Akilah Oliver: "poetry extends the limit of its frame"

Akilah Oliver (1961-2011)

... Poetry like the body

extends the limit of its frame. I was just

reading over old emails between myself

and kari edwards. she says at one point

as we discuss the intentionality of entering

into an aporia, "human life is a bleep in

the evolutionary conundrum that we as

humans have applied meaning to and in

doing so, for the most part, do things that

are based on contemporary belief

systems that we attempt to maintain as a

sense of permanence or purpose."

Perhaps so, but I miss the humans.

Poet, teacher and activist Akilah Oliver died unexpectedly last week in Brooklyn. This email appeared in Poetry magazine, February 2009, in response to Charles Bernstein's "Manifest Aversions, Conceptual Conundrums, & Implausibly Deniable Links," Her most recent book of poems is A Toast in the House of Friends (Coffee House Press, 2009).

Thomas Jefferson's library: lost books hiding in plain sight

Jefferson stamp, 1870

In the literary games of hide-and-seek that keep readers, reaearchers and historians busy, discovering the books that belonged to Presidents can be a special find. When the books themselves are discovered hiding in plain sight waiting only for a chance discovery, they form an unexpected piece of the continuing historical puzzle.

A recent article by Sam Roberts in the New York Times describes the discovery of 78 books that once belonged to Thomas Jefferson and which, through time, auction and debt, had been sold and subsequently lost to history. The books in Latin, Greek and French are described as having been acquired by Jefferson in the ten years before he died in 1826. The article reports one researcher found leads performing a simple Google search. The Times article includes a link to the complete list of book titles.

A literary detective story that began 18 months ago and was advanced through a chance reading of an 1880 edition of The Harvard Register has led researchers from the Jefferson Library at Monticello to a trove of books that were among the last ones that Thomas Jefferson, the nation’s most bibliophilic president, collected and read in the decade before he died.

The 28 titles in 74 volumes were discovered recently in the collection of Washington University in St. Louis, immediately elevating its library to the third largest repository of books belonging to Jefferson after the Library of Congress and the University of Virginia.

... The Washington University library learned of the Jefferson bonanza a few months ago from Endrina Tay, project manager for the Thomas Jefferson’s Libraries project at Monticello, the former president’s home near Charlottesville, Va., a National Historic Landmark. She has been working since 2004 to reconstruct Jefferson’s collection and make the titles and supplemental reference materials available online.

... The retirement collection is the least known of Jefferson’s libraries and one in which classics were represented in disproportionately greater numbers than politics and the law. He cataloged all 1,600 books according to “the faculties of the human mind,” like memory, reason and imagination, and then classified them further. Many were in French or Italian.

“Currently Monticello and the University of Virginia have the largest concentrations of books from the retirement library,” said Kevin J. Hayes, an English professor at the University of Central Oklahoma and the author of The Road to Monticello: The Life and Mind of Thomas Jefferson. “This new find would put Washington University among them. The question I would like to answer is: Do they contain any marginalia? Sometimes Jefferson wrote in his books; his marginalia would enhance both the scholarly and the cultural value of the books immeasurably.”

The answer is yes. Jefferson initialed his books (to affirm his ownership), often corrected typographical errors in the texts and also occasionally wrote marginal notes or comments about the substance. Researchers are combing the newly discovered collection to find such notations.

... Ms. Tay found letters suggesting that Joseph Coolidge of Boston, who met one of Jefferson’s granddaughters at Monticello and later married her, submitted lists of the books he wanted to buy.

... Ms. Tay also found an annotated auction catalog with the letter “C” written next to a number of items, which seemed to indicate that Coolidge had bid successfully. ...

The discovery that the 3,000 books in the Coolidge collection included 74 that once belonged to Jefferson means that about half of his retirement library has been accounted for. It has also prompted a search by librarians at Washington University to determine whether any other books in the Coolidge collection had been Jefferson’s.

A new editor at "The Paris Review": re-inventing the cool

That Kentucky man-of-rare-letters Ed McClanahan once remarked of his own method of writing that sometimes he followed his nose, sometimes his muse, and sometimes his muse's nose. One of the continuing pleasures of the internet's endless hall-of-mirrors is that occasionally one is able to reflectively follow all three at the same time. The Paris Review interviews -- nearly sixty years' worth -- are now all available online, and they are a pleasure to have available at last all in a single place to discover, or discover again.

Lorin Stein, the new editor at The Paris Review, is building a reputation for rejuvenating the magazine's literary cool -- by recalling the Review's freewheeling past. Today's Style Section of the New York Times, perhaps with just a bit of hyper-cool hyperbole, describes an office only lacking Terry Southern's expected appearance: "Mr. Stein, 37, is a proud throwback. His desk has an old-fashioned Rolodex, a vintage Lucky Strike case and a neat bowl of paper clips. A small, cream-colored saucer doubled as an ashtray for his Marlboro Reds. A martini glass, mostly drained of Tanqueray, rested near a typed manuscript."

That "mostly drained" martini glass with its Tanqueray -- there's the TS ultra-detail, the put-away.

Those who have wandered bookshops and old magazine stacks and stumbled on stray volumes of The Paris Review Interviews in their multi-part book form are now free to spend leisurely hours discovering that their literary heroes (and sometimes, villains) are just as they imagined -- or not as the reader imagined them at all.

As expected, Eliot, Marianne Moore, Nabokov, and Faulkner cast long shadows, while Auden, Cheever, Anthony Burgess, and Kingsley Amis best one another's observations sounding as if they had cocktails in hand. (“After fifty, one ceases to digest; as someone once said: ‘I just ferment my food now'": that's Terry Southern's witty 1958 talk with Henry Green.) In a unexpected wistful moment, tough-guy Hemingway lets his guard down: “. . . the best writing is certainly when you are in love.”

A previously unpublished Ray Bradbury interview from the 1970s: "A conglomerate heap of trash, that’s what I am. But it burns with a high flame." Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut, and Woody Allen all make appearances. And here's Guy Davenport on his education, sounding a common note of many writers everywhere trying to find their voice: “I learned early on that what I wanted to know wasn’t what I was being taught.”

Aldous Huxley, Reynolds Price, V.S. Naipaul, Joseph Heller, John Steinbeck, Seamus Heaney: for any reader, spending an hour with a great author is easy; far more difficult is stopping at a sane and necessary point amid the sheer volume of interviews. One unexpected idea sparks another and sends a reader scurrying from Shelby Foote's ruminations on dip-pens to Sam Shepard's views on the terrible price of story endings: “I hate endings. Just detest them. Beginnings are definitely the most exciting, middles are perplexing and endings are a disaster.” Much the same can be said of Ted Berrigan's and Aram Saroyan's complete 1968 interview with an increasingly drunken Jack Kerouac, as the talk literally careens around served drinks and proffered drugs:

INTERVIEWER What do you think about the hippies and the LSD scene?

KEROUAC They're already changing, I shouldn't be able to make a judgment. And they're not all of the same mind. The Diggers are different . . . I don't know one hippie anyhow . . . I think they think I'm a truck-driver. And I am. As for LSD, it's bad for people with incidence of heart disease in the family [knocks microphone off footstool . . . recovers it]. Is there any reason why you can see anything good in this here mortality?

INTERVIEWER Excuse me, would you mind repeating that?

KEROUAC You said you had a little white beard in your belly. Why is there a little white beard in your mortality belly?

INTERVIEWER Let me think about it. Actually it's a little white pill.

KEROUAC A little white pill?

INTERVIEWER It's good.

KEROUAC Give me.

INTERVIEWER We should wait till the scene cools a little.

KEROUAC Right. This little white pill is a little white beard in your mortality which advises you and advertises to you that you will be growing long fingernails in the graves of Peru.

With an online collection as broad as The Paris Review interviews there are many surprises, and readers will bring their own judgements as to what can be glanced at or read in depth after a few interviewer's questions. I might have to read more of the stories of T.C. Boyle after reading his 2000 comments, and there are scores of writers whose work I'm just as eager to discover for the first time.

Other than some well-known names, the recent group of 2010 interviews is less interesting, but that's more than likely due to my own lack of reading than any fault of the writers being interviewed. Still, it may give the reader pause to consider that in the craft of writing, even Stephen King can have his moments of doubt no matter how unexpected:

"Every book is different each time you revise it. Because when you finish the book, you say to yourself, This isn’t what I meant to write at all. At some point, when you’re actually writing the book, you realize that. But if you try to steer it, you’re like a pitcher trying to steer a fastball, and you screw everything up. As the science-fiction writer Alfred Bester used to say, The book is the boss. You’ve got to let the book go where it wants to go, and you just follow along. If it doesn’t do that, it’s a bad book. And I’ve had bad books."

In the new-old era of The Paris Review, maybe that's just King's way of saying he's seeing Kerouac's white beard in his mortality belly.