a heart eaten in the first stanza is an exception

From a 2005 interview in Bookslut with Frank Bidart, whom I saw read last week:

When “The Third Hour of the Night” (about Benvenuto Cellini) appeared in the October, 2004 issue of Poetry, readers seemed to react only in one of two ways: awe or outrage. …[another] complaint was that the poem read too much like prose, or was too obscure or esoteric or whatever. The final complaint was something like revulsion. The poem contains disturbing scenes of murder and some sort of ritual/sexual violence. These complaints beg a couple of questions: “How much of a long poem can actually consist of ‘poetry’?” And: “These poems really are very violent. Why?”

If a poem is any good, I don’t think of some parts as “poetry” and other parts as “not poetry.” Each line has to be written with a feeling for its place in the shape, the pulse of the whole: if it does that, it is authentically part of the whatness of the thing. It then has its own eloquence.

Here’s the really good part:

I think the question of violence is only a question because people think of poetry as lyric poetry. In lyric there is often a great deal of psychic violence, but usually little (say) murder. (Even in Browning’s lyrics.) A heart gets eaten in the first sonnet of Dante’s “Vita Nuova,” but that is the exception.

For example, murder. I like how his read of the Dante/Béatrice story is not restricted to love eternal, as flesh aspires to divinity, but also comprises straight out of the gate heart-eating.

I saw him read last week, thanks to my friend E the poet. There isn’t the right clip on YouTube, or I would post, because he was a riveting and transporting reader; every iota of breath goes into the sentence as it comes out. He does a lot of character poems, only some of whom are “I.” It’s very passionate without being lyrical and all self-enclosed, which I like. I find many New England poets provincial; they can’t seem to locate themselves in a “tradition” outside of a few anglo hermetics who, interesting as they are, are treated as freeze-dried and the only stuff on the shelf.

I like going to poetry readings because I like seeing what makes something move and transpire in an audience sitting still. And what kind of reading produces a good provocative question, as opposed to gush; these are good for teaching. I also like hearing how people make the rhetorical moves of written things available to the ear. Some readings feel like spinach, or church.

Here is one of the early ones, or the first few passages, Ellen West, from Ploughshares. It’s one of the anti-confessional first-person ones. 1975, 12 years after The Feminine Mystique. This is a subject I have more vexed by the oftener I think about Mad Men, and talk to my friends about how claustrophobic it is, and why the Betty character seems so smug but bereft in the mid-century dollhouse, until she snaps with hysteria and takes after the birds with a BB gun. I leave the graphic design, because layout and the splattering of space is often important in his poems.

Ellen West

I love sweets,— heaven would be dying on a bed of vanilla ice cream . . . But my true self is thin, all profile and effortless gestures, the sort of blond elegant girl whose body is the image of her soul. —My doctors tell me I must give up this ideal; but I WILL NOT . . . cannot. Only to my husband I’m not simply a “case.” But he is a fool. He married meat, and thought it was a wife.

The combination of purity and obliviousness is quite compelling. The rest of the poem has excerpts from the “case” of Ellen West, in the voice of the physician.

neighborhood flotsam

I think my recent turn to the choo-choo pastoral has something to do with the mildly terrifying sights I routinely pass on my way through the neighborhood. I saw a tarantula in the park the other night, when I was walking. But Los Feliz Boulevard in particular is scarier, since you are least expecting, for instance, to see severed heads on the concrete, when the sun is beating down many, many BPM.

For about a week recently, just after the underpass, there was a dark green leaf-size garbage bag packed with stuff. Falling out of it was something that looked like the severed topknot of meth-head Barbie. The kind of head, for example, that you used to groom at slumber parties, with the knob in her back that you could twist, and roll her curls up and down, like slinkies. After about a week of staying put and falling apart at the seams, it turned out to be a bag of insulation, with a weird frustration pencil-type bulge at the top of the container. That just looked like a severed head, but wasn’t really.

on hiatus till August. mostly.

Time to finish my book. But I leave you with
• the first episode of a nice new animé, Library Wars. It’s a near-future story, after the Japanese government declares a state of emergency, institutes a media improvement act, and initiates a new special forces division of book-seizing operatives. Alex says: “At the same time, libraries have been declared autonomous governing bodies with their own armed forces. Of course havoc, nostalgia, and romantic subplots between recruits -in-training ensue. Dialectics return!” You can see it on Youtube:

• a CBC review of the terrible-seeming new movie starring Mike Myers. I’ve seen the trailer 5 times and it’s still terrible, even with hockey jokes!

• and in tribute to the late, lamentable heat wave, the liner notes of a new musical genre also born out of one of the hottest summers on record. From a new Trojan boxset I picked up @ Amoeba other other day:

The development of Rocksteady, and the demise of its predecessor, Ska, resulted from a general need for change allied with one of the hottest Jamaican summers on record. The scorching conditions which persisted throughout the eearly months of ‘66 undoubtedly played its part in the desire for the creation of a slower style more conducive to dancing in such a climate. As the high temperatures continued unabated, the tempo of the music decreased according and by the end of the year the transformation from Ska to Rocksteady was complete. The once favoured driving beat had disappeared and with it the limits its rigid structure had imposed.

So, who knows what the future of heat waves will bring?

crafty boy comics for hire

So, you say you don’t have the big bucks to lay out for optioning your own hot comic property like this and this, which have super-hit the movie theatres lately. But for a mere $20, arguably the price of a ticket and a snack, you can commission your own avant-garde musical version of a favorite comic strip. Lay those chirping birthday cards to rest, my friends, and partake of the old-timey patronage system. The Comics Curmudgeon links to this guy who adds serial (or at least experimental electronic) music to serial stories–here, the rivetingly boring Mary Worth, in a very intriguing composition titled “My Compulsion to Help Others.” She’s still nosy after all these years!

Also, feel Gil Thorp gaze deep into your troubled but probably fixable soul here.

Needless to say, the composer is a big PK Dick freak. You can see his wares on etsy, which I normally associate with crafty girl stuff…

“wheelmen increase and multiply every season”

The Militant Angeleno linked to this groovy post, on the FHA website. Published in 1901, in Good Roads magazine, the article heralds a bike highway, before the term “freeway” was invented. The article mentions some 5,000 “inventors” of bicycles among the 30,000 who have gotten in on the cycling “enthusiasm.” You had to pony up a ten-cent toll for a one-way ride, or a bargain fifteen for the round trip price-performer.

The South California towns, Los Angeles and Pasadena, are now connected by the strangest and most interesting of links-a magnificent, elevated cycle-way, with a smooth surface of wood, running for nine miles through beautiful country, flanked by green hills, and affording views at every point of the snow-clad Sierras.

On this splendid track cyclists may now enjoy the very poetry of wheeling. At Pasadena they may mount their cycles and sail down to Los Angeles without so much as touching the pedals, even though the gradient is extremely slight. The way lies for the most part along the east bank of the Arroyo Seco, giving a fine view of this wooded stream, and skirting the foot of the neighboring oak-covered hills.The surface is perfectly free from all dust and mud, and nervous cyclists find the track safer than the widest roads, for there are no horses to avoid, no trains or trolley-cars, no stray dogs or wandering children

The funny thing is that you now get on to the 110 around Pasadena on ramps literally designed for the Model T Ford, infra that stayed.

APB: apartment needed for visiting researcher

Actually, it doesn’t have to be a treehouse, but I’m sure that would be lovely, hot as it is these days. I received a note from a friend in Montreal, who seeks housing for a few months, starting in July. He is a historian, and will be based at the Huntington, in Pasadena, and wants something w/i commuting distance. Send your leads here.

parataxis, mon amour

Today I would like to give a little tribute to one of my favorite rhetorical/poetic devices, parataxis. It is, says the OED:

parataxis (gram.) placing of propositions or clauses side by side without connecting words. XIX. — Gr. parātaxis, f. paratássein place side by side

I first really got obsessed with parataxis by reading Gertrude Stein. She has a lot of cryptic crypto-theories about words and citizenry–citizen word stands alone, forthright, apart, but adjacent.

Parataxis tends to privilege the world of the sentence, and movement within it. I have been working obsessively on chapter titles lately, so I have found this mini-genre of sentence or clause very intriguing. I think it’s such an interesting format because it is so simple, and places such emphasis on the relations of the respective units, which makes it different than just paradox or repetition.

A paratactic title may modify (“Girl, Interrupted”), or surprise with counter-intuition (“Hiroshima, Mon Amour”). It may sit elements in a curious relation to one another, in paradoxical (or is it metonymic?) opposition: the title of Edouard Glissant’s Faulkner, Mississippi. One more example, here in sentence form, which starts admitting action and characterization, is here in Chandlerian form:

“He stopped. His eyes rolled. His head jerked.” Farewell My Lovely.

And now in Roman imperial form: “I came; I saw; I conquered.” (Julius Caesar).

And in Roxy Musical form!!–”You came, you saw, you conquered me.”

the yoshida brothers, neo-shamisen twins

I drove by Amoeba Records yesterday afternoon, and noticed that a guy was sitting on the curb outside playing the banjo in a very percussive way. Doh–! I had obviously missed the event he was riffing on, the in-store performance of the Yoshida Brothers (吉田兄弟), who are playing at the El Rey next week, touring the US and Canada, and may have actually relocated to LA.

The Yoshida Bros are two amazing neo-shamisen players–specifically, the Tsugaru-jamisen. The Tsugaru style of shamisen playing is often likened to the rough, crashing and merciless sound of the sea in that part of the country. Hear for yourself, and note the fauxhawk!:

They’re more known here for their Nintendo Wii tune. But the larger wave whose heels they ride on is worth noting. For about the last twenty years, there has been a revival of this rough, percussive style of shamisen, whose strings are thicker than the delicate ones used for court and kabuki music, and hit as much as pulled or plucked.

Tsugaru-jamisen derives from the very tip-top North of the country, Aomori prefecture, and was initially practiced in the late 1800s by itinerant blind musicians. Aomori is known, when it is known at all, for potatoes, rice, apples, tasty clear saké, migrant agricultural workers, high unemployment, and an extremely bleak sense of humor. It borders the colonial expansion territory of Hokkaido, and would be flyover country if your travels took you between Niigata and Idaho.

I’m not so keen on the neo-national red-and-white made-for-export kimono. To me, this scheme is more often associated with the controlled palette and geometry of Mishima-style cultural fascism (this is a still from the Paul Schrader Mishima movie, playing @ LACMA May 16).

This dumb-down is especially baffling to me, given the local nature of the music, which you can see in an NHK broadcast here. The song is a Tsugaru jongara bushi, one of the staples of the early mod repertoire which the Yoshida Bros have recorded in several different versions.

Their reach is actually kind of stunning. Their latest album apparently covers a Brian Eno number, and they do a pretty nice ambient spaghetti-western soundtrack with slide guitar, in “Morricone.” Their publicists seem to be lamely scrambling to find the right slots and “cool Japan” metaphors to describe the Bros–hmm, let’s see what’s in the virtual pirate crate here…

Clad in formal, ceremonial attire of kimonos and hakama pants, but sporting the dyed light brown hair that is trendy among Japan’s savvy youth, the Brothers play the age-old Tsugaru-shamisen-an instrument akin to a rustic three-stringed banjo-with the fervor of Jimi Hendrix.

I like “rustic,” as a tipoff to folky timelessness, found in the “age-old,” uh, nineteenth-century style of the Tsugaru jamisen. And “clad” as a verb meaning “to wear in a stiff, formal manner” as in iron-clad, def conveys the angle that these dudes don’t put their pants [hakama] on just one leg at a time, like you and me. But what really puzzled me was the Hendrix comparison–it’s like they said “hmm, 2 guys, not white…wait… playing a power instrument, hmm, let’s round up to Hendrix!” Last time I looked, the Yoshida Bros were acoustic musicians, all about rhythm and not improvisation, never sing anything longer than a single shout at a time. But there is that flag thing in common.