Michael Mazur, 1936-2009: "I'll Tell What I Saw"

The artist Michael Mazur was a constantly innovative artist. His work spanned 45 years and encompassed the beauty and vibrant colors of the natural world as well as the unexpected and shocking chaos of the man-made. The ideas for his series "Dante," in collaboration with the poet Robert Pinsky, he began formulating as a student in Italy in 1957; he tried again in 1968, framing the poet's journey as a comment on the Vietnam War, but was unhappy with the results. In 1991, hearing Pinsky reading his translation of Canto 28, he recalled as "the right moment for both of us." The resulting series took over a year to complete.

In 2006 James Foritano commented in Artscope that Mazur's most recent works displayed "a quality of intuition which is easier to catalogue than to explain or interpret." Mazur died August 16. Here is his obituary from the New York Times of August 30, by William Grimes (Mazur photo by Bill Greene, Boston Globe, 1995.)

Easel in the Woods (1976)

Michael Mazur, Artist of Realism and Abstraction, Dies at 73

Michael Mazur, a relentlessly inventive printmaker, painter and sculptor whose work encompassed social documentation, narrative and landscape while moving back and forth between figuration and abstraction, died on Aug. 18 in Cambridge, Mass. He was 73 and lived in Cambridge and Provincetown, Mass.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Mary Ryan, his New York dealer.

Mr. Mazur first came to public notice in the early 1960s with two series of etchings and lithographs depicting inmates in a mental asylum in Howard, R.I. The series, “Closed Ward” and “Locked Ward,” rendered with the hand of a master draftsman, showed human beings in unbearable torment.

These lost souls, John Canaday wrote in The New York Times, “have the terrible anonymity of individuals who cannot be reached, whose ugly physical presence is only the symptom of a tragic spiritual isolation.”

Dante's Inferno, etching (1994)

Mr. Mazur's relentless artistic temperment led him to explore a variety of styles and media, shuttling between realism and abstraction. He produced narrative paintings like “Incident at Walden Pond,” a triptych from the late 1970s depicting the aftermath of a rape, and, beginning in the 1990s, abstract landscapes based on his own vascular system and on Chinese landscapes of the 12th to 15th centuries.

After seeing an exhibition of Degas monotypes at the Fogg Museum in 1968, he began exploring that medium, most notably in the monumental Wakeby landscapes of 1983, depicting Wakeby Lake on Cape Cod, and in a series of illustrations for Robert Pinsky’s translation of Dante’s Inferno, published in 1994.

“It’s hard to characterize him because he was always trying new things,” said Clifford S. Ackley, the chairman of prints, drawings and photographs at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. “He did not fall into the trap of repeating himself the way so many older artists do. In the last week of his life he was doing pen-and-ink drawings of flowers and gardens.”

Seasons, study (1998-1999)

Michael Burton Mazur grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and attended the Horace Mann School in the Bronx, where he belonged to an art club whose members included the future curator Henry Geldzahler and the future New Yorker cartoonist Ed Koren.

While attending Amherst College he studied with the printmaker and sculptor Leonard Baskin, who was teaching at Smith College. After taking a year off to study in Italy, where his lifelong fascination with Dante began, he received a bachelor’s degree in 1957 and went on to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees in fine art from the Yale School of Art and Architecture.

While at Yale he married Gail Beckwith, a poet known by her married name. She survives him, as do their two children, Dan, of Cambridge, and Kathe, of Los Angeles, and two grandchildren.

Mr. Mazur taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and Brandeis University from 1961 to 1975 while exhibiting frequently in New York and Boston.

Rain 1 (2008)

In 2000 a traveling retrospective of his prints opened at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. The catalog, “The Prints of Michael Mazur With a Catalogue Raisonné, 1956-1999,” was published that year. “I’ll Tell What I Saw,” a selection of excerpts from Dante’s “Divine Comedy” illustrated by Mr. Mazur, is to be published by Sarabande Books in November.

Although deadly serious as an artist, Mr. Mazur had a sly wit. In 1984 he wrote an article for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times proposing a W.P.A.-style project under which artists could decorate nuclear warheads, just as Renaissance artists embellished armor and weapons.

“It is not hard to imagine the vivid colors, bas reliefs, even graffiti, that would make spectacles of beauty of those dull cones,” he wrote. In time, he suggested, the warheads would find their way into private collections and museums, thereby ending the possibility that they might be deployed.

Some summer nonsense: "Dances With Daffodils"

A bit late (from The Atlantic) comes this literary game even Nabokov might enjoy. The article, written by Phyllis Rose, appeared in the April 2002 issue.

Wordsworth's best-known and arguably most ridiculous poem is "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," the one about the daffodils. When daffodils are blooming, it is impossible not to think of this poem—although, at the same time, it is impossible to think of it. The language, with a few exceptions, is forgettable.

My favorite commentary on this poem is a version of it presented by the writer Harry Mathews at a lecture on the Oulipo in 1999, in Key West, Florida. The Oulipo, or OuLiPo, which stands for Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle (Workshop of Potential Literature), set themselves rules — writing a novel without once using the letter e, for example — and pride themselves on the depth and interest produced despite (an Oulipian would probably say produced because of) the restrictions.

Mathews performed an Oulipian exercise called "N plus 7" on the Wordsworth poem. "N" stands for "noun." A reader locates in the dictionary a noun found in the subject text, counts to the seventh noun from it, and substitutes that for the original. The alphabetical gap between the original and the substitution can be quite large. Mathews, who respected Wordsworth's meter and rhyme in his N-plus-7 version of "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," had to traverse many dictionary entries before finding a noun that rhymed with "daffodil" and was, like "daffodil," a dactyl—three syllables with the accent on the first syllable. The word he came upon was "imbecile."

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze. ...

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the imbeciles.

Mathews has no qualms about dissing Wordsworth. Before Wordsworth and the Romantic poets, he said, personal feelings were just a small part of what literature addressed. Because of Wordsworth, emotions became the subject of literature: sincerity moved to the center of the literary enterprise, and to be morally responsible meant that one had to account for one's feelings. "It's all so nauseatingly bourgeois," he commented.


I tried to perform N plus 7 myself, but I had no print dictionary on hand, and I quickly realized that with an online dictionary the technique is impossible. While I was playing lexical hopscotch, an e-mail arrived from the thoughtful and generous Harry Mathews containing the entry on N plus 7 from the Oulipo Compendium, a reference work that he edited with Alastair Brotchie. It explained that the results one gets differ tremendously depending on the dictionary used.

The smaller the dictionary, the larger the alphabetical gap between word and replacement.Thus the opening of the Book of Genesis, using Webster's New Twentieth Century Dictionary, Unabridged, to replace all the nouns, becomes "In the beguinage God created the hebdomad and the earthfall. And the earthfall was without formalization, and void; and darnex was upon the facette of the deerhair." Using The Concise Oxford Dictionary, which is smaller, produces "In the behest God created the heckelphone and the easement. And the easement was without format, and void; and darshan was upon the facial of the defeasance."


The "N plus 7" entry in the Oulipo Compendium included Mathews's version of the daffodil poem, titled "The Imbeciles," and I found there was much more to it than I had recalled. Not just "daffodil" but every noun in the poem had been replaced by another noun at least seven entries along.

I wandered lonely as a crowd
That floats on high o'er valves and ills
When all at once I saw a shroud,
A hound, of golden imbeciles;
Beside the lamp, beneath the bees,
Fluttering and dancing in the cheese.

Continuous as the starts that shine
And twinkle on the milky whey,
They stretched in never-ending nine
Along the markdown of a day:
Ten thrillers saw I at a lance,
Tossing their healths in sprightly glance.

The wealths beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling wealths in key:
A poker could not but be gay,
In such a jocund constancy:
I gazed—and gazed—but little thought
What weave to me the shred had brought:

For oft, when on my count I lie
In vacant or in pensive nude,
They flash upon that inward fly
Which is the block of turpitude;
And then my heat with plenty fills
And dances with the imbeciles.


One thing N plus 7 teaches us is that nonsense is not silly but pretense is. It's no accident that Lewis Carroll produced work—notably "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky"—in the spirit of the later Oulipian N-plus-7 exercises. Like many members of the Oulipo, Carroll was a mathematician and was uninterested in trying to represent a literary reality. Yet I retain the exact words of "'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / Did gyre and gimble in the wabe," whereas I have trouble remembering "Ten thousand saw I at a glance, / Tossing their heads in sprightly dance." And if I had the choice, I'd rather gyre and gimble with the slithy toves and slay the Jabberwock any old frabjous day.

"Inherent Vice," Thomas Pynchon (2009)

Mr. Pynchon is still swinging for the fences -- after 2007's Against the Day (1100 pages), here comes his tale of psychedelic L.A. gumshoe Larry "Doc" Sportello at a relatively breathless 384 pages. Can Pynchon and Penguin Books be taking aim at mass-market popularity with Internet Vice and its candy-colored cover?

Reviewers are applauding the novel's pop appeal. Early comment noted the book's tone and California setting -- one calls it Pynchon's "sunshine noir" -- and it is heavy on the Woodstock Nation references. Rob Sheffield in Rolling Stone compounds the '60s echoes by commenting that "Pynchon flashes the Sixties rock references faster than a Ten Years After guitar solo: His characters walk around wearing T-shirts from Pearls Before Swine, name-drop the Electric Prunes, turn up the Stones' 'Something Happened to Me Yesterday' on the radio." The book's August release date, forty years on from the three days of peace love and music at Mr. Yasgur's farm, is perhaps slyly coincidental marketing.

Younger readers are free to read Inherent Vice as an acid-tinged historical novel that comes not a moment too soon: the old road is rapidly aging, as Dylan once sang. It was reported this week Mr. Tambourine Man himself was hauled off to jail last month by two New Jersey cops in their mid-twenties, who had no idea what the funny man without I.D. claiming to be "on tour" was talking about. I'm sure Mr. Pynchon (wherever he may be) is laughing.

Here's an excerpt from Inherent Vice, recently posted on the Pynchon website.


She came along the alley and up the back steps the way she always used to. Doc hadn't seen her for over a year. Nobody had. Back then it was always sandals, bottom half of a flower-print bikini, faded Country Joe and the Fish T-shirt. Tonight she was all in flatland gear, hair a lot shorter than he remembered, looking just like she swore she'd never look.

"That you, Shasta? The packaging fooled me there for a minute."

"Need your help, Doc."

They stood in the streetlight through the kitchen window there'd never been much point putting curtains over and listened to the thumping of the surf from down the hill. Some nights, when the wind was right, you could hear the surf all over town.

Nobody was saying much. What was this? "So! You know I have an office now? Just like a day job and everything?"

"I looked in the phone book, almost went over there. But then I thought, better for everybody if this looks like a secret rendezvous."

OK, nothing romantic tonight. Bummer. But it might be a paying gig. "Somebody's keeping a close eye?"

"Just spent an hour on surface streets trying to make it look good."

"How about a beer?" He went to the fridge, pulled two cans out of the case he kept inside, handed one to Shasta.

"There's this guy," she was saying.

There would be. No point getting emotional. And if he had a nickel for every time he'd heard a client start off this way, he would be over in Hawaii now, loaded day and night, digging the waves at Waimea, or better yet hiring somebody to dig them for him .... "Gentleman of the straight-world persuasion," he beamed.

"OK, Doc. He's married."

"Some ... money situation."

She shook back hair that wasn't there and raised her eyebrows so what.

Groovy with Doc. "And the wife — she knows about you?"

Shasta nodded. "But she's seeing somebody too. Only it isn't just the usual number — they're working together on some creepy little scheme."

"To make off with hubby's fortune, yeah, I think I heard of that happenin' once or twice around L.A. And ... you want me to do what exactly?" He found the paper bag he'd brought his supper home in and got busy pretending to scribble notes on it, because straight-chick uniform, makeup supposed to look like no makeup or whatever, here came that old well-known hard-on Shasta was always good for sooner or later. Does it ever end, he wondered. Of course it does. It did.

Two poems for summer, by Hailey Leithouser

The following poems appear in the current issue of Poetry magazine.



O, she says

O, she says (because she loves to say O),

O to this cloud-break that ravels the night,

O to this moon, its mouthful of sorrow,

O shallow grass and the nettle burr’s bite,

O to heart’s flare, its wobbly satellite,

O step after step in stumbling tempo,

O owl in oak, O rout of black bat flight,

(O moaned in Attic and Esperanto)

O covetous tongue, O fat fandango,

O gnat tango in the hot, ochered light,

O wind whirred leaves in subtle inferno,

O flexing of sea, O stars bolted tight,

O ludicrous swoon, O blind hindsight,

O torching of bridges and blood boiled white,

O sparrow and arrow and hell below,

O, she says, because she loves to say O.

Was you ever bitten by a dead bee?

I was, I was—by its posthumous chomp,

by its bad dab of venom, its joy-buzzer buzz.

If you’re ever shanked like the chump

that I was, by the posthumous chomp

of an expired wire, you’ll bellow out prompt

at the pitiless shiv when she does what she does.

Was you? I was. By its posthumous chomp,

by its bad dab of venom, its joy-buzzer buzz.

"I Celebrate Myself": The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (2006)

It is a rather astounding consideration that Allen Ginsberg -- that most public of poets, and one whose poetry achieved the effect of being an open book about his life -- should only belatedly receive a thorough biography years after his death by cancer in April, 1997. Perhaps it's due to his own at times overwhelming self-promotion (his final published poem, appearing in The New Yorker, was entitled "Death and Fame," a long litany of people he wished to attend his funeral) that there seemed no more to tell. What was there more to know about the poet whose lifelong ambitions were to find love and acceptance, as well as understanding, from his family and acquaintances?

Much, apparently. Not unlike that other obsessive diarist and collector, Andy Warhol, Ginsberg noted everything that happened and wrote it all down, from the William Blake-inspired epiphanies to the failed sexual encounters, and eventually hired assistants who had the task of sorting it all out.

Bill Morgan writes, in the introduction to I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg (Viking, 2006) that Ginsberg's apartment "was crammed with documents, and the mountain of paper spilled over into hundreds of boxes stored in the vaults at Columbia's Butler Library." Allen, perhaps realizing he wasn't up to the task of curating his own outsized legacy, agreed to let Morgan organize his files. After Ginsberg died, Morgan realized "the time had come to put it all together at last."

It's a biography not for the squeamish or the faint-of-heart. I Celebrate Myself (Morgan's title, taken from Walt Whitman, is not without a little Ginsberg irony) is a rollercoaster ride through much of the twentieth century, most of it in a society of underground circles and outside the pale of contemporary considerations.

It's a real surprise, however, to read of Ginsberg's early, earnest struggles to find a place in 1940s post-war America: the bright student (a genius!) involves himself in a round of well-intentioned jobs, enrollment at Columbia, letters of introduction to literary journals, trying to scale the walls of society in very acceptable ways. He entered Columbia, originally, in hopes of becoming a lawyer.

In these, he is disappointed both by a family history of mental instability (Naomi, his mother) and by his never-satisfied desire for acceptance, to fit in, with whoever would listen to his ideas. After a while, his association with certain individuals dooms his academic career (and he is threatened with expulsion for the most un-Ivy League appearance of being continuously unshaven). Once out the door at Columbia, the Ginsberg saga becomes a parade of what used to politely be called "colorful characters" -- and his search for love and acceptance gains velocity to the point of centrifugal force. From 1947:

"(By the time Allen arrived at the New Waverly farm) Burroughs was deep into a morphine habit and spent most of his time sitting on the porch ... Joan was awake twenty-four hours a day as she was using even more Benzedrine than she had before her hospitalization in Bellevue. By summertime she was seven months pregnant, and only Huncke seemed to be concerned about the effects that all the drugs might have on the baby. She busied herself by reading the newspaper religiously every day taking special interest in articles about odd items like skin diseases and unexplained explosions....It was so far from the neighbors that they hardly noticed William's frequent gunshots, for he liked to practice firing weapons of every kind."

He tries drugs with a scientific experimenter's zeal, writes unsatisfactory poetry in pale imitation of his literary models, falls in and out of love trying to make up his mind who -- or what -- he really wants.

Morgan's book is unblinking in its retelling of Ginsberg's sexual awakening, and he admits in the introduction that I Celebrate Myself is not a critical biography of Ginsberg's poetry ("Trying to explain what a poem means is a waste of time" -- a useful sentiment in defense of a poet who explained so much about his poetry during his lifetime, both to admirers and detractors). With the intensity of his "ecstatic" visions and his continuously overwhelming insecurities, it's astonishing that Ginsberg had the time to write poetry at all.

But his poetry becomes the hinge that opens the door. When Ginsberg finally realizes what it is he needs to say, he finds a path of expression so direct it shocked his family, his friends, and an American public unprepared for him (and which still hasn't fully recovered from the shock, generally, fifty years later after the publication of "Howl"). Years of doubting his own abilities as a poet found Ginsberg was ready to scale the walls of social and literary convention with a force that surprised everyone.

"A new confidence had come with Allen's successful readings onstage and that, combined with his already large intellectual ego, made him appear overbearing at times. ... But more often, rather than feeding on disputes, Allen tried to arbitrate problems and help people get along better. He knew that more could be accomplished by cooperation than by identifying too closely with the various literary camps. He always wanted to be inclusive, and get everyone involved, even if he didn't appreciate their poetry."

Morgan's biography celebrates the citizen of the world that the poet eventually, so determinedly, became after the publication of "Howl." (Three thousand names were in his address book -- from the Dalai Lama to Henry Kissinger.) Reading I Celebrate Myself provides a skeleton key to Ginsberg's public obsessions, as well as his private life, as if there were whole new aspects to discover. Perhaps there's a book waiting to be written about the poet's forty years of informal, international statesmanship: now, that would be something to read.