The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

Tag: William Blake

  • Rose, Where Did You Get That Hippo?

    Roses are not nearly as old as rocks. Rocks have their beauty too, but they don’t usually make good Valentine’s Day gifts. But roses do go way back, in botany and in poetry. We find roses in the ancient myths of Aphrodite and Venus. And by the late 18th century, when Robert Burns wrote “A Red, Red Rose,” the rose, used by medieval courtly love troubadours to express romance and devotion, was deeply rooted in poetry, and would soon be grafted by Victorian writers onto the secret language of floriography. But a big secret in the poem Burns wrote is that he never quite explains how his love is like a rose; in fact, he walks away from the rose into song and never gets back, but he does mention rocks in stanza three. 1

    O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,
    That’s newly sprung in June;
    O my Luve’s like the melodie
    That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

    Kenneth Koch’s “Rose, Where Did You Get That Red?: Teaching Great Poetry to Children” (1973) takes its title from a poem written by one of his elementary school students. The assignment was to take the question idea from Blake’s “The Tyger” and ask it of some other entity, “a mysterious and beautiful creature” (36), something that can’t answer back. Adults will learn something about poetry from Koch’s book too, if they work the exercises.

    Or your love might be like a crabapple, a wild, wild rose, one that wants pruning and dusting and its canes tied up. Koch’s student poet asked but one question of the rose, spending the rest of her five line poem on questions to a dog, a dragon, a kitten, and a bird, but we might never tire of asking questions of the rose, once we get going:

    Rose, where did you get that sepal?
    Rose, where did you get that prickle?
    Rose, where did you get that yellow?
    Rose, what have you done to your trellis?
    Rose, get back into your obelisk;
    Rose, what kind of trick is this?

    Blake recognized the vulnerability of the rose. His rose is crimson. The root of crimson contains some mystery: a red dye made from crushed insects, once mistaken for worms:

    The Sick Rose

    O Rose thou art sick. 
    The invisible worm, 
    That flies in the night 
    In the howling storm: 

    Has found out thy bed
    Of crimson joy:
    And his dark secret love
    Does thy life destroy.

    William Blake, 1794

    Blake’s poem is from his “Songs of Experience.” Anyone with experience growing roses might at some point have asked some of these questions:

    Rose, where did you get that feathery blackspot?
    Rose, did I pour you too much fish emulsion?
    Rose, oh, my, your grand floribunda!
    Rose, where did you get that Japanese beetle?
    Rose, where did you get that powdery mildew?
    Rose, oh, Rose, are you going to turn blue?

    Roses are favorites on Valentine’s Day, but Dorothy Parker said, don’t send for me a rose; send for me a limo:

     One Perfect Rose

    A single flow’r he sent me, since we met.
         All tenderly his messenger he chose;
    Deep-hearted, pure, with scented dew still wet—
         One perfect rose.

    I knew the language of the floweret;
         “My fragile leaves,” it said, “his heart enclose.”
    Love long has taken for his amulet
         One perfect rose.

    Why is it no one ever sent me yet
         One perfect limousine, do you suppose?
    Ah no, it’s always just my luck to get
         One perfect rose.

    Dorothy Parker, 1926

    No end to questions we have for roses, or poems:

    Rose, where did you get that big pot?
    Rose, how did you survive that long war?
    Rose, where did you get that spider mite?
    Rose, where did you get that whipped cane?
    Rose, where did you get that green aphid?
    Rose, where did you get that hippopotamus?

    ~~~

    1. The Red, Red Rose

      O my Luve’s like a red, red rose,
      That’s newly sprung in June;
      O my Luve’s like the melodie
      That’s sweetly play’d in tune.

      As fair are thou, my bonie lass,
      So deep in luve am I;
      And I will luve thee still, my Dear,
      Till a’ the seas gang dry.

      Till a’ the seas gang dry, my Dear,
      And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
      I will luve thee still, my dear,
      While the sands o’ life shall run.

      And fare thee weel, my only Luve!
      And fare thee weel, a while!
      And I will come again, my Luve,
      Tho’ it were ten thousand mile!

      Robert Burns, 1794
      ↩︎

  • The Red Wheelbarrow in Spring and All

    Human imagination is part of nature, turning light into food, like photosynthesis in plants. Imagination is a natural process that needs no teacher or school, theory or method. Thus poetry should not become a profession, nor should a poem profess anything, nor should poets become professors. Most formal education activity turns subjects into sports and competition. Imagination is not competitive.

    We might see that William Blake, in his “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell” (1790), explains the imagination as a natural means of protecting the human from an onslaught of reality:

    “1. Man has no Body distinct from his Soul. For that called Body is a portion of Soul discerned by the five senses, the chief inlets of Soul in this age.

    2. Energy is the only life, and is from the Body; and Reason is the bound or outward circumference of Energy.

    3. Energy is Eternal Delight.”

    William Carlos Williams associated the season of Spring with the imagination. It’s in his short book titled “Spring and All” that we find his now famous poem called “The Red Wheelbarrow.” But we’ve been reading that short piece sort of “à la carte,” or slightly out of context. It appears in “Spring and All” as a numbered poem in a series of poems interrupted in several places by Williams’s prose discussion about what he is doing and why in the way of poetry. There are a total of 27 poems in “Spring and All,” and “The Red Wheelbarrow” is number:

    XXII

    so much depends
    upon

    a red wheel
    barrow

    glazed with rain
    water

    beside the white
    chickens

    “The Red Wheelbarrow” appears in “Spring and All” on page 138 (Part II: pp 88:151) of my copy of Imaginations (New Directions Paperbook 329, 1971):

    pp. 138-139 from “Spring and All” (1923) in Imaginations (NDP329, 1971)

    Reading “The Red Wheelbarrow” in the context of “Spring and All” we begin to see how Williams invites the reader’s imagination to absorb the image. It is a well-lit poem. A painting is suggested, and the imagination creates the image (food) from the juxtapositions of color and light and things placed as if by hands (red, white, wheelbarrow, water, chickens, glaze), but will the chickens sit still? Probably not.

    Susan with Chicken (Susan is on the right) 1952

  • On No Progression

    The plough divides
    a worm multiplies
    where two + two
    equals five.

    To see a beach
    in a grain of sand,
    hold time in a glass
    filled clock.

    The privileged are due
    the poor overdrawn
    the middle class
    approves.

    The selfie shatters
    the looking glass
    the valleys are empty
    bathtubs slowly refilling.

    Politics is a rich ugly
    old man’s courting
    the priests and the
    prostitutes.

    Put out dearth stats
    in a year of death
    wear a mask
    and walk asunder.

    Walk in the morning
    nap at noon
    fast in the evening
    lap the night long moon.

    Culture cars cruise
    the city strips
    radios talk blaring
    the end of days.

    The wise avoid likes
    links and comments
    while fools post poems
    almost daily.

    The fool prepares
    to like a scholar
    a celebrity hires
    security.

    Devils eschew
    angels desire
    melting ice
    feeds the fires.

    Who teaches the tree
    to drink the child
    to nurse the old
    to appear free and easy.

  • A Modest Halloween Proposal

    A Modest Halloween Proposal

    It sometimes seems clear if there is an afterlife it does not interfere with present life. But what is present? The light from our sun is already a little over eight seconds old. We sunbathe in the past, confident in a present we never quite seem to fully inhabit (physics explains it’s perfectly possible to split infinitives). Where then do we go? Maybe time is a question of physics, maybe of metaphysics – the things that may come after the physics.

    The dead seem an extremely polite bunch. They do not intrude. Looking for them is like searching for aliens. We may feel their presence, approach them with the telescope of faith, but if they exist, somewhere-somehow, that life lies far far beyond the present five senses. To prove an afterlife, if we want to believe in ghosts and such, we must create a sense beyond our given five.

    William Blake noticed angels out and about. Rilke claimed to have seen one. What is it about poets that make them easy prey for such notions? Wouldn’t it be a bit frightful if the first aliens the astronomers discover turn out to be previous earthlings? The problem with communicating with the dead may simply be the length of time their message takes to reach us. By the time the first message from the first dead reaches Earth, we may all be gone. What would the message say? Trick or Treat?

    I take no issue with the dead. Nor am I looking forward to meeting any aliens. Let them keep their distance. My problem seems to be sugar: to wit, candy – the Halloween tradition (in these parts).

    This year, instead of passing out candy, I propose to hand out poems. Short poems printed on three by five cards, maybe with a cartoon or drawing on one side of the card. I’ll drop a poem card into every little critter’s Halloween basket. No candy. No sugar.

    But when I mentioned the idea to Susan, she said, “We’ll get our house egged for sure.”

    “You think? With the cost of dairy these days?”

    “And the parents will accuse you of poisoning their kids with poetry. Besides, Halloween cards are nothing new. And poetry, while sugar free, is still very high in carbs and calories, not to mention saturated and trans fats.”

    So much for my proposal. I guess we’re sticking with candy.

  • Ode to Joy

    Ode to Joy

    Old monk drunk walk garden
    olive way moon path nude
    blue light strain powder pouring
    bare feet stains red muscatel.

    On his rock sits Jesus eyes clear
    tell him of your life sans joy
    brave Brother Anhidonus oh
    fun monk too but without joy.

    Hung over herbs your Jesus praying
    not an only child was he
    resting for the weak of passion
    who find no joy in silent being

    feel no peace no happiness
    no light of joy no sound of joy
    for the ears no touch of joy no
    raised goosebumps on the skin

    no taste of joy sweet salty bitter
    no sour bites teeth the tongue
    no smell of joy stirs memories
    no prayer saturates the temperate.

    No joy found in going silent
    sing for your soup of certitude
    what has brought you not to
    here certainly cannot help now.

    “The cut worm forgives the plow”
    Blake sang now you at least may
    forgive yourself and drink to joy
    lost to joy abstained all these years.

    Walk out of this garden leave
    transcend all plants and animals
    there above where the angels sing
    awaits the turn of your perfect being.

  • On Boredom

    Today we gaze into the Abyss of Ennui. What is boredom?

    “Excess of sorrow laughs, excess of joy weeps”: In “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake understood the Abyss, and sought to correct our assumptions and expectations. “The busy bee has no time for sorrow,” Blake said. But commuting home through an hour of plodding, plowing traffic, loaded down with work we’ve taken home for the weekend, we feel not the lightness nor the fickle flightiness of the bee. “The cut worm forgives the plough,” Blake said. Maybe, come Saturday night and he just got paid.

    Some tasks seem intrinsically boring. But we often confuse boredom with irritation, frustration, or addiction. Is boredom addictive? We say we are bored with what we don’t want. Tasks too bureaucratically procedural or repetitive lend themselves to boredom, not to mention carpal tunnel syndrome. What we don’t want to do, we put off, some of us; others, we jump in and get it done, so we can get on to something we find more interesting, those things we are passionate about. The former are the procrastinators, we are told, the latter the achievers. Both, though, we suspect, are susceptible to boredom.

    We often gravitate voluntarily to intrinsically boring tasks. What could be more repetitive than typing out another post? Physically repetitive: mentally, spiritually, and emotionally, the blogger flies with the bees of the cosmos! Really? I should try blogging.

    When we open the laptop or cell phone, we are not met with the organic breath of the compostable paper page of the book or newspaper. Someone should invent an app for smells, so that when we open the laptop, we are met with roses or the must of an old book. Maude had a similar idea in the film “Harold and Maude.” Harold is a bored rich boy, until he meets and falls in love with Maude. The protagonist is age; Harold is young, and Maude is old. Still, love alleviates Harold’s boredom, and after Maude, and after Harold sends his old life in a makeshift hearse over a cliff, the banjo.

    We hear of solutions that would alleviate boredom, suggesting boredom is a heavy and dark load that might be lifted from the bearer. Boredom begins to resemble depression. And boredom blends easily with guilt, for in a world saturated with pain and suffering at one end and glitz and shazam at the other end, who dare the chutzpah to turn the cheek of boredom outward? Quit your bitching and get back to your widgets.

    Does Superman ever get bored? Batman, bored? Spiderman? The specialist, it would seem, would be the first to suffer from boredom.

    In “Only Disconnect: Two cheers for boredom” (New Yorker, 28 Oct 2013, 33-37), about the relationship between boredom and distraction, Evgeny Morozov maintains that “to recognize oneself as bored, one must know how to differentiate between moments – if only to see that they are essentially the same” (34). When we’re bored, we want to be distracted, to take our minds off the monotony. We look down the assembly line of our lives and see nothing but more of the same, the same terrain, and unless we’ve been able to sustain an endless summer of surfing, we start to crave a fifth season, and we understand the winter and every other season of our discontent. The ability to click off one app and on to another is ongoing, but the solution creates another problem – call it the William Blake challenge: Excess of distraction bores, and we crave more and more distraction.

    On Boredom
    “What are you doing?”
    “Nothing.”
    “I’m bored! Let’s do something!”
    “I am doing something.”
    “You just said you are not doing anything.”
    “I did not say I am not doing anything. I said I am doing nothing.”
    “Oh, wow! You’re not going on another John Cage binge, are you?”

    What is boredom? John Cage provided what we might call a working definition: “It is not irritating to be where one is. It is only irritating to think one would like to be somewhere else” (Silence, 1961, “Lecture on Nothing”).

    If the specialist is the least equipped to stave off boredom, the artist is the best equipped. Because artists are generalists, they are able to turn their attention in different directions, outward or inward (whether at will or forced change does not matter) without the quality of disinterest or distraction. A true artist cannot know boredom in the act of art. Artists don’t require passion; passion is for amateurs. This is true for the painter or poet, gardener or dancer, musician or chef, surfer or clown, sailor or walker, potter or plumber.

    Got boredom? Get art. At the bottom of the Abyss sits art, doing nothing.

  • Notes on the Difficulty of Reading a New Poem

    Poem WalkingWhat happens when we encounter a new poem? New poems can seem impenetrable. But maybe the idea is not to penetrate. If the poem is new, the reading experience is also new, unfamiliar, foreign to our eyes and ears, to our sensibilities. What happens when we read a poem?

    In the darkroom, the developer slides the photographic paper into the chemical bath. Slowly, an image emerges. Reading a new poem is a similar process in as much as the full picture does not immediately reveal itself. But that’s as far as that analogy might go. A poem is not a photograph.

    The poem as montage, as mosaic, the narrative line pieced together stitch by stitch. Begin anywhere.

    Poems are made with words, usually, and words have two basic kinds of meaning, denotative and connotative. With regard to connotative meaning, words suggest, have associative meanings, colloquial twists, and personal meanings. We have our favorite words, and words we find distasteful. “Are you going to eat those adverbs?” “No. I got sick on an adverb once, in grammar school.” Cultural, contextual meanings. We can’t control language.

    When encountering a new poem, we ask the traditional questions: who is speaking, with what voice, and what is the intended audience, remembering not to confuse the speaker with the author, the audience for ourselves. What’s the speaker doing, talking about? What the diction, what the tone, what the setting, what the irony?

    Here’s the poem under question: “Foxxcan Suicide (Stylish Boys in the Riot),” by Russell Bennetts (the editor of Berfrois). We look for help. Suicide we know. Painless, as the song says, though we doubt that, and that song is not about suicide. A soldier’s choices are limited. Are a reader’s choices similarly limited? Does “Foxxcan” suggest Foxconn, the so-called Foxconn suicides?

    I recognize Starnbergersee, from T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, but is a single word enough to create an association? Why not? Eliot’s poem is fragmentary. “Foxxcan Suicide” is fragmentary, or so it seems. What if picking up on an Eliot reference is wrong? We could ask the author. No. What can the author know of the reader’s experience? Words are out of control once they hit the paper. The poem is a reading experience. And something more than Starnbergersee reminds me of Eliot: the many references, obscure to this reader, though I know who Axl Rose is, sort of, but I can’t say I know him, though he’s from my home town, big town. And the Roses had a label: UZI Suicide. So? Threads, though, links. And I know who Legacy Russell is, though not well enough to get the three asterisks at the end of that line, asterisks that point to no footnote.

    Still, I like the new poem. I like the fragmented narrative. I like it for its changes in diction and speech, its orality, its lyrical last stanza, or paragraph, the socio-economic comment it ends on. I like the almost hidden poetic characteristics, the rhyme, for example, of “Legacy,” “easy,” and “please me.” Gradually, more of the picture seems to emerge: the teen spirit (Nirvana). Maybe it’s language that has become suicidal. The poem casts this reader as a kind of outsider, beyond the pale. Maybe I just don’t get it. “Well, how does it feel?”

    Some time ago, in a workshop with David Biespiel, we used a kind of shorthand response technique as a way of quickly getting at new reading experiences. David called the technique, “What I See.” You had to tell it, what you saw, in 25 words or less, or so. Kenneth Koch taught a similar kind of technique, an attempt to get at the poem’s “idea.” What’s the idea, Koch asks, of Blake’s poem “The Tyger”? The speaker is asking questions of the wild animal, but of course the Tyger does not respond. The questions the speaker asks seem to have something to do with who made the Tyger, the maker’s character. Blake uses images of a blacksmith to try to picture the Tyger’s maker. For Blake, the blacksmith would still have been a powerful and practical individual, a maker of things useful, but his work was being subsumed at the same time by larger manufacturing forces that would come to be known as the Industrial Revolution. And that revolution would give way to more: “Stylish Boys in the Riot.”

    What happens when we read a poem? From the Paris Review Interviews, this one with August Kleinzahler:

    INTERVIEWER: Recently Poetry posed a question about the social utility of poetry. Does that interest you?
    KLEINZAHLER: No. I agree with Auden that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Nothing else needs to be said about it.

  • p-1: The Evil Hill on Mariposa

    n+1 vs The BelieverIf print does disappear, I will be only partially responsible. I’m doing my part to keep a few print publications healthy. But I can’t subscribe to everything. The question is always the same: what to read and how. A loyal subscriber to The Believer, alas, my subscription has lapsed, and just prior to the 2013 music issue, which turned out to be jazz inspired. Bummer.

    I’ve been comparing the cover changes over time of the New Yorker with the cover changes of the Rolling Stone. “Time is real,” Cornel West reminds us. But a few weeks ago, finding myself reading, with interest, no less, in the New Yorker, a “Tables for Two” eatery review of a restaurant I’ll never eat at, I decided I’d better augment the New Yorker and replace The Believer with something new. Meantime, I had discovered Kirill Medvedev, and noticed that n+1, which I follow, sporadically, on-line, was giving away the Medvedev “It’s No Good” book with a new subscription, so I went for it. And last week, the Fall 2013 n+1 print issue arrived, red dressed, calling itself the Evil Issue. Evil? Really? I felt the proverbial wince of buyer’s remorse.

    I sat down and opened my n+1. I glanced guardedly through the table of contents, not one for haunted houses, horror films, that sort of thing. Something here by Marco Roth on politics, on drones – ok, that’s evil. A drama piece titled “sixsixsix.” Why do folks think Satan evil? Consider Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell”: “The reason Milton wrote in fetters when he wrote of Angels and God, and at Uberty [a lot] when of Devils and Hell, is because he was a true poet, and of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” Still perusing the evil issue’s table of contents and glancing through the articles to see what I might want to start with, I came to something from the Stanford Literary Lab, titled “Style at the Scale of the Sentence.” I haven’t finished it yet, but I’ve decided it’s at the heart of the evil issue for a reason. Then I saw this, which took me by surprise: Alice Gregory’s article titled “Mavericks: Life and death surfing,” and soon found myself into the evil issue in earnest.

    If the entire evil issue was instead titled “Mavericks” and filled with Alice’s writing about surfing I would be a happy reader. The only problem with the article is it’s only ten pages, which means back to the Literary Lab’s “Sentence” article too soon. Maybe I should have renewed The Believer, after all, seen if they’d send me the music issue I missed. On jazz! Jazz in the evening can turn an evil day good. Wondering about the etymology of the word evil, I found this in Wiktionary: “from Proto-Indo-European *upo, *up, *eup (“down, up, over”).” Ah ha! That’s a definition of surfing. One of the best pieces of journalistic writing on surfing I’ve ever read came in the New Yorker, back in 1992, written by William Finnegan, himself a surfer. “Surfing is not a spectator sport,” he says in the second of the two-week, long article. In the first week, Finnegan had said, describing the surf at Ocean Beach, off San Francisco, “The waves were big, ragged, relentless, with no visible channels for getting through the surf from the shore.” Conditions in the water, often fast changing, are difficult to read from the shore. Waves always seem bigger to the surfer in them than to the spectator watching from the beach or from a cliff high above the water. I read the long Finnegan piece twice before mailing my two copies with the articles to an old surfing buddy, not much of a reader, who later called me, totally stoked.

    Preparatory to surfing, back in the day, hey-hey, kids growing up in South Santa Monica Bay rode skateboards: literally, the wheels removed from old roller skates and nailed to the bottom of a two by four, crude vehicles compared to today’s boards. I lived on Mariposa, at the bottom of a long, steep hill, followed by a short straightaway, then an easy hill ending at my house on the corner. The houses on Mariposa backed up to railroad tracks (since removed). Between the railroad tracks and the back fences was a path the local kids called “Devil’s Path” or “Devil’s Pass,” a shortcut toward downtown. We regularly rode skateboards up and down the mild Mariposa hill, but to ride a board from the top of Mariposa was considered a daredevil feat.

    One day, my friend Pete Ponopsko, a few years older than me, took a skateboard to the top of upper Mariposa. He was going to ride down the big hill and would pick up enough momentum to carry him through the straightaway and down the lower hill all the way to the bottom. A small crowd of skateboard aficionados positioned themselves mid straightaway, where we could watch Pete whiz by on his way to the lower hill.

    One of the problems with early skateboard technology was shakiness. At fast speeds, the boards wobbled side to side. Another problem had to do with the metal, roller skate wheels. A pebble might catch under a wheel and brake it, stopping the board and throwing the rider forward. We never knew for sure what went wrong with Pete’s ride down the upper hill. Some said the board shimmied so severely he simply could not keep his balance. Others said he hit a rock and pearled. Still others said Pete chickened out and tried to jump off. Whatever the cause, the effects included a startling array of raspberry red scrapes and bruises along one side of Pete’s body, from his ankle to his ear. It was said Pete slid on the sidewalk a distance equal to the length of a 1956 Ford station wagon. It was an evil wipe out, and it was a long time before anyone tried to ride upper Mariposa again, but by then skateboards were wider and thinner and longer and fitted with smooth rubber wheels and stable wheel bearings, and Pete was already an old-timer.

    Joe at the top of an evil wave. Well, an evil photo, anyway.
    Joe at the top of an evil wave. Well, an evil photo, anyway.

    Follow Up: n+1 has put the Alice Gregory Mavericks piece on-line, 9 Oct 13.

  • Where the Palace of Wisdom is Loaded with Vice

    John Lancaster’s review of The Road of Excess, Marcus Boon’s book on writing under the influence, appeared in the January 6, 2003 New Yorker, and the review provides an effective, short introduction into drug use in writing as well as the journalistic impulse to too easily categorize, stereotype, and generalize. Associating addictions with occupations simply creates a stereotype. It’s probably true to say that alcoholism travels promiscuously in sales, but this doesn’t mean that alcohol is notably absent from other occupations, nor that all who work in sales are alcoholics, so what does the adage gain us in understanding either addiction or sales? Addictions transcend occupations; we find them everywhere. We may be living in the Age of Drugs, since we also live in the Age of Anxiety. Lancaster points out that most of the drugs we associate with addictions are late 19th or 20th century inventions. But while drugs addict, not all addictions are to drugs. Boon’s title comes from William Blake’s “The Proverbs of Hell,” found in Blake’s long poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. The complete line is “The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom.” But Blake wasn’t talking about drugs. He was talking about contraries. When Salvador Dali was asked if he painted while on drugs, as if that might explain surrealism, he responded, no; and asked in reply, “Why should I take the drug; I am the drug.”

    Lancaster attempts to level the hyperbole, claiming that beyond the classic cases frequently referenced, attempts to associate drugs with writing usually miss the train we’re actually on. Then, he adds a final paragraph, which unfortunately drags jazz and drugs into his discussion, to support his anti-climactic claim that drug use has, after all, influenced the arts, particularly popular music. “The story of dope-fiend writers is interesting, but the history of dope-fiend jazz musicians is the history of jazz,” Lancaster says. Dope is not the history of jazz, any more than alcohol is the history of any occupation. Drugs have seeped into all socio-economic demographics of our society. Should we say that steroid use is the history of baseball? In the end, the average writer is no different from the average carpenter, who rises early and starts pounding nails, not beers, while the writer is pounding keys. Of interest with regard to Lancaster’s review are the letters found in the January 27 New Yorker “Mail,” Sue Mingus emphatically insisting that her husband, the famous jazz bassist Charles Mingus, listed by Lancaster as an addict, “was not a heroin addict,” and she eloquently argues that Lancaster “perpetuates myths and clichés and reveals little of the nature of creativity.” Another reader wrote to deflate Lancaster’s reference that listening to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue approximates the heroin experience. The reader claimed that the Kind of Blue album came after Miles’s addictions, seemingly a question of fact; but, in any case, the year we saw Mark McQuire and Jose Canseco hit back to back homers in the King Dome – did that approximate for the fan what it’s like to be on steroids?

    As pervasive then as drug use, are the associations we make about its use, and so we were not surprised to hear JazzWax weighing in on jazz and popular music drug use in yesterday’s Sunday Wax Bits. Keith Richards’s recent memoir, Life, provides a fresh example of the JazzWax point that popular music’s business plan has always promoted the glamorization of drugs. But Lancaster also pointed out that writing that is about drugs is usually best when it doesn’t take itself too seriously, and is wrapped in humor. We’re not sure we can take Richards’s entire memoir seriously, for it’s a memoir meant to sell a life, and if the story of popular music is about something other than popular music, it’s about an addiction not to drugs, but to money, which reveals itself in exploitation and adulteration, a watering down of goods and needs to wants and consumptions.

  • When Reading Was Everything

    Alfred Kazin’s Writing Was Everything is about 20th century US reading. The book could have been titled Reading Was Everything. It’s the text of Kazin’s 1994 Massey Lectures in the History of American Civilization at Harvard. There are four sections, a short prologue, “All Critics Are Mortal,” and three chapters: “Before the War,” “During the War,” and “After the War.” The War is WW II. But it seems we’re always somewhere in this context, before a war, during a war, or after a war. For my generation the during chapter would be Vietnam, and while there have been more recent wars, many of us still seem stuck in the after of that one. Kazin doesn’t even mention Vietnam; for him there was only one war. This doesn’t matter; for all wars are the same, and we are all always before, during, and after one.

    Kazin places all relevant writing in a cultural context of social and political forces; the greatest forces for his generation were socialism and totalitarianism. The was in the title is informing; it establishes the value of literature as remembering. Writing is looking back, going home again. Kazin began his writing career during the depression as an independent book reviewer, and he became a professional critic, but Writing Was Everything opens and closes on the critical note that literary criticism is not literature. For it’s literature that was everything, and Kazin deplores today’s “ideologues [who] ignore the imponderables of existence that are still with us after all the work of science, technology, analytic philosophy, psychology, deconstruction, or linguistics, after all the political, racial, and sexual debate so hot in the academy.” For Kazin, literature is the “value we can give to our experience.” Thus he deplores that today’s “academy is so preoccupied with status that it can proclaim literature to be only a branch of criticism, just another ‘discourse’.”

    After the war, Kazin discovers Milosz, who invokes Blake’s Ulro: “What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song? / Or wisdom for a dance in the street? / No, it is bought with the price / Of all that a man hath: his house, his wife, his children.” I thought, “this is Job,” and a few pages later we do find Job: “Poetry to him [Milosz] is profoundly a recall, not a mere presentation of lived experience. It resembles what he calls ‘the cries of Job,’ not our endless defenses and explorations of the ego.” When everyone is down, as in the case of Job, when everyone is on trial, as in the case of Kafka, when everyone is hungry, beat, and destitute, as in the case of Simone Weil, an important voice for both Milosz and Kazin, “…when an entire community is stricken…poetry [becomes] as essential as bread.” Milosz claimed not to understand the spirit that prompted his poetry, and therefore, in his own teaching, he “limited [himself] to the history of literature, trying to avoid poetics.” Kazin, in Writing Was Everything, does essentially just that, sticks to the history of the writing, believing that “what gets us closer to a work of art is not instruction but another work of art.” Each writer Kazin introduces is introduced by another writer, until the reader has met them all, albeit briefly (the book is only 152 pages), and understands that their writing is a dialog. There are writers missing from Kazin’s discussion (Beckett, for example, for whom writing really was everything, but Kazin may have had difficulty figuring out what to do with Beckett’s seeming absence of cultural or political context), but I was happily surprised at the space given Flannery O’Connor and Simon Weil, who are among the many writers Kazin talks about that he knew personally.

    Writing Was Everything is one of the books I picked up at the Multnomah County Library book sale a month or so ago, in perfect shape, hard back with dust jacket intact, for $1. I’m slowly working my way through the pile of books I picked up at the sale.

  • Where Listening Gives Rise to Silence and Fizzles

    There lived in our neighborhood some time ago a locally famous pianist who enjoyed great demand for piano lessons from parents for their children. The demand was such that a prospective student had to interview with the teacher. One of the interview “questions” involved listening to chords: the child identified a chord as “happy” or “sad.” Children unable to pass this interview question eliminated themselves from consideration. It’s been some time since I’ve talked to the pianist, but I’ve wondered from time to time what emotion a Bm7b5 (B minor 7 flat 5) might equate to, or an Eb7b9 (E flat 7 flat 9, as an inside chord, without the 5th, on the guitar).

    How one distinguishes sounds, as in the experiment discussed over at Language Log, might explain musical preferences. Listeners who prefer a country western song, such as Hank Williams’s “I’m So Lonesome I Could Cry” (and its many covers), over a short piece by John Cage, might not hear sounds the same way the Cage fan distinguishes sounds, for “A fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees” (Blake, “Proverbs of Hell”) – as both Williams and Cage would probably agree.

    The Language Log listening experiment might also explain reading preferences, why some readers, for example, prefer Charles Dickens to Samuel Beckett (Dickens writes in minor keys, invoking pathos and bathos and every other kind of oath, Beckett in jovial major modes with flurries of flats falling like ash in downward spiraling scales).

    Emergence might be at work here, too (the entire piece can’t be predicted by any one of its chords), or simply that our ears sometimes grow tired or lazy, as do our tongues and our eyes. This is what Cage explored in Silence, and what Beckett meant by Fizzles.