-Michel Kantor have also unraveled a historic math mystery in Naming Infinity: A True Story of Religious Mysticism and Mathematical Creativity. The news here is that the major math finding of the 20th century- the nature of infinity- owes its discovery to a mystical religious sect called the Name Worshippers. Along the way we have a big dose of Russian history and paranoid stalinist repression, interpersonal and nationalist competition among scientists, and yet another example of the strange historical dance between science and religion. It’s incredibly well-written, with a sort of Beautiful Mind vibe.

The need to hold an audience’s attention, according to Brian Boyd in On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition and Fiction, is the fundamental problem facing all story-tellers. He takes this insight and uses it to show the evolutionary origins of art and story-telling. (Story-telling was important because through it we learned to think beyond the here and now.) Stories were not just an amusement, but honed our minds, fostered cooperation, and were a survival advantage. This is one of those books that crosses so many fields and disciplines that booksellers were constantly challenged about where to shelve it. But in the spirit of consilience, this is the best kind of thinking and the best kind of problem. Did I mention that fantastic jacket illustration?

Finally, I almost hesitate to mention A New Literary History of America since I’ve been singing its praises since April. (Yes, the daily emails got annoying, sorry about that) To recap: NLHA is a monumental, decades in the making stab at uniting American history and American literature. America was made by writing! Two hundred short original essays by contemporary hipsters (Sarah Vowell, Camille Paglia, Walter Moseley) explore specific literary moments that changed America. This is not not not some thick boring doorstop of a canon-smashing reference book. It is fun, it is alive, and it can be read in small digestible pieces. If you are up on your Walter Benjamin, it may remind you of Arcades Project, the quintessential “memory theater.”

from Your Face Tomorrow v3, Javier Marias p 204

2009-11-24T15:30:00.001-06:00

Nostalgia, or missing some place or person, regardless of whether for reasons of absence or abandonment or death, is a very strange and contradictory business. At first, you think you can’t live without someone or far from someone, the initial grief is so intense and so constant that you experience it as a kind of endless sinking or an interminably advancing spear, because each moment of privation counts and weighs, you feel it and it chokes you, and all you want is for the hours of the day to pass, knowing that their passing will lead to nothing new, only to more waiting for more waiting. Each morning you open your eyes- if you’ve had the benefit of sleep which, while it doesn’t allow you to forget everything, does at least numb and confuse- thinking the same thought that oppressed you just before you closed them, for example, “she’s not here and she won’t be coming back,” (whether that means coming back to you or coming back from death) and you prepare yourself not to trudge through the day, because you’re not even capable of looking that far ahead or of differentiating one day from another, but through the next five minutes and then the next, and so you’ll continue from five minutes to five minutes, if not from minute to minute, becoming entangled in them all and, at most, trying to distract yourself for just two or three minutes from your consciousness or from your ponderous paralysis. If that happens, it has nothing to do with your will, but with some form of blessed chance: a curious item on the television news, the time it takes to begin or complete a crossword, an irritating or solicitous phone call from someone you can’t stand, the bottle that falls to the floor and obliges you to gather up the fragments so that you don’t cut yourself when out of your laziness you wander about barefoot, or the dire TV series that nonetheless amuses you- or that you simply took to straightaway- and to which you surrender yourself with inexplicable relief until the final credits roll, wishing another episode would start immediately and allow you to keep clinging on to that stupid thread of continuity. These are the found routines that sustain us, what remains of life, the foolish and the innocuous, that neither enthuses nor demands participation or effort, the padding that we despise when everything is fine and we’re busy and have no time to miss anyone, not even the dead (in fact, we use those busy times to shrug them off, although this only works for a short while, because the dead insist on staying dead and always come back later on, the pin price pressing into our chest and the lead upon our souls.)

Time passes, and at some ill-defined point…we raise our head and once more look around us, and although we see nothing particularly promising or attractive, nothing that can replace the person we long for and have lost, we begin to find it hard to sustain that longing and wonder if it was really such a loss. We’re filled by a retrospective laziness regarding the time when we loved or were devoted or got over-excited or anxious, and feel incapable of ever giving so much attention to anyone again, of trying to please them, of watching over their sleep and concealing from them what can be concealed or what might hurt them, and one finds enormous relief in that deep-rooted absence of alertness. “I was abandoned,” we think, “by my lover, by my friend, by my dead, so what, they all left, and the result was the same, I just had to get on with my own life. They’ll regret it in the end, because it’s nice to know that one is loved and sad to know one’s been forgotten, and now I’m forgetting them. I did what I could, I held firm, and still they drifted away.”

from Two Solitudes, Hugh MacLennon

2009-09-16T11:28:00.002-05:00

A windy day is always a bad time to start figuring things out, especially if a man has been too much alone.

from The Tanners, Robert Walser

2009-09-15T11:41:00.002-05:00

How strange: time marched right past all good intentions just as surely as past the bad qualities one hasn't yet overcome. There was something beautiful, accepting and forgiving in this passage of time. It swept past both the beggar and the president of the Republic, the strumpet and the lady of refinement. It made many things appear small and unimportant, for it alone represented the sublime and the grand. What could life's hustle and bustle signify, all those stirrings and strivings, compared to this loftiness that paid no heed to whether a person became a man or a simpleton, and found it a matter of indifference whether or not one desired what was right and good. (p 325)

A Gate at the Stairs, Lorrie Moore

2009-09-11T08:31:00.002-05:00

"... in literature- perhaps as in life- one had to speak not of what the author intended but of what a story intended for itself."

"...Don't make your own life your project in your own life: total waste of time."

Sens-plastique, Malcolm de Chazal

2009-09-11T08:27:00.002-05:00

Literary senility is marked by verbal spoilage, words spilling over into other words, writers changing accepted meanings because they can't invent the right new words they need, writers living by fresh experience with old habits, overworking the idiom until it turns completely flabby like a mayonnaise whipped until it collapses.

Heartbreak Glue

2009-09-02T07:27:00.002-05:00

One Sunday in May 1972 I drove Fred Blair, the aged chairman of the Wisconsin Communist Party, to Madison. He’d been invited to speak to a group of academic leftist researchers about Wisconsin party history. He was flattered by the invitation but contemptuous of their strictly past-tense interest. Communists were endlessly fascinating to the new left, who condescendingly thought of them as political dinosaurs who had a crack at seizing state power in the thirties but blew it. Fred was bemused.

A dozen people were seated around a table in a meeting room at the Downtown Y. The format was open-ended question and answer. The session was taped. Initial questions were timid- where he grew up, how he became political, his many runs for public office. Then someone broke the ice with a question about whether the party’s support for the jailing of Trotskyites in the forties under the sedition laws in Minneapolis- which were later used to lock up CP leaders- was ill-considered. Fred would only concede that “mistakes were made,” and painted the Trotskyites as near fascists. Nobody was convinced.

More nuanced questions about Marxist principles and Leninist strategy came to predominate. There was a respectful atmosphere, eager students at the foot of some elder master. But Fred hated the “eminence grise” role, and ended the session by promoting an Angela Davis fund-raising car wash.

I thought the whole trip a waste of time, but he seemed energized. On the way back we stopped to buy a jug of rhine wine, which he loved to sip all day. A sign in the liquor store window said “Heartbreak Glue.”

Piecework

2009-09-01T09:56:00.004-05:00

A self-important man is giving the six of us- newly hired second shift line workers at AO Smith- very detailed instructions. Dangerous-seeming machines and apparatuses whiz and percolate along a conveyor belt in a space the size of a couple football fields. Scowling, bored piece-workers are deployed strategically, it would seem, to somehow rein in these machines. They appear to be failing.

The man is using lots of gestures along with his verbal instructions because the deafening racket makes it impossible to hear a word he’s saying. We try to ask questions, but his sign language responses are only more confusing, and he's hard to see through our smeared plastic goggles. Not wanting to appear stupid on our first day, we are simultaneously trying to disguise our incomprehension, while hoping to glean some decipherable clue about what we are supposed to do next. He’s getting frustrated. He can’t really hear our screamed questions, and he screams back answers to questions we didn’t ask. We don’t hear these either.

At one point, his face light bulbs. He disappears for a moment, and returns with an "I am a genius" look and a handful of what he obviously thinks is the solution to a problem: earplugs. They look filthy and used, but we dutifully insert them into our ears. The machine roar is instantly reduced to a muffled hum. But his instructions are just as unintelligible as before, and we desperately try to read his lips, and each other’s, to figure out what’s going on.

Still, progress: as we work our way through the foundry, our small group dwindles as we are deposited, one by one, at the machine that will be ours for the night. Each is loud, greasy and massive, but there are a variety of shapes and apparent functions. Though the factory as a whole is manufacturing auto parts, no single piece of metal being processed by these machines seems to have any obvious relation to a car.

As the first few recruits are left at their stations, it becomes clear that not hearing a word the foreman said was not such a handicap after all. Within moments, our new co-workers on the piece work line wordlessly demonstrate the couple mindless, repetitive, back-breaking steps that will be our contribution to the finished automobile for the next eight hours. Minus twenty minutes for lunch, and two six minute breaks for the bathroom, which is a two minute walk from the line.

I am last. My machine is a very tall punch press, one of a long line of machines strewn along the line. Oddly shaped pieces of metal are moving slowly down the belt- though the lazy pace proves to be an illusion once I begin lifting them. My task is to pick up the object- eight crooked feet long, weighing about 30 pounds- and to insert it into the jaws of the behemoth. After pressing two large buttons, the only apparent controls, the giant mouth clamps shut and two new holes appear in the metal slab. (It used to take just one button but too many hands had been snapped off, so the union won this safety concession.) The final challenge is to replace the piece on the belt in a standing position, so that the next worker up the line can lift it with the least possible strain.

Nobody needs to know anything beyond how to work their particular piece- in fact, the less we know the better. Since we are paid by the piece, it seems obvious to us virgin industrial proletarians that the faster we work, the better for everyone. But within a couple hours, each of us is taken aside and given a short but firm seminar in the long term dangers of “speeding up the line.” This is the most important thing I learn in my AO Smith career.

At any rate, working too fast is not my problem. I never master the challenge of making those pieces stand up for the next guy. After six weeks of coming home after midnight, exhausted, ragged, like some escapee from Dante’s inferno, I quit. But I keep the steel-toed boots I’d been issued, a gift from AO Smith Corporation, and wear them to picket lines for the next ten years.

My Year of Reading Boswell's Johnson pt 2

2009-08-30T09:53:00.001-05:00

originally posted at BoswellandBooks

When we last left John Eklund, he was rather ecstatic that he was finally tackling "The Life of Samuel Johnson." I've continued to put it off to another day. I did recently contemplate Stanley Elkin's first novel, "Boswell," which is about a modern-day version of Johnson's biographer. I wasn't even ready for that. So hats off to Eklund:

Reading James Boswell’s Life of Samuel Johnson, part 2

My last post on this project, about 250 pages in, was somewhat giddy with the sense of accomplishment that comes with plunging into a fat book about which you are ambivalent and sticking with it. I also made a few observations that struck me about the way bookselling and publishing was done in Boswell’s time, the similarity between Johnson’s early pamphlets and contemporary blogs, and the strangely familiar obsession with ownership of intellectual property that comes across in the book.

Reporting in from page 560 (of 1235, though over 200 of that is back matter and apparatus), I have to say that the going has gotten a bit tougher. Boswell has been credited with producing the template for our modern idea of biography, but it seems to me more a model for a certain kind of biography: the kitchen sink school. Nothing is too small to go unremarked upon- except perhaps the women and children in these men’s lives who, at least through the first half of the book, remain ghosts. And for Boswell, the smallest biographical detail or anecdote about Johnson still seems to call for a footnote to draw the innocent reader into an even more baroque narrative labyrinth. I shudder to think what Boswell would have made of hypertext. His pages would be nothing but hot links.

But reading Boswell’s Johnson is still more joy than chore. I marvel at the extensive documentation. In my job as a book rep, I’m expected to pass along to my presses all the brilliant comments made by the booksellers during our appointments. I struggle to find a surreptitious method to record these so as to not interrupt our flow like some mad scribe. When I give up and decide to just do it later from memory, the flavor is lost. Boswell, on the other hand, would have made a superb rep. Either he has an encyclopedic memory for dialog (and remember, these 18th century people spoke in full sentences- no “I was like’s”), or he had a fantastic imagination. His sourcing is meticulous.

Another important documentary resource that helps make the book so alive is the trove of letters Boswell has assembled. These two men and their vast circle of brainy acquaintances seemed to do nothing but write to each other. In volume, they remind me sometimes of a sustained, urgent email correspondence, but they must have been vastly more time-consuming. And they are vastly more erudite than most of the messages I get and send. As much as a profound early example of the biography form, this is a great monument to the power of a letter collection to make satisfying reading.

The bond between the two men is fascinating. Boswell (Johnson calls him “Bozzy”) was thirty years younger than Johnson, and though there was a distinct sense of mentorship and power imbalance in the relationship, there was also plain love. It’s expressed in such an unaffected way (i.e. “I love you”) that it’s a little startling. It violates our modern expectation of appropriate affection between heterosexual men.

One recurring unpleasantness I’m facing in the reading: Johnson was a jerk. Apparently he was known as a jerk far and wide. Boswell has assigned himself the task of redeeming Johnson’s nasty reputation, but this is not a whitewash. Some of the most entertaining bits are “he said/he said” arguments between the two. Boswell acknowledges Johnson’s frequently appalling behavior, his retrograde opinions, his slovenly personal life and habits. Yet somehow you come away sort of liking the man. He is what we might today call a right wing public intellectual. But he seems to relish taking contrary opinions for the sake of argument, and it’s sometimes hard to decipher what he actually believes. In this Johnson reminds me a little of H.L. Mencken, another right-wing blowhard who many of us love to read because he was so witty and argued so well.

So will I soldier on to the end? I’m in too deep to stop now. But I’m taking a break. There are just too many great fall books piling up and I can’t stand to look at them anymore without wading in. First up: Lorrie Moore’s new novel A Gate at the Stairs, the wait for which has been of Boswellian proportions.- John Eklund

Rose Alley

2009-08-26T09:04:00.003-05:00

originally posted at The Front Table

Rose Alley by Jeremy M. Davies

This is one of those small quirky novels that suffer unjustly when reduced to a linear plot summary. But even with a book that’s up to so much besides storytelling, prospective readers do like to know the storyline, so here goes: a somewhat mad director decides to produce a film based on the life of John Wilmot, the ribald poet who was the second Earl of Rochester. Unfortunately for the film crew, but fortunately for the reader, they’ve chosen to do this in Paris, amidst the events of 1968. The book is essentially a compendium of character sketches, and introduces us, one by one, to everyone associated with the ill-fated project- each one of whom is more eccentric than the last.

Davies’ prose is funny, sexy, and relentlessly brainy, but not at all pretentiously so. He has a gift for spot-on, hit-and-run representation:

"Abelard’s baby-face, twisted to a point like stirred pudding. . .”
"…the smell of take-out slinking from the garbage bin."

"Wexler’s posture was Paleolithic: he looked like he’d been curled in a hot wind.”

The writing is simultaneously light and dense, if that’s possible; each paragraph feels as if it weighs more than the sum of its sentences. The narrative has a sort of clinical, distant, formal flavor. By contrast, this makes the deliciously imagined ingredients all the more comic.

The cast members and hangers-on, with their preposterous names and elaborate backgrounds, are uniformly hilarious. And Davies doesn’t stop with the key characters themselves- family members, friends, and spectators are conjured in exquisite detail. Here’s a typical description, of the parents of Myrna Krause, screenwriter:

Her mother Rose was a typist at an insurance company and her father Michael a retired factory worker (car parts). Neither were readers; both were second-generation German-American Methodists; both had been born with stutters that so disfigured their speech that they had as schoolchildren in the same parish learned to communicate with one another by whistling the choruses of popular tunes whose titles contained phrases practical to everyday life; e.g., “What’s New,” “Betcha Nickel,” “Open the Door, Richard,” “I Want the Waiter (With the Water),” “What’s the Matter with Me?,” “Keep Cool, Fool,” “Undecided,” “Oh, Lady be Good,” and, eventually, “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me.”

Life was quiet until an anthropologist named Pantry and a piano-playing sociologist with a strong left hand moved in for thirteen months…They wrote a book that no one in town would read, cataloguing the vocabulary of over one thousand five hundred ideo-melodic phrases used in the Krause household.

“Cataloging” is a key word, because in many ways this is a book about classification. The film set, for instance, is not so much designed as cobbled together. The hapless set designer has no budget, and must resort to “collecting and foraging” props and costumes.

"Worse,’ he muses, ‘it was a period film— another layer of abstraction. He couldn’t get just any potato peeler: it had to be a Restoration potato peeler.’”

The book is filled with layers of abstraction, and weird taxonomies of every sort. A meal that takes seventy-two hours to prepare must be eaten in strict order- “food stratified like Aztec architecture.” A character sleeps with his sex partners sequentially, “in size order.”

In the brilliant, tour-de-force final chapter, the film notes of the director are uncovered. It turns out there are thirteen extant cuts of Rose Alley- some filmed, some manuscripts and notes, one just a catalog entry from UC Berkeley Film School.

"Things establish their own categories in time. They resonate, not in a gross natural array, but gratifying to a more discerning sense of order. I wave my hand over my collection, in my mind, and know what belongs with which. It is a basic assumption of scholarship that certain units of information vibrate in harmony.”

If you are overly obsessed with whether a fiction is “true,” this book will either please or annoy you. If you are put off by interruptions, digressions, literary blind alleys, and ambiguous meanings Rose Alley may ask an uncomfortably high level of reader surrender. But in a very clever way, Davies has made the connection between the improbable ways that stories arise out of both written and cinematic jumble sales, and you’re unlikely to read a more stimulating meditation on truth, literature and movies this year.

"What a strange, you’d have to say avant-garde sort of thing even the dullest film was, being in form- as we all know- a series of incoherent fragments, sorted through and soldered together with dreamy nonlogic, so that no gaze remains aimless, no gesture redundant: exactly the opposite of life.”

Reviewed by John Eklund

Rose Alley by Jeremy M. Davies
Counterpath Press, 2009
Paper, 192 pp., $15.95
ISBN: 9781933996134

Schwartz Bookshop memories

2009-08-24T10:45:00.002-05:00

originally posted at Inside Flap Feb 2009

- I was a nerdy bookish fourteen year old and spent hours hanging around the downtown Schwartz Bookshop. One day an older guy cruised me as I looked at some remainders. It was spooky, unnerving, but memorable. I’d never registered the look of desire pointed at me before. Later, I managed that store!

- I was not a great manager. I was only in it for the books, I hated the business aspects. And my staff management philosophy boiled down to Please Love Me. I could never really settle disputes, even the most petty. I thought making a grumpy face would just make people fall into line. But I was mostly good at picking people. They were good booksellers and I liked most of them and loved some of them. Of course, there were some bad decisions. Once I needed a receiver urgently so I just hired the first guy who showed up. An older gentleman, he had a good story about being a veteran and seemed super responsible. But within a couple days it was clear he was an alcoholic, couldn’t open a box, and would disappear for hours. Later I found out that he had “borrowed” money from every bookseller, and booksellers didn’t generally have money to lend. I should have re-imbursed everybody, this was my fault.

- There was one customer who came in every single day and every single day asked the same two questions: 1) what time do you close? 2) is there a tax on magazines? Mainly it was sort of comical but one day I lost it and screamed at him “Six o’clock!!! We closed at six o’clock yesterday, we’re closing at six o’clock today, and we’ll be closing at six o’clock tomorrow!!!” It wasn’t fair, I was taking out frustrations about other customers on him. But I don’t think I hurt him too much, he was in the next day to find out what time we closed and whether there was a tax on magazines.

- I miss the rhythms of those days. Phones ringing like crazy in the morning, the lunch crowd, the quieter afternoons. I miss the regulars. John Norquist, the nerdy bookish mayor! Many others. Some customers knew every bookseller by name and made the rounds greeting them in a ritualized way. Others would come in day after day, week after week, and we’d never exchange a word with them. But a bookseller could mention she’d seen “pop culture guy” on the #15 and we’d all instantly know who she meant.

- Book reps from the publishers would parade through the store on their way to meetings with buyers. It was sort of an upstairs downstairs situation. Some would march right by all the booksellers on the way to these more important things. But others would go out of their way to talk to the staff, invite them out for pizza, find out what they’re reading. As a rep, I’ve tried to model myself on these schmoozers but it hasn’t always worked too well. Social networking of any kind feels unnatural to me.

- Bookselling: it always seemed like the one honorable profession. Maybe the last place in retail where authenticity could be profitable. Maybe that’s not the case any more.

- Most of our books were delivered by Leroy, the UPS man. He was the sweetest, nicest, most consistently upbeat person with a really hard job I’ve ever known. When I get stuck in some road ragey jam, even now, so many years later, I think to myself, “Be Leroy.”

- We had a nerve-wracking, stone-age, 1.0 version computer system that broke down or fucked up constantly. Fixes were always quite elaborate and required late night stays and many floppy disks. Occasionally the genius behind this system would fly out from San Francisco and crawl under the front desk and would take our computer apart. He was sexy, looked a little like Richard Gere, and wore shades while he worked. He made me nervous.

- Once, we had an author signing for a book about local beers and microbrews. The publisher supplied cases of ale. For some reason, not a single person showed up. So the staff got drunk.

- Once, Deeelite was in town at the Riverside and Lady Kier came in to peruse the magazine section. This caused a stir, but not as big a stir as the time Lara Flynn Boyle was spotted in the poetry section.

- Once, some anti-abortionists from Wichita converged on the clinic down the street. For days it was under siege, and for days a bunch of booksellers got up at 4am to join the defenders, who were trying to keep a pathway to the clinic open amid the scary mobs. David Schwartz didn’t allow political expressions in the store - “express yourself with the books you sell,” he’d always say - but half the staff would be bleary-eyed and out of it for the rest of the day. I remember standing in front of that clinic, screaming over and over until we became the words, as if by the force of our collective will we could make it true: THIS CLINIC IS OPEN. THIS CLINIC IS OPEN. THIS CLINIC IS OPEN.
In my dreams there’s a wicked mad defiant crowd like that in front of every great Schwartz-style store in America, screaming THIS BOOKSHOP IS OPEN.

Reading (finally) Boswell's Life of Johnson (part one)

2009-08-22T15:15:00.002-05:00

originally posted at Boswell and Books

There are a handful of classics that I've circled for years, intending to read but never quite getting around to them. You probably have a few of your own. For me, one of the most compelling in this genre has been Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson. I couldn't even say how many times I've picked it up, considered reading it- I've even bought it a couple times, only to give it away or sell it unread. But still, it calls to me. It was one of David Schwartz's favorite books- hence the bookshop logo, which has now passed down to Daniel Goldin at Boswell Books. "Who is that guy?", people would sometimes ask when I worked at the bookshop, though, thankfully, not as often as you might expect, because I didn't have a very good answer. "Oh, that's James Boswell, who wrote the first modern biography- of the great Samuel Johnson." My boyfriend even dressed up as Boswell (don't tell the Milwaukee Rep we pillaged their prop department for his costume) for the grand opening of the Iron Block store downtown. He knew even less about Boswell than I, but did an excellent impression.

So now that my neighborhood bookstore is called Boswell Books, and now that I'm selling a book on the fall Harvard University press list in honor of the Samuel Johnson tercentenary (sorry, shameless plug: Selected Writings of Samuel Johnson, September 09, $35), the time has come to get serious about Boswell's Johnson. I'm spending a week at our cabin on the Mississippi River with lots of reading time, so I've decided to dedicate myself to Jim and Sam (though of course I brought a shopping bag full of alternative books in case I don't make it. I have looked at it longingly from time to time.)

Have you seen the size of the book? It's one of those great massive Penguin Classics, 1245 pages. It was published in 1791, and at first glance seems impenetrable. Smallish typeface, oddly archaic stylistic flourishes, many long poetic digressions, tons of footnotes (more on that later), and appendix upon appendix. This is not a book for the literary faint of heart. But I've made the plunge, and though a mere 185 pages in, I can file a brief report from the front. (And these notes must be taken as tentative until I actually finish. Daniel chides me for so often raving about a book, demanding that he drop everything and read it when I'm on page 25, only to turn against it by page 200.)

So here are my first three impressions:

1) The structure begins to evolve from your enemy to your friend as the book unfolds. The notes in the back are actually helpful- there's a glossary I discovered (100 pages in, I should have seen it earlier but I was afraid to go back there) which explains each and every personage who is mentioned. There are hundreds, impossible to keep track of them all. And the footnotes, though elaborate and long, can either be ignored, or, once you start paying attention, read with pleasure as well. They remind me very much in places of David Foster Wallace's digressions in Infinite Jest. Boswell can't leave a single thread unpursued. Did I mention that this is a very funny book?

2) Gee whiz facts: booksellers used to be publishers! Much of the work that Johnson published in the mid 18th century was a result of cutting deals directly with booksellers, who paid him a flat advance and then printed and sold the books. If his costs outran his advance, as they often did, too bad. Also no agents. Johnson had a series of publications, issued once or twice a week with names like "The Rambler" and "The Idler," that were shockingly akin to present-day blogs. A reader would subscribe to them, they were published several times a week, and he'd receive them by mail, which was delivered several times a day. The "postings" (that's what they seem like) were about everything and nothing, whatever popped into Johnson's very smart head that day. They were raw and unedited, and he bragged about not even reading them after setting them down. Like most bloggers, he had to push himself to keep feeding the beast. "This year I hope to learn diligence," he noted once in a diary, and another time "I bid farewell to Sloth!." Second that!

3) There's an amazingly contemporary-sounding debate about copyright and intellectual property ethics. (in one of those dense footnotes, good thing I started scanning them). It's 1759, and Johnson is incensed that he's noticed some of his writing from The Rambler in other, unauthorized publications, for which, of course, he isn't compensated. He's outraged, and warns that "those who have been busy with their sickles in the fields of their neighbors are henceforward to take notice, that the time of impunity is at an end." Sounds familiar.

More to come.....

Victor's vs Mad Planet

2009-08-22T15:10:00.003-05:00

I go to Victor’s- I call it “Victims”- and the Mad Planet, and all the black bars. I love black people.

People don’t seem so hung up on the existence of God anymore. They’re existential but it’s not about “does God exist”, it’s more about experiencing urban life.

I don’t change clothes when I change bars. Yeah, when I walk into Victor’s the red power ties say “oh, east side,” but it’s all a matter of conversation. These Victor’s people seem moronic to me, but maybe it’s just my prejudice.

I dress contemporary- too contemporary for them. They’re living in Saturday Night Fever. They’re just looking for sex. At Mad Planet they’re looking for bondage. There’s a bondage fashion show tonight. First prize is free body piercing. It’s a meeting of the subculture. You could be in an underground bar in Berlin or Copenhagen. But there’s probably a bar like Victor’s in Berlin too.

There’s no mysticism whatsoever at Victor’s. These people make money legitimately but at the Mad Planet it’s strictly illegitimate. That Victor’s is like a dinosaur- we got limos, we got roses, we got champagne, we got cocaine.

I’m both. My priority is acquiring. I want a good house but I don’t give a damn about a car. I want to accumulate wealth. I’m Victor’s AND Mad Planet.

I feel more like an insider at Mad Planet. I know the lady who owns it.

I go to Boobie’s on Garfield. For $4.50 you get half a barbecued duck with greens. I feel like the inner city is part of Milwaukee. There’s a cultural life. There’s a bar with a stage where they put on plays. What’s it called? I forgot. Over by A.L. Smith. A. O. Smith? There’s a lot going on.

You don’t see many white people at Tap One or Boobie’s. They’re glad to see me. The Q & F Diner on Martin Luther King right before Keefe has the best dessert anywhere. Sweet potato pie for 95 cents. I buy a whole one. Banana pudding for a dollar. And fish!

I like people. Everywhere I go I talk to everybody. They say Walt Whitman was like that. He was so avant garde.

Overheard @ Webster’s café
Transcribed 12-7-91

Five Ways to New Haven (with ghosts)

2009-08-22T15:03:00.001-05:00

Rhonda

I caught a 4:45am bus to the Milwaukee airport for my flight to LaGuardia. It was packed with sad, tired, first-shift workers heading to Allen-Bradley. In 1970 my friend Rhonda and I often distributed communist newspapers at the gates of this plant. Comrades working inside told us how happy the workers were to get them, despite the glum blankness with which they were usually accepted. Once, a can of green paint was poured on us from the third floor. Rhonda, enraged, said it was “management, obviously.” Eventually, she moved to Maryland and, so I’ve heard, became a fourth-grade teacher.

Harold & Peter

On the plane I recalled my first flight- to a communist youth camp in Pennsylvania. I was sixteen and had run away. We studied Marxism, sang corny folk songs, and played non-competitive sports. I was shy and said almost nothing, so the idea that I might be a police agent arose. One guy- Harold, from Philadelphia, actually confronted me. “Are you an agent?” he demanded during breakfast. But another guy- Peter, from Boston, said “Leave him alone.” They were all red diaper babies and super-confident. I longed to be one too. Harold and Peter, where are you?

Murray & Esther

In the cab to Grand Central (I am important now, with an expense account), I’m flooded with memories of New York party meetings- like the 1972 convention at the St. George Hotel in Brooklyn. I stayed with a quiet, older couple in the Bronx. They reminded me of an alternate universe version of my parents. Each night, after an endless subway ride, they quizzed me about what Gus Hall or Henry Winston had to say. They were honored to have a distinguished delegate for a guest. My Allerton Avenue hosts- ghosts! The St George Hotel- a ghost!

Rolf

The Metro North station names strike primal sitcom chords: New Rochelle- the Petries! Westport- the Ricardos! I remember a 1973 train ride from Berlin to Moscow, and giant Soviet women passing through each car, fussing and tucking and serving hot tea. Rolf, an East German boy I secretly loved, sat beside me, asking so many questions that I later wondered whether he was recruiting me for the Stasi. As he dozed, his head came to rest on my shoulder, and I stayed alert with the electric knowledge of this all the way to Minsk. Rolf- wo bist du denn?

John

I disembark at New Haven and walk toward Yale. Dizzy with memory, I’m conscious of arriving at a time as much as at a place. I have a sweet job with a prestigious university press, and now I am mature. But I harbor red ghosts. Maybe I am a red ghost. Sometimes they seem more real than real. As I cross the Green and head up Temple street, I’m haunted by lyrics from Kings of Convenience :

Everyday there’s a boy in the mirror
Asking me what are you doing here?
Finding all my previous motives
Growing increasingly unclear.

Walt Whitman, Specimen Days

2009-08-17T15:16:00.002-05:00

It will illustrate one phase of humanity anyhow; how few of life's days and hours (and they not by relative value or proportion, but by chance) are ever noted. Probably another point too, how we give long preparations for some object, planning and delving and fashioning, and then, when the actual hour for doing arrives, find ourselves still quite unprepared, and tumble the thing together, letting hurry and crudeness tell the story better than fine work.

Pals

2009-08-13T10:16:00.004-05:00

How do you forget someone when his footprints are all over your life?

The opposite of love turns out to be indifference, not hate.

A decade ago, nothing in the world happened until we had a chance to talk about it. Now, we say hello and catch up if we happen to see each other on the street.

A friendship based on occasional, chance encounters after so many years of exchanging so many words. No! I will match his casual desertion with my own more powerful indifference.

It’s surprisingly easy to avoid someone in the city. But my first attempts at this strategy (“do friends require strategies?” I can hear him asking incredulously) collapsed the last time I ran into him. The gaping blankness between us seemed too unnatural, too hard to sustain. So we reverted to the familiar: the reconciliation coffee, the fast-paced, slightly panicky conversation about everything and nothing, the sensation that I’m unreasonable, the parting without a plan, the “see ya.”

Reality itself depended on the sharing of trivial quotidian episodes- a strange item in the Times, gossip about an acquaintance, a lovely boy on the street. To not exchange these things, it’s more than loss. They don’t fully exist until conjured to interestingness by our speaking about them. The raw experience contains within itself the prospect of the upcoming telling. Event and anticipation are one, and now event alone is chronically vacant, unfinished.

Eventually, the friend years will seem like a dream, over-written by the new, indifferent passer-by years. Eventually, every day without a message will stop seeming like a distinct, stand-alone sadness, and weeks and months and years will zip file into a single loss. Eventually, I will stop stumbling upon postcards falling unexpectedly from old books, with messages like:

Minneapolis, August 28, 1997
Have you read J. Updike short story The City? I haven’t either but I think it feels like today.

Eventually, I will not rush to the library to find that story.

Google translate: ouch ouch ouch

2009-05-06T10:28:00.003-05:00

Recently I came across an old musical favorite from 1989, a time when I was obsessed with French pop. It was Maurane's rendition of "Pas gai la pagaille" (sorry that's just a clip, the rest of the song is great.) Then yesterday I found a completely charming and amazing rendition of it by what looks like five thousand French teenagers. This led me to the lyrics, which I'd mostly memorized despite my shaky French (it's a sort of imaginary romp by a boy named Jeremy through Parc Monceau in Paris). Out of curiosity, I ran the lyrics past Google Translate, and here are the hilarious results, French first:

French lyrics

Pas gaie la pagaille

Y a des crocrodiles
Devant nous qui défilent
Des hommes à chapeaux
A fusils, à couteaux,
Parc Monceau

Jérémie se cache,
Dans le camp des Apaches
Pas peur des pas beaux,
Lui très grand, très costaud
Parc Monceau

Jérémie a tout vu, tout entendu,
Et les mémés à toutous lui crient dessus
Aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe
Ce n'est pas gai, la pagaille
Yeah, yeah, la pagaille y a qu'ça d'vrai
Aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe
Jouer la vie vaille que vaille

Quand les dromadaires
Cherchent les hélicoptères
Menant le troupeau,
Jérémie de Ronceveaux
Parc Monceau

Oublie son cartable
Dans le bac à sable
File incognito
Vers la tour du chateau
Parc Monceau

Jérémie a tout vu, tout entendu,
Et les mémés à toutous ne l'ont pas cru
Aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe
Ce n'est pas gai, la pagaille
Yeah, yeah, la pagaille y a qu'ça d'vrai
Aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe
Jouer la vie vaille que vaille

Jérémie a tout vu, tout entendu,
Et les mémés à toutous ne l'ont pas cru
Aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe
Ce n'est pas gai, la pagaille ...tu parles...
Yeah, yeah, la pagaille y a qu'ça d'vrai
Aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe, aïe
Jouer la vie vaille que vaille

English translation as rendered by Google translate:

Translation: French » English

No gay mess

Y has crocrodiles
Parade in front of him
Men hat
A gun, knife,
At Park Monceau
Jeremiah hides
In the camp of the Apaches
No fear of not beautiful,
He very large, very strong
At Park Monceau

Jeremiah saw everything, heard everything
And the same to him shout above toutous

(Refrain:)
Ouch ouch ouch
Oh, it's not gay, a mess!
Yeah yeah yeah yeah
Ouch ouch ouch
Is life worth play that works!

When camels
Helicopter hunt
Leading the flock
Jeremiah Roncevaux
At Park Monceau
Forget his satchel
In the sandbox
File incognito
Go to the castle tower
At Park Monceau

Jeremiah saw everything, heard everything
And the same in toutous did not believe

(au Refrain)

Jeremiah saw everything, heard everything
And the same to him shout above toutous

(au Refrain, ad lib)

That Mad Ache, Francoise Sagan

2009-05-06T08:49:00.001-05:00

That Mad Ache by Francoise Sagan; trans. by Douglas Hofstadter.
Published with Translator, Trader: An Essay on the Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes of Translation by Douglas Hofstadter.

Amidst all the gloom and doom afflicting the publishing industry these days, it’s easy to overlook the more hopeful trends. Here’s one: after enduring years and years of a “literature in translation” imbalance that rivals any trade imbalance, there are signs of renewed domestic interest in what the rest of the world is writing about. The steps are tentative, but unmistakable. The great independent literary presses that have single-handedly carried the torch for translation (including New Directions, Dalkey Archive, the New York Review of Books Classics, David Godine) have recently been joined by some exciting newcomers who are opening the world to American readers. These include the fantastic Archipelago Books series, Yale University Press’ Margellos World Republic of Letters books, and the irrepressible Chad Post’s excellent Open Letter Books out of the University of Rochester. Whether this perfect literature in translation storm is a function of the re-alignment of the political zeitgeist, or just a coincidence, it’s a gift to American book-lovers who have long been deprived of access to some of the best writing being done on the planet.

One of the more unusual translations I’ve come across for awhile is Douglas Hofstadter’s witty, elegant rendition of Francoise Sagan’s sixties novel La Chamade. Sagan, who died a few years ago, was best known for Bonjour Tristesse in the fifties, and went on to become a sort of spokes-novelist for a particular brand of French upper middle-class ennui. There’s a suggestion of John Cheever. Her style and story (as channeled by Hofstadter of course) seems a little like Jules and Jim only written and directed by Anita Brookner. (That’s a good thing!)

Set mainly in Paris in the mid-sixties, Sagan gets inside a complicated three-way relationship involving Lucile, a self-involved, immature, somewhat bratty twenty-something; Charles, her fifty-year old sugar daddy; and Antoine, a passionate thirty-year old hottie to whom Lucile is (surprise!) irresistibly drawn. Against the backdrop of the affair(s), a juicy cast of high-class posers and back-biters form a kind of Greek chorus, though they never really steal the stage from Lucile. There are passages of great beauty and great fun, though Sagan is mainly interested in exploring profound philosophical questions as they are played out in human relationships.

This would be an excellent book even if the story simply ended there, but it does not. Most translators these days are lucky to be acknowledged on the title page, and in a brief biographical blurb. (Not that long ago even this small courtesy was sometimes withheld, perhaps based on the idea that the word “translated” would kill sales.) But Basic Books has done something very clever with this translation by giving Hofstadter 100 pages for an extended essay about what it was like to transform La Chamade into That Mad Ache. (How he handled the translation of that title itself is a key to his overall sensibility.) It’s one of those strokes of publishing genius that immediately makes the reader think “why hasn’t someone thought of that before?”

Perhaps they have. But in truth, it helps to have a translator with the stature and imagination of Hofstadter. The author of the classic Gödel Escher Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid and many other books, this is not his first stab at exploring the paradoxes of translation. One of the most charming books of all time is his amazing investigation of a small jewel of a poem by the sixteenth-century French poet, Clement Marot. In Le Ton Beau de Marot, he demonstrated that there is no such thing as a simple, straight-forward translation, and I guarantee that you will never take a translation for granted after reading that book, or this one.

For the Sagan project, over which Hofstadter obsessed for many years, he lays out the many knotty issues that need to be addressed by anyone hoping to translate accurately. Scratch that, there is no “accurately!” There are seemingly mundane decisions about how to treat very localized words, or how to solve the “vous/tu” problem when English can only offer an egalitarian “you.” (His elegant solution is “You/you”). And there are bigger philosophical thickets involving transculturation that at times make it seem as if translation is really about something much bigger than itself.

I recently watched the first season of the sixties series Mission Impossible on DVD, and it struck me that whenever the team was in another country, they all spoke a heavily accented English. Why? We’re watching it in English, and we are suspending the knowledge that everyone we see would actually be speaking Slovenian. This is the type of paradox Hofstadter addresses.

As he was well into this project, Hofstadter came across the one prior English translation of the book, done in the sixties by Robert Westhoff. He forces himself not to look until he’s finished with his own translation (hard to believe, but I do believe him), and then he goes on to share with us the often utterly different choices the two translators made for the same passages. It’s sometimes like reading two different books. That is to say, three different books!

He’s incredibly whimsical, personal and playful. My only complaint is that I was left with one nagging curiosity: what was it about La Chamade that spoke to him so profoundly in the first place?

This is a wonderful marriage of great author, great translator, and great editorial vision―a much more compatible three-way than Lucile, Charles, and Antoine. To see these classic literary ingredients transformed into something so totally new and fresh makes me hopeful for books. It’s a breathtaking amount of entertainment and erudition packed into a $14.95 paperback.

Reviewed by John Eklund

That Mad Ache by Francoise Sagan; trans. by Douglas Hofstadter.
Basic Books, 2009
Paper, 320 pp., $14.95
ISBN-10: 0465010989

Drifting from metaphor to point of view, 1977

2009-04-30T14:54:00.004-05:00

While closet cleaning I came across the cover sheet from a paper I'd written for a communications class at UW in 1977. The professor's comments were intact but the paper itself was missing:

This is an extremely thought-provoking paper. It offers an idea of considerable consequence. Let me sketch my reactions

1. the argument seems tight to page and becomes clear at the paragraph “nice.”
2. Thereafter the argument becomes either faulty, unclear, or itself a metaphor.
3. The argument must carry the character of metaphor, i.e. a tenon and vehicle (two parts) which are not commonly linked (expectations violated) but have sufficient commonality at some level so that the info associated with one (either/both) illuminates aspects of the other.
4. It seems to me that your arguments drifts from metaphor (characterized as above) to perspective or point of view. But, a metaphor involves the juxtapposition of perspectives, not merely the existence of a non-unique perspective.
5. Some metaphors are inappropriate (linguistically)- do we not carry this constraint to behavioral metaphors, e.g. the first man to treat poison ivy as a salad green probably found it an inappropriate choice.
6. I would recommend Koestler’s The Act of Creation since it discusses creativity, humor, and just about everything else in terms of the juxtaposition of perspectives. Grade: A

Grade and comments-midterm paper
John Eklund
“Human Behavior as Metaphor”
Comm Arts 472- Prof Joe Cappella
5/16/77

an April morning in Manhattan

2009-04-22T10:52:00.000-05:00

During breakfast at the Leo House, my favorite place to stay in New York, one of the nuns in charge approached me and said “I don’t know why they won’t just leave him alone.” I agreed, although I had no idea who or what she might have been talking about. It was the kind of thing people over sixty will say to you on buses in Milwaukee. Rather than commencing at the beginning or end of the narrative, these conversational overtures plunge straight into the center. It’s as if we’ve been having a discussion and I’ve had a brief bout of amnesia. The odd thing is, it works for them- or at least, it works often enough to keep it thriving as a form of public discourse. Older Milwaukee people seem to have a huge reservoir of shared assumptions, and the confidence to assume them with strangers in public spaces. I heard one old woman launch a conversation with another by asking “What are you gonna do?” The stranger just sighed and replied “Nothing you can do.” Both seemed satisfied that information had been exchanged. The eaves-dropper is left to wonder whether they were talking about nothing, or everything. Writers and artists struggle constantly with the creative challenge of making the particular universal, but this skill was mastered long ago by the busybodies of Milwaukee. As the Sister moved on to greet another breakfast diner with another non-sequitur, I remembered that the Leo House is a project of the Sisters of Saint Agnes. They are from Wisconsin.

II.

I took the C Train up to 125^th Street, hoping to see the Kalup Linzy video installation at the Studio Museum in Harlem. As I climbed the stairs out of the subway station, the man ahead of me suddenly lobbed a huge gob of spit at the wall. I was momentarily startled. He noticed this, and asked me what the fuck I was doing walking so close behind somebody. This startled me more than the spit, and I said I was sorry. I figured that he was a little embarrassed, and that this was a loss-of-face situation, and it would be better to just let him save his. But then, for good measure, he asked whether I was sick in my fucking head. There didn’t seem to be a good way to respond, so I walked briskly to my destination a few blocks ahead. When I got there, I was told sorry, the museum is closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. I said that I’d checked the website and it explicitly said they were open Mondays. The woman at the counter smiled a gorgeous smile, shrugged, and said “Well, you need at least four hours to see them anyway.” This made sense to me at the time, but as I thought about it later I was baffled.

III.

I decided to walk down to Book Culture near Columbia. It was a rainy morning, and there were only a few customers in the store. I spent an hour looking over my pet subject areas, one of which is old lefty memoirs. On a shelf in a sub-section of a sub-section, I came across a spined copy of a thin paperback called Red Family, about the thirties communist organizer Junius Scales. After reading a few pages, I decided to order it from my local bookshop when I got home, and returned it to the shelf. Almost immediately, I heard a man approach the information desk and ask for this book by name. “Your website says you have a copy but I don’t know where to find it,” he added. The bookseller looked it up, hunted it down, and within a couple minutes he had purchased the book I’d just had in my hand. If you haven’t worked in a bookstore, you may not realize how bizarre this is. When a celebrity plugs her book on Oprah, or, since this is Book Culture, when Hugo Chavez gives the President a book exposing US imperialist atrocities in Latin America, it wouldn’t be surprising to have many requests for a single title in a single day. But Red Family is the sort of book that might sell a couple copies in an entire year. How strange! For a moment I suspected that this man had been watching me, and was staging some sort of Paul Auster-like mind game. And then I wondered, in a non-sequitur sort of way, whether he was in league with the thug on the subway and the nun at Leo House.

James Purdy, r.i.p.

2009-03-15T12:33:00.000-05:00

A fine obituary by William Grimes in the March 14 New York Times.

"Reputations are made here, as in Russia, on political respectability, or by commercial acceptability," he once said. "The worse the author, the more he is known."

Bruce Jenkins, intro to "On the Camera Arts & Consecutive Matters: The Writings of Hollis Frampton" (MIT Press April 2009)

2009-03-02T13:22:00.000-06:00

Frampton may strike contemporary readers as being a bit like the protagonist of the Dali and Bunuel film Un Chien Andalou: a figure whose quest is freighted with cultural baggage from the past, symbolized in his arduous attempts to drag a pair of grand pianos, laden with dead donkeys, and two bound Catholic priests, across the parlor that separates him from his object of desire.

A cheery New Year's thought from Karl Marx, Communist Manifesto, quoted by Marshall Berman in Adventures in Marxism

2009-01-01T09:10:00.000-06:00

The bourgeoisie cannot exist without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of production, and with them the whole relations of society... Constant revolutionizing of production, uninterrupted disturbance of all social conditions, everlasting uncertainty and agitation distinguish the bourgeois epoch from all earlier ones. All fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions, are swept away, and all new-formed ones become antiquated before they can ossify. All that is solid melts into air, all that is holy is profaned, and man at last is forced to face with sober senses, his real conditions of life, and his relations with his kind.

Mikhail Gorbachev on Jesus Christ

2008-12-24T08:17:00.001-06:00

’Jesus was the first socialist, the first to seek a better life for mankind.’

from Halldor Laxness, The Great Weaver From Kashmir (1927)

2008-12-19T07:10:00.000-06:00

How in the world can Christianity, a nineteen-hundred year old ghost story from Asia, be expected to have any influence on contemporary Europeans?

Men live in reality, and there they are condemned to help themselves. God has sentenced man to help himself. God does not help him; that is evidenced everywhere. It is also evidenced everywhere that the more faith men put in God, the more liable they are to wallow in idiocy and penury, the less liable to rise up against their enemies, against lies and tyranny. In just a short time the holiest names of Christianity will not be seen upon anything other than fatted calves, lapdogs, soft drinks and laundries.

..........................

The older a man becomes, the more vain become the questions that he ponders, the more paltry the decisions that he makes. It is a rare exception to meet a man older than thirty who thinks. To grow older signifies a man's surrender to facts. He no longer changes water into wine, no longer gives orders, is no longer a creative philosopher. His cleverness from this point on is confined to taking a position toward things as they are, settling himself down in such a way that the flaws he fought against most often in his youth cause him the least amount of trouble possible. To grow older is to lose the nerve to try to untie the Gordian knot, to settle with whatever one wasn't able to conquer. The soul of a middle-aged man is solidified lava.

Wallace Shawn, Designated Mourner

2008-12-04T12:50:00.000-06:00

There are ideas that are almost like formalized greetings. Everyone agrees with them, but we keep repeating them anyway, all day long. Everyone keeps saying, for example, "Human motivation is very complex." But if you stop and think about it, you have to admit that human motivation is not complex, or it's complex only in the same sense that the motivation of a fly is complex. In other words, if you try to swat a fly, it moves out of the way. And humans are the same. They step aside when they sense something coming about to hit them in the face. Of course, you do see the occasional exception-- the person who just stands there and waits for the blow.

Thom Gunn, Autobiography

2008-12-04T12:45:00.000-06:00

The sniff of the real, that's
what I'd want to get
how it felt
to sit on Parliament
Hill on a May evening
studying for exams skinny
seventeen dissatisfied
yet sniffing such
a potent air, smell of
grass in the heat from
the day's sun

I'd been walking through the damp
rich ways by the ponds
and now lay on the upper
grass with Lamartine's poems

life seemed all
loss, and what was more
I'd lost whatever it was
before I'd even had it

a green dry prospect
distant babble of children
and beyond, distinct at
the end of the glow
St Paul's like a stone thimble
longing so hard to make
inclusions that the longing
has become in memory
an inclusion

Roberto Bolano, 2666, p. 722

2008-11-30T12:23:00.000-06:00

What was Ivanov afraid of? Ansky wondered in his notebooks. Not of harm to his person, since as a longtime Bolshevik he'd had many brushes with arrest, prison and deportation, and although he couldn't be called a brave man, neither could it fairly be said that he was cowardly or spineless. Ivanov's fear was of a literary nature. That is, it was the fear that afflicts most citizens who, one fine (or dark) day, choose to make the practice of writing, and especially the practice of fiction writing, an integral part of their lives. Fear of being no good. Also, fear of being over-looked. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear that one's efforts and strivings will come to nothing. Fear of the step that leaves no trace. Fear of the forces of chance and nature that wipe away shallow prints. Fear of dining alone and unnoticed. Fear of going unrecognized. Fear of failure and making a spectacle of oneself. But above all, fear of being no good. Fear of forever dwelling in the hell of bad writers. Irrational fears, thought Ansky, especially when the fearful soothed their fears with semblances. As if the paradise of good writers, according to bad writers, were inhabited by semblances. As if the worth (or excellence) of a work were based on semblances. Semblances that varied, of course, from one era and country to another, but that always remained just that, semblances, things that only seem and never are, things all surface and no depth, pure gesture, and even the gesture muddled by an effort of will, the hair and eyes and lips of Tolstoy and the versts traveled on horseback by Tolstoy and the women deflowered by Tolstoy in a tapestry burned by the fire of seeming.

Why? What for? For whom?

2008-11-26T12:36:00.000-06:00

Jose Saramago, avid blogger, asked about why he blogs rather than writes in the newspaper: "Perhaps it's the feeling of being able to start over again: writing without limits. The papers would pay, of course. But look, Obama won and I'm happy about it so I sit myself down and write an article in my blog, and I demand outright that he shut Guantanamo and lift the trade embargo against Cuba. And I can do this sort of thing whenever I want. Of course you will be eventually integrated into the system. Basically you are just a morello cherry on a cake. They tolerate you, laugh at you – that Saramago again... But I refuse to give up. I wake up feeling like a libertarian communist every morning. There are three questions which we should never stop asking: Why? What for? For whom?"

november 21

2008-11-21T11:04:00.000-06:00

1694: Voltaire is born in Paris. At 65 he will spend three days writing Candide.

1910: Leo Tolstoy, 82, dies of pneumonia contracted when he flees from his wife of 48 years and heads for the Caucasus.

Robert Frost, contribution to Esquire symposium on "What Worries You Most About America Today," 1958

2008-11-11T16:11:00.000-06:00

Worries is a hard word for me. I am interested in strengthening the high schools of America, bringing them up. A little thing I want is named chairs in the high schools. Once you got it, you would be in it for life. This would enrich the position of the high school teacher. Their position is not dignified enough. The first chair, I'd have for mathematics. The other chair would be of the school's choosing. Instead of spraying money all over the colleges, I'd like to see something done for high-school teachers.

Passage from A.E. Housman's More Poems cited by Alan Bennett at dedication of Housman memorial, London, 17 Sept 1996

2008-11-11T16:06:00.000-06:00

Shake hands, we shall never be friends, all's over;
I only vex you the more I try.
All's wrong that ever I've done or said,
And nought to help it in this dull head:
Shake hands. here's luck, good-bye.

But if you come to a road where danger
Or guilt or anger or shame's to share,
Be good to the lad that loves you true
And the soul that was born to die for you,
And whistle and I'll be there.

Kenneth Fearing, American Rhapsody (1938)

2008-11-07T08:27:00.000-06:00

Tomorrow, yes tomorrow
there will suddenly be new success, like Easter
clothes, and a strange and different fate
and bona fide life will arrive at last, stepping
from a nonstop monoplane with chromium
doors and a silver wing and straight, white
staring lights
....

Tomorrow, yes tomorrow, surely we begin at last to live
with lots and lots of laughter
solid silver laughter
laughter, with a few simple instructions
and a bona fide guarantee

Walt Whitman, Mediums

2008-11-04T09:27:00.000-06:00

They shall arise in the States,
They shall report Nature, laws, physiology, and happiness,
They shall illustrate democracy and the kosmos,
They shall be alimentive, amative, perceptive,
They shall be complete women and men, their pose brawny
and supple, their drink water, their blood clean and clear,
They shall fully enjoy materialism and the sight of products,
they shall enjoy the sight of the beef, lumber, breadstuffs,
of Chicago, the great city,
They shall train themselves to go in public to become
orators and oratresses,
Strong and sweet shall their tongues be, poems and
materials of poems shall come from their lives, they
shall be makers and finders,
Of them and of their works shall emerge divine conveyers,
to convey gospels,
Characters, events, retrospections, shall be convey'd in
gospels, trees, animals, waters, shall be convey'd,
Death, the future, the invisible faith, shall all be
convey'd

Umberto Saba, The Poet & the Conformist

2008-10-31T10:03:00.000-05:00

How I envy you, Friend! Firmly
anchored to your faith, you live in peace
with men and gods. You talk and write
easily, true to the will
of your master. In exchange he gives you
bread and, as his thing, strokes you.
He doesn't point a weapon at you;
your smile fends off all threats. And you pass
among men and events almost unharmed.

There is one who thinks himself alone and defenseless.
He thinks his flesh has an excellent flavor.
Better, he thinks, in the hunter's sight
to be a sparrow than a partridge.

Sigur Ros, Ara bátur (English trans.)

2008-10-17T09:23:00.001-05:00

Row Boat

You tried everything
Yes, a thousand times
Experienced enough
Been through enough
But you it was who let everything
Into my heart
And it was you who once again
Awoke my spirit

I parted, you parted

You stir up
Emotions
In a blender
Everything in disarray
But it was you who was always
There for me
It was you who never judged
My true friend

I parted, you parted
(hopelandic)

You sail on rivers
With an old oar
Leaking badly
You swim to shore
Pushed the waves away
But to no avail
You float on the sea
Sleep on the surface
Light through the fog

(hopelandic)

Upon seeing Wong Kar-wai's In the Mood for Love for the third time

2008-10-13T08:19:00.000-05:00

Among green willows and fragrant grass along the road of post stations
Youth discards you and slips away
In the tower the fifth watch bell shatters what's left of dreams
Beneath the blossoms, the sorrow of parting and March rain
More bitter to love than not--
One inch unravels to a thousand, ten thousand threads
Somewhere is an edge of heaven, an end of earth
But to longing, there is no end.

-- Hating Spring, Yen Shu

Jay McInerney, from Brightness Falls

2008-09-30T09:37:00.000-05:00

He could hear the scratching at his heart's door of a dog that needed to be walked.

Cormac McCarthy, from Suttree

2008-09-30T09:35:00.000-05:00

"...Craven, half bald watchdogs yapped and slank."

Lewis Hyde, On the Grey Wolf River

2008-09-29T09:23:00.000-05:00

little ouzel bird
under
cliffs of pillow lava
over
ice-green
glacier rapids,
should I
go back to the university
or what?

Randall Jarrell, Girl in a Library

2008-09-24T07:45:00.000-05:00

The ways we miss our life
are life.

Anita Brookner on competition

2008-09-23T12:28:00.001-05:00

In real life, of course, it is the hare that wins. Every time. Look around you.

an italian proverb

2008-09-23T12:26:00.000-05:00

Se non e vero, e bon trovato.

(Even if it isn't true, it's well-founded)

Max Schachtman on doubt

2008-09-23T12:25:00.001-05:00

Doubts are bridges you cannot stand on for long. Either you go back to the old views or move on to the new.

Ted Solotaroff on writing

2008-09-23T12:22:00.001-05:00

Writing itself, if not misunderstood and abused, becomes a way of empowering the writing self. It converts diffuse anger and disappointment into deliberate and durable aggression, the writer's main source of energy. It converts sorrow and self-pity into empathy, the writer's main means of relating to otherness. His wounded innocence turns into irony, his silliness into wit, his guilt into judgment, his oddness into originality, his perverseness into his stinger.

Barbara Pym, An Academic Question p. 137

2008-09-22T13:12:00.001-05:00

Summer began to move toward autumn, and the September mornings were cool and bright. There was even a touch of frost in the air. It seemed a time for looking forward, and perhaps even for making resolutions to alter and improve one's life. The beginning of the new academic year was the most suitable time for us to think of change, and we knew that some would be forced upon us.

Hans Enzensberger's poem Karl Heinrich Marx

2008-09-22T13:10:00.000-05:00

I see you betrayed
By your disciples
Only your enemies
Remained what they were.

overhard, Alterra Coffee, Sept 10 2008

2008-09-22T13:09:00.001-05:00

The biggest problem I see in this world is that they don't teach personal finance in elementary school.

from David Benioff, City of Thieves

2008-09-22T13:06:00.001-05:00

Talent must be a fanatical mistress. She's beautiful. When you're with her, people watch you, they notice. But she bangs on your door at odd hours, and she disappears for long stretches, and she has no patience for the rest of your existence: your wife, your children, your friends. She is the most thrilling evening of your week, but some day she will leave you for good. One night, after she's been gone for years, you will see her on the arm of a younger man, and she will pretend not to recognize you.

Flannery O'Connor on Jesus Christ

2008-09-22T13:05:00.001-05:00

The ragged figure who moves around from tree to tree in the back of one's mind.

Rebecca Solnit

2008-09-22T13:04:00.000-05:00

Once I loved a man who was alot like the desert. Before that, I loved the desert.

Wittgenstein

2008-09-22T13:03:00.001-05:00

How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life.

Coetzee on the similarity between Pound and Benjamin

2008-09-22T13:02:00.001-05:00

Both have investments in antiquarian bodies of knowledge whose relevance to their own times they over-estimate. And neither one knew when to stop.

Gary Snyder's 2000 May Day toast, Portland OR

2008-09-22T12:57:00.000-05:00

Let's drink a toast to all those farmers, workers, artists and intellectuals of the last one hundred years who, without thought of fame and profit, worked tirelessly in their dream of a worldwide socialist revolution. Who believed and hoped a new world was dawning, and that their work would contribute to a society in which one class does not exploit another, where one ethnic group or one nation does not try to expand itself over another, and where men and women live as equals. The people who nourished these hopes and dreams were sometimes foolishly blind to the opportunism of their own leadership, and many were led into ideological absurdities, but the great majority of them selflessly worked for socialism with the best of hearts...The failure of socialism is the tragedy of the 20th century, and we should honor the memory of those who struggled for the dream of what socialism might have been. And begin a new way again.

Raphael Samuel, British communist, on the demands of marxism

2008-09-22T12:54:00.000-05:00

Marxism: absolutes and totalities. It claimed jurisdiction over every dimension of experience, every department of social life.

- political economy showed how capitalism was a unified essence;
- socialism as "the science of society," an all-embracing determinism;
- a mode of reasoning with universal laws and prophetic authority;
- a philosophy of life that demanded subordination of the self to a higher cause.

Sol Lewitt's advice to Eva Hesse

2008-09-22T12:51:00.001-05:00

Stop it and just do. Try to tickle something inside you, your "weird humor." You belong in the most secret part of you. Don't worry about cool, make your own uncool. You are not responsible for the world, you are only responsible for your work. So do it. And don't think that your work has to conform to any idea or flavor. It can be anything you want it to be.

from Edward St. Aubyn, Mother's Milk

2008-09-22T12:49:00.001-05:00

America is just people in huge cars wondering what to eat next.

So much road and so little place. So much friendliness and so little intimacy. So much flavor and so little taste.

Javier Marias, Paris Review interview

2008-09-22T12:45:00.000-05:00

Illusions are important. What you foresee or what you remember can be as important as what really happens. We usually tell our own story by mentioning only the positive things, but there is also the negative part of your life that forms you: what you didn't do, what you renounced, what you didn't dare to do, what you doubted and discarded, what you dreamt of, what you expected, what you left aside, what you didn't study but thought you would, the job you didn't take, the job they didn't give you even though you wanted it. The things you're not are a part of you as well.

the Hopi 2x2 Rule

2008-09-22T12:24:00.000-05:00

See twice as much as you hear.

Hear twice as much as you say.

Bertolt Brecht, In Dark Times, 1936

2008-09-22T12:23:00.000-05:00

However, they won't say:
The times were dark.
Rather: why were
Their poets silent?

Christopher Isherwood on Germany, 1931

2008-09-22T12:22:00.001-05:00

Somehow the feeling that nothing catastrophic will really happen only makes it worse. I think everybody everywhere is being ground down by an enormous tool. I feel myself getting smaller and smaller.

Susan Sontag's rules for writers, from Journals 12/3/61

2008-09-22T12:19:00.000-05:00

The writer must be four people:
1) the nut, the obsede
2) the moron
3) the stylist
4) the critic

1 supplies the material, 2 lets it come out, 3 is taste, 4 is intelligence.

A great writer has all four, but you can still be a good writer with only one and two- they're the most important.

Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope

2008-09-22T12:16:00.000-05:00

In the Phaedrus, Socrates argues that writing can function as a form of forgetting rather than remembering: for it can lull one into thinking that one is remembering when one is only moving the phrases about.

Bookstores in Milwaukee Wisconsin, 1934

2008-09-22T12:08:00.000-05:00

H.W. Brown & Co
87 E. Wisconsin Avenue

Casanova Bookstore
591 Downer Avenue

C.N. Caspar & Co.
454 E. Water Street

Childrens Book Shelf
391 Prospect Avenue

DesForges & Co.
143 E. Wisconsin Avenue

Herman J. Eggert
693 Forest Home Avenue

Sol Elbaum
709 Walnut Street

Emil Emmenegger
906 24th Street

Hampel's Book Shop
218 Wells Street

Charles F. Hermann
188 2nd Street

Edward A. Higgins
319 Wisconsin Avenue

Francis McLeod Bookseller
144 Mason Street

May McVann
1311 Prospect Avenue

Milwaukee Bookshop
417 Milwaukee Street

H. Niedecken Co.
337 E. Water Street

Richter Bros.
975 2nd Street

Southside Bookstore
402 Grove Street

Artlyn Bookshop
1700 N. Farwell

Aurora Bookshop
4424 W. North Avenue

Badger Bookstore
526 W. State Street

Callaghan & Co.
617 N. 2nd street

German Bookstore
2415 W. Fond du Lac Avenue

Happy Bookshop
3204 N. 27th Street

Marquette University Bookstore
1205 W. Wisconsin Avenue

Ye Olde Bookshop
1523 W. Mitchell Street

overheard conversation at the Carleton Theatre, Toronto, March 4 2006, waiting to see Why We Fight

2008-09-22T12:04:00.000-05:00

-What's your girlfriend doing these days?
-Still writing poetry. Waitressing.
-Is she still working on that book?
-It's published.
-I didn't know that.
-It's in the top 15 across Canada.
-I didn't know that.

[pause]

-What number?
-I don't know. Maybe 13?
-Is she making alot of money then?
-I don't know. I haven't asked her something like that.

from Your Face Tomorrow: Fever & Spear by Javier Marias

2008-09-22T11:50:00.000-05:00

Some people can't forgive you for behaving decently towards them, for being loyal to them, for defending them and giving them your support, let alone doing them a favor or getting them out of some difficulty, that can, on occasions, sound the death knell for the benefactor. It's as if they felt humiliated by being the object of someone's affection and good intentions, or thought that this implied a degree of contempt towards them. It's as if they could not stand to be indebted, however imaginary the debt, or to be obliged to feel grateful...Some people are simply impossible, and the only sensible thing to do is to remove yourself from their presence and keep them at a distance, and not to let them near you for good or ill, or count on you for anything. Quite simply, to cease to exist for them, not even in order to fight them. (p. 176)

We forget what we say much more than what we hear, what we write much more than what we read, what we send much more than what we receive, and that is why we barely count the insults we hand out to others, unlike those dealt out to us, which is why almost everyone harbors some grudge against someone. (p. 199)

You never think to keep the unimportant things when they occur in your own time, when they exist naturally, you think of them as easily available and assume they always will be. Later, they become real rarities, and before you know it, they're relics. You just have to see the silly things they sell at auction nowadays, simply because they're not made anymore and can't be found. There are collectors of picture cards from 40 years ago which fetch the most exorbitant prices, and the people who bid on them like mad things are usually the same ones who collected them as children and who, as young adults, threw them out or gave them away, who knows, perhaps after a long journey, after the albums have passed through many hands, they're buying back the ones they themselves once collected with such childish perseverance. It's a curse, the present, it allows us to see and appreciate almost nothing. Whoever decided that we should live in the present played a nasty trick on us. (p. 326)

These mediocrities who rule over us in such a totalitarian spirit and who have more or less been given carte blanche to do so by the Twin Towers massacre...it's insulting what these pusillanimous, authoritarian fools want to do and impose on us in the name of security, that prehistoric pretext. (p. 369)

James P. Cannon, "After the Maritime Strike"- Labor Action Feb 20, 1937

2008-09-22T11:43:00.000-05:00

A conflict between workers and employers is not merely a misunderstanding between two elements who have a common general interest. On the contrary, it springs from an irreconcilable conflict of interest. It is an expression of a ruthless class struggle wherein power alone decides the issue. Viewed in this light, a dispute between workers and employers cannot be settled fairly by the government. The government is an instrument of one of the parties to the dispute- in this case, the capitalists. The class conflict cannot be handed over to "the public" to decide. The public is itself divided into classes with different interests and different sympathies regulated primarily by these interests. The polemics of Karl Marx against the conservative labor leaders of his day answered all these questions. All the experience of the labor movement since that time, including the recent west coast strike, speaks for the position of Marx and against all conceptions which overlook the class struggle.

Julian Barnes, Arthur & George

2008-09-22T11:41:00.001-05:00

What does he [George] know? Does he finally know anything? What is the sum of knowledge he's acquired in his 54 years? Mostly, he has gone through his life learning and waiting to be told. The authority of others has always been important to him. Does he have any authority of his own? At 54, he thinks alot of things, he believes a few, but what can he really claim to know?

Walter Benjamin On Hashish

2008-09-22T11:38:00.000-05:00

Always the same world, and yet one has patience.

Boundless goodwill. Falling away of neurotic obsessive anxiety complexes. All those present take on the hues of the comic.

One is aware of how very long one's sentences are.

A feeling of understanding Poe much better now.

You follow the same paths as before only they are strewn with roses.

Hollis Frampton, 1984

2008-09-22T11:32:00.000-05:00

The mind is a labyrinth. Sometimes it's just one of those very dull labyrinths where the rat runs around one way and he gets an electric shock and the other way he gets a grain of corn; and then there are other days when it's a labyrinth that consists of a straight line....I have all the time the sense that there are perilous random seas that surround all our discourses. We really are on little rafts and maybe we make it to the Fiji Islands and maybe we don't. But in trying to bring back something of the quality of the journey, we have got to talk about more than the raft....If there is not in the tale something of the quality of the random seas as well, then you have essentially falsified it....you have, in the phrase of an old friend of mine, snipped off all the necktie ends to make it look as though the suitcase closed neatly. And...something I'm more interested in now (as I'm perhaps older or more confident or less reticent or something like that) is getting a sense of that into my work.

Sign at Legacy Village, "lifestyle mall" in Shaker Heights

2008-09-22T11:31:00.001-05:00

Attention: These Are Real Parking Meters

NSK at the Frye Museum, June 05

2008-09-22T11:29:00.000-05:00

A retrospective futuristic negative utopia.
More state than the state.
We believe in the future and we will look for it in the past, if necessary.

Laura Nyro's address in 1968

2008-09-22T11:28:00.000-05:00

145 W. 79th Street, 17th floor

A.O. Scott on Slavoj Zizek

2008-09-22T11:26:00.000-05:00

In the post-communist, late capitalist world, social control is exercised not by the repression of desires, but rather by their creation and partial fulfillment.

Dennis Healey, on core philosophy of the Labour Party

2008-09-22T11:25:00.000-05:00

To erode by inches the conditions that produce avoidable misery.

James Wechsler, The Age of Suspicion

2008-09-22T11:18:00.000-05:00

We were convinced that although we were living on the edge of catastrophe, we had been uniquely blessed with a knowledge of what was happening to us.