63
This is the week when the English and Irish newspapers and magazines run their BOOKS OF THE YEAR. I read the sections in the TLS, The Spectator and The Irish Times. The TLS like The Spectator and The IrishTimes has a gang of writers writing little essays about their year's best books.
I will not make one of those lists of who said what. Most of the writers who contribute to these sections are or will eventually be just names: publicists, academics, once popular novelists and poets. My one exception will be to notice that George Steiner did not report that he had read, as in previous years, with a passionate and defining interest, 10,000 pages of Heidegger manuscripts.
I was saddened, a little--- one always hopes for some evidence of change but of course--- to realize the dread Philip Roth's latest had been read by a number of these people. Roth is a perfect example of POSHLOST, that wonderful Russian term made popular by Vladimir Nabokov:
Corny trash, vulgar cliches, Philistinism in all its phases, imitations of imitations, bogus profundities, crude, moronic and dishonest pseudo-literature--- these are obvious examples. Now if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, over concern with class and race and the journalistic generalities we all know. Poshlost speaks in such concepts as "America is no different than Russia" or "we all share in Germany's guilt. The flowers of poshlost bloom in such phrases and terms as "the moment of truth," "charisma," "existential" (used seriously), "dialogue" (as applied to political talks between nations), and vocabulary (as applied to the dauber). Listing in one breath Auschwitz, Hiroshima and Vietnam is seditious poshlost.
Of course, any reasonably well informed person can make a list of contemporary writers who personify POSHLOST: Toni Morrison, Russell Banks, Rick Moody, Joyce Carol Oates, Dave Eggers, Jonathan Franzen, James Patterson... I can't go on with this list. I guess if you see a course listing for the contemporary novel at a college or university... 90 percent of the writers will exemplify Mr Nabokov's...
As to Roth...
It must have been in 1971 when I first met Nelida Pinon. You might remember her as the Brazilian writer whose REPUBLIC OF DREAMS came out some years ago... she was included in that defining anthology of South American writing published by Tri-Quarterly... there was a short story of a woman who gave birth to an egg... she was a close friend of Clarice Lispector...
Pinon is still alive, travels constantly-- was the first woman to be the President of the Brazilian Academy... she visited back then a class given by Hannah Green at Columbia University. She must have come to Columbia at the invitation of Frank MacShane who was probably one of the best writing program directors in the country at that time or since. Nelida was only one of the many who came to Columbia at MacShane's invitation: Niconor Parra, Jorge Luis Borges, Jose Donoso... that apologist for Stalin, Pablo Neruda...
... but the point. Nelida was telling me that on this her second visit she was only meeting writers and people who are not famous. On her first visit she had been forced to meet the famous. Then when she met Roth at a restaurant on 8th Street in Manhattan she learned that famous American writers are very different from... all Mr Roth could talk about other than his own writing and the sense of himself as an important writer was that this was to be his year to make a million dollars. Nelida learned from Roth that in America it is somehow decided that each year one writer will make a million dollars. Two years before it had been Saul Bellow and then William Styron and this was to be his year. Of course she was talking about Portnoy's Complaint.
66
Elsewhere in the Books of the Year issue of the TLS is an article by Gabriel Josipovici in which there is:
what has happened to our culture such that serious critics and intelligent well-read reviewers, many of whom studied the poems of Eliot, the stories of Kafka and the plays of Beckett at University, should go into ecstasies over Atonement or Suite Francaise while ignoring the work of marvelous novelists such as Robert Pinget and Gert Hofmann?
Mr. Josipovici must be living in some fantasy world. You can get out of many good colleges and universities without ever having read the three authors he mentioned and I can well assure him if a reviewer ever talked about such writers or of holding them in esteem-- they would simply be thought to be sadly out of touch with the needs of the newspaper or magazine.
745
FORTUNATE READERS: there is no excuse not to read Robert Pinget's books. Almost all of them are available in English. I was reminded of this by seeing Joanne Gunderson at the 20th Annual Independent and Small Press Book Fair. She has through her small press RED DUST made available all of Pinget's small prose books and his plays. DALKEY ARCHIVE has his great work THE INQUISITORY available. A reader might find MONSIEUR SONGE who in some way is of the same family as MONSEIEUR TESTE by Paul Valery... but both Mr Pinget and Mr Songe are, as they say in Ireland, their own man... or those other late books THEO OR THE NEW ERA or BE BRAVE or THE ENEMY--- all well translated by the great Barbara Wright...
in THEO OF THE NEW ERA:
Still the same old thing. He's read so many books that he tries to remember them all together I think.
Why all together.
Because he's in a hurry, he hasn't got time now to reread them one after the other so as to write his own.
What is his own?
That bundle of pages he gets you to read bit by bit.
That isn't a book it's just scribble you can't understand a word.
It's the best he can do.
or in Pinget's last published book TRACES OF INK:
And then the years pass.
Anxiety.
What can he do to overcome it?
One line plus one line. and keep going at all costs.
And from earlier in the book: Mortin says I'm waiting for the rats of memory.
Sunday, December 2, 2007
Wednesday, November 28, 2007
ANNIE DILLARD, ALEXANDER THEROUX, HOLLINS COLLEGE, GOING TO PATCHOGUE
99
I picked up a copy of the bound galleys of ANNIE DILLARD'S new novel THE MAYTREES at the downtown Strand Bookstore. $1.49. An N was penciled in at the upper left hand corner of the cover. It was a reject from the rare book room. The book is written as if from a great distance and seems to echo in some way--- beyond my ability to figure out--- EVAN CONNELL'S novels MR BRIDGE and MRS BRIDGE.
I first met Annie Dillard at Hollins College in 1969-70. She had been a student at the college and had married Richard Dillard who was a professor. She spent a lot of time in the little snack bar near the library. She must have heard me talking about an incident in Patchogue as it later appeared in her now famous PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK. (I am not going to take down that book to find the exact page. One has to have some slight dignity)
I put my own story into my own little book GOING TO PATCHOGUE (Dalkey Archive):
Dad talks of the first winter. On the morning when the bay froze over for the first time I went down to the beach and walked out on the ice. Sea gulls had been trapped in the ice. Some of them were still alive. I hit them over the head with a piece of drift lumber. Then I took a penknife and cut the bodies off at the first joint of the leg. I left behind a little forest of bloody stumps. We had a lot of sea gull soup that first winter.
63
I last saw Annie in the 1980s at a bookstore up near the Museum of Natural History--- long gone now, but once one of the great bookstores. She was signing books and I was surprised that the line was out of the store and into the street. Men, women, all ages and dress, lined up with piles of her books. She was famous, an authority, a knower of nature and of the finer feelings, one sensed
87
As my year at Hollins College wore on Lilia and I drifted apart. I went up to New York City. Lilia stayed at Hollins College where she received two and half years credit for being Bulgarian and having been a gymnazium student in Sofia. Annie would talk to Lilia and suggest that she marry a professor but make sure he is tenured. It is the perfect life. Lilia was not interested in that as she was interested in the very young son of the the Dean of the College; she did not marry him.
Within a year of winning the Pulitizer Prize for PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK Annie Dillard was done with Richard--- but kept his name as Doak simply does not--- and years later George Garrett told me Annie had moved on to husband number two because he was younger and would be the father for her child and when that ended she realized she needed an older man for husband number three and to whom she could read the reviews of her books without him getting jealous... this story has been told hundreds of times across the South.
88
Last year when I was preparing to drive my daughter to Vanderbilt, George was again telling me an ANNIE DILLARD story as relayed by her former husband still living in Hollins, near Roanoke. It seems Annie was in the mountains nearby and having a hard time writing. Would Richard have dinner with her. He agreed as they were still friendly after a fashion. The dinner went well enough and as they were leaving and saying goodbye in the parklng lot Annie suddenly asked Richard if he could do a favour for her. He agreed and she asked could he dispose of her garbage as there was no collection at the cabin where she was living. She opened the trunk of the car and it was stuffed with large plastic bags of weeks of garbage. It seemed like old times, Richard said. I was always taking out her garbage back then.
43
There is a whole other area of conversation about Annie Dillard when it comes to blurbs... but that has to be for another time...
12
GOOD NEWS. GOOD NEWS. GOOD NEWS. Steve Moore wrote and told me that he had just received his copy of ALEXANDER THEROUX'S LAURA WARHOLIC or, The Sexual Intellectual. A Novel. 888 pages. The perfect way to end the year.
I picked up a copy of the bound galleys of ANNIE DILLARD'S new novel THE MAYTREES at the downtown Strand Bookstore. $1.49. An N was penciled in at the upper left hand corner of the cover. It was a reject from the rare book room. The book is written as if from a great distance and seems to echo in some way--- beyond my ability to figure out--- EVAN CONNELL'S novels MR BRIDGE and MRS BRIDGE.
I first met Annie Dillard at Hollins College in 1969-70. She had been a student at the college and had married Richard Dillard who was a professor. She spent a lot of time in the little snack bar near the library. She must have heard me talking about an incident in Patchogue as it later appeared in her now famous PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK. (I am not going to take down that book to find the exact page. One has to have some slight dignity)
I put my own story into my own little book GOING TO PATCHOGUE (Dalkey Archive):
Dad talks of the first winter. On the morning when the bay froze over for the first time I went down to the beach and walked out on the ice. Sea gulls had been trapped in the ice. Some of them were still alive. I hit them over the head with a piece of drift lumber. Then I took a penknife and cut the bodies off at the first joint of the leg. I left behind a little forest of bloody stumps. We had a lot of sea gull soup that first winter.
63
I last saw Annie in the 1980s at a bookstore up near the Museum of Natural History--- long gone now, but once one of the great bookstores. She was signing books and I was surprised that the line was out of the store and into the street. Men, women, all ages and dress, lined up with piles of her books. She was famous, an authority, a knower of nature and of the finer feelings, one sensed
87
As my year at Hollins College wore on Lilia and I drifted apart. I went up to New York City. Lilia stayed at Hollins College where she received two and half years credit for being Bulgarian and having been a gymnazium student in Sofia. Annie would talk to Lilia and suggest that she marry a professor but make sure he is tenured. It is the perfect life. Lilia was not interested in that as she was interested in the very young son of the the Dean of the College; she did not marry him.
Within a year of winning the Pulitizer Prize for PILGRIM AT TINKER CREEK Annie Dillard was done with Richard--- but kept his name as Doak simply does not--- and years later George Garrett told me Annie had moved on to husband number two because he was younger and would be the father for her child and when that ended she realized she needed an older man for husband number three and to whom she could read the reviews of her books without him getting jealous... this story has been told hundreds of times across the South.
88
Last year when I was preparing to drive my daughter to Vanderbilt, George was again telling me an ANNIE DILLARD story as relayed by her former husband still living in Hollins, near Roanoke. It seems Annie was in the mountains nearby and having a hard time writing. Would Richard have dinner with her. He agreed as they were still friendly after a fashion. The dinner went well enough and as they were leaving and saying goodbye in the parklng lot Annie suddenly asked Richard if he could do a favour for her. He agreed and she asked could he dispose of her garbage as there was no collection at the cabin where she was living. She opened the trunk of the car and it was stuffed with large plastic bags of weeks of garbage. It seemed like old times, Richard said. I was always taking out her garbage back then.
43
There is a whole other area of conversation about Annie Dillard when it comes to blurbs... but that has to be for another time...
12
GOOD NEWS. GOOD NEWS. GOOD NEWS. Steve Moore wrote and told me that he had just received his copy of ALEXANDER THEROUX'S LAURA WARHOLIC or, The Sexual Intellectual. A Novel. 888 pages. The perfect way to end the year.
Tuesday, November 27, 2007
PAUL VALERY, ARNO SCHMIDT, JULIAN RIOS, ANDREY PLATANOV, JOHN JAY COLLEGE OF CRIMINAL KNOWLEDGE
41
PaulValery, Arno Schmidt and Julian Rios have created three great literary monuments that are inconceivable in these United States of America.
I was in the library last night to pay again homage to two of those monuments: the CAHIERS of Paul Valery and ZETTELS TRAUM by Arno Schmidt.
Paul Valery wrote something every morning of his life. After his death 29 volumes of a facsimile edition of these jottings was published. 26,600 pages.
Valery himself never fully organized these jotting but recognized that they did fall into certain areas. He believed that it was very hard to draw distinctions between philosophy, literature, art, science and mathematics and that any civilized man would of necessity be interested in everything.
To make a long story short, Valery eventually came up with 215 sub-classifications under which this massive mountain of writing could be organized.
But the monument is on the shelves in the form of those 29 volumes, each approx 900 pages, measuring 8 x 11 inches...
In more recent years a Pléiade edition has appeared in which those pages are transcribed and arranged into broadly based categories. Those two books comprise 3248 pages... and are serving as the basis of the English language version that is slowly making itself available from Peter Land Editions. Two volumes have been published and a third is coming out as I am typing or is possibly on its way here right now.
"I have a unitary mind in a thousand pieces (p62) from the section Ego in volume one of the Lang edition.
Valery would have taken to the bog. There can be no doubt about it. But there is one little disadvantage to the bog: if you hit the wrong key, words, sentences, sections disappear never to be... in those printed volumes there is a strange permanence that no electronic media can equal.
An earlier version of these words got lost. There is a sadness that falls down upon me. These are not the inspired words of that previous version. They come from afar.
42
A reader can begin to read PAUL VALERY with his short book MONSIEUR TESTE. Valery "speaks" or "writes" in/of the "character" of Monsieur Teste. Everything is called into question.
43
In that lost bit of the bog I had been writing about John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge and about having to repatriate my academic book collection, my folders of student essays, long lists of long gone students, and my collection of wall clippings. One such clipping quoted Andrey Platanov's thought that a writer should know, "what God is thinking about."
I was also writing that the powers to be have decided that those who do not hold a sinecure in the form of lifelong tenure are to no longer have an office in which to meet students, gather our few wits about us, to organize ourselves for the teaching. I am sure they know what they are doing and it will be of a great benefit to the students and the college as a whole. It will allow us to arrive each day with our offices on our backs in the form of tightly bound bundles which will contain the tools of our vocation. I will miss that office that I have occupied with a few colleagues for these 19 years but one must move with the times... I will remember one of those clippings of a photograph of Celine standing near the gate of his house in Meudon and under which was a slip of a quote from some interview he must have given, WASH YOUR HANDS.
Like a heteronym of FERNANDO PESSOA I will set up my office at a far table in the student cafeteria...
44
I will come to Arno Schmidt some other day. His ZETTELS TRAUM is an even greater monument...
45
But to the living. This morning as every morning Julian Rios looked down from the front window of his house in Saint-Martin-la-Garenne at those trees midst the Seine that Monet had discovered in paint.
LARVA is Rios's great book and is available in English. To say it is a novel like FINNEGANS WAKE, like ZETTELS TRAUM...
but again all of that is for another day. Unlike them, it comes with a fold-out map, a pictorial section and index.
Julian Rios signed a copy for me: TOM LE MOT
PaulValery, Arno Schmidt and Julian Rios have created three great literary monuments that are inconceivable in these United States of America.
I was in the library last night to pay again homage to two of those monuments: the CAHIERS of Paul Valery and ZETTELS TRAUM by Arno Schmidt.
Paul Valery wrote something every morning of his life. After his death 29 volumes of a facsimile edition of these jottings was published. 26,600 pages.
Valery himself never fully organized these jotting but recognized that they did fall into certain areas. He believed that it was very hard to draw distinctions between philosophy, literature, art, science and mathematics and that any civilized man would of necessity be interested in everything.
To make a long story short, Valery eventually came up with 215 sub-classifications under which this massive mountain of writing could be organized.
But the monument is on the shelves in the form of those 29 volumes, each approx 900 pages, measuring 8 x 11 inches...
In more recent years a Pléiade edition has appeared in which those pages are transcribed and arranged into broadly based categories. Those two books comprise 3248 pages... and are serving as the basis of the English language version that is slowly making itself available from Peter Land Editions. Two volumes have been published and a third is coming out as I am typing or is possibly on its way here right now.
"I have a unitary mind in a thousand pieces (p62) from the section Ego in volume one of the Lang edition.
Valery would have taken to the bog. There can be no doubt about it. But there is one little disadvantage to the bog: if you hit the wrong key, words, sentences, sections disappear never to be... in those printed volumes there is a strange permanence that no electronic media can equal.
An earlier version of these words got lost. There is a sadness that falls down upon me. These are not the inspired words of that previous version. They come from afar.
42
A reader can begin to read PAUL VALERY with his short book MONSIEUR TESTE. Valery "speaks" or "writes" in/of the "character" of Monsieur Teste. Everything is called into question.
43
In that lost bit of the bog I had been writing about John Jay College of Criminal Knowledge and about having to repatriate my academic book collection, my folders of student essays, long lists of long gone students, and my collection of wall clippings. One such clipping quoted Andrey Platanov's thought that a writer should know, "what God is thinking about."
I was also writing that the powers to be have decided that those who do not hold a sinecure in the form of lifelong tenure are to no longer have an office in which to meet students, gather our few wits about us, to organize ourselves for the teaching. I am sure they know what they are doing and it will be of a great benefit to the students and the college as a whole. It will allow us to arrive each day with our offices on our backs in the form of tightly bound bundles which will contain the tools of our vocation. I will miss that office that I have occupied with a few colleagues for these 19 years but one must move with the times... I will remember one of those clippings of a photograph of Celine standing near the gate of his house in Meudon and under which was a slip of a quote from some interview he must have given, WASH YOUR HANDS.
Like a heteronym of FERNANDO PESSOA I will set up my office at a far table in the student cafeteria...
44
I will come to Arno Schmidt some other day. His ZETTELS TRAUM is an even greater monument...
45
But to the living. This morning as every morning Julian Rios looked down from the front window of his house in Saint-Martin-la-Garenne at those trees midst the Seine that Monet had discovered in paint.
LARVA is Rios's great book and is available in English. To say it is a novel like FINNEGANS WAKE, like ZETTELS TRAUM...
but again all of that is for another day. Unlike them, it comes with a fold-out map, a pictorial section and index.
Julian Rios signed a copy for me: TOM LE MOT
Friday, November 23, 2007
LOUIS ZUKOFSKY CONTINUED, KNUT HAMSUN
428
I walked out in the afternoon to see if the building was still there in which Louis Zukofsky was born (1905) and lived out his childhood in the Lower East Side of Manhattan
97 Christie Street, just below Grand Street is a 6 story walk up with an iron flight of stairs to the entranceway. To either side of the door are four shops, two up, two down: WING HANG LASER VIDEO CENTER, JM WIRELESS CELLPHONE REPAIR, NEW EAST AUTO DRIVING SCHOOL CORPORATION, ALL STATE RESTAURANT EQUIPMENT CORP.
When Zukofsky was born there, the signs were not in Chinese as they are today but would have read like Chinese to a person such as myself. Yiddish would have been the language of the streets and not like today, Chinese and Spanish
In the park in front of Christie Street I noticed a group of young Chinese men playing touch football. A good sign of...
I wondered if there was right then a eleven year old Chinese boy who was reading through all of Shakespeare's plays because his public school teacher, like Zukofsky's, had offered a prize for answering what he later described as "pretty stiff questions."
I think not.
Probably that teacher last week was asking the boy to read some dreary relevant but awful crap in simplified English and then writing about something he already knows... His parent(s) would be offered a bribe to make sure the kid showed up at school--- hard to believe but this is now public policy in New York City--- and the teacher at the end of the day would remind the children that next week they would all share on how the celebration of Thanksgiving had revealed the racist nature of American society.
928
from THE CULTURAL LIFE OF MODERN AMERICA by KNUT HAMSUN published in 1889
(Yes the same man who wrote HUNGER, a novel that simply has to have been read by anyone who thinks himself or herself well-read)
Take a city like Minneapolis, a city the size of Copenhagen, a center of commerce in the West--- Minneapolis with its theaters, schools, "art galleries," university, international exhibition and five music academies. There is one bookstore--- a single solitary one.* What does this bookstore advertise, and what does it have in its windows and on its shelves? Decorated congratulatory cards, gilt edged collections of verse, detective stories, some sheet music for "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Home Sweet Home," dear and departed Longfellow, and all the variations of the latest inkwells. Then there is that whole deluge of "fiction" that belongs to a large nation with aspiring female scribblers. Now the bookstore is also a patriotic bookstore: it has the histories of the United States wars and lithographs of Washington; it has Uncle Tom's Cabin and General Grant's memoirs. And then it has all of America's magazine literature.
Now I would still rather read a collection of sermoins than Grant's memoirs. Grant was a man who could not even write his own language correctly; several of the generals letters are preserved as stylistic curiosities. I would rather read the city directory from cover to cover that these American detectve stories.
* There are two Scandinavian ones, selling stationary and collections of sermons.
I walked out in the afternoon to see if the building was still there in which Louis Zukofsky was born (1905) and lived out his childhood in the Lower East Side of Manhattan
97 Christie Street, just below Grand Street is a 6 story walk up with an iron flight of stairs to the entranceway. To either side of the door are four shops, two up, two down: WING HANG LASER VIDEO CENTER, JM WIRELESS CELLPHONE REPAIR, NEW EAST AUTO DRIVING SCHOOL CORPORATION, ALL STATE RESTAURANT EQUIPMENT CORP.
When Zukofsky was born there, the signs were not in Chinese as they are today but would have read like Chinese to a person such as myself. Yiddish would have been the language of the streets and not like today, Chinese and Spanish
In the park in front of Christie Street I noticed a group of young Chinese men playing touch football. A good sign of...
I wondered if there was right then a eleven year old Chinese boy who was reading through all of Shakespeare's plays because his public school teacher, like Zukofsky's, had offered a prize for answering what he later described as "pretty stiff questions."
I think not.
Probably that teacher last week was asking the boy to read some dreary relevant but awful crap in simplified English and then writing about something he already knows... His parent(s) would be offered a bribe to make sure the kid showed up at school--- hard to believe but this is now public policy in New York City--- and the teacher at the end of the day would remind the children that next week they would all share on how the celebration of Thanksgiving had revealed the racist nature of American society.
928
from THE CULTURAL LIFE OF MODERN AMERICA by KNUT HAMSUN published in 1889
(Yes the same man who wrote HUNGER, a novel that simply has to have been read by anyone who thinks himself or herself well-read)
Take a city like Minneapolis, a city the size of Copenhagen, a center of commerce in the West--- Minneapolis with its theaters, schools, "art galleries," university, international exhibition and five music academies. There is one bookstore--- a single solitary one.* What does this bookstore advertise, and what does it have in its windows and on its shelves? Decorated congratulatory cards, gilt edged collections of verse, detective stories, some sheet music for "Yankee Doodle Dandy" and "Home Sweet Home," dear and departed Longfellow, and all the variations of the latest inkwells. Then there is that whole deluge of "fiction" that belongs to a large nation with aspiring female scribblers. Now the bookstore is also a patriotic bookstore: it has the histories of the United States wars and lithographs of Washington; it has Uncle Tom's Cabin and General Grant's memoirs. And then it has all of America's magazine literature.
Now I would still rather read a collection of sermoins than Grant's memoirs. Grant was a man who could not even write his own language correctly; several of the generals letters are preserved as stylistic curiosities. I would rather read the city directory from cover to cover that these American detectve stories.
* There are two Scandinavian ones, selling stationary and collections of sermons.
POETRY READING NOT POETRY WRITING, LOUIS ZUKOFSKY, HENRY ADAMS
537
EZRA POUND
T.S. ELIOT
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
ROBERT FROST
WALLACE STEVENS
and then... if one continues with LORINE NIEDECKER
if one continues with JACK SPICER
if one continues with ROBERT DUNCAN
if one continues with CHARLES OLSON
if one continues with RONALD JOHNSON
if one continues with JAMES MERRILL
and finally if one continues with LOUIS ZUKOFSKY and then announces that this list pretty much sums up what anyone really needs to know about American poetry in the Twentieth Century...
I was thinking about this because finally a biography of LOUIS ZUKOFSKY is about to appear: THE POEM OF A LIFE by MARK SCROGGINS and this afternoon I am going to walk down to 97 Chrystie Street a few blocks away from where I am sitting on this cold day after Thanksgiving, to see if the building where Zukofsky was born in 1904 is still there...
In the 60s I used to go into the Catholic Worker place on Christie Street to pick up copes of THE CATHOLIC WORKER to sell in front of St. Francis de Sales Church in Patchogue--- for the cover price of one penny.
But I have been thinking about ZUKOFSKY whose body of work is still mostly unknown but from what I am able to read is the one gorgeous bloom before the last flowering of that great list above, RONALD JOHNSON---
Maybe you have heard of ZUKOFSKY'S : "A" and then BOTTOM the two volumes on Shakespeare, the Catullus translations, the A USEFUL ART Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design, LE STYLE APOLLAINAIRE and PREPOSITIONS the collected critical essays in which he quotes from one of his favorite writers, HENRY ADAMS, writing about being a student at Harvard in THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS:
No one cared enough to criticize, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his own limits.
DO YOU GET IT??????
NO ONE CARED ENOUGH TO CRITICIZE
538
It is no accident that I quoted early on in this bog from WHITTAKER CHAMBERS... who people will discover was a good friend of Zukofsky's at Columbia...
539
By taking into your heart and brain the poetry of the above poets...
EZRA POUND
T.S. ELIOT
WILLIAM CARLOS WILLIAMS
ROBERT FROST
WALLACE STEVENS
and then... if one continues with LORINE NIEDECKER
if one continues with JACK SPICER
if one continues with ROBERT DUNCAN
if one continues with CHARLES OLSON
if one continues with RONALD JOHNSON
if one continues with JAMES MERRILL
and finally if one continues with LOUIS ZUKOFSKY and then announces that this list pretty much sums up what anyone really needs to know about American poetry in the Twentieth Century...
I was thinking about this because finally a biography of LOUIS ZUKOFSKY is about to appear: THE POEM OF A LIFE by MARK SCROGGINS and this afternoon I am going to walk down to 97 Chrystie Street a few blocks away from where I am sitting on this cold day after Thanksgiving, to see if the building where Zukofsky was born in 1904 is still there...
In the 60s I used to go into the Catholic Worker place on Christie Street to pick up copes of THE CATHOLIC WORKER to sell in front of St. Francis de Sales Church in Patchogue--- for the cover price of one penny.
But I have been thinking about ZUKOFSKY whose body of work is still mostly unknown but from what I am able to read is the one gorgeous bloom before the last flowering of that great list above, RONALD JOHNSON---
Maybe you have heard of ZUKOFSKY'S : "A" and then BOTTOM the two volumes on Shakespeare, the Catullus translations, the A USEFUL ART Essays and Radio Scripts on American Design, LE STYLE APOLLAINAIRE and PREPOSITIONS the collected critical essays in which he quotes from one of his favorite writers, HENRY ADAMS, writing about being a student at Harvard in THE EDUCATION OF HENRY ADAMS:
No one cared enough to criticize, except himself who soon began to suffer from reaching his own limits.
DO YOU GET IT??????
NO ONE CARED ENOUGH TO CRITICIZE
538
It is no accident that I quoted early on in this bog from WHITTAKER CHAMBERS... who people will discover was a good friend of Zukofsky's at Columbia...
539
By taking into your heart and brain the poetry of the above poets...
Wednesday, November 21, 2007
ALBERT JAY NOCK AND THE DREARIEST OF SUBJECTS
The newspaper this morning like every morning (By starting in this way I have labeled myself as... because I know that reading the newspaper is no longer a normal activity and I self-consciously mention this newspaper reading shadowed by Marina Tsvetaeva's good and necessary cursing of such an activity) reports of another scandal in school testing. There is always a scandal in education.
A long time ago Albert Jay Nock pointed out that when the perfectly good classical high school was disbanded and replaced by the so called modern educational system that of necessity it would have to be endlessly reformed, fixed, reconfigured, fixed again because the people running the education industry dare never think really on what they are doing...
The other night at FREEBIRD BOOKSTORE I was talking with a graduate of Harvard. I mentioned that I had heard it was pretty grim for under-graduates and that they never really got the best professors and that at Harvard there was very little sense of being part of a community of scholars. This no longer young man replied, "Yes, that is all true but you get great contacts for opportunities later in life."
ALBERT JAY NOCK in THE THEORY OF EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES:
I do not think that our American society will ever return to the Great Tradition. I see no reason why it should not go on repeating the experience of other societies, having already gone as far as it has along the road of that experience, and find that when it as last realises the need of transforming itself, it has no longer the power to do so.
And then from A JOURNAL OF THESE DAYS June 1932 - December 1933
April 24, 1933
I am greatly impressed by the number and quality of the bookstores in Lisbon. They are an interesting and an encouraging sight. The whole population of Portugal is less than New York City's, and I hear that 70 per cent of it is illiterate, which, if so, makes the reading public very small. It is astonishing to estimate, roughly the number of bookstores that New York or any American city, would have if they stood in the same proportion to the number of people who are able to read. The literate Portuguese, moreover, seems able to manage French and Spanish as well as his own tongue, for the shops carry a large stock in both languages. English books are few and of a low order, mostly shilling shockers; and there are hardly any German books, except in translations. All this sets one thinking afresh about the social value of a wide-spread, indiscriminate literacy.
June 30, 1933
One sees a considerable blessing in illiteracy when one remarks the utter absence of signboards along the roadside. They hardly exist in Portugal; one may drive a hundred miles without seeing one. I do not think it would be unfair to say that the only advantage of our general literacy is that it enables people to read advertisements.
REMINDER REMINDER Walking, at that time, those streets of Lisbon was the poet FERNANDO PESSOA whose book THE BOOK OF DISQUIET sits comfortably on the shelf along with ULYSSES, THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, DEATH OF VIRGIL, THAT AWFUL MESS ON VIA MERULANA, LARVA...
April 21, 1933
In the view of the modern novelist, love is apparently reducible to sheer transactions carried on inter stercus et urinam, and this, I suppose, passes for a realistic view; but I doubt that the human spirit will be permanently satisfied with it, and hence I doubt that the works which reflect it will have any place in literature. Novelists may yet rediscover sentiment as being quite as much a reality as trees and boulders, or even as the determination of blood to this or that part of the human body.
ANOTHER REMINDER. Nock wrote two books tracing out the life and works of Rabelais. He was no dour puritan.
I have not mentioned his great autobiography: MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN as the title cuts too close to the very bone of my own life.
A long time ago Albert Jay Nock pointed out that when the perfectly good classical high school was disbanded and replaced by the so called modern educational system that of necessity it would have to be endlessly reformed, fixed, reconfigured, fixed again because the people running the education industry dare never think really on what they are doing...
The other night at FREEBIRD BOOKSTORE I was talking with a graduate of Harvard. I mentioned that I had heard it was pretty grim for under-graduates and that they never really got the best professors and that at Harvard there was very little sense of being part of a community of scholars. This no longer young man replied, "Yes, that is all true but you get great contacts for opportunities later in life."
ALBERT JAY NOCK in THE THEORY OF EDUCATION IN THE UNITED STATES:
I do not think that our American society will ever return to the Great Tradition. I see no reason why it should not go on repeating the experience of other societies, having already gone as far as it has along the road of that experience, and find that when it as last realises the need of transforming itself, it has no longer the power to do so.
And then from A JOURNAL OF THESE DAYS June 1932 - December 1933
April 24, 1933
I am greatly impressed by the number and quality of the bookstores in Lisbon. They are an interesting and an encouraging sight. The whole population of Portugal is less than New York City's, and I hear that 70 per cent of it is illiterate, which, if so, makes the reading public very small. It is astonishing to estimate, roughly the number of bookstores that New York or any American city, would have if they stood in the same proportion to the number of people who are able to read. The literate Portuguese, moreover, seems able to manage French and Spanish as well as his own tongue, for the shops carry a large stock in both languages. English books are few and of a low order, mostly shilling shockers; and there are hardly any German books, except in translations. All this sets one thinking afresh about the social value of a wide-spread, indiscriminate literacy.
June 30, 1933
One sees a considerable blessing in illiteracy when one remarks the utter absence of signboards along the roadside. They hardly exist in Portugal; one may drive a hundred miles without seeing one. I do not think it would be unfair to say that the only advantage of our general literacy is that it enables people to read advertisements.
REMINDER REMINDER Walking, at that time, those streets of Lisbon was the poet FERNANDO PESSOA whose book THE BOOK OF DISQUIET sits comfortably on the shelf along with ULYSSES, THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES, DEATH OF VIRGIL, THAT AWFUL MESS ON VIA MERULANA, LARVA...
April 21, 1933
In the view of the modern novelist, love is apparently reducible to sheer transactions carried on inter stercus et urinam, and this, I suppose, passes for a realistic view; but I doubt that the human spirit will be permanently satisfied with it, and hence I doubt that the works which reflect it will have any place in literature. Novelists may yet rediscover sentiment as being quite as much a reality as trees and boulders, or even as the determination of blood to this or that part of the human body.
ANOTHER REMINDER. Nock wrote two books tracing out the life and works of Rabelais. He was no dour puritan.
I have not mentioned his great autobiography: MEMOIRS OF A SUPERFLUOUS MAN as the title cuts too close to the very bone of my own life.
Tuesday, November 20, 2007
MONTH OF THE DEAD, PAUL VALERY, ANTHONY BURGESS, CHURCHILL
93
As November wears on the memory: of having just finished up working on the dish washing line in the cafeteria at Beloit College and hearing the news that the President had been shot. JFK. That night I walked alone to the library while many students went to the chapel. I simply then and still to this day do not really understand how people could be so moved.
Yeah, I know in a intellectual way why people are moved but...
I was thinking, as I remember it now: one less politician.
A few years ago in EAT AT JOE'S a pizza joint on Second Avenue in Manhattan between Fifth and Fourth Street a guy was saying: they should dig up JFK and shoot him again and that goes for his brother too.
245
Writers I have known who are now dead: Chad Walsh, W.H. Auden, Bink Noll, Kenneth Rexroth, Stephen Spender, Patrick Kavanagh, John Jordan, Francis Stuart, Jakov Lind, Hannah Green, Michael Hartnett, Edward Dahlberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Higgins, Frank MacShane, Richard M. Elman, Julian Green, Malcolm Cowley, John Currier, Liam O'Flaherty, Anthony Burgess, Nina Berberova, Philip Hobsbaum, Tillie Olson, Kay Boyle...
And there are those who should be dead....
or are dead but don't know it
749
Do not search for truth-- But seek to develop those forces which make and unmake truths.
---Paul Valery
56
In Clair Wills' very good book THAT NEUTRAL IRELAND, a broad, clearly written description of Ireland during World War Two there is a delicious moment when she is describing a popular quiz program QUESTION TIME and the host asks a contestant for the name of the world's best known teller of fairy-tales. The expected answer was of course Hans Christian Anderson but that was skipped over in favor of "Winston Churchill."
56a
Anthony Burgess once told me the reason Churchill got tossed out of office as fast as he did in spite of his so-called heroic role during WW2 was because it was the first election when the many veterans of the British army could vote and everyone of them hated Churchill because of the cigars he was always photographed smoking. The ordinary soldiers had to make do with roll-your-owns or Woodbines and here this fuckin bastard had been puffing cigar smoke into your face every day of the war...
As November wears on the memory: of having just finished up working on the dish washing line in the cafeteria at Beloit College and hearing the news that the President had been shot. JFK. That night I walked alone to the library while many students went to the chapel. I simply then and still to this day do not really understand how people could be so moved.
Yeah, I know in a intellectual way why people are moved but...
I was thinking, as I remember it now: one less politician.
A few years ago in EAT AT JOE'S a pizza joint on Second Avenue in Manhattan between Fifth and Fourth Street a guy was saying: they should dig up JFK and shoot him again and that goes for his brother too.
245
Writers I have known who are now dead: Chad Walsh, W.H. Auden, Bink Noll, Kenneth Rexroth, Stephen Spender, Patrick Kavanagh, John Jordan, Francis Stuart, Jakov Lind, Hannah Green, Michael Hartnett, Edward Dahlberg, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Higgins, Frank MacShane, Richard M. Elman, Julian Green, Malcolm Cowley, John Currier, Liam O'Flaherty, Anthony Burgess, Nina Berberova, Philip Hobsbaum, Tillie Olson, Kay Boyle...
And there are those who should be dead....
or are dead but don't know it
749
Do not search for truth-- But seek to develop those forces which make and unmake truths.
---Paul Valery
56
In Clair Wills' very good book THAT NEUTRAL IRELAND, a broad, clearly written description of Ireland during World War Two there is a delicious moment when she is describing a popular quiz program QUESTION TIME and the host asks a contestant for the name of the world's best known teller of fairy-tales. The expected answer was of course Hans Christian Anderson but that was skipped over in favor of "Winston Churchill."
56a
Anthony Burgess once told me the reason Churchill got tossed out of office as fast as he did in spite of his so-called heroic role during WW2 was because it was the first election when the many veterans of the British army could vote and everyone of them hated Churchill because of the cigars he was always photographed smoking. The ordinary soldiers had to make do with roll-your-owns or Woodbines and here this fuckin bastard had been puffing cigar smoke into your face every day of the war...
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