Jimmie Noone, Apex Blues, MCA/GRP/Decca, 1994. Recorded 1928, Chicago

On the title track, amazing throb-pulse of Lawson Buford's tuba. Earl Hines Piano break into feather-light, confident, encouraging Noone clarinet solo. Insanely stomping slow outro-chorus.

Reading Brecht’s Journals 1934-1955. Blog-like, short, razor-sharp entries. From Denmark:

5 mar 39
interesting, this new “realistic” american literature (CAIN, COY, HEMINGWAY). these people protest against the prevailing descriptions of certain milieu, bank heavily on the novelty of “unbiased” description. it all remains within the domain of the formal. at its inception stands the experience of film (and at the end stands hollywood). film, esp. silent film, needed an unexpectedly large amount of action (consumed a large amount of expression) . . . with these hard boiled men it is a matter of producing hot stuff, they need to arouse emotions because they are part of the great emotions racket. So they use emotions as a driving force, as the path of least resistance. They give a new 10 horse power engine, complete with appropriate brakes to the man in the street, to each of roosevelt’s new deal types, garage mechanics, farm hands, reporters, the souped-up petty bourgeois, a romantic character, comes into existence. he is a poor devil who is highly strung beyond belief, has been given a seconds spirit by rationalization, stands gasping, is threatened by unemployment, and invests his last vestige of strength in competitiveness. He bestrides the stage as hero and muscle-man, and the boards cave-in. 24

Professor Griffes

Listening to Charles Tomlinson Griffes, Collected Work for Piano, recorded 1979, (New World, 1997):

Griffes was an American composer, a somewhat more traditional contemporary of Charles Ives. Serene, beautiful. Really helping me with the returning-to-work stress.

and

Anthony Braxton, recorded 1969, (actuel, 2002) w/ Leo Smith, Leroy Jenkins, Steve McCall:

Three separate arrangements by Smith, Jenkins and Braxton. Quiet, carefully arranged music with a lot of space and revolving, unaccompanied soloing. Interesting even after multiple back-to-back listens. Henry (Katie’s parrot) really likes this CD, which is always a sign of high-quality music.

read The Future of an Illusion, Sigmund Freud, Strachey translation, on the Fung Wah bus on the way back to New York:

"It goes without saying that a civilization which leaves so large a number of its participants unsatisfied and drives them to revolt neither has nor deserves the prospect of a lasting existence." 12

Apparently, part of the magic of the Fung Wah bus when it is operating in beneficent mode is that I am able to read on it without getting nauseated. On the way to Boston I finished the Wire, read The Economist as well as the highly absorbing article in the New Yorker about Gertrude Stein. I’m guessing that the details of the disclosures therein about her right-wing tendencies are common knowledge to my many Stein-enthusiast friends. Esp. interested in Stein and Toklas paying to bust Nazi collaborator Bernard Fay out of jail. It made me think of the inverse moment when The Weather Underground broke Timothy Leary out of jail. Curious now if there is critical work on Stein that relates her reactionary/conservative tendencies to her poetics in some way? Has someone does this with Pound?

On the island I banned all electronic communication and kept reading to a minimum. I did bring two books, though. Writings of the Zen master Dogen (Northpoint) and Eduardo Galeano’s Memory of Fire part two -- Faces and Masks (Quartet Books), two books that balanced each other out nicely. The Galeano book, in the course of its varied, clear and fluent historical multiplicities, contains some material appropriate to the current foreign policy of the US:

"In full imperial euphoria, the United states celebrates the conquest of the Hawaiian islands, Samoa and the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and some little islands eloquently named the Ladrones (Thieves). Now the pacific and Caribbean are North American lakes, and the United Fruit Company is coming to birth; but novelist Mark Twain, the old spoilsport, proposes changing the national flag: the white stripes should be black, he says, and the stars should be skulls and crossbones."

Out of town until Sunday, 20th.

Henry Grimes Quintet, Iridium, 7/8/03
Roy Campbell, Jr.(tp), Rob Brown(as), Andrew Bemkey(p), Michael Thompson(d)

I’ve been fascinated by the story of Henry Grimes’ return to music after having been missing in action for thirty years. Grimes had been a important jazz musician in the fifties and sixties, having played with Sonny Rollins, Lennie Tristano, Cecil Taylor, Albert Ayler, Don Cherry, Coleman Hawkins, Roy Haynes, Lee Konitz, Steve Lacy, Charles Mingus, Gerry Mulligan, Roswell Rudd, Pharoah Sanders, Archie Shepp, McCoy Tyner, and many more. He was recently discovered living in a SRO hotel in LA, having bailed completely on music since the late sixties. Word got out that he had been found and people started mobilizing to help him. William Parker donated a bass to him named Olive Oil. I assume this was the bass he was playing last night.

I’ve been listening to him for years on CD, including some of my favorite recordings -- such as Cecil Taylor’s Unit Structures and Grimes’ own ESP recording The Call, with the amazing clarinet player Perry Robinson.

KCR did a Grimes radio tribute a few months ago, playing four days of the bassist’s music. I turned on the radio before I knew about the tribute, heard some tuneful, vibrant, and rather wild clarinet playing that I couldn’t place and, of course, strong bass playing. It turned out to be Grimes playing with Tony Scott.

Iriduim is a slightly odd place to hear this kind of improvised music, since it’s expensive and a little touristy, though I suppose it’s good that they’re supporting it were they can. I only wish the sound mix had been handled better. For some reason, Grimes’ bass doesn’t have a pick-up, so he was amplified with a mic. He was also buried in the mix for much of the set. You could only hear him properly when the band was at it’s quietest. It would have been easy to dispense with the horn mics and bring the band volume to his level. It’s frustrating that getting the bass sound right wasn’t a priority for the club when a living legend has returned for the first gig under his leadership in over thirty years!

Still, it was possible to tell what was happening, and it was beautiful. His playing had a strongly implied swing, but one that seemed to go in multiple directions at once. It was extremely supple, with constant variations of tone and rhythm. He was also able to imply multiple melodies without droning or limiting the melodic trajectory of his playing. It sounded inquisitive, curious. He was simultaneously supporting, adding new information and invigorating the overall sound field, and not one of these multiple dynamics was dropped for very long. It’s as though he was utilizing a system of musical multitasking, the sound of simultaneous human modes -- social, mental, emotional, physical….

His presence on the stage was modest and fragile, in fact he seemed to be a bit stressed, but this didn’t show at all in the playing.

The band was strong, as you would expect from this mostly veteran combination, though maybe slightly distracted or just not quite warm yet. The drummer Michael Thompson was the only player I hadn’t heard before, and his playing was impressively responsive, strong and gentle, like Grimes' own.

Interesting article about Michael Gira by Alan Licht in Wire 233. I didn’t realized Gira had any connection to Glenn Branca. Maybe I should just assume that connection exists with anyone downtown with any proximity to a guitar from 1977-1987.

I guess you could make the argument that the Swans were part of a American tradition of emphasizing sound, timbre, physicality of presence over form etc. that includes Cage, Feldman, Oliveros.

Ironically, Gira, Throbbing Gristle and Laurie Anderson could be seen as being in the same historical groove, crossing performace art with rock.

I recall liking the Swans as a teenager because of the extremity and slowness. I only heard the records, though. Now I wonder what the live shows were like.

Guilty pleasure: The Bad Plus, These Are The Vistas, Columbia, 2003.

Deleted a post responding to Nada's deleted post.

Karen Horney doesn’t use narcissism as a category in itself. It's a nook in the vast terrain of self-alienation which she explores with startlingly crystalline insight.

She sees narcissism as a element which immobilizes and hampers self-awareness.

In her book Self-Analysis, she uses the word narcissism interestingly in a discussion of Freud’s attitude towards the nature of the desire for self-improvement. Freud dismisses this desire as a "narcissistic" tendency towards self-inflation and excelling others:

"What Freud refused to recognized is the fact that this 'narcissistic' element is a contributing factor only. If the need for self-aggrandizement has been analyzed and abandoned, the wish to develop still remains, yes it emerges more clearly and powerfully than before. The "narcissistic" elements, while they have kindled the wish to grow, have at the same time hampered its realization. To use the words of a patient: "The 'narcissistic' impulse is towards the development of a phony self." The fostering of this phony self is always at the expense of the real self, the latter being treated with disdain, at best like a poor relation."
-KH

(When not quoting she doesn't use the term "real self", but tends towards pointing out the difference between possible and impossible self, and static vs. dynamic self etc.)

So narcissism is seen as a paralyzing feedback loop in the circuit of the character structure. It’s a drag because it prevents new information from entering the system.

It’s not hard to think of examples of writers who essentially use poetry to create a fantasy image of themselves which they are trying to get the reader to validate, even if this is done indirectly. I see this across traditions and styles. Work of this kind is tiring to read. You feel used. To what extent is poetry used as a place where one is allowed to more safely harbor and nurture one's neuroses?

In his dissenting opinion Scalia says that the overturning of the Texas sodomy law will result in:

"a massive disruption in the current social order."

sounds good to me…

Reading report
Jean Donnelly. Ron Silliman, Rae Armantrout.
The Drawing Center, 6/24/03

Acousticly, the Drawing Center is not the greatest space for poetry. It’s as though it was designed specifically to muffle the sound of the human voice. Because of this situation, the room presents a kind of test for readers. Since every reader I’ve heard there struggled against the acoustics of the space, you can see how different readers handle struggling with acoustics, not just with volume.

Jean Donnelly:

Quiet reading style. Made me hear some of the more micro- breath and pitch changes.

The throat, mouth, lips, and tongue are after all a biological envelope filter changing the timbre and articulation of sound. In English all the linguistic information is carried by this filter system, rather than the vocal chords, which control pitch. I can’t help but wonder if the music of a culture that uses a non-tonal language is more likely to have a greater emphasis on timbral variation?

Much about domestic life and children mixing with brief spans of politically suggestive material.

Full of literary references and carefully developed thematics.

Some sharp observations -- "the clicks of an electric meter on the back of a house."

The poetry panned slowly over landscapes -- rural, suburban, mental, social.


Ron Silliman

Silliman at first tried to bypass the mike entirely, which did improve the sound for the first couple of rows, but make it inaudible to everyone else. Katie helpfully stepped in and remedied the situation.

Silliman‘s projection was good and he managed to overcome some of the sonic deadening and get the poetry out into the space of the room.

A chain of observed details with their hierarchy of significance removed.

He has an instantly recognizable take on certain kinds of details -- often trivial things (rather than quadrivial) which are commonly experienced but go unremarked upon, "the pigeon walks up to me and when I move my foot it flies away" / "the unripe banana" / "top of the business card used as a toothpick." In this sense it is a poetry of social commonality, the implicit social commonality of visual perception. It is Eignerian in that the poet observes what is in front of him. At one point he comes out and says "write what’s in front of you."

Mixed with this is what sound like straight-forward autobiographical vignettes and commentary as one would get in a mainstream poem, but without the sentimental inflation, as well as political material -- a story taken from the news, about Serbian torture, for instance. Again, the playing field of significance is totally level, so that a report of forced cannibalism happens in the same register as items about Mike Piatta or mosquitoes. To me it replicates the disturbingly unequal moral simultaneity of the world as well as implying some questions about how we get information about it, through the media, and through our own senses.

I also thought of a late Olson poem -- about watching a fly -- the significance of insignificance.

Observations that could be straight out of his blog are also thrown in: "the expansion of genre has been much faster than the expansion of readers" or "the cast system of literary reputation."

A lot of dream material, all prefaced with "in the dream" or ended with "then I woke up." So despite all this mixing of modes, the categories of experience are not blurred in this work, actually the opposite -- they are carefully delineated.

One of the ways Silliman produces variation in his work is the use of an unusually wide spectrum of ironic distance, which moves from the extremes of irony to total sincerity.

At one point he used the image of an approaching train, which I’ve noticed before in his work. This seems analogous to something central in his process -- things held in an equalized mutual potentiality of imminent arrival.


Rae Armantrout

If Silliman is the potentiality of imminent arrival, Armantrout is the continuously transforming moment of arrival.

Armantrout was able to get the poetry into the sonic space, not with projection, but, seemingly, with personality.

This is poetry that could fit into several "separate" strains of American poetic tradition.

She somehow manages to take energies which clearly have their origin in mentally negative modes and transform the energy to something quite positive and energizing, as well as funny and sharp.

Beautifully developed cognitive movements turning around an axis of humor.

"I was a forwarding address"

"A pun pretends to be a bridge"

Magically transmogrified complaints and fiercely intelligent playfulness.

Not letting anything mess with her, not tradition, not innovation.

Highly compact observational critiques: "a fetish object appears as previous centuries."

Philosophical and even mathematical preoccupations beautifully unwinding in the poetry.

Making poetic use of indigestion. A meditation on the Borg. Making poetic use of anything…

Actually it is a pretty funny typo to point out. But now that I see that Nada's being affable how am I going to take out all my pent up feelings of resentment from the years of having my spelling mocked in grammar school? At least I can still say Dug Rothschild is worse!

I've always wondered what makes a person develop into a "corrector," the kind of person who, when faced with a trivial typo or mispronunciation, will pointedly interrupt someone as though they had committed some profound crime against humanity and correct them with a snotty, condescending tone, regardless of context. I guess it's some inferiority complex. It allows one to feel superior, even for a brief second.

Being an atrocious speller, verging on dyslexic, I've had to live with these people all my life. They tend be people with a strong need to have others follow sets of rules or socially mandated guidelines for behavior, or, as is more often the case, people who have these controlling needs but have repressed them, so they balloon out in odd places.

Thousands Count Out Loud, George Albon, Lyric&, San Francisco, 2000


A progression of sonnets in single sentence lines which accrue as separate units but build into a single poetic environment with multiple layers. Almost every line adds something. Very little is wasted.

A greater degree of proposition, critique and humor than in Empire Life.

"They eat as if to hide the food."

Rich phenomenological harmony and counterpoint.

Engaging with overlapping and mirroring systems:

"Social games will function as enzymes"

Crossing Amsterdam at 108th street the other day, I saw a nun carrying the collected poems of Robert Lowell.

George Albon, Empire Life, 1998, Littoral Books, LA.

The first two-thirds of the book consist of a single serial poem composed of eighty-eight eight line poems.

Mental autobiography.

The poems build up in units of scenic, Gaussian-blurred subjectivity.

There is often an implied relationship narrative where only tiny bits of information about the story are shared, though the sensation of urgency in the missing bigger picture is allowed through with much of it's energy. It's as though the poem is stepping back from a setting where a human drama is unfolding, and this backward movement allows in a subtle and odd layer of psychological implication.

Would you find
the country

thru the steel
grasses of

such collision,
the gift of

his knotted
blare & call--

Similar to Creeley in its nuanced pivoting between psychological and perceptual valences, except unlike Creeley it moves strongly away from the dynamics of sentiment.

Very small units of information put together like puzzle pieces which fit perfectly even though they seem to be from totally different puzzles.

A beautiful, tense, odd wholesomeness like Lorine Niedecker.

At one point, he makes a little drama out of the process of a thought's inception, and the relation of the area of that inception to anxiety, complete with harpies:

He reassured
himself with

the smallest,
the almost

unborn thought.
It held a

center that
harpies clawed.

The feeling or pressure of the physical world is strong even within the confines of a fairly abstract and cerebral poetics.

It is going
between (the bus).

Part of me
will actually

miss this
music.

A gust of
wind like gale.

Strong objectivist tendencies-- clarity and precision. Also possessed of Eignerian moments of stationary observation:

Waking,
life,

& white
shines out

from the blue
sky with

a sound in
it, window.

In fact this work is deeply Objectivist- not only is the poem itself seen as an object, but every element within the poem is treated as an object. The perception, the thought, the word, the observation, the feeling, the self, the person, etc., all have the feeling of assembled objects.

The poems are like carefully improvised beddings make from the gradual accruals of everyday, domestic life.

Some of these sequences seem to be simultaneously asking a question of and depicting a memory and/or a setting:

A couch but
some in chairs-

it goes round-
words

heard, then in
circle, the couple

singing Working
Class Hero


The other part of book is Cosmophagy, which consists of a sequenced string of short, smooth, one-sentence prose units.

Narrative in a blender, or existing in a suspension of poetic science fiction like Soft Boys mode William Burroughs or J.G. Ballard.

Scenes melting into each other as though seen from a passing car, all happening in a landscape like a post-Blade Runner Gunslinger.

Many images of machines wearing away the earth, as though all human activity were a kind of erosion. The title means world-eating.

Blurred dream material but also metaphoric thought and questioning:

"In vassal-mind an ethos traveling like a geese-V in pinkish dusk to the appropriate host a creature-calling lucidation of lives they stumble into what? From the resulting what?"

Matthew Barney, The Cremaster Cycle, Guggenheim Museum


An expensive Hollywood auction where props and costumes from Raiders of the Lost Ark or Star Wars: Episode One are sold for the price of some countries’ GDP.

Sporty things that are spilling out.

The subject of this art is the individual acquisition of cultural capital, fame and money, symbolized by Barney climbing the wall of the Guggenheim to displace Richard Serra form the lofty heights.

Tomb Raider.

Expensive racing side-car motorcycles with testicles.

Barney’s art is similar to that of the Wachowski brothers in The Matrix Reloaded: a confusing and tedious self-enclosed fantasy world whose primary purpose is to display wealth and status to earn more of same.

Not nearly enough stuff to fill the space.

Intensely inventive, but using the inventiveness in an all-out embrace of corporate art power, hence of trans-national corporate power?

Late 90’s internet bubble capital feeling.

Is it just an elaborate teaser for the movies? Hence the overwhelming feeling of incompleteness?

Hermetically sealed preoccupations siphoned into a franchisable fantasy world.

Creatively blocking social reality as a part of trading up the social ladder.

The beginning of Nick's poem makes me wonder if irony doesn't involve, among other things, a form of linguistic data compression, fitting more meaning (information) in the same amount of linguistic space. Like Stuffit.

Computers make it very clear- that
everything in life can be reduced to
a simple yes or no. Humans have
never stood for this. After centuries
of solemn obedience to the rules of language, we
created the yes that is no and the
no that is yes.
The linguistic birth of irony.