Archives Project: STL #27 (Playing Catch Up)

Title: Playing Catchup Description: Records of the Year(s) Publication Date: 29 December 2003 And so ends the republication of my most prolific year of blogging. I'll have a few comments on the list at the bottom.

That list I offered last week will provide the matter for several entries in the coming weeks. However, I want to take a brief pause to talk not about my stable favorites, but new ones. Last week, I mentioned the factors which slowed my orderly progress through my CDs: new albums and temporary obsessions. The end of the year provides an occasion for compiling a list of those which compound the second and first of these factors. However, having neither the time nor the money to compile anything like an authoritative list, I have to rely on other critics' year end recommendations to budget my X-mas money. I won't have much of an idea of the year in music until next year is underway. But this is nothing new; I'm forever finding out about the new and cool belatedly. Therefore, I offer a list of "new" music from the past two years that I listened to last year.

1. Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man: Out of Season. Go buy this beautiful record now. The singer from Portishead and the mastermind of Talk Talk team up to make a great record mixing sources of cabaret, melodrama soundtracks, and the tragic jazz chanteuses.
2. Sleater-Kinney: One Beat. I don't suppose they want me calling them 'my home-grrls,' but I have driven past the Sleater-Kinney exit from I-5 lots of times.That's not relevant, but "Far Away," the only sincere response to 9/11 I've heard, certainly is.
3. White Stripes: Elephant. It repeats the formula, but what a formula: stadium rock swagger, a similarly allusive guitar vocabulary, and a DIY sensibility. (Oh, why did I have to say "DIY sensibility"?)
4. Songs:Ohia: Magnolia Electric Company. The mysterious band finally coalesced with this album. Similar sources to the Whites, but moody and more elusive goals. "Farewell Transmission" is my nomination for rock epic of the year.
5. Tori Amos: Scarlett's Walk. I came to Tori late in the game. The confessional lyrics of the early massively popular records didn't draw me in, but the musical complexity of the middle albums (including her baroque vocal style) did. The first six songs of this album are great, and most of it very good. The music is less progressive but just as accomplished, and the singing as good as ever.
6. Stratford 4: Love and Distortion. British invasion via Marin county. Check out the "Telephone"/"Tonight Would Be All Right" one-two punch of diffident communication, the first an honest, friendly talk with Mom. That's so punk rock.
7. Cast Recording: Once More With Feeling. If you have to ask "what cast," I couldn't convince you anyway. Not as great as the episode of course, but these are some finally crafted and moving songs.
8. Papa M: Songs of Mac, Papa M Sings, Whatever Mortal Wifey tracked down this group via their Will Oldham connection. The first thing of theirs she found is a two song ep: dark, moody, long. "So Warped" for moody post folk-rock epic of 2002!
9. Missy Elliott: Under Construction. There are a half-dozen kick-ass songs ("exclusives") here, but the last half just drops off the table. Still, the hooks and beats of the first half still work.
10. Bonnie Prince Billy: Master and Everyone. Most-used words describing the former Palace mastermind: Appalachia, ghosts, loss.
11. Camper Van Beethoven: Tusk.Actually recorded in the mid-eighties. It's a song-for-song cover of the Fleetwood Mac album. (How could I not?)
12. Beck: Sea Change. Beck. What is there to say about Beck that hasn't already been said? He's our Prince, Neil Young, and Leonard Cohen rolled up in one.
13. Marianne Faithful: Kissin' Time. This is a pretty high ranking when you consider the album makes me a little nauseated every time I play it. Nobody sings with Marianne Faithful's authority.
14. Future Bible Heroes: Eternal Youth. One of Stephin Merritt's side projects. Not the Magnetic Fields, but witty and enjoyable just the same. The "I'd rather" structure of "Losing Your Affection" is wonderful.
15. Bill Ricchini: Ordinary Time. I have a friend who likes a particular kind of music: introspective lyrics over lush, pop-orchestral arrangements. He gave me this.
16. Solomon Burke: Don't Give Up On Me. Comeback for the forgotten soul master.
17. Low: Things We Lost In the Fire. Slow and sparkling, like a glacier.
18. Wilco: Yankee Hotel Foxtrot. I'm starting to think they're a little overrated, but I loved this album for a while. Being There is better though.
19. The Streets: Original Pirate Material. Raps some skinny British kid made in his bedroom. A brilliant, parallel-universe version of gangsta rap.
20. Richard Thompson: 1000 Years of Popular Music. Conceived as a lark, it's nevertheless illuminating to hear the songs Thompson values, along with a medieval version of "Oops I did it again."

Anyway, that's how I sees it now. I'll be back next week, explaining myself as usual.

/other/

Books: Great Expectations, Oracle Night (Paul Auster), The Spy Who Came in from the Cold, Banquet Years (Shattuck), Fray (Wheedon)

Flickeries: One, Two, Three (Billy Wilder), Buffy 5

Music: Listen Up 1 and 2 (homemade mixes-- see Ricchini above), "Milkshake," "Crazy in Love" (iTunes purchases--about 100 times each!)

okay, so I think the ranking is still about right. Around #10 begins records I don't and/or don't want to listen to anymore (though "Losing Your Affection" is still the most played song on my computer.) A quick look at the ol' metadata suggest some candidates I came to later: The Yeah Yeah Yeah's (maybe top 20), Sufijan's Michigan album (maybe top 10), Outkast (top 10), The Kills (top 10 if not 5), Fiery Furnaces (10), Decemberists (10), Alasdair Roberts (10), Spoon's Kill the Moonlight (20), and Iron & Wine (20). A revised top 10, sans gnomic thumbnails might be something like

1. Beth Gibbons and Rustin Man: Out of Season.
2. Sleater-Kinney: One Beat.
3. Outkast: Speakerboxx/The Love Below.
4. The Kills: Keep on Your Mean Side
5. Fiery Furnaces: Gallowsbird Bark
6. Tori Amos: Scarlett's Walk.
7. White Stripes: Elephant.
8. Songs:Ohia: Magnolia Electric Company. Plus the previous year's Didn't It Rain
9. Papa M: Songs of Mac, Papa M Sings, Whatever Mortal
10. Missy Elliott: Under Construction.

Archives Project: STL #26 (50)

Title: 50 Description: A few of my favorite songs (being a December tradition) Publication Date: 22 December 2003

It's funny that when I was doing this I had many responsibilities to attend to, but the last several months I've had little to do yet can hardly seem to find the time to repost what I've already written. A couple of things to note: I'm currently in the middle of a listening project similar to the obsessive alphabetical working through I mention below. In this case I'm listening to a playlist of songs in my iTunes with a play count of zero. This actually comprises a lot of my old favorites that I would listen to a lot on CD, yet for one reason or another hadn't listened to via iTunes or the iPod, or in many cases hadn't even uploaded. This project might help me make a top 50 again this winter, which I don't think I've done since the following.

Just before sitting down to post this abbreviated entry, I put on Tom Ze's Hips of Tradition. Listening to this CD represents the completion of a year-and-a-half listening project.* That's right, it took me 18 months to listen to all my CDs, played in alphabetical order. That long span tells me one of two things: either I have too much music, or too little time. There are mitigating factors to consider; new CDs which I'd listen to several times, or CDs that I played in order but wanted to hear again. But either way, this vantage point provides a good excuse to resort to one of my favorite and most useless pastimes: list-making.

It's been a tradition of mine (well, this makes the third year) to compile a list of my favorite songs. The first year it was a top 50, the next year it expanded into a top 100, but this year it's back to 50, with a couple of arbitrary rules in place: first, that no 'artist' be allowed more than one entry. My other rule is that "songs" by defined as music with words, so no "Ruby My Dear." My informal guideline is to avoid snobbery-- to include songs that I like, and not ones I think I should like. Sometime in the future, I'll provide commentary on the various selections, but I've still got to pack for my trip home. In the nearer future, like next week, look for a year's best sort of list. This will be a list of those CDs that interrupted my mechanical progress by demanding to be played, and now. But now, my top 50 songs, countdown style:

50. Patches, Clarence Carter (1973) (up from #96 last year) 

49. Good lovin gone bad, Bad Company (#67) 

48. Strychnine, The Sonics (new!) 

47. Living for the City, Stevie Wonder (new!) 

46. Loretta, Townes Van Zandt (new!)

45. Far Away, Sleater-Kinney (new!) 

44. Pissed off 2 a.m., Alejandro Escovedo (#91) 

43. Sugar Baby, Dock Boggs (#69) 

42. Kool thing, Sonic Youth (#56) 

41. Flyby, Ice T (1991) (#57) 

40. CCKMP, Steve Earle (1988) (--, #42 in 2001)

39. Gin & Juice, The Gourds (1998) (down from #23) 

38. Losing Your Affection, FBH (#88) 

37. Blue, Jayhawks (--, #39 in 2001) 

36. Death Letter, Son House (#71)

35. Pale Blue Eyes, Velvet Underground (#53 ) 

34. Ace of Spades, Motorhead (#51) 

33. Walking to You, ETBTG (--) 

32. Enjoy the Silence, Tori Amos (#42)

 31. I Just Wasn’t Made for these times, Beach Boys (#40) 

30. It’s Tricky, Run DMC (--)

29. Suspicious Minds, Elvis Presley (#36) 

28. By the Marks, Gillian Welch (1996) (--) 

27. Born for Me, Paul Westerberg (--) 

26. If I had Possession over Judgment Day, Robert Johnson (#49) 

25. I Can’t Stand the Rain, Ann Peebles (#29)

24. Gravity of the Situation, Vic Chesnutt (#28) 

23. More than This, Roxy Music (#64) 

22. Back in Black, AC/DC (1980) Holy Writ (#26)

21. Tumblin’ Dice, Rolling Stones (1972) (#24) 

20. Tonight I Think I’m Going to Go Downtown, Flatlanders (1972) (#22) 

19. Black Steel in the Hour of Chaos, Public Enemy (1988) (#21) 

18. Louisiana 1927, Randy Newman (1974) (#20) 

17. Try a Little Tenderness, Otis Redding (1966) (#19) 

16. In the Midnight Hour, Wilson Pickett (1966) (#15) 

15. Best is Yet to Come, Sinatra (#46)

14. I Walk the Line, Johnny Cash (--) 

13. Little Honey, Dave Alvin (1994) (#13) 

12. Barrett’s Privateers, Stan Rogers (#14) 

11. Black Eyed Dog, Nick Drake (1974) (#11)

10. Paranoid, Black Sabbath (--) 

9. Train Song, Tom Waits (1987) (#5) 

8. Breakfast in Bed, Duffy Springfield (1969) (#10) 

7. Have You Been Making Out Okay, Al Green (1973) (#6) 

6. Kiss, Prince (1986) (#7) 

5. Tonight’s the Night, Neil Young and Crazy Horse (1975) (#3) 

4. Divorce Song, Liz Phair (1993) (#8) 

3. Idiot Wind, Bob Dylan (1974) (#34) 

2. Tracks of My Tears, Smokey Robinson & The Miracles (1965) (#2) 

1. Brompton Oratory, Nick Cave (1997) (#1)

Well, I see I have a lot of explaining to do. I'll start soon enough.

*I say "represents" because the assorted soundtracks and comps that are stored following the Z's make an anti-climactic finale, and I choose not to mention the ZZtop album. Although the trio's orthography makes a more definitive conclusion, they so lack Ze's hipster cache. But, as I am able to actually drive to LaGrange, you couldn't expect me not to do so, listening to the "how-how-how-how" as I rolled into town?

/other/

books: Watt (Beckett) Wittgenstein's Ladder (Perloff), Poetry in the Museums of Modernism (C. Paul) McSweeney's 12, The Believer

Movies: Two Towers, Return of the King, Band of Outsiders

Music: Sweetheart of the Rodeo, Randy Newman Songbook, Soul of Black Peru

Archives Project: STL #25

Title: Language Holds Us
Description: Reading Roundup: Poetry
Date: 17 December 2003

I've been catching up with "post-avant," "progressive," "pomo," or, my favorite, "postlangpo" (post-Language) poetry since I starting checking out a number of blogs linked from Ron Silliman's blog this past summer. A lot of these poets take their inspiration from Zukofsky, so it makes sense that I try to figure out what they're up to. The more immediate inspiration for most of the poets I discuss below is the so-called Language poetry that flowered in the 1970's. You can access the famous journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E online if you're curious.

Language writing was a heavily theorized stew of Wittgenstein, Marx, Saussure, Charles Sanders Pierce, and other Big Thinkers. The original crew of poets (Silliman, Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, Bruce Andrews and many others) wrote theoretical explanations of their work (I mean their "projects") that make for a useful, necessary really, grounding for the poetry. T.S. Eliot once said that to understand Ezra Pound's poetry you had to read his prose, and vice-versa, and I although the language poets rejected the political implications of the arch-modernists tropes of mastery, they certainly share this hermeticism. The place to start with the theory might be Bernstein and Andrews's The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book, which features short essays by a lot of people, along with some nice appreciations of their influences, like Stein and Zuk. Bernstein has published many of his own _________ essays in three volumes (to date). I've been reading Content's Dream. That blank two sentences back stands for a quality I can't quite place. It's not that they're "lyrical," "lucid," "thoughtful," "insightful," though they are all those things. They partake in some of the same tactics that his poetry does: associative, rupture, humor, skepticism toward language, absolute belief in language, though a bit more directly. The unifying principal of langpo is that language doesn't reflect social reality, but constitutes it. "Language is the material of both thinking and writing.... thinking cannot be said to 'accompany' the experiencing of the world in that it informs that experiencing. It is through language that we experience the world, indeed through language that meaning comes into the world and into being" (61-62). The poetry therefore isn't discourse (or description, or documentation) but enactment or instantiation. Okay?

Take Clark Coolidge's At Egypt. Please. I've been meaning to read this book for years, ever since it was cited by Marjorie Perloff as an example of avant garde work that resorts to syntactic defamiliarization made necessary because imagistic innovation is immediately gobbled up by advertising and other media. You can see this in the opening: "I came here. I don't know you here./ I say this. I have lost such./...There is little sure./ It was a coming which was done." It's a long poem, 80 pgs in 11 sections, and I'm sure my reading is only partial, but my reaction to the book is that it's about how language mediates, no wait, constitutes, change, as figured by travel. This reading is informed by the five epigraphs, by Flaubert, Michael Palmer, Jabes, Rilke, and sumbuddy named Robin Cook. I won't quote these; you can look 'em up. I'm also intrigued by the form of the poem. Short sections of this book length poem are justified to the right, many of which in the early going contain references to a shadowy 'he.' I'm not sure what to make of it, but you can see what it looks like here

Another of Coolidge's books is called The Crystal Text. I haven't read it, but the implication I think is that writing is like a crystal: seemingly transparent yet opaque, focusing but dispersive. Christian Bok (there's an umlaut over the 'o' which I don't know the html for) pushes this equivalence in his Crystallography, which (mis)uses that science to understand poetry. For example, a stunning poem called "Diamond" appropriates terms of art to create a poetic equation: LIFE X FIRE = BRILLIANCE (all this is true)" Though Bok is playful and experimental (he cuts the word diamond apart and refashions it: "i am, and i/am, and/i am, and i/am, and/i die, amen") some of his work, particularly "Diamonds," is moving in a way that only the distance of heavily artificed work allows.

I already burned my Coolidge transition on Bok, but I make the rules here. Lee Ann Brown's Polyverse also uses some juicy epigraphs, one from Emily Dickinson ("There is a Zone whose even Years/ No Solstice interrupt--") and one from Gertrude Stein ("Any letter is an alphabet./ When this you see you will kiss me.") You can dismiss language-based poetry has trickery if you want: Bok uses some concrete techniques, and my first reaction to the word "polyverse" was a sarcastic 'ooo wow, she's overthrowing the hegemony of the unitary implicit in the linguistic construction of the basic paradigm of existence.' But looking at the poetry more closely, you see craft and music ("Rhythms silly/when you tink it/sneezy pretty/Crepe and crush"), and sophistication and lyricism ("I say these things not because they happen but because many things happen") to go along with good old-fashioned paradigm smashing.
Brown creates a sort of Language lineage out of women: her epigraphs and the dedication to Bernadetter Meyer, her "CoLabs" with Meyer, Hannah Weiner, Jennifer Moxely, and Lisa Jarnot, and her poems for quasi-riot grrls like Liz Phair and Polly Jean Harvey. I've toyed with the idea of investigating a women's lineage for postlanguage poets (of both genders). You could start with Anne Carson's Sappho, a translation which uses fragmentation powerfully, continue through Dickinson and Stein to the many significant Language writers who were women.

That route takes you through Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson. It is a book of criticism, though Howe is also a well-known poet. Dickinson is interesting because her "publication" method of home-made fasicles allowed for a great deal of contingency and reader participation. Though the editions we read give the illusion of a single text, she would regularly star words and provide alternatives at the end of the poem. Her poems are semantically and textually amibiguous. The nice thing that Howe does is in a sense 'recover' this famous and extraordinary poet from critical abuse: "The reductivist approach to writing signalled by the title of their book forces [Gilbert and Gubar, of Madwoman in the Attic fame] to worry unnecessarily that Dickinson choose not to celebrate and sing herself with Whitman; nor could she declare confidently with Emerson that 'the Poet is the sayer, the namer, and represents beauty. He is a sovereign, and stands on the center.' She said something subtler." The bulk of Howe's book is a close and widely allusive of a single poem, "My life had Stood--a Loaded Gun." I haven't read Howe's poetry, but this book of criticism is as 'poetic' as can be.

I've brought up the idea of "lineage" of progressive poets, which helps them distinguish themselves from the current mainstream, which Silliman recently dubbed the "School of Quietude." That's a reductive opposition, between "post-avant" and SoQ, and it's really only good for proselytizing. But by God we need proselytizing! However, it leaves some poets, particularly John Ashbery, in a weird position. After all, Ashbery is easily the most prestigeous living poet, having had laurels and honors heaped on him. His style has been hugely influential, creating a sort of tribe that has significant power in poetry (which is like have significant power in Iceland these days). But he was once an innovator himself, before he started repeating himself in great quantity. I read The Mooring of Starting Out a collection of his first five books where he first developed his deliberately ambiguous, ironically beauracratic style: the fabulous "Decoy" begins "We hold these truths to be self-evident:/That ostracism, both political and moral, has/Its place in the twentieth-century scheme of things;/That urban chaos is the problem we have been seeing into and seeing into,/For the factory, deadpanned by its very existence into a/Descending code of values, has moved right across the road from total financial upheaval/And caught regression head-on." Ashbery is like a Kafka who heard somewhere that everything's going to be OK. In the first of his Three Poems (written in prose), he says that "life holds us, and is unknowable." The language writers would want replace "life" with "language," and aren't so content with ignorance.

I read these books over the course of the last few months. I paged through them all while writing this roundup, but forgive me if my impressions have dulled since I read them. One of my reasons for keeping this site is to save things I read from disappearing into the fog of memory, so in this review I'm at least trying to cut my losses. Toward this same end (memory), I hereby reinstitute the "/other/" feature from the early days of STL. The formal rule is now eleven things, mostly books, I've been occupying myself with in the last week or so. I'll explain why this number some other time.

/other/
books: Ashbery, Drawn and Quartered by Robt Creeley and Archie Rand, Connected by Stven Shaviro, Paratextual Communities by S. Vanderborg, McSweeney's 12, The Believer, Return of the King

movies: All That Jazz, Buffy Season 5, Alias Season 1

music: We're Only In It For the Money by Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention

Archives Project: STL #24

Title: MOMA on the Road
Description: A Ramble Through the Twentieth Century
Date: 10 December 2003

This is an example of experience I might otherwise have completely lost if not for writing about it. In my upcoming move, I expect to burn the journals I kept on and off for 10 years. Maybe I should reconsider, or at least review these.

The Museum of Fine Arts-Houston is lucky enough to host the only American stop of "The Heroic Century," a collection from the Museum of Modern Art which is out wandering while MOMA's building is being renovated. There's a temporary MOMA space open right now in Queens I guess, but I don't know what's on display there because it seems like all the good stuff is in Houston. Though this treasure trove of modern art coming to Texas might seem like Michaelangelo's David visting New York, LA, and Springfield (on the Simpson's), there are some fine museums in this state, including the MFAH.

I've been to plenty of special exhibitions in my life, but tend to forget most of them. I'm going to try to retrace my steps through this exhibition, from the crowded entrance to the thinned-out exit, pausing at a few pieces which impressed me most. This collection is so well known by the reproduction that it's hard to see a lot of it with fresh eyes, and my experience of it mostly consisted of my tastes being confirmed: I still appreciate without liking cubism, still cannot fathom what people see in Salvador Dali, and still have a morbid passion for Adolph Gottlieb and Franz Kline. I wrote a few months ago about how hard it is to see art, a statement I felt stupid about when I noticed the paintings for sale in the coffee shop I go to everyday, but the quality of this stuff, above and apart from its familiarity, is extraordinary.

Entering the exhibit, you are confronted with Matisse's big painting of a ring of dancers. It's a well-known image, though I had never noticed that in the bottom left corner two of the dancers' hands aren't touching, so the circle actually isn't complete. It's fitting that this hopeful keynote to a show of the most self-consciously depressing century have this devious sign. The first large room is a mix of some late 19th century stuff, like Van Gogh's famous Starry Night and a nice Gaugin South Seas portrait, and early twenthieth-century European masterpieces, including Rousseau's The Dream, an image that decorates many a dorm room wall (though not as many as Klimt, who has a typical oil, gold and platinum piece in this room as well). I know this image well, having written an embarrassing descripto-symbolico poem about it as a teenager, but wasn't aware of its large size, nor of the color contrast which makes it hard to see the black stripe of the snake in the shadows. The next room is devoted to Picasso and Matisse, who I like but don't have anything to say about now. You then move into a room that charts the movement toward abstraction, from cubism to the purer abstractions of Kandinsky, who is juxtaposed with Monet in tribute to a recent, well-received show, and Mondrian.

The next room apparently recreates a famous show from the thirties, "Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism." There's a Duchamp ready-made, a bicycle wheel mounted on a stool. I haven't mentioned that, for the first time in my life, I was listening to one of those audio guides.* I generally scorn these, but they gave it to you with admission. Anyway, the description of the Duchamp went strictly by the book, citing Duchamp's questioning of the nature of art by exhibiting a mass-produced item as sculpture. The commentary didn't get into recent research that suggests that Duchamp altered all of his ready-mades or made them himself. If this is true, it obviously complicates the meaning of his art. (Find out about this new theory here.) If I ever get smarter, I'd like to study Duchamp in depth, and puzzle out a theory of his work (including his turn from artist to chess-player). Most of the rest of this room is worthless, though I almost missed a Cornell box, only the second I recall seeing, because it was wedged between two Dails. I had to shove through a herd of mouth breathers to see it.

Then you go through a room of sculpture to a small room of later representational paintings by Balthus, Beckman, and Hopper. Hopper is a funny case, since his current popularity is based, I suspect, on nostalgia, though his ongoing argument was about the isolation of modern life. The Beckman was an eye-opener, a symbolic tryptic called Depature. His topic is Nazi domination of German politics, represented by disturbing images on either wing. The center panel is ambiguous, of a king and queen on a boat. Are they leaving or returning?** Are they even relevant? I wasn't familiar with this painting at all, and haven't though too much about Beckmann in my life, but was mightily impressed by this piece.

This painting is an appropriate place from which to take leave of European painting, moving with emigree artists to America. A large room featuring de Kooning, Pollock, Klein, Gottlieb, Motherwell, and others was comparitively empty. Sure, the crowds pressed around Starry Night were tired from progressing through real space and so passed quickly toward the exit, but they are also increasingly challenged as we progressed in represented time. People simply don't want to grapple with something that looks like this in terms of "art." They do cluster a little more in the following rooms on pop art, though this walk is starting to tire me out, so I think I'll head toward the exit. I will pause though, to quote the Audiostar (TM) guide on Claus Oldenberg's big floppy sculpture of a piece of chocolate cake: "He changes the way we look at cake" (paraphrased, but it was just as stupid.)

This last thing you see before heading downstairs is an assemblage by Dan Flavin of multi-colored fluorescent light tubes connected in a square. It's not a ready-made (more like a made-made), but all the parts are store-bought. There's plenty of 'nature-of-art' theorizing that you can do about it, but the bottom line is that the artist worked with the materials of the contemporary world, and made something pretty. A good way to end this ramble though last century.

*Funny anecdote on those audioguides (or whatever they're called): My wife and I were eating at a second-rate Italian restaurant in downtown Austin (go figure). A couple at the next table, obviously on a first date, were making small talk next to us. The woman was from New York (you could tell from the shoes) and the no-neck was an urban Texan (you could tell from the utter studidity). After asking if his date was a big eater (he wanted to get salads and split an entree--classy move), he steered the discussion to museums, for that she was cultured and all. He liked museums, he said, especially the headphones. Especially the headphones!

**Yeah, this seems a thick-headed question because of the title, but it's worth asking departure of whom, from what, and by what means. Or maybe I'm just getting excited about The Return of the King.

Archives Project: STL #23

Simplest! Things! Last! #23: The Big Cop Out
Description:"This is what Tom does"
Date: 5 December 2003

I like this one. It's short and funny. I doubt if I will ever comment on the Frank Waters book.

It seems like forever since I've written about a novel. As every illiterate knows, it takes time to read a novel, and as a poetry specialist, I have to use my precious free time to read them. I enjoy novels as much as the next somebody, so usually have one going which I read nights before bed, and maybe Sunday mornings. I had been reading Frank Waters modest-length The Man Who Killed the Deer for an improbably long time, but I finally finished it Thanksgiving Day. Shall I tell you what I think of it? Maybe, but not today. My week has been filled with end-of-semester chores, and in an hour I teach the last of what has been the most dreadful class I've ever taught. Immediately afterwards, Junebug and I are off for the weekend to celebrate our 5th anniversary. (That's wood, in case you were wondering.) In other words, I don't have time to craft one of the thoughtful and felicitously expressed essays that you are used to reading here, and what's more I don't even have time to write one of the hare-brained pieces of crap you are more used to finding.

As I've said, I don't have a lot of time to read novels, like for instance Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, but sometime I read about them. N. Katherine Hayles, famous smart person, recently wrote a short book called Writing Machines about the materiality of texts in the information age. That topic is of great interest to me, but I won't be writing about that either. Instead, I will quote from Hayles quoting from Danielewski: "'This is Tom. This is what Tom does best. He lets you down.'"

I have found my motto.

Archives Project: STL #22

Title: "If Such a Category Exists"
Description: On Specialization
Date: 25 November 2003

I just learned that this post was linked as a resource for a class on modern American poetry. I swell with pride.

My "morning in rare book room" post a couple of weeks ago nearly violated my 'no dissertation' rule, and this week I'm going to break it altogether. But it's more to note an occasion than to surrender my mind to a single subject, and I promise next week I'll be back in the wider world. Writing a dissertation requires (and more importantly, signifies) becoming a specialist in some small portion of an academic discipline. "Specialist" to me is a dubious concept. I'm working on a doctorate in English, which to the layperson (opposite of specialist) might seem the appropriate credential for teaching Beowulf, The Duchess of Malfi, and The Powerpuff Girls. But actually, specialization is far more specific (special) than that. Me, I'm going to be a specialist in 20th century American poetry of the Objectivist tradition. 'Specifically' I'm working on a book on Louis Zukofsky, obscurest of the obscure. The poet and critic Bob Perelman, in a good book called The Trouble With Genius: Reading Pound, Stein, and Zukofsky, mentions the immense labor that goes into creating difficult art, and the commensurate labor in reading it. He writes that the value of such work relies largely on hearsay because "the writing remains illegible or semilegible for any reader who is not a Poundian, Joycean, Steinian, or--if such a category exists--a Zukofskian." While I resent the restrictiveness and pigeon-holing that specialization represents, I recognize that the work that reading works of genius demands requires it. And there's no doubt in my mind about the supreme value of difficult art.

If such a category exists, I guess I belong to it. The curator of an upcoming exhibit at the Harry Ransom Center of 20th century poets (it'll display manuscripts, letters, rare editions, etc) asked me to write a biographical sketch about Zukofsky for the exhibit. Mind you, this person is on my dissertation committee so it's not like he heard about me through the grapevine or something, but this task, which I guess will wind up as the blurbage on the placard next to the display, may represent the first formal exercise of my specialty. While I'm against specialization on principle (when I'm famous I'll write an essay "Against Specialization"), I confess that being consulted in this way is quite a thrill.

And so, here's the statement, coming soon to a museum placard near or far from you:

LOUIS ZUKOFSKY (1904-1978)

The son of Yiddish-speaking Russian immigrants, the husband of a composer, and the father of a concert violinist, Louis Zukofsky valued language, music, and family. Like two other great Modernists, Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams, Zukofsky spoke another language before learning English. Perhaps because of this outsider’s perspective, his poetry shows a fascination with the musical aspects of language, with the sound of language, even at the expense of sense. He once even described the bounds of his poetry as set by a “lower limit speech” and an “upper limit music,” and imitated musical forms like the fugue and the motet in his writing. Some of his poetry may make little “sense” on a first reading, due to its eccentric syntax and obscure references, but can still be enjoyed for pure musicality. Although the surface pleasures of Zukofsky’s language are always available to us, certain passages are elusive because they simply were not written for us. He referred in print to his wife (“Blessed/Ardent/Celia”) as his “one reader,” and there is a sense of hermeticism to much of his work, as if it is written in a private language we can never fully understand. Lines like “music, thought, drama, story, poem/ parks’ sunburst—animals, grace notes-/ z-sited path are but us” have some meaning in the context of a larger work, but only a family intimate would that the final three words evoke Arbutus Lane, the street where his adult son lived. His work is full of such private references.

Zukofsky persevered through almost complete indifference from publishers and readers, supporting his life-long writing with jobs for the WPA, as a technical editor, and for many years as a teacher at the Brooklyn Polytechnic Institute. Though little known to the wider world of letters until late in life, he compiled a large body of work, including an eight-hundred page poem entitled, with characteristic understatement, simply “A”, hundreds of lyric poems, a controversial translation of the Roman poet Catullus, essays, fiction, and a book of Shakespearean criticism. He referred to “A” as a “poem of a life,” and while this obscure and beautiful twenty-four movement work is far from a traditional autobiography, we can see in it a life filled with intellectual pursuits, love of family, and an appreciation of daily interactions. While we can trace through its pages personal and public events from the 1920’s to the 1970’s, elaborate motifs based on Bach, horses and Marxism, transliterations of foreign languages, and even a condensed history of the world, he boils down his work to a simple equation: “As I love:/ My poetics.”

Archives Project: STL #21

Title: One Bad Movie
Description: A prayer against Matrix: Resurrection
Date: 22 November 2003

I stand by my prediction that soon you won't be able to tell the difference between Matrix movies and Tron. I also hate computer-generated animation, but that's the tale of another day.

So I've been working like a dog, well a dog-of-letters anyway, for the past seven days. My research has taken up virtually all my time, with breaks to eat and to teach. So what do I willingly do when I have some leisure time at last? I pay money to see a movie I expect to suck. And wouldn't you know, it did suck, even far beyond my capacity to believe it.

The Matrix was a cultural phenomenon. I, too, was fascinated with the look and feel, the technique, and the unspoken fear that information technology has mediated our lives so much we can no longer see the real. I never took the philosophical pretensions seriously, but why would you with so much stylish spectacle? The Matrix Reloaded, as I mentioned way back in STL #2, seemed totally stale, and a little icky too. But Matrix Revolutions is so bad it staggers the mind. In the first fifteen minutes, three of the primary characters storm a Marilyn-Manson-inflected night club to confront, uh, "The Merovingian." There's some now familiar Matrix-issue combat, with lots of guns and walking on walls and such. It seemed to me as I was watching it that it might serve as good demo for one of those first-person-shooter games. Little did I know that the shootout in the coat room would be the best scene in the movie. After a half hour or so of stilted dialogue full of Capital Letters about people with Ridiculous Names, we have to suffer through what seems like an hour of men in absurdly inefficient and cumbersome suits of armor fighting mechanical insects. As least this section of the movie gave me something to laugh at: first at the 'inspirational' speech the general (well, some general--we're asked to keep track of too many people in this part) gives to his mechano- warriors, who pump their ridiculous mechanical fists in the sky. It was kind of like Mel Gibson from Braveheart addressing the Transformers. The special effects of this battle were chuckle-inducing too: I doubt if in twenty years we'll be able to see a qualitative difference between this movie and Tron.*

The original Matrix had some cultural significance, as I indicated above. Now, it's a weapon that the Robots from Mars use to oppress The Last Free People. The best thing about the matrix was always that you got to wear sunglasses at night and were a kung-fu superstar in it. But when you start think about the matrix too much, (like for instance if you sit through three movies about it) you start to wonder things like, why you can stand on the ceiling but not stop bullets? And if these supersoldiers are so powerful, why do they have to fight at all? I remember one time Superman punched a hole in time--now that's strong. But the big final showdown of Neo and Agent Smith seemed like a conventional fight between two dudes who can fly. The whole "One" versus an army of Smiths is supposed to be some kind of individualism over group thing, but that has no connection with the matrix per se and is about as current as Ayn Rand (or Robots from Mars).

Revolutions was far worse than any of those movies I complained about last summer. The only recent movie I can compare it too in scope of dreadfulness is the Kate Beckinsale vehicle Underword. Sometime I'm going to have to learn that beautiful people running around in leather suits firing guns from each hand does not a good film make. But why you would ruin such a simple and beautiful thing I'll never understand.

*And while on the subject, I think the best way of describing this whole underground militaristic world is as "Tron meets Das Boot."