the blog

§From "Fish Peddler and Cobbler" by Kenneth Rexroth (The Collected Shorter Poems, New Directions, 1966):

For lunch Mary catches a two pound
Grayling in the whispering river.
No fourteen thousand foot peaks
Are named for Sacco and Vanzetti.
Not yet. The clothes I wear
Are as unchanged as the Decker
Saddles on the pack horses.
America grows rich on the threat of death.
Nobody bothers anarchists anymore.
Coming back we lay over
In Ogden for ten hours.
The courthouse square was full
Of miners and lumberjacks and
Harvest hands and gandy dancers
With broken hands and broken
Faces sleeping off cheap wine drunks
In the scorching heat, while tired
Savage eyed whores paraded the street.

§Find yourself a copy of Marcel Schwob's Imaginary Lives:
"He seldom spoke of gods or questioned them. What difference did it make, said he, if there were gods or none, knowing as he did how little they could do for him. At first he reproached these divinities with having turned men's faces toward heaven, thus depriving them of the faculties enjoyed by animals on all fours. Since these gods have decided that we must eat to live, thought Crates, they might better have turned our faces to the earth where food is, instead of twisting them up in the air to graze on the stars."
I can't help but think the young Borges must have read these faux-biographies, though he probably read the original French. My copy is Lorimer Hammond translation (Boni & Liveright, 1924.) The book first appeared in French in 1896.

§Another quotation, perhaps you'll forgive me, from Joseph Roth: the words of a former police spy of Czarist Russia --
"The might of the Czar had its limits, even in his own palace. But our might, the might of the police, only ceased at the frontiers of the empire, and often -- as you will soon hear -- far beyond the frontiers. Nevertheless it gave a police official inexpressible pleasure, firstly to see a harmless person tremble with fear, secondly to do a favour for a colleague, and thirdly -- and this is particularly important -- to frighten a pretty young woman. That, my friends, is the peculiar expression of police eroticism." (Confession of a Murderer: Told in One Night, p. 126; Tusk/Overlook, 1985; trans. by Desmond I. Vesey.)

§Death in Rome, which I've just begun reading, is the third volume in Wolfgang Koeppen's post-Nazi trilogy. How's this for the opening to a novel?:
"Once upon a time, this city was a home to gods, now there's only Raphael in the Pantheon, a demigod, a darling of Apollo's, but the corpses that joined him later are a sorry bunch, a cardinal of dubious merit, a couple of monarchs and their purblind generals, high-flying civil servants, scholars that made it into the reference books, academics of dubious distinction. Who gives a damn about them?" (1954 in German; W.W. Norton, 2001; trans. by Michael Hofmann, p. 5)
Or this --
"Wrong, the music sounded wrong, it no longer moved him, it was almost unpleasant to him, like hearing your voice for the first time, a recording coming out of the loudspeaker, and think, well, so that's me, that braying twit, that phoney, that smoothie, and in particular it was the violins that were wrong, their sound was too lush; it wasn't the unearthly wind in the trees, it wasn't the child's conversation with the daemon at nightfall, that wasn't what the fear of being sounded like, it wasn't so measured, so well-tempered, it should be more tormenting, more passionate, old panic fear of the green trees, of the expanse of the sky, of the drifting clouds -- that was what Siegfried had meant to sing, and he had totally and utterly failed, and so now he felt weak and timid, he felt like crying, but Kürenberg had been reassuring and praised the symphony." (p. 6)

§Meet the New Boss. In Wolfgang Koeppen's fiction you see not only the specific time and place of post-war Germany of the early 1950s, but also a masterful linguistic artist in peak performance as he examines both the internal lives of his characters and the social and economic problems they face. In The Hothouse he follows his protagonist Keetenheuve, a member of the German parliament, through two eventful days.
"There might still be the occasional coup d'état, they came in hot or cold versions, like punch, but the drink was always mixed with cheap ingredients and it left the people who tried it with sore heads. Keetenheuve was not in favor of mollification. He was in favor of looking the Gorgon in the eye. He didn't want to lower his gaze in front of horror. But he wanted an agreeable life, and he wanted to trick the devil of his due. He was in favor of happiness in despair. He was in favour of a happiness built from convenience and solitude, a happiness within the reach of everyman, a lonely, convenient and despairing happiness in the technological world that had been created. There was no need to feel cold as well as miserable; or hungry as well as suicidal; one shouldn't have to wade through dirt while one's thoughts were on the void." (1953 in German; 2001, W.W. Norton; trans. by Michael Hofmann, p. 132)
Fifty-eight years later, Germany may have adequately addressed these issues, though we have not. But Koeppen's political stance is not the reason to read him: his excellence as a writer is.
"Keetenheuve went into the little buffet room, schoolchildren were sitting around a table, charmlessly clad girls, boys already with the faces of civil servants, smoking furtively, they too were industrious, like the Chancellor, had open books spread out in front of them, were studying, striving (like the Chancellor?), grim-faced young people, because that was supposed to be sensible and help them to get ahead, they steeled their hearts, they were mindful of the timetable and not of the stars. The waitress gave gave it as her opinion that she should have been born with wings, Keetenheuve could see her float off, a halibut with pinions, the establishment wasn't large enough to accommodate all the custom issuing from the big trains, the lobbyists were cross, they wanted their eggs, Keetenheuve ordered a lager. He loathed beer, but on this occasion the bitter fizz seemed to calm his heart." (p. 61).

§"In the bathrooms, members were compared. Everything (houses, trees, street signs) made us think of girls. By the power of this eroticism, books read themselves.
As in the world of non-Euclidian geometry things came together. All inclined, as in a convex mirror, toward women's panties."
-- Yoel Hoffmann, Curriculum Vitae (translated by Peter Cole; New Directions, 2009).

§From The Silent Prophet by Joseph Roth (translated by David Le Vay; Tusk/Overlook, 2003): "He wiped the sweat from his forehead although his red hands betrayed that he was freezing. He was hot and cold at the same time. His head was in quite another climate than his body." Besides its worth as fiction, Roth's "Trotsky novel" has the value of having been written during the '20s, when Trotsky was still alive and "the West" had little enough insight into what Stalin would become.

§The third stanza of Johannes Bobrowski's "Fishingport", translated by Ruth and Matthew Mead and published in Shadow Lands: Selected Poems (New Directions, 1994):

My face tainted with fish, in dew
I shall come, one
whose hot hands
squander warmth on the silver form of
night. Here he comes
with his salty mouth. Now
he jumps into the last boat.

§Great wordplay: ". . . minutes are hours in the noctuary of terror, -- terror has no diary. . ." --Melmoth the Wanderer, Charles Maturin

§In a letter to Michael Schmidt, Ian Hamilton Finlay writes, "Also, I am not literary. Poems go on about unimportant things. They don't tell you whether you are expected to believe them. They use too many words. They suggest desks. They are usually written by people who have no feeling for language, and who think language is words. What baffling stupidity." (from A Model of Order, 2009).

§"I can't agree, though, that just any poem defines itself as art. On the contrary, almost any Scottish poem of the present is offered to one as a comment on life, an aid, an extension, etc... Hence we get inane critical remarks like: 'X has something to say' (which actually means, X's poems are crammed with jargon, about politics, hunger, Scotland, his love-life, or whatever). The notion that 'something to say' is actually a modulation of the material scarcely enters anyone's head." -- Ian Hamilton Finlay to Ernst Jandl, 1965 (quoted in A Model of Order, 2009 (see below).

§Wax366, a Glasgow publisher I've only just now heard of, last year published A Model of Order: Selected Letters on Poetry and Making by Ian Hamilton Finlay. Recipients include Lorine Niedecker, Robert Creeley, Louis Zukovsky, and Gael Turnbull, to whom Finlay wrote in 1961: "I like the poems you sent for this collection. My own feeling would be that you should set out less, I mean say less, and leave more to emerge -- but I may be quite wrong -- this I say on the basis that I like the poems: beyond that, I feel you tend to use the didactic level too much, like, if you could, use more making and less saying -- I don't know how to explain this feeling, I want to condense your poems -- Tell me if you think I am wrong, but I feel you tend to write about a thing, instead of writing it. On the other hand, your writing is very un-nasty and un-corrupt, and its big open movement is plainly connected with its big open feeling, so I may be quite wrong, do you see? I feel you could keep the generosity and goodness and YET have more magic. But could one, I don't know?"

§"Like most Europeans, who have a literary sense of geography, he thought the east was mysterious and the west ordinary. The east began at Katowice, and extended as far as Rabindranath Tagore." (Joseph Roth, Right and Left [and] The Legend of the Holy Drinker (Overlook/Tusk, 1992; translated by Michael Hofmann.) Right and Left, from which the quote is taken, was first published in 1929. Roth's depiction of German culture and society of the '20s is of the time and not written in hindsight.

§"A necessary penitential exercise" -- Geoffrey Hill. Start a conversation by removing the word German from the following and inserting American in its place: "I do not believe in the worth of the literature of our time. I understand, to be sure, that every period must have its literature as it must have its politics, its ideals, its styles. But I can never rid myself of the conviction that German literature in our time is a transitory and doubtful business, a seed that has grown in thin, badly prepared soil, interesting to be sure, and full of problems, but hardly capable of attaining full, ripe, long-enduring fruits. As a result, I can only consider the attempts of today's German poets (my own included, of course) to produce genuine creations, truly fine works, as in some way inadequate and derivative; everywhere I seem to perceive a trace of the stereotype, the fossilized model." -- Hermann Hesse (Autobiographical Writings, pp. 203-204).

§In the late '60s when I was a teenager, one of the stores where I bought records -- mostly 45 RPM singles -- was actually a television sales and repair shop, P&J. It was in the Westmoreland Heights shopping center in southwest Dallas, about a mile and a high from our house. The shopping center straddled two east-west-bound neighborhood streets, with the two main 'strips' of the center on the south side of one street and the north side of the other. In between were mostly block-long parking aisles, along with a few scattered buildings housing a movie theater, a hobby shop, a couple of restaurants, etc.
What was distinctive about P&J wasn't that it sold records: in the '60s, you could find singles and LPs in all kinds of places: dime stores, drug stores, department stores. But P&J had a wonderful set-up. There were the usual bins for the LPs and some of the singles, either older ones which had dropped off the charts or newer ones which hadn't made it yet or were still "bubbling under". But the cool thing was the display of the Billboard Hot 100: the owner had all 100 of the singles up in numerical order, in racks on the two walls of one corner, and he changed them every week. You could go in, look for something you'd heard on the radio and fallen in love with, and then turn to "Mr P&J" and ask for your single by number. Of course, just browsing was great too and often revealed something new to you that you hadn't heard of or known existed.
I miss record stores.

§Larry McMurtry was only 32 in 1968 when he published In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas, a collection remarkably insightful and wise for such a young writer. The following sentences could, I think, provide a great beginning point for a discussion on Cormac McCarthy and his books set in the West. (Remember that by 1968 McCarthy had published only two novels, set in the South.) McMurtry writes:
"Prose, I believe, must accord with the land. The forests of East Texas reach to Yoknapatawpha -- someone like William Humphrey can occasionally get away with the Faulknerian density. For the West, it doesn't work. A viny, tangled prose would never do for a place so open; a place, to use Ross Calvin's phrase, where the sky determines so much. A lyricism appropriate to the Southwest needs to be as clean as a bleached bone and as well-spaced as trees on the llano. The elements still dominate here, and a spare, elemental language, with now and then a touch of elegance, will suffice. We could probably use Mark Twain, but I doubt we're yet civilized enough to need a Henry James." (p. 18, UNM Press edition)

§Okay, okay, so maybe it won't really be a blog in any ordinary sense, but rather a place for me to post information, or quotations from what I'm reading, or stray opinions on this thing or that thing. This, for example, from Hermann Hesse's "A Guest at the Spa" (including in Autobiographical Writings, Farrar 1972, translated by Denver Lindley, p. 89):
"But however great the care I may take in reconstructing a well-tempered, average day, a normal, plain plus-and-minus day, I must make one painful confession, for every day, even a day at the spa, alas, begins with the morning: I have no use whatever for morning, praised in so many wonderful poems. Presumably there is a connection with my greatest distress and vice, bad sleeping, as well as with every aspect of my being, my philosophy, my temperament and character. All this is a disgrace and it comes hard to me to admit it, but what sense can there be in writing if the will to truth is not behind it? The morning, that celebrated time of freshness, of new beginnings, of happy youthful impulse, for me is deadly, it is vexatious and distressing; the morning and I, we do not love each other."