one:
i am about 3/4s of the way thru the last avant garde a discussion of the poets of the new york school--(except blackburn (who i really like, who i find myself clsoer and closer to, who i think is the real under rated of those five and whose collected poem i cannot find, hes sexy in a black sweater and thick plastic glasses kind of way) So it mentions ashberry, koch, o hara, and shulyer. he made me reconsider ashberry--he qoutes an anglo english critic (maybe from oxford) who says that one cannot like larkin and ashberry at the same time, and i will admit, i have had the collection of the first five books or so of ashberry and i have not read it anymore then twenty pages or so--but i want to like ashberry, he seems funny and sexy and well read and well constructed--cryptic of course, but cryptic in the same way as pound (ie in the same way that if you get the key, if you get the right way about things, then you will be able to crack it apart like a cocunut.) But thats a wrong metaphor, because in many ways Pound wrote polemic, and wanted to e clear, wanted to be read, the book makes the point that ashberry doesnt nessc. and that the confusion and confundment can be a legitmate poetic stragey. it made me want to read him again, at least.
two
thinking of that, thinking of liz still missing in london, going back to o hara, whos sadness and laughter comingling tend to drag me thru what ever tragedy i am going thru, he has a reading of the lady day died, the most famous of o haras poem, and he doesnt make this point directly--but i keep thinking of the poem over and over again, its not the most obv. one ot go to in tragedy, but its one that conveys a v. impt lesson. here it is:
THE DAY THE LADY DIED
By FRANK O'HARA
It is 12:20 in New York a Friday
three days after Bastille Day, yes
it is 1959, and I go get a shoeshine
because I will get off the 4:19 in East Hampton
at 7:15 and then go straight to dinner
and I don't know the people who will feed me
I walk up the muggy street beginning to sun
and have a hamburger and a malted and buy
an ugly NEW WORLD WRITING to see what the poets
in Ghana are doing these days
I go on to the bank
and Miss Stillwagon (first name Linda I once heard)
doesn't even look up my balance for once in her life
and in the GOLDEN GRIFFIN I get a little Verlaine
for Patsy with drawings by Bonnard although I do
think of Hesiod, trans. Richmond Lattimore or
Brendan Behan's new play or Le Balcon or Les Nègres
of Genet, but I don't, I stick with Verlaine
after practically going to sleep with quandariness
and for Mike I just stroll into the PARK LANE
Liquor Store and ask for a bottle of Strega, and
then I go back where I came from to 6th Avenue
and the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatere and
casually ask for a carton of Gauloises and a carton
of Picayunes, and a NEW YORK POST with her face on it
and I am sweating a lot by now and thinking of
leaning on the john door in the 5 SPOT
while she whispered a song along the keyboard
to Mal Waldron and everyone and I stopped breathing.
i may also be thinking of this because it is bastille day, and well thats a place--but its filled with all these hi/lo details, and the day to day living, and the not really paying attention, and it doesnt seem really like an elegy, a proprer respectful paen.
think about this again--he does not really know her, he has heard her once, and that was so transcedent, but she does not owe him anything. and anyways--this is how we live our lives, we go thru them, and some days are really good, and some days are waylaid by tragedy, but we need to go thru, we need to read books, and drink strega, and what we do for the heros who die, is note them gentley, place the death in the daily construct of our everyday lives and move on. we do not write epic verses, we do not wear sack cloth and ashes, we kneel, bow our heads, note the context of death and remeberence, and then regain our place in the way of the living.
this poem reflects that, more then anything else ive read. and i feel stupid it took years for me to note that.
three
im thinking of george went hensley, i wrote about him for his book, and he and snake handling--and then i read this via mefi on some kind of arch con baptist website. http://www.henryinstitute.org/commentary/read.php?article=20050601b. it should really piss me off, the great gender warrior and pacifist, but i keep thinking about this, and i have yet been unable to reconcile this idea, but god is not a nice fellow, and god is not pleasent, and there is something more aware of the nature of the divine in handling snakes or viewing the world as the great dragon, i wrote this to mark sinker, about his recent posts about the nature of violence and politics: n my book i am writing about the jesuit martyrs, and about how what
the west assumed was savagery was something different---it was two
warriror societies killing each other--the death, the grizzly details
of that death i wont repeat here, was the death given to fellow
warriors, and its complicated and im working on the details, but
there is no honour left--im a pacifist, i dont think war is a nessc.
or good thing, and i dont think that we should cast our lots with
villians and fools--though we are all those two things, d epending on
the day.
i didnt want the citizens of huronia to die, and i didnt want the
martyrs to be lauded. i want for liz to be safe. i want the fucking
war to end, i want islamics to stop bombing trains, and i keep trying
really hard to find a way to say this w/o moving into pim fountyn
territory or the bush thing of they hate our freedom--if the xian
freaks of america or the muslim freaks of the middle east (and both
have their diasporas) we all lose--we lose pubs, we lose loving boys,
we lose writing what we want, we lose britney spears and girls aloud.
i dont know what to do about this mark, and i dont want to go back to
the arms of jesus, and im sure that you dont want to return to the
supersitions of your childhood--but at least praying deludes you into
beliving you are doing something--
i dont have any easy answers--but if you believe that it is the last days, and their is a culture of wickedness, and the children will be the ones fighting for jersuelem, all of this is reasonable--and the only truck one can have w. it is the question of boys--girls should be taught to be violent as well. i could argue that this is a bad lesson, but if you asked me if i wanted my kids to be taught by hensley who believed in spirtual death vs spirtual life or hammond baptist church in indidina, who mostly teaches being nice, well it would be hard not to be in favour of hensley. its a false dichtomoy, i damn well know its a false dictohomoy, but its a seductive one.
three
ebbers got 25 years in prison, which seems to be a good idea, and perhaps a genuine good place for the people who deserve to go in prison to go there.
four
hilary clinton will lose this election, (the one in 2008) on trying to be too much a republican--here call to get 100k new soilders into the immoral, tactically moronic, just encouraging the terroists, more and more unpopular, vietnam part two is absurd--she went to wessley, she did the work on vietnam, she should learn the lessons, and even if he didnt, doesnt anyone remember michael dukakis in the tank. tactically she needs to place her self in oppostion to those in power. (waylon jennings comes on the stero now--singing ruby dont take your love to town, 25 years ago--and this line comes thru "it wasnt me who started that crazy asia war/but i was proud to be my patrotic chore. His girl is cheating on him, and he cannot leave (ie "its hard to love a man whos legs are bent and paralysed")--its this gothic version of coming home with out the arrogance, and thinking of vietnam war, with this, and with movies like coming home --and i wonder what the implications of patrotic chore are now, and what the implications of this song, of his man dying, of this man who has no legs and no useful cock and nothing but a sense of exhausted lonlienss--and it ends as a murder ballad ("if i could move/id get my gun/and put her in the ground") and this was a hit, for bobby bare and willie nelson and waylon jennings and kenny rogers for christs sake--where is this now, the closeset we have to someone like waylon is toby keith, and he has been in enough hospitals to know that this cant work anymore.
five.
thinking of the pinhole camera photos of kdays i saw at the alberta binelle, and thinking of the dark and lovely nudes/self portrait daugertypes of chuck close, and thinking of kodak jetisionning everything in a mad dash towards suburban house wife, wal mart kiosk digital photos, and thinking of my practice, and the difference b.w digital poloroids and 35--and missing the ritual of the 35, and thinking of how difficult it is to maintain the cult of object (fuck how difficult it is to maintain the object itself, silver bromide photos go blank after 100 years, poloroids have 25, and non printed digitals have maybe 5) i wonder what the implications of lots of photogs taking old shit out of the cupboards(worth an exhibition, i think) and also about this revoution ? (note closes book of daugertypes is called a couple of ways of doing something, which is a wry nudge towards the nature of photogging, no?)
example:
elizabeth murray:
six
the pitt foto below is amazing, because it is an almost perfect formal composition. the colour and form all work, and its accidental--like the handsome us magazine photo 6 months or so of one of the older blondes in a supermarket, which worked the rule of thirds like some kind of reniassance dispostion.
detailed reading:
the shirts from the girls are the same colour as brads hair, the brunette has the same colour (in the family at least) of the t shirt of brad, the boom mike breaks the fourth wall, they are all kinds of caucasion, their bellies provide a sort of visual tunnel to the hottness that is pitt, who provides a kind of warholian blankness instead of the shit eating grin expected of him--the boredom in the face of supposed pleasure a retreat from the image expected, adn in opposite t papparazi shots of him and jolie--its too bad one cannot be g iven oscars for public personae.
seven
431 in my account from gvnt, not sure why, but im not complainting, pineapple of course, but its about a week too early for the second, and i want expecting it, etc etc--way too much. tis not our way to complain though.
eight
the best thing i think about dead wood is not the nasty words, etc but the calustrphobic filth, the closeness to shit and piss, the violence w/o carthasis--it is a correction against mythologies of honour and pride that infest the rest of the genre.
links
http://www.canada.com/entertainment/books/story.html?id=06cde225-5dbc-4608-b4bc-afaf2cf4021c
ratzinger views the harry potter books as a seductive evil for children--when do you think we are going back to burnings and bannings ? (mefi)
http://www.psychiatrictimes.com/showArticle.jhtml?articleId=164902208
good article on the nature of lit and shrinks. (monkeyfi)
http://www.nature.com/news/2005/050627/full/050627-7.html
add fire ants to the list of sex that is weirder and more prolifigate then we think they are. (i am not sure)
http://www.lvri-ny.com/dvl.html
next time you hear someone talk about how the west treats women better then islam, give them this assholes phone number
http://www.newsdesk.umd.edu/scitech/release.cfm?ArticleID=1098
i would prefer my meat on cows and not on vats.
what i have read:
mommy myth
two hundred and seventy pages on how we have not moved forward on from the second wave, how we have no simple things like child care, how legistors tend to hate women, and how the media is both sexist and racist when it comes to depicting people on the dole. all said before, but not better and not in one convient place. recommended.
america the book
not nearly as funny or clever as it thinks it is, though stewart has aa generational distrust in poltics as usual, and combines satire with hard poltics--though the satire is becoming less and less, and the new setand the peabody might mark the death of the funny/absurd/erotic and into more screaming fuck you. though he is balanced with his hatred.
the cr of warhols prints
mentioned earlier
bruce davidson subway
mostly pictures, though read the two essays, so i am including it--i dont like davidson as much as i should, he is one of those street photogs that seems ot be seminal to my aesthetic, and i have no reason for not liking its dark griminess, its effective compostion, etc--i will have to think about it before i give a full verdict.
chuck palinchuks new book of occasional peices
funny, astute, well written, lots of facts, falls apart near the end, not as clever as he thinks he is, but a better writer then his critics give him credit for--learnt impt things about men building castles and the state/country politics of canoloa, get it from the library
barthes camera lucida
i have been thninking about found and vintage photos in relation to this book, books that were nto as composed as they should be, and the poltics/aesthetics of compostion that centers this book (and centers most photog crit since then) so i read it again, an i havent found an answer.
and a v. good ethnographic study on the virgin of gaudlope and mexican american women. i will qoute in depth, maybe here. it was a doctorate thesis but one that was driven by the voices she was recording and not theory.
which makes the total 68
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