Book of the Day, Friedrich Hölderlin

I used to collect pictures of clouds.  Back when a photograph was something you could hold in the hand like a soda or a coin.  I have a photo album comprised of nothing but cloud photos, in fact.  A photo album of nothing but beds.  A photo album of nothing but one summer in Southern France.  A photo album of skating rinks.  A photo album full of clouds.

There was rare a cloud in the sky today.  A halcyon afternoon, one could call it.  K. and I and a pit bull and a rottweiler and a baby walking up and down the crooked avenues talking about what it would be like to own a brownstone.  I wanted one with tiny stained glass windows; K. liked the one with the modern statue in the window staring at the antique statue in the other window.  I don't know how we found the bookstore café with the beautiful lady in the head scarf who made fresh lemon pound cake and stocked her bookshelves only with non-American books by non-American authors.  Where in America would I ever find another bookstore like this one?    

I bought the book of the day there, Hyperion, doesn't that word make you think of Scriabin?  Hyperion, a satellite of Saturn, the sixteenth closest to the planet, discovered in 1848, Hyperion, a Titan of Greek mythology, Hyperion, by Friedrich Holderlin.  Once when I was foolish I spent an evening in Tübingen, where Hölderlin once lived in a tower overlooking the river, writing poems.

There are great hours in life.  We gaze up at them as at the colossal figures of the future and of antiquity, we fight a glorious battle with them, and if we persevere against them, they become like sisters and do not abandon us.

Hyperion to Bellarmin, Friedrich Hölderlin

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Triptych Readings: Charles Wright, Vijay Seshadri, Ana Božičević

Monday, November 9, 7:00pm. 11th St. Bar (510 East 11th Street, between Avenues A&B)

Join us to hear Charles Wright (author of nineteen book of poems and winner of Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the National Book Award, Los Angeles Times Book Prize, the Griffin Poetry Prize), Vijay Seshadri (author of Wild Kingdom and The Long Meadow, winner of James Laughlin Prize), and Ana Božicevic. We are also celebrating Charles Wright's new book, Sestets, and Ana's just released first book, Stars of the Night Commute.

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I purples, spat blood, laugh of beautiful lips

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Book of the Day, The Sorrow and The Fast of It

 I notice a boundary around breathing.  The dogs notice it first in the sag of a half-eaten espalier.  A garden grown down into an earth that rejects it.  I understand it as the place where the head detaches.  It doesn't hover so much as soar.  But this is inconsequential.  What matters more are the palpitations of the sleeping creatures for whom there is no atmosphere.  The green of the fabric on my arm is closest to sensuous.  Without the ploughed follicle of dirt nor the abruptness.  It was not the sea that parted but a plate of bone hafted to a screen of skin.  The water passed and the light with it and someone wrote it on paper thin.  The earth was framed and none could enter.

I am plying now the grimmest part of language.  A stern made foremost for bending for binding.  Tomes and tomes of liberty ill conceived.

 This sentence then.  How will you bear it?  

from "The Sorrow and the Fast of It", Nightboat Books 2007, by Nathalie Stephens.  

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Book of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro

I've always thought that there is something very pleasing and soporific about the face of Kazuo Ishiguro, and he bears an uncanny resemblance to a distant uncle.  Notwithstanding those facts, he is one of my favourite authors- I read The Remains of the Day when I was thirteen or so (a good commonwealth citizen I was) and continued with A Pale View of the Hills, which I remember nothing of whatsoever except that it bathed my mind in a fine fog, of course I wanted to go to England then, and Japan, all these books simply whetted my appetite for wandering and literature.

The only request I had for W. when he went to London last week was that he bring me a black dress from Top Shop and a first edition of Ishiguro's new book of short stories, Nocturnes, which Kakutani gave an unenthusiastic, if not scathing review in the New York Times.  Christopher Hitchens (a writer I esteem and admire) was kinder, but again, not very complimentary.  But I was thrilled when W. returned with a slip-cased first edition of Nocturnes, and even more delighted when I saw Ishiguro's neat but poignant signature on the front page.

Can a signature be poignant?  In this case it was.

As are the stories in Nocturnes, the ones I've read so far, in any case.  My mini-reviews are not meant to be reviews in any case, just glimpses of books as they pass in and out of my days, and I spent an ideal evening last night lying on the living room floor, with the muted sound of the World Series in the background, reading these five stories of music and nightfall.

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Book of the Day, The Laundromat Essay

Kyle Buckley, author of the The Laundromat Essay

"So damn good", writes the Eye Weekly, of Canadian author Kyle Buckley's labyrinthine discourse, aptly entitled The Laundromat Essay.  The protagonist in this sleek little book of non-classifiable genre is attempting to enter a laundromat where he has left his clothes, navigating instead through a maze of architecture and memory.  Listen:

And I don't have time to argue with the laundromat owner because I've only just returned from a trip, having realized that it broke my heart to leave the city.  Or really that it broke whatever wasn't broken in the city already.  I would explain to him about getting back to the city, about having to find you, except that I think sometimes we have to edit our reasons for things.  This becomes another scene depicting a dramatic return: I get back to this very broken city and I'll go out to find you.  I will find you at a public monument, I will find you on a vast flight of cracked concrete stairs, tumbling apart.    

The words in bold are connected by a dotted line to the adjacent page, where Buckley writes pieces of poems or prose fragments explicating the emboldened words.  

Reading this book makes failure more palatable, if that makes any sense at all.  Not to say that one should aspire to fail, but we should embrace it [failure] somehow, or give it a better reputation.  Each poem that does or does not take place, a step in the backwards direction, a dotted line that leads to nowhere one expected.

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Happy Birthday John Keats

You have to watch this in honour of J.K.! It's a hoot.

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Book of the Day, Sarah Kane

Someone, obviously, went without me to the Botero museum.   No matter, one can read Sarah Kane's complete plays at home unhindered.   The book of the day is apropos for the season, or for the day at least, Halloween, which is translated, literally, as Holy Evening.

It's difficult to find an excerpt in Phaedra's Love which does not include profanity or graphic sexuality.   Here's a snippet:

Phaedra: You're difficult.  Moody, cynical, bitter, fat, decadent, spoilt.  You stay in bed all day then watch TV all night, you crash around this house with sleep in your eyes and not a thought for anyone.  You're in pain.  I adore you. 

Hippolytus:  Not very logical.

Phaedra:  Love isn't.

Phaedra: Have you ever thought about having sex with me?

Hippolytus:  I think about having sex with everyone.

Phaedra:  Would it make you happy?

Hippolytus: That's not the word exactly.

Phaedra:  No, but-Would you enjoy it?

Hippolytus: No, I never do.

Phaedra:  Then why do it?

Hippolytus:  Life's too long. 

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Here's what's happening this week:

Will Alexander & Edwin Torres

November 4, 2009

8:00 pm

@The Poetry Project

Will Alexander is a poet, novelist, essayist, artist and educator who lives in Los Angeles. His poetic works include Exobiology as Goddess, Asia & Haiti, Above the Human Nerve Domain and The Stratospheric Cantacles. His philosophical essays, Towards the Primeval Lightening Field, were published by O Books in 1999.  His novel, Sunrise in Armageddon, was published by Spuyten Duyvil in 2006. His visual art has been shown in collections in Berlin, Los Angeles and other locales. Alexander has performed throughout the country, and has taught courses at the University of California at San Diego, Naropa University, Hofstra University, and Mills College. He was the recipient of a Whiting Fellowship for Poetry in 2001 and a California Arts Council Fellowship in 2002. His new books of poems THE SRI LANKAN LOXODROME is just out with New Directions Publishing.

Edwin Torres has collaborated with a wide range of artists, creating performances that intermingle poetry with vocal & physical improvisation, sound-elements and visual theater. His poetry fellowships include, the New York Foundation for the Arts, The Foundation For Contemporary Performance Art, The Poets Fund and The Lower Manhattan Cultural Council. He has taught workshops at St. Marks Poetry Project, Naropa University, Bard College, Mills College and Miami University among others. His work has been published in many anthologies, and his CD “Holy Kid,” (Kill Rock Stars Records) was part of The Whitney Museum’s exhibition, The American Century Pt. II. He’s inventor of a noh-boricua inspired non-movement called NORICUA, and has performed its non-ideologies with Spanic Attack in the Bronx, Berlin and Loisaida. He is co-editor of the poetry journal/DVD “Rattapallax.” His books include, I Hear Things People Haven’t Really Said, Fractured Humorous (Subpress), The All-Union Day Of The Shock Worker (Roof Books) and The PoPedology Of An Ambient Language (Atelos Books). This reading will launch his new book, In The Function of External Circumstances, forthcoming from Nightboat Books.

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Quick Snaps:

Nick Thran at Unnameable Books









Maya Pindyck at Bowery Poetry Club










Moez Surani at Unnameable Books

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Book of the Day, Roland Barthes

A found picture on my camera of a place I can't quite recognize.  What happens then?  Can I reverse Google earth it?  Or maybe the elf who has been pilfering my camera and shooting photos with it can shed some knowledge.  Can you?  It makes me think of Roland Barthes.

The book of the day is "A Lover's Discourse, Fragments" by the aforementioned gentleman, translated by Richard Howard.  Randomly the page opens to this:

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Flayed
écorché / flayed
The particular sensibility of the amorous subject,
which renders him vulnerable, defenseless to
the slightest injuries.

1.  I am a "a mass of irritable substance."  I have no skin (except for caresses).  Parodying Socrates in the Phaedrus, one should speak of the Flayed Man, and not the Feathered Man, in matters of love.

***
One thinks of the word "flayed" and one visualizes certain lacerations, whips maybe, the suffering of Christ.  To peel the skin off a corpse or a carcass, the dictionary says, conjuring up a slaughterhouse, Hallow's eve.   Really?  I never celebrated Halloween, even as a child.  Once I think, I dressed up in a garbage bag.

This Hallow's eve there were many beards in the house, Brookland style.  Many people wore vintage clothes and eyewear.  People smelled like poetry.  People scarved themselves.  People introduced other people.  People tripped on other people.  People kissed in corners.  Overheard:

Everyone wanted to be either Bob Dylan or Maria Callas, skinny as thermometers. 

OK, back to Barthes.

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p.167
 (Like a bad concert hall, affective space contains dead spots where the sound fails to circulate. -The perfect interlocutor, the friend, is he not the one who constructs around you the greatest possible resonance?   Cannot friendship be defined as a space with total sonority?)
***

It sounds like Barthes knew my friend, even if I don't see him very often.  One appreciates that the best way to read the Barthes is to open it at will or whimsy, and everything written makes no sense and perfect sense concurrently.  Is that even possible?  It almost sounds as if Barthes is a predecessor of FLARF, did he really write all this or did he simply piece together things he read on billboards and diary pages?  I look down again at the book and in big letters:

No Answer
mutisme / silence   

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I liked F.'s poem the best, though even if I try very very hard, I can't remember any of the lines.  I think it was because she read it so well that I remember the voice.  Chestnuts.  The other day I went to a reading at Cornelia Street (Hila Ratzabi, Carla Drysdale, Elizabeth Von Uhl, and Jean Valentine) and one woman's voice sounded like chestnuts.  Is that even possible?

I guess so.

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Happy Birthday Sylvia Plath

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