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Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
I was pretty young when I found out about A Coney Island of the Mind -- I bought a copy at one of the bookstores on Telegraph Ave. and it's the first book of poetry I can remember carrying around in high school. I just loved the title! And the poems themselves began gradually to sink in, too... I read them today and they are familiar like old relatives and slightly embarrassing too, like old relatives can be; but it seems to me like there is real beauty in them mixed in with the clumsyness.
I have not lain with beauty all my life
telling over to myself
its most rife charms
I have not lain with beauty all my life
and lied with it as well
telling over to myself
how beauty never dies
but lies apart
among the aborigines
of art
and far above the battlefields
of love
It is above all that
oh yes
It sits upon the choicest of
Church seats
up there where art directors meet
to choose the things for immortality
And they have lain with beauty
all their lives
And they have fed on honeydew
and drunk the wines of Paradise
so that they know exactly how
a thing of beauty is a joy
forever and forever
and how it never never
quite can fade
into a money-losing nothingness
Oh no I have not lain
on Beauty Rests like this
afraid to rise at night
for fear that I might somehow miss
some movement beauty might have made
Yet I have slept with beauty
in my own weird way
and I have made a hungry scene or two
with beauty in my bed
and so spilled out another poem or two
and so spilled out another poem or two
upon the Bosch-like world
A couple of more poems below the fold.
 Here is "Spirit of the Crusades," from These are my Rivers (1994). It is a concise, powerful image, it hits you with the same force as his early poems but it is, I think, much more disciplined:
Stony Wales
with its slate-grey roofs
in slate-grey Cardiff
and its greystone houses on greystone terraces
and its great high statue of
"The Spirit of the Crusades"
in the Wales National Museum
portraying a medieval knight
in grey metal armor and helmet
with visor down
on a great grey steed
with four grey foot soldiers
in close march around him
(two at the head of the horse
two behind)
wearing World War One helmets
and carrying World War One rifles
with fixed bayonets
And the Crusades are over
but they are still marching
over the sea-locked land
in a dead march
straight through the twentieth century
In 1997 he published A Far Rockaway of the Heart, which might be my favorite book of his poetry for the way it reflects back on A Coney Island of the Mind from the perspective of a much older, more mature poet. I saw Mr. Ferlinghetti reading from this book and got his signature!
Driving a cardboard automobile without a license
at the turn of the century
my father ran into my mother
on a fun-ride at Coney Island
having spied each other eating
at a French boardinghouse nearby
And having decided right there and then
that she was for him entirely
he followed her into
the playland of that evening
where the headlong meeting
of their ephemeral flesh on wheels
hurtled them forever together
And I now in the back seat
of their eternity
reaching out to embrace them
↻...done
posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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 This weekend Ellen and I watched "Wild Combination: a Portrait of Arthur Russell" and were very taken with it; thanks for the recommendation, Bryan! There was a huge variety of music from Russell's brief career, and it was all brand-new to me. Here is one of my favorite pieces from the film, "Go Bang" by Dinosaur L, produced by Russell:
posted evening of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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 Lawrence Ferlinghetti is 90 years old today. What a milestone! He is one of my favorite poets -- this evening when I have some time I would like to pick out a couple of his pieces to post here. In the mean time you ought to give him a birthday present by heading over to City Lights and buying a book.
 Ooh and look at this! Nick Lowe (the Jesus of Cool) turns 60 today! And Olivia is 9 years old. A good day for birthdays.
posted morning of March 24th, 2009: Respond
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Monday, March 23rd, 2009
Another Robyn Hitchcock interview, from Yep Roc -- here he is talking, among other things, about the title track from Goodnight Oslo, what it is about and where it comes from. As you get older, I suppose you have to vacate certain comfort zones. Because in the end, they're not comforting, they're stifling. So, you have to move out of your shell -- you cannot stay where you were.
I'm meaning to write an extended post or series of posts about the songs on this record, which I like a whole lot -- trying to find a couple-of-hours block of time that I can devote to that.
posted afternoon of March 23rd, 2009: Respond
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 Orhan Pamuk was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the University of Rouen last week; in his acceptance speech, he reflects on the modernist ideal of the reclusive author, and what he and other authors have taken from Flaubert. h/t LanguageHat.
posted morning of March 23rd, 2009: Respond
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By way of Saramago's Notebook,  I see that Mauricio Funes, of the FMLN, has been elected President of El Salvador; ARENA will leave office peacefully after 2 decades in power. This strikes me as fantastic news. In El PaÃs, MoÃses NaÃm speculates as to whether the new center of power in Latin America will be Hugo Chávez of Venezuela, or Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva of Brazil. It is natural to think an FMLN victory would give Chávez more influence; and Lula's recent meeting with Obama can be seen as the end of "a long period of disengagement between the US and Latin America."
Saramago notes that Mauricio Funes shares his surname with Funes the Memorious, and advises him:
...Thousands of men and women [have witnessed] at last, the birth of hope. Do not disappoint them, Mister President. The political history of South America breathes deception and frustration, whole peoples tired of lies and deceit; it is time, it is urgent that all that change.
posted morning of March 23rd, 2009: 1 response
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Sunday, March 22nd, 2009
Ellen decided a couple of weeks ago that we should repaint the main hallway of our house. We've been slowly getting going, doing some taping and picking colors and painting some sections of the big wall next to our staircase -- today suddenly it seems like we're really underway. I built a platform that will support a stepladder on the staircase, for taping the intersection of that large wall and the ceiling -- I did this taping and pretty much finished painting that wall. Next we have the first-floor hallway, the second-floor hallway, and then the molding... Hopefully we will be done with this by May and we'll post some pictures.
posted evening of March 22nd, 2009: Respond
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You know that little metal disc in the drain of the bathroom sink, that you lower by means of a lever next to the water faucet to block the drain? Until today I did not know how that disc worked. For the last couple of days the bathroom sink has not been draining properly -- I wanted to open up the drain so I could clear out whatever was blocking it, but that disc was in my way -- tried pushing and twisting at it, figuring there was some kind of threading or catch, to no avail. Well -- a good idea in this sort of situation is to look behind the visible assembly and see how the functionality is implemented. Turns out that lever by the water faucet is linked to the back of the drain pipe; if you unscrew the nut where it is attached, you can pull the lever out; then it is easy to remove the disc. This nut is much easier to deal with than most plumbing joints as it is not welded in place or anything. So, I got that out and pulled a gigantic mass of hair out of the drain pipe. (Hair that has been stuck in the drain of the bathroom sink turns out to be one of the most unappealing substances around.) And the sink is working again! Took some figuring out, but not at all difficult of a repair in the end.
posted morning of March 22nd, 2009: 2 responses
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Saturday, March 21st, 2009
So here are two things I read recently and a chain of thought they have prompted: - I've been reading Patrick Kurp's blog Anecdotal Evidence for the past few days, since Levi Stahl linked to it from his Twitter feed with a pretty beguiling quote about the ghostly presence of books; and yesterday I looked in Kurp's archives to read his first post.
More than 30 years ago, at a state university in Ohio, I briefly shared a dorm room with a French horn player. ... I entered our room one day and found him sitting in the corner, cackling over one of Shelley's verse dramas and eating confectionary sugar from the box with a long ice tea spoon. Well: I'm chuckling as I read this and picturing myself as the roommate; but in the next paragraph I see that Kurp is setting up his former roommate as a representative of the "misuse of books", for which he feels a righteous distaste. Hm: I read the rest of the entry and go about my day, not sure how I feel about this.
- Later on (at another newly discovered blog), I was reading Robyn Hitchcock's notes from the release of Moss Elixir 13 years ago. He had just left A&M, and was dissatisfied with the music he had recorded there; and here is how he expressed that dissatisfaction:
I always associate the word "production" with some kind of sheen--a sugar buzz patina that has the listener lying on their back, almost licking the record.
This is kind of troubling to me. Much of my relationship to books, to music, to movies is dilettantish -- I consider much of what I write on this blog to be the moral equivalent of cackling over Pamuk's prose while I eat spoonfuls of sugar, of licking the inexhaustible candy coating off of Robyn Hitchcock's music -- having to think about Patrick Kurp (for whose writing and thinking I have a great deal of respect) sitting in judgement of me is bad enough, but thinking about the musician I love taking offense at my manner of loving his work -- well, it gives me pause. Is dilettantish enjoyment of art worthwhile? Is it reprehensible? Will it interfere with my development into a thoughtful human being? Does it make me a moral monster? I don't have an answer to these questions. My immediate reaction is "no" to all of them -- OTOH much of what I write on this blog seems worthwhile to me, and I would have a really hard time separating out what is "worthwhile" from what is "dilettantish". I was trying to figure out this morning how the sugar-buzz reaction to art could be seen as reprehensible, as morally negative -- all I could come up with was a vague sense that it befouls the intellectual space around the work of art in question, makes it more difficult to respond to the work in a valid way -- but there are tons of unexamined assumptions underlying that vague sense. So: not sure what to make of this. I am going to muddle on listening to music, reading books, writing my blog, and much of that listening and reading and writing will be done from the standpoint of a dilettante. I hope some worthwhile thought will come out of it.
posted afternoon of March 21st, 2009: 2 responses
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Not sure quite what to make of this but it looks like it might be a very useful tool... I was Googling™ around for information about Grove's Tasteless Chill Tonic after I saw an amusing advertisement for it at cleek's place -- and happened on this page from the St. Petersburg Daily Times of August 30, 1918. A-and apparently, Google has a huge news archive (and/or index into offsite archives) that I didn't know about. I'm not sure how fully built up it is -- but this bodes well for future searching.
posted morning of March 21st, 2009: Respond
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