Apparently David Berman is retiring from music this year. Maybe to focus on his writing? I actually haven't read any of it, but the Silver Jews have been on the outer edges of my radar over the years. Here's their video for 'Sleeping is the Only Love'.

Salute
--James Schuyler

Past is past, and if one
remembers what one meant
to do and never did, is
not to have thought to do
enough? Like the gather-
ing of one of each I
planned, to gather one
of each kind of clover,
daisy, paintbrush that
grew in that field
the cabin stood in and
study them one afternoon
before they wilted. Past
is past. I salute
that various field.

Some portions of interviews, found within the online paper, James Schuyler's Poetics of Indolence:

Mark Hillringhouse: Edmund White says that "Only through the long poem can Schuyler recreate the experience of time living through us."
James Schuyler: That may be true, but I don't think about things like that. I think I just want to keep the story going.
MH: Do you internalize the poetic forms?
JS: No. I don't write that way at all. I write as I go along... Those technical aspects of poetry are something I simply never think about.

Robert Thompson: You can be quite different from Whitman in not taking a bardic stance.
James Schuyler: I leave that to Allen [Ginsberg]
RT: How is it you resisted that?
JS: The bardic? It didn't suit me, I guess
... ...
RT: You don't care for symbols, either.
JS: No, I don't care for them at all. I don't want to get involved in that.

Interviewer: "Did you ever try to write poems about his [Fairfield Porter's] paintings?"
James Schuyler: "No, but I tried to write poems that were like his paintings"
I hate fussing with nature and would like the world to be
All weeds ...
So much messing about, why not leave the world alone ...

John Ashbery wrote the introduction for the newest Selected Poems of James Schuyler and provides quite the compliment:

Frank O'Hara once said that after listening to Haydn's music for long periods of time, he felt he wanted to hear nothing else (this from a passionate fan of the uncompromising art of Cage and Feldman), and after immersing myself in Schuyler's music I often feel it's all I need-- all other poetry is somehow present there. Though he is in a sense saying the same thing again and again, it is, like the pages of one's diary, always new. The poems are seldom "about" anything in the way poetry traditionally is; they are the anything.

Sure this would have made James Schuyler smile, if somewhat self-consciously, but probably the larger compliment would come from seeing his style of writing echoed in Ashbery's own poems, as you can find even in what Ashbery produces today. In tone as well, as Ashbery writes a certain poetry based on loafing, though more within his mind and less stemming from the input of the outside world.

Yesterday was one of those days where I never really allowed myself to wake up. Not in a physical sense, but because my thinking never shifted out of idle. I was content, for a day at least, to simply ‘be’, or, if the pretension is removed, to ‘loafe’. Its something many Americans do every Sunday, but few can turn into a regular lifestyle. While ‘easy’ to the extent that demands aren’t really dealt with, a continual routine of passive receptivity all too easily also invites unchanneled anxiety and flaccid depression in through the back door.

Poet James Schuyler, however, was one such individual who faced these latent challenges. He was unable to hold down a steady job, lived the majority of his adult life as a houseguest in the homes of others, was without a family to provide for, and, perhaps most importantly, was a manic-depressive and prone to nervous breakdowns. As to how much the effects of his illness were compounded by his lifestyle, or the lifestyle a result of the illness, I wouldn’t be able to say. However, it’s likely the influences of both that allowed Schuyler to become a unique voice in American poetry.

Because of his association with Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, Schuyler is identified as a member of the New York school. His initial poems are vibrant works that experimented with a variety of forms and demonstrate a playfullness with words, used loosely in the same way a painter might accent an abstraction on a canvas. While Schuyler was to later settle into his own forms, the initial experimentation ended up with some incredible poems, such as these two stanzas from 'Hudson Ferry', which are as emotively suggestive as they are assured in their physicality:

it's another city going back
the moon one night past its full
writes signs vanishing hypnotically
downtown the towers block massively
at the rail a man who rests his hands

looks heroic: he works at night: going from or to?
I don't know I hardly know why I'm on the river
late at night. Its a bore, waiting for a train
reading a tabloid. The City Hall all clean
gleams like silver like the magnolia in the moonlight.

However, Schuyler’s publications in the early 1970's were to become representative of his signature and more personal styles. One being through an extension of the syntax while stacking seemingly unrelated clauses upon one another, subject matter being based upon descriptions of natural or urban scenes. With this, Schuyler developed a poetry which transformed his passivity and the quotidian details of daily life into a musical art composed from the dynamic relationships between self and the external world. For the reader, they work as quiet meditations upon those captivating scenes which we, at some level, naturally understand as a synesthesia of our emotions with the world’s myriad sensual stimuli. From Buried at Springs:

There is a hornet in the room
and one of us will have to go
out the window into the late
August midafternoon sun. I
won. There is a certain challenge
in being humane to hornets
but not much. A launch draws
two lines of wake behind it
on the bay like a delta
with a melted base. Sandy
billows, or so they look,
of feathery ripe heads of grass,
an acid-yellow kind of
goldenrod glowing or glowering
in shade. Rocks with rags
of shadow, washed dust clouts
that will never bleach.
It is not like this at all.
The rapid running of the
lapping water a hollow knock...

These are poems that don’t have identifiable meanings, but instead are self sufficient as experiences– both the original scenes which provided the moments of inspiration and then the experience of Schuyler’s poetics.

Schuyler’s other poetic mode was the use of the long line and in poems which would go on as long as Schuyler felt appropriate, sometimes just a few pages and other times taking up half a book. The first of these are some of my favorite Schuyler poems, as they are born from the same emotive inspirations as the shorter poems but with the implications extended, the comprehensiveness of time and rhythm stretched into a freedom which subsumes the momentary content of our consciousness. From Hymn to Life:

The turning of the globe is not so real to us
As the seasons turning and the days that rise out of early gray
—The world is all cut-outs then—and slip or step steadily down
The slopes of our lives where the emotions and needs sprout. “I
Need you,” tree, that dominates this yard, thick-waisted, tall
And crook branched. Its bark scales off like that which we forget:
Pain, an introduction at a party, what precisely happened umpteen
Years or days or hours ago. And that same blue jay returns, or perhaps
It is another. All jays are one to me. But not the sun which seems at
Each rising new, as though in the night it enacted death and rebirth,
As flowers seem to.

Later this style was used more for Schuyler to provide an autobiography. While still with exceptional moments and worth the time to locate these, the two which I am specifically thinking of, 'The Morning of the Poem' and 'A Few Days', are overly burdened with Schuyler’s much too personal disclosures and don’t have the liberating qualities found in his earlier works.

James Schuyler didn't develop his poetry much further than this, either with content or style, but what he did write was uniquely his own, of works that are filled with emotion, vivid in their imagery and enjoyably swift through the unexpected use of language.

[Death of the Grave Digger; Carlos Schwabe]

But France, England, Russia...these too would be beautiful names. Lusitania too, is a beautiful name. And we see now that the abyss of history is deep enough to hold us all. We are aware that a civilization has the same fragility as a life. The circumstances that could send the works of Keats and Baudelaire to join the works of Menander are no longer inconceivable; they are in the newspapers. That is not all. The searing lesson is more complete still. It was not enough for our generation to learn from its own experience how the most beautiful things and the most ancient, the most formidable and the best ordered, can perish by accident; in the realm of thought, feeling, and common sense, we witnessed extraordinary phenomena: paradox suddenly become fact, and obvious fact brutally believed.

I shall cite but one example: the great virtues of the German peoples have begotten more evils, than idleness ever bred vices. With our own eyes, we have seen conscientious labor, the most solid learning, the most serious discipline and application adapted to appalling ends.

So many horrors could not have been possible without so many virtues. Doubtless, much science was needed to kill so many, to waste so much property, annihilate so many cities in so short a time; but moral qualities in like number were also needed. Are Knowledge and Duty, then, suspect?

--from Paul Valéry's Crisis of the Mind (1919)

The airplane weaves telegraph wires
and the fountain sings the same song
At the rendezvous of the coachman the aperitif is orange
but the locomotive mechanics have blue eyes
the lady has lost her smile in the woods
--Tristan Tzara

Are you familiar with the Mexican composer Silvestre Revueltas? You should be, especially if you like modern composers such as Stravinsky and Béla Bartók. Revueltas is one of the all too many artists who was taken from us prematurely, though what pieces he was able to complete prior to his death at the age of 40 are known for their kinetic passion and free innovations. "La noche de los Mayas" being especially well known, with the final movement incorporating over a dozen different percussion instruments and meant to depict a Mayan sacrificial dance. Here is the Martinez Bourguet String Quartet playing one of his string quartets.

Godzilla in Mexico
-Roberto Bolaño

Listen carefully, my son: bombs were falling
over Mexico City
but no one even noticed.
The air carried poison through
the streets and open windows.
You'd just finished eating and were watching
cartoons on TV.
I was reading in the bedroom next door
when I realized we were going to die.
Despite the dizziness and nausea I dragged myself
to the kitchen and found you on the floor.
We hugged. You asked what was happening
and I didn’t tell you we were on death’s program
but instead that we were going on a journey,
one more, together, and that you shouldn’t be afraid.
When it left, death didn’t even
close our eyes.
What are we? you asked a week or year later,
ants, bees, wrong numbers
in the big rotten soup of chance?
We’re human beings, my son, almost birds,
public heroes and secrets.

“An oasis of horror in a desert of boredom.” That’s a Charles Baudelaire quote Bolaño uses to preface his novel. With this, he appeared to have a vision of mankind as a monstrous force of energy, bringing with it nearly unstoppable acts of horror, but also prodigious glory. And this is reflected in the writing from first to last page. However, on occasion, Bolano slips in poetic moments which evoke a contrast to the compiling actions, the monumental products, all of the torrential effects:

“Sometimes, however, as they sat on a café terrace or around a dark cabaret table, an obstinate silence descended inexplicably over the trio. They seemed suddenly to freeze, lose all sense of time, and turn completely inward, as if they were bypassing the abyss of daily life, the abyss of people, the abyss of conversation, and had decided to approach a kind of lakeside region, a late-romantic region, where the borders were clocked from dusk to dusk, then, fifteen, twenty minutes, an eternity, like the minutes of those condemned to die, like the minutes of women who’ve just given birth and are condemned to die, who understand that more time isn’t more eternity and nevertheless wish with all their souls for more time, and their wails are birds that come flying every so often across the double lakeside landscape, so calmly, like luxurious excrescences or heartbeats. Then, naturally, the three men would emerge stiff from the silence and go back to talking about inventions, women, Finnish philology, the building of highways across the Reich.” (pg 663-4, hardcover; 1st American edition)

Some additional thoughts on 2666:

Jonathan Letham, in the New York Time Book Review, wrote: "Reading Roberto Bolaño is like hearing the secret story, being shown the fabric of the particular, watching the tracks of art and life merge at the horizon and linger there like a dream from which we awake inspired to look more attentively at the world."

One of the negative critiques against 2666 is that Bolaño’s personal anxiety towards his approaching death overly influenced the writing, making the book’s mysteries derived from personal subjectivity rather than artistic development. I would agree that Bolaño’s concerns are undeniably intertwined with the text, but I don’t think this hinders it artistically. If anything, the opposite. The novel is in a constant flux between the specific and the general, and knowing of Bolaño’s personal health problems only adds to this concept, as another specific that extends itself outward through the entirety of the text.

In 2666, Bolaño spends quite a bit of time identifying the accomplishments of German arts and culture but then the tragic irony of such a rich country being responsible for the Nazi party. At one point, a line is drawn to the Aztecs– another highly developed culture in history but also responsible for atrocious acts of violence. And apparently these questions are raised in other Bolaño works as well, such as pointed out in the blog Wuthering Heights (link), which examines Bolaño’s Nazi Literature in the Americas with Edgar Allen Poe and the totalitarianism of the ‘ideal’. Is the critique against art that does not address the problems of its time? Or a critique of aesthetical hierarchies? It should be noted that Bolaño had no allegiance to other Latin American writers.

Stacy D'Erasmo in the New York Times writes: "Among the many acid pleasures of the work of Roberto Bolaño, who died at 50 in 2003, is his idea that culture, in particular literary culture, is a whore. In the face of political repression, upheaval and danger, writers continue to swoon over the written word, and this, for Bolaño, is the source both of nobility and of pitch-black humor. [... ...] The word has no national loyalty, no fundamental political bent; it’s a genie that can be summoned by any would-be master. Part of Bolaño’s genius is to ask, via ironies so sharp you can cut your hands on his pages, if we perhaps find a too-easy comfort in art, if we use it as anesthetic, excuse and hide-out in a world that is very busy doing very real things to very real human beings. Is it courageous to read Plato during a military coup or is it something else? [... ...] — for him, literature is an unnervingly protean, amoral force with uncanny powers of self-invention, self-justification and self-mythification."

I came across this quote from his book Amulet this afternoon, "I'll tell you, my friends: it's all in the nerves. The nerves that tense and relax as you approach the edges of companionship and love. The razor-sharp edges of companionship and love." In consideration of this with my 'stone hallway dream', along with where one of the characters in 2666 temporarily finds himself towards the end of the novel, I arrive at a choice with two conclusions: A) there are indeed mystical aspects to literature; or, B) Bolaño is an incredibly skilled and suggestive author. I believe the answer equals 'C'.

With all of the reviews and talk over Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, I’m not sure how much I can add to the discussions. All one has to do is go over to Complete Review and read the opinions of those far more qualified than myself to begin to get a handle on why this book is being exalted as a modern masterpiece. Or why our country is probably in the midst of coming as close as possible for the existence of a national book club. In fact, the New Yorker has an ongoing blog for the countless number of readers that had this book given to them as a gift over the holidays. Despite the numerous reviews though, I still find myself at a loss towards how to approach a quick review of the work. Like trying to explain the ocean with a bowl of water. Bolaño’s content and writing styles are so numerous, ‘immense’ is too limited of an adjective. 'Oceanic' or 'expansive' being more appropriate.

One way Bolaño is able to accomplish this is through the numerous side stories and characters, but also the sudden shifts in writing styles and genre: going from noir to factual accounts, to science, to melodrama, to black humor, to dense dialogue, to poetic visions, and so on. Which is not just fancy boasting of an author's writing talent, but stategically developed so the way in which a section is written provides just as much comment upon the subjects as the narrative events. The fourth section, "About the Victims", being a prominent example. Bolano provides clinical accounts of the raping and killing of hundreds of young women around the city of Santa Teresa (a stand-in for the real life and ongoing murders in Ciudad Juarez and which, I am assuming you all know, is the centering axis for the novel). This particular section is about 300 pages, but well over half of the pages are one to two page accounts of the victims, done in a style similar to the content of a police report, accounting the victims' backgrounds, ages, names, social contacts, the locales of the bodies, physical evidence of the rapes, methods of the murderer(s), etc.

The impact upon the reader is both singular and cumulative– for the first dozen or so, personal shock begins to swell, but the true depravity of the matter reveals itself as Bolaño piles one case on top of the other, the effect being as though you are thumbing through file cabinets in the basement of a police station until being swallowed up in the endless horror that has taken place. This does make for tedious and unpleasant reading, and I’ll admit that about half way through this section I only skimmed the accounts, as you would if you were looking through actual police files, but the novel would not have been the same without inclusion of this sort of detailing, especially when the surrounding stories implicate all the layers of Mexican society to the murders, symbolically encased in the occasional black car spotted near the crime scenes.

So is 2666 the masterpiece which the critics are suggesting it will be? I think so in that it satisfies two conditions which are probably necessary for a work to reach this sort of prominence. First, it’s a major literary work that is told and read at an international level. The book begins in Europe and then travels to to Mexico for three sections, and then back over to Europe, specifically World War II, which correlates the acts of the Nazi party with the Santa Teresa murders into the extreme violence mankind is capable of. The other necessary criteria I would argue would be the use of post-modern techniques in the writing. Bolaño is all over the place with his narration, breaking just about every traditional rule in fiction writing, yet is able to conceptualize it all into a singular whole, where the loss of any one of those styles would be a detriment to the novel’s impact.

Back in High School, I had an English teacher who always claimed Moby Dick had no symbolic meaning. Instead it was just a story about a man searching for a whale. But because he repeated this over and over again, I think now he was conversely trying to suggest something else to our little 16 year old minds: how the text of Moby Dick was actually larger than mere symbolism, as something more elusive, grander, beyond what could be placed into an essay, something about life that could only be alluded to, as through the experience of the novel. I would say the same thing about 2666. You could talk endlessly about the intricacies of the novel, or the density of its content, even shed light on its mysteries, and certainly this is part of the magnificance within 2666. But in the end those are still simply its components, the hardware that allows it to exist as a narrative, and uncomparable as to when the entirety of these components are brought together for the end experience and that glimpse of a dark truth* which awaits the individual reader.

*As I put on the finishing touches to this post, my local public radio station is serendipidously playing Stravinsky's orgiastic Le Sacre du Printemps.

[ from Jupiter and Semele; Gustave Moreau, 1894-95]

On two different occasions I have had dreams which resembled the books I was reading at the time (Haruki Murakami and Cormac McCarthy). When I started Roberto Bolaño’s 2666 a few weeks ago, I wondered if I would again have such an experience, especially when considering it was my intent to read through the 900 pages rather quickly in order to absorb myself in Bolaño’s vision as much as possible.

About midway through, on a Sunday night I believe, I had an unusually vivid dream and which, because of the lack of direct representations for what I had read up to that point, I only recognized later on as being conceptually connected to 2666. Was it possible that my subconscious mind had cued into the unspoken aspects of the book sooner than my conscious mind? Probably something that happens with any good piece of literature.

For the dream, the setting was a giant stone hall, elaborate in that there were endless arched corridors heading in all directions. But also coldly austere, with the only color being various shades of gray, walls void of windows or doors, only the stones and paths and their eventual collapse into shadows. However, off to one side, like a small drop of blood on a white ceiling, there was a room with pillows strewn about on the floor, upholstered in rich oriental prints of red and yellow. And then sitting on a small platform was a late middle-aged man talking about Hinduism, specifically the concept of the universe being in a constant state of destruction and creation, as what you find with the Shiva Nataraja, his/her cosmic dance within an aureole of flames. But while this was being spoken about, out in the hallways, with sharp echoes coming from the hard soles of dress shoes, cutting through the otherwise monotoned silence, were neurosurgeons dressed in white lab coats, writing on clipboards and softly whispering results to one another.

DJ Spooky reads John Ashbery.

The Love Interest
--John Ashbery

We could see it coming from forever,
then it was simply here, parallel
to the day's walking. By then it was we
who had disappeared, into the tunnel of a book.

Rising late at night, we join the current
of tomorrow's news. Why not? Unlike
some others, we haven't anything to ask for
or borrow. We're just pieces of solid geometry:

cylinders or rhomboids. A certain satisfaction
has been granted us. Sure, we keep coming back
for more-- that's part of the "human" aspect
of the parade. And there are darker regions

penciled in, that we should explore some time.
For now it's enough that this day is over.
It brought its load of freshness, dropped it off
and left. As for us, we're still here, aren't we?

When trying to explain to someone why so many find John Ashbery's poetry enjoyable, or why he will be significant to the canon of American poetry, its probably best to keep intellectual rhetoric to a minimum. As his poetry approaches subjects through the indirect, maybe so should the explanations.

From a Jacket 20 April 1985 interview:

Q: — in your Paris Review interview you talk about your analyst... What do you feel about that kind of relationship to your own mind, where you go to learn about it through a third party, as it were? What do you get from it?

A: At the time I started going to him I was in a very distressed period, and was very anti-social, although I didn’t realize it. I had a tremendous drinking problem, and I would go to somebody’s house for dinner and get drunk and leave before dinner was served. It was as though I somehow couldn’t bear to be with people, but I couldn’t stand to be alone either, and I couldn’t write very well, and ... anyway I really needed help. I’ve continued seeing this man, but it’s certainly not any kind of ordinary therapy — it’s really just chatting, the way we are now. And he’s a very odd person to be an analyst, as I said in the interview. He’s more interested in playing the piano, and he studied with Claudio Arrau, who’s a friend of his. For a long time he couldn’t decide whether he was going to become a concert pianist or an analyst. So we talk about music a lot, as a matter of fact, and recordings, and things like that.

And in another Jacket interview, 19 May 1988:

Do you teach writing, or do you teach reading?

Well, uh, I don’t really like it very much. I now only teach creative writing courses. I taught some literature courses but I didn’t like that very much. In fact I don’t really like teaching at all. I hate... I’ve always tried to avoid telling people what to do. So it’s rather ironical that I’ve ended up being both a critic and a teacher, and am forced to assume this role. But I don’t feel that I in most cases really know what people should do, whether they’re artists or students, and it’s a bit of a strain having to pretend that I do know.

[... ...]

I wrote that ('And Ut Pictura Poesis Is Her Name’) shortly after I began teaching, which I did relatively late in life, and found that I was constantly being asked by students what a poem was, and what it wasn’t, and why is this a poem and why is this not. And ah... I never really thought about that before. I’d written poems but it’d never occurred to me to question whether they were poems or whether other poems were or were not poems, so, suddenly, thinking about this, I wrote this poem...

Then 22 February 1999:

J. Ashbery: That's OK with me. It's OK to interpret poetry in a variety of ways. In fact, that's the only way poetry is read, I think. We all interpret poetry according to what we've experienced, therefore everybody's interpretation is going to differ from everybody else's.

DK: Are there such things as wrong interpretations, or do you distinguish more along the lines of imaginative interpretations versus dull, unenthusiastic interpretations?

J. Ashbery: It depends on the reader. If the reader is bored by his or her interpretation, then I suppose it would be a boring interpretation. I don't think it's a question of being right or wrong.

Composition
--John Ashbery

We used to call it the boob tube,
but I guess they don't use tubes anymore.
Whatever, it serves a small purpose after waking
and before falling asleep. Today's news--
but is there such a thing as news,
or even oral history? Yes, when you want to go back
after a while and appraise the accumulation
of leaves, say in a sandbox.
The rest is rented depression,
available only in a season
and the season is always next month,
a pure troubled time.

That's why I don't go out much, though
staying at home never seemed much of an option.
And speaking of nutty concepts, surely "home"
is way up there on the list. I feel more certain about "now"
and "then," because they are close to me,
like lovers, though apparently not in love with me,
as I am with them. I like to call to them,
and sometimes they reply, out of the deep business of some dream.

Back in March, 2005 Slate magazine posted a review of John Ashbery’s book, Where Shall I Wander. Within this article is a paragraph which does a fantatic job at providing an introduction to Ashbery’s poetry. I reprint it here for those not familiar with Ashbery and in hope that it might garner some interest:

It is hard to talk concretely about Ashbery's poetry, because his subject is, so often, aesthetic consciousness—what he calls "the experience of experience." On the one hand, the poems have the dashed-off look and feel of pop culture-inflected postmodernism, inspired by the radical innovations of Dada and French Surrealism. On the other hand, at their heart is a kind of high Romantic yearning for wholeness: In a sense the poems are simply about being unable to give up that longing. At the center of an Ashbery poem isn't usually a subject (à la Philip Larkin) but a feeling (à la Jackson Pollock). That feeling is conjured up by the interplay between aesthetic conviction and amiably bland bewilderment; amid all the flotsam and jetsam of everyday life is the enduring hope that, as one speaker puts it, "at last I shall see my complete face." The best thing to do, then, is not to try to understand the poems but to try to take pleasure from their arrangement, the way you listen to music. It's only then, for most readers, that the meaning begins to leak through. [link]

For the book at hand, Notes from the Air consists of selected poems written from the mid 1980's onward. After purchasing it this past fall, I found out a short time after that Ashbery's Collected Poems was also out. At first I regretted the purchase, but after reconsideration I found value in this volume and changed my mind. Mainly because all of the poems in Notes from the Air are those personally chosen by Ashbery himself, which assures his readers of their being identifiers for his aesthetical development and/or because the poems are those which Ashbery must be especially passionate about, which is helpful considering the wild subjectivity involved with his work.

Regarding the Slate introduction above, while it is good advice for any Ashbery poem, I find this notion of the "complete face" actually more applicable to the poems Ashbery wrote during the first half of his career. With the later works being represented in Notes, Ashbery seems to lessen his technique of rerouting the poems to a ‘wholeness’, less concerned with a final unity, and instead remains in play with the ephemeral nature of existence through language. On the one hand, this allows more self-sufficient material and a greater lingual presence in the poetry (a rose is a rose is a rose), including a stronger relevancy to our times, but it also increases the chance of Ashbery abandoning the reader for personal obscurity. Ashbery does what Ashbery wants, and sometimes you have to go ‘ok, go ahead, but I’m moving onto the next page’. This is particularly true with the longer poems written in paragraph format, which became a later technique in Ashbery's oeuvre.

Along with the poems being personally selected by Ashbery, the graphic style of the publication also makes Notes from the Air an attractive book, and I’m referring specifically to it's irregular, square-like, dimensions: 7" x 9'’. While maybe not too conforming to bookcases, the wider pages do appropriately fit the longer lines Ashbery chooses to write in at times and, conversely, also adds extra space around the shorter poems, both of which visually represent the breadth of possibilities inherent within Ashbery’s work. The singleness of the measurements also has a way of drawing attention to the fact that the book's content communicates through the unexpected, not in rectangled perpindiculars, with prosaic tops and finished bottoms, but more errantly democratic, the poems as verbal pictorials, freely placed windows or photographs, peering in and from cube shaped thoughts that are both transparent and opaque, capturing the mad, the beautiful, those essential descriptions that compose Ashbery's poetic art.

[A Late Afternoon in Winter; Louis Apol]

The label on this video is органное исполнение ("organ performance") and I found it last night while searching through clips of Tarkovsky's Solaris--for a segment that incorporates Bach's Prelude in F Minor with the Pieter Bruegel Hunters in the Snow painting. I like this for many of the same reasons I enjoyed last weekend's. Emotive tone and the fact that it was made by someone specifically for the internet. A modern form of folk art. The weather also matches what we have had here all day.

[Gas Stove III*; Jean Dubuffet, 1966]

"For me, insanity is super sanity. The normal is psychotic. Normal means lack of imagination, lack of creativity."

--Jean Dubuffet

* Notice how along with the gas range, a skull is equally apparent in the work-- a piece I had the opportunity to see down in Kalamazoo last week.

Is our species crazy?

Plenty of evidence.

All of course seems man's invention. Including madness. Which may be one more creation of that agonizing inventiveness. At the present level of human evolution propositions were held (and Sammler was partly swayed by them) by which choices were narrowed down to sainthood and madness. We are mad unless we are saintly, saintly only as we soar above madness. The gravitational pull of madness drawing the saint crashwards. A few may comprehend that it is the strength to do one's duty daily and promptly that makes saints and heroes. Not many. Most have fantasies of vaulting into higher states, feeling just mad enough to qualify.

--from Mr. Sammler's Planet; Saul Bellow

Bellow lays out fairly early in the novel the conflicts in Mr. Sammler, mainly his perception that he is somehow removed from the culture around him, while also then alluding to the solution later solidified in the final pages:

Accept and grant that happiness is to do what most other people do. Then you must incarnate what others incarnate. If prejudice, prejudice. If rage, then rage. If sex, then sex. But don't contradict your time. Just don't contradict it, that's all. Unless you happened to be a Sammler and felt that the place of honor was the outside. However, what was acheived by remoteness, by being simply a vestige, a visiting consciousnes which happened to reside in a West Side bedroom, did not entitle one to the outside honors. Moreover, inside was so roomy and took in so many people that if you were in the West Nineties, if you were in fact here, you were an American...

But perhaps it was an even deeper thing. Humankind watched and described itself in the very turns of its own destiny. Itself the subject, living or drowning in the night, itself the object, seen surviving or succumbing, and feeling in itself the fits of strength and the lapses of paralysis-- mankind's own passion simultaneously being mankind's great spectacle, a thing of deep and strange participation, on all levels, from melodrama and mere noise down in the the deepest layers of the soul and into the subtlest silences, where undiscovered knowledge is. (pg 59; Penguin Classics edition)

Set in New York City just prior to the lunar landing, and while the U.S. was going through unprecedented social changes, Saul Bellow lets us in on the ongoing internal monologue of Mr. Sammler, an occassional lecturer at Columbia University, but otherwise, a lounging aristocrat. The two main subjects being his personal philosophies and (crotchety) opinions toward fellow friends and family members, all of whom are freely embroiled in the modern era’s encouragement of money, prestige, sex and general self-centered fulfillment. Mr. Sammler himself, though, prefering the self-singular joy of personal judgement (especially towards women) and lamenting the decline of Western civilization.

While Bellow’s novel is funny at times, as a result of his usual cast of vivid characters that tend to side with the extremes of upper and middle class social behaviors, the book is a bit too heavily composed with Mr. Sammler’s pontificating. However, Bellow does eventually reveal that Mr. Sammler lived through several atrocious World War II experiences, each with the harsh components of luck and violent brutality, and both of which a Jew living in Europe during that time would have likely faced in order to survive. In light of these forced experiences, it becomes understandable why someone might leave behind a more immediate, short-sighted view on life for the grandeur of philosophical and moral abstractions.

And this reveals the other side of Mr. Sammler’s character. At one point in the novel he debates with an Indian professor whether or not man should pursue space exploration. Mr. Sammler indicates he would prefer to be at the bottom of the ocean-- choosing depth over expansiveness-- and one could read this position as a plea from someone who is already in the outer limits but wants to get his feet back onto earth in order to confront mankind’s problems with understanding rather than abstract disassociation. Mr. Sammler wishing to return from his icy realms to the warmth of human connection.

However, it is Mr. Sammler’s distance that has also allowed him to maintain and develop a greater sense of morality, of being able to tell right from wrong. While the other characters may be more actively involved with human activities, ‘life’ in general, they seem to do so with a lack of empathy towards one another. And here is where the complexity of the characters and the issues raised in the book are revealed. Do philosophical and moral viewpoints remove us too much from the realities of life? Does living ‘fully’ also equate to self-absorption? Can a balance be achieved?

While Mr. Sammler’s Planet can be tiresome at times, internal ruminations ad nauseam, the book’s final, and very fullfilling, pages conclude with a story that compassionately focuses upon the dynamics of familial and societal relationships and, ultimately, how we must all meet the terms of the contract with the inmost heart (phrasing borrowed from the last pages of the book).

Moon and Stars
-- William Carlos Williams

January! The beginning!
A moon
scoured by the wind
calls

from its cavern. A vacant
eye stares. The wind
howls.

Among bones in rose flesh
singing
wake the stormy
stars.

A wonderful video assemblage with Radiohead's Reckoner.

from Sonatinas for the New Year
--John Ash

9.
The hour approached so slowly
that the minutes grew more separate,
each a gifted monomaniac confined to its cell,
recording in watercolours the light on a tree trunk,
the fuzz on a baby's head, the folds of a sleeve...

One might see the importance of it all
if one were not too drunk or dazed by the approach
of a giant with dead leaves and glass in his hair:
he has come merely to announce the past, out of which
your future grows like a day lily in Vermont.