THROUGH THE YEARS, 8

25 years ago: March, 1982

Lou Reed founded The Velvet Underground and with some version of that band produced four mercurial albums from 1967-70. Then he faded away, only to be resurrected by David Bowie (in the era of rampant Ziggyness, when glam was queen) who produced Reed's comeback LP (and, for some, finest solo album) Transformer. The album was a hit as was, improbably, "Walk on the Wild Side" (which wryly referred, uncensored on Top 40 radio, to a transvestite "giving head," among other things AM hits tended not to mention in those days). Lou followed that up in 1973 with Berlin, which is for me one of the greatest "concept albums" of the '70s and one of the darkest, most unrelenting albums ever made. It established Lou as a standard unto himself. Even Pete Townshend's excellent and more sprawling Quadrophenia, released that same year, isn't as powerful in giving a sense of a complex story unfolding in brief elliptical glimpses.

The Blue Mask was in some ways Lou's second comeback album (returning to RCA after several years of uneven albums on Arista). Rather than dwell on what happened to him in the '70s, it's better to look at how unlikely it was that anyone whose career began in the mid-60s would be producing some of their higher quality work in the early '80s. But Lou did it with this album and its follow-up. The strength of the albums is based on some of the more varied and nuanced songwriting of his career combined with a clean-edged sound composed mainly of Fernando Saunders on bass and Robert Quine on lead, with Lou himself working out a harsh but melodic rhythm guitar that gave the songs just the right gritty, poetic edge. Listen to it unaccompanied on "The Heroine," a surreal ditty that neatly plays off the title of Lou's signature tune (and in some ways theme song) "Heroin" to offer a visionary sense of sacrifice and, possibly, redemption.

The album's sense of redemption is significant due to its autobiographical shadings -- "My House," a song in honor of Delmore Schwartz, poses the doomed poet as both a mentor of Lou's for a time at Syracuse University and as a ghost come to visit the mature songwriter Lou has become (sacrificial figure redeemed). Then too there are two songs in honor of Lou's wife Sylvia that suggest the degree to which a beloved in Lou's life has exorcized some of his more self-destructive tendencies. And, lest we assume that a settled life means Lou has become boring, we have "Average Guy" as a joke on the idea of a "normal" Lou ("I'm average in everything I do / my temperature is 98.2 / I'm just an average guy") and songs like "Underneath the Bottle" to record -- quite tongue-in-cheek -- the kind of lifestyle the singer has been known for. Then there are the show-stoppers: "Waves of Fear" with its distinctive, churning, fat-bottomed bass as Lou serves up a catalogue of neuroses; "The Gun," with Lou returning to that cold, razor-like voice heard on Berlin to deliver deadpan the musings of an armed housebreaker; and "The Blue Mask" which kicks ass sonically as Lou -- always willing to flirt with the Freudian myths of what gives birth to our deepest anxieties -- literalizes castration anxiety and unmasks a sado-masochistic thrill in punishment that "Venus in Furs" had only played with for kicks.

Finally, there's "The Day John Kennedy Died" which takes its place with other songs that mused about "the hour of the assassin" that reigned in the '60s and found its later manifestations in attempts on Presidents Ford and Reagan and the killing of John Lennon in December 1980: Ray Davies' "Killer's Eyes" (1981) and Peter Gabriel's "Family Snapshot" (1980). Lou's lyrics, when at their most sensitive, sometimes drop the ball into bathos or awkwardness, but something in the earnest assertiveness of "I dreamed I was the president of these United States / I dreamed that I was young and smart and it was not a waste" registers a sadly aware conviction of some deep failure in U.S. society. Lou, in his early 20s when JFK was gunned down, perhaps found in the murder of a musical contemporary an incentive to reconstruct musically a bit of his own journey. The Blue Mask still holds up as the testament of Lou at 40, moving toward middle-age, still an original, but also a survivor.

Take the blue mask from my face / And look me in the eyes
--Lou Reed, "The Blue Mask" (1982)

TW3, WHC

Lauding Auden Wednesday was the 100th anniversary of the birth of W. H. Auden. There was an afternoon festival in his honor at the WHC, but I was unable to attend due to other obligations. I feel remiss at not posting anything that day to laud Auden, but, though I recognize him as the last great poet of the modernist generation and the first -- and possibly only -- indisputably great poet born in the 20th century, yet he wasn't, isn't one of my main men. That has to do with his formalism, with his Britishness, with his idiom that is never so elusive as Eliot, nor quite as musical as Yeats, nor simply as imaginatively challenging as Stevens. Auden's "the first of those who come after" that great generation, but not freed of it, as those born in the '20s are.

As the First Man of the 20th century he has my respect, but he's far too in command of himself to earn my love -- as those more doom-laden figures like Dylan Thomas, John Berryman and Robert Lowell did in my youth. My respect for Auden hinges, more than anything, on the superlative poem, "In Praise of Limestone," which is a poem to rival "Prufrock" in its sonorous assurances and idiosyncratic voice and viewpoint, if any poem is. 

Impaired Lives X2 Last night the WHC screened two films brilliantly paired the way that Mouchette and The Ratcatcher were in the fall (see Dismal Lives X2): Michelangelo Antonioni's The Red Desert (1964) and Todd Haynes' Safe (1995). Both films feature female protagonists who simply can't cope any more with the lives they lead. Both women are comfortable bourgeois wives -- Monica Vitti, in Desert, is a mother; Julianne Moore, in Safe, is a stepmother. One might say that both women need a release -- but what will such release come from? 

Antonioni's heroine, in Bologna, Italy, is at least willing to consider that "amour" might be the answer -- but there's no reason to evoke Emma Bovary (as Todd Field's current film Little Children does) pining for a man as a means to escape. Richard Harris is a successful business magnate, looking like a young Brando and certainly virile and sensitive-enough (on the surface) for the task. But he "doesn't help" her, she says. Yet the idea that some kind of deliverance through an affair is possible at least hovers at the edge of much of the film, though in Antonioni's world personal connection is always inadequate.

Haynes' heroine, in San Bernadino, CA, searching for an escape, seeks it in self-help constructions: Wrenwood, a special facility set up for those who suffer from our toxic environment (in all its senses). The absence of any real sexual tension in the film suggests something about how far we've come from the world of Antonioni where the fact that sex fails is still presented as a significant (if predictable) failure. For Carol White, the only answer is to live in a pristine cell that looks something like a moon-module: a forecast of how we'll live when earth becomes unlivable. But the other characters' comfortable acceptance of the comfortable lives they live (with painted-on childish simplicity) contrasts so sharply with Carol's search for an alternative that she seems demented, obsessive, sickened by her culture in some deeply psychosomatic way. When Carol, looking haggard and sallow and splotchy, faces herself in the mirror at the film's end, murmuring "I love you," the image resonates with a question: who will love us when we become unlovable (analogous to a world that is unlivable), but it also sustains Carol's hope: that learning to love herself is the answer, however New Agey (and Wrenwood is plenty New Agey) that sounds. 

For Guilliana in Desert, that idea is more remote. The kind of satisfaction with herself that Carol pursues single-mindedly is not an option in this film (Antonioni doesn't "discover" CA until Zabriskie Point), and so the search for fulfilment that Guillana embarks on can lead only back to her role as mother, in some kind of wise détente with the sickening threats of the modern world. In part this is because Antonioni finds beauty even in the desolation of industrial waste and the shapes and colors of machinery. The film is a tone poem of colors and shapes and gives us a world that has at least visual interest -- a great virtue for an artist such as Antonioni and his viewers, whether or not it offers much to his heroine (is her beauty, like art itself, any consolation?). 

Both Vitti and Moore are perfect in their roles. Vitti's feral eyes, so dark-rimmed, thick hair coruscating any old way, and face of a Cinquecento madonna all add up to a woman whose interior life is at odds with her appearance. Her suffering is personal and finds no means of sublimation, no matter how sublime she appears (though Antonioni seems not willing to surrender woman as madonna -- if the final scene of Vitti and the boy is deemed positive). Moore's Carol is vacuous and brittle, her suffering gives her no depth (as her disconnected parroting in her birthday speech show), but makes her different -- even in the touchy-feelie world of Wrenwood -- and that difference makes her a sign for us all, a warning sign.

Hear my voice, hear my voice It's saying something not very nice --David Byrne, "Warning Sign" (1978)

SENTENCES (CAKES, LEAVES)

This week the task was sentences. Short, clipped sentences. Long, meandering sentences involving many clauses, sentences that flow and dip and weave, picking up details along the way like so many twigs afloat on a swiftly moving current, bearing the reader along through no effort of his own, letting him glimpse the world, as it were, through the windows of a moving train where each sight registers itself on his vision like a new idea, a new feature added to those that have already accumulated; in both similes -- river, train -- the notion of accretion, of things adding up or adding themselves to what is already known and stored. Flowing sentences can also record with fidelity the stages of action, the precise sequence of activities in the relentless progress of the day -- or in the progress of thought: the shifts, the breaks, the resumptions.

It was a good week for the class. Some of the students did their best writing so far this semester. Which is good, as midterm is approaching.

It was also a week in which extreme cold gave way to some thawing, and, for me, a week of varied readings: in the group discussion of Against the Day, the sense that those few still keeping up are in for the long run (we've only reached page 318 in discussion) was appreciated as I found myself somewhat quizzical about some of the turns the book takes (and this is my second time through!); in the group discussion of Finnegans Wake, a smaller group was able to be a bit more leisurely on the opening of Book 2, where the children's pantomime for the parents is introduced, and the book, as it were, begins all over again; in the poetry reading group, some selections from Ashbery's latest, A Worldly Country, provided, as usual, the kind of delights that Ashbery regularly concocts: that sense of every word meaning something else, how is it achieved?

A low-grade fever install itself.
These were dancers once, with faces
and senses of humor. Which of course wasn't
too much to ask, and so she came through smiling,
good-natured to the end. The cakes that were served--
is there a record of those? Or leaves collected
in the hollow of a stump, something one
would wish to have included in the reckoning
even if it was never going to be reckoned,
or small sail breasting the apparent tide,
on and out of the forever harbor, just this once?
--"Autumn Tea Leaves"

Spending so much time in the world of prose where I expect students' words to create a scene, a definite effect, and where I even try to hold TP's flights of fancy to some kind of manifest plot (oh, I forgot to mention that I made it through the first 1/4 of Infinite Jest as well -- a book in which -- unlike TP -- the sense, generally not even the implication, of any passage is not in doubt, but in which the sheer overload of information and the glacial pace of depiction plays havoc with the notion of narrated time), or where, as in FW, I am at times able to read a story that is being told in many different ways simultaneously, I find in Ashbery's poems the refreshing aspect of poetry that sets the terms of what poetry should be: a speech 'as if.' As if the things said were adequate to the occasion of their enunciation. The occasion is never known for certain but the adequation is assumed; it "controls" the movements the voice will take. But any word chosen -- "fever," "dancers," "cakes," "leaves" -- might almost be any other word, is at least a word in quotation marks, as a term the world, not the mind, provides.

The mind has no words for its own interior thoughts and rhythms and so must make use of those the world provides. The small sail breasting "the apparent tide" -- a phenomenal thing, a thing possibly seen or envisioned -- "on and out of the forever harbor" -- a place that is encompassing (as a harbor surrounds) but also an ingress and egress, and also interminable, "forever" -- appears to "breast the tide" "just this once," a moment which, like leaves and cakes, faces and sense of humor, must be included in the reckoning, "even if it was never going to be reckoned." The pathos of the things that will be forgotten because never reckoned, and the hope that perhaps they will be reckoned ("one would wish") is what gives the force to that small sail as it beats on against the tide of time: poems are "leaves collected / in the hollow of a stump."

Bethicket me for the stump of a beech if I have the poultriest notions what the farest he all means.
--JJ, FW 1.5

THROUGH THE YEARS, 7

30 years ago: Feb. 1977

Marquee Moon was Television's first album, and Television was the first band that was "mine." Everyone else I listened to had begun their recording careers in my childhood (some, like The Doors or Hendrix, were already history). A debut album released in the last half of my last year of HS (though I didn't hear it till the following fall) inaugurated Tom Verlaine's band as "of the moment" (and "the moment" was my coming-of-age).

Verlaine's contemporaries, like Springsteen and Waits, began their careers in '73, during the singer-songwriter glut of my adolescence, and were molded by an older sensibility. Verlaine and company were "new wave," which meant they had a post-glam moxie and a rock club-edge that seeped into the music and gave it its non-mainstream bite. Two guitars, bass, drums, and Verlaine's strangled vocals. Lyrics that recalled the minimal lyricism of some of Jim Morrison's best -- a poetic sensibility refined to attitude, expressed in oracular phrases, eschewing the expansive word-pourings of Dylan, Springsteen, Patti Smith.

The latter was the herald of this sound on her debut Horses (1975): call it New York art rock. But what made Television more attractive to me was the lack of "I'm a poet and I know it" posturing that Smith indulged in. Television was leaner, tenser, offering an aesthetic stance that, in 1977, seemed to invoke a future for serious rock. I was induced to buy this album after becoming familiar with some of John Cale's Island recordings on the comp album Guts, released in Fall '77, and the possibilities of this kind of music, dating from '75 to '79, would be taken up to some extent in some early '80s bands of my g-g-generation such as Psychedelic Furs, Echo & The Bunnymen, The Cure, Bauhaus, R.E.M., and Dream Syndicate.

The main thing about Television -- for ears that began to appreciate the satori-through-electricity states induced by hearing Jerry Garcia play live (my first Dead show was in Sept. '77, in Englishtown, NJ, outdoors, enhanced in ways I won't elaborate here but which, contrary to received wisdom about memory impairment risks, were and are quite memorable) -- was that, unlike punk which would shortly be assaulting our shores, Verlaine and Richard Lloyd were guitarists. Verlaine was new wave's answer to the guitar heroes still going strong on the Philly airwaves of my immediate orbit. Like Talking Heads, who debuted later this same year, Television was a band that seemed to know the music I knew and were interested in going somewhere with that knowledge. And that meant finding a way of playing live, not of hiding out in some never-neverland recording studio.

What punk gave to all this was the willingness to make it fast and dirty and ugly, to eschew the sensual professional sound-doctoring that bands like Steely Dan, The Eagles, and The Doobie Brothers had taken as far as it could go. The hedonism of such music (saturated in CA sun) was its own reward, no doubt, but it was a far cry from winter in NYC in the closing years of the '70s, and that difference made all the difference. It meant lighting a candle for the Velvet Underground instead of The Beach Boys as the Creator of "the Sound." Guitars in dialogue, paired down rhythm section, minimal use of keyboards. Chords! Raw playing that could be set beside Neil Young's incarnations with Crazy Horse: fuck-you-in-the-gut guitar work that at times weeps and sings and choirs like bells.

I wasn't part of the CBGB scene, but it seemed important at the time to know about it. And so when I hear this album I hear a kind of call-to-arms. So many parts of it are intrinsic to whatever turning 18 meant, at the time (and, for a bookish nerd, it was refreshing to find poetry cool in a streetwise way, and to see Rimbaud name-dropped in music mag copy): "I understand all destructive urges / It seems so perfect / I see no evil"; "You know it's all like some new kind of drug / My senses are sharp and my hands are like gloves"; "I want a nice little boat / made out of ocean"; "Elevation -- don't go to my head"; "I sleep light / on these shores tonight"; "I remember / how the darkness doubled / I recall / lightning struck itself / I was listening / listening to the rain / I was hearing / hearing something else'; "Tell me who sends these / infamous gifts. / To make such a promise / and make such a slip"; "It's warm and it's calm and it's perfect / It's too 'too too' to put a finger on."

Pull down the future with the one you love
--Tom Verlaine, "See No Evil" (1977)

VIVE L'IMPÉRIALISME CINÉPHILE!

I caught a few more films at the WHC festival yesterday: a film made by Pasolini about a film he wanted to make about India (1968); a film by Agnès Varda about The Black Panthers in Oakland (1968); a silent film of very deliberately paced images involving a man, a woman and their child, by Philippe Garrel, a short made by French film actor Pierre Clementi in Paris and Rome (where he was acting in Bertolucci's Partner) during May and June '68. 

In comments after the Varda film, Prof. Hazel Carby took issue with the extent to which the Eurocentric choices of the festival excluded film-makers of color. And that the New Wave-influenced projects of Pasolini and Varda, as documentaries, were made as outsiders directing a European gaze on "the others" in these postcolonial situations. 

This was so obviously the case that it did indeed need to be said. But, that said, the festival was intended to be about Europe and its cinematic response to the crisis year of '68. No American film-makers -- of North or South America -- were in the festival, neither were the British. So it seems, in a sense, beside the point to decry, as Carby seemed to, the absence of film-makers who didn't fall into the festival's purview and who, from what she said, made their notable works after the nexus of '67-'69 that the festival explored. But her larger point was still to the point, I had to concede. We were watching another version of the Eurocentrism of Comp Lit/Film Studies and that in itself is indicative of the fact that "the world" certainly did not change in '68. The 'cultural imperialism' of Europe, if losing ground in some areas -- notably in painting and popular culture -- kept its hold on "le cinéma" (despite the fact that the New Wave auteurs were all enthusiasts of '40s Hollywood films). Feeling guilty-as-charged myself, I only sat through films by film-makers whose names I knew due to la nouvelle vague. 

Pasolini's film struck me as a quaint attempt by an older, humanist form of inquiry to come to terms -- terms which are already suspect -- with a vast situation: the state of post-independence India. The "humanist" element was found in the fact that he expected to get some insight through a) a story of a Maharajah who sacrificed himself to a starving tiger and her cubs (certainly intended as a kind of allegory), b) direct questions to people who reply on camera. What mainly emerges is the power of the camera, and a special kind of Western presence on the streets of India. 

Something similar happens in Varda's film on The Panthers, the narrating soundtrack of which sounds like one of those educational movies we used to have to watch in Social Studies. In fact, the film wouldn't have been out-of-place in such a course. In both cases, the documenting presence had the aura of Dylan's Mr. Jones. And yet, in both cases, the footage itself was well-worth seeing.

Le Révélateur (1967), by Garrel, is something I would've loved as a young man. When my friend Tim Gilfillan and I used to sit around in art class in high school planning movies we'd like to make, this is the kind of thing we were groping toward: no sound, no dialogue, no music, just images. In this case the images were about a little nuclear family, with the young boy as the main focus. Some of the sequences were incredibly effective despite the obvious limitations of the film-maker. In such a film (as Tim and I understood even back then) everything is a matter of location, pacing, cutting and lighting. Garrel used lighting and location to considerable poetic effect. Moi, I would've preferred a bit more imagination (and rigor) in editing and pacing. Both Le Révélateur and Godard's La Chinoise went on too long, producing a fatigue that more nimble editing (and a willingness to shorten the film) could have avoided. That said, I was glad to see both these works.

Clementi's La révolution n'est qu'un un début: continuons le combat was a lot of double-exposed film which at times approached stock footage of hippydom. The only really interesting part was the actual footage of "les événements de Mai" looped into the collage -- which bore labels that shouted at us things like "L'IBERTÉ" (sic), "LA RÉVOLUTION PERMANENTE," "POUVOIR DE L'IMMAGINATION" (sic). It too was longer (at 24 minutes) than it had to be, but as a curio of the time it had some interest. 

My gripe with the festival was that it would've been much more interesting to show the "big name" film that Clementi was working on with Bertolucci. Partner -- with its send-up of (or is that homage to) many Godardian effects -- would've fit right in and then, of course, we would've been able to watch Clementi on the other side of the camera, where he truly belongs. And, while I'm at it, if Britain had been deemed a part of "Europe," a showing of Lindsay Anderson's excellent "if..." (1968) would've fit into the theme of "revolution" better than some of the other films in the proceedings. If nothing else it would've shown that such fulminations even found their way to Britain! . . . home of "sleepy London town" and "the well-respected man about town," and those "dedicated followers of fashion." 

In any case, I have to admit I avoided most of the discussions. In part because, unlike a literary conference where we may not have read the books under discussion, or not mere moments ago, discussion of films we are about to see or have just seen strike me as, in the first case, irrelevant (I tend to ignore "forwards" in books too) and, in the second, impertinent -- if only because, after seeing a film, we all have something to say about what we saw and prepared statements clash with the mood of spontaneous response.

Hey, professor, could you turn out the lights? Let's roll the film... 

--Laurie Anderson, "Big Science" (1982)

EN ATTENDANT GODARD

At the WHC this weekend there is a film conference called "Sixty-Eight! Europe, Cinema, Revolution?" Friday night, the festival screened Jean-Luc Godard's La Chinoise, featuring the ever-effervescent Jean-Pierre Léaud and Anna Wiazemsky, the fascinating gamine with eyes like Shelley Duvall's who starred in Au Hasard Balthazar. Here, they play a radical couple disillusioned with Soviet Communism and the French Communist Party who have turned their eyes, as many extreme Leftists did at the time, to Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution in China.

That much I already knew about the film. What I didn't know is how wry, amusing and silly the film often is. The film struck me as a knowing send-up of the pretensions of the bourgeois students who -- inspired by Mao -- sought to close the French universities, as if that gesture alone would constitute a revolution. But that's hindsight, of course. Godard, while portraying the naive revolutionary "re-education" this small band of enthusiasts undergoes, also provides us with a sense of the degree to which this "revolution" is generational. Late in the film, Veronique (Anna W) encounters a former teacher on a train. He had been imprisoned for his radical stance toward the Algerian war. Veronique gives him her spiel and is met with a sympathetic but much more informed view of what the revolution of her and her comrades amounts to: a few disgruntled students who are angry with the university system. That this discontent would snowball into the events of May '68 is what gives La Chinoise its place in history. What we know, as the professor does not, is that there are numerous "cells" like Veronique's comprised of discontented students who will in fact change the system.

The "band apart" of this film consists of four or five -- one is ejected from "the party" for his appraisal that Veronique, influenced by her boyfriend (an actor), has confused politics with theater; the other -- Kirilov -- kills himself rather than carry out an assassination, fulfilling an amusing parallel to Dostoevsky's Demons.

The film, en attendant '68, is also en attendant Week End, Godard's more satisfying and successful film of the following year. The two films use many of the same devices: title cards that spout proclamations, characters reading from books, direct address to an off-camera questioner that gives a fake documentary feel to the proceedings at times, cutaways -- in this film, often images from comics or of toy guns -- and a sense of unpredictable absurdity. The surreal sense of absurdity is greatly heightened in Week End, no doubt because its protagonists are a bourgeois couple ripe for re-education, and perhaps because Godard, in the subsequent film, sees the revolutionaries as just another part of the insupportable madness of modern life.

In La Chinoise, the madness of trying to change society with a few bombs or well-placed bullets is portrayed, it seems to me, as a kind of folie à quatre so that we see both what is appealing and what appalling about these youths who sought to re-educate themselves without sufficient education. And yet, one can also imagine how the film would play to teens and college students of the time, as it sketches a degree of commitment to social change that many must have found exciting and, as espoused by Anna and Jean-Pierre, irresistible.

The festival prefaced the film with remarks by a Chinese scholar who reminded the audience of how devastating Mao's Cultural Revolution actually was in China, so as to underscore the naivety of the French youths. But it seems to me the film does that enough already, and that in 1967. The pop song on the soundtrack with its chorus of "Mao, Mao" suggests the extent to which "the glamour" of the Cultural Revolution resided in its remoteness from Western culture, and in its radical revenge on the established intellectuals. When Jean-Pierre begins to boogie to it briefly, Mao's Cultural Revolution aligns with the revolution in pop culture, and the gap between the two "programs" is explicit.

But if you go carrying pictures of Chairman Mao
You ain't gonna make it with anyone anyhow
--Lennon/McCartney, "Revolution" (1968)

DIALOGUE

This week in Daily Themes, students had to write dialogue. The main lesson I learned, and tried to impart, is that dialogue is best with as little authorial intrusion as possible. This has become the norm in contemporary fiction, in part -- I don't doubt -- because of the influence of TV and movies. As readers we've grown impatient with some authorial know-it-all trying to cue us as to how we should take a statement, or trying to orchestrate how things are said. But it's also the fact that many writers these days are trained by writing programs and the beginning writer's awkward attempts to "be a narrator" are quickly jettisoned in favor of "just the talk, m'am." I found myself doing that too. Since it was "dialogue week," that was OK, but still -- at some point (unless one is writing plays or scripts) that pesky narrator persona is going to have to reappear and orchestrate talk with action and description and analysis and . . . the whole shebang.

A: So, you're saying that dialogue is best without a narrator?
B: "Best"? Well, not best, necessarily, but . . . in this case, certainly preferable.
A: And dialogue has to speak for itself?
B: Dialogue, as Elizabeth Bowen said, "is what the characters do to each other."
A: Do to each other? I thought it was what the characters say to each other.
B: Well, obviously it is that, but . . .
A: ...
B: You have to think of words as actions -- or rather you have to think of dialogue as verbal action. The best examples were the ones in which some crux or "turn" or . . . it could be a silence, an avoidance, a confrontation, an outburst -- something happened in the discussion.
A: I get it!
B: ...
A: I'm having an epiphany!
B: Something like that, but more subtle, obviously.
A: I know. But how subtle? What makes us notice the shift?
B: For instance, the introduction of a previously lacking irony.
A: Or sobs of despair, perhaps.
B: A loaded gun aimed at the first speaker.
A: But that would have to be narrated, wouldn't it?
B: What are you doing with that? Where did you get that gun?
A: It's not even loaded.
B: Nor is it really there.
A: And yet . . .
B: It would signal a shift, it would concentrate the power in the relationship.
A: You could shoot me, in other words.
B: In other words, shoot you.
A: A pause.
B: Well, I also noticed that in reading a dialogue between two voices, the reader naturally sympathizes with one speaker or the other. That the dialogue is not only what the characters do to each other, it's something the characters do to the reader. They assert themselves almost independently of the narrator.
A: The dialogic, or something like that?
B: Yes.
A: The characters take over the narrative. Six Characters in Search of an Author, kinda thing.
B: You've been here before.
A: So what do we do now?
B: Wait for Godot.
A: Shouldn't literary reference be kept to a minimum? Doesn't that intrude an authorial presence into what is ostensibly a naturalistic dialogue?
B: Naturalism is dead.
A: But so is stylization.
B: Granted. The best overheard dialogue this week may well have been: Are you hearing the voices now?
A: That has potential.
B: Potency.
A: Pungency.
B: Parody.
A: ...
B: But no one gave me an IM dialogue this year.
A: Passé?
B: Preterite.
A: Pluperfect.
B: ...
A: The law of non sequitur.
B: A basic right. The escape valve. But about that crux: it's where someone departs from the script. It could also be an unguarded moment. Facing down the barrel, so to speak.
A: Assuming such a thing could happen.
B: Assuming you'd know it if you saw it.
A: So . . . is this getting personal?
B: More like personally relevant?
A: I can live with that.
B: Assuming you have a choice.
A: Well, whatever. g2g
B: k

THROUGH THE YEARS, 6

35 years ago: Feb. 1972

Pink Moon is Nick Drake's third album and the last one he finished. He died in 1974. None of his albums did well in his lifetime and Drake had problems with performing, and with people generally, apparently. Not a viable candidate for show-biz.

I never heard of Nick Drake until somewhere around November 2000. No doubt the reason that I noticed the existence of Fruit Tree, the 4 CD box set of his three albums and a fourth containing the last tracks he recorded plus some other out-take stuff, was that it was placed in prominence in Cutler's in New Haven, and no doubt that was because of the effect the use of "Pink Moon" on a Volkswagen commercial in 2000 had on sales of Drake's albums. So, though I didn't hear the song on the commercial until after I'd become familiar with all his albums (through fairly steady and continuous play in Nov. and Dec. 2000), I probably owe some thanks to that commercial for making Drake a viable commodity.

It's odd that I never got wind of his music in the thirty-plus years from his first album in 1969 till 2000, particularly as the kind of arrangements and vocals he favors are flavored with the lyrical melancholy I associate with British folk music. I also wonder why, when sensitive singer-songwriters were all the rage in the early '70s, Drake wasn't pushed more, or didn't meet with more appreciative reviews or audience response. With Cat Stevens, James Taylor, Jackson Browne, and female singers such as Phoebe Snow and Janis Ian all over the airwaves, couldn't someone find a way to work Drake into the playlist? Who knows, but it's too late now.

It's hard not to hear these songs as the musings of a loner, something of an outcast, stuck in the parental home, smoking herb and practicing guitar at all hours, while the world of fame and fortune happens elsewhere: "Now I'm darker than the deepest sea / Just hand me down, give me a place to be"; "Please beware of them that stare / They'll only smile to see you while / Your time away / And once you've seen what they have been / To win the earth just won't seem worth / Your night or your day"; "Take a look you may see me on the ground / For I am the parasite of this town"; "And none of you stand so tall / Pink moon gonna get ye all."

There's something significant about not hearing this music until long after Drake's death, if only because at times the persona on these albums is the more poignant for the embattled, possibly at times embittered, neglect the artist had to live with, but which his current fame partly offsets (Drake songs became somewhat ubiquitous in movies for a time -- notably, for me, in Noah Baumbach's Kicking and Screaming, and in Lynne Ramsey's The Ratcatcher).

Pink Moon is the sparest, most stripped-down and unadorned of all Drake's records, providing more grounds for the glory of "unplugged" which became all the rage for a time in the '90s. The unvarnished recording also makes the songs sound personal, private, as if recorded at home. This music is even quieter than a Leonard Cohen album, but the guitar playing is nothing short of luminous. Again, because I love Cohen (and I can remember when even he got airplay) and other albums generally referred to as "dark" -- like Lou Reed's Berlin -- or "non-commercial" -- like Neil Young's Tonight's the Night -- it's surprising to me that I didn't pick up on Nick Drake much sooner. Then again, I realize that, without the internet, there was much less opportunity to pick up on obscure stuff (and I wasn't really online till 2000).

It's a singular album. The two previous Drake albums offer much more in the way of lovely arrangements, a factor which makes them sound more like albums of their day, which is to say at least nominally produced for a market. Pink Moon is more "timeless" in a sense, though there's some quality in Drake's voice and in his sense of melody -- in the title song, in "Road," in "Things Behind the Sun," and particularly in the melody of the line "Hear me calling, won't you give me / A free ride" -- that evokes for me the time when these songs were current. So part of the "loss" of Drake is the loss of a time, an era, some quality intrinsic to the music that is less notable in songs one has heard at various times over the years. Drake's sound is a little time capsule, a glance back at a timeless time that is also finally, ironically, current.

Know that I love you
Know I don't care
Know that I see you
Know I'm not there
--Nick Drake, "Know" (1972)

CATALOGUES

Daily Themes this week was about catalogues. A fun week because I tend to like the use of catalgoues, like Homer's list of who shipped out for Troy, or JJ's list of who was present at the hanging in Ulysses, or like the one I've copied in here: TP's account of the desktop of one Lt. Tyrone Slothrop in Gravity's Rainbow. Students had to use models like Harper's index to give numerical data about themselves, to describe contents of a room or a bag, to narrate using a catalogue of actions, and to list a regimen or instructions of some kind. It's an unpredictable week but it's a good week for a) lists, b) looking at stuff, c) thinking about steps or sequences in a procedure.

"Tantivy's desk is neat, Slothrop's is a godawful mess. It hasn't been cleaned down to the original wood surface since 1942. Things have fallen roughly into layers, over a base of bureaucratic smegma that sifts steadily to the bottom, made up of millions of tiny red and brown curls of rubber eraser, pencil shavings, dried tea or coffee stains, traces of sugar and Household Milk, much cigarette ash, very fine black debris picked and flung from typewriter ribbons, decomposing library paste, broken aspirins ground to powder. Then comes a scatter of paperclips, Zippo flints, rubber bands, staples, cigarette butts and crumpled packs, stray matches, pins, nubs of pens, stubs of pencils of all colors including the hard-to-get heliotrope and raw umber, wooden coffee spoons, Thayer's Slippery Elm Throat Lozenges sent by Slothrop's mother, Nalline, all the way from Massachusetts, bits of tape, string, chalk . . . above that a layer of forgotten memoranda, empty buff ration books, phone numbers, unanswered letters, tattered sheets of carbon paper, the scribbled ukulele chords to a dozen songs including "Johnny Doughboy Found a Rose in Ireland" ("He does have some rather snappy arrangements," Tantivy reports, "he's a sort of American George Formby, if you can imagine such a thing," but Bloat's decided he'd rather not), an empty Kreml hair tonic bottle, lost pieces to different jigsaw puzzles showing parts of the amber left eye of the Weimaraner, the green velvet folds of a gown, slate-blue veining in a distant cloud, the orange nimbus of an explosion (perhaps a sunset), rivets in the skin of a Flying Fortress, the pink inner thigh of a pouting pin-up girl . . . a few Weekly Intelligence Summaries from G-2, a busted corkscrewing ukulele string, boxes of gummed paper stars in many colors, pieces of a flashlight, top to a Nugget shoe polish can in which Slothrop now and then studies his blurry brass reflection, any number of reference books out of the ACHTUNG library back down the hall -- a dictionary of technical German, an F.O. Special Handbook or Town Plan -- and, usually, unless it's been pinched or thrown away, a News of the World somewhere too -- Slothrop's a faithful reader."--Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow (1973)

In subsequent weeks there's an assignment asking students to try to write as long a sentence as possible. This is a good example for that week too. For my catalogue of my own desk top, see my blog entry for Nov. 15, 2006.

ELIZABETH BISHOP'S BIRTHDAY, 2/8/1911

THE HOUSE ON THE BEACH (for E. B.)


In the house on the pilings
A woman lives alone.
Days and nights she gazes
Upon lion-colored sands
Remembering other houses,
Other places, dear ones gone.
She spends her time
Among her books--boring ones--
And souvenirs: a wasps' nest,
Mollusk shells, kite-string,
A large bad painting
Of a familiar scene, random
Copies of National Geographic,
Histories of explorers, islanders,
And travelers who spend time
Moving from identity to identity
As tides, mistrals, maps dictate
The itinerary. Sedentary,
She lets her mind roam coasts
She's walked, recalls colloquies
Held while waste deep
In Maine's frigid waters.
Her only burden, a perfectly
Useless concentration
That keeps her poised above the past
Even as her proto-dream-house
Poises in its rickety splendor,
Dubious, apparitional, inviting,
Above a protean sea
Emerging each dawn from mist
Slick as sealskin, white
As fields of ice before the sun
Catches fire like the match
That lights the stove, a faint
Flickering beacon to whatever
Creatures roam the wide beach.
--DB, 1998

THROUGH THE YEARS, 5

40 years ago: Feb. 1967

The Rolling Stones' Between the Buttons was a kind of coming-of-age for the world's ugliest band. When I was eight I got to know the song "Ruby Tuesday," the first Stones song I ever heard and which has remained one of my favorite songs to this day. Even then the song seemed much older, like it had been around forever -- that quality sometimes referred to as "timeless." And yet, in retrospect, the song -- which is about the changes time brings -- is very much of its time. What I associate with 1967 is an opening of the available musical palette for rock bands. In the typical history, Rubber Soul (1965) begat Pet Sounds (1966) which begat Sgt. Pepper (1967) (and then Brian Wilson's brain french-fried trying to top that with Smile), or something like that. The Stones, of course, were left out of that trajectory because they were the copycats, not the ringleaders, following wherever the Fab Four led.

Maybe so, but Between the Buttons takes chances that lend it an odd double vision of both innocence (maybe because I was only in grade school at the time) and a knowing weariness. Take the lead-off hit, "Let's Spend the Night Together" (the "B side" of "Ruby Tuesday," as I saw it, but actually the A side); I didn't even know why the song was kinda scandalous. Sure, The Beach Boys had already imagined being older "so we could say tonight and stay together" (but didn't say sleep together!). "Spend the night together" is not a euphemism, it's actual parlance not for sleeping together but for having sex! "I will satisfy your every need/ And now I know that you will satisfy me." Outrageous! Surely these must be the Bad Boys of rock!

Many songs on the album (which I didn't hear in its entirety till many years later and which I didn't own until the enhanced CD of the British version of the album came out a few years ago) visit areas not generally broached. If The Beatles' "Dr. Robert" (left off the U.S. version of Revolver) was a coy reference to the man who supplies the drugs (or to Robert Zimmerman), BTB's "Something Happened to Me Yesterday" is an even more coy reference to "something" the singer has been getting into ("something oh so trippy") -- is it drugs, is it sexual kink of some kind, is it "true love," is it all of the above? And if The Beatles had already given us a portrait of the upper-class girl who wants to be a star (in "Drive My Car"), The Stones' acid "Miss Amanda Jones" paints the little high-born minx in even gaudier colors. The Stones had already shown themselves masters of the put-down song ("Under My Thumb," "Get Off My Cloud," "19th Nervous Breakdown," "Stupid Girl") in which the singer rags on some chick who's playing him or on some clown who doesn't quite get what's what. On BTB, the put-downs have more charm -- "Who's Been Sleeping Here," "Yesterday's Papers," "All Sold Out," "Cool, Calm, Collected" -- and, the odd thing about them, the surliness seems almost beside the point.

Why? Something to do with the musical arrangements. I always assume that any significant improvement in the sound or dynamics of Stones' songs in this period is the work of Brian Jones. It seems to be the case that Brian was the man with an itch to experiment with different instrumentation -- "something" very much in the air at the time. The sound of pre-Sgt. Pepper albums is not quite psychedelic, but it's on its way. And there is something "timeless" about that too -- it's a kind of head music ("my bags they get a very close inspection") before the heads were everywhere and before there was such a thing as "acid rock." Hell, the first "Human Be-In" in SF (with Grateful Dead and Jefferson Airplane performing) was in Jan. '67 and Monterey Pop didn't happen till June. Hendrix is charting in the UK, but unknown in the US. The Stones aren't in the vanguard (in fact the album seems to be responding to Revolver, more than pointing to what's to come), but the album gains a lot of its staying power from the way it registers the moment "between" Revolver (August '66) and Sgt. Pepper (June '67) when the Brits were all about doing something interesting to rock'n'roll. And the cover's heavy coats and blurry photography recall Blonde on Blonde (May '66) the way its probably meant to ("everybody must get stoned!").

The Stones, with "Ruby Tuesday," showed that "Paint It, Black" wasn't just a flash in the pan. "Ruby Tuesday" had something of the stately melancholy I associate with "Eleanor Rigby" and so adds greater maturity to the kind of lyrical Stones song that I would later get to know with the release of Hot Rocks in 1972: "Play With Fire," "Heart of Stone," and "As Tears Go By." But I heard "Ruby Tuesday" first and this is the album it's on. And "She Smiled Sweetly" (used effectively in The Royal Tenenbaums when Margot is in the tent after Richie's suicide attempt) is another nice gem -- "I understood for once in my life."

I remember an older friend telling me that the title "between the buttons" was really dirty. It took me a long time to get it. Oh, those Bad Boys!

You need teaching, you're a girl.
There are things in this world
That need teaching with discretion, my profession
--Jagger/Richard, "My Obsession" (1967)

DICTION

Last week the assignments in Daily Themes required students to consider diction, to write without what Ezra Pound called "emotional slither," to write a theme using all the connotations of a chosen word (I saw good ones on "light" and "strike" and "run"), to write a theme in which each sentence included a word the writer had never used before (one or two themes used words I had never seen before), to describe the same scene with two different registers of discourse (the assignment that met with the best results overall), and to write a theme about a slang term ("totes," "fugly," and "Altzheimer" were some of the new terms I learned about).

Prof. Deresiewicz's lecture began with this quotation from Clive James' Cultural Amnesia: "If we had never heard anyone else, we would not sound more like ourselves, we would sound like Kaspar Hauser the savage infant, on the day he was rescued from solitude. In the matter of style, freedom lies in all the ways we have been a prisoner of someone else's example. He might only have been a school bus conductor with a gift for sardonic verbal abuse. She might only have been the woman who stamped your card at the lending library. But they gave you the gift that comes next after the gift of speech: the gift to give it shape."

I don't know about learning style from such ephemeral contacts as James imagines. But I do know that I was certainly marked by my father's ability to kid, to say things for comic effect, and by my older brother's penchant for verbal epithets and nicknames, often derogatory. In fact, his ability to name things was valued highly and was something that all his younger siblings emulated to some extent. We could say he originated the practice because he was the first of us, but it seems just as likely that the skill we all showed for such things is one that for some reason is endemic to the family. Something in the genes I guess. I might go so far as to say that "the genes" for that particular gift of language come from the Irish grandmother of my mother that none of us ever saw. And who knows, maybe I owe something to her for finding -- as I said yesterday -- so much fascination in the works of JJ.

But I do like James' idea that our language is never our own, not only in the obvious sense that someone has already used every word we've used, but also in the sense that some sort of model exists for what we try to do with the words we use. I think this is so in our daily speech, in speech-making and lecturing and teaching, and certainly in anything we write. The more literary our writing becomes, the more it owes to the literary effects that have left a mark on us.

In the class, it's an interesting week to see how students work with connotations of words, and if they succeed in not sounding like themselves -- an outcome that can be good in breaking bad habits (e.g., trying always to sound like 19th century ideals of elegant prose), but also in demonstrating, as I said to some students, a range -- as though they were singers and we had to see how high or low they could go and still stay in tune.

The assignments also make me reflect on how much poetry, as the supreme use of language, is almost wholly a matter of diction (and rhythm, of course). One or two themes managed to sound like prose poetry to me, and that's high praise indeed -- for the control of diction so that its effects become, in part, the point of the piece is to move to a level of writing where how things are said takes on a life of its own in the ear and in the mind. Something that fiction achieves too seldom, for me.

I start to spin the tale / You complain of my diction
You give me friction / But I dig friction
-- Tom Verlaine, "Friction" (1977)

THE USE OF JOYCE (for JJ's birthday, 2/2/1882)

This past week the Finnegans Wake reading group recommenced its labors with the first half of "Anna Livia Plurabelle" (chapter 8). This will be the third semester of work on the book and with this chapter we'll be leaving Book One behind. I've been through the entirety of the book probably no more than twice, but I've been through some chapters three or four times that number. Why is it I feel compelled to keep repeating the trip through Joyce's works, particularly Ulysses and the Wake?

The title of this blog is actually the title of an essay (which might be a short book) I've contemplated writing several times. The essay would be an attempt to delineate what reading Joyce, indeed study of Joyce, does or can do for a writer. The idea first cropped up when I realized that some critics, like Dan Peck and James Wood, lay blame at JJ's door for contemporary writers who excel in excess -- excess which is deemed to be unnecessary, a kind of self-perpetuating overload of the reader's patience and resources. The point of the essay would be, in part, to give some consideration to that criticism, to try to look at what is going on in Joyce's prose, why it has to be the way it is. And why, it being the way it is, it has to be read and appreciated. The other point of the essay would be much more personal: an attempt to get down on paper my Joyce, the main version of Joyce that I encounter in his works, which is to say, my conception of a certain idea of "the writer" as it existed for a time in the first half of the previous century. I don't know if such an essay is really necessary -- either for readers or for myself -- but it sometimes seems a tantalizing task, rather than a boring chore.

I believe there are few reading experiences that have affected me as strongly as my reading of Joyce. My knowledge of him began when I was in 7th grade. My sister, who was in 11th grade, was challenged by an English teacher to give Dubliners a try. She read the first story and couldn't make anything of it. So she passed it along to me. I also couldn't make anything of it, but I never forgot certain very strong impressions the story created: the use of some odd words -- paralysis, gnomon -- and the specifics of a kind of creepy Catholicism as filtered through a boy's mind that seemed to me to be rather startlingly faithful to that boy's perspective.

In high school, I read about Joyce, and I looked through The Portable Joyce. I even checked out Finnegans Wake just to have it around -- to look at it and feel that attraction of the unfathomable, but also of something else that I couldn't have said then: I saw in it a lesson from an era when greatness in literature was still possible. However unreadable the book was, it belonged to Great Literature; the time in which Joyce was an upstart having to prove himself was long gone and that fact riveted me. He had done it, and what's more he had done it without being an Englishman, or a European. Unlike writers whom I had read a great deal of -- like Hesse and Nietzsche and Dostoevsky and Dickens and Baudelaire and Shelley -- I saw that Joyce was a part of my world, of modern times, in a way that those others weren't. And set beside the likes of Fitzgerald or Hemingway or Orwell, there was a dimension they lacked: call it the metaphysical. Catholicism was an issue for Joyce, as it had been for me growing up. Systems of belief. And words, because of prayer and because of Shakespeare, were never innocent, never simply the names of things. They had histories, they opened onto inner worlds of reverie that many writers seemed to believe in but that no other writer was so meticulous about rendering. And so there had to be some point to Finnegans Wake. Its oddity had to have something to do with the oddity of Joyce's own position, the fact that, as an Irishman in exile, there was simply no one else who shared his unique perspective -- and his unique obsessions.

But Joyce didn't become an obsession for me until I finally made it all the way through Ulysses in the summer of '80 while living in a thoroughly beat apartment building in Philadephia, behind the public library. I had tried to read the book in high school but only made it to the start of "Oxen of the Sun" (chapter 14). The opening of that chapter was incomprehensible to me and I couldn't just skip it and move on because my conviction that I was "following" the story had been too violently shaken. After I read its entirety -- turning 21 and with a child on the way -- I undertook to read it again in the fall.

That second reading was one of the great pleasures of my life and from then on the book has been a lodestone of my conception of what literature can be, of what the novel can be, and of what the challenge of modernism was all about. Subsequently, I read Ellmann's biography of the man (first published the year I was born), then read through all Joyce's works in sequence, even going so far as buying a Penguin copy of Finnegans Wake and reading maybe 100 pages. It was my friend Joe Scuderi who challenged a group of us to undertake a reading of the Wake together, aloud. I didn't make it through all the way that time either, but eventually Joe and I did so, with our friend Rick Moore. By then I was 24 and had made it through Proust's Recherche (another work I'd spend a long time coming to terms with); for that first reading of the Wake in its entirety I relied on Campbell and Robinson's Skeleton Key.

The camaraderie of reading it with others is what keeps me going back to the Wake group at Yale; between the two reading groups, I wrote a senior thesis on Part Three of the book, included some references to the Wake in a chapter on Joyce in my dissertation, and recorded myself reading selections and entire chapters; for several years in grad school I kept an Easter vigil till dawn, reading from the Wake. For awhile there I seemed to have believed that the book had some particular meaning for me, that there was a purpose for me in trying to interpret it. I've also been called upon three times to present a kind of intro to the Wake in Laura Frost's Joyce seminar, so that, to some students at least, I'm identified with the Wake as one of the few people around the university who seems to think that some purpose is served by reading it.

What I get out of Joyce's works would indeed take a book to say, but the simple way to say it is that when I'm reading him I'm always in the presence of the Master's voice. And sometimes, it seems, that's purpose enough.

I'm reading Ulysses for the fun of it.
I'd like to live inside a comprehensive fiction,
but all I have is memory, dream, and imagination.
--DMT Brown, "Bukowski's Got the Right Idea" (1981)