Myshkin2

defensive writing

From David Slavitt's new book of essays:

“You learn to write defensively, as you learn to drive defensively, always looking out for sudden wacky things those with whom you share the road are likely to do. But there is a limit beyond which caution becomes anxiety so that you can´t even get into the car.”

I'd imagine a whole series of essays: manual vs automatic transmission / poetry in overdrive / always use your turn signals / jumpstart / oil change / tire pressure or tired pressure / power steering / catalytic converter / passenger comfort / fan belts / mufflers / cruise control.......I'm sure there are many more.  Any help?

Re Verse: Essays on Poetry and Poets
David R. Slavitt
Northwestern University Press

m&m's

Mania and I went to an opening last night--a guy who used to have a studio in the same building, though both have sinced moved out and on.  I think the guy is (or was) a Sikh, and though his given name is something like Douglas, he now goes by something with a Har and (I think) a Singh in it.  No turban, but I've never seen him w/o a cap, so he might have have uncut locks folded away underneath it.  His work was pretty much spraypainted (a little bit of acrylics added for effect) on wood panels and canvas, even an entire wall of the gallery.  Very (completely) graffiti and street-art influenced, though less graphicy (to my untrained eye) and more decorative, along with a touch of Warhol portraiture thrown in--including one of himself, looking exactly like he looked.  What struck me about the opening, though, besides the tangy pile of stuffed grape leaves, were the visitors, at leat early on and probably after we left.  I counted at least 11 young males (late teens, early 20s) in obvious hiphop garb.  Close-cropped hair, low-hanging pants, ball caps (w/o team logos!) angled just right.  Sneakers.  Tattoos on the back of their necks, etc.  I expected m&m to walk through the door and greet his guys with that white-version of a hiphop handshake--a slap on the back and a close-in, close to the chest quick handshake, while turning the head decidedly away from the other--to avoid eye contack I suppose, but the whole thing enacted closely enough to resemble a hug.  (In spite of m&m's failure to show, there was still a lot of this going on.)  Although I don't go to openings that much any more, and although this is Toledo in Ohio (which perhaps says it all), this was the first time I encountered this sort of crowd.  They seemed harmless, even shy, very unagressive even, almost soft in their presence.  They also avoided the food, hummos and the aforementioned grapeleaves) and didn't seem to have the two bucks for a Pabst Blue Ribbon.  Or maybe they were underage?  In any case, I think they felt they were there to see "their" art and I did feel very out of place.....though not quite as strange as I felt last week.........................................when I was the invited guest at a local women's reading group.  Some of them, or at least one of them, felt it would be interesting to invite a local poet.  So I went, having supplied them with discounted copies of The Orpheus Complex, which several of them read and made notes about.  And asked questions, pointed and specific questions about what a particular line here or there meant.  Or whether a particular incident was autobiographical.  It was much more pleasant than I expected--a seeming genuine interest from a few.  A few of the others seemed totally bored or minorly irritated.  Still, quite different from a reading, and not what I expectected or feared:

The Maenads, all dressed up in their animal skins, away from home, up on the hillside, chasing down wild animals to tear the flesh.  (Yes, a few of the ladies were drinking moderate amounts of Pinot Grigio).  And then, as Ovid tells the tale, along comes the brooding Orpheus.  Torn to pieces in the frenzy.  No, it wasn't like that at all.

oh my god...

from Gilbert Sorrentino's last work, The Abyss of Human Illusion:

“In his old age, childless and thrice-divorced, with all of his old friends either dead, sick or gone to sunbaked funereal places that were beyond his wish even to imagine them, Arthur began, one day, with no plan to speak of, to tote up, idly, to be sure, his grievances: the slights he’d endured, the insults, the petty humiliations unanswered and unavenged. He listed the unreciprocated kindnesses he’d shown others, the unanswered letters, the snubs, hurts, bad manners revealed, the advantage taken of him by those he had considered friends, or, at the least, not enemies. The project, if it may be given such a name, overwhelmed him, and he began to recover incidents, long forgotten, that he added, painstakingly and precisely, to his cruel catalog. He felt as if driven before a wholly unexpected avalanche.”

Hunger beyond Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving


Do others know about that great hunger that sometimes
stems from lack of nourishment, but also emanates
from a deeper longer lack that feels like abandonment?

Even the gods grieve, though it is their fault, languishing,
no longer boastful, nameless, aghast that when beneath
the starry vault of heaven, the longed-for feast commences,

They won’t know where to sit.  After they flooded the earth
and its crass, noisy, annoying inhabitants who
interrupted their sleep, they were deluded

into thinking (don’t blame me!) that the chants and slaughtered
animals might not disappear.`(What were they thinking?
No one even left to sing their names.)  So when at last

the waters receded, taking far longer than expected,
swirling into drains below and above according
to Coriolis’ rule--the only law still in effect--

and the great restraining walls were reinstalled,
the gods were ravenous, desperate beyond hierarchy,
when Utnapishtim dismantled his boat, stacked

the boards and bound one of his precious saved creatures
to the flames.  The gods went wild, smashing into each other
in fury to get at the rising scent, some even forgoing

that prized essence for the grosser trimmings.  
Buzzing and swarming like flies above just-heaped
Garbage, steaming in the cold damp morning air.

Lev in as....

from Levinas's essay "Revelation in the Jewish Tradition.":

"...the totality of truth is made out of the contributions of a multiplicity of people: the uniquness of each act of listening carries the secret of the text; the voice of Revelation in precisely the inflection lent by each person's ear, is necessary for the truth of the Whole. The fact that God's living word can be heard in a variety of ways does not only mean that the Revelation adopts the measure of the people listening to it; rather, that measure becomes, itself, the measure of the Revelation. The multiplicity of people, each one of them indispensable, is necessary to produce all the dimensions of meaning; the multiplicity of meanings is due to the multiplicity of people."

Seems of self-evident and simple.

might as well still be poetry month

BUDDHIST TAKES, 5

 

Kids from the local arts high school

play Chick Corea’s Spain by the river

under a tent people go crazy

over mangy dogs auctioned off

the river bereft of boats compared

to last, unauctioned dogs squeal

ramped up into the Uhaul.  Guitar

solo first, then trumpet, vibes.

Beyond measure.   A sparrow dips extra long

in the drinking trough, a spider bites

my calf--milk it for all it’s worth.  Why not?

Vibes first, then guitar, no trumpet:

We don’t get around much anymore. 

Some folks dig jazz, some dig bones.

Lately, I've been stealing from other blogs.  So here's something lifted that was itself lifted:

In a review of Rebecca Goldstein's Betraying Spinoza, Harold Bloom writes:

"As in Epicurus and Lucretius, Spinoza's God is scarcely distinguishable from Nature, and is altogether indifferent to us, even to our intellectual love for him as urged upon us by Spinoza. Many Americans are persuaded that God loves each of them, personally and individually. Is that our blessing, in this era of George W. Bush, or is it not the American malaise, partly productive of the daily slaughters on the streets of Baghdad? A transfusion of Spinoza into our religion-mad nation could only be a good thing."

multiplicities

I include this passage from the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas w/o much context.  Sorry, but it's so good!

Midrash [Jewish tradition of commentary, storytelling, story retelling, filling in the gaps, etc.] as Levinas comments is:

A way of speaking that incorporates, and enlivens, that more confidential, closed and firm manner more closely linked to the bearers of meaning—bearers who will never be released from the duties of the signified…Such are the biblical verses, and even the terms used in their first, ancient deciphering by the sages of the Talmud. Tireless signifiers! But one day it is discovered that philosophy is also multiple, and that its truth is hidden, has levels and goes progressively deeper, that its texts contradict one another and that the systems are fraught with internal contradictions. Thus, it seems to me essential to consider the fact that the Jewish reading of the Scriptures is carried out in the anxiety, but also the hopeful expectation of midrash. (In the Time of the Nations, 169)

a fan of a fan's notes/

The from Frederick Exley’s  A FAN’S NOTES, which came out in 1971. A terribly painful account of his alcoholism, his love for the New York football Giants (and particularly the halfback, Frank Gifford), his time in a mental institution…..

“Never once in the two years I lived [in Chicago] there was I distressed by the possibility—as perhaps I was in New York—that there were men and women in the area seeking to commit to paper or to canvas their joy, their grief, their passion.  Never once did I detect in a saloon, as I had begun to detect in the village, the dark, brooding silhouette of a man apart, a man caught up and held in awe by the singularity of his vision.”

“After the most cursory of examinations, it was determined that  I undergo insulin-shock treatment; and, though I must have experienced qualms at the rapidity of this determination, I soon dismissed them, replacing them with the utter and adoring devotion of the doctors and the attendants that the treatment instilled.  Each morning I rolled over in bed, turned the cheeks of my ass to the ceiling and received my injection.  While the insulin began to burn the sugar—the very life—from my body, I quite cheerfully lay back to await the disappearance of debilitating dreams, ancient insults, past hurts inflicted—the disappearance, as though they had never existed, of all the things that ravage the soul and age the body, that turn the eyes inward and settle a melancholy on the countenance.”

“We were all making penance fro the grief we had caused others; and we had to believe that a treatment which one fawned and begged, and drooled and prayed, a treatment which cost much in loss of pride and manhood, in humiliating dependency, would have to bear miraculous results.  We had to believe in the end we would be purified.”

poem a day, april 30!!!!

ONE LAST ORPHIC

 

Maybe it was a good thing you lost her.

She was just no good for you, some said,

Not your type, she belonged among the dead,

In darkness—that’s why she was just a blur

When you looked back.  It showed your doubt.

Or hers—always wanting to be a bride,

Never a wife, already so allied

To dark things and silence, both a deadly route

For you.    I hope you enjoyed your sojourn

In hell, at least, lover extraordinaire,

Failed hero, psychopomp, most forlorn.

Now just practice singing songs on cue,

Stopping when it’s time.  Tell them what you

Long for, and they will tell you who you are.