The furies fly in from the desert, weave like wasps from their cool eve nests, disturbed and attracted by bile, envy, and insolence. One lands in the ear canal: “Erinyes, erinyes,” echoes from one side of the head to the other. She stirs the wax and lays her eggs. It’s a cuckoo wasp, emerald and gold. She’s got hold of your thoughts her young will eat away, furious and urbane.
Tag: Writing
-
Where to Write
We often wax wasted writing what to write, how to write, why write at all. A refreshing sidebar might discuss where to write. We could compose while walking, a kind of no place to write, or allplace, which Wallace Stevens did, composing lines, poems, in his head as he walked from his rather palatial home through local paths through the park to his desk at the Hartford in New Haven where he transfigured from poet Wallace Stevens to Wally, Claims Manager. He wouldn’t forget his words from his morning walk commute. Hemingway said he could write anywhere, though maybe we are not as good writing in some places as others. In Cuba, Papa wrote standing up at a typewriter placed atop a casement or podium. During the war, Jacques Prévert wrote at sidewalk cafe tables in Paris, the leaves falling, one imagines, weather also being a kind of place, or, as Hemingway points out, place being a kind of weather. In any case, we sit down now to write this post in new writing digs. We have three choices of where to write in our current quarantined predicament, apart from the ubiquitous pocket notebook which with pen goes everywhere, for unlike Wally, we are poor at remembering our words, and must write them down or they disappear like birds out of the corner of the eye: the basement, the main floor, the upstairs. Since we write using an electric, we need to be near an outlet, and since the basement in winter is often damp, our choices where to plug-in quickly diminish to two. The living room is comfortable, with couch, no television, much light from windows, with a limited view of the sidewalk and street through the twisted branches of a giant rhododendron Cynthia. The kitchen is nearby, coffee refills within easy reach, and Susan will not have come down yet, and we sometimes gas up imagining what she might be dreaming, fuel for priming the writing carburetor. But we’ve moved to the upstairs back bedroom, now sitting at an old oak desk, three drawers on the right, a wide thin drawer across the sitting space, a pull out board on which in the old days someone might have set a manual typewriter. This desk is quite heavy, solid panelled sides and front, such that it must have been intended to sit in an open space, not against a wall, and it’s difficult to move around. It creaks complaints in various seams when jostled, and probably won’t withstand any more moves down the stairs. We’ve had it, at one time and another, in the basement and in different rooms on the main floor and upstairs. It presently sits at an angle off center toward the middle of the room, affording a view out a wide window facing east-northeast, over roofs and growing trees in the foreground, buildings nestled in trees and streets, lit at night, and, farther out, the opening of the Gorge, the Washington hills tapering down from the north, the Oregon Cascades steeping sharply down from the south. In the distant sky, airplanes can be seen coming in for landings at PDX. Down in the yards, closer in, birds are seen fittering, frittering, flittering, fluttering about: crows in the tops of the firs, flickers and jays lower down, hummingbirds, all sorts of bushtits and the like, flocks of them. The occasional racoon or possum at dawn or dusk, coming or going, though one must get up from the desk and go to the window to see those. This view is a distraction. This is not a good place to write. Back to the living room. One can’t get any writing done upstairs with a such a view that all one wants to do is to go out and fitter with the birds, not sit in and write.
-
Nothing but the Oldies
“nothing but the music” (2020, Blank Forms Editions, Brooklyn) is a kind of compilation, a box set, of pieces composed by Thulani Davis over the years 1974 to 1992, lines written while listening to live music or reflecting on the experience of an avant garde art form as it’s happening, and before it might be neutered by mainstream commercialization too influenced by those with control of the means of production. Most of the Davis pieces appeared in poetic form in alternative press issues over the years and some were set to music. The scores are informed, and may be read with reference to, performance and theatre, jazz and punk, R&B, and mixed forms or art form synesthesia, the courage and risks found in the places music is born, but the rewards too of achievement, however much that success may appear to some as failure. The music’s codification (its reliability, approvals, its aesthetic argument) might be seen in the cost for a ticket to get in: $20 – for a 63 page paperback, made possible in part by support from the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts.
Is the music now artifact? The oral argument, written or recorded, becomes a document. What the music feels like, in words, what it stands for, and stands against. The importance of the work, these pieces, these entries, is found in the subtitle: “Documentaries from nightclubs, dance halls & a tailor’s shop in Dakar.” Or, in the words of the book’s epigraph:
“to the artists
& dharma guides
who coax us
minute by minute
from retold pasts
& possible futures
ever
to the present
moment”Each piece is sourced at its end with a date and location and often the names of the musicians. For example: “1982, CBGB, New York”; “April 27, 1977, The Rogue & Jar, Washington, DC. The players: David Murray, Hamiet Bluiett, Charles “Bobo” Shaw, Fred Hopkins. The poet: Ntozake Shange”; “April 15, 1975. Five Spot, New York. The Cecil Taylor Unit: Cecil Taylor, Jimmy Lyons, Andrew Cyrille.” That last piece just cited, “C. T. At The Five Spot,” begins:
“this is not about romance & dream
it’s about a terrible command performance of the facts
of time & space & air”…and moves on:
“ripple stamp & beat/ripple peddlin’
stomps taps of feet slick poundin’ out
tonal distinctions between/keys & sticks”…and ends:
“I have heard this music
(22-23)
ever since I can remember/I have heard this music”If music is a cultural argument, an aesthetic fight, it must come complete with a thesis statement about which some will disagree, backed with claims with examples, illustrations, supported with evidence and sources. It’s not enough to dress the part and go punk for an evening; one must want to be hardcore punk, and harder still. The wall does not give way so easily. It’s not enough to listen to the radio or buy the recording; one must enter the mosh pit. Who can survive it?
“the punks jumped on the stage
and dove into their friends
let their chains beat their thighs
the crowd thought death
in two-minute intervals
heavy metal duos and creaming murderthe band of twelve year-old rockers
from “Bad Brains: A Band”: 1982, CBGB, New York
wished they could do it
come like that on the refuse
of somebody else’s youth”We find, in “nothing but the music,” in addition to the music itself, criticism, analysis, reaction, conclusions, as well as questions for further research. What happens when the avant garde becomes tradition?
“Not just history not just Trane
from “T-Monius”: February 17, 1982, 122nd Street, New York (50-51).
No not what we heard about
What we heard
Just what we hear
It always being night
We’ll still be there
Dancing the dissonant logic
The loneness
Just playing music
He speaking to himself
Really paying us no rabbitass mind
Digging what himself was doing
T-monius and ‘al-reet’”In a life of disenfranchisement, art may be the only place to find certain freedoms: of expression and voice, enjoyment and creativity, play and work coming together in a spirit of desire and interests, not of servitude or boredom, and where one may object to a status quo in a statement with examples of new possibilities. And beauty, where beauty may come to rest, looking tired and worn out, where she can mix with the crowd and feel at home and dig the music. And truth hangs out in the rhythm section. Some hep young cat might ask, “What was it like?” And the answer is important, how we answer, what we say, what we hold back. We are old now, and passing, older than we ever imagined. You can’t breakdance at 70 like you could at 17, Cornel West said in his ten minute section of Astra Taylor’s Examined Life: “Time is real.” Yes, and you can find it in the music:
“giving a spring to the dance
X-75-Vol. 1, Henry Threadgill “Side B (Air Song/Fe Fi Fo Fum)” (31-32).
of who we are/unexpected beauty
beauty we have known ourselves to be
like reaching old age & infancy in a breath
of this is the music
knowing we can’t be us
& be afraid of who we are”
-
“The Morning” & “Just Write Anything!”
Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini, translated by Jessica Sequeria, just out from Sublunary Editions (Seattle), measures a mere 80 pages (4 and ½” by 7” by ¼”) and contains the pieces “The Morning” and “Just Write Anything!” and also an introduction (by Cesar Aira, translated by Adrian Nathan West), an acknowledgements page, a 4 page translator’s note, and 62 endnotes (in a font size so small this reader’s used eyes required over-the-counter reading glasses of +3.50 strength), almost as long as either story – indeed, a third story – as well as a Parental Advisory warning label (suitable for bookmark use), modified to read:
P A R E N T A L
A D V I S O R Y
OSVALDO LAMBORGHINIOne is tempted to form a review as response in a supposed style of the stories:
In the beginning was the word. And the ice dam(n) broke, the word escaped, and all hell broke loose, as in a Blow-up. A devil’s drool (“Las Babas del Diablo,” Cortazar). It was all done on a typewriter. That tin bell kept us awake. Its tintinnabulations. And he had to send his only son, or daughter, as the case may arise, to supply some endnotes, but he didn’t explain to what end. And the notes musical, in a sense, pleasant. One confessed to eating the plums. Bless me Father, for I have eaten the plums. They were purple. And the season Lent. We had given up meaning for the season, without reason. And the church filled with words, every pew stuffed end to end. And every word related. In each word all the genetic material of the language, of all the languages, of the uttered universe. Prokaryotic flagellum. To allow word movement. The words stood, knelt, sat, stood, and filed out, one by one, pew after pew, line after line. Some disappeared. Through the blank pages of the cosmos, along the gaucho trails along the green rivers in the gorged valleys below the ghastly ghostly mountains, seeping through the pampas and the full drainage basins, out to sea. The sea, the sea! Wordomics. This is my body, a comics: “To ourselves … new paganism … omphalos” (Joyce, Ulysses).
Of the two stories, “The Morning” and “Just Write Anything!,” the latter is perhaps the more accessible, comprehendible if not understandable, than the former, but the first, “The Morning,” one might find more enjoyable. The two stories might have been written for two different audiences (although Aira’s introduction suggests Lamborghini didn’t write to any particular audience), but neither seems within the purview of the common reader. But what is within the purview of the common reader? Slogans? Well, slogans are comprehendible, but rarely understood. They become like magic words, spells. In the US today, MAGA might serve as an example; an argument of proposal in no need of backing, it is not an argument at all, but an order, a command. Authoritarian. Enter, sex, and why we need a parental advisory. Sex, like politics, manipulative, special interest, you scratch my back I’ll scratch yours. For the working class, sex is one thing, for the middle class, something else. The middle class wants relief from guilt, a guilt the working class does not feel. The middle class wants to enjoy, to experience pleasure, guilty it has benefits others don’t, but not enough that it can’t also enjoy envy of those who have more. Thus the middle class craves perfumes and brands, must have fantasy and escape, ritual that includes punishments and rewards. The working class has not time nor appetite for values which can’t readily be seen, measured, felt. As for Peronism and whether or not readers need a background in Argentine history to appreciate Lamborghini, Peronism might not be substantially different from any other ism around the world seeking to exploit one class by numbing another class for the enrichment of a third class, except that Peron started out wanting to make all of the people happy all of the time. But of course there are always those who don’t want to be happy, or don’t care to be made happy. Politics is sex without love.
In other words, for the working class, the word innuendo means exactly what it sounds like, while for the middle class, it can only suggest what cannot in what is sometimes called polite society (on the endangered species list) be directly talked about, and must be submersed in ambiguity, doubt, and mistrust. Enter Peron, that is to say, to wit, an imputation that what is valued most in each class can somehow be conjoined, but the ballroom can’t hold everyone.
Click here, on the belly button, where you were tied to your mother, treading water in the salt marsh. You were still nullifidian then. All gills and fins. Your mother’s voice coming muffled through the cloudy water. And then your cry, and then your sucking, and then your sleep, and then the tin bell, and the rhythm rolling. The next time you awake, you are swaddled in the bottom of a dory, your father at the oars, your mother tending a fishing line, all against a muddy current in coastal waters.
Lamborghini’s writing is probably not egalitarian, not as evidenced by these two stories or the three poems appearing in Firmament No. 1 (Sublunary Editions, Winter 2021), not that it needs to be, yet it contains all the characteristics readers generally value. Humor surrounded by horror. The sweets and sours and bitters and salts of life. It is a writing of associative addition, one image conjuring up or giving way to another, the narrative like a bus ride, the bus stopping at the end of every sentence to let someone off and to take on another rider. Though these riders are not necessarily characters – they may be ideas, or props. Repetition is therefore valued, and memory encouraged. So that at the end of “The Morning,” if asked what it is about, we can say it is about a character savaged. But the common reader wants her back scratched, not whipped.
The form (forms) of these two short stories appears very different in each, the one on the open sea, the other back and forth where the rivers spread in the tidal marsh. Jessica Sequeira’s “endnotes” are indispensable, and actually a pleasure. For one thing, it’s comforting as a reader to know you’re in the same boat as other readers, translators, critics. That is to say, the difficulty is not yours alone, not yours at all. You are now able to read. And while the endnotes clarify, elucidate, inform, they also project, surmise, guess.
Sublunary Editions is an independent press out of Seattle. You can find a copy of Two Stories by Osvaldo Lamborghini here.
-
Comma and Anti-comma
Is the comma in danger of extinction? Here at the The Coming of the Toads commas have fallen out of favor as we have begun to eschew the common comma, not all commas, and the comma in writing (where else is it used?) still remains an effective tool for the common reader, but sometimes the right word in the right place creates its own pause and nothing more is needed by way of punctuation, for the common reader or the anti-reader. Of course commas are used for more than to create pause. The comma used to separate items in a series, red white and blue, for example, often punctuated as red, white, and blue, keeps the colors from running together. The comma evolved from the colon and suggested something cut out but today the comma is used to add on, to amplify, to continue, to ramble on, sometimes unmercifully, the end nowhere near, the sentence a structure of lean-tos, each clause flipping about like a butterfly which may look to the common reader indecisive. Then there is the comma butterfly, also called angelwing, and what writer would want to eliminate angel wings from their writing, not us. Whoops, that’s anglewing, not angel wing, a mistake no comma can rescue. Still, the happy discovery that commas may suggest angel wings gives us a lift.
-
Rain
As said of politics, all rain is local, parochial. It may seem frivolous to a parish under water that in a neighboring bureau filled with sun denizens are dressed in shorts and sleeveless shirts drinking dizzy fizzy wine coolers in the town square park sitting in beach chairs on the warm dry grass listening to a gypsy jazz band play La Mer, while next door, where rain falls, Leonard Cohen indoors on a turntable sings, “All the rain falls down amen, on the works of last year’s man.” Yet in rain country umbrellas are not as ubiquitous as one might expect, nor are they absent in the sunny clime. The rain falls through hair, straightening the curl, seeps through flannel and wool, fills the shoes and soaks the socks, wrinkles the skin. The rain bounces off the asphalt street, runs down the gutters carrying along leaves summer and fall debris: a dirty tennis ball, a burnt out sparkler, a used up crumpled face mask. The rain overflows the curb down at the corner and a car spins by splashing a muddy wave across the sidewalk. A city bus sploshes around the corner, windows fogged, the driver and riders masked and anonymous. There are no cats to be seen out and about, a few dogs hunkered up on their porches. A woman with no umbrella scurrying shoulders hunched head down misses her bus and takes shelter under the awning in the doorway of a closed cafe, pulls out her phone and votes for sun, but the polls are closed for the winter.
-
Clocked
The clock is the most totalitarian of instruments, brutal and tortuous in its omnipresent place, its tick, tick, tick neither musical nor metrical, its singular forever forward motion that can only be circular not once portraying the true feeling of time, which can only be experienced in a still state. The watch, the clock’s child, suggests a semblance of private ownership, but it must be set to the public heartbeat. Only in a trap can time be kept. The clock is a syllabus for a curriculum of time in which two horses run a race clip-clopping in opposite directions.
-
Befogged
Not Alfred Prufrock’s fog, the little yellow neighborhood cat come smelling, touching, and arching once, wags, then slinks furtively off and licks herself to sleep, the house warm and safe in her arms. But the fog that falls from a hairball night, wet and thick, as sleazy as the backuped drains running up the gutters down on skidrow. A light that illuminates nothing. And the only sound one hears is the tinkle of a bell like the carriage return signal on a fin de siè·cle typewriter, the kind T. S. Eliot might have used.
-
The Anglers
They line the streets, sitting out at sidewalk cafes, watching the passersby, angling for what they might catch. Patiently they wait, nursing a coffee through a first frost morning, almost napping off over a warm afternoon beer, coming back in the evening for a smooth glass of purple pinot noir or a shot of postprandial espresso. The burbling, gurgling, murmuring river of cars drifts along, punctuated by busses and trucks, bicycles, pedestrians crossing, a cop on a Harley, a delivery truck snagged on a rock, three buskers in an open boat. The anglers move along too, changing spots, carrying their birdcages of verbs, baskets of nouns, hooks and swivels and spinners tucked in their tackle box notebooks. And I move upriver, looking for a new hole, so hungry I will not catch and release a cliche, but will pick out its bones and pan-fry the fillet in butterfat in a cast iron skillet.
-
Settings
Settings is everything. If you don’t get your settings under control you risk exposure to a crowd of marketeers and advertisers, scammers and schemers, grammarians and auditors, spelling and lingo specialists, APA and MLA experts and all sorts of self-appointed stylists, and there you are, slipping down swell after swell of pop ups as you fall into the troughs between paragraphs, your settings in disarray. Not that marketing or advertising are intrinsically bad or wrong. But you can’t just sit there. You must ensure fork and spoon and knife and teacup are correctly situated, properly placed, not to move them, mind you, but to observe their movement around the table. Just kidding, that – don’t know anybody frets over those settings anymore, but in writing, there seems to remain a force, a sitting army ready to be activated to a sentence disaster (run-on or fragment), a paragraph catastrophe (its topic sentence decapitated), a thesis statement emergency (no one in disagreement). Fonts and points are important though, for the setting of the hens relies on easily reached clucks and clicks and the broody trance setting in. Yet, if you want to be set completely free, the thing to do is disable, disarm, disengage, dissemble, disassemble. The problem we have been set is to first find settings and to then calibrate and if no pop ups appear, to celebrate. I don’t know what set me to thinking about settings, just sitting here, wondering if it’s worth getting into or not, the topic, floating on the open sea of writing, settings uncleated, set loose with pen and paper as with oar and boat, where propriety is indeed a kind of table setting so that the tea party does not go mad, rarely though all that useful navigating an open sea, a blank sheet, subject to the predicates of clockmaking winds.
-
Of Friendship
“Those friends thou hast, and their adoption tried, Grapple them to thy soul with hoops of steel,” the bumbling Lord Polonius in Shakespeare’s play “Hamlet” tells his son Laertes in a rant of advice often repeated since as sage and sound. But who wants to be grappled with a metal belt? Neither is friendship a luxury cruise liner where one might go shopping for a friend. A rowboat, maybe, lost on some stormy night on some stormy sea in some stormy argument, a crew of two with only one oar. A lack of friends may be associated with loneliness, and one is often never so lonely as when part of a crowd in which one can find no partner. Acquaintances and neighbors are often confused with friends when they are not. Likewise, parents, children, and siblings, when impressed as friends are often the first to jump ship. A friend at court can hardly be trusted, neither is one’s cohort a circle of friends. A friend in need is not free. To simply like is not necessarily to befriend. What is the focus point of a circle of friends? One’s spouse must not be mistaken for one’s friend, nor one’s friend mistaken for one’s spouse. Friendship is not a vessel, unless it is a ship of fools.
The Coming of the Toads 