GUY DAVENPORT SAYS

e. e. cummings “was not a wise person, but had the wisdom of his folly, a bravado of spirit, and his own special way of knowing and talking about the world; and these are better than wisdom, to a poet….”

The exact same could be said of Gertrude Stein.

BUT I LIKE SOME OF THOSE SONGS!

Dept. of De Gustibus Non Est Disputandum.

In fact, some of them have been favorite songs. & “I’ll Fly Away”? Isn’t badmouthing that blasphemy?

On further thought, what makes them “worst” songs is not that they are unspeakably dull but that they’re catchy, for some irritatingly catchy. Me, I’m a sucker for catchy. In fact it’s taken me a long time to like non-catchy music. The first time I heard it I thought Pod was dull, dull, dreadfully dull. The only song I liked was the Beatles cover.

In fact, the songs have to have some catch for them, or you wouldn’t want to listen to a medley of them, even as a mock. So there!

& what about Oates & Garfunkel themselves? I like them too! & they’re kind of catchy & cute. It’s easy to imagine them making some worst-ever list.

Or is there some further level of irony I’m missing here? Because I miss those things. The other day I was complaining to a friend about an A Team rerun I’d seen & he said, “I pity the fool who can’t tell it’s tongue in cheek!”

I thought that was funny.

Stephen J. Greenblatt on Charlie Rose. At first I don’t recognize him. Another memento of the lost life? All memory is about what’s lost. Speaking of which, Charlie Rose is a crappy substitution for Dick Cavett. At least Cavett had sparkle. Rose goes instead for gravitas. Cavett’s shtick was a kid from Nebraska who could work his way up to being a cultural elitist. Yes, surely middlebrow, but at least it had a DIY quality. Rose is a professional. He speaks to professionals. There is no need for charm or charisma: what’s required is a license. It’s a job, not an art. Cavett was a pale copy of Oscar Wilde (pale as the cathode ray illumination on the wall, seen of course from someone on the sidewalk looking in windows). If you’re going to be fake, why not something fun like Wilde? Rose may be a real thing, but it’s a clerk. What did Marlon Brando say in that movie? The world is run by clerks.

2004

Warren Zevon had a joke about that movie: Marlowe travels up river, through battle and jungle and nightmare, through the heart of darkness, only to find at the end of his quest Truman Capote.

A world that falls off from Dick Cavett wasn’t falling from a great height.

2009

PISAN CANTOS: Kenner digression

but not The Pound Ezra. (That’s a Pound-like joke: when my sister & I were college roommates, she kept misreading the bookspine. It’s the kind of misprision that comes from knowing more rather than knowing less. It’s the kind of joke that’s tolerable in Pound, elsewhere, not so much.) No, this from A Colder Eye: The Modern Irish Writers. I’ve something to say about the book,  but for now I’ll excerpt a part, relevant to a common theme in the scholarship, vestigial Imagism in the Cantos:

To an exhaustion that was beginning to be perceived in standard English, Modernism early in the twentieth century brought two remedies that at first seem diametrically opposed. One was recourse to the Saxon hoard of strong verbs; the other was this Celtic habit of vivid static images.

“Celtic habit” in this case seems not as much linguistic anthropology as marketing ploy, a cousin to the “PQ (Peasant Quality)” required of Abbey Theater dramaturgy. But irrespective of questions of authenticity, there’s something interesting about the poetics of it.

PISAN CANTOS: Sieburth’s Notes

One way to read: first, read a Canto straight through, w/out any notes; second, read the notes, flipping back at the relevant lines in the poem.

The thing is, both of these experiences are aesthetic. I enjoy reading notes. They’re quick & monadic (they don’t form a narrative, so you can break off at any time). I think it goes back to the first book reading I ever did, which was the photo captions in the Ballantine Second World War books.

It also goes back to the first time I read the Wasteland, at the urging of a professor. Hated every word of it, except for the one note about Shackleton in the Antarctic hallucinating an extra member to his party.

Sieburth’s notes are remarkably thorough, yet still there are some references go unremarked. Given how personal Pound could get, it would seem some will never get tracked down. These opaque markers can glow with unknowable significance. Like fetishes! & I do like fetishes, though I have prescribed for myself Walter Benn Michaels’s Shape of the Signifier. I’m sure after that medicine I’ll be thinking better.

In the Department of Opaque Markers, we have those books that await the Sieburth treatment, such as some other sections of the Cantos, or Zukofsky’s A (though it would be nice to get the book itself back in print). But that’s an odd kind of text, one that stands ever-pregnant w/anticipated exegesis.

One way of thinking better would be to stop writing the kind of poems that call for such note-making. In the minutiae department, one man’s mountain is everyone else’s molehill.

ATAVISMS

Dept. of This Morning on KBRD.

KBRD is one of the local treasures, a low power, unaffiliated, not-for-profit station out of Olympia. They do everything from hot jazz of the 20’s to easy listening of the 70’s. Stuff you’ll not hear anywhere else. Terrestrial radio may be dying, but they also have a strong internet presence (in fact, through the air they only go during daylight hours, but on the wire you can get them 24/7).

This morning they’ve got Charlie Palloy doing “42nd Street.” I thought I knew that song pretty well, from the oft clipped Busby Berkeley production of the number, but a couplet surprised me. In describing those beautiful Manhattanites, the song says,

They’re side by side,

They’re glorified.

“Glorified” sounds like from a different register, like from an evangelical hymn or something. Something like this?

I’m a sucker for goofy, I’m a sucker for the 80’s, I’m insufficiently wary of the cultural borrowings, but I still dig the KLF.

FLANN O’BRIEN SAYS

“The dawn was contagious, spreading rapidly about the heavens.”

“The road was narrow, white, old, hard and scarred with shadows.”

PISAN CANTOS: Sieburth’s Introduction

Michael Morse & I are reading the Sieburth edition of the Pisan Cantos. I’m going to try to put down some of my thoughts, and maybe some of the dialogue with Michael. Try to be quick about it. Make the reader feel good, like a young blog should.

Sieburth tells the story, Pound’s years in Italy, the radio broadcasts, the arrest, the prison, the writing, the exit to the US, with a coda for incarceration in St. Elizabeth’s & publication & the Bollingen Prize, smartly: he’s got good details & some verve. It’s a nice contrast to the version that’s in my head, Hugh Kenner’s hagiographic Pound Era. Mostly Sieburth allows Pound to be responsible for some of his trouble. By toning down the tragic, Sieburth opens up the possibility for the comic. & as much as I admire Pound, there’s plenty of comic potential in his life story.

IT’LL NEVER WORK

as Eeyore said.

Then again, you can because you must, as Kant said.