Wednesday, March 17, 2021

parade of daily notes in process from 07- 08 March, 2021: excerpts, and earlier


In the last hours of Sunday, March 7, 2021, I made some dinner and sat down to read. I had slept most of the day after having gone to bed near midnight the night before, i.e. the night of the 6th. This followed a busy day. Saturday I had taken care of errands and walked half way across town and back. Somehow I had turned my hips and ankles into tense ropes on these long walks and then made that worse by carrying a lot of groceries home. So, I figure my body needed the rest. But when I got up in the afternoon on Sunday I realized I needed again to get a few more things from the store. Happily I can report, I did that today and my aches are lessened, so I am more conscious of my posture etc. as I do this.

Many, many times over the years I take to writing down what I'm reading and researching. I do this in a number of ways for myself in order to keep track of what is in process. But now and then I get the urge to tell others. For this of course I have to write it down. There is always for me a wide range of materials. Longer views turn into lists as a result, by necessity, and might be interesting for no one but the far away in time. Still people ask what I'm doing and I laugh thinking what they may want or imagine is a finished product! But no, what gets the most attention is the constant process, after all.

After a normal morning routine when I think I may have cooked some pasta, and poured & drank a cup of cold coffee, it dawned on me that I wanted to finish the section in the recent Balzac novelette I was spending time with. First published in 1834 as a submitted manuscript in L'Echo de la Juene (or Young) France as "Ne touchez pas la hache (Don’t Touch the Axe)", it came a few years after the imposition of the new July Monarch of France. This was Duke Louis Phillippe from the other, 'lesser' Orleans branch of the Bourbon line.

The story though, takes place just a few years earlier when the other Bourbon line, that of the brothers of Louis XVI had wrestled for dominance after the fall and disgrace of Napoleon in 1814 and his defeat at Waterloo in 1815. A verbal contest of emotion is playing out here between a General and a Duchess. The time is the 1820's. The place for this contest is at the Hotel of the Duchess - her house - in central Paris, and near to the Palace Bourbon which lay on the south bank of the Seine. This neighborhood had for centuries been the domain of a number of noble houses close to that of the Palais Bourbon nestled in and among various churches and hospitals and charities. She is married to a Duke closely attached to the efforts of Charles X, and conveniently for the story, he was out of town on some extended mission. She had been close to the ladies in the House of Bourbon all her life.
 
The General is a hero from the Napoleonic wars. He had won battles and suffered much, got lost in the desert in Egypt, and had been away for so long that it took a man even with his commanding skill sets some time to return to the center of things back in Paris. When things changed in 1830 and Charles, the misruling monarch was replaced, the Duchess had already left and entered a Carmelite convent, far away, hanging off the end of Tarife at the southernmost tip of Spain. Then, Tarife was a British protectorate like Gibraltar is now and off limits for the French. The Bourbon family and entourage had also fled and spent the rest of their lives looking for safe haven.
 
This General had fallen for the Duchess who was inclined to let him visit her, and for some time, thus distinguishing him from other gentlemen, as her neighbors and nobles in the Court could point out. At this point in the story though they were both still in Paris. The Bourbon line and all the Houses with their deep associations still straining after decades of terror and reassemblage in the wakes of the revolutionary tumult, still felt far less than stable and it made some sense for ladies to make friends with powerful forces. These alliances and friendships however had to be carried out with a delicacy and finesse that the French fortunately had turned into an artform and which had existed for centuries. This Duchess knew very well who she was and what she would stand for and not. But, tragically for her she had never experienced real love. And this, unsurprisingly, the General still did not understand. He was a military man and she was a court lady and they both had different ideas about just what was going on. After months of his assertions based on his hopeful outlook, and her not quite denying how she felt for him, it is late, he is on his knees with his head in her lap. She runs her fingers through his curly dark locks, thinking to herself, realizing that he would kill her if he ever concluded she had been fooling him. Spurred by his expectations he meets the intransigence of her sense of self, and her appraisal of her responsibilities. The layers of proper behavior unravel where for him his endless sets of means reach out for an end that she will not abide. Because for her that end means death.
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The next thing within reach is the current NY Review of Books. In it, a brief overview of the writing career of American author Nicholson Baker is laid out alongside a new release for him called "Baseless: My Search for Secrets in the Ruins of the Freedom of Information Act". Baker has been a regular author of fiction and sometimes essays since the late 1980's. His frustration with politics over the last twenty years in particular has led him to appeal to the US government through official channels to find out the answer to certain questions about the torture regime, drone strikes, and even the origins of COVID-19. He waits for years and time and again finds, when he does get responses, that they are so full of redaction he can't construct explicit enough answers or chronologies that could show what has actually happened. He laments that if we don't know what has happened then we don't know what is done in our name as Americans and so can't even say what we do or do not stand for. 

We thereby lose a sense of who we are in these redacted intelligence files. But, in this latest book, Baker writes out these searches alongside his day to day routines, He has a pair of dogs he dearly loves and who are his constant companions. He goes to the market, he makes dinner. He washes the dogs, they sit by him when he writes or sleeps. These quotidian rounds, the freelance author Peter Baker of this review [NYRB 11Mar21] tells us, are the explicit known forms of actual known life that are most important to all of us anyway. For Nicholson Baker, he seems to tell us, they act as a solace rather, that counters the sought meanings which Baker returns to again and again in order to try to confirm for him and us what we likely already sense but know are likely beyond certain proof.

The next article from Jenny Uglow explores the beauty of an old mapbook of England published in 1815. A section on the life and career of William Smith follows. Another look at Smith's methods also show how he and the book's publication were paid out. It was a beautiful volume and still is as it sat in the archives for centuries not seeing the light of day, but it was hardly ever purchased. Mr Smith spent ten weeks as a result in debtor's prison in 1819. He would work on several projects in his time though and give birth to the study of geology on a massive scale. The title of Smith's major work was "A Delineation of the Strata of England and Wales, with part of Scotland: exhibiting the colliers and mines, the marshes and fen lands originally overflowed by the sea, and the varieties of soil according to the variations in the substrata, illustrated by the most descriptive names". As the first ever geologic map of an entire country, subscribers could pay 5 guineas (in 1815!) for individual sheets or pay £12 for the whole thing which covered 8.5 feet by 6 feet. He had worked as an engineer working out problems in drainage and irrigation, he traipsed across the lands and dug up fossils, and in the beginning worked as a youthful surveyor in Somerset where he took an interest in the seams of local coal sediment. Where do we stand? How is that possible? It's not so simple!


In 1921, Six Characters In Search of an Author brought fame and a resolution of debt to Luigi Pirandello, a 53 yr old Sicilian. Pirandello's father, a wealthy owner of a sulfur mine lost it all in a major flooding in 1903, and so, 35 yr old Luigi started writing. He spent nearly twenty years at it before they caught the public eye and then he became famous for these satiric, dark stories of betrayal and vengeance. [...]
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08 March

Awaking and looking briefly at the news, I get up to make some coffee and fill the water bottle. It is Monday and cool this morning but it promises to be 70F and bright, sunny with a strong wind from the south. The daffodil tops have slipped their spears above the crust of dead scrub in their little isolated clusters - first harbinger of spring I see here.

I returned to finish an interview with Toni Morrison from the summer of 1993 and published that fall in The Paris Review (no. 128), after having left off reading just a couple days ago. She had been talking about sources and inspirations and how to make plots work without detailing their central actions, leaving that til the end or for the reader's mind to work out and how understatement can work far better. She says she did this explicitly in her novel Jazz to be like the music, where the structure frames the improvisation. Where the work of endless hours, the years in countless measures, the practice polish is shown off in graceful paucity and crisp lines. Meanwhile the steady, propulsive beat is building all the while, working its underlying pulse where the melody accentuates, captures with some hovering hint, snatching and releasing from that driving undertow. Not only does she praise the understatement, she claims it as a must-be-so. The reader must never be satiated, she says. Instead they must be taught that the tune can be played again and again, but with endless variation. This can-can is a demonstration I see with a perfect number of steps, a flurry, and then it stops. A bow, the cheers, then the curtain.

Of course, because she can, a number of things rise to the surface in this interview. Asked about other structural elements in her work she tells of how migration and movement to the cities seems to have profoundly changed the course of so many lives but particularly African-Americans. The tumult, the difficulties, the density and diversity of wide-ranging populations, the grittiness and toughness of survival all proliferate new understandings and insights. Amidst all this, an individual can become themselves, can learn their own skill sets and hone them to a polish. The music and the dance and the words and the art become emblematic of self ownership. And then beyond that from that place of self-mastery, a person can become a center of one's own, of one's own circles with the ripples extending outward. The music gets heard and a person can learn of their own body, their own thoughts and then test them against so many others. Individuals stand out and an audience can hear and see - for the first time in the US - Black people aren't some indifferentiable, confused mass of inarticulate hordes. Duke Ellington is not like Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis is not like Charlie Parker. You can hear anew, as Billie Holiday is not like Ella Fitzgerald or Aretha Franklin or Nina Simone. Of course, each of them, and us, have our own voices, often submerged. But we get the benefit when we witness their voices grow and change in time.

She explains how she was asked when she would write about white America. And to hear her say how she first wanted to be understood as an African-American writer gives a profound insight into her sense of place and being. And maybe the rest of us. She knows those asking that think it's a compliment that she can give her voice to the white experience, and she would, she said, if she wanted to. But primary for her was to write as an African-American woman. She defined for herself a place to write from. 

Joyce, or Tolstoy, she says, weren't asked to do that, it was demanded of them though, because it was assumed that they already were writing from the center of what already existed. And they were branded as hostile to authority when they wrote what they did. The place of western civilization already was the arbiter, the decider of what could be and what could not be written about. She had set about to make another, different center, another locus to view things from. As long as people keep asking the question of when artists or writers were going to come into the center, to talk about that center, she says, then she won't, she can't: "...I'm gonna stay out here on the margin, and let the center look for me."
She wonders that the French didn't ask Joyce when he would write about Paris. This provincial sounding nonsensical question makes her point plain.
And,
"Each subject matter demands its own form, you know."

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The pandemic has sprung new habits for us all I think. This year I've been reading as much from the huge archive of the Paris Review that extends back to 1953 as anything else. It turns out to be a treasure trove of stuff I never knew existed before and every week I find more things I feel I have to make time for. Access to the archive is open to subscribers but will lock up when the subscription ends for me in September (I think). So I have an incentive to plow thru as much as I can, in case, for whatever reason, I can't renew. Since the beginning of January I've kept the pace of an issue of that per week. Jumping around decade to decade, for variety, I alternate one issue from the earliest years and one from some other decade. It seemed important to get as many of the earlier ones read to get a sense of how they started out, hopefully showing purpose and range of their material and consistency. For this scattershot reading approach I have to make lists of what I get done or I'll get lost. There's so much here for writers and readers alike. The earlier ones are shorter but sometime in the 1960's individual issues grew in length to around 200 pages, or more! My schedule is late with the 40 year anniversary issue no. 128 of fall 1993 finished today - with that interview with Toni Morrison.
...
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17JAN21
There was a recent Paris Review I picked up to see if, or how quickly I could speed thru it.
The structure is simple: each issue has a bunch of poems, some short stories, a couple interviews, a photo essay or art conception.
It all has the thrown together feel of a few dozen unrelated articles, stacked and squared-off, then cut, shorn into crisp, thick-paged form.
Regularized font. 
Topics breeze in and sail out. Words dip and sway or jolt and cascade. 
Meaning, substance, chiseled like aphorae,
but catalogued like discount coupons tucked sublimely next to the fertilizer. 
A story of foreign agents? no. 
They're little kids, 
who comically clown, then, betrayed by the tectonics of culture, left brutalized, alone in fields of broken glass. Glass that time is viewed through. 
A turn of page finds shop-worn counters of durable vows, shiny from frequent scrubbings, lined straight along sills of windows
left unwashed, too cloudy for vision to penetrate. Redounding back, Interiors resound like drums, then settle as leaves in fall.

"Are we there yet?"

Dozens of poems. Short, long, catchy, self-contradicting, lines double up. Words separate, untie united.
...
~05JAN21
This issue, spring 2019, #228, went right along. In a day-and-a-half, it was two-thirds done.
The interview with the living poet (Carl Phillips) who teaches on the other side of Missouri,
rides along the regular track. The obstacles that made his path uneven get highlighted, some.
The output is prodigious, but the thoughts and their presentation seem ordinary to me. The expected tracks of Obvious.
His life read aloud putters round that track: 'Glad to meet you." "Charmed I'm sure." 
I should, I think, finish this issue up really quick.
~16JAN21
Ten days later... after a morning of this or that - the news, which treats the emotions like a yoyo with the string of reason made out of rancid silly putty - 
and a paragraph or two of Michel de Montaigne, for good measure;
Maigret the chief detective, [in Georges Simenon's "Maigret & the Apparition] is back at the office and knows he won't likely make it home for dinner.
The second night in a row. There are threads engaged seeking witnesses afield. Surveil watches posted, calls made to London and Nice, awaiting what the researchers may unveil. Left with no idea who did it or why and only a sixth of the story left - even that, I can leave it til tomorrow.

Dinner on the stove gets a stir. 
What there is left in this recent issue of the Paris Review can be mostly read backwards, piece by piece.
spring 2019, #228:
"Study of Two Figures (Orpheus/Eurydice)" Monica Youn 
21., 16., 8., John Ashbery
"Elvis Has Left The House" James Tate
"Monsoon" Eduardo C Corral 
"You're Gonna Write This" - Patricia Smith 

I'm also keeping up with the New York Review this year (and last fall) which is a task sometime as there is just so much material there.

Sunday, March 14, 2021

rainy day - 14march21

Today is the shortest day of the year. Daylight Savings Time in the US means that the clocks are set ahead an hour in the spring. This means today is only 23 hours long while sunrise and sunset will happen about an hour later than it did yesterday. People have different ideas as to what that means and why we do it. The history of it points to federal laws borne from Department of Commerce notions from fifty years ago about daylight for farmers, getting products to market in daylight, cutting down on traffic accidents. Saving insurance money. Most folks just seem to see it as a hassle and a day or two of jostled sleep patterns, the kids will need an explanation, the pets start bugging us for food earlier than what the clocks tell us.

Of course as the earth's tilt in the northern hemisphere brings longer daylight hours, the course around the sun makes sunrise happen about a minute earlier and the sunset about a minute later every day without this clock adjustment. Until late June. Sunset does come an hour later today and in a month's time this slow accretion of minutes does add up. 

But here today there is an absence of sun. It rains for the third day in a row. The daffodils have shot their spears up in alliance with their annual rhythms and today I've seen their very first yellow trumpet bell plop out. The rain makes it hang its head in dripping assent. That one will get plucked and brought in and lain out on a dry sheet of cardboard in the front room. When it dries out it will get set in a teacup on a book shelf just above eye level. A reminder. Last year's soldier will get taken out and placed with the others on a ledge in a closet where the others lie in quiet rows. Paper-thin fragile, crimpled brown testament to passing time on another scale.

An intermittent drip outside the window here counts an irregular beat. The coffeemaker's heater still clicks tho it's given off today's last heaving huff of steam. The thermostat clicks on to the right, and the drop furnace to my left with a whoosh comes alive. The low roar builds softly, the metal of the furnace creaks expanding in the heat generated. The thermostat clicks again, the furnace fire goes out. Again I hear the refrigerator has kicked on circulating it's fluid with the whirring of its motor hidden in, but making obvious, the layered blankets of white noise found everywhere these days. 

The rain outside comes harder again. The drip outside the window more insistent. I hear a train horn in the distance. It's good I don't have any reason to go out. Groceries gotten yesterday, rent and bills got paid the week before. The trickle of news I see seems dumb, numb like a shuddering worn out train slowing before a weather-beaten station. The AP and Washington-Post act as though they're hand-wringing over the President's forty minute commute every other weekend to go to church and see his grandkids. If that's what they think is news they should listen to the rain dripping outside my window. 

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Last year I got subscriptions on a whim to The Paris Review and The New York Review of Books. They give a good excuse for some performative discipline. If I read an article or two a day I can keep up with the relentless supply of topics fed out of the NY Review. Even though I have to stick with it this process I've allotted to myself feels easy since the topics range so far and wide feeding my parallel curiosities. More on that later.

Late last month they had a Zoom'd symposium with a number of their contributors talking about the crisis in journalism. Compiled and edited, the youtube clip of that runs just under eighty minutes. They talk about our cloistered indoor activity necessitated by the pandemic over the last year. Conversation grew around how social justice has been hampered, then exploded, then exploited over the last year and how the institutions of the media has come under simultaneous attacks, an ongoing mass delegitimization over the last several years. Also acknowledged is the hive-mind of internet-delivered social media where people tend to listen only to those like themselves, which in turn, tends to have a polarizing effect on our day to day thoughts. 

But the internet also exposes us to those outside our humid silos and people react to those 'other voices' generally out of ignorance. "Because they just didn't know about that." More people feel they are being forced to reckon with all of the old wounds and old disparities and injustices as each confrontation with supposed 'new information' flares up. There's plenty of hurt to go around. It will be a real series of hard tests to make sure these don't all metastasize, or get met with harsher, overcompensating forms of stricter authority. There are people in Congress and the Senate and all over the country who feel they don't need to learn anything new, and that the answers that only they can supply is just what 'those people' need.

________________________________

On the other hand I've been reading back issues of The Paris Review. Started in 1953 by Americans wanting to present new literature to a country that hungered for it, they've managed, despite the odds, to keeping itself afloat for over 67 years delivering poetry, short stories and interviews with writers and readers from all over the world. Adjusting to its format took a little slowing simmer. Perusing the 67 year digital archive whose access comes with the subscription, it quickly became apparent that the best writers and thinkers in print of the twentieth century were represented. And also there were so many that I had never heard of! Issue number 236 just arrived the other day but I won't get to that for months probably. Instead I try to read a back issue every week. Older issues are shorter, but recent ones run over 200 pages each so that keeps me busy reading every one cover to cover. So much variety!

Last week I read inspiring 1993 interviews with Toni Morrison and Don De Lillo. That one also had a short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and a 'lost' Ezra Pound Canto when he was running with the fascists in Italy. This week the spring 1977 issue I see sports a long interview with Kurt Vonnegut, poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gary Soto & Frank O'Hara, and, a short story from William S. Burroughs telling when he spent a summer in The Valley of the Rio Grande in 1949. 

Next week in the queue, issue 7 from fall-winter 1954-5 has a bunch of work from writers I've never heard of but has a number of drawings from Pablo Picasso. Two weeks ago, in issue 5, there were a number of line drawings called Livres d'Or. Collected by Parisian restaurants and clubs and kept in closets for decades they show, leaf after leaf, momentary sketches from (now very famous) artists who sat for a moment in the darkened booths and, handed a pen and paper, delightful flourishes of another age's brilliance. Never having known these existed they appear before my eye like new flowers. One that really jumped out at me was by Leonor Fini who I had never heard of. This blog talks a bit about her


edit: Oh yeah! today is Π (Pi) day: 3.14... round and round it goes. And I guess the Grammy Awards are tonight which is an especially weird thing this year since so much just didn't happen last year.