THE CRUELLEST MONTH

April's ending. Always a month of odd mood swings. Rilke it was who spoke of those who "understand flowering and fading at once." Suitable language since this week in Daily Themes the assignments were "beginnings and endings." Students were invited to write two openings to their "novel" -- one in third person, one in first person. And then to conclude the same unwritten novel. In another assignment they were to write about something beginning, and in another something ending. One thing that's ending is the semester and so that's basically the point of view of this entry. I'm also trying to end the first chapter of the Pynchon book and begin the second, so that makes me perhaps more than usually aware of how beginnings and endings are indissolubly linked. I'll be ending my second reading of Against the Day this week too.

Just the facts, ma'am. The week previous the DT assignments were "Reportage," which is to say, some version of newspaper reporting. Not my favorite week by a long shot. Mainly I avoid reading newspapers and if I do read one it's for information not for "something to read." Reading it is almost beside the point. Which is why "news" is so easily replaced by radio and TV. You're only half listening to it anyway, certainly not concentrating on its verbal qualities. And yet the ideal of "good writing" does hang over the journalist sphere. In class "good journalism" equates with "New Journalism" -- that brand of fiction effects mixed with factual reporting touted by Tom Wolfe and engaged in by the better hands of the day (the '70s), such as Hunter Thompson and Joan Didion. In other words, those writers upped the readability of reportage by including a strong individual point of view rather than indulging in the bland rhetoric of "objectivity." In student assignments I got the most out of those in which the "reporter" was a part of the story.

Mistah Kurt, he dead. In April we lost Kurt Vonnegut, an ideal of the maverick writer when I was in high school, which is when I read all his novels published up to Breakfast of Champions. Vonnegut helped to consolidate the idea that the finding of an individual voice and original material and a unique perspective was not born of writing seminars and the academic study of the Greats. It came from life, from the individuality of the writer, and from the common denominator of popular writing. Vonnegut was able to sustain throughout his career the conceit of the plain-spoken man, the seer of common sense, the humorist whose humor derives from human absurdity. He doesn't provide the punch lines, he simply notes them. As a writer Vonnegut seems to me inextricably American, the voice of a homespun wisdom America likes to think it has some monopoly on. In his case I grant that ideal some credence. 

Armed and Deranged. This month presented us with the drama of the Virginia Tech killings, certainly the cruellest news story one could imagine. What as a society might we learn from this bloodbath? That to make assault weapons available to persons already deemed dangerous to themselves and others invites some form of carnage. If the killer's credit rating had been flagged, would he have been able to purchase weapons so blithely? I think not. Policing bad credit risks is apparently easier than policing ticking time bombs. 

Pantheon. After deaths, let's consider births. April is notable for the birth of some writers of staggering talent and originality. April 9th was the birthday of Charles Baudelaire, the man who created an idiom of poetry that bequeathed to symbolism, and to modernist verse in general, a sense of sensual possibilities and a subject matter that would generally come to be called "decadent." Where would we be without him? April 15th was the birthday of Henry James, the master of fine distinctions in fictional prose. If Jane Austen is great because of how well she understands how her characters think, James is even greater for how well he understands what his characters are incapable of thinking consciously, for grasping what they understand without quite knowing they do. April 23rd was the birthday of Vladimir Nabokov who I will forever toast for his novel Lolita, the audacity and near perfection of which is still staggering -- but I may be particularly susceptible to its foreigner's eye view of American banality. That same date is traditionally the birthdate of William Shakespeare and I have to say that it is in April and in October that I think most of the Bard. In fall it tends to be the tragedies, in April the comedies. The magic embrace of his language at the service of "love's dalliance" re-enchants a world reviving from "the sere, the fallen leaf." The Tempest also does good service at this time, since at semester's end there's always a sense that "our revels now are ended."

PUBLIC COMMENTARY

This week Daily Themes assignments were for Public Opinion. One of the assignments called for a review of or response to some kind of art work. I realized the extent to which writing about music has become an aspiration -- having as it does both cultural critique cool as well as being a means to come to terms with what seems the single-most influential art-form. Everyone has a soundtrack to their lives, everyone has tunes in the car and while working and while on public transport. This is the iPod era and all that.

It was an interesting week if only because students had to 'take a stand' in some sense, whether praising something -- a Bloc Party concert, a new song by Björk -- or knocking something -- Neil Young's Living with War, music criticism itself. Students also wrote essays on beliefs and two centered on belief in the performance of and the teaching of music. On the other hand there was a jaundiced view of the jaundiced view of "American Idol." The topics made me consider my own blog-fueled efforts to get down thoughts about musical artists and particular albums that have left their mark on my consciousness, not only to indicate my tastes but to make some larger claim for how music has affected my life.

What some of the reading this week caused me to think about is both the personal and popular element of music criticism -- what really is the criteria by which one can criticize it? Once one moves outside the realm of what matters to oneself and why, where is there any basis for what is truly "significant" or truly excellent or truly execrable? This seems to be tied to the problem of pop or rock music more than other arts because it is so deliberately a popular phenomena, so clearly channeled for broad public consumption. And those more esoteric avenues are by their nature reserved for the coterie that can admire them. So, you're either "in" or "out" when it comes to vast areas of the musical landscape.

I think that's as it should be. I think the only thing that makes my comments on music possible is that I'm deliberately historicizing. There's not much I could say about music today, what is new and noteworthy is for the new generation to decide. What I'm after is something like what I do as a literary scholar: describe a context in which the music I'm discussing "belongs" or makes a certain kind of sense. More and more I see that context as almost wholly personal -- which is not to say private, for the personal does partake of various public perceptions and the popular culture of any given time. What interests me is how my own selection occurred within those contexts, and what I can say about that now. "Now that," as BD sez, "the past is gone."

POETRY COMMENTARY

On Andrew Shields' blog there's a list of seven poems that link to seven poems from Poetry Daily's poems for the week. In Andrew's "Poetry Daily Project," his class votes on them to choose best poem, and he accepts votes and comments on his blog as well. Any excuse to read poems is a good excuse I guess, even if it's a kind of "American Idol" type gambit. I'm pasting here my comments on the poems.

It seems the order of the day this week is to write poems as clear as good prose, as Pound advocated. The only problem with that: it doesn't make for particularly exciting poems, in this case. Examples are Shulman ("Fifth of July"), Bakken ("Portrait Detail"), Bradfield ("Industry"), Zimmer ("Suck It Up"). The others try something else: Shuttle ("Dukedom"), Wright ("Dear night"), Sleigh ("Blueprint"). My top three consists of Bakken, Bradfield and Sleigh.

Shulman loses out for some clunky enjambments and (drum roll please) "bayberry candles / of uncertainty." I really think this sort of thing would be flagged in a beginner's course, but when you've published lots and won awards and all that, you can be as bad as you want, apparently.

Zimmer is basically prose and, what's more, prosaic. That's the way he writes, and he's good at how he writes, but it never stands out for me beyond what a short story would do (I want poetry to be something else).

Shuttle tries something else, but just doesn't know when to stop. It's overlong, redundant, repetitious, finally precious. It didn't have to be. At least it is imaginative use of language (at times) but with some clunkers as well: "he ravels me into his dukedom's conchology"...

Wright also tries something else. One-liner poetry. "No condoms for the heart" -- and that's not even the worst line. The worst line is "for what's worth" as introductory clause to the stats on kids and guns. Rhetorically it's pointless in a poem that is trying to be streamlined and it also, I think, cracks the facade of the poem, I don't think deliberately.

Bradfield's is just an ok little poem, but because it doesn't try to inflate itself it doesn't do the pretentious stuff that others here do. And it's a bit more "interesting" (as in unusual) than Zimmer's slice of life.

Sleigh almost wins, for me, for pulling out an ending that works after almost ruining it with his clumsy re-cap of a Homeric moment; the fact that he comments on its ineffectiveness and makes that a way of getting somewhere else indicates some very real poetic strengths. But it's still too much in the "welcome to my head" genre.

So Bakken wins for actually having a subject and rendering it well and just making us think about it in a way we might not otherwise. For me, poetry is all about "as if" and Bakken writes "as if" that portrait detail were simply waiting for a poem to notice it. And despite its fidelity to form, the poem is as clear as good prose.

EASTER EVERYWHERE

Title of a Thirteenth Floor Elevators' LP, yes. But it is Easter today, after all. A time of year that always has a kind of significance, seeming to herald spring more effectively than the equinox does in this climate. This year not so much, still very March-like with winds and occluded skies, but I'm not complaining -- and anyway sometimes Easter is in March. 

Pa's teapucs. For several years I had an Easter ritual of staying up till dawn reading Finnegans Wake aloud on tape fueled by chartreuse vert. There's something about those Joycean cadences in the wee hours of the night. In Infinite Jest there's a DJ, Mme Psychosis, who only talks, or sometimes reads, on the air. I used to have a kind of fantasy in which I imagined my reading of FW going out on the airwaves and into the sleeping craniums of whoever might be tuned in (I never really imagined who that might be). Stuff like this, from last week's reading: Since the days of Roamaloose and Rehmoose the pavanos have been strident through their struts of Chapelldiseut, the vaulsies have meed and youdled through the purly ooze of Ballybough, many a mismy cloudy has tripped taintily along that hercourt strayed reelway and the rigadoons have held ragtimed revels on the platauplain of Grangegorman; and, though since then sterlings and guineas have been replaced by brooks and lions and some progress has been made on stilts and the races have come and gone and Thyme, that chef of seasoners, has made his usual astewte use of endadjustables and whatnot willbe isnor was, those danceadeils and cancanzanies have come stimmering down for our begayment through the bedeafdom of po's taeorns, the obcecity of pa's teapucs, as lithe and limbfree limber as when momie mummed at ma.--FW II.2 (236) 

Parables. This week in Daily Themes the assignments were Fables, Parables, Aphorisms. Wisdom literature, I suppose. I learned that to write a Fable successfully it's best if it has a tripartite form and if you don't try to mix humans with the animals. The animals in a Fable are a world unto themselves. For Parables almost anything goes, but not everything works. Those were best which maintained some element of mystery or something that could only be settled by intuition, rather than by some easy allegorical one-to-one correspondence. I guess it would be cute if I were to write a series of aphorisms about fables and parables, but I'm not in the mood. I can say that if you write half a page of aphorisms and three or four have the ring of authentic aphorisms or actually communicate something witty or profound, then you've succeeded. 

Many complain that the words of the wise are always merely parables and of no use in daily life, which is the only life we have. When the sage says, 'Go beyond,' he does not mean that we should cross to some actual place, which we could do anyhow if the labor were worth it; he means some fabulous yonder, something unknown to us, something too that he cannot designate more precisely, and therefore cannot help us here in the very least. All these parables really set out to say merely that the incomprehensible is incomprehensible, and we know that already. But the cares we have to struggle with every day: that is a different matter. Concerning this a man once said: Why such reluctance? If you only followed the parables you yourselves would become parables and with that be rid of all your daily cares. Another said: I bet that is also a parable. The first said: You have won. The second said: But unfortunately only in parable. The first said: No, in reality: in parable you have lost. --Franz Kafka, "On Parables" 

V. 'n' me. Work on the V. chapter proceeds a-pace, despite an annoying headcold. If my luck or perseverance holds, I could be done this difficult 2nd section and into the next part before again footing my way campusward on Tuesday. Speaking of perseverance or its lack, "and then there was one" describes the status of students still engaged in reading Against the Day with me. Normally that would be demoralizing, but thanks to my newly undertaken task of writing on TP's fiction, I take it as an indication of the need for such a book. I think that one reason Pynchon is not better received at places like Yale and Princeton is that there is no good recent book on his work to help make the case for his work's importance. So, incentive enough, I'd say. 

Young again. Just got the new release, Neil Young live at Massey Hall in Toronto from Jan. 1971, with Neil all of twenty-five. Lovely, so intimate (just Neil and acoustic guitar and piano), fragile, dreamy, and pointed as so many of those early Young songs are. This performance catches him just as he was getting launched on the "sensitive songwriter" bandwagon that had him rubbing elbows with the likes of James Taylor; pre-Harvest, but four of the songs later recorded for Harvest are here in demo-like clarity without Nitze's strings or the Nashville musicians, and "The Needle and the Damage Done" is here with a nice preface from Young explaining the occasion for the song. 

Won't you help me please / I'm growing old Won't you help me sneeze / I've caught a cold --John Cale, "Please" (1970)

THROUGH THE YEARS, 13

Forty years ago: April, 1967

The Indigent Ministers' 1967 release, Camp Scratch, is out of print and hard to find, lamentably. I didn't become familiar with this oddly quirky band until 1978's disco-era return to psychedelia, The Episcopalian Alien Sarcophagal Society, which is probably my favorite if only because it's so completely out-of-step with the timbre of its times. But the first album by Bill Melater and company has to rank as one of the more glaringly overlooked gems of the era.

The arrangements show the influence of The Mothers of Invention's Freak Out from the previous year (notably the noise fest of "Help, I'm a Rock") and now that I've become more familiar with the '60s output of The Beach Boys, it's easier for me to see why some of Melater's songs have been likened to "Brian Wilson meets Syd Barrett": there's something demented about the lyrics and the music is childlike in a kinda sinister way. Note though that this album, released in April 1967, precedes Pink Floyd's debut by several months. Note too that the attribution of "harmonica--a friend" in the liner notes sparked much conjecture that this was possibly an appearance by Dylan during his reclusive period after the motorcycle accident. It's never been completely disproved. More certain is the likelihood that Melater actually penned the lyrics for the album, even though they were initially said to be the work of eight-year-old Matthew Thomas, who earned the nickname "Little Shelley" at the time, for his precocious poetry. Simply put, the album is couched in a certain mystery, maybe even allegory, and should be added to any attempt to sum up psychedelia pre-Sgt. Pepper.

The title song runs for eleven minutes and clearly shows the influence of Dylan's lengthy cut of two years previous, "Desolation Row." Melater's sense of phantasmagoria is campier (pun intended) than Dylan's and that's part of the fun: "Aardvarks eating orange ice cream / down there by the mill stream / keep me contented with the wilds" isn't a line you're likely to find in Dylan's repertoire, though the delivery is reminiscent of the Man from Minnesota -- but not outright parodic as in Zappa's "Trouble Coming Everyday." Note too that The Beatles' "Penny Lane" topped the charts in March, '67 and "Strawberry Fields Forever" hit the Top Ten in April, and hallucinogen-inspired retrospects on childhood seemed to be the order of the day. Fine with me, I was only a kid at the time and associate both those songs with my childhood.

The Ministers' debut strikes me as a kind of nightmare version of a Disney film in which it's not so much that the visuals have changed as that their implications have become somehow unsettling. See for instance "Doom Troop": "we like our work, work, work / we never shirk, shirk, shirk / the tasks we're made to do / oh yes, for me, me, me / it's quite a spree, spree, spree / to have to clean the zoo." For a different feel, there's the obligatory vaguely medieval sound that crops up on so many albums of the era, yes, replete here with harpsichord and mandolin, "She Spins": "Nights of gold thread / pulled from her own head / she spins / a trestle of tresses / she spins / a flaxen ladder / to let him in." Melater was always an imaginative lyricist and the late '60s was the perfect period for the kind of play he's prone to. Musically, the album is dense and layered with lots of overdubs that seem to be deliberately discordant with the basic track. Sounds have a tendency to leap out at odd moments. It's dated, yes, but still fun.

When I first heard the album, I was put off by the lackluster production -- it certainly sounds like a shoestring recording -- but there doesn't seem to be any CD version, remastered or otherwise, coming in the future. Find a vinyl copy if you can.

Now we run
Because it's fun
Never caring what comes next
What germs we catch
No postmortem or pretext
Just Camp Scratch
--Melater / Thomas, "Camp Scratch" (1967)