Poems: Kenneth Patchen

Kenneth Patchen in 1957 with a collection
of his painted books, taken on the rooftop
of photographer Harry Redl's apartment
house in San Francisco. (Photo: Harry Redl,
via FoundSF.com)

Kenneth Patchen (1911-1972) was an exact contemporary of Robert Hayden, whose poem "Monet's Waterlilies" I posted yesterday, yet a very different poet in aesthetic approach and vision. A poet and novelist, Patchen also played with the visual aspect of his poems, sometimes painting or drawing them and collaging in musical verses drawn from the American popular and jazz traditions, and during the 13 years of his life, when he was mostly bedridden, he extended and refined his experimentation, which had included concrete poetry, painted book covers, and silk-screen texts, to created his famous "Painted Poems." Patchen's visually vibrant works invite the reader to multiple possibilities for poetic reading and interpretation, while also functioning overtly as works of visual art.

I had seen some of his Painted Poems before, but I was delighted when I happened upon via Professor Vaughn B. Anderson's former undergraduate comparative literature online course site, "Painting with Words: Exploring Poetry and Image," which he taught in 2013 at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. He included the Patchen poems in his "Visual Poetry" module, and they are that and more. Out of the dozen that he posted I have selected four, all of which remind me of William Blake's illustrated poems, but updated for the 20th century and, considering the moment of post-Pop Art and post-modernism, the 21st. To quote Patchen, "I don’t consider myself a painter. I think of myself as someone who has used the medium of painting in an attempt to extend."

The Academy of American Poets website describes these works as

free verse poems with whimsical imagery using pieces of Japanese paper and common construction paper, glue, tempera, watercolors, casein, crayons, ink, pencils, cloth dyes, cloth string, and coffee and tea (used as dyes). The idea for the painted poems, Patchen’s wife Miriam has said, emerged from his fascination with sheets he received from John Tate, a botanist. The sheets, once used in France to press botanical specimens, became the backdrop to the painted poems, which were bound and published in the collections Hallelujah Anyway and But Even So. Emitting both joy and grief, the painted poems depict the ways of the world—its cruelty included—with mature resignation and playful humor. His last work, Wonderings, contains reprints of his silkscreen pages along with abstract and figurative drawings. Patchen died in 1972, a year after Wonderings was published.

To put it another way, FoundSF says of these works that, "They are celebrations of everyday playfulness as well as realizations of the sadnesses, humor and limitations of the body and mind. Also they are personal protests, insights into the institutionalized notions, both spiritual and political, that corrupt community and creativity."

XYZ

Poem: Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore and Muhammad Ali,in 1967

I could have sworn I had posted the following poem, by Marianne Moore (1887-1972), a poet whose work I, like anyone educated even passably in the US before the last 25 years, was required to read at various intervals--in grade school, junior, high school, college, and graduate school--and which I have increasingly come to adore. She was, like William Carlos Williams, whose poetry I featured a few days ago, a leading figure in American Modernism, and, as many critics have noted, a superlative stylist and magician with language. Instead, it turns out I'd posted about Moore's poem "Poetry," which carries with a publication history worthy of a scholarly lecture. Moore also was, like T. S. Eliot, a poet I regularly heard about growing up because she was born and grew up in the near suburbs of St. Louis--in Kirkwood, Missouri, to be exact, the next town over from Webster Groves, where I spent a good portion of my youth.

In fact, I sometimes think that the deceptive simplicity and apparent naturalism of Moore's work leads readers, as it did for me, to assume they will "get" her work when in fact its complexity is right there before your eyes. But a little deeper reading usually opens the poem's meanings up, like paper flowers unfolding in water. Like Elizabeth Bishop (1917-1979), Moore's poems also avoid, at least on the surface, the personal and confessional, but her variable perspective on the world does eventually become clear, and that surface control seems at times to lie atop something burbling below, a rich vein of feeling. (As Dan Chiasson discussed in his thoughtful review, Linda Leavell's acclaimed 2013 biography of Moore, Holding on Upside Down (FSG), reveals how much personal tumult the seemingly placid Moore did live through, from childhood on.)

"No Swan So Fine" is one of Moore's briefest masterpieces, unsurpassed in its music, precision, wit, and irony.  I taught it most recently in "Foundations of Literary Studies," Rutgers-Newark's introductory course for potential undergraduate English majors and minors, and it left most of the students bemused, until we walked through it together and, as is so often with Moore's poems, it clicked. They started to get it and wanted to talk about it; some did with considerable exuberance. It was the direct result, critics have pointed out, of Moore's lifelong observation and careful notation. Scholar Patricia Willis writes that in March 1930, Moore saw in the Illustrated London News a pair of Louis XV candelabra, the "property of the late Lord Balfour," a friend of her friend, British critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933), to whom she had sent a condolence about Balfour earlier that year. She even sketched them (see below).

A year later Moore read a New York Times Magazine article (19 May 1913, pp. 8-9), by Percy Philip, about the Rockefellers' restoration of Versailles, and notated above a clipping of one of the featured images (cf. below) the line "There is no water so still as the dead fountains of Versailles." I find it fascinating to consider how she fits that resonant aperçu into the poem, leaving it as a prose quotation but transforming it into poetry, not unlike the poem itself, which unfolds as an argument attempting to make sense of disparate and contrasting images, artifacts, ideas. The overtly rococo language not only evokes Louis XV but embodies that era--"with swart blind look askance / and ambidextrous legs, so fine / as the chintz china one with fawn - / brown eyes and toothed gold..." This tongue-twisting ornateness, which is nevertheless not superficial but full of depth and seriousness, continues in the second stanza, culminating in that falling final sentence, like a guillotine.

Lastly, the theme of the past and the evanescence of culture was in Moore's mind as well because, as Willis adds, she wrote the poem to commemorate the 20th anniversary of Poetry magazine, but with the thought that it would shutter that spring; it is, however, thankfully still with us, and Moore's poem appeared in that October 1932 issue, alongside poems by Carl Sandburg, Wallace Stevens, Witter Bynner, Eunice Tietjens, and others. Here, then is the poem:

Moore's poem, copyright ©
Poetry Magazine

And now, those images--the candelabra, Moore's sketch, and the clipping (all from the Marianne Moore Archive Online):

The actual swan candelabra
sold at Christie's

and

Moore's sketches of the candelabra

and

From the New York Times Magazine: "The Tapis Vert at
Versailles Where Melancholy Now Reigns as Queen"

Poem: William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams

In the American Modernist pantheon William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) looms large as one of its most important poets, and rightly so; from his earliest collections to his last writings, he cut a powerful path of experimentation, using everyday American language and rhythms, and an array of forms, not unlike a painter or sculptor, that has continued to influence English-language poets of all kinds ever since. He may be best known for his short poems that children still learn--I hope!--in grade school and junior high, including "The Red Wheelbarrow" and the often-parodied but memorable "This is just to say," among others.

A trained physician and native of New Jersey whose mother was from Puerto Rico and whose father was from Great Britain, Williams published poetry, fiction, and criticism, with one of his greatest works, the long, elaborate, mixed-genre volume Paterson appearing late in his career. At the end of his life he again turned to shorter forms, and his Brueghel poem, in dialogue with Auden's (which I posted several days ago), appears in his last collection during his lifetime, Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (1962), which received the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. (Like many a great poetry pioneer, he deserved numerous awards but was overlooked for many of them for most of his career.) I am not, however, going to feature his Brueghel entry (and I should note, he published several poems based on Brueghel's work, including "The Dance"), but instead, a poem from earlier in his career that I taught years ago and love: "The Great Figure."

Here the symbiosis differs from the usual poet's imaginative interaction with the art work. Williams wrote his poem, a Modernist pearl, first, and the painter Charles DeMuth (1883-1935), Williams' friend and one of many gifted artists who was conversant with the leading figures in the literary and visual arts in the first decades of the 20th century, painted his Cubist and Futurist-style oil painting, "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold" after reading Williams' poem, which despite its brevity brings a rainy city street at night fully to life though its flashes of imagery and its resonant music ("gong clangs"). Williams was on his way, after a long day at the clinic, to visit another artist friend, Marsden Hartley, and this poem, which could be considered exemplary of Imagism, was the result. DeMuth was enchanted, and produced his own memorable image in tribute. It has become a signature work of his and of the era.

THE GREAT FIGURE

by William Carlos Williams



Among the rain 
and lights 
I saw the figure 5 
in gold 
on a red 
firetruck 
moving 
tense 
unheeded 
to gong clangs 
siren howls 
and wheels rumbling 
through the dark city. 

Copyright © William Carlos Williams. Used with permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation. All rights reserved.

Here is DeMuth's masterpiece:

Charles Demuth, "I Saw the Figure Five in Gold," 1928, oil, graphite, ink, and gold leaf on paperboard (Upson board), Alfred Stieglitz Collection, 1949, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Amidst the Notes: RIP Pierre Boulez & David Bowie

Pierre Boulez,
by Carlo Bavagnoli

I've been of two minds about the recent deaths of two leading figures in the world of music, Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), and David Bowie (1947-2016), mourning their deaths while also feeling the need to acknowledge key faults--which are not commensurate, let me be clear--that marked the characters of both. Both were musicians of original vision and talent, and born performers. Both left a deep mark not only in the musical cultures of their native countries but in the US and globally. Both wrote music that I turn and return to periodically, for differing but aesthetically and emotionally necessary reasons. So I feel sorrow and grief at their deaths, but at the same time, perhaps akin to the form of negative capability I maintain when reading certain writers like Wallace Stevens or T. S. Eliot, I keep in mind certain criticisms of them, even if the elation and admiration their music brings sometimes temporarily evacuates that criticism. (Keguro at "With(out) Predicates" offers one of his characteristically profound, moving and concise meditations on the necessary distinction between acknowledging the flaws of a deceased person and haranguing someone who is mourning that person as a way of forcing them to engage in such acknowledgement.)

Pierre Boulez was perhaps the towering figure in avant-garde Western classical music in the second half of the 20th century. He became one of the leading composers and judgmental exponents of new music, championing certain composers, especially those of his generation, as well as key figures in the French tradition, and the leader early 20th century modernists. He pursued a parallel career as a conductor, beginning in the 1950s, and perhaps most famously, led the New York Philharmonic from 1970-1975, a tenure that still provokes mixed reviews, though his focus on contemporary composers and the 20th century repertoire was undeniable, and remains unmatched by the Philharmonic even today, in 2016. His conducting style, without a baton and noted for its precision and clarity, brought the modernist composers Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, Anton Webern, Gustav Mahler, Bela Bartók, Maurice Ravel, and Edgard Varèse in particular to life. His own work showed their influences while moving in its own direction; just a few years ago I saw Messagésquisse performed at Columbia University, and it was more beautiful and stirring than any recording of it I'd ever listened to. Boulez, however, could be extremely harsh to the point of cruelty in his criticisms. He famously proclaimed Arnold Schoenberg "dead" at the end of an eponymous essay in which he trashed Schoenberg's failure to fully exploit the possibilities of the dodecaphonic system he had developed, and published the essay shortly after that pioneering composer died. Boulez cruelly described the great Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich as "the third pressing...of Mahler," and cast Karl Amadeus Mozart off as "trite." His fallings out with fellow musicians, including his former teacher Leibowitz, and former experimental compatriots John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, are well recorded. He also apparently never publicly came out of the closet as a gay man, though some critics and many fellow musicians knew about his sexual orientation and relationships. I take all of this into account, but also point to his music itself, which at its best--and there are certainly high points--is the lasting testament of the man.


Pierre Boulez, Répons - Ensemble intercontemporain - Matthias Pintscher, conductor, 2015.


 Pierre Boulez, Messagesquisse - Eric-Maria Couturier - Ensemble intercontemporain, Matthias Pintscher, conductor, 2014.

David Bowie, 2016

David Bowie championed another kind of 20th century music, or several, rock & roll and soul-influenced pop. Born Robert Jones in Brixton, London, he initially launched his career in the late 1960s, and first made the charts with his song "Space Oddity," which introduced the figure Major Tom, whom Bowie would revisit later in his career. In the early 1970s, he created the queer, glam rock alter ego character Ziggy Stardust, the titular figure of his LP The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, and transformed the public figure of the male rock icon through his overtly androgynous persona, which he concluded with Diamond Dogs. Throughout his career, Bowie remade himself, shifting into "plastic soul" in 1975, with the album Young Americans, which featured the overtly queer "John, I'm Only Dancing," one of my favorites, includes one of my favorite songs, and 1976's Station to Station, with the track "Golden Years," which he performed as one of the first white musicians on Soul Train. Subsequent shifts included the adoption of electronic elements and collaboration with Brian Eno, a stagy pop style with "Ashes to Ashes," and his biggest hit, which was one of the top tunes during my senior year of high school and freshman year in college, "Let's Dance." Bowie continued to record up through the final months before his death, issuing his final album, Blackstar, just days before he died. He acted in films, including the still striking and bizarre The Man Who Fell to Earth, an unforgettable vampire in The Hunger's sex trial, and an equally memorable Andy Warhol in the biopic Basquiat. David Bowie flirted with Nazism in his youth, adopting some of its trappings as a kind of fashion statement and aesthetic performance, and also had sex with an underage girl, the first of which I knew, the latter of which I didn't, and both disturb me tremendously. On the racist front, he did speak out more than once about the racism in the music industry, famously calling out MTV's overt discrimination while on air; as to whether the song China Girl is heard as something other than the Orientalism it ostensibly is a matter for others to uncover, and whether he ever atoned for what essentially involves the abuse of a teenager I cannot say. I can speak to the electric feeling I felt as an early adolescent watching him perform in a plastic suit, and later drag, with gender performers Joey Arias and Klaus Nomi, which I link to below.

David Bowie - Let's Dance, EMI Music.


David Bowie & Klaus Nomi - TVC15 & Boys Keep... by ZapMan69

Ian S. MacNiven's "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions

Say you were born at the start of World War I, the second son and heir to a prominent Northeastern steel company fortune on your father's side, and a wealthy, patrician family on your mother's; and say your family milieu was conservative, stolid, pious--a bit narrow-minded, snobbish and prejudiced--but with some sense of civic duty and responsibility; and say your own father, who had gone to Princeton and expected you to as well suffered from serious mental health issues for which there was neither analytic or pharmacological relief, and those same mental health issues would hover around you all your life, manifesting themselves fairly late in life, and your mother was fairly cool to you from the moment of your birth, though you had other powerful, rich female figures who stepped into the breach with love and guidance.

And say you, this scion, had both artistic and scholarly interests, nurtured at your preparatory school, and instead of desiring to follow your older brother into the steel company business you had aesthetic leanings, and chose, to your father's disappointment, to enter Harvard, where you promptly encountered, as your roommate, another extremely wealthy scion and art collector, Joseph Pulitzer, Jr., and by the end of your freshman year you were palling about with the likes of Robert Fitzgerald, Wayne Andrews and Robert Lowell, befriending slightly older prominent cultural avatars like Lincoln Kirstein and Sherry Mangan, and eccentrics like John Brooks Wheelwright, while also chatting up and dining with the Norton Professor of Poetry, who happened to be the by-then increasingly world famous T. S. Eliot; and say that in part through Eliot's intercession and your own boldness you were able to meet another poet you idolized, Ezra Pound, living in Rapallo, in Italy, and instead of encouraging you toward a career as a poet and scholar (as he certainly was in the first case and might be considered eccentrically in the second) he (apocryphally) urged you to become a publisher.

If you somehow happened to fit all those conditions and took the advice of Pound, you would be James Laughlin IV, who did found a publishing house, initially by compiling an annual anthology called New Directives, which eventually would New Directions Publishing Corporation. Laughlin did this while still a Harvard undergraduate, and as Ian S. MacNiven's ample, enjoyable biography "Literchoor Is My Beat": A Life of James Laughlin, Publisher of New Directions (Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2014) makes clear, Laughlin's creative and intellectual affinities, combined with a compulsion to work, played a key role in the development of what we think of as American literary Modernism, particularly in terms of poetry. When Laughlin got going in the late 1930s, of course, Eliot and Pound, as well as William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Louis Zukovsky, and others had already begun publishing their work, and several of these poets, like Eliot, were already well known and acclaimed.

Yet Laughlin's decision to bring together reprint older and newer work by them, particularly in terms of Pound and Williams, set the stage for their wider recognition. That he managed this in the midst of attending classes and sitting for exams, participating in other school activities like the Harvard Advocate, taking off on holidays to ski--once missing by half a year frantic communiqués from Williams to print more copies of the great poet's collection White Mule, which had received excellent reviews, because Laughlin was off in New Zealand and nearly impossible to reach--and semesters to traipse about Europe (expressing pro-Nazi sentiments at first, until he woke up), and courting various young women, is almost mind-boggling. It did take him seven years to complete his degree, though he did earn it cum laude. (As for the skiing, he would soon thereafter establish a ski resort, Alta, still standing and drawing afficionados in Utah.)

Laughlin did manage all of this and more, though not without the assiduous assistance of a range of people, some of them noteworthy figures in their own right, including writers Kenneth Rexroth, Hayden Carruth, and Delmore Schwartz, until the latter's paranoia finally drove him away not only from Laughlin but to an early death, while other longstanding helpmeets, like Gertrude Huston, for many years his mistress, in-house designer and eventually his third and final wife, remain little known even today to history. MacNiven guides readers through Laughlin's entire history, beginning with the origins of the American Laughlins, originally from Ireland though they liked to claim Scottish heritage--it being more respectable--and their march toward industrial success, which provided James Laughlin with the financial means to pursue his avocation. Indeed, MacNiven does not stint on details at any point, though as the years progress and events pile upon themselves, he does start to pare the tapestry of the narrative down.

At its core lies several main threads: Laughlin's longstanding relationship with Pound, which would be perhaps the most important of his adult life; his struggles with his own art-making, and the persistent feeling that his work and life--except the womanizing--not only kept him away from but overshadowed his pressing desire to write poems; his lurking fear of having inherited the family's "madness," which destroyed his father and several uncles; and his musical chair games with his female lovers, some of whom, like Huston, became his wife, while others, like Lady Maria (Britneva) St. Just, would retain his lifelong affection. MacNiven devotes many pages to each of these biographical strands, using a great deal of Laughlin's personal--and often erotic--poetry not just for illustration but sometimes as factual proof. I had not thought of Laughlin as a documentary poet, but sometimes, MacNiven suggests, particularly in works like Byways, he was.

Though I was familiar with Pound's history, a good deal of the material here felt new to me, in part because of how important Laughlin's hand was in making Pound's reputation, pushing it relentlessly despite the elder poet's diffidence and truculence, and, as his World War II fascistic radio broadcasts represented, treasonous behavior. From Pound Laughlin gained not just a landmark author--crazy as he was--but ideas, however ill-formed, about poetry, art, economics, the world, as well as a deep intellectual, almost filial bond. Pound provided a male anchor that Laughlin's father Hughart could not. Laughlin did not have a particular aesthetic or even political stance, or rather, belonged to no school, but he did possess a keen eye for the new and formally experimental, particularly through the first 25 years of his firm, and Pound and Pound's poetry, like William Carlos Williams and his work, was central to that sense of what poetry could be. As the biography's title demonstrates, Laughlin even communicated in his letters using a playful, faux-naif Poundian idiom for his entire adult life. Pound grows no less politically repulsive here, but, especially in terms of Laughlin's life and career, considerably more significant.

Part of Laughlin's connection with Pound involved a casual attitude to racial and ethnic slurs, though Laughlin had already begun to break away from a good deal of the racism and ethnocentrism of his familial milieu by the time he reached college; at the college of "Jews and Beaconhillites," as his father labeled it, he was casting a far wider social net than anyone in his family could imagine, and not just for lunch dates and evening parties. (And Williams, half-Puerto Rican, was no stranger to racist slurs either.) Alongside the devotion to Pound, MacNiven shows, Laughlin spotted a great deal of other talent, either directly or after the recommendation of others. He nearly became the publisher of Elizabeth Bishop, for example, but for a sexist comment; he did, however, catch on early with Tennessee Williams and the impoverished Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, who would become a sensation in the US, and two of his other favorites, Henry Miller and Thomas Merton, would serve as central figures of wings of the American counterculture for years to come. He also introduced a great deal of Modernist European literature, as well as some Asian and Latin American writing, into American bookstores, schools and homes, including Gabriel García Lorca, Boris Pasternak, Vladimir Nabokov, Pablo Neruda, Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Cardenal, and Hermann Hesse, whose Siddhartha remains a strong backlist seller. Alongside these authors, his Alvin Lustig-designed covers--with other famous designers, including Ray Johnson later--would become iconic for generations of readers, especially young ones.

Part of his prospecting came as a result of his work, which I had never heard about, for the Ford Foundation, working in conjunction with the University of Chicago's former boy-genius of a president Robert Maynard Hutchins. As Laughlin's marriage disintegrated and his relationship with his eldest son Henry remained contentious (a younger son, Robert, suffering from what was probably inherited bipolar disorder, would commit suicide in New York in the 1970s), the publisher-poet traveled all over the globe, leaving his company in the care of a trusted assistant, and serving as an editor-publisher for Ford's and the US government's Cold War (and propagandistic) national literary annuals. While in Asia he immersed himself in what was for him mostly unknown literary traditions, except where Pound had offered glimmers, with the result that he ended up bringing out volumes by Raja Rao, Osamu Dazai, Yukio Mishima.

Although Laughlin did mostly shed his family's anti-Semitism, and included Hughes in an early annual, MacNiven notes that he published no African American authors, yet strangely does not mention perhaps the first one--and for many years the only one--whose books he did, Bob Kaufman, one of the most original Beat and midcentury poets. Laughlin also published few Asian American or Latino (other than Williams, though until recently he was not considered such) authors till far into his publishing tenure, and in general was no great pacesetter in terms of race. He also missed out on publishing many of the major Beat poets, finding their behavior repellent, though he did issue works by important members of other mid-century experimental schools, including the San Francisco Renaissance (Duncan, Ferlinghetti) and the Black Mountain writers (Creeley, Levertov), as well as Gary Snyder, who would later count as one New Directions' Pulitzer Prize winners.

Another blind spot, oddly, was the New York School, three of whose members, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, and Frank O'Hara, attended Harvard a decade after Laughlin. In fiction, the domestic track record was quite eccentric, but Kay Boyle, John Hawkes, Edward Dahlberg, and later Walter Abish and Clarice Lispector would be among the great finds. (After his death, of course, came the polestars of W. G. Sebald and the inexhaustible Roberto Bolaño.) He published one of Vladimir Nabokov's first books written in English, but passed on Lolita. (Imagine if he had taken it.) Barney Rosset's Grove Press, which emerged in the late 1950s, was a spur to get back on the ball. One of the pleasures of this biography is MacNiven's accounts of Laughlin's interactions with many of these figures, including Djuna Barnes and the wily Nabokov; as his days start to dwindle in the 1970s and his great friends die, a wistful tone colors his correspondence and tinges MacNiven's prose. In these final 20 years, particularly as Laughlin's health worsened, Guy Davenport becomes a key correspondent, which provided the pretext for one of the late examples of Laughlin's daring, which involved pushing for the publication of Davenport's potentially scandalous prose. (There was, however, no scandal.)

I should note that I never met James Laughlin in person, though he was still alive when New Directions accepted Annotations; I believe we may have spoken on the phone, though we mainly communicated through the intermediary of then editor, now President of the firm Barbara Epler. I knew that he was well up in years and spent most of his time in Connecticut, though I had no sense of the larger story of the firm, its rich and often ground-breaking history, or of Laughlin himself. I did know that he wanted to have a glossary at the end of the book, in part to learn what "rudipoots" were, and that he was willing to sign off on the book's publication. He got the glossary, the book appeared, he passed away shortly thereafter, and it would be almost thirty years later--today--through MacNiven's efforts that I discovered a great deal more about this extraordinary person, his important work as poet and publisher, and about a vital sector of the  landscape of 20th century American and global literature. 

Alain Locke's Proper Burial + Poem

Alain Locke,
by Winold Reiss, c. 1921

In 1954, Alain Leroy Locke (b. 1885), one of the chief intellectual forebears and anchors of the Harlem Renaissance, an important theoretician of philosophical pragmatism, and the author who coined the term "New Negro," which was the title of his landmark, eponymous anthology and essay, announcing the arrival of a new artistic, social and cultural movement, died in New York City. For many decades Locke had been Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Howard University, from which he was temporarily dismissed for three years in the 1920s, before being reinstated, for teaching a course on race relations. It was at Howard that he taught Toni Morrison and many other major African American artists and other cultural and political figures.

A native of Philadelphia, Locke had graduated from Harvard College with highest honors and been elected to Phi Beta Kappa, and in 1907 became the first African American recipient of a Rhodes Scholarship, allowing him to study at University of Oxford's Hertford College, after which he studied at the University of Berlin, before returning to Harvard to receive his Ph.D. in philosophy in 1918. All of the important figures in the Harlem Renaissance knew and interacted with Locke; for some, like Langston Hughes, who would study at Howard in part through Locke's urging, he played a key role in cultivating their intellectual development. Like a number of his fellow Harlem Renaissance peers, Locke was also gay, though this was not widely known beyond his close associates and other Harlem Renaissance figures until after his death.

The container that held Locke's ashes
(Astrid Riecken/Washington Post)

Despite his stature, upon his death and after his cremation, his ashes were not interred anywhere, but passed into the custody of his estate executor, dear friend and fellow educator, Arthur Huff Fauset, half-brother of Harlem Renaissance author Jesse Redmon Fauset. After Fauset's death in 1983, his 91-year-old niece, Conchita Porter Morison, received the cremated remains and she contacted her friend, Sadie Mitchell, who also knew Locke and Arthur Fauset. Mitchell would serve as an "intermediary" with Locke's longtime employer to secure a place for the late philosopher's remains. When Howard coordinator of music history J. Weldon Norris traveled to Philadelphia in the mid-1990s, Mitchell passed on the ashes to him. From Norris the remains went to Howard's renowned archives, the Moorland Spingarn Research Center, where Locke's papers are stored, and then on to the W. Montague Cobb Research Laboratory, where they were repackaged in a simple urn and placed in a locked safe by then director Mark Mack.

Finally, as Frances Stead Sellers reported in a Washington Post article on September 12, Locke's ashes were buried in Capitol Hill Congressional Cemetery, in a September 13 ceremony funded by African-American Rhodes Scholars, of whom there are over six dozen now. This tribute and proper memorial, with an engraved granite headstone, arose during planning by the Association of American Rhodes Scholars, in conjunction with Howard, for a symposium to honor the centenary of Locke's Rhodes Scholarship. In the process of conceiving the symposium, the Association learned of the status and location of Locke's remains, and through the financial support of Black Rhodes Scholars, he is now properly laid to rest.

According to Stead Seller's article, his headstone appears as follows:

Alain Leroy Locke, it reads, 1885-1954: “Herald of the Harlem Renaissance, Exponent of Cultural Pluralism.” On the reverse side are four symbols: a nine-pointed Baha’i star representing the religion that emphasizes the spiritual unity of humankind; a Zimbabwe bird, the emblem of the African country formerly called Rhodesia, which the American Rhodes community adopted; a lambda, symbolizing gay and lesbian rights; and Phi Beta Sigma, the fraternity Locke joined at Howard.

Alain Locke, by Betsy
Graves Reyneau

Some years ago, I wrote a short poem for Locke that I've never published, but in his honor, I'm posting it here. He was, as the Washington Post article notes, and as Toni Morrison described in her public conversation with Ishmael Reed at Margaret and Quincy Troupe's Harlem Arts Salon last year, utterly "fastidious,"  so I hope the poem possesses some of the spirit of his rigor too. He was an extraordinary figure, one of so many of his time and era, who have made so much that followed him possible, in this country and beyond. I thus share with you "Alain Locke at Stoughton Hall" (Stoughton is one of the freshman dorms at Harvard, Sever is the home of Harvard's philosophy department, William Henry Lewis was one the college's first and black football stars, William Monroe Trotter one of its famous black activist alumni. Du Bois needs no introduction).

ALAIN LOCKE IN STOUGHTON HALL
 
Between their theses he writes his own.
 
Between "the general theory of value"
 
and "beauty consisting in ideal forms"
 
he pens fresh hypotheses. Back, past
 
Pliny and Mary Locke to the first ones,
 
speechless and staggering sick with sea
 
and living memories of sour-sour, gold-
 
weights, delta deities ghosting

into mastlines. Dread of these forlorn

shores. Dread of salty tongues' renaming
 
them, their own names buried under winter-

ed paving stones. In the spirits' graveless

inquietude, the cries of two centuries'

mute nights, he has grasped his nation's
 
true history: resistance and the cold-
 
hearted ability to make oneself
 
anew remain his true inheritance.
 
***

           
His journey from colored Philadelphia
 
to the Square: the hero's solitary
 
trajectory.  Within the dreamsongs
 
guiding him out of yesterday's

sorrows furl maps of righteousness
 
and Quaker industry. Here he treads
 
as he did through the schoolyards
 
and alleyways of fists, brick valleys
 
of indifference. Tiny warrior,
 
he holds little fear of being the queer
 
exception defying local customs,
 
minister of his own natural law.
 
As for fools and impolitic white
 
people, he suffers them coolly as any
 
politico, performing the acrobatics
 
by which he balances his days
 
with "master minds" in Sever, nights
 
at the library, the Boylston laboratories.
 
Someday some will claim they knew
 
him. Some days he thinks they'll recall him
 
more swiftly than the footballer Lewis,
 
the agile scholar and gem-eyed DuBois,
 
the Boston-born rebel Trotter.
 
***

You are the emblem of Negro genius.
 
You are the affirmation of the plural cause.
 
You are the angel gliding between histories
 
you must use and ones that silence you,
 
man, African, American, Harvardian, human.

Amid this desert of touch, threadbare

society of friends who can never

truly comprehend or love you,

amid the arid propositions of Kant,
 
Plato and Aristotle, Hegel and Santayana,
 
which once might have been your sextants,
 
you chart your passage into the bay
 
of your people’s stories, voyage

of a mind and vision honed.

Sunday now, and distant bells summon

hungry souls. Freedom is sailing
 
by the compass of possibility, fearless,
 
even if with no ship or sea at all.
 
You will stay and write until
 
your heart runs out.  You will take this
 
dark knowledge and spread it.

Copyright © John Keene, 2014. All rights reserved.

Baden-Baden 1927 at Gotham Chamber Opera

The set, designed by Georg Baselitz
and Court Wilson

In 1927, two years before the US Stock Market crash, on the eve of the Great Depression and the eventual fall of Germany's democratic republican government, the organizers of the German Chamber Music Festival invited four young composers each to present a Zeitoper (opera of the current moment/time). Two were German: Kurt Weill and Paul Hindemith; one was Austrian, Ernst Toch; and the fourth, Darius Milhaud, was French. Additionally, Weill, Toch and Milhaud were Jewish composers coming of age in the moment just before National Socialist fascism began infecting the body politic of Germany, and later that of Austria. Three of them also constituted a distinct strand of the contemporary European musical avant-garde: Weill incorporated cabaret tunes, other forms of popular music, and English texts, often inflected by his left-leaning convictions; Hindemith played with structure and daring content, especially in his initial trio of operas; and Milhaud drew from and wove jazz idioms into his scores.

From Mahagonny-Songspiel
(Photo by Richard Termine)

So the future was then, in Baden-Baden. Each of the selected composers brought to the festival's spectators a brief, pared-down operatic work he felt reflected the times. Kurt Weill staged his Mahagonny-Songspiel, a loosely linked six-song prequel to his masterpiece with Bertolt Brecht, Der Aufstieg und der Fall des Stadts Mahagonny (The Rise and the Fall of the City of Mahagonny). Paul Hindemith, who had become a young master of the Zeitoper format, presented his palindromic Hin und zurück (There and Back), which was in many ways a preparatory step for his larger three-act Neues vom Tage several years alter. Darius Milhaud, one of the key figures in Les Six, the French Modernist musical collective, offered a violent monodrama, L'enlèvement d'Europe (The Abduction of Europa); and Ernst Toch, who had begun to develop his own polyphonic style, presented the seemingly light confection Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse (The Princess and the Pea).
Thanks to the Gotham Chamber Opera, now in its 12th season, today's opera lovers got a chance to hear all four operas in one evening, as spectators might have in that German spa town in July of 1927. The New York versions, directed by Scotsman Paul Curran, however, which ran from October 23-29, were staged in a distinctly up-to-date fashion, with production design by German artist Georg Baselitz and Court Watson, hinging the theme of "What Is Art?", a question as relevant in the Modernist ferment of the 1920s as it is in our post-post-modern moment. Yet this underlying theme, as it played out in the staging, did not lend itself well to all of the works. On the other hand, the opera company cast--led by star soprano Helen Donath, with soprano Maeve Höglund, mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera, tenors Daniel Montenegro and Matthew Tuell, baritone Michael Mayes and bass John Cheek--and the orchestra, led by conductor Neal Goren, did a superb job of bringing each of the works to life musically. My opera companion noted the textural richness the small orchestra captured in each work, and the pianists accompanying the orchestra for the Hindemith piece played with untrammeled contrapuntal fury, giving listeners the sense of a scene exploding forth into being. (I could easily sit through those opening bars again and again.)

From Hin und zurück
(Photo by Richard Termine)

Milhaud's opera, one of his trio of Opéras-minutes and only 8 minutes long, was perhaps the best suited to the theme and set, as the work's singers, appearing as gallery attendees admiring the set's immense canvas featuring a Baselitz-style image, slid from their silent appreciation to a recounting of the musical work's events. Milhaud's lush but tiny score was over before it began, with a dead body as its exclamation point. Toch's literal retelling of the story "The Princess and the Pea," and its dramatic and musical whimsy, transposed onto a reality-show frame, was aesthetically out of joint with everything else. The set, which now included a giant bed atop whose back the prince initially perched, before it turned around to reveal a Himalayan pile of mattresses on which the putative prince capered, wracked my nerves; instead of focusing on Toch's cheery melodies, I found myself praying no one fell from that precarious aerie. The opera company might moreover have done more to explore the deeper idea in the fairytale and in Toch's work, of the beloved needing to possess a particular kind of purity, especially given Toch's background and the looming consequences of racialization in subsequent decades.
After a short break, Hindemith's 12-minute "Sketch mit Musik," as he described it, unfolded in thrilling fashion. Very much redolent of silent movies--then current--and Expressionist works in all genres--visual art, literature, music--Hin und zurück tells the story of a woman who decides to have breakfast with her grandmother when her husband arrives home with with a gift for her birthday. She also receives a letter from her lover, which the husband sees, and he ends up shooting her before jumping out of the window. In 6 minutes! This being an avant-garde work, an angel-like figure appears, sings that nothing matters, and rewinds the entire story, not just dramatically--which means that the wife, her husband, and granny all move backwards--but musically, as a palindrome. It was over almost as soon as it began, but it made me wonder whether it influenced some of the internal musical mirroring in works by Hindemith's peers, including Bela Bartók and Alban Berg, who has palindromes in both his "Chamber Concerto" and his final, unfinished opera Lulu.

From Die Prinzessin auf der Erbse
(Photo by Richard Termine)

My main reason for attending the concert, though, was to hear Kurt Weill's music performed live. I had never heard anything by him in a live setting, so the six Mahagonny-Songspiel songs, several of which I knew pretty well, were a revelation, chief among them Elisabeth Hauptmann's English-language parodies the "Alabama Song" and the "Benares Song." The singers, especially the famous soprano Helen Donath, served up the perfect mixture of beauty and yearning as she crooned, "Oh moon, of Alabama…." The staging, however, did neither the songs nor the concept behind them, no credit. The cast performed one of them on treadmills (?), and as with Toch's opera, I found myself focusing more on their personal safety than on what they were singing. The Mahagonny songs' commentary on the underside of jazz age prosperity--dissolution, poverty, homelessness, the desire for escape with no place, not even Mahagonny, offering anything but illusion--lacked its reflection in the set, not least when a performer wandered around in his underwear (huh?), though the performers did their best to bring the songs to life. The staging was, unfortunately, a lost opportunity. For a very affordable price on a fall evening, though, the opportunity to see four live early 20th century operas, whatever their failings, was an excellent deal.

The cast, with the conductor

Bloomsday: Ulysses in 3 Minutes

Today is Bloomsday, the day that Leopold Bloom (I almost typed Harold--!) wandered around Dublin, thus providing the plot, slender though it was and is, of James Joyce's and Irish, English-language and world literature's greatest novels, Ulysses. Most people probably don't get much further than "Stately plump Buck Mulligan..." the phrase that opens the novel, and it is quite a slog at points, though thrilling at others--it ends with Mollie Bloom's multipage orgasm--with enough colorful characters, obscure words, rhetorical play, recondite references, thematic shifts, and more, to keep the professors at work for years, which is not exactly how Joyce put it but close enough.

For those who want a bit of Joyce's Ulysses but  can't find the time just yet, here, from the Irish Times, are the Temple Bar Company's Anne Tyrrell, Paul Kennedy and Robert Gogan performing a three-minute version of Ulysses.

Here's a screenshot:

And though I can't get the video to play on Firefox, it does play fine on Safari and Chrome.



And here is a map of the various Ulysses sites in and around Dublin (with legend), should you happen to find yourself there today or anytime:

Poem/Translation: Xavier Villaurrutia

For a long time I've loved the poetry of Xavier Villaurrutia (1903-1950), one of the greatest poets in Mexican and Latin American literature, and I've read translations of his work that I liked, but I've only tinkered with translating one or two poems of his, publishing none of them on here. Back in September 2005, however, I did publish one of Rachel Benson's translations, of his poem "Love Is an Anguish, A Question," and also posted my typical potted biography of the poet as an introduction.

Recently during this tiny breather between classes I decided to tackle one of his masterpieces that I mentioned in that post, the haunting "Nocturno de Los Ángeles," one of a group of poems in this genre, the "nocturne," that Villaurrutia published in his collection "Nostálgia de Muerte" in 1938. He had previously published an entire collection in 1933 entitled "Nocturnos." This exceptional example of the form is, as you will see, more openly homoerotic than its predecessors, though all of the ones he wrote, as well as many of his other poems, possess a queer thematic undertow.

The very idea of a poem invoking and celebrating the night and nocturnal life suggests and opens up queer possibilities for a gay poet, especially one such as Villaurrutia, who wrote before the more widespread acceptance, in Mexico and elsewhere, of LGBTIQ literature. In the poem "Nocturno," he offers a definition of sorts, beginning "Todo lo que la noche/dibuja con su mano/de sombra;/el placer que revela/el vicio que desnuda" (Everything that the night/draws with its shadowy/hand;/the pleasure it reveals/the ugliness it lays bare." There is Villaurrutia's thematics of the "nocture" in a stanza. Turning darker in tone and imagery towards the end of life, they also point to his chief strategy for revealing and concealing at the same time his interests, as a man and poet, among them an abiding cosmopolitanism, a probing interest in metaphysics and the deeper realities behind and beyond the surface of things, and, rather obviously, queer desire and sociality.

Often in Villaurrutia's poems the rhetoric and discourse cut, at differing angles, through the abstractions; what is not said, "the secret" he broaches below, "shatters" into revelation nevertheless through its presence and invocation. We know it; he chooses to share it with by not sharing it openly. Except below, and in a few other poems. He did not need to hide among his circle of friends, the important group of modernist poets centered in Mexico City, nor was he hiding much when he was translating foreign writers including André Gide and Langston Hughes. His student Octavio Paz, among others, was in on the secret. As all of us who read his poems eventually are.

"Nocturno de Los Ángeles" is one of his most beautiful. It is as strange (with angels, no less) as Rilke, but distinctly Villaurrutia's gem. I recommend reading the English and Spanish aloud, to get the fullest sense of what he's doing. The Spanish, unsurprisingly, casts a greater spell than (my workmanly) English (translation) ever can, at least to my ear. Still, enjoy!

NOCTURNO DE LOS ÁNGELES
to Agustin J. Fink

You could say the streets flow sweetly into the night.
The lights are not so bright that they actually reveal the secret,
the secret that men who come and go know,
because everyone is in on the secret
and nothing would be gained by shattering it
     into a thousand pieces
if, on the one hand, it is so sweet to keep
and share it only with the one you choose.

If each one were to say at a given moment,
in only one word, what he thinks,
the six letters of DESIRE would form
an enormous, luminous scar,
a constellation more ancient, more brilliant
     than any other.
And that constellation would be like a sex organ burning
in the deep body of the night,
or, better, like the Gemini who for the first time
     in their lives
saw themselves brow to brow, eye to eye,
and then took each other in their arms forever.

Suddenly the river of the street peoples with thirsty beings,
they stroll, they pause, they walk on by.
They exchange glances, they dare smiles.
They improbably couple up.

There are shadowy bends and banks,
edges of indefinable and bottomless forms
and sudden blinding shafts of light
and doors that give way to the slightest pressures.

The river of the street stands deserted for a moment.
Soon it seems to rearrange itself by itself
longing to begin again.
For a moment it stays paralyzed, mute, yearning
like the heart between two orgasms.

But a new pulsation, a new beat
casts into the river of the street new thirsty beings.
They cruise, intermingle, lift off.
The fly above the earth.
They swim on foot, so miraculously
that no one would dare to say they were not walking.

They're angels!
They've come down to earth
by invisible ladders.
They come from the sea, that mirror of the sky,
in ships of smoke and shadow,
to find themselves, conjoin themselves with mortals,
to surrender their brows to the thighs of women,
let others feverishly caress their bodies,
as other bodies search for theirs until they find them
as they find them when closing
their lips on the same mouth,
wearing out their mouths unused for so long,
setting free their tongues of flame,
chanting the songs, the pledges and the cursewords
in which men concentrate the ancient mystery
of flesh, blood and desire.

They take assumed names, divinely simple.
They call themselves Dick or John, or Marvin or Louis.
In no way way beyond their beauty can they be
    distinguished from mortals.
They stroll, they pause, they walk on by.
They exchange glances, they dare smiles.
They improbably couple up.

They smile maliciously ascending
the hotel elevators
where they can still practice slow and vertical flight.
On their nude bodies are heavenly marks--
signs, stars, blue tattooed letters.
They fall back into bed, drown themselves in pillows
that make them recall, for a moment, the clouds. 
But they close their eyes in order to give themselves up
to the pleasures of their mysterious incarnations,
and, when they sleep, they dream of mortals, not angels.

Los Angeles, California

Copyright © Estate of Xavier Villarrutia. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Translation by John Keene, 2013.


NOCTURNO DE LOS ÁNGELES
a Agustín J. Fink

Se diría que las calles fluyen dulcemente en la noche.
Las luces no son tan vivas que logren desvelar el secreto,
el secreto que los hombres que van y vienen conocen,
porque todos están en el secreto
y nada se ganaría con partirlo en mil pedazos
si, por el contrario, es tan dulce guardarlo
y compartirlo sólo con la persona elegida.

Si cada uno dijera en un momento dado,
en sólo una palabra, lo que piensa,
las cinco letras del DESEO formarían una enorme
      cicatriz luminosa,
una constelación más antigua, más viva aún que las otras.
Y esa constelación sería como un ardiente sexo
en el profundo cuerpo de la noche,
o, mejor, como los Gemelos que por vez primera en la vida
se miraran de frente, a los ojos, y se abrazaran
      ya para siempre.

De pronto el río de la calle se puebla de sedientos seres,
caminan, se detienen, prosiguen.
Cambian miradas, atreven sonrisas,
forman imprevistas parejas...

Hay recodos y bancos de sombra,
orillas de indefinibles formas profundas
y súbitos huecos de luz que ciega
y puertas que ceden a la presión más leve.

El río de la calle queda desierto un instante.
Luego parece remontar de sí mismo
deseoso de volver a empezar.
Queda un momento paralizado, mudo, anhelante
como el corazón entre dos espasmos.

Pero una nueva pulsación, un nuevo latido
arroja al río de la calle nuevos sedientos seres.
Se cruzan, se entrecruzan y suben.
Vuelan a ras de tierra.
Nadan de pie, tan milagrosamente
que nadie se atrevería a decir que no caminan.

¡Son los ángeles!
Han bajado a la tierra
por invisibles escalas.
Vienen del mar, que es el espejo del cielo,
en barcos de humo y sombra,
a fundirse y confundirse con los mortales,
a rendir sus frentes en los muslos de las mujeres,
a dejar que otras manos palpen sus cuerpos febrilmente,
y que otros cuerpos busquen los suyos hasta encontrarlos
como se encuentran al cerrarse los labios de una misma boca,
a fatigar su boca tanto tiempo inactiva,
a poner en libertad sus lenguas de fuego,
a decir las canciones, los juramentos, las malas palabras
en que los hombres concentran el antiguo misterio
de la carne, la sangre y el deseo.
Tienen nombres supuestos, divinamente sencillos.
Se llaman Dick o John, o Marvin o Louis.
En nada sino en la belleza se distinguen de los mortales.
Caminan, se detienen, prosiguen.
Cambian miradas, atreven sonrisas.
Forman imprevistas parejas.

Sonríen maliciosamente al subir en los ascensores de los hoteles
donde aún se practica el vuelo lento y vertical.
En sus cuerpos desnudos hay huellas celestiales;
signos, estrellas y letras azules.
Se dejan caer en las camas, se hunden en las almohadas
que los hacen pensar todavía un momento en las nubes.
Pero cierran los ojos para entregarse mejor a los goces
     de su encarnación misteriosa,
y, cuando duermen, sueñan no con los ángeles sino con los mortales.

Los Angeles, California

A Little of This, A Little of That

Today, after a false morning alarm, which involved the electricity surging on while I was in the shower,    only to shut off not even 10 minutes later, it finally clicked back on as I was scrubbing the refrigerator clean of its foetor, and there was easily enough within its walls and those of the little cooler that became a makeshift mini-fridge to supply biochemistry experiments at every local university and college. So far, it has held. We are expecting a nor'easter or some other serious storm tomorrow, with high winds and waterline surges, so I am praying that whatever the problem turned out to be, our local energy company, PSE&G, has resolved it for the future. We went nearly eight days without electricity, in the absence, at least in our area, of severe flooding or extensive pole damage. The capacitors (?) in the transformers, I heard someone say on the radio. PSE&G has said anything at all about what was wrong, instead referring us to a vague online article. Once the entire city and other towns, the worst hit of which will require many more weeks, perhaps even months, of rebuilding at every level, have power and are on the mend, I plan to suggest to every official I can find that they take into account the recommendations of the American Society of Engineers, who offered useful suggestions in 2009 on how to address the storm Hurricane Sandy turned out to be, with a push for greater regulation of the power companies, and for those at the federal level, I will do my part in renewed efforts to get them to pay attention to global warming and climate change.

===




Unlike many parts of New Jersey, our voting precinct thankfully was functional, so we didn't have to try either the provisional ballot or far more experimental email/fax options, and C and I went to vote first thing this morning. The building, a nearby senior center, had gotten electricity a night or two ago, and was buzzing when we arrived. I have never seen it that busy; perhaps it was in 2008, though because I had to be in Chicago to teach I voted by absentee then, with the benefit that I was able to head down after class to Grant Park, where then President-elect Barack Obama, First Lady Michelle Obama, and the First daughters Sasha and Malia Obama greeted the enthusiastic, festival-like crowd. Tonight I will be at home, I hope with working lights, TV and Internet, and remain cautiously optimistic that the president will be reelected and that the Democrats will not only retain the US Senate but gain a few seats in the bargain. My hopes for the US House are less expansive, but I would love to be surprised in a positive way (the departures of the likes of Michele Bachmann, Allen West, being more important than the lagniappe of Democratic control; or should I make that the reverse? etc.).

I've expressed my thoughts on the last four years on here before, but I do think the President has some real accomplishments, such as the Affordable Care Act, the bailout of the auto industry, Dodd-Frank (as weak as it nevertheless is), the righting (if not the less successful right-winging, i.e., austeritization) of the eoconomy after the debacle of Bush, the two new Supreme Court justices (Sotomayor and Kagan), his glacial affirmation of same-sex marriage and the repeal of Don't Ask, Don't Tell, and the increasing greening of the economy. His record on  a range of other issues, warmaking and warmongering has been more mixed, with the Iraq War's end more of a mulligan and Afghanistan mostly a bloody wash, the horrendous National Defense Authorization Act, the normalization of drone warfare, the demonization of whistleblowers, the continuance of Bush's War on Terror and multi-decade War on Drugs, the magazine-wielding against Iran, and other deleterious policies that crush our civil liberties, extend the worst aspects of the military industrial state, and advance neoliberalism and neoconservatism all reasons to give a voter pause. As has tended to be the case in presidential elections, the Republican nominee, Mitt Romney, a hyper-secretive, ultra-rich Trojan Horse for the plutocracy, is far, far worse. In fact, he might be the worst Republican nominee I had the opportunity to vote against in my lifetime. Almost nothing he says is consistent with what he's said, let alone done, in the past, and his Vice Presidential running mate, Rand-roid Paul Ryan (R-WI), is so far to the right he's almost off the charts.

I don't think even they can steal this election, as occurred in 2000; but every election in the US is always a leap into the dark, with those running things the only ones with strike matches and a map at hand. Still, I think Obama will win reelection, and when that's certified, the real work begins again.

===

The transportation systems connecting the New York metropolitan area are still recovering from the hurricane and its aftermath. As of today, there is no PATH train service originating from the World Trade Center, which is one end of the line whose other is Newark. There is also no Newark Light Rail or subway train yet. Yesterday I took C to the NY Waterway ferry to NYC; the first departure point, at Paulus Hook, had a line easily a half-mile long. The second pier, at Newport, appeared more manageable, and despite his bus hitting a taxi, he got to work. I on the other hand had to drive to Newark, and picked up a colleague who also was teaching on Mondays. Gasoline is still scarce in many parts of this area, but I had filled up the car, which has decent fuel economy, and was able to ferry us to the university without a problem. Getting home was more a challenge; the traffic exiting Newark was slower than molasses in the cold, and I probably burned twice as much gas leaving as arriving. I am glad, though, that I did not get rid of my little car, which carried me, and my cousin when I wasn't in town, all over Chicago and the Midwest. I sometimes think I no longer really need it, and then an event like the hurricane occurs that reminds me how necessary it can be, even if, under regular circumstances, public transportation is a far more ecologically and financial sound option.

Many of my students are still dealing with the effects of the hurricane. Many also lost electricity and either had just gotten it back or were still waiting. One student who lives in Newark told me that her mayor, Cory Booker, had brought her family and others pizza to ensure they ate during one chilly, light-less night. Another who lives in Manhattan told me it took him four hours driving to school via the Lincoln Tunnel. Another is still without electricity and was so worried about his grade he sent me multiple pleading emails not to penalize him for not submitting an assignment. The university has asked us to be flexible, and one of the things I've learned over many years of teaching is that creating a syllabus that you can compress or expand depending upon circumstances--though with lots of notice especially for undergraduates--is the best plan. In the undergraduate Afro-Latin literature class we are now reading Mayra Montero's tragic novel The Messenger, which I trust will draw the students back into the course, and in the graduate class we're talking about Ray Kurzweil's interest in "the singularity" and the possibility of infinite life, or, as Jean-François Lyotard suggests in his famous article, of the survival of the mind after the death of the body, yet another point on the spectrum of the transhuman as well as the posthuman, which this hurricane's terrible effects held up as if under a magnifying glass.  In both courses we are working around the challenges the lost last week and the early part of this one have dealt us. Above all I sincerely hope every one of my students and their families, like everyone else affected by the storm, is on the path to recovery.

===

Congratulations to the San Francisco Giants, who won this year's World Series by defeating the Detroit Tigers in 4 straight games. The Giants, mostly unheralded all season and featuring a bevy of talented batters from Venezuela as well as excellent starting and relief pitching, took the final two games of the National League Championship Series from my St. Louis Cardinals, last year's Series champs, who had already knocked out the top NL team, the Washington Nationals, then proceeded to blank the Tigers in the first three games, allowing runs only in the fourth and final game. Many on this roster were also on the team that won the 2010 World Series, vanquishing the Texas Rangers, and they still have the talent and drive to return next year, though something tells me it'll be a new NL team vying for and winning the crown.

===

Rest in piece, Elliott Carter, after 103 years of innovative composing. An American original!

10 Most Difficult Books? + Coelho Slams Joyce

So often I'll Tweet things I hope to blog about, then I look up and an entire week has passed without the planned post. I do accomplish the required tasks, though, so I guess that's what's most important. But before another week zipped by I said I must write even a brief entry about this list, originally posted by Emily Colette Williams and Garth Risk Hallberg (I love that name) at The Millions, of what they find to be the top 10 most difficult books, which are mostly the most difficult novels, with two works of philosophy, and one long book of poetry. So first, the list, as reposted by Alison Flood at the Guardian's website:

Nightwood by Djuna Barnes;
A Tale of a Tub by Jonathan Swift;
The Phenomenology of Spirit by G. F. Hegel;
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf;
Clarissa, or, The History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson;
Finnegans Wake by James Joyce;
Being and Time by Martin Heidegger;
The Faerie Queene by Edmund Spenser;
The Making of Americans by Gertrude Stein;
and Women and Men by Joseph McElroy.

They have set up a conversation on these books on Publishers Weekly's website. I am going to say that I agree with them about 7 of these books, of which I have begun 7, but have finished only three: 1) Nightwood; 2) To the Lighthouse; and 3) Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady. I read the first two for pleasure and curiosity, the third for a graduate class. I have started but never finished The Phenomenology of the Spirit, Finnegans Wake, Being and Time, The Fairie Queene, or The Making of Americans. I have never even begun A Tale of the Tub or Women and Men. Nightwood is written as if its author was high and striving to twist the entire book into a series of knots, but it isn't not too long, so if you stick with it, you can at least finish it even if you don't fully grasp it. To The Lighthouse isn't difficult at all, in my opinion, but it requires, like the first two sections of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, utmost concentration to grasp how the rhythms of the interleaving thoughts guide the narration. Clarissa is also not difficult in terms of its narrative, style or language, just monstrously long and tedious in parts, with horrific bits (I mean, Richardson really was trying to scare the daylights out of young female readers!), but if you can stick with it, you can grasp it.

Now, to the others: though I've long wanted to I simply have never had the time or patience to read Finnegans Wake, though I have read Ulysses (which has very tough bits but is quite enjoyable) and The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man several times, including in a race when I was in high school (don't ask). The Hegel and Heidegger texts are the most difficult of all their works, in my opinion. I didn't study philosophy, analytic or otherwise, so I didn't have to get through either, but I think that would have been the only way I could have. I also would venture that there are probably philosophical texts that are as if not more difficult. For example, some of the work of Baruch Spinoza, or Immanuel Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. From what I can tell, some of the analytic material is also pretty tough going, though it may be a lot easier to a more mathematically minded person. The Fairie Queene is just long and densely allusive, and since I have never had the time nor inclination to complete it, I didn't. I'm going to go out on a limb and say that no one, not even John Ashbery, who claims to have read it, has completed The Making of Americans. Not even Stein herself. Well, that's not true, because I know that at least a handful of scholars, Lord help them, have read it fully enough it to write about it. But it is written, I think, in such a manner as to frustrate forward reading.

There are other very difficult books, though. A few years ago, I taught Wilson Harris's Carnival in a graduate course, and several students mentioned that they were struggling to get through the text; it isn't too long, but verges on impenetrability. Harris manages, in a way few others do, to layer multiple narratives atop each other, much in keeping with the novel's thematics of time, in which Carnival spatiotemporality allows a fluid movement between past, present and future, and Carnival time, which might exist in all or none of these. The prose also brims with paradoxes, rhetorical curlicues and so forth, and seems straightforward until you try to read it that way. You can't. Two other very difficult books are Claude Simon's The Flanders Road and Triptych. Almost any of the major novels by this author, though, save The Visit, I have found very difficult to get through. Again, none is Clarissa-length, but all are almost riverrine in their handling of temporality. Simon's insight, following Faulkner, was to combine multiple temporal and narrative snippets together as in The Sound and the Fury's "Quentin" chapter, but extended over pages, with analeptic leaps, and radical shifts in voice. I actually did finish The Flanders Road and think Simon, who received the Nobel Prize in 1985, is a major author, but I will not be reading the book again if I can help it. Julián Ríos's novels Larva: A Midsummer Night's Babel and Poundemonium throw up multiple hurdles because of their Joycean inventiveness, but are ultimately navigeable, as is José Lezama Lima's lone novel, the masterpiece Paradíso, whose difficulty lies not only in its baroque syntactic style, but in the baroque complexity of its plotting. Persistence will get you through it, though.

More difficult authors: another Nobelist whose work is just like cutting through granite is Elfriede Jelinek. I am not going to lie; I simply could not bear, let alone get through, the book version of The Piano Teacher. (The movie version--whew!) I tried several other of her books and had a similar response.  I started to think that she was having a joke on readers, because the marmoreal quality of her prose retards progress. There supposedly is a strategy and a theory behind all of this. But I haven't figured it out, and after the several tries, I'm not going to try. Almost everything William Gaddis wrote is tough going. The Recognitions requires a test of will, and time. J R requires a forensic scientist's capacity to follow threads. A Frolic of His Own is, to me, the easiest of his big books, because of the humor. But none is easy to get through. In fact, a good deal of the experimental US fiction of the 1960s and 1970s is like spelunking without a compass, or rock-climbing with a rope. If you make it to the end, you really deserve a medal. But Gaddis is the most difficult, even compared to John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, William Gass, and the rest.

I am going to confess that I have never, ever been able to finish a Stanley Elkin novel, not even The Dick Gibson Show, The McGuffin and Mrs Ted Bliss, and he is hardly the most difficult author out there. I don't know why. I tried to read him repeatedly when I was younger because he was a St. Louis celebrity (of sorts) and won many major prizes. But I cannot for the life of me get into his prose. There could be a code in it for winning $1 million, but I'd have to forgo it. Well, maybe. Samuel Delany's long works are challenging, but I find all of them quite enjoyable to read, as he usually spices them up with action, vibrant descriptions, vivid scenes, sex, you name it. I feel this way about other authors of very long works of fiction--Leo Tolstoy, Marcel Proust, Robert Musil, Herman Melville (though his poetry is hard to get through!), Mikhail Bulgakov, Roberto Bolaño, João Guimarães Rosa in the original, etc.--who at least give the reader things to hang onto. I feel less this way about David Foster Wallace; over this past year I had to reread War and Peace (the newer translation being one I hadn't read before) and Infinite Jest to supervise a brilliant undergraduate (who is now writing comparative essays on both books), and while I tremendously enjoyed Tolstoy's endless but extraordinary novel, which in the newer translation includes long sections in French, which Tolstoy originally used alongside the Russian, I strongly disliked Wallace's book, the awful black dialect in it being just icing on a rotten cake. UGH! There is always a portion of my male students who adore him, though, and I find some of his stories, especially the earlier ones, fascinating. But I am not a fan by any means, and think he's overhyped.

I am surely leaving out other works people could cite (Juan Goytisolo, Diamela Eltit, B.H. Johnson, Alasdair Gray, Ricardo Piglia, Mark Danielewski, etc.). Many a person has complained to me about the difficult of Toni Morrison's work, though I've never had that experience with any of her books, and read Beloved from cover to cover without a break I was so enthralled. Jazz was a bit harder, but in general I don't think she's that tough. At a dinner I attended just before I left Chicago, two people told me that they thought Morrison's work was "horrible," mainly because they found Beloved unreadable. Again, I think it's a matter of taste; she's not exactly easy, but there are far more difficult writers and works out there. Henry James is another author that students at least have complained about, and a work like The Golden Bowl or The Ambassadors can be strenous to get through, just because of James's style, but again, there is usually enough of a plot, and enough interesting description and commentary, as well as the unrealing of thought, to make him bearable for me. The author I always find perhaps the most baffling in terms of citations of difficulty is William Shakespeare; there isn't a single play by him, or any of the sonnets, that anyone with a basic familiarity with English cannot read all the way through and gain the gist of. But many have been the people, including lawyers (!--they work with some of the most impenetrable language out there), who've told me Shakespeare is "too difficult" or "I just can't understand him at all." I usually cite Macbeth or Romeo and Juliet, and they will revise their statements to say, "Most of his plays."

In terms of poetry, I'd say there are countless examples of very long works that I have started but not finished, both in terms of older texts and in terms of post-mid-century US poetry. I have read large portions of Ezra Pound's The Cantos, but have neither read all of them nor even grasped a large portion of the later ones. Some long works, like Derek Walcott's Omeros, James Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover and John Ashbery's Flowchart, pose challenges, but are not exceedingly difficult, just as one could say of much older long works of poetry, like The Iliad, The Odyssey, The Aeneid, The Canterbury Tales, Paradise Lost, The Ring and the Book, etc. The Stein cited above is in a category of its own, even for her work. Anything by the British poet David Jones is difficult, for sure. Again, I know I'm probably leaving out a great deal of work. I was trying to think of very difficult poems or plays, but most of the ones that come to mind are just long--cf. Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh--but hardly impossible to understand. I should mention Samuel Beckett, whose work is not especially easy to grasp, the novels being more difficult than the plays or the experimental prose, but often with him I find the humor, his use of repetition, and his larger themes make finishing the work not only possible but enjoyable. Watt, however, is a doozy.

If any J's Theater readers want to sound off on this topic, please do. I'm interested to hear your thoughts.

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Paulo Coelho

As an addendum, I wanted to point to this commentary by Brazilian author Paulo Coelho, whose spiritual-lite novels have sold millions of copies, denouncing James Joyce's Ulysses as "pure style." Coelho's full statement, which initially appeared in the Folha de São Paulo, was: "One of the books that caused great harm was James Joyce's Ulysses, which is pure style. There is nothing there. Stripped down, Ulysses is a twit." He is not the first to criticize Joyce for this work or for his profound influence on contemporary literature, as Guardian critic Stuart Kelly notes in his follow-up. He follows the likes of Roddy Doyle, Dale Peck, Jonathan Franzen, and many more, but on top of his misreading he appears to utterly miss the specifics of the novel, which is nearly bursting with incident, details, language, everything--and has a plot to boot. There are novels that are pure style; I think of one I recently reread, Clarice Lispector's Água Viva, which has neither character nor plot, and is really all theme, voice and style, but Ulysses, for all its successes and faults, goes well beyond Joyce's style to achieve a portrait, singular in its richness and depth, of a single day in a single city, filtered through the consciousnesses of a trio (really, though there are more of course) of characters: Stephen Dedalus, and Leopold and Molly Bloom.

As Kelly points out, one should consider the source; Coelho may sell books as easily as McDonalds sells hamburgers (65 million copies of his novel The Alchemist are in print) and bind readers in his spell, but despite his self-aggrandizement as one who can "make the difficult seem easy," he does not come close to Joyce in terms of richness of style, his characterizations, his capacity to represent reality, or his deployment of language (Portuguese in his case).  Nor does he approach in his literary gifts the many authors from his own country (Lispector, Machado de Assis, Mário de Andrade, Guimarães Rosa, Jorge Amado, Lygia Fagundes Telles, Iván Ángelo, etc.) who have made major contributions to Brazilian, Lusophone, Latin American or global literature. He knows how to tell a good tale, or many variations on a few, certainly. Joyce could do that--read nearly any of the stories in Dubliners if you have any doubt--but also grasped the power of language itself at its most fundamental levels, as well as the multiple possibilities of storytelling. He is a literary mint. That counts for something--or a great deal, in financial terms. But James Joyce he isn't.