BELLEMEADE BOOKS

Terry Wilson's "Perilous Passage" is re-published: "flashing zigzagging comic helix punctuating language"

2012-01-31T14:13:00.007-05:00

I shift my gaze back to twisted vertiginous snakes vines chromosomes entwined labyrinths as ever flashing zigzagging comic helix punctuating language spelling out the same message again like a tickertape symbol control system processed by a hebephrenic computer high on aguardiente. ("Ends," Terry Wilson)

From the ever-expanding consciousness at Psychedelic Press UK comes this welcome dispatch:

Originally published in 2004, Perilous Passage: The Nervous System and the Universe in Other Words by Terry Wilson is being republished in 2012. It describes the author’s apprenticeship under the tutelage of the avant-garde artist and writer Brion Gysin; along with a wonderful passage about Wilson’s experiences in South America with ayahuasca. The book is the final part of his ‘Green Base Trilogy’, which includes Dreams of Green Base (1986) and ‘‘D’ Train (1985). He has also previously published Here to Go (2001), a book of interviews with Gysin that documented his life, work and philosophy.

While living in Paris at 9 Rue Git-Le-Coeur in the late 1950s, Brion Gysin accidentally sliced through some newspapers with a knife and became fascinated with the resulting jumble of text -- half of one sentence became the end of another, unrelated one. He began to experiment with this technique, slicing up newsprint, books, and other materials. He refered to these as "cut-ups," and when he demonstrated the process to William Burroughs, Burroughs asked if he could try it himself. "Go ahead, that's what it's for," Gysin replied.

Unwittingly, Gysin handed Burroughs a writing tool that he would use extensively in his career (The Ticket That Exploded, The Soft Machine, Nova Express and Exterminator). He achieved such infamy that Burroughs -- although he was careful to credit Gysin as often as possible -- became famous for the cut-up technique, while Gysin (whose multifaceted career as a musician, writer, painter, and calligrapher contines to defy categories) went on to write The Process (1971) and The Last Museum, an edited version of a much larger work about the fate of 9 Rue-Le-Coeur itself, published posthumously in 1986.

When Perilous Passage was originally published by Synergetic Press in 2004, the publisher described it as events just prior to and after Gysin's death in 1986: This book details the extreme psychic "Third Mind" effects known as The Process, and includes transcribed audio hallucinations, notes, cut-ups, the interview format, and collaged material. Perilous Passage is a cautionary tale about the uses and abuses of power, a paranoid espionage thriller. Like Gysin and Burroughs, Wilson treats language itself as a parasitic invader which must be resisted, broken up and reassembled. This book is about how the magic was passed on and carried into the future.

In order to show Burroughs the extraordinary possibilities of juxtaposing text-on-text, while in Paris Gysin experimented with the cut-up technique on audio tape (heard here) as well as print. Describing this in an interview published in Terry Wilson's book Here to Go: Planet R-101, Gysin says:

I suggested to William that we use only the best, only the high-charged material: King James' translation of the "Song of Songs" of Solomon, Eliot's translation of "Anabasis" by St. John-Perse, Shakespeare's sugared "Sonnets" and a few lines from "The Doors of Perception" by Aldous Huxley, about his mescaline experiences.

The result -- as can be expected from such diverse sources -- is at once mysterious and glorious, beautiful, and maybe the finest example of the cut-up process Gysin himself created. Unfortunately, it was never published in its entirety during his lifetime. An excerpt appeared in the Burroughs/Gysin cut-up collaboration The Third Mind (1978) and mistakenly credited to Burroughs -- once more undercutting Gysin's contribution.

In one interview Gysin put his multimedia career in perspective by saying the art world thought of him as a writer, and the writers thought of him as an artist. "I should have been one or the other," he said, somewhat ruefully. By the 1980s, he was a performer as well -- he'd written for Broadway in the '40s, but here he was onstage singing new lyrics he'd written and describing himself as "the world's oldest living rock star."

It's all the more ironic that Gysin's work remains largely undiscovered in this multimedia age his work helped create. His legacy, long overshadowed by others of more fame or infamy, remains elusive as ever.

Townsend Award fiction nominees announced

2012-01-30T12:43:00.001-05:00

The Townsend Award for Fiction is a major Georgia literary prize that began back in 1981, named in honor of Jim Townsend, the founder of Atlanta magazine. Townsend, who died unexpectedly at 48 in 1981, created the magazine in 1961 and over the course of two decades served as an inspiration to a number of aspiring authors. Today the Townsend Prize is administered by Georgia Perimeter College, the Georgia Center for the Book, the Margaret Mitchell House, and the Atlanta Writer's Club.

This background, of course, matters not nearly as much as the award itself and the writers who have been chosen to receive it over the years. They include a group with many familiar names to readers: Alice Walker, Terry Kay, Philip Lee Williams, Mary Hood, Ha Jin, Ferrol Sams, and others. It’s a significant award by any name, however, and the ten nominees for this year have just been named. They are, in alphabetical order:

Daniel Black, Perfect Peace
Lynn Cullen, Reign of Madness
Ann Hite, Ghost on Black Mountain
Joshilyn Jackson, Backseat Saints
Collin Kelley, Remain in Light
Thomas Mullen for The Many Deaths of the Firefly Brothers
Andrew Plattner, A Marriage of Convenience
Josh Russell, My Bright Midnight
Joseph Skibell, A Curable Romantic
Amanda Kyle Williams, The Stranger You Seek

Townsend would appreciate the variety of stories nominated in his honor. In an early column for the Atlanta Journal and Constitution he described himself as a writer who was ''an old con who has heard just about every story a man ever believed, and had believed every one of them himself.''

A full list of previous winners is available here.

The winner of the award, which is given every other year, will be announced at a reception on the evening of April 26 at the Atlanta Botanical Garden. The Center for the Book and the Southern Academy of Literary arts at GPC have chosen a panel of three out-of-state judges who will make a decision among the ten nominees. The award evening keynote speaker will be the prize-winning novelist Ann Beattie.

"My New Voice," by Mark Pentecost

2012-01-29T12:25:00.000-05:00

"Untitled," Fred Tomaselli (2002)

"My New Voice"
Mark Pentecost

This is my new voice. Same old paint job, sure,

But check out under the hood:

New clutch, new throttle, new choke,

Block and head remilled in history’s machine shop,

Filters pulled out, the muffler junked,

No catalytic converter. Lines cleaned

Of too much form and education,

The radiator flushed with psychoanalysis

And the overflow topped off with ritalin.

The roof even retracts, like scalp before the brain surgeon.

Now it accelerates like an obsession,

Revs and screams like some rancorous baby,

Or burbles and thrums along smooth as a secret.

I’m not done. The brakes are unreliable,

The windshield snowed in by smashed bugs,

And the rewiring! It’s taken forever,

Burned and shocked friends trying to help.

I need new carburators in my ears,

Sometimes the torque is too much for my throat.

Don’t ask what it runs on. Just listen,

And you can hear how I’m covered with oil and grease,

Too much for an honest mechanic. Hear how soiled I am, how rich.

In the mirror my colorless nakedness, once pallid and poor as

Some god-forsaken panhandle or the Empty Quarter,

Breaks out with a thousand euphoric gushers, blooms of dark sheen,

Stain, and damned spot. Tar sands under my nails,

My fingers glitter with benzene rings.

Orifice, follicle, pore, all ooze synonyms of hydrocarbon:

Naphtha, kerosene, pitch, sweet Texas

Crude, diesel fuel, jet fuel, napalm.

It collects in my shoes and gluts my eyeballs

With anthracite, with bitumen, with blindness;

I weep, and the kleenex stinks of thirtyweight.

My bowels are marshy with byproducts,

Rainbows gather round my shit.

My sludge-congested arteries baffle my cardiologist;

She cannot hide her dismay at

My new voice.

This is what it runs on.

We are carbon that lives on carbon,

Eating it, riding it, selling it.

How could it be otherwise?

The force that drives the fossil through the

Cracking, the fracking, the bourse

Drives my greasy age in flames

To the anointed conclusion.

My head is the head of a match.

It sits atop my body like the spark

On the end of the restless fuse.

Inside my head, the oil fields are burning.

I stumble in the chaparral and wait for the rest of me to ignite.

By the viscous light, like chicken stock,

Like melting butter, the rendering of some animal’s fat,

I see men as trees, walking.

This is my new voice.

Is it really new? And what is a voice anyway?

At least it’s mine. Not all mine, maybe, but

Still me. Always me.

Me, the ancient fuel. Me, the combustion, the fire-tormented

pistons,

The coiled steering wheel too hot to grip.

Me the joyride, me the swervings. Look out! Look out! Look out!

Me. Tire tracks like new-turned earth, the asphalt a burned-over

farm—me.

The homemade cross beside the highway: me.

The highway, paved with flint and shale: me.

Is this what it sounds like, what it looks like,

What it feels like, to have a new voice?

An unmufflered mouth? Dreams in the driver’s seat at last?

Somewhere up the road blue lights flash and people are singing.

Let’s go.

Mark Pentecost, a therapist in Athens, Georgia, is "reconciled after sixty years to my fate of native Southerner." He read "My New Voice" at December's Word of Mouth gathering. The poem originally appeared online at the Word of Mouth website.

Dada, meet mama: the poetry of Hugo Ball, read by Marie Osmond

2012-01-28T12:23:00.002-05:00

Sometimes it's best to let words and images speak for themselves. Explaining too much about the theory and writings of Hugo Ball and the Dada movement he helped create in the early decades of the twentieth century would risk ruining the joyous rhythms (and the sheer beauty of nonsense language) that resonate in his poetry.

If you're up to it, though, Malcolm Green's anthology of many early Dada texts offers all the intentionally maddening mysteries of the Dada movement. Blago Bung Blago Bung Bosso Fataka!, with a title taken from a poem by Hugo Ball, offers a look at Dada's brief but complex history, and the resulting outrage from Dada's confounded critics and even more confused audiences.

Ball did try to upset the cultural expectations of his time. His poems sought to "dissolve language" and create "a new sentence that was neither determined by, nor tied to, any conventional meaning," according to his diaries. The Cabaret Voltaire -- his Zurich nightclub -- became the center of a riotous, intentionally provoking, group of artists who called their movement Dada, itself a nonsense word chosen at random from a dictionary, and meant to denote no particular meaning.

Academic discussion aside, public outrage was swift at the total confusion of word and image that followed Dada performances, even surpassing Ball's own previous experiments with Expressionism and theater. Sophisticated audiences who were learning to appreciate (some would say grapple with) new artistic ideas such as cubism in art, dissonances explored by twentieth-century composers, and other experimental artistic forms were confused and angered by the Dada artists' complete disregard for meaning -- a clear reaction to the meaninglessness of World War I. In March 1916 one critic complained about the movement's "unforgivable blasphemy against the intellect":

They no longer believe in the intellect and its words ... and all they produce are monkey tricks. And if they were asked why they do it, probably they would answer it would be impious to expect them even to know. And they would underline this answer with a smile and this smile with a gesture of superiority.

On the evening of June 23 1916 Ball came to the stage of the Cabaret Voltaire dressed in a cardboard suit and wearing an outrageous headdress, looking, as Green observes, like a "shaman." Nervously he recited a few of his sound poems, and inspired by his Catholic upbringing he began to recite his nonsense words in the "ancient cadences of priestly lamentation," Ball later wrote. One sound experiment, "Karawane," read:

When the performance was over, Ball wrote in his diary, "covered in sweat, I was carried from the stage like a magic bishop." This event turned out to be a defining moment in Dada; and although Dada art took many forms, the photo of Ball in his "magic bishop" suit has become a visual representation of the entire movement.

And who better to express the ineffable in the spoken words of Hugo Ball than the delightful Marie Osmond? For a presentation on sound poetry in an episode of Ripley's Believe It or Not television series from the 1980s, Marie introduces the audience to the complex world of Dada as she puts on makeup -- explaining that "when you know you're going to be on stage, you want to be sure you look your best -- and that you're properly dressed for the part."

It's an amusing way to describe the unconventional concepts of Ball's Dada poetry and its performance as art -- especially so when she produces the famous printed text of "Karawane" (reproduced above), pauses for a long moment, and creates one of the most unexpected and truly most dada-like moments in the history of television. Marie's introduction and striking performance of "Karawane" would undoubtedly bring a small smile from Hugo Ball. It would probably be impious for him to suggest he knows why.

The real lovesick blues: Rodney Crowell's "Chinaberry Sidewalks"

2012-01-27T13:24:00.000-05:00

It's not really fair to call Rodney Crowell just a singer-songwriter. His 35-year career has been part of country and rock music in a way that few can match. His credits include writing songs for performers from EmmyLou Harris to Bob Seger, producing albums for his wife Rosanne Cash, and his own performing career includes thirteen albums.

But before all that, Crowell was a Texas kid whose life was "folksy but complicated," as one reviewer of Chinaberry Sidewalks, his autobiography, put it, and with a set of parents who provided him with much of the material for a lifetime of country songs. His funny but achingly-told tales have an edge that can't disguise a young man's confusion and hurt. Addie Cauzette and J.W. Crowell's relationship was wild and got wilder, in one of Crowell's own phrases, "from the git-go."

In an early mix of Hollywood matinee-bravery and undeniable scene-stealing at the age of five, Rodney grabbed a gun to break up one alcohol-fueled party -- New Years 1955 be damned:

...My decision to fish the .22 from the closet wasn't made lightly. To retrieve the gun meant entering the room alone, a chilling prospect even in broad daylight. But sensing the storm gathering behind the rising levels of alcohol, I figured those dark corners were no match for what would happen if the adults out there started screwing each other.

Aside from enhancing the gravity of my announcement that it was time to go home, I had no intention of using the gun. Based loosely on the Saturday matinees I'd seen at the Navaway Theater, where the good guy got the bad guy's attention by wielding a six-shooter full of silver bullets, my plan required the gun as a prop.

Hank Williams was singing "Lovesick Blues" when I stepped into the living room armed with my father's rifle. Dorothy Lawrence was the first to notice my arrival. "My Lord, he's got a gun!" she called out, a bit less dramatically than I'd have liked but compelling nonetheless. The focus of attention shifted instantly in my direction, and having all eyes on me sent a surge of power through my nervous system that left my mind a small blank canvas. From there, the script unraveled.

It was lack of preparation for this pivotal moment that provoked two serious blunders: one, inadvertently disengaging the thumb-activated safety on the rifle; two, pointing it at my father and pulling the trigger. The bullet exploded into the linoleum floor less than a foot from where Dorothy stood. "Lovesick Blues" came to a screeching halt, and my father pounced on me like he was Batman on pep pills. Sensing his first impulse was to beat me with the butt of the rifle, I braced myself for the worst. Instead, he hugged me so close to his heart that even through the ringing in my ears I could hear it pounding. Being squeezed so hard that I could barely breathe gave me a feeling of comfort. My peacekeeping mission was complete. There would be no fighting that night.

Shocking people sober and sending them home thankful to be alive is one way to break up a party. Although visibly shaken, my parents' friends showed no ill feelings. Cookie Chastain said she knew I was "a good boy and wouldn't hurt a flea." Pete Conn reckoned I "knew not to play with no more loaded guns." Doc Lawrence went as far as making a joke about my aim being so bad that I was "lucky not to have shot [my] dang pecker off." Hushed exits, however, told the story of how they really felt. ...

The young gunslinger may not have had the mechanics of marksmanship down but he knew how to make an entrance. As any musician can tell you, that counts for one hell of an impression.

Photographer Reuben Cox and "The Work of Joe Webb" (2009)

2012-01-26T15:58:00.000-05:00

Mention "photography in the south" and a certain imagery of decay leaps to mind: steel-gray clouds in a black-and-white sky, weather-beaten clapboard, the forgotten faces of Appalachia -- as if the ghosts of Walker Evans and Dorothea Lange were still documenting the slow turning of the human soul south of the Mason-Dixon line.

Or perhaps it's here that William Faulkner's "the past isn't really dead" is more truth than aphorism; maybe the inexorable and ultimate reconstruction that progress brings hasn't yet removed all traces of the past that linger in the south, and which Reuben Cox is drawn to capture.

The North Carolina artist whose website offers a welcome and a request ("welcome to my mosque ... please wipe your muddy mind before entering") is a photographer, luthier, portraitist; his photo subjects range from the ephemera of the soul to whorls of river water to the graffiti-plastered walls of the now-closed CBGB's, documenting the passage of the temporal in sharply-rendered images of both beauty and clarity.

image from Record Shack collection, Reuben Cox

His human subjects challenge the camera's eye, rather than divert their attention from it. Their assurance in the captured moment is a personal statement, even in the seemingly offhand way Paul McCartney plays an upright piano and the potter Georgia Blizzard sits in window light loosely holding a carved Buddha in her lap.

image from The Work of Joe Webb, Reuben Cox (2009)

His book of photographs The Work of Joe Webb: Appalachian Master of Rustic Architecture (Jargon Books, 2009; distributed by the University of Georgia Press) is work that celebrates the craftsmanship of the Highlands, North Carolina woodworker and builder who created nearly thirty log cabins in the 1920s and 1930s. Cox's contemporary photographs -- taken with a large-format field camera -- reveal the houses in current states of repair, disuse, or unrecognizable renovation: a review in Blueprint calls the images "hallucinatory ... balustrades of thick, twisted twigs minimizing thickets; staircases constructedwith random patterns of interlocking laurel or rhododendron branches."

Though Cox's photographs of log cabins are beautiful documents of a physical past rapidly disappearing, his website offers other work showing Cox's interest in the metaphysics of belief.Everybody Wants to go to Heaven but Nobody Wants to Die is a series of evocative C-print photographs -- smoke evaporating into air, explosions caught in the moment of combustion, as if the human spirit had suddenly ignited and caught fire -- in settings of fall woods, in the dark of night, or against blue skies and skeletal trees.

image from "Everyone Wants to go to Heaven, But No One Wants to Die," Reuben Cox

Cox created these fleeting moments of flash and fire by experimenting with available light, gunpowder and shutter speed, and the results are unrepeatable instants captured reflexively on film. The ghostly and beautiful images can be unsettling reminders that life is momentary, that the nature of spiritual belief is a matter of individual faith and doubt, and that human nature is changeable as smoke even as the artist tries to capture man's nature against the impermanence of time.

The Jargon Society remains a valuable asset to the continuing memory of its founder (the "visionary coach and, at times, crank") Jonathan Williams, and now in the capable hands of Thomas Craven. Its stated goal is still "dedication to the care and preservation of the singular, the personal, the local, the individual. ... What other press would devote equal effort to White Trash Cooking and the collected poems of Lorine Neidecker at the same time?"' Williams's boundless energy in promoting the vast and largely unheralded wealth of American creativity was expressed in an interview with Leverett T. ("Sneaky Fast") Smith and posted at the Jargon Society website: in it, Williams declares “'There is no end to desire.' But, perhaps, there is an end to energy? I will try to go to the well as long as I think there is a drop of water in it."

Art Spiegelman meets Lynd Ward, 1971: "slivers of light in the darkness"

2012-01-25T13:27:00.000-05:00

The Paris Review features a short piece on graphic artist Lynd Ward written by Art Spiegelman, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The 1971 meeting in upstate New York between scruffy young fan and established artist, as often happens, doesn't turn out as hoped but it did help spark Spiegelman's own graphic career. This fond memory is excerpted from his introduction to Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts, a two-volume set published by The Library of America on October 14, 2010.

... It seems natural now to think of Lynd Ward as one of America’s most distinguished and accomplished graphic novelists. He is, in fact, one of only a small handful of artists anywhere who ever made a “graphic novel” until the day before yesterday. The ungainly neologism seems to have stuck since Will Eisner, creator of the voraciously inventive Spirit comic book of the 1940s, first used it on the cover of a 1978 collection of his seriously intended comics stories for adults, A Contract With God. It was a way to distance himself from the popular prejudices against the medium, and he often cited Ward’s 1930s woodcut novels as an inspiration for his work and for the euphemism. But Ward’s roots were not in comics, though his work is part of the same large family tree, belonging somewhere among the less worm-ridden branches of printmaking and illustration.

... In 1970, I briefly met Lynd Ward at the opening of a small Binghamton, New York, gallery show of his prints. I was a twenty-two-year-old cartoonist and told him how much I admired his woodcut novels. As I recall, I was by far the youngest and scruffiest person at the opening (he was just a few years older than I am now), and he expressed surprise that I even knew the books. I asked what newspaper comics had been important to him, and he explained that he hadn’t been allowed to read them as a child. When pressed, he expressed appreciation for Hal Foster’s Prince Valiant, which he discovered as an adult.

I didn’t share his enthusiasm—I thought Foster’s work, with its captions positioned safely beneath each of the stately illustrations on his Sunday pages, was barely comics at all —but we went on to find common ground in our mutual esteem for the great old socialist cartoonist, Art Young, before he turned back to talking to his grown-up friends.

... When walking through that Binghamton gallery show back in 1971, I regretted that no original prints from Ward’s woodcut novels were part of the exhibit, but I remember slowing down to notice that a number of the prints on display depicted trees and forests. I thought about the poetry of patiently carving into a dead tree to make a print on paper that commemorated the once-living thing. One beautifully structured print stayed with me (I later found it again, reproduced in Storyteller Without Words): a panoramic treescape of a young man in shadows, groping and climbing through the dense neuronal wickerwork of dappled trunks and branches, carefully exploring and working his way through the maze of marks that surround him.

I’ve recently been told that it was intended to be a picture of the nature writer, John Burroughs, but I’d thought of it as a moving self-portrait of the artist embedded in the wood, seeking slivers of light in the darkness and carving out a new medium. The print was called “The Pathfinder.” ...

(Art Spiegelman's work also includes the startling Shadow of No Towers, a graphic novel about September 11, 2001. His most recent book of comics is Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!. Art by Lynd Ward reproduced from the Paris Review.)

The website Forgotten Bookmarks offers a reader's life, left behind in used books

2012-01-24T13:54:00.014-05:00

The website of a used-book seller, Forgotten Bookmarks, posts the ephemera left behind in used books. What gets left behind between pages is probably just as good as any human time capsule encased in stone, and much easier to retrieve at will, too, before a hundred years have passed.

These are books bought for a thousand occasions: novels to pass the time on vacation, books as gifts, textbooks as schoolroom drudgery, library books never returned. In each case the variety of forgotten and left behind items posted here shows readers in a hurry to part with the printed page. These can be tantalizing and incomplete clues to the reading life: advertising counts for a surprising amount of book-mark material, as do reminders about doctor's appointments, scenic post-cards, and a wide variety of notes (sometimes of the bank kind).

For some readers it must be easier to tell a dream, a personal story, and tuck it away in a book, with no one to know. Here's an example of one remarkable retrieved night, found in a copy of Mrs. Pollifax and the Second Thief by Dorothy Gilman (1993). The Forgotten Bookmarks note and transcription: looks like a page from a journal or dream notebook.

Saturday, July 26, 2008

2nd AM of 2 powerful dreams.
Yesterday: woke up from maybe couple hours of progressive dreams: me from younger to older. 1st really erotic dream I can remember having. Bill was downstairs, though; Murphy's whining at door brought me to consciousness. (the same Murphy who needed to go out and is not getting tummy rubs to my left)

This AM: vivid regressive dreams - born though (what?) maybe seven lifetimes. Part-way through I knew in dream that I'd been through "older lives." Two brothers, a sister? Boys had different fathers. Smarter one aged more quickly than less gifted, but sweeter, brother. A sort of Lex Luthor/Marvel Comics/radiation thing I was "burned?" at some point in my life?

Woke up just b-4 6 AM. Bill facing me - my reality touchstone. Ernie was slightly erect, became more so with (rather insistent on my part) stroking. Lower back/pelvis killing me; remembered stomach/ab contraction can ease pain, so did that. Realized dream sequence and got conscious enough to realize that waking Bill wasn't fair. Left Ernie to rest, kissed my beloved, patted/scratched Murphy with my foot while reaching for journal and pen, Had to pee, so did that, then got book's (??) dog to go downstairs. He had to pee - long night for him - and now we are on couch w/Murphy properly curled up to my left my R wrist properly braced, and me pondering the powerful dreams showing me that I am coming into the kairostic moment of being not in my past nor in my future, but the true present. And I can get my life in order, my finances - my heart, soul, body - and not only God but also life is good - all the time.

Thank you.

That closing remark -- "thank you" -- is the mystifying piece, as if the note was addressed to the dream self. Many of the notes have no such narrative to frame them. Here is another, with helpful but intriguing notes from the blog's curator: Found in "Apollo: An Illustrated Manual of the History of Art Throughout The Ages" by S. Reinach. Published by Charles Scribner's Sons, 1935. Short note, looks like the start of a story. Most of the page is missing:

March 31st - '36
Written Feb. 21 '37
Sun. Eve.

Twilight had settled over the small city.

A girl came out of a hotel ...

stepped into a car at the...(other side)

caused it to glide so easily over the ground and then too, there was the dip in the road just ahead, so the girl said "Let it go."

The machine leaped forward but so did...

dog, from the side of the road, at the...

...instant...

The site's most recent posts indicate a new years' tragedy of burst water pipes, a paper-trader's nightmare. It might be worth a browse to offer condolences. If you're in the mood you might contact the bookseller and offer your own scans of lost-and-found used book items. Here's a recent post, with photos.

... I wanted to get an early start this morning, as with yesterday's holiday, we would have twice the orders to wrap up and get out. I was in by 7:30 or so, and the first thing I noticed when I walked in the door was that there was a big puddle. At first I thought some snow might have drifted under the door and melted, as the winds were high last night. Then I heard the sound. The great hissing of the beast.

It took me a second to realize what had happened and what I had to do. I sloshed though the water and over to the main shut-off. The hissing quieted, then stopped. I got up off the floor and took a good look; it was still mostly dark outside, and the only light was from the EXIT sign above the door. I noticed the reflection on the floor, rippling. This wasn't just a little water. It's a good thing I wore my boots.

Thank you for indulging me a bit. I'm a little overwhelmed. And sad. And angry... but I wanted to let you know where I've been this morning. For a moment, I wondered what I was doing here on Blogger in the middle of this emergency, but I realized that you all are my friends, and I'm here to share news with you, good or bad. Today is not good, but we're all alive and it appears that we have only lost about $10,000 in books or so. It could have been a lot worse...

The pipe burst right behind my desk, where we keep a lot of the expensive books, and where I keep all the forgotten bookmarks. I lost most of them.

A loss of "about $10,000" in used books is sad news indeed, though the lost volumes will undoubtedly be replaced with more used books. But the bookmarks and other ephemera of the individual reading life are irreplaceable.

"This Strange, Old World," Katherine Anne Porter: "utopias are steadily on the decline"

2012-01-23T13:15:00.001-05:00

The writing of Katherine Anne Porter has slipped out of literary fashion these days -- her sharply-drawn observations and difficult, flawed characters aren't the easy stuff of today's contemporary fiction. Her one major novel, Ship of Fools, was published more than 45 years ago and was the best-selling novel of 1962. Her short stories are seldom anthologized, but they are gems of beauty and precision. The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter won her a Pulitzer Prize for Literature in 1966.

She was a guest at the writer's colony Yaddo in upstate New York often in the 1940s, and completed Ship of Fools there. Ms. Porter -- who once declared "my life has been incredible, I don't believe a word of it" -- was a prolific letter writer throughout her life, and the brief, sharp book reviews written from the '20's through the ''50s's, collected here by Darlene Harbour Unrue, are written in a familiar, just-between-us style of a personal letter between writer and reader. The result is a witty and unique literary salon-of-one.

This collection of published reviews shows Miss Porter, not surprisingly, was just as conscientious and thoughtful about the craft of her fellow authors as she was of her own writing. Although many of the books Miss Porter reviews in This Strange, Old World (University of Georgia Press, 2008) were not considered major works at the time, their issues were of obvious interest to her as a writer: history, travel, culture (especially of Mexico), independent women discovering their growing social and economic equality. She finds contemporary parallels of this burgeoning freedom in surprising literary places:

"... Mary Wollstoncraft must have found her world a singularly dreadful one: she was a woman cursed with deep emotions, a quick argumentative mind, a frustrated religious conscience, and a rigid set of moral scruples. She had picked up the pedantic social theories which heralded the nineteenth century, and J.J. Rousseau's sentimental humanistic libertarianism now bore fruit in some horrid schemes to right all social wrong. Her radical feminism seemed monstrous to her times. Her delicate high beauty did not save her from a life of hardships incident to the disaster of having been born with an inquiring mind. She was thirty-five before she had a lover, and then a basely inferior one. She bore her child out of wedlock and was deserted.

... She stuck to her principles and her pride (and lived to be) the wife of William Godwin, a pedant and charlatan, and the mother of Mary Shelley. Her Vindication of the Rights of Women remains a monument to her boldness, her anger, and her frustration. Her luck was the worst of them all."

It's a rare treat to read criticism that enhances and illuminates its subjects with such grace and style. There are nice touches of wit, too, without being cruel, even with authors that may undoubtedly deserve it. "Utopias are steadily on the decline," Miss Porter comments on one author's conclusion that the solution to the rise of feminist ideas is a return to "good, old-fashioned, romantic, hearty masculinity."

She finds an equal target in Catherine the Great of Russia: "Female despots in the making do not suffer from a mother fixation," she writes in a witty review emphasizing Catherine's political -- and marriage -- ambitions.

These brief reviews, written mainly on deadline, still echo the finely crafted style of Miss Porter's short stories. They also require the reader to read between the lines; much is implied. But they manage to be entertaining and worthwhile, years later, and anyone interested in Katherine Anne Porter should not miss reading them.

"A barker outside a girl-show tent": E.B. White and the election circus of 1944

2012-01-22T14:25:00.002-05:00

It's January -- at long and weary last, the beginning of election season in earnest. While the G.O.P. circus of debate and straw poll, debate and primary, trades ringmasters with every new week (Santorum, Romney, Gingrich ...) , here are a few words about Republicans and their 1944 convention published in E.B. White: Writings from the New Yorker, 1927-1976.

White's description of the event -- a barker outside a girl-show tent -- may find familiar echoes in this year's big top. History was not on the Republican side then, either; the 1944 election was a blow-out for FDR, even though the G.O.P. gave it that old electoral-college try.

They brokered the governor of New York (Thomas Dewey) and the governor of Ohio (John W. Bricker) on the ticket. It didn't work, but not all was lost in the lopsided FDR victory, his fourth -- at least Bricker carried his home state.

The thing we remember of the Republican keynote speech, as it came in over the air, is the summer heat in the long grasses of the June night outside the window, and our feeling of sin and futility.

It was the same feeling a boy has at the county fair, on the hot midway in the suggestive summertime, as he passes before a barker outside a girl-show tent, with the smell of fried food in his nostrils and the enticements of girls in his mind, lost in the immemorial sheepishness of humanity and its deliberate exploitation by the ancient devices of oratory.

The keynoter in Chicago indicated that the Republicans were against aggression, New-Dealism, and the man-eating shark. There was to be no more aggression because the Republicans do not tolerate any evil thing like aggression.

The speaker gave no indication that the reorganization of a shattered world would require anything more than a mere extension of American culture and habits, as exemplified by past and present Republicans.

In this summer night we felt we were armed, bloody, and tired standing and listening to this slick spiel, outside this gaudy and unlikely tent -- listening and knowing all the while that we were about to be taken.

Four years later, Dewey went on to lose again, this time to Harry Truman, famous Chicago Tribune headline to the contrary. It was not an exceptionally bright era for Republicanism. Still, we all know we're about to be taken for quite a ride this year. Hang on to your straw hats.

"A Winter Prayer," Arthur Solway

2012-01-21T14:36:00.001-05:00

Atlanta, Georgia (2011)

"A Winter Prayer"

Arthur Solway

Along the frail limbs of a tree, outlining rooftops,

a light accumulation changes to heavy rain.

Just as any life can suddenly change

the way people foolishly complain, drifting

toward decline, quiet dissipation.

Do you hear the fainthearted complaints

of snowmen while others simply bitch

about the slush? Send us some healing notes,

the gentle hush of any god willing to listen.

"A Winter Prayer" by Arthur Solway originally appeared online at Word of Mouth, Athens, GA.

Sketches from "MetaMaus," Art Spiegelman's book about the creation of "Maus"

2012-01-20T14:03:00.000-05:00

MetaMaus is Art Spiegelman's new comprehensive book about the creation of Maus, A Survivor's Tale: My Father Bleeds History, the 1992 Pulitzer Prize-winning story of his father's experience in a Nazi prison camp. It's a great look-behind-the-scenes at the creation of Spiegelman's ground-breaking approach to visualizing non-fiction.

The book, which includes a DVD of the complete Maus hyper-linked with source materials, is structured around an extensive interview with Spiegelman.

In a 2011 interview with David D'Arcy at The Art Newspaper, Spiegelman revealed what he called his "ambivalence" about doing press junkets for this particular work -- in essence, interviews about the interview presented in the book:

“I feel it’s a bit absurd to be interviewed about an interview, but the book came out way better than expected, so I feel protective of it. I’m in my usual situation, which I think is called ambivalence. I know I have to do something with the press. I’m not going to J.D. Salinger this one out. On the other hand, I don’t relish being in a hall of mirrors, like MetaMetaMetaMaus.”

Here, from The Atlantic online, is a selection of Spiegelman's original sketches that eventually framed the story for Maus.

"The Freedom to Surf": SOPA and the ACLU's "Don't Filter Me" campaign

2012-01-19T13:20:00.000-05:00

(The Google homepage on Wednesday, January 18, 2012)

One of the benefits of this week's successful "go dark" campaign on many websites -- a voluntary, daylong denial-of-service to halt passage of Stop Online Piracy legislation -- was to act as a reminder that In the digital age, websites are an increasingly important source of information for everyone, including school kids.

The American Civil Liberties Union has seen an increase in the number of censorship issues in public schools that relate to websites and domains school boards find objectionable or controversial.

The ACLU'S Blog of Rights has posted "The Freedom to Surf: Protecting Internet Access in Public Schools." Lindsey Kee, ACLU of Tennessee, details the case that sparked the group's nationwide "Don't Filter Me" campaign in conjunction with Banned Books Week.

Websites are an increasingly targeted component of censorship battles around the nation. Kee makes clear in the post that censorship can take a passive role as well as an active form -- as when school districts block student access to online gay and lesbian groups while permitting sites for ex-gay ministries and therapies urging sexual conversions. Here is an excerpt:

... eighty percent of Tennessee public schools used filtering software that blocked sites categorized as "LGBT." While Tennessee law requires that schools use Internet filtering software, that law is meant to protect students from information that is obscene or harmful to minors — material that was already blocked by a different filter and was not part of the "LGBT" category.
The discriminatory censorship in this case not only hurt students by making it impossible to access important material about scholarships, research for school-related assignments, and Gay-Straight Alliance club information. Students also need to be able to access information about their legal rights or what to do if they're being harassed at school, especially given the high rate of bullying and suicides among gay teens.
On May 19, 2009 ACLU-TN and ACLU filed a lawsuit in federal court against Metropolitan Nashville Public Schools and Knox County Schools on behalf of three students and Storts-Brinks, who was also the advisor of the school's GSA.
On June 3, Knox County Schools Superintendent Jim McIntyre released a statement saying that their filters were no longer blocking the LGBT category. This change went into effect in all Tennessee and Indiana schools that used the same software. ...
Unfortunately the problem of web censorship still takes place in other school systems. The American Civil Liberties Union's LGBT Project is asking public high school students throughout the U.S. to check out your high school's web filters and help us make sure you're not being blocked from information that you have a right to have. ...

The right to information is as important to a free-thinking and knowledgeable society as any freedom Americans cherish. With the proliferation of websites and information sources, the ACLU's "Don't Filter Me" campaign is a vital part of Banned Books Week in spreading the message that internet censorship is a growing part of the targeted and selective banning of ideas.

Cataloguing Ubu, and links to Gysin's audio works

2012-01-18T15:16:00.000-05:00

Gysin with William S Burroughs and the Dreammachine, 1966

Brion Gysin -- artist, writer, multimedian -- once commented on his many projects that the art world thought of him as a writer, and the writers thought of him as an artist. "I should have been one or the other," he said in one interview, when he had taken on another mantle -- "the world's oldest living rock star," onstage in his eighties. The inventor of both the poetic cut-up technique and the Dreammachine (which was, briefly, considered for production by Phillips Electrontics back in the heady days of the 1960s) seems be getting some well-deserved attention at The New Museum and accompanying features at Kenneth Goldsmith's UbuWeb media resource.

Brion Gysin - An Audio Retrospective (1958-81) Recently honored by a exhibition at The New Museum in New York, UbuWeb presents the full scope of Brion Gysin's sound poetry and audio works. Included are his seminal permutation poems from the early 60s such as I've Come To Free The Words and I Am That I Am as well as lectures on various subjects such as Thoughts On Modern Art. The historic Poem of Poems (1958), recorded at the Beat Hotel in Paris and considered one of Gysin's important experiments in cut-up and recording technique, is available for download, as is his more ambient works such as The Pool K III (late 1950s, early '60s) and Bruits du Beaubourg (1977). Finally, a posthumous 1993 recording -- Self-Portrait Jumping -- of Gysin's songs, poems and stories, are set to music by Ramuntcho Matta and performed by Brion Gysin and Ramuntcho Matta with Don Cherry, Elli Medieros, Steve Lacy, and Lizzy Mercier Descloux. You can read interviews with Gysin here and here, as well as William S. Burroughs' The Cut-Up Method of Brion Gysin. And you can view a demonstration of Gysin Permutation Software here.

Cataloguing Ubu

In its pages, the site UbuWeb "posts much of its content without permission; we rip out-of-print LPs into sound files; we scan as many old books as we can get our hands on; we post essays as fast as we can OCR them. UbuWeb is an unlimited resource with unlimited space to fill. It is in this way that the site has grown to encompass hundreds of artists, hundreds of gigabytes of sound files, books, texts and videos."

Margaret Smith's valiant efforts to archive the sprawling UbuWeb are a continuing project. Smith undertakes the job as site archivist for her Masters in Library Science at Syracuse University; more can be read about her ongoing work, with an excerpt from the project overview below.

"UbuWeb is a collaboratively curated website which includes thousands of historic and contemporary avant-garde texts, sound recordings, moving images and related curatorial and analytic commentary. Founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith, it has grown to be a vast educational resource, providing online access to an obscure yet vital aspect of the cultural record that would be, in many cases, otherwise lost.

The initial goals of this project were to propose improvements to UbuWeb’s navigation and content access, and to introduce a plan for archiving and preservation."

Martin Amis on aging: "It all works out"

2012-01-17T10:35:00.003-05:00

T.S. Eliot may have called April the cruelest month, but those whose luck it is to celebrate a January birthday may sometimes consider this accident of birth just as cruel a fate. Cold winds blow, ice forms, and springtime zephyrs seem more distant in January than in hearth-and-warmhearted December, when civilization at least has the hope inherent in a holiday season.

Many of my friends have birthdays this month, and to them I offer the solace of the following observation by Martin Amis. His words have the bite of rye whiskey on a wind-swept evening, and I hope all my friends are able to find some reason to believe that all things, even January birthdays, do work out in the end. I raise my glass with the hope that you all find a personally warm and happy reason to celebrate another year.

As the fiftieth birthday approaches, you get the sense that your life is thinning out, and will continue to thin out, until it thins out into nothing. And you sometimes say to yourself: That went a bit quick. That went a bit quick. In certain moods, you may want to put it rather more forcefully. As in: OY!! THAT went a BIT FUCKING QUICK!!!...

Then fifty comes and goes, and fifty-one, and fifty-two. And life thickens out again. Because there is now an enormous and unsuspected presence within your being, like an undiscovered continent. This is the past.

And it all works out. Your hams get skinnier--but that's all right, because your gut gets fatter. Your eyes get hotter--but that's all right, because your hands get colder (and you can soothe them with your frozen fingertips). Shrill or sudden noises are getting painfully sharper--but that's all right, because you're getting deafer. The hair on your head gets thinner--but that's all right, because the hair in your nose and in your ears gets thicker. It all works out in the end.

To all of my friends born in cold January, a warm and happy birthday!

Dizzy Gillespie, "To Be, or Not ... to Bop" (1979): "Everybody knew it was good"

2012-01-16T13:20:00.004-05:00

I've been listening to a lot of Dizzy today for Martin Luther King's birthday. The Gabriel with the bent horn and horn-rimmed glasses who started a musical revolution with Charlie Parker was born in South Carolina, staking a case for the Carolina Piedmont as the birthplace of bop: the one-and-only Thelonious Monk was born in Rocky Mount, NC eleven days earlier than Diz.

His own book, To Be or Not ... to Bop was published by Doubleday in 1979, a rollicking and roughhouse story of jazz at it was lived in the TOBA circuit: "Tough on Black Artists" was the name given to the management style that required three-to-five shows a day. John Birks Gillespie, with a growing reputation for eccentric dancing on the bandstand, became a stand-out. "Where's that dizzy cat?" the musicians (and fans) began to ask, and the nickname stuck.

The book is told in the self-effacing style of one who is present at the creation, and who enjoys the stories and camaraderie of life on the road, as well as off the record. There are also reminiscences by companions and players who shared stages with Gillespie, recalling the times with genuine fondness and not a little awe. Here's drummer Kenny Clarke, remembering the hot-house moments of the New York jazz scene as it developed in the 1940s and '50's around Diz and Charlie Parker:

"I used to follow Diz around to all the jam sessions and hear him blow against other trumpet players. He was young and he was blowing. Everybody was asking me, 'What is Dizzy playing?' I was just telling them to 'Listen....' We were with Teddy Hill's band together, Ella Fitzgerald, Claude Hopkins, so we've been barnstorming, early, you know.

I noticed something unique about Dizzy's playing, that's why I was hanging out with him. His approach to modern harmonies, but rhythms mostly. He could take care of all that harmony, but his rhythms interested me real profoundly, and I just had to find out about that gift he had hidden in him, the gift of rhythm. It wasn't only his trumpet playing, he was doing a lotta other things that some people didn't see, but I saw the rhythmic aspect of it. The way he played and the way he would hum time and things like that. I knew it was avant-garde, ahead of time, so I just fell in line with what was going on ....

The most important characteristic of this new style of playing was camaraderie, that was first because everybody, each musician, just loved the other one, just loved them so much they just exchanged ideas and would do everything together. That's one characteristic about it I liked very much. Another word for that isunity. That's right, and I think that era of jazz had more enemies than any phase of jazz.

It was sort of esoteric from the beginning. Only a few people understood what was going on. Everybody knew it was good, but they couldn't figure out what it was. And when somebody doesn't understand a thing, he has a tendency to dislike. But I mean the music has been so strong and was strong, and is strong now ...

Whew! Oh, yeah, we used to discuss it on the bandstand sometimes and write out little things. I would say, 'Hey, Diz, whaddayou think of this?', you know. I think when we left Teddy Hill, we definitely knew that was going to happen. We were pretty sure of it, and everybody worked toward the same goal. That's what made it happen."

(Photos of Dizzy Gillespie at a Washington, DC elementary school by Donna Wilcox, 1965. From the JazzWax website.)

"The bleakness of corroding despair": Martin Luther King, April 16, 1963

2012-01-15T14:03:00.001-05:00

My dear fellow clergymen,

... You may well ask, "Why direct action? Why sit-ins, marches, etc.? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue.

My friends, I must say to you that we have not made a single gain in civil rights without legal and nonviolent pressure. History is the long and tragic story of the fact that privileged groups seldom give up their privileges voluntarily. Individuals may see the moral light and give up their unjust posture; but as Reinhold Niebuhr has reminded us, groups are more immoral than individuals.

We know through painful experience that freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed. Frankly I have never yet engaged in a direct action movement that was "well timed," according to the timetable of those who have not suffered unduly from the disease of segregation. For years now I have heard the word "Wait!" It rings in the ear of every Negro with a piercing familiarity. This "wait" has almost always meant "never." It has been a tranquilizing Thalidomide, relieving the emotional stress for a moment, only to give birth to an ill-formed infant of frustration.

We must come to see with the distinguished jurist of yesterday that "justice too long delayed is justice denied." We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God-given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward the goal of political independence, and we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward the gaining of a cup of coffee at a lunch counter.

I guess it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say wait. But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize, and even kill your black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your 20 million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see the tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see the depressing clouds of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son who is asking in agonizing pathos: "Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?" when you take a cross country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading "white" men and "colored" when your first name becomes "nigger" and your middle name becomes "boy" (however old you are) and your last name becomes "John," and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title of "Mrs." when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tip-toe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of "nobodiness"—then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into an abyss of injustice where they experience the bleakness of corroding despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. ...

Martin Luther King was born January 15, 1929. The "Letter From The Birmingham City Jail" was a response to a published statement by eight fellow clergymen from Alabama (Bishop C. C. J. Carpenter, Bishop Joseph A. Durick, Rabbi Hilton L. Grafman, Bishop Paul Hardin, Bishop Holan B. Harmon, the Reverend George M. Murray. the Reverend Edward V. Ramage and the Reverend Earl Stallings) and handwritten by Martin Luther King on April 16, 1963. It was then slipped out of the jail, turned over to his assistants on the outside, typed, copied, and widely disseminated to various organizations and individuals as an "open letter" in order to generate public support for Dr. King and his civil rights activities.

An excerpt from "Crowded by Beauty," David Schneider's new biography of Philip Whalen

2012-01-14T13:36:00.001-05:00

Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen

Here is an excerpt from Crowded by Beauty: A Biography of Poet and Zen Teacher Philip Whalen, by David Schneider, forthcoming from University of California Press. A longer extract is published in the current issue of Trticycle magazine.

Whalen, along with Gary Snyder, was integral in the San Francisco group of poets who read at the Six Gallery in 1955. They were introduced by Kenneth Rexroth, a San Francisco poet of an older generation, who was a kind of literary father-figure for the younger poets and had helped to establish their burgeoning community through personal introductions at his weekly poetry readings. That night, Snyder read "A Berry Feast", and Whalen,"Plus Ca Change."

This excerpt describes Whalen's experience living as Snyder's roommate in 1952. Whalen eventually followed Snyder to become a Forest Service lookout, although as Schneider notes, Whalen "was much given, even then, to the sedentary life."

...Philip might never have found work in the mountains: sitting in that same Telegraph Hill apartment in the hot summer of 1952, Whalen read one of Gary’s regular letters, this one from a Forest Service lookout on Crater Mountain in the North Cascades of Washington State. Provoked by it, and by working (“bad anytime, but especially nasty in summer in the city”), Whalen wrote back to declare, “By God, next summer, I’m going to have a mountain of my own!”
This he did; then got another mountain the following year, and spent a third summer as a forest lookout the year after that, making this by far his steadiest, most satisfying job until many years later, when he became a “professional” man of the cloth—that is, a Zen priest. Whalen would never have read in the historic Six Gallery reading had not Snyder put Philip’s name and poems literally in front of Allen Ginsberg’s face. Philip certainly would have floundered longer with unemployment and flirted more dangerously with outright homelessness had Gary not taken care of him whenever the two were in the same town at the same time.
They roomed together in San Francisco off and on from 1952 to 1954 in a flat on Montgomery Street, above the city’s North Beach district, to which they descended together nearly nightly for beer at Vesuvio and other drinking establishments. Thus Philip and Gary came to know the writers, players, merchants, philosophers, painters, filmmakers, musicians, and scholars circling around the Bay Area in the gestation phase of the San Francisco Renaissance.
During this same period, Snyder and Whalen began going together to the American Academy of Asian Studies (now the California Institute of Integral Studies), where they heard and met Alan Watts, and later also D. T. Suzuki. From among the audiences there, they got to know Claude (Ananda) Dahlenberg, who cofounded the East-West House and later became an ordained Zen priest under Shunryu Suzuki Roshi. And from connections there, they began attending the regular Friday evening literary gatherings held at his home by the poet Kenneth Rexroth.

Snyder, Whalen and Lew Welch

Other Friday evenings found Whalen and Snyder in Berkeley for the study group with Rev. Kanmo Imamura and Jane Imamura at the Berkeley Buddhist Temple. Together the Imamuras were descended from the most important old families of Jodo Shinshu Buddhism, yet they welcomed the young men, going so far in the subsequent years as to turn their little church publication—theBerkeley Bussei—over to the artist Will Petersen for a time. Snyder, Whalen, Ginsberg, and Kerouac all published early poems in its pages. The benevolent Imamura family gave both Snyder and Whalen their first contact with people actually practicing Buddhism instead of purely discussing its philosophies and traditions.

Whalen might have made his way out to the Academy or over to the study group without Snyder’s impetus, but Philip was much given, even then, to the sedentary life. As long as he could, he spent hours each day reading, writing, drawing, playing music, doodling, staring into space—wondering from time to time where and how he could find a job that wouldn’t drive him crazy. He ventured out when he needed to—for cigarettes or food or for fresh air—but he had nothing like the get-up-and-go Gary had. It is, in fact, difficult to think of anyone with the drive and sense of adventure the young Snyder had.
These qualities propelled him up mountains, up trees, down the hole of tankers, out into deserts, back into libraries, into universities, into monasteries, across the country, out of the country, across oceans; they armored him against the many outer and inner obstacles an un-moneyed young man might encounter in such travels; they sustained him as he went where he needed to go, saw what he wanted to see, studied what, and with whom, he needed to study, worked as he had to, and cut loose when he could. ...

Photos: (top) Gary Snyder and Philip Whalen sit outside a temple above the village of Shimoyama in Japan(Brancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley). (bottom) Gary Snyder, Philip Whalen, and Lew Welch before a poerty reading at Longshoreman's Hall (Photograph by Jim Hatch).

"Blowing Minds": A happening for the East Village Other

2012-01-13T11:45:00.005-05:00

Initiated by poets, painters, artists, seers, perverts and prophets, it shared its pages with the likes of Buckminster Fuller, Timothy Leary, Robert Crumb, Ishmael Reed, Allen Ginsberg, Lenny Bruce, The Beatles, Bob Dylan, Baba Ram Das, Jerry Rubin and Abbie Hoffman – the conspiracy of the 1960s.

Like all culture receding quickly into the hazy and obscured past, the East Village Other is having a quick look in the rear-view mirror. From the press release:

The panel on Feb. 28, to be livecast on this site, is poised to feature some of the EVO’s greatest living treasures: Ed Sanders, Steven Heller, Claudia Dreifus, Dan Rattiner and two who still live in the neighborhood –- EVO editor Peter Leggieri and writer and activist Alex Gross.

Other neighborhood residents, illustrator and cartoonist Yossarian and writer Steve Kraus, have helped us locate and gather the far-flung EVO tribe. John McMillian, author of Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America, will moderate.

More about McMillan's book, from a previous BellemeadeBooks post, is here.

If you'd like to contribute, the website adds: EastVillageOther.org will also feature newly commissioned and republished pieces about the period from legendary EVO writers, artists (we’ve solicited a piece from R. Crumb), and thoughtful fans. If you’d like to contribute, please e-mail the editor of The Local. We’re seeking posts of 600 to 1,000 words.

Moral uplift for a bleak month: Murray Lachlan Young

2012-01-12T13:17:00.003-05:00

The man who fell to Conwall:

Murray Lachlan Young

"Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine"

(Murray Lachlan Young)

From Mayfair to Morden from Soho to Sidcup
From Richmond to Dalston through old Regents park
From Borough to Bayswater, Crouchend to Clapham.
From Debden to Tooting beneath Marble Arch.

There are daughters of ministers children of clergy
There are amiable honarables barristers verging
On every single section of today’s society
Have thrown figs to the wind and embraced with such glee
The most wonderful pastime to have come around in years
Yes policemen and plumbers road sweepers and peers

Simply everyone’s taking Cocaine

Well last weekend I rode the Millennium wheel
From above and beneath I heard giggle and squeal
For instead of enjoying fine views all about
All the tourists were busily racking them out
Even those from the west of Ukraine

Simply everyone’s taking Cocaine

In the marathon runners are running with glee
With a vigour quite plain for spectators to see
It’s a marvel how thousands have slashed at their times
By at regular intervals hoofing a line
They’ve been stoking it up like a train

Simply everyone’s taking cocaine

Well I saw a young fireman helmet in hand
With a placard declaring we need thirty grand.
When I asked him to justify such an increase
He said “we have to buy it unlike the police”
Then he left for his villa in Spain

Saying everyone’s taking cocaine

Well I saw fizzy Sipworth attempting to eat
Inexplicably missing the most of her teeth
I said Fizzy your gummy what gives you old wag
She said “snorting Peruvian from the pound bag”
Then she laughed like a Portuguese drain

Simply everyone’s taking cocaine

Well I saw aunty Millie, her nose in a cast
I asked how would she manage her hourly blast
“She said needs must dear boy though it may seem a farce
I’ve been having it blown up the old Khyber Pass
By an elderly friend from Bahrain”

Simply everyone’s taking Cocaine

Uncle Percy set off on his great expedition
I said Percy you look in the peek of condition
“Quite so dear boy I’m a jack in the box
Since I purchased a sack of Bolivian rocks
From a couple I met on a plane ”

Simply everyone’s taking Cocaine

In the jungle old Percy’s supply was near done
He said this lack of chang is impeding my fun
When a barer discovered the wreck of a plane
Fairly stuffed to the gunnels with bales of Cocaine
For a year did he chatter and gurn
His remains were returned in an urn

Well the vicar proclaimed it the poorest of taste
To be scattering ashes all over the place
And if as he suspected, the powder were pure
“We should snort the old goat off the rectory floor”
So he chopped out old Percy in lines
Well at first aunty Millie declined

But she quickly gave in when the reverend stepped in
And assured her that Percy would waggle his chin
If he heard that his very last blast
Was a trip up the old Khyber Pass?
Then we all shouted hip hip hooray

Simply everyone’s taking Cocaine

For bus drivers are tooting it
Jockey’s are hoofing it
DJ’s are spinning it
Gamblers winning it
Forces manoeuvring it
Cleaners are hoovering it
Models are booked on it
Anglers hooked on it
Pensioners drawing it
Footballers scoring it
Technicians miking it
PA’s are biking it
Producers are trying it
AnR men denying it
Publishers collecting it
Lawyers protecting it
Artists are begging it
Some of them pegging it
It seems like it’s simple there’s no one to blame
For the whole of this nation is taking Cocaine
Simply everyone’s taking Cocaine

Oh how gay it all seems and how bright we all are
How much fun we are having and Oh what a lark
To have blistering jousting and sharp repartee
Oh please less less, less, about you
And please more, more, more, about me

The dullest weeks of the year are those in mid-January. For those who might be needing a boost to their flagging spirits (by substance or spirit), Murray Lachlan Young offers a tonic of social satire and biting wit. His rock-oriented poetry and performance style is comment with a certain gimlet eye; imagine, if you will, performance that is part Oscar Wilde velveteen, part Bonzo Dog Band antic. Here's Murray's own louche performance of "Simply Everyone's Taking Cocaine." In 2005, he collaborated with the band Morcheeba to record a now-legendary trip hop version.

(Photograph from Corduroy Lines, September 2011)

The 21st-century perils of translation, and using English as a decorative language

2012-01-11T13:37:00.003-05:00

A unique shopping opportunity in Osaka

An October post on Bellemeade Books discussed the labyrinthine process of translating the Buddha's teachings across multiple languages in the tenth century. A recent post at the Japan Subculture Research Center site offers oddly heartwarming proof that no matter the labor-saving devices offered to contemporary users, attention to detail and, ultimately, meaning, are still primary components to correct translation.

The following advertising example also brings to attention (as if any were needed) the mess any online translating machine may make of language without careful cross-reference. Misunderstanding can be a two-way street: it would be difficult to estimate what many Chinese/Japanese language tattoos on so many American homeboys may actually be broadcasting to the 'hood and beyond.

Here's the post, by the site's curator, Jake Adelstein. Responses demonstrate some cultural curiosities that are worth a browse, too. (One suggests that the Chinese characters for "meat lover" may be an unintended tattoo message on a friend's arm. Or maybe not.) Several respondents mention the phenomenon of using English as a decorative letter-form in Japan and elsewhere, and of absent language meaning. Navigating the path to true international understanding, apparently, is still a bit tricky.

... God knows what the people in this Department Store in Osaka were thinking when they came up with this advertising slogan but Zarina Yamaguchi, a friend of a friend, was thinking “pretty damn funny” when she snapped this picture on January 4th. Zarina explains:

"Well, a childhood friend of mine and I were strolling along the local street in Shinsaibashi, Osaka. Being around the extra-genki Osaka-jins and salesladies screaming ‘Irashaimasse’ from every direction for the ongoing New Year Sales has never made us feel more at home. On our way to catch up over coffee, I walked into this store to check some things. Truth is, I didn’t even notice the posters. When I looked around, each corner had posters that printed ‘fucking sale’. I didn’t know how to react but what caught me by surprise was that none of the people around me seem to understand the profanity. My friend Sarah and I, both of mixed Japanese descent, both bilingual in Japanese and English, were struck with the comical twist. Pretty sure I would have never seen this elsewhere, I had to snap a shot."

The store is located in Shinsaibashi right next to Hearton Hotel Shinsaibashi and Planet 3rd cafe, she adds.

I should note that Zarina’s childhood friend is Sarah Kashani, my friend and one of the most knowledgable scholars on Koreans in Japan. Sarah verified the authenticity of the signage and the sale, although neither side has disclosed whether they actually bought anything at the sale.

2012 is going to be a fuckin’ awesome year in Japan. You can’t help but feel that way. Our thanks to Ms. Yamaguchi-sama for her contribution. We’re f*ckin’ grateful. 超感謝ですよ。

(Photos by Zarina Yamaguchi at the Japan Subculture Research Center site.)

Letters from Burroughs: a selection in Granta

2012-01-10T10:48:00.002-05:00

Granta has published a selection of William Burroughs' letters online, presented with commentary by James Grauerholz and from the forthcoming book edited by Bill Morgan. The Granta excerpts show WSB in contention with his family (to his mother:"A rundown on some of the good burghers of Palm Beach would quite eclipse the Beatniks") and his contemporaries (to Paul Bowles: "Staying in Leary’s house. Enough food to feed a regiment left out to spoil in the huge kitchen by Leary’s over-fed, undisciplined children.")

The letters run from 1959, when Burroughs was living in Paris, to New York in 1974. The Granta excerpts zero in on WSB's kaleidoscope of drug experiences and their various scenes, some with awe, others with a snort of disapproval ("Unused TV sets, cameras, typewriters, toys, books, magazines, furniture, stacked to the ceiling. A nightmare of stupid surfeit. The place is sick sick sick. And disgusting," he complains in 1961 about Leary's house to Bowles in Tangier. "Like a good European, I am stashing away all the $ I can lay hands to with one thought in mind. Walk don't run to the nearest exit.")

Such cantankerous, back-biting behavior became a hallmark of Burroughs' image early on, so much so that in the letters it is difficult to separate the writer from his cranky persona. It was a trick of his craft he was good at, and he seemingly practiced it virtually non-stop until it became his actual voice. Referencing a 1959 article in Life magazine about the Beats to his disapproving mother, his style reaches some kind of rococo, demi-monde apogee of self-promotion: "In order to earn my reputation I may have to start drinking my tea from a skull since this is the only vice remaining to me ... I hope I am not ludicrously miscast as The Wickedest Man Alive, a title vacated by the late Aleister Crowley." ...

Presumably, Burroughs Sr. still sent 45-year-old WSB the $200-a-month allowance to practice his tea-drinking-from-a-skull vices. It was quite a bargain for Bill: the elder Burroughses were taking care of WSB's son Bill, Jr., after their son's 1951 William Tell party trick killed his wife Joan.

Here's an excerpt from the Granta selection. From the post-script it appears he'd patched up relations with his mother Laura and his then-ailing father. The duty of a family visit: "Of course," he writes, "I have to stay clean in Cambridge."

William S. Burroughs [New York]
to Brion Gysin [Paris] 
pre-September 28, 1961 
General Delivery Newton, Mass. USA

Dear Brion: 

The scene here is really frantic. Leary has gone berserk. He is giving mushrooms to hat check girls, cab drivers, waiters, in fact anybody who will stand still for it. However Gerald Heard and your correspondent have taken a firm stand. We both refuse to take any more mushrooms under any circumstances. Heard is certainly the most intelligent and well intentioned person connected with this deal. He gave a great talk at the symposium about LSD and paranoid sensations. The last barrier: PANIC! To God Pan. I managed to do all right too, fortified by two joints and the whole symposium came off very well.

Burroughs, 1959

Michael [Portman] wants to come here now and I have written to dissuade him. Let me explain that I really put in a lot of overtime on that boy and thought I had managed to separate him from his deplorable connections. Then something happened and there he was with a cold sore and I lost my patient and my patience as well. I'm not complaining but I have been under considerable pressure trying to sort out and assess hundreds of conflicting reports and demands pleasing no one of course so maybe I goofed. In any case he is now in an impossible condition. Imagine having Eileen Garrett, Mary Cooke, Old Lady Luce in the same room with you. It is absolutely intolerable and I don't propose to tolerate it.

Otherwise the situation here is not too bad. At least I have room to work and there is much to be said for American conveniences. I can get good food out of the ice box and take a bath and wear clean clothes at least. Seems to be plenty of pot around NY and nobody worries about the heat. Its like they all have the fix in. Of course I have to keep clean in Cambridge. Flying back on Sunday. Please write what your plans are. I wish you could arrange to come here. Like I say NY is really a great scene and a goodly crowd is there. And more expected momentarily. Please write. 

Love, Bill 

P.S. Very pleasant visit with the family.

Rub Out The Words: The Letters of William S. Burroughs 1959-1974, edited by Bill Morgan, will be published in the U.S. in February, 2012 by Ecco, and in the UK by Penguin in March.

Truman Capote and "In Cold Blood": "It nearly killed me"

2012-01-09T14:39:00.001-05:00

Truman Capote, 1965 (photographed by Irving Penn)

Truman Capote's legacy these days seems secure in American letters, and his personal life has become familiar to moviegoers and magazine readers over the years since his death at age 59. Yet it remains difficult to imagine the impact his non-fiction novel In Cold Blood had on the country's imagination when it was published in 1966 after being serialized in The New Yorker. Readers were introduced to an entirely different kind of reporting -- a deepening spiral of darkness and factual revelation that was ultimately true in its shocking particulars.

Capote's novelized form of reality has since become a staple of book lists. It can be argued that the success of Capote's book created the modern horror novel, which uses at its base the shards of real-life crime to imagine possibilities of human degradation. This legacy is a far cry from the short stories and the roman candle success of Breakfast at Tiffany's which had made him a literary celebrity. But as Rupert Thompson points out in a recent column in The Guardian UK, the writing of In Cold Blood also exacted a psychological price on the author from which he never fully recovered.

Fully aware that he had erased too well the line between the teller and the tale, Capote later remarked that "no one will ever know what In Cold Blood took out of me ... It scraped me right down to the marrow of my bones. It nearly killed me. I think, in a way, it did kill me."

What horrors Capote uncovered on the Kansas plain have since become part of the American subconscious of unlocked doors and noises in the middle of the night. In Cold Blood telegraphed remorseless psychosis: that the murder of the Clutter family was ultimately a senseless act in a botched robbery of a Kansas farmhouse. The novel's complete starkness, Thompson notes, was a function of its reportage: the unbelievable facts developed novelistic force in their telling.

As the real-life drama of Dick Hickock and Perry Smith developed, the author claimed an emotional distance as he wrote. "It really doesn't make any difference to me if the case is ever solved or not," Capote remarked coldly at the time. Tom Wolfe wrote later: "The book is neither a who-done-it nor a will-they-be-caught, since the answers to both questions are known from the outset ... Instead, the book's suspense is based largely on a totally new idea in detective stories: the promise of gory details, and the withholding of them until the end.

In the Guardian article, Thomson emphasizes the difference between In Cold Blood and what Capote had written before:

... Capote had exploded on to the literary scene with short fictions that exhibited a retrospective point of view. He was, first and foremost, an exquisite stylist – "the most perfect writer of my generation", as Mailer called him. Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948) and The Grass Harp (1951) were carefully wrought examples of swamp gothic – unashamedly ornate, lush and impressionistic, and for all its metropolitan sass, Breakfast at Tiffany's (1958), Capote's third novel, in which he gave us the kooky, amoral Holly Golightly, also had its roots in the deep south. Yet, even early on, and despite phenomenal success, Capote seemed conscious of the need to push his writing in new directions.
He wanted, as he said, "to do something else", and In Cold Blood gave him the opportunity, allowing him to ditch his attachment to childhood and nostalgia, the literature of the backward glance, and to immerse himself in something that was both current and universal. At the same time, he largely dispensed with his breathless, gossamer sentences, which often teetered on the brink of preciousness and whimsy, and ushered in a style that was much leaner and more sinewy: "Dick! Smooth. Smart . . . Christ, it was incredible how he could 'con a guy'." This was a new Capote – surprisingly tough, almost hard-boiled.
He had cut his non-fiction teeth on two extended pieces, both written in the mid-1950s."The Muses Are Heard", published in the New Yorker in 1956, chronicled a trip to the Soviet Union by the Everyman Opera, which was touring with Gershwin's "Porgy and Bess," and showcased razor-sharp observation and a tone of voice that ranged from the playful to the acidic. In "The Duke in His Domain", published the following year, and still considered a milestone in the history of celebrity profiles, Capote interviewed Marlon Brando on location in Kyoto. Here, too, Capote displayed uncanny journalistic skills, capturing even the most languid and enigmatic of subjects – Brando in his pomp – and eliciting the kinds of confidences that left the actor reflecting ruefully on his "unutterable foolishness".
Capote saw journalism as a horizontal form, skimming over the surface of things, topical but ultimately throwaway, while fiction could move horizontally and vertically at the same time, the narrative momentum constantly enhanced and enriched by an incisive, in-depth plumbing of context and character. In treating a real-life situation as a novelist might, Capote aimed to combine the best of both literary worlds to devastating effect. ...

The devastating effect was apparently total on both the American public and the writer. After the relentless motion of the novel, Capote appended a fictional resolution in order to bring some peace and emotional balance to the story's end. "I felt I had to return to the town, to bring everything back full circle, to end with peace," Capote offered his critics, but it ended the book on a fictional note that didn't suit the book's tone.

He hoped the novel would win the Pulitzer prize, and when it didn't Capote seemed exhausted and drained. Whether his inability to complete another major fiction was because of what Thompson calls Capote's "Faustian pact" with In Cold Blood, the sum of his career seems unfulfilled and an example of wrecked ambition.

"To the marrow of my bones": Capote might have viewed the murderers as a distorted mirror-image of the author himself. Thompson includes a telling quote from Gerald Clarke, Capote's biographer: "In Perry he recognized his shadow, his dark side, the embodiment of his own accumulated angers and hurts." The murderers and the author, it seems, were all pure products of America each in their own way.

Listening to the twentieth century: "The Rest is Noise," Alex Ross (2007)

2012-01-08T14:05:00.002-05:00

"Once musicians obtained everything they had imagined in their most daring dreams, they started again from scratch."
(Kurt Weill, 1928)

Battle-lines are still being drawn over the meaning of much twentieth-century music. Often, the music is (still) overlooked in performance as too challenging, too difficult for audiences, trying the patience as well as the comprehension of most listeners who prefer the sounds of Strauss over Stravinsky. Alex Ross, of The New Yorker magazine, tries in his brief if too broad overview The Rest is Noise to put the musical daring of Stravinsky and Sibelius, Cage and Glass, Ellington and even Coltrane (as well as many others, mostly from Europe) in context with the times.

Understandably, two world wars, totalitarian regimes, and economic upheaval produced many fractured forms, and no single view of the century's music can explain it all. But Ross writes entertaining history, even if the reader may be familiar only with the names of many composers. And just when the book begins to take on the brisk, breezy approach of a survey course in modern music, he devotes 35 pages to the rise of Nazism in Germany and its effects on composition, as well as another 45 pages to the smothering effects of Communism.

Even Richard Strauss, whose music had once been a favorite of Hitler's (and whose premiere of Salome, in 1906, marks the opening chapter of the book) eventually becomes an object of ridicule from the German high command. Strauss suffered what Ross writes as "a public breakdown" as a result of a series of psychological games by Joseph Goebbels, the Reich's propaganda minister. "He is unpolitical, like a child," Goebbels wrote in his diary about Strauss, who sought assurances for his family's safety. A witness recounted Strauss' public humiliation in front of a large assembly:

"'Lehar has the masses, you do not!' the minister screamed. 'Stop once and for all your chatter about the significance of "serious music"! You are not helping your case! The art of tomorrow is different from the art of yesterday! You, Herr Strauss, are yesterday!'"

Ironically, the effects of this creative chill in Germany and Russia helped to spread the ideas of exiled musicians, who moved anywhere there was freedom to write and perform. (Hollywood became the surprising home to a number of emigre composers, who wrote film scores.) Ross does a good job illustrating how the many threads of modern music that subsequently developed -- serialism, minimalism, atonality -- have become part of a common musical vocabulary familiar to most listeners of popular music, even as "serious music" appears to draw futher from the mainstream.

His book also dispels the notion of a singular, dramatic arc to twentieth-century music -- the conservative notion of modern art as acts only of mere shock, and a dislocation of values. Some of the chapters deserve books of their own (the Russian chapter, although lengthy, still seems just an introduction). Certainly as the perspective on the century lengthens Ross could revisit some of the later themes, which seem slightly rushed. The book's critics claim Ross's leftward leaning politics are clearly in view, but it's hard to argue with his main thesis: that composers spent most of the twentieth century demolishing the romantic forms of the century before it.

But not completely. He begins the book with Strauss's opera Salome -- based not just on the Biblical story of a jealous wife and wanton daughter, but also drawn from a scandalous play written in 1891 by Oscar Wilde. In the audience sat Gustav Mahler, the young Arnold Schoenberg, and Puccini,"the composer of Tosca and La Boheme, who arrived to see what 'terribly cacophanous thing' his German rival had concocted."

The outrage ought to have been complete; Ross writes that Strauss's opera retells the story "in which the princess eroticizes the body of John the Baptist and indulges in a bit of necrophilia at the end." Instead, the Vienna audience erupted in applause and Strauss emerged in triumph, although Mahler later admitted he was "bewildered" by the opera's popularity. Also in the theater that night, with money borrowed from his mother to make the trip, was seventeen-year-old Adolph Hitler; Salome became one of his favorite Strauss works. By the 1940s, Salome was on the list of "degenerate" Jewish music, although Hitler continued to insist versions of it be performed -- the echoes of the nineteenth century, it seemed, would give birth to more things inexplicable than mere music in the twentieth.

The Rest is Noise is a brief, sometimes confounding introduction to the complexities of modern music. John Adams' Nixon in China (1987) and the beautiful, haunting music and movement of his recent opera, Doctor Atomic (2005) about the life of Robert Oppenheimer and the development of the atomic bomb, move contemporary music even further into new fields of politics and history. In a final chapter Ross careens from Boulez to Terry Riley, from Ligeti to the cool mathematics of Iannis Xenakis; his survey ends in a bit of a spin trying to name-check a multitude of composers for whom music can be a beautiful noise, and vice versa.

Is it music, or just noise? In his preface Ross tries to prepare the reader for the journey ahead by quoting John Cage, whose 1952 piece 4'33" is divided into three movements yet involves only the sounds of the audience: "Wherever we are ... what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating."

Reading ahead in 2012: catching up with Dickens and Lincoln

2012-01-07T11:14:00.010-05:00

After every holiday season the growing pile of books by my bedside keeps threatening to topple over one dark night and crush me. Until then I keep adding to it -- this Christmas even my landlord added to the weakening of my eyesight by presenting me Team of Rivals, 700 pages of Abraham Lincoln's politics and the friendships he nurtured into his tenure as President. Good timing for this political season and great stuff, even if I can only get through two pages at a time. That's okay: I like Doris Kearns Goodwin's near-obsession with the tandem story of Mary Todd Lincoln, and read those pages with even more attention.

Unfortunately this means that the list of books I promised myself to read, and some re-read, this year gets re-arranged. Great Expectations is there for a third reading. There's also an ultimate goal of a first-time through of the 800-page Bleak House (I swear it's in the bed-side pile). The first ten pages, all London smoke and fog, is Dickens writing for the sheer money value per-word, but it's an incredible promise of the novel's interior landscape.

2012 is the Dickens bicentennial and so that makes him a target for some well-meaning and even un-comprehending tributes, television presentations, and general rewriting of Dickens for this modern age. Britain, of course, is well ahead of the colonies on this: the BBC is already in full swing with new versions of Pip and Magwitch in the churchyard, as well as a presentation of Dickens at home in his serial of personal and financial troubles heartwarmingly titled Mrs. Dickens' Family Christmas.

In the Guardian UK, Howard Jacobson sounds a note of warning about the re-casting of Dickens' all-too-human stories for a "modern" audience in this celebration. He mentions one egregious example of the BBC embroidering the "meaning" of Dickens' fiction: Jacobson writes, in the context of one program, it should not have been necessary to wheel out "real" people – a real debtor, real lawyers – as though the wildness of Dickens's imagination has forever to be hauled back to what's recognisably ordinary.

With a typically Dickensian mode of overstatement beginning with his title, "Charles Dickens has been ruined by the BBC," Jacobson makes his case in the opening paragraph. Then he goes on to illustrate a few ways in which the BBC gets it wrong in trying to contemporize the writer. And certainly in the large part, he's right: taking out the humor makes the morality play of Dickens' fiction a difficult lesson to learn -- it's as if the humanity of the characters, already embedded in their very names, has been erased. Pretty dull stuff indeed.

You don't have to like Dickens. Literature is a house with many mansions. But if Dickens gets up your nose, as he clearly gets up the BBC's, the question has to be asked why you simply don't leave him alone.

... Not only on account of what he wrote, but on account of his bridging the chasm between the serious and the popular, I consider Dickens to be our finest writer after Shakespeare, an example and reproach to every too high-minded stylist and every too low-minded populariser who has come after him. David Copperfield, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend – beat that for an achievement.
As for Great Expectations, it is up there for me with the world's greatest novels, not least as it vindicates plot as no other novel I can think of does, since what there is to find out is not coincidence or happenstance but the profoundest moral truth. Back, back we go in time and convolution, only to discover that the taint of crime and prison which Pip is desperate to escape is inescapable: not only is the idea of a "gentleman" built on sand, so is that idealisation of woman that was at the heart of Victorian romantic love.

Great Expectations, in short, is a more damning account of the mess Dickens himself had made of love than any denunciation on behalf of the outraged wives-club could ever be. Missing from the usual attack on Dickens's marital heartlessness is any comprehension of the tragedy of it for Mr as well as Mrs Dickens, the derangement he suffered contemplating his own weaknesses, and its significance for the murderous, self-punishing novels he began to write.
That Great Expectations achieves its seriousness of purpose by sometimes comic means, that the language bursts with life, that its gusto leaves you breathless and its shame makes the pages curl, that you are implicated in every act of physical and emotional cruelty to the point where you don't know who's the more guilty, you or Pip, you or Orlick, you or Magwitch, goes without saying if you are a reader of Dickens. But you would never have guessed any of these things from the BBC's adaptation. For this was Dickens with the laughter taken out.

Of course you can't dramatise a novel and keep everything. But to exclude, say, Miss Havisham clutching her heart and declaring "Broken!" or Joe giving Pip more gravy, for the sake of a brothel scene that would have made Dickens snort, is inexplicable, unless your aim is to write Dickens out of Dickens.
We must guess that the BBC is embarrassed by the eccentricity of the writing, the hyperbole of the characterisation, the wild marginalia, the lunatic flights of fancy – think of Pip embroidering what he saw at Miss Havisham's (four dogs fighting for veal cutlets out of a silver basket) – the fearless seriousness which will drop into bathos or magniloquence at any moment, confident it can recover itself and be the wiser for where it's been. Lacking confidence in anything but a judgmental monotone, this major BBC production didn't reinterpret Dickens, it eviscerated him.

What the age demands, the age must be given. The "snob's progress" version of Great Expectations – a simplistic, retributive "class" reading about a boy who scorns his origins – is now the common one. It suits our would-be egalitarian times. But Great Expectations is more a novel about eroticism than snobbery. In an extraordinary scene, also excised from the TV version, Pip awaits the arrival of Estella with a disordered agitation, stamping the prison dust off his feet, shaking it from his dress, exhaling it from his lungs. "So contaminated did I feel …" And there's the novel's subject.
The fastidious consciousness of blemish that disables a man from loving a woman as flesh and blood, that feeds an idealisation which ultimately damages those he loves, and desexualises him. And all along, Estella the remote and icy star is more mired in the dirt of humanity than he is. She marries Bentley Drummle who makes no such mistake about her nature and beats her. Mrs Joe craves the attention of the man who tries to kill her. Sexual violence stalks the novel, making a fool of dreamers.

How Dickens was able to lower himself into these black depths of the soul and still make us laugh is one of literature's great wonders. He took us where no other novelist ever has. You don't have to like him, but you're impoverished if you don't.

"One of literature's great wonders": making readers see the humanity even in the darkest depths is what makes Dickens worth reading (and re-reading) in the first place.

Dickens died in 1870 after an extended reading tour of America, where he was drawn for the sake of his finances. By accounts it was a successful visit, and a necessary one, as Dickens tried to earn a profit in America with no copyright protections of his wildly popular work. Somehow the 700 pages of Abraham and Mary Lincoln's life in the 1850s / 1860s seems an appropriate companion to Dickens in the bed-side stack. Lincoln's political and personal fortunes are a contemporary American shadow of Dickens' impossible stories -- the frontier lawyer and virtual unknown who, improbably, rises to the Presidency and cannily succeeds by keeping his rivals close at hand.

Even so, the violence stalks him; Lincoln even has a dream of a catafalque in the White House, and is informed by a guard that it is "The President." Lincoln's assassination is the end of some sort of unbelievable fiction, but the pathos of Lincoln's ultimate tragedy must have seemed too much even for a writer of Charles Dickens' imaginative gifts to imagine.

"Sheer cussedness:" Ken Kesey's "Sometimes a Great Notion"

2012-01-06T10:36:00.000-05:00

What did your favorite writer do for his or her living before writing the indispensable book that changed your life? Do you care?

There was a period in the mid-twentieth century when a writer's ability to depict time and place with eye-witness accuracy was based his own on real-life (i.e., school, work, neighborhood) experience. Gerald Howard, in an essay featured online at the quarterly print magazine Tin House, elaborates this idea of the writer-as-reporter through the decades, often reflected in the author biographies as they were featured on the published book. As he writes, "The message being conveyed was that the guy (and they were, of course, guys) who had written the book in your hand had really been around the block and seen the rougher side of life, so you could look forward to vivid reading that delivered the authentic experiential goods."

This worked great for war stories, road novels, thinly-disguised fiction: Sinclair Lewis, Hemingway, Steinbeck. Howard goes deeper, invoking Dreiser, Dahlberg, James T. Ferrell's Studs Lonigan trilogy as emblems of the search for working-class authenticity, "a star search for the writer of impeccable working-class credentials." Then an interesting turn occurred after World War II: new American prosperity and wealth created an extended period where differences of class seemed to disappear, only surfacing again in the chafing discontent of the Beats in the 1950s. (Kerouac the football-scholarship Columbia drop-out had the rough-and-tumble of blue-collar experience to draw on to enhance the barely-disguised realism of On the Road.)

The current state of much fiction is different, reflecting a change not only in the nature of book publishing but in the expectations of the reading audience. A writer's experience now counts primarily as background material, pages of intricate detail on which to hang a cinematic trial, a murder, or an historical event.

The amount of research and information that can be found online or through simple research creates contemporary novels of enormous detail, but little depth. The real stories of working-class Americans, and the authors who write them, seem to have vanished except largely as examples of a misunderstood "K-mart realism," as Howard calls it.

In his lengthy essay Howard celebrates authors -- Raymond Carver, in particular -- whose work maintains authentic working-class roots, and there are others (Bobbie Ann Mason in Kentucky, Richard Russo in New York State, and Dorothy Allison are just three of many he mentions) whose novels are "set in affectionately but precisely observed bars, diners, and workplaces that are their native habitat." And then, surprisingly, comes this well-deserved tribute to a writer whose novels seem to have disappeared behind his public persona of 60s hipster-trickster but are still marvels of time and place:

Take, for instance, Ken Kesey’s almost overwhelmingly powerful 1964 novel Sometimes a Great Notion. Kesey is best remembered today as the psychedelic superhero and culture warrior of the sixties and the author of the anti-authoritarian cult classic One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. But Kesey was also as authentically working class as his fellow Pacific Northwesterner Carver, a son of dairy farmers who ended his gaudy days working that same family farm. Sometimes a Great Notion is an epic saga of a family of loggers whose slogan, in thought, word, and deed, is “never give an inch,” and whose sheer cussedness brings them into conflict with the entire community.

Politically incorrect (the Stampers battle against the union to continue delivering lumber to the local mill) and formally innovative in the manner of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! the novel is imbued with the sort of mythic American intransigence celebrated in such events as the Alamo and the Battle of the Bulge. ... The book’s famous master image — of patriarch Henry Stamper’s severed arm mounted on his home in such a way as to give the finger — to the rising river, to the striking workers, to anyone who cares to look — may seem overdetermined to certain literary tastes. But Kesey earns his image through his undeniable vitality and authority and the reader can’t help but smile.

It would be great to read a novel these days whose characters were full of "sheer cussedness." It's been a while since a novel like Sometimes a Great Notion raised a middle finger to expectations, either to its readers or the demands of the marketplace .

(photo of Gerald Howard from Tin Drum)

W.D. Snodgrass, born January 5, 1926

2012-01-05T12:30:00.003-05:00

Today is the birthday of poet W.D Snodgrass, who died on January 14, 2009 at his home in Erieville, New York, near Syracuse. He taught at Syracuse University 1968-1977 and I am glad to have been a student of his in 1973-1974. He gained early fame with his first book of poems Heart's Needle in 1959, which won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1960.

"Who Steals My Good Name" was originally published in Poetry magazine, April 2003, and collected in Not For Specialists (2006).

"Who Steals My Good Name"
W.D. Snodgrass

(For the person who obtained my debit card number
and spent $11,000 in five days)

My pale stepdaughter, just off the school bus,

Scowled, "Well, that's the last time I say my name's

Snodgrass!" Just so, may that anonymous

Mexican male who prodigally claims

My clan lines, identity and the sixteen

Digits that unlock my bank account,

Think twice. That less than proper name's been

Taken by three ex-wives, each for an amount

Past all you've squandered, each more than pleased

To change it back. That surname you affect

May have more consequence than getting teased

By dumb kids or tracked down by bank detectives.

Don't underrate its history: one of ours played

Piano on his prison's weekly broadcast;

One got rich on a scammed quiz show; one made

A bungle costing the World Series. My own past

Could subject you to guilt by association:

If you write anything more than false checks,

Abandon all hope of large press publication

Or prizes — critics shun the name like sex

Without a condom. Whoever steals my purse

Helps chain me to my writing desk again

For fun and profit. So take thanks with my curse:

May your pen name help send you to your pen.

An April Fool's-type test from Jonathan Williams

2012-01-04T13:25:00.000-05:00

Cement figure detail from

Mrs Laura Pope's museum, Ochlocknee GA, 1982

(photo by Jonathan Williams)

Jonathan Williams (1929-2008), that Jack-of-all-verse from Skywinding Farms up among the Franklinia there in the North Carolina hills, liked to remind us that poets and poetry are a force beyond all abilities to quantify or explain, but with a powerful ability to entertain and amuse. Williams will be gone up country four years already this next April, but a good well-meant jibe in the service of education is always worth repeating. His laughter resounds.

APRIL FOOL’S IMITATION-TYPE TEST TO WHILE AWAY A LITTLE TIME

(JW gave this test to his Wake Forest University students, April 2nd, 1973)

If you have read the various epistles I have been passing out, been attending class and evening hoe-downs, and digesting slowly the books I have recommended to you, then you might be expected to answer the following questions. Have a go!!!

(1) In tracing the background of Ragtime, I stressed two composers with French backgrounds (one frog, one cajun), and one black pianist from Texarkana, Arkansas. Who are they? Please spell them correctly.

(2) Ezra Pound and Louis Zukofsky concur that the pleasures of poetry are three. I.e., they are the supreme qualities of what three faculties brought to bear upon the words?

(3) What has President Nixon brought us?

(4) What Japanese haiku-master wrote a travel journal which can be considered indispensable to all poets, particularly those studying with Jonathan Williams this very month?

(5) What are your five favorite architectural structures, or landscapes, or wilderness areas?

(6) What drunkard’s last half-dollar climbs, with how sad feet, the sky over town?

(7) List 10 poems that stick in your head. From Homer on down. If you can’t remember the names of 10 favorite poems, then we are wasting our time...

(8) What does the title An Ear in Bartram’s Tree mean?

(9) What spring flowers (or birds or flowering trees) have given you pleasure recently? Name at least ten. Use local names, not scientific ones, when you can.

(10) Why did you not come to see the films of James Broughton or hear him read his poems? One student said he didn’t like to be intimidated by people from the outside—an honest answer, if a deplorable one. I do not take poetry casually, I admit to being bemused by people who do, and I am always interested in such ticklish matters. (I sometimes think that the students in Winston are spoon-fed, much too comfortable, and more than a little vague. I have been known to be wrong...) The School of the Arts, Wake Forest, Reynolda House, and I spent $500 to bring him here; and Mr. Broughton travelled hundreds of miles for the occasion. The arts are a community and we owe each other attention, especially when we are as accomplished as JB.**

(** from question 10: Those who did not come to Trap Hill today, Sunday, April 1st, for the centenary celebration of Sergei Vassilievich Rachmaninov (1873-1973) missed a very fine afternoon of music, beer, and warm, sunny weather—the Lewis’s waterfall was at its best. You got no chill at all after swimming because the wind was warm. The only people who accepted my invitation were friends from Penland School, who had to drive 3 hours (one way) up the Blue Ridge Parkway from Spruce Pine. This occasion assures me that it is silly to schedule any more such events for the benefit of Laodicean & Midianite students with an advanced case of the Mississippi-Fat-Ass. The hike on the Appalachian Trail (April 14-15) may be enjoyed by whomever, but don’t ask me a thing about it. Find Mt. Rogers, Virginia for yourself. Nothing in life is more dangerous in life than expressing, or expecting, enthusiasm.)

(11) I have said on many occasions that a course in reading and writing could perhaps be better taught as manners or decorum. I.e., that craft, in large part, consists of being receptive, democratic, ecological and in not thinking that the world rises and sets in our own private anal orifice. Do you agree? More particularly, do you see that poetry can sometimes be the making of refined art objects, not simply forms of therapy, self-expression and gunning for people?

(12) Bucky Fuller says: “The possibility of the good life for any man depends on the possibility of realizing it for all men. And this is a function of society’s ability to turn the energies of theuniverse to human advantage.” Buck Johnson says: “Music is to make people happy!” Francis Bacon says he wants: “...to make the mind of men, by the help of art, a match for the nature of things.” Comment, very briefly, on one of these three; or, give us your own basic definition of why poetry is worth writing and reading.

(13) Baker’s-Dozen Question: Just what does Mae West mean when she says: “Use what’s lyin’ around the house!”?

If the 13 questions strike you as preposterous or silly or hopeless, then either you haven’t been paying attention or I have been assuming you were capable of study without being belabored and yelled at. I am certainly willing to take some of the blame, since I lead my life among people who are working artists and not people at the beginning of careers, with various vague ambitions, whims, fancies, etc. You can write me a paper on this subject if you care to. I like cards face-up, on the table... If you get through this period of three or four months and feel more encouraged than discouraged, that is actually quite a lot. If poetry just isn’t worth it to you, then by all means get a job selling tires, insurance, or Judo & Karate for Christ. Orpheus will respect your decision.

(Jonathan Williams, from the website of The Jargon Society: Musings for the Season, Late Spring, 2002)

J.R.R. Tolkien, born January 3, 1892

2012-01-03T13:21:00.003-05:00

(Full-size view available at Strange Maps)

Today would have been the 120th birthday of author, linguist and professor J.R.R. Tolkien. W.H. Auden was a student who listened to Tolkien read Beowulf at university in the 1930s; Anthony Burgess would later write about Lord of the Rings that "Tolkien loved Anglo-Saxon literature because there were no women in it." Burgess was one to know; his own A Clockwork Orange (1962) described a modern dystopia with its own hyper-masculine psychological topography.

Both authors, it seems, were interested in myths created by stories told after the battles are over, and both had ideas involving a previous golden age, if more vicious one, of gods and monsters.

As Roger Lewis writes in his controversial biography, Anthony Burgess: "Tolkien ... maintained it was all downhill after the Norman Conquest -- all that Frenchification despoiling the Old English -- and Burgess had a similar racist philosophy, except he went back further still, wanting to purify us from the influence of the Angles, from the Danish peninsula, who invaded in the fifth century, and of the Germanic peoples, who migrated to our shores at a similar period. ... 'In principle, I'm in favor of Welsh nationalism,'" Lewis quotes Burgess at one point, "'and the Celts recovering England, too."

Quoting Burgess further: "Excalibur would be a rallying cry to drive the bloody Anglo-Saxons out. They are the invaders. But it will never happen." At another point Burgess (who saw himself as a Welsh writer) makes his point by naming Oscar Wilde, Brendan Behan and Dylan Thomas as three writers who surrendered their gifts "to the Anglo-Saxon gods of dullness. ... I will beat the Anglo-Saxons yet."

The mythological European setting of Tolkien's trilogy was no accident. Burgess commented on some of Tolkien's themes in The Lord of the Rings: “the flavor of the book is feudal rather than democratic: the theme is loyalty and the willingness to combat pagan enemies. ..." These are admirable sentiments for any tale of victories remembered around the campfire, but for Tolkien they might have had a contemporary resonance.

When Tolkien wrote Lord of the Rings in post-World War II Britain (1954/55) the lessons of a world-under-threat and a recently-vanquished Third Reich, with its own mythological Wagnerian framework, would have been a strong creative agent. To Burgess, there are other echoes in the action of the story: "... The great epic poem Beowulf is entirely masculine, all warriors relaxing in meadhalls before going off to fight fearful enemies. Beowulf’s supernatural enemy is Grendel, a frightening monster, but Grendel’s mother is worse.”

Frank Jacobs, in Strange Maps, posts the work of Peter Bird. Bird, professor of geophysics and geology at UCLA, overlays the current map of Europe with Tolkien's original sketch of imagined land, to locate the "long-gone" geography of the Third Age. Here's part of Jacobs' post, which features Bird's map (above; a full-size version is available at Big Think):

... Created by Tolkien somewhere in the 1930s, the map shows the ‘mortal lands’ of Middle-earth, which according to Tolkien himself is part of our own Earth, but in a previous, mythical era. At the time of the events described in ‘The Hobbit’ and ‘The Lord of the Rings’, Middle-earth is moving towards the end of its Third Age, about 6,000 years ago.

... The Hobbits are described as inhabiting ‘the North-West of the Old World, east of the Sea’, and therefore it’s tempting to associate their home with Tolkien’s own, England. Yet, Tolkien himself wrote that ‘as for the shape of the world of the Third Age, I am afraid that was devised ‘dramatically’, rather than geologically, or paleontologically.” Elsewhere, Tolkien does admit “The ‘Shire’ is based on rural England, and not any other country in the world.”

Tolkien at least compares his ‘Old World’ with Europe: “The action of the story takes place in the North-West of ‘Middle-earth’, equivalent in latitude to the coastlands of Europe and the north shores of the Mediterranean (…) If Hobbiton and Rivendell are taken (as intended) to be about the latitude of Oxford, then Minas Tirith, 600 miles south, is at about the latitude of Florence. The Mouths of Anduin and the ancient city of Pelargir are at about the latitude of ancient Troy.”

But, as Tolkien states in the prologue to ‘The Lord of the Rings’, it would be fruitless to look for geographical correspondences, as “Those days, the Third Age of Middle-earth, are now long past, and the shape of all lands has been changed…” And yet, that’s exactly what Peter Bird attempts with the map here shown.

Jacobs's post is complete with a kind of Rough Guide to the real Middle-earth, a list of geographic approximations where the action is laid, from the Shire to Mount Doom. As Brian D'Sousa comments elsewhere about The Lord of the Rings, "Sometimes a book or film tells us more about the era in which it was made rather than the fictionalized plot or setting."

After an ultimate triumph over the Nazis in a wracking, bloody, six-year war, It's probably no surprise that in Tolkien's Middle-earth, the imagined Mordor would be geographically located in the dark forests of Transylvania -- the medieval and superstition-filled haunts of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

"Kindness," by Joseph Lease: "We are running out of eyes"

2012-01-02T20:24:00.004-05:00

Kindness

by Joseph Lease

*

When the soul opens

There will be a cheap hotel

Someone yelling

The first snow and wrapping paper

*

I was in houses, cold, strange houses, gray

morning, just empty—broken door, broken

door, broken wall, broken

dawn—

just empty—

*

Right there—stone and glass shine—answer, answer, yes—oxygen makes fire brighten—brilliant water, stick your hand in—nothing ends, do you believe me—no, in waves you must paint, from plenty to nightmare—Tuesday he’ll be dead a year—tonight, tonight—and morning comes—dead face, open mouth—dead face, open mouth—buried in snow—

*

no—

paint—

plenty to nightmare—

brightness

—no—paint angel—

flesh

—paint—

so

willows

so

lost

*

We

Are

Running

Out of

Eyes

*

just

squeeze

daylight

from your

finger—

just

spill

lifetimes

on the

floor

*

so

willows

so

lost

so

open

so

long

From the site Collected Photographs, "worth a browse," as Jonathan Williams would admit: Joseph Lease's critically acclaimed books of poetry include Testify (Coffee House Press, 2011), Broken World (Coffee House Press, 2007), and Human Rights (Talisman House, second edition forthcoming)."'Broken World' (For James Assatly)" was also selected for The Best American Poetry 2002.

"This is Your Brain on Music": why we listen (and respond) the way we do

2012-01-02T12:53:00.002-05:00

Does it help to know why you can't get the music of Pink Floyd or Mozart, Adele or Miles Davis out of your head? This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession, by Daniel J. Levitin (2007) makes the reader at least consider the effect of music on the human mind and its functions.

Levitin's theorizing is a bit of wobbly science in an early stage, what might be called psycho-accoustics; his writing is more of a kind of wool-gathering of anecdotes and side-trips into how musicians achieve their effects that support his ideas, rather than extensive research. In a subjective sense, that's how music works: it's an extremely personal response, whether we're hearing it in a comfortable chair at home or charging into battle.

From the Beatles to Coltrane to Disney soundtracks, Levitin layers on a lot of how music is made, how certain keys in the musical scale carry emotional weight, why we respond to tempo and even individual instruments in particular ways. A lot of this, of course, used to get discussed in classrooms in "music appreciation," but no longer.

Paradoxically, the daily wave of music that surrounds us should make books like Levitin's more interesting to the general reader, and maybe that's why many of his examples hinge on pop artists. Here's one example:

... Joni Mitchell had sung in choirs in public school, but had never taken guitar lessons or any other kind of music lessons. Her music has a unique quality that has been variously described as avant garde, ethereal, and as bridging classical, folk, jazz, and rock. Joni uses a lot of alternate tunings; that is, instead of tuning the guitar in the customary way, she tunes the strings to pitches of her own choosing. This doesn't mean that she plays notes that other people don't – there are still only 12 notes in a chromatic scale – but it does mean that she can easily reach with her fingers combinations of notes that other guitarists can't reach (regardless of the size of their hands).

... A string that is pressed on ('fretted') has a different sound than one that isn't due to a slight deadening of the string caused by the finger; the unfretted or 'open' strings have a clearer, more ringing quality, and they will keep on sounding for a longer time than the ones that are fretted. When two or more of these open strings are allowed to ring together, a unique timbre emerges.

By retuning, Joni changed the configuration of which notes are played when a string is open, so that we hear notes ringing that don't usually ring on the guitar, and in combinations we don't usually hear. You can hear it on her songs 'Urge for Going' and 'Refuge of the Roads' for example.

... But the chords Joni plays, as a consequence of her unique composition and guitar playing styles, aren’t typical chords: Joni throws notes together in such a way that the chords can't be easily labeled. ... Joni's genius is that she creates chords that are ambiguous, chords that could have two or more different roots. When there is no bass playing along with her guitar (as in 'The Circle Game' or 'Urge For Going'), the listener is left in a state of expansive aesthetic possibilities.

Because each chord could be interpreted in two or more different ways, any prediction or expectation that a listener has about what comes next is less grounded in certainty than with traditional chords. And when Joni strings together several of these ambiguous chords, the harmonic complexity greatly increases; each chord sequence can be interpreted in dozens of different ways, depending on how each of its constituents is heard.'

Of course, Levitin makes clear throughout that the physics of music is something most musicians themselves have a difficult time explaining. The author's website has links to many of the songs in the book, page by page, for those who want the much simpler task of hearing what effect Levitin is describing.

While some of his conclusions may be up for discussion (the "sound of a tree falling in the forest" debate gets a surprising "no" answer -- so much for the laws of physics) a lot of his book is very comforting: music, beginning with rhythm, has been a human component for a long time, and is intricately connected with many human activities.

This is Your Brain on Music won't change the reader's listening habits, or musical preferences -- but at the very least it should sharpen an awareness of the role music plays in our everyday lives.

Happy New Year from Bellemeade Books!

2012-01-01T08:59:00.001-05:00

"Inspiration does exist, but it must find you working."

Pablo Picasso, 1881-1973

image from artnewsblog.com

Readings for a year's end: Party

2011-12-31T15:38:00.002-05:00

from "New Father Time (to Allen Ginsberg)"
M Bromberg

.. dear Allen

I wonder what you're doing this new years eve
it must be some crazy scene
Jesus & Mohammed
Coltrane blowing "Ascension"
Walt putting the moves on Neal
Jack and Guatama discussing the dharma
you and Peter rolling the joints
(finest gage at low low prices)
imagine the conversation
poetics and transcendence
a love supreme ... a love supreme ...

(pls tell Whitman
we share the same birthday May 31)

later
it's no time for talk
party hats askew after serious drink
give Jack that bliss'd out sloppy kiss
let Bill cop the immaculate fix
keep Neal away from the hydrogen jukebox
but let him drive the bus

most of all new Father Time
slip America the dope of hope
this new year's eve
give America the big-hope midnight kiss
to last a thousand years
to last a thousand years
to last a thousand years
to last a thousand years
let it be enough
to last a thousand years

Let there finally be enough
enough America to get it right
enough time to get it right
enough love to get it right
enough peace to get it right
enough hope to get it right
enough daylight to get it right
enough night

(photo of Allen Ginsberg by Fred McDarrah, New York City 1966)

Readings for a year's end: Taste

2011-12-30T15:41:00.000-05:00

C, by Tom McCarthy -- now out in paperback -- was nominated for the 2010 Man Booker prize. McCarthy's third novel is a roller-coaster fiction of history, technology, drugs, and the occult that manages to be equally confounding and funny in a detached, distant writing style readers find variously frustrating, flat, or provocative. In short, the book is in danger of becoming worthy of the "experimental fiction" tag McCarthy earned from the slow-building success of his first novel, Remainder (2007).

An admiring Guardian UK reviewer called C "a 1960's-style anti-novel," one that reflects the word-play and idea-layering techniques of Beckett, Burroughs, and Joyce. Those are comparisons that can swing in multiple directions: Michiko Kakutani, in a New York Times review, called these same reference points disappointing, derivative, and contrived.

McCarthy recently said of the novel's shattered plot and near-Edwardian prose settings that the four-year writing process was a difficult start:

Once you get past that point of critical velocity or whatever, the whole project flies ... I was thinking about death and mourning, and researching the history of wireless, i.e., thinking about crypts and encryption, and the idea for the novel came to me reading about first world war pilots and early radio buffs and 1920s drug-fiends. C is absolutely not a "historical novel" (it's about new media and empire -- i.e., about now), but all the same it's set during that period and the research was real fun.

In simplest outline, Serge Carrefax is born in 1898 on an estate named Versoie in southern England. In World War I, he's a wireless operator in spotter planes over the front -- an experience he enjoys, in a Futurist kind of way.

Having acquired a taste for cocaine and heroin, he turns up next in London after the war, studying architecture and tangling with flappers and fraudulent spiritualists. At novel's end, in 1922, he's sent to Egypt to help set up a world-spanning imperial communications network. It's a task that takes him to an archaeological dig in Cairo. Christopher Tayler, The Guardian UK reviewer, describes this modernist, mysterioso interlude as a point "where McCarthy dispenses a few of the keys to what is, by this stage, an immense symbolic superstructure."

Here's a short excerpt from the novel's first chapter; C has recently been published in paperback by Vintage Books.

Dr. Learmont, newly appointed general practitioner for the districts of West Masedown and New Eliry, rocks and jolts on the front seat of a trap as it descends the lightly sloping path of Versoie House. He has sore buttocks: the seat's hard and uncushioned. His companion, Mr. Dean of Hudson and Dean Deliveries (Lydium and Environs Since 1868), doesn't seem to feel any discomfort. His glazed eyes stare vaguely ahead; his leathery hands, reins woven through their fingers, hover just above his knees.

The rattle of glass bottles and the fricative rasp of copper wire against more copper wire rise from the trap's back and, mixing with the click and shuffle of the horse's hooves on gravel, hang undisturbed about the still September air. Above the vehicle tall conifers rise straight and inert as columns. Higher, much further out, black birds whirr silently beneath a concave vault of sky. Between the doctor's legs are wedged a brown case and a black inhaling apparatus. In his hand he holds a yellow piece of paper. He's scrutinising this, perplexed, as best he can.

From time to time he glances up from it to peer through the curtain of conifers, which reveal, then quickly conceal again, glimpses of mown grass and rows of smaller trees with white fruit and green and red foliage. There's movement around these: small limbs reaching, touching and separating in a semi-regular pattern, as though practising a butterfly or breaststroke. The trap rolls through a hanging pall of wood smoke, then turns, clearing the conifers.

Now Learmont can see that the limbs belong to children, four or five of them, playing some kind of game. They stand in a loose circle, raising their arms and patting their hands together. Their lips are moving, but no sound's emerging from them. Occasionally a squawk of laughter ricochets around the orchard, but it's hard to tell which child it's coming from. Besides, the laughter doesn't sound quite right. It sounds distorted, slightly warped—ventriloquised almost, as though piped in from somewhere else. None of the children seem to notice his arrival; none of them, in fact, seem to be aware of their own individual presence outside and beyond that of the moving circle, their separateness given over to its fleshy choreography of multiplied, entwining bodies.

Without jerking the reins or speaking to the horse, Mr. Dean pulls the trap to a halt. Beside it, to its right, a narrow, still stream lies in front of a tall garden wall over which, from the far side, ferns and wisteria are spilling. To the trap's left, a veined set of rose-bush stems and branches, flowers gone, clings to another wall. The wood-smoke pall comes from beyond this. So, too, does an old man with a rake, emerging from a doorway in the wall to shunt a wheelbarrow across the gravel.

"Hello!" Learmont calls out to him. "Hello?"

The old man stops, sets down his wheelbarrow and looks back at Learmont. "Can you tell me where to find the main house? The entrance?"

The old man gestures with his free hand: over there. Then, taking up the handle of his wheelbarrow once more, he shuffles past the trap towards the orchard. Learmont listens as his footsteps die away. Eventually he turns to Mr. Dean and says: "Silent as a tomb."

Mr. Dean shrugs. Dr. Learmont climbs down onto the gravel, shakes his legs and looks around. The old man seemed to be pointing beyond the overspilling garden wall. This, too, has a small doorway in it.

"Why don't you wait here?" Learmont suggests to Mr. Dean. "I'll go and find—" he holds his yellow paper up and scrutinises it again—"this Mr. Carrefax."

Mr. Dean nods. Dr. Learmont takes his case and inhaler, steps onto a strip of grass and crosses a small wooden bridge above the moat-like stream. Then, lowering his head beneath wisteria that manage to brush it nonetheless, he walks through the doorway.

Inside the garden are chrysanthemums, irises, tulips and anemones, all stacked and tumbling over one another on both sides of a path of uneven mosaic paving stones. Learmont follows the path towards a passageway formed by hedges and a roof of trellis strung with poisonberries and some kind of wiry, light-brown vine whose strands lead off to what look like stables. As he nears the passageway, he can hear a buzzing sound.

Admittedly the story -- and its conflicted, cocaine-sniffing hero -- isn't intended as a chart-topping Dan Brown style potboiler, and the author is pointed in saying so. McCarthy's writing has a sort of backward-glancing, almost leisurely charm about it that makes C more about the telling than the tale -- an early 20th-century story where the secure and horse-drawn past is about to collide with an unexpected and twisted future.

Reading for a year's end: Hearing

2011-12-29T15:28:00.001-05:00

Before the old year disappears altogether it's good to acknowledge the 45th anniversary of Mahler, Jonathan Williams's beautiful poem cycle privately published in 1966, written in accompaniment to the composer's ten symphonies. His literary cohort and often-collaborator Guy Davenport called the forty poems composed while listening to the music of Mahler "one of the really lovely things of our time." It was re-published in a larger edition by Cape Goliard Press in 1969.

In May, 1966, Williams wrote that "the Austrians know little of Mahler ... he is much too much for them, and still is." And while more than 40 years have passed since that observation, Williams's poetic cycle is as vibrant as the music it celebrates.

Unavailable for many years until resurfacing in the collection Jubilant Thicket (2005), Williams's poems respond to the music of Mahler but are not deliberate interpretations. The poet agrees with Paul Stefan in Mahler: A Study of His Personality and Work: "In general, the hearer who interprets rather than listens likes nothing better than to investigate what the composer 'meant' by his works. Of course, he meant nothing whatsoever."

In a note dated December 8, 1967, the poet writes of these poems: "they were written only during the duration of each movement, lest the com-posing (sic) get too elaborated." He goes on to compare the compositional practice to that of an artist who might "draw with the eyes shut, using only the motor faculty while listening with closest attention." Here is the poet listening to the fourth movement of Symphony no. 1, the "Titan": the section is marked, Stormily agitated.

The things seen, the
intervals, and the noises
are nature's, Dr.
Williams:

"Measure serves for us as the key:
we can measure between objects;
therefore we know that they exist."

lichens on aspens
seen in green
lightning

the crack of perception isn't too quick,
the cuckoo's call is tuned by
adrenalin glands,
clouds linked to the world
by lightning and tuning -- it cracks the
stones and melts the heart

the cuckoo takes heart, eye-bright
in blue air, lightning
hits it

Spontaneity was key, and observation paramount; the poet and the artist, seeing with eyes closed, witness more than the world can offer. Did Mahler intend a cuckoo's call, or linking cracked stones and melting hearts? It's romantic imagery fit for a poet, hardly what a composer of symphonies might intend, but the music conjures such ideas when the mind is surprised by the moment of perception. How does the poet put it? The listener observing as sharply as the cuckoo "eye-bright / in blue air."

Williams was a keen observer of nature, and human nature both. He traveled to Innsbruck, Salzberg, Linz, sites linked with Mahler, Bruckner, Webern, Berg, and other Austrian composers -- and found the worldly (and Jewish) Mahler almost an outsider in his own country, better understood "on the Thames or the Hudson, at Portmeirion or in the Rockies," than in his homeland. Williams remarks in his introduction that Mahler was a composer "in whom a very un-Austrian, cosmopolitan, Freudian daimon existed." This dislocation must have appealed to an artist like Williams, who spent a lifetime's career in the North Carolina hills valuing the unexpected, the individual creating art against the grain of expectation.

At end, of course, Mahler's symphonies and Williams' poems share worlds of experience: the visions of William Blake as well as the linden in summer, both the emotion and the intellect (as Williams writes: the commonplace takes us farther and farther / from ourselves / but we are brought back to ourselves / by solitude, / and from ourselves to God / is only a step.) The writer of verses and the composer of symphonies, though they never met, share with us more than they know. From "Primeval Light" (scored "very solemn, but simple"):

... While we slept these kept with us:
the grosbeak's breast in the early sun,
the wood thrush's notes, ants
in the leaves,
mallows in the wind and
dogwoods opening

the world of the little hears little Mahler,
but while we slept
these kept with us

(photo of Jonathan Williams: Dobree Adams, 2003)

A week of readings for a year's end: Speech

2011-12-28T16:16:00.002-05:00

Xmas Words
By Roy Blount Jr.

It is at this special time of the year, and especially of this extra-special year in particular, that we realize how urgent is our need to foster love and faith and brotherhood and —at any rate faith, and by that I mean consumer confidence. When Americans, of all people, are afflicted with what the singer-songwriter Roger Miller called “shellout falter”—a reluctance to spend—then the whole world is liable, as Mr. Miller put it so well in his song “Dang Me,” to “lack fourteen dollars having twenty-seven cents.”

Are we going to let it be said that all we had this Christmas to cheer was cheer itself? No! Let’s put the holly back in shopaholic, let’s get jingle-bullish. We owe it to ourselves, to the world, and to future generations. The more presents we spring for now, the lighter the tax burden is going to be down the line.

You notice how much more merrily that last sentence bounced along because I chose spring to express spending, instead of, say, plunge; and lighter instead of, say, less staggering. Words are important. So let’s say “bah, humbug” to b-words like bailout and bankrupt. Let’s digress from anything ending in -ession. Let’s entertain some new, upbeat holiday words.

Why not wake up tomorrow morning feeling consumptious? Rhymes with scrumptious, and approaches sumptuous. When we’re consumptious we’ve got that fire in the belly that’s burning a hole in our pocket. We’re going to be pumping bucks today, we’re going to open our hearts to goods and services, we’re going to take it upon ourselves to help America, and consequently the world, reconomize. In so doing, we can personalize what is just about the only appealing phrase regarding the economy that has emerged this year: each of us can be his or her own stimulus package.

The season of giving is upon us. Need that sound like such a threat? Let’s see if we can spruce up that venerable old word generous, which can be so cringe-inducing when we hear it spoken over the phone by a stranger calling in the interest of a charity. “I hope you will be as generous this year as last” puts us on the spot, so let’s spread generous out. I don’t think we want to go to heterogenerous, because people might think we’re talking about sex, and there will be plenty of time for that after we get our mercantile heat back on. (For this reason, even businesses whose appeal is essentially spicy should resist, for now, the temptation to send their customers illicitations.) But autogenerous, as in autobiographical, might remind us that giving unto others is also giving unto ourselves, especially if others give back unto us and therefore unto themselves, and we buy our presents at their store and vice-versa. Does auto- strike an ominous note? Let me just say that if each of us becomes a cargiver this Christmas, there will be a lot more shining faces this New Year’s in Detroit. And Japan.

Let us not shrink from taking a look at the word Christmas. It’s a fine old word and I for one would be loath to suggest that it has lost its edge entirely. But it doesn’t exactly sing. The only thing it rhymes with is isthmus, and that but loosely. How do you like the sound of Jingle Day? Says bells and sunshine, says catchy marketing, says plenty of change. The rhymes sell themselves: mingle, tingle, Kringle, Pringles, bling’ll, and hey, sleigh, pray, pay, hooray. We might even go a little more on-the-nose: Ka-chingleday.

And incidentally, when you take your tree down and put your ornaments away for next year (yes, of course there will be a next year, don’t even ask such a question), do you know the best way to protect those ornaments? By wrapping them in newspaper. Several sheets per ornament. Maybe a whole newspaper section per ornament. And magazines and books are good to put between wrapped ornaments for further protection. Not to knock the tissue-paper industry, but what has it ever done for, say, people who support themselves and their families (not to mention the Jingle Day puppies their families have been promised) by thinking up words?

From The Dreaded Feast: Writers on Enduring the Holidays by Michele Clark and Taylor Plimpton (Abrams Image, 2009).

A week of readings for a year's end: Touch

2011-12-27T15:01:00.009-05:00

"Song to the Opherian"

Gus Krutzsch

The golden foot I may not kiss or clutch

Glowed in the shadow of the bed

Perhaps it does not come to very much

This thought this ghost this pendulum in the head

Swinging from life to death

Bleeding between two lives

Waiting that touch.

The wind sprang up and broke the bells,

Is it a dream or something else

When the surface of the blackened river
Is a lace that sweats with tears ?

I saw across the alien river
The campfire shake the spears.

"Gus Krutzsch" is the pseudonym of T.S. Eliot. "Song to the Opherian" was published in 1921 and appeared in The Tyro, the second magazine published by Wyndham Lewis. Eliot also contributed two essays, "The Lesson of Baudelaire" and "The Romantic Englishman, the Comic Spirit, and the Function of Criticism," in the same number. The "Tyros" illustrations were satirical caricatures intended by Lewis to comment on the culture of the "new epoch" that succeeded the First World War. "A Reading of Ovid" and "Mr Wyndham Lewis as a Tyro" (above) are the only surviving oil paintings from this series. Lewis (1882-1957) was also a novelist and social critic. The Tyro, no. 1 and no. 2, as well as Blast 1, Blast 2, and Blast (War Number) are available for viewing online at Brown University's Center for Digital Scholarship.

A week of readings for a year's end: Vision

2011-12-26T11:05:00.001-05:00

Monet: Water Lilies 2

"Monet Refuses the Operation"

by Liesel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent. The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and changes our bones, skin, clothes

to gases. Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

From the Reckonings website curated by John R. Boettiger: ... The Private Life, a book of 73 short poems in which "Monet Refuses the Operation" first appeared, was Liesel Mueller's second book of poems, published in 1976. (Mueller herself was growing blind when she wrote the poem.) ... The last triptych of Monet's paintings of water lilies on his pond at Giverny was painted near the end of his life, during the years 1920 to 1922. He was going blind, and many early critics found these paintings obscure and ill-made because his eyesight was failing, reflecting an alleged realism kin to that of Monet's doctor in Liesl Mueller's poem. The triptych lay in Monet's studio for twenty years after his death. Now at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, they were most recently the subject of a special MOMA exhibition in late 2010 and early 2011.

Merry Christmas! A thought from Wendell Berry

2011-12-25T08:21:00.002-05:00

"When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”

Wendell Berry

"Guerrilla conditions," Brion Gysin

2011-12-24T10:28:00.002-05:00

(Image from biblioklept)

"The Bedside Book of Beer": A Guinness pudding recipe for Christmas

2011-12-23T12:10:00.000-05:00

From The Bedside Book of Beer (Barrie Pepper), 1990

Just in case you've misplaced your Christmas pudding recipe (and, you thought, just in time, too -- lucky you!) your luck's run out; here's the replacement: step-by-step instructions from Barrie Pepper's The Bedside Book of Beer. It's his convivial compendium of beer and ale in British literature -- and, of course, English politics. (The book was originally published by CAMRA, the Campaign for Real Ale, complete with CAMRA application form in the back). Here are cartoons, limericks, poems, histories written by authors high and low and anonymous about the joys and sorrows of bitters, plains and smalls through the ages. No need during this Christmas week to belabor the point: there's too much to do to just sit and read about beer, when there's a holiday party somewhere we're all late for. Cheers ....

"The Friendly Dickens" (1998): re-reading "A Christmas Carol"

2011-12-22T17:11:00.002-05:00

Original illustration from A Christmas Carol (John Leech, 1843)

"Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge's name was good upon 'Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail."

You have read A Christmas Carol, haven't you? Without Charles Dickens, what would have become of Christmas --in the nineteenth century, that most somber and soberest of all religious days on the Church calendar?

After the success of A Christmas Carol -- it was published December 19, 1843, a tale written in six weeks to pay off debts -- Dickens' tale of seasonal goodwill eventually became the antidote to England's Victorian gloom which, truthfully, wasn't very dark to begin with: the empire's money was rolling in from the burgeoning railways and overseas trade, and people had money to spend ... well, not everyone, as the story of Bob Cratchit and his family was meant to illustrate. The divisions of the English class system, and the poverty and hardship it wrought, were unassailable, it seemed.

Yes, I know: at this point, old Dickens seems as antiquated as the dead Marley himself, an overstuffed Victorian curio whose funny-named characters and creaking plots are the stuff of schoolday dread. But A Christmas Carol is the cautionary tale of what just too much money, in the wrong hands, can do: a familiar theme these days, it seems. The soft-hearted old Marley was dead -- and his business partner, Ebenezer Scrooge, wasn't going to part with a shilling's worth of work from Bob Cratchit even on Christmas Eve. Thereby hangs a tale of three visiting spirits.

I doubt that Norrie Epstein's The Friendly Dickens: Being a Good-Natured Guide to the Man Who Invented Scrooge is on any English class reading list, but it does make the case for Charles Dickens in an entertaining way. The book is funny, lighthearted and full of anecdotal stories about the novels and Dickens' own life as it unfolded around his personal fortunes. These turn out to be as complicated as any of his own characters; debt, bankruptcy, divorce ... he could have been his own best fictional creation, only Dickens was too busy knocking out the next installment of, say, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations, which were published in weekly serials. Creaky plots? Stephen King must eat his heart out in jealousy. The stories sold, and how:

The serial's primary advantage was its low price. By paying a shilling a month, a reader eventually got an original, illustrated 300,000 word novel for a pound. Spread over nineteen months -- and sales for The Pickwick Papers often reached 40,000 for one installment -- that one shilling grew into a fortune, netting 10,000 pounds. ... Sales figures for a successful installment are enough to make a modern novelist weep with envy. One number of The Old Curiosity Shop sold more than 100,000 copies in one month....

All of these profits were being made as Dickens sat feverishly writing the next installment, with creditors usually knocking on the door. Here's Epstein's account of one such episode:

"Martin Chuzzlewit, his current serial, was falling in sales, and in an effort to boost his flagging income, Dickens dashed off a tale for the Christmas of 1843 in about six weeks. The manuscript for his 'ghostly little book' is a scant sixty-six pages, as compared to the usual eight hundred for the typical Dickens blockbuster, yet it is the biggest seller he ever wrote. ...

The previous summer he had visited a 'ragged school,' part of an evangelical movement to provide basic instruction to poor children. Although he disapproved of religious indoctrination, believing that the poor need a bath more than a psalm, (Dickens) firmly held that ignorance is inseparable from want. ... The sight of such wretchedness horrified and unnerved him: 'I have very seldom seen in all the strange and dreadful things I have seen in London and elsewhere, anything so shocking as the dire neglect of soul and body exhibited by these children.' Dickens had intended a tract on education for the poor, but he now decided to write a story that, he announced with justifiable hyperbole, would hit his readers over the head like a 'sledge-hammer'."

It's another Dickensian irony that the beautifully-bound first edition netted the author only 230 pounds -- most of his royalties were absorbed by printing costs, which he had paid for himself. Dickens wrote he "had set his heart and soul on a Thousand clear," and he thought he was ruined. He packed up the family and moved to Italy to avoid creditors. Eventually, his own staged readings of A Christmas Carol made him more money than any book he ever wrote.

The Friendly Dickens is a good introduction to those novels we were all supposed to read and seldom did. Judging from Epstein's foreboding outline of the aptly-titled, late period Bleak House -- more than 800 pages of Dickensian gloom which begins with

six paragraphs describing the murky London fog -- I may save that work for January, when the Christmas bills begin rolling in. In the meanwhile, while we're all trying to abide our relatives and avoid the holiday fruitcake, here are Epstein's suggestions on "How to Read Dickens." High tea at four is, of course, optional, but in keeping with the spirit of things.

1) Take a Zen approach: the destination doesn't matter, it's the journey that counts. Savor each word; don't rush. And don't try to think logically! The truth is not always literal.

2) Read like a child, i.e., allow yourself to slip into Dickens' world completely. Let go of the desire to "find out what happens."

3) If you're tempted to skip something that looks boring, and it's either that or not finish the book, skip it.

4) Expect the author to make mistakes. He wrote fast. He wrote to entertain.

5) Expect inconsistency.

6) Read out loud! Dickens spoke his characters' lines as he wrote.

7) If one Dickens novel isn't to your taste, try another. A Tale of Two Cities, often the only one most people read in school, is the least Dickens-like of them all.

8) If you've read a late-Dickens novel (anything after David Copperfield, or 1850) and hated it, try an earlier one. It's almost as if the two groups were written by different authors.