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In Which We Can Feel You're About To Forget

Durga — Thu, 24 May 2012 15:55:00 +0000

Imperial Afflictions

by ARIANA ROBERTS

“Yehpeudah,” I tell her. She thanks me in Korean, and our guide proudly says she’s marrying the richest man in the village. He was married before, and has a daughter the same age as her. There were lots of young boys vying for her hand, but wasn’t she good for making a smart match? The bride whispers to our guide. “She wants to know what color hanbok you had when you marry.”

“I’ve never been married.”

“Why fat boy and brown girl talk about your wedding? Not that fat boy,” Mrs. Yoon says, noticing me scan the tour group. “The one with glasses.”

“I was supposed to be married last year.” Supposedly the bride doesn’t speak English, but she stops hiding behind Mrs. Yoon and takes a step closer to me.

“Why didn’t you?”

“If I’d gotten married, I wouldn’t have been able to come here.”

“Then you right. This is the greatest and most beautiful country on earth. Was he Korean?”

“No, Italian. But he’s from Australia. My family wants me to marry a Korean doctor.”

Mrs. Yoon shakes her head. “No matter if Korean, Italian, Australian. You find the person you can eat with every day. If he doesn’t make you lose your dinner, then he the right one! You have to find person you love. But not an American.” I throw my head down and laugh because I think she’s joking. She is not.

“The last Americans I see, boy and girl, they marry. They say, ‘Tie the knot.’ But knot can be untied! Husband can never be untied! American movies, they untie and retie, no deal big! Wait some. Don’t worry about husband until older. When you get to be 21, 22, we worry.”

“I’m 23,” I tell her, and Mrs. Yoon looks horrified, as if I’ve just plucked her heart out with chopsticks. She throws her hands in the air. “Maybe I find you a husband here. You pretty sometimes. But you need a lot of fixing.” She walks off muttering about the heavy burden I’ve placed on her. The bride is standing so close to me now. Her eyes are wet, but she’s smiling. “You are courageous,” she whispers in perfect English. She squeezes my hand, lifts up her skirts, and runs towards the pebek, straight to the husband she can never untie.

the author in front of a temple in Kaesong

We are outside Kaesong now, and the highway cuts into a steep hill overlooking mountains. This must be the place my grandpa talked about. “What did he say?” General Shin asks. His voice is so sharp, so startling, that my face is red, my chest is heaving, and the hair on my arms stands straight up. My lips didn’t move. I didn’t say that out loud, I’m sure of it.

“He said King Kongmin is buried here. His father came before the Japanese raid — I have a sketch he made from memory — and saw the Mongol treasures, from Persia, Russia, Constantinople, Egypt. My grandfather went after everything was destroyed. The raiders used dynamite on the tomb’s entrance. He said there’s a great love story in these mountains.”

“Tell story.”

“I don’t know it.”

“Why don’t you know?”

“He said he’d tell me when I was older. He died before I was.” I try clenching my jaw to stop my chattering teeth, but they’re beyond control.

“Stop the bus,” General Shin orders the driver. He steps off to make a phone call. A few minutes later, he reappears. “Come now,” he tells me.

the author in chongjin

I obediently follow him around the bend, out of sight from the bus. I can’t pray, and I’m too panicked to run. Eventually stone muninseok and tigers surround me. Yangsok guard two moss-covered granite mounds. General Shin pets the sheep, as tenderly as if they were flesh and wool.

“Americans aren’t allowed here anymore,” General Shin says. “But you are not really American, are you? It’s where you were born, not what you are.” He cups my chin with his hand. “You never say, ‘I’m American’ or ‘I’m Korean.’ Not like the others. First night, they all say what they are. It’s where they’re from. I’m Belgian, Dutch, English! You say only, ‘I’m Ariana.’ Do you know what you are? You don’t, because you’ve never been told. Nobody tells you in America. That’s why Americans are lost.

“Gongmin was captured many years, forced to serve Empress Ki. When he a boy, he vow to marry Noguk. The Yuan laughed! She was princess, he was hostage! But he painted her, and she loved him. She called him kunmang, because his painting more perfect than nature. Gongmin grew strong, crossed the Yalu, freed the Goryeo. He married the princess. For thirteen years, one never left the other’s side. Noguk became pregnant and died with child. Gongmin’s tears were as blood. He could not bury her seven years. He could not rule.”

the tomb outside Kaesong

“Gongmin called all mathematics and stargazers in the land to find his love a resting place. As each failed to please, he killed each. One of the Jung Kam Lok promised good pung su. Gongmin would give him all he desired if succeed, but if fail, certain death. Gongmin climbed this hill alone. He told the muninseok that if he waved his scarf, they should kill Jung Kam Lok.”

“It’s perfect,” I say breathlessly. Mongnan and mokran bloom in these hills. The first apricot trees sprouted here. “The geomancer must have been so relieved.”

“No interrupt,” General Shin scolds, wresting a magnolia blossom from my hand. He tries to put it back in the tree, and, failing that, flings it at me. “Climbing the mountain made Gongmin weary. He wiped his head with the scarf and looked over the land. It was delight. Gongmin descended the mountain to congratulate Jung Kam Lok. He dead. The muninseok saw the scarf and killed without hesitation. That how the mountain get name.”

One mound for Noguk, one for Kongmin. They fought the Turbans together. Rain soaked their garments, which froze to their bodies in the cold; they burned the queen’s carriage to warm themselves and traveled on skeletal horses instead of steeds. Koryo writers say the sound of wailing moved heaven and earth as Yi’s forces advanced towards the capital. All around them, children and mothers abandoned one another, but nothing separated these two, not flood or fire or one million warriors camping around Kaegyong. Scrawled on Noguk’s tomb is calligraphy, the most delicate and feminine script I’ve ever seen. Later I’ll learn that this was probably the work of Kongmin, along with various rock paintings and murals scattered throughout the countryside. It says:

“Throughout the land, wind-blown dusts exceed years past. What quarter was not in tumult? If our dynasty stands firm like a rock, protecting our livelihoods, heaven will allow these people, to sleep in peace. Death has come upon everyone unaware, haggard from laboring, a touch of frustration. They change with times, the affairs of men. Could they worry that there is nowhere they can sleep in peace?”

I tuck the blossom behind my ear. Over a hundred years ago, Japanese soldiers blasted open the tomb chamber. It is believed they carried everything off to Japan — relics Temujin himself held — but nothing like it has surfaced anywhere since. “Why aren’t Americans allowed here anymore?” General Shin has been fiddling with a shrub, but now he swings around with such suddenness that I’m mentally slapping myself on the forehead for asking. “I don’t mean to be disrespectful. It’s just so beautiful. Don’t you want the world to know how wonderful this all is?”

General Shin smiles for the first time all week. “Ariana,” he says, pronouncing the ‘r’ as ‘l,’ “Americans not allowed because Americans don’t understand love.”

Ariana Roberts is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Cleveland. This is her first appearance in these pages.

Photographs by the author.

"The Commander Thinks Aloud" - The Long Winters (mp3)

"Ultimatum (live)" - The Long Winters (mp3)

In Which We Dance To The Music Of Your Mother

Alex — Wed, 23 May 2012 15:44:00 +0000

My Only Advice

In every relationship, romantic or otherwise, one of the two people feels slightly closer to the other, if only by a matter of degrees. So it was with Gustave Flaubert and his hypochrondriac, flaky friend Ivan Turgenev. These two barnacles met when Flaubert was 40 and Turgenev was three years older. From the tenor of their conversations, which Flaubert seemed to treasure above all else, we can deduce that their spirits remained substantially youthful. Flaubert's self-professed love of literature was so all-encompassing it almost crowded out other parts of himself; Turgenev shared his friend's basic interest but saw the underlying reality for what it was. (Turgenev called his friend, "the only man in existence really devoted to literature.")

Turgenev would visit Flaubert at his retreat in Croisset in the summer, or in Paris during the winter season. Many of the hours they passed together consisted of Flaubert reading his novels or plays aloud, a difficult task even for one of his most central admirers. The written correspondence between the two in the 1860s leaves the mortal plane behind; it can be classified as the first bubbles of modernity to enter the universe.

March 1863

My dear Turgenev,

Your letter was most kind and you are too modest. For I have just read your latest book. I found your essential qualities in it, and more intense, more rarified than ever.

What I admire above all is the distinguished quality of your art — a wonderful thing. You manage to ring true yet avoid banality, to be sentimental without morbidity, and comic without being at all low. Without looking for high drama, you achieve it none the less by the sheer professionalism of your tragic effects. You seem very casual, but you have great skill, 'the skin of the fox combined with that of the lion', as Montaigne said.

Elena's is a fine story. I like this character, as well as Shubin and all the others. While reading you one says to oneself 'I've experienced that'. Thus I believe that page 51 will be felt with greater intensity by no one than by me. What a psychologist! But I'd need many lines to express all my thoughts on that.

As for your First Love, I understand it all the better for its being the story of one of my closest friends. All old romantics (and I who slept with a dagger under my pillow am one) should be grateful to you for this little story that has so much to say about their youth! What a real live girl Zinochka is.

The creation of women is one of your strong points. They are both ideal and real. They have the attraction of saintliness. But what dominates this work, indeed the whole collection, is the two lines: "I had no bad feelings towards my father. On the contrary he had, so to speak, increased in stature in my eyes." That strikes me as being startlingly profound. Will people pick it up? I don't know. But for me, it is sublime.

Yes, dear colleague, I hope that our relationship will not stand still, and that our mutual sympathy will tum into friendship.

In the meantime, one thousand handshakes from your

Gustave Flaubert

April 1863

My dear colleague,

I don't need, I hope, to tell you how much pleasure your second letter gave me — and more than pleasure! If I didn't reply straightaway, it was because I had to extricate myself from a host of disagreeable little matters that made me ill-humoured and lazy at the same time. These miseries continue, but my conscience will not permit me to delay any longer. I have been counting, and still do, on your indulgence — and above all I want to thank you and shake you by the hand.

I am very glad to have your approval and you should be convinced of it: I well know that an artist and man of goodwill such as yourself reads a host of things between the lines of a book, for which he generously appreciates the author's effort: but it doesn't make any difference. Praise coming from you is worth gold — and I pocket it with pride and gratitude.

Shall we not see each other during the summer? An hour of good, frank conversation is worth a hundred letters. I'm leaving Paris in a week's time to go and settle in Baden. Will you not come there? There are trees there such as I've seen nowhere else — and right on the tops of the mountains. The atmosphere is young and vigorous and it's poetic and gracious at the same time. It does a power of good to your eyes and to your soul. When you sit at the foot of one of these giants, it seems as if you take in some of its sap - and it's good and beneficial. Really, come to Baden, even if it were only for a few days. You will take away with you some wonderful colours for your palette.

Before I leave, you will receive a book by me which has just been published. I am cramming you full — but you are partly to blame.

A thousand friendly greetings, keep well, work well, and come to Baden.

Yours

I. Turgenev

Turgenev,

Cram me full then, dear colleague! I await your book impatiently and I shall read it with delight, I am sure.

I also have had a number of little aggravations just lately. The affinity between us is complete, you see.

I don't think I shall be able to go to Baden, because I shall have several obligations that will disturb my routine this summer. When will you be back? And send me your address.

I shall spend the whole of June or the whole of August in Paris. In any case, we shall see each other next winter.

A thousand very long and very vigorous handshakes from your

Gustave Flaubert

May 1868

My dear friend,

I'm very grateful to you for thinking of writing to me. Your letter gave me much pleasure — for it re-established relations between us and because it showed that you liked my book.

These days every single artist has something of the critic in him.

The artist is very great in you — and you know how much I love and admire it; but I also have a high opinion of the critic and I am very happy to have his approval. I well know that your friendship for me counts for something in all this: but I have the feeling that a master has stood in front of my picture, has looked at it and has nodded his head with an air of satisfaction. Well, I'll say again that this has given me great pleasure.

I was very sorry not to have seen you in Paris — I only stayed there three days, and I regret even more that you are not coming to Baden this year. Your novel has you in harness — that's good — I await it with the greatest impatience — but could you not take a few days rest, to the profit of your friends here? Since the first time I saw you (you know, in a sort of inn on the other bank of the Seine) I have felt a great liking for you — there are few men, particularly French men, with whom I feel so relaxed and at ease and yet at the same time so stimulated. It seems to me that I could talk to you for weeks on end, but then we are a pair of moles burrowing away in the same direction.

All this means that I should be very glad to see you. I'm leaving for Russia in a fortnight's time, but I shan't stay there long, and I shall be back by the end of July — and I shall go to Paris to see my daughter who will probably have made me a grandfather by then. I shall be game enough to come and chase after you even at home — if you are there. Or will you come to Paris? But I must see you.

In the meantime I wish you good fortune. The living, human truth that you pursue indefatigably can only be captured on good days. You have had some - you will have more — and many of them.

Keep well; I also embrace you — and with true friendship.

I. Turgenev

July 1868

My dear Turgenev,

This is simply to remind you of your promise. You were supposed to be in Paris at the end of July or the beginning of August. As for me, I am here, and I await you.

So as to avoid your making unnecessary arrangements, here is my programme: from 30 July (next Thursday) until August I shall be at Saint-Gratien at the Princess Mathilde's. Then I shall return to Paris for two days. I shall then spend another two days at Dieppe at one of my nieces. Then I shall return to Croisset, to get on with my book.

We must spend a few good hours together.

I embrace you wishing you cooler weather than we're having in Paris, and I remain yours

G. Flaubert

August 1868

My dear friend,

I have waited until now to reply to your kind little note, because Iwas still hoping to be able to announce my arrival; but my devilish gout is obstinately refusing to leave me, and I cannot yet contemplate any kind of long journey. It's annoying — but what can I do about it? I shall come as soon as I can; and in the meantime I embrace you and beg you to present my respects to your mother, whom I shall be very happy to meet.

Work hard in the meantime.

I. Turgenev

November 1868

My dear friend,

The cheese has just arrived; I shall take it to Baden with me, and with every mouthful we shall think of Croisset and of the delightful day I spent there. Decidedly I feel that there is a real affinity between the two of us.

If all of your novel is as good as the extracts you read to me, you will have written a masterpiece, I'm telling you.

I don't know if you've read the book I'm sending you; in any case, put it on one of the shelves of your library.

Present my respects to your mother — and let me embrace you.

Your

I. Turgenev

P. S. My address is: Carlsruhe, poste restante. It would be very kind if you were to send me a photograph of yourself. Here is one of me that looks very forbidding.

P.P.S. Find another title. Sentimental Education is wrong.

January 1869

But I must have news of you, my dear friend. Let's see now — in two words: where are you — and how is the novel going? I am writing to you at Croisset, and perhaps you are in Paris, sniffing out what's new.

In any case, I don't think you'll stay there long.

I have not yet thanked you for the photograph, which makes you look very military and well groomed — but it's you all right — and it's always good to look at it. Why don't you have some good ones taken?

I have often thought of Croisset, and I think to myself that it's a nest to fledge songbirds in. As for me, I have done almost nothing. I have embarked on a task that I find repugnant and I am floundering about sadly in it. There's no going back, but when it's finished, I shall give a great sigh of relief! It's a sort of anthology of literary reminiscences that I promised my publisher; I have never worked in that field and it's not at all amusing. Oh! Two hours of being Sainte-Beuve! I'd like to know if he enjoys it very much.

My best greetings to your honourable mother, who seems to me the best possible of mamas one could imagine, and a good vigorous handshake to you.

Your

I. Turgenev

P. S. I am here for the whole winter because my friends the Viardotl are here. It's not very gay, Carlsruhe, but it's better than its reputation. I shall come to Paris towards the end of March.

My dear friend,

Yes, people have certainly been unfair to you, but this is the time to brace yourself and hurl a masterpiece at the reading public. Your Anthony could be such a projectile. Don't tarry too long over it, that's my refrain. Don't forget that people judge you according to the standards that you yourself have established, and you're bearing the weight of your past. You have energy; el hombre debe ser feroz as the Spanish proverb says — and artists especially. Even if your book has only gripped a dozen people of any worth — then that is enough. You understand I'm saying all this not to console you, but to spur you on.

I have been here for about ten days — and my sole preoccupation is keeping warm. The houses are badly built here, and the iron stoves are useless. You'll see a very little thing by me in the March edition of the Revue des 2 Mondes. It's nothing very much. I'm working on something more 'solid', that is, I'm getting ready to work.

I shall go to Paris before returning to Russia; that will be towards the end of April. I shall stay a good ten days — we shall see each other often.

If you see Mme Sand, give her my regards. Greetings to Du Camp and the Husson family.

I embrace you and wish you courage! You are Flaubert after all.

Your I.T.

April 1870

I was very sorry to hear in your last letter that we shan't see each other this summer, my dear friend. I had counted on a good chance to let myself go with you, before your departure for Russia. But how difficult everything in this life is!

The great sadness I've had this winter has been the death of my closest friend after Bouilhet, a good lad called Jules Duplan who was devoted to me. These two deaths, coming one on top of the other, have overwhelmed me. Add to that the pitiful state of two other friends (not such close friends, it's true, but none the less they were part of my immediate circle). I'm referring to Feydeau's paralysis and the madness of Jules de Goncourt. The loss of Sainte-Beuve, money worries, my novel's lack of success etc., etc. even down to my manservant's rheumatism (the one who looks like Lassouche), everything, as you can see, has conspired to aggravate me. And to do so to no mean extent.

I can easily say that the only good thing to happen to me for a long time was your last visit, which was too short. Why do we live so far away from one another? You are (I think) the only man I enjoy talking to. I can't see that anybody else bothers about art and poetry! The plebiscite, socialism, the International and other such garbage are cluttering up everybody's brains.

I fear I shan't be able to accept your invitation this summer. Here's why. In four or five days' time I shall return to Croisset, where I'm going to write the preface to the volume of Bouilhet's verse straightaway. It will take me two or three months — after which, I shall tackle St Anthony which will be interrupted in October by the rehearsals for Aisse. They will rob me of a good two months. So between now and next New Year I shall have barely six weeks to devote to the good hermit. I would like to spend not more than two years on that fellow. So you see how pressed for time I am. I must get on with that work, as quickly as possible, as I'm already starting to feel I've had enough of it. I have consumed too many books, one on top of the other — but it was in order to make myself numb to my personal sorrows.

Send me your news when you're at home in Russia — and think of me often, because I often think of you, and I embrace you, ex imo

G. Flaubert

My mother was, as they say, very touched by your kind regards.

"Tic Tac Tic" - Elli et Jacno (mp3)

"Bien Plus Fort" - Elli et Jacno (mp3)

In Which Nothing Protects Us From Moving On

Durga — Tue, 22 May 2012 15:12:00 +0000

This Is

by SARAH WAMBOLD

I asked three different friends to join me on a trip to Marfa, TX and none of them found the matter as urgent as I did. They said they would look into it but then decided to wait until something was going on out there. I could see that they would go to Marfa only when nothing was keeping them from it. I wrote about my first experience in Marfa in a hurry. I was full of ideas the moment I got there. Later on, I heard those same ideas come out of the mouths of my friends who eventually did go to Marfa. The words had disappeared from where I originally wrote them, but left a space for me to return. I went to Marfa alone for nothing.

I drove to Marfa in seven hours, going 85 the whole way. I felt rushed by the empty road, surprised by how quickly I could become a cliché. It is true that thousands of tourists have traveled the same route I took, but they had all disappeared before I got there. Eventually, we would come upon each other, staring into the distance beyond us rather than make eye contact. Out there, we could pretend we were following our own lead.

photo by the author

I want to crawl inside Paul Valery’s quote, “God made everything out of nothing, but the nothingness shows through,” and see if I can still write about it. He wrote that line a quarter of a century after he spent twenty years learning how to write invisibly. Periods of silence and space are associated with crisis but sometimes language has simply taken another form.

I arrived in Marfa presciently inspired; it’s a town with an aura only seen by cattle ranchers and artists. It has the same provincial train tracks, sunlight and rusted gates that hold back the West Texas desert as any town in its vicinity, but Marfa is tastefully flaking away. Rust has become the design element for the hotels and gallery owners who have set up there since the town became a destination in the 1970s. A quick look around is like a close reading of hipster ipsum:

Farm-to-table leggings, fanny pack mustache
Tattooed dreamcatcher readymade gluten-
free skateboard art party Austin jean shorts
keytarscenester, bicycle rights vegan.

I take a drive west out of Marfa and see a sign that warns of no services for the next 74 miles. It recalls where I grew up; in the Midwest surrounded by inescapable farmland framed by signage with the same dismal promise of the future. Without those words, I would not have known how to get outside of them. As I drive, Prada Marfa appears like a shapely leg poised on the side of Highway 90, one that reveals itself to be just a prosthetic.

photo by the author

Outside that installation, I take a picture of my reflection on the glass window with my phone. It feels like I am helping in the destruction of the piece, contributing to its purpose of weathering into the desert with pastiche. Marfa is home to some of the most inspired Minimalist art and seduces tourists into becoming artists in its space. The results are like images from a flipbook, all part of the same story where the slightest shift in perspective keeps it moving towards the end.

photo by Elaine Litzau

On my final night alone in Marfa, I went to the Chinati Foundation at sunset. Open that evening was Donald Judd’s works in concrete and mill steel. The air was brisk as we waited by another rusted gate to be let into the area which had been a military compound used through World War II. In the distance, what looked like a construction site in flux awaited our arrival. The fifteen concrete block installations that make up Judd’s outdoor piece appeared as burial vaults. The same concrete structures which could hold our precious remains were now uprooted and tipped over, empty of the sludge that will become of us.

As I walked past, the desert sunset cast my shadows through them. I thought about my grandfather’s vault, emblazoned with his military symbol from the war. I thought about his body, fast disappearing inside that box.

photo by the author

Many of Judd’s structures have only one end open, forcing you to focus on their corners and shadows. If you turn halfway around, you are met with open space. After a full revolution, the box is open and empty and space. In Marfa, Judd can say “The public has no idea of art other than something portable that can be bought.” Outside it, burial vaults are sold as protection from the elements, eventually becoming all that is left of the person it once held. In Marfa, there is no funeral home. The desert town’s residents are close to their deterioration. Nothing is protecting them from time moving on.

The day I left Marfa, I got up before sunrise to look for the Marfa Lights. I sat alone on the viewing platform and watched three glowing orbs float above the horizon. They moved across the desert toward me and I could see how people viewed them as only the headlights of cars passing along some distant road. Beyond that, I couldn’t see anything at all.

Sarah Wambold is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Austin. You can find her twitter here. She last wrote in these pages about synchronized swimming.

"Ocean Eyes" - The Medics (mp3)

"Griffin" - The Medics (mp3)

The new album from The Medics is called Foundations, and it was released on May 18th.

In Which Edna St. Vincent Millay Comes Undone

Durga — Mon, 21 May 2012 15:39:00 +0000

A Poet's Appetite

by SHAHIRAH MAJUMDAR

CHART
MISS MILLAY
Dec. 31, 1940

Awoke 7:30, after untroubled night. Pain less than previous day.
7:35- Urinated- no difficulty or distress
7:40- 3/8 gr. M.S. {morphine shot} hypodermically, self-administered in left upper arm...
7:45-8- smoked cigarette (Egyptian) mouth burns from excessive smoking
8:15- Thirsty, went to the ice box for a glass of water, but no water there. Take can of beer instead which do not want. Headache, lassitude...
8:20- cigarette (Egyptian)
9:00- "
9:30- Gin Rickey (cigarette)
11:15- Gin Rickey
12:15- Martini (4 cigarettes)
12:45- 1/4 grain M.S. & cigarette
1.- Pain bad and also in lumbar region. no relief from M.S.

At age 48 – looks fading, youth fading, genius (she thought) also fading — the extravagant American poet Edna St. Vincent Millay found herself staring blankly into the abyss that had moved with her all her life.

Once she had written ecstatically of that “conscious void” (her first encounter: a passage of poetry from Romeo & Juliet when she was five years old), of both “the tangible radiance in which I stood” and “the edge of nausea” that bordered it. Once it had left her thrilled, transcendent, outside herself; the “radiance” and the “nausea” had been intertwined. But, at 48, interred at the farmhouse she and her husband had converted near the Berkshires, worn out by her lifelong hungers, that abyss was now dark to her — and it took it took two gin rickeys, a martini, eight cigarettes and several morphine shots, all before 1 p.m., to be able to face it.

All her life Millay sought wild moments of ecstasy to which she could submit herself fully and come undone. Her childhood in turn-of-the-century Camden, Maine had been provincial, but Millay — called “Vincent” by her mother and two sisters — was the product of a clan of fiercely independent, literary women who nourished the wildness and the ambition within her. Her mother Cora was a woman who had “dazed all her people” by divorcing her charming loafer of a husband and taking work as a nurse to support her daughters.

Cora loved music, books, poetry and — despite the family’s constant, visible poverty — fed her girls on the riches of her organ and her attic library. “Vincent” herself wrote poetry from a young age, gifting her mother with a handwritten collection of 61 poems titled The Poetical Works of Vincent Millay when she was 16.

In school, she was similarly extravagant, always a performer. She acted in all the school plays, gave piano recitals, edited the school newspaper. She was larger than life but not very popular: the girls thought “she was the type… to make a lot of almost nothing” (yesterday’s high school parlance, I suppose, for, she’s so fake!), and the boys actively made fun of her. She longed for escape, and she longed for a bigger stage.

For a while, she thought it was a man who would provide it. Her limits of her world seemed so small, even while eternity gaped within her, and the only rescue she could conceive took the shape of a man. In the end, however, she made her escape with her own hands.

At age 20, her poem “Renascence” (“The world stands out on either side/No wider than the heart is wide; Above the world is stretched the sky,—/No higher than the soul is high.”) was selected as a finalist in the The Lyric Year, a significant contest of American poetry. She became a star, a bit of a cause célèbre since — as many people said, even in the pages of the New York Times and the Chicago Evening Post — her poem was far superior to the poems that had actually won.

She had been flirting madly, purposefully (via post) with the editor of The Lyric Year for the months leading up to the announcement of the winners, and her own sense of injustice at having been denied the prize was confirmed and amplified by the reaction of the public. But, like an American Idol runner up, she discovered that the real first prize wasn’t the putative one; it was celebrity itself — adulation, recognition, an adoring public. This hunger, once awakened, was to stay with her the rest of her life.

Things moved quickly, gloriously after that. A coterie of wealthy ladies took “Vincent” in hand. Deciding that it would be a good thing to educate her, they removed her from the rambles of the Maine coast and off to New York. They gave her cash, gifts (including shopping trips to Lord & Taylor, but also boxes of cast-off clothing), lots of life advice to temper their praise, and sent her to Vassar. Her patrons adored her, but they also wanted a piece of her. Nancy Milford, author of the Millay biography Savage Beauty, writes: “They wanted to assist her in any way they could, perhaps because in the careful structure of their lives, they felt diminished. Her life would be grand, sweeping, urgent. Incapable of this themselves, they would help her.”

And her life was to be “grant, sweeping, urgent”: a life that one could dream upon, that she herself could dream and feed upon. At Vassar, Millay’s persona was as carefully constructed as her poetry. Her poverty — and the fact that she was there on charity — was known, but she was determined to be an entity.

Her years there were a performance, a practice for the wider stage that lay ahead. She dazzled her classmates, who fell in love with her, and her teachers, who allowed her unimaginable leniencies. She took regular trips to the city, and leisurely country weekends — which gave men, also, the chance to fall in love with her, and gave her the chance to play, at least, at falling in love with them.

For Millay, love (& lovers, both men and women) were as much a substance as food. She burst with hunger for love, just as she did for poetry, freedom, beauty, adoration… and, later drugs, sex and alcohol. Her desire gave shape and momentum to her life, and the “radiance” and the “nausea” that haunted her were two halves of the same whole. She was wild for the thrill of standing on the edge of the abyss and for the radiant colors moving within; it fed her sense of self and her creativity, and her poetry was to be the means and the remains.

Desire and the performance of desire are Millay’s subjects, particularly of the sonnets. Her work, as Mitchell Kennerley, publisher of her first book of poems (black binding, gold letters, creamy Japanese vellum paper), blurbed, dealt “as poetry should, primarily with emotion; with the sense of tears and of laughter, with mortal things; with beauty and passion; with having and losing.” Her themes were always what was personal to her: love, death, nature, longing, sex and self.

In terms of form, her meter is light, lilting, iambic; it hardly strays; and her rhymes are always clean and sweet, often sharp and witty. She writes in a voice that is direct, intimate, sometimes coy but never shy. Her imagery is infused with a sensuality that is both pure and coarse: the well from which it spring from is deep, irreducible, pure unto itself — but the substance itself has a thick grain, is fat with pathos and groans under its own gorgeous, aching weight.

When I encountered my first Millay sonnet (#41 from her 1923 Pulitzer Prize winning collection The Harp Weaver & Other Poems), I was 14. Years later, I can still recite it from memory:

I, being born a woman and distressed
By all the needs and notions of my kind,
Am urged by your propinquity to find
Your person fair, and feel a certain zest
To bear your body's weight upon my breast:
So subtly is the fume of life designed,
To clarify the pulse and cloud the mind,
And leave me once again undone, possessed.
Think not for this, however, the poor treason
Of my stout blood against my staggering brain,
I shall remember you with love, or season
My scorn with pity – let me make it plain:
I find this frenzy insufficient reason
For conversation when we meet again.

It was such a fun sonnet, so not like Shakespeare, so unambiguous and good to read out loud. There were shades of it that I didn’t get until I was older and had been myself “undone, possessed,” but I have come back to it again and again over the years and, though I no longer find the rhyme of “breast” and “possessed” as inventive as I once did, it still arrests me with its play of high purity of form with unapologetic coarseness of sentiment. It’s a dirty poem fashioned with skill and grace, and to make the exalted sonnet disturb the way this sonnet does is in itself enough to give you pause. During Millay’s time, in the heat of a Jazz Age, for a woman to be writing sonnets of such rigorous craft and bold content made her a kind of literary rock star.

It didn’t hurt that Millay was one of those poets who used her life as practice for her art. The mythos that she invented — the starry-eyed creature of enormous appetite left incandescent (in all senses) by its own hungers — was both for her poetry and her daily bread. Her poems were always a portrait of herself: as she was or had been or wanted to be.

If the speakers in her sonnets come undone, they pose first; they vogue a little, they protest too much. Everything they do is mannered, meant to be observed. For Millay, the poem itself is a performance — a series of stylized acts — and the form itself carries meaning: every foot of iambic verse is a coy gesture, every rhyme a teasing glance, every image of birds and songs and lips and breasts a signal flag that says come hither, says love me, adore me, leave me dispossessed.

In a short scholarly piece in Millay at 100: A Critical Reappraisal, Stacy Hubbard Carson writes that Millay’s sonnets demonstrate how “sexed bodies attach themselves to poetic forms, tropes and narrative structures.” Read this way, Millay’s [sexed] body is the poem’s body, and that she shoves herself into such a series of conventions and constraints — like a person in drag — is the very point of the endeavor. The fun lies in witnessing how she throbs against them, how the sensual charge of her poetry is defined, finessed and magnified by the conservative prettiness of the tropes and narratives that cloak them. Thus Millay’s genius is exercised not in double vision, but in double play: the way she uses her skilled formalism to trick the mind — leave it dazzled, “undone” — while simultaneously flooding and exhausting the senses.

The contradictions in Millay are what people worry over. She adopts masculine and feminine masks, is masked and unmasked, is consumed and consuming. She is her own double: burning herself (“my candle”) from “both ends,” eating from the inside what she has begged others to eat. In life, she was a tiny creature, often described in terms of the startling intensity of her coloring: all pale limbs, bright eyes, fiery hair and lips. In imagination — her own of herself, her public’s of her — she was magical and godlike, an unquenchable Amazon who gave wholly of herself to everyone but remained undiminished.

She thrived in her own duality. Often, she managed to perform the imaginary into reality but even “Vincent” sometimes had her heart broken. As Milford writes, the headlong satiating of the senses in which she routinely indulged could leave her both “stunned by beauty” and “sickened by loss.” The sonnet that follows #41 in The Harp Weaver & Other Poems is this one:

What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,
I have forgotten, and what arms have lain
Under my head till morning, but the rain
Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh
Upon the glass and listen for reply,
And my heart there stirs a quiet pain
For unremembered lads that not again
Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.
Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
I only know that summer sang in me
A little while, that in me sings no more.

The tone is different here, though the formal methods and manners recognizably the same. We observe the same hungers — perhaps even the same encounter — but through the lens of a quieter emotion. The speaker aches from the void within her and lacks distance from it; here, however, she also lacks the earlier sense of triumph or thrill. It’s a lovely poem, simple, as elegant as the one that came before, and also just as childlike in its helplessness before its own unknowable feelings. There is such sadness in the imagery, in the spareness of the language and its slow slide into memory, but the sentiment pools without deepening or expanding. It exists as an emotion bottled in time, wallowing in its own moodiness, dazzled by its own dignified, moody splendor. On the surface, sonnets #41 and #42 might appear to differ in terms of purpose, but the truth might be that they differ simply in terms of the way that they achieve a very similar purpose — which, in Millay, is nearly always to seduce us with the figure of her exquisitely unraveling self.

In her bohemian New York years, post-Vassar, Millay was a star. She gave readings, acted, published often and created a ferocious one-act anti-war play called Aria da Capo that was a runaway success. She became involved in both political and poetical causes, championing poets that she cared about who had less celebrity than she did, and loved and drank and partied to legendary lengths.

In 1923, the year of her Pulitzer, she married a man 12 years older whose only ambitions seemed to be to bask in her bright flame and to husband her writing. They bought a farmhouse in the mountains and began a town & country life. In 1931, she published Fatal Interview, her best and most popular volume of poetry, a collection of 52 sonnets written about a love affair with a much younger poet, a handsome but weak man about whom — after the affair went cold — the gossips said she had simply worn out, or that he had always been homosexual.

Millay’s husband Eugen gave her space to conduct the affair, letting her run about Paris with her lover on a Guggenheim she had helped secure for him while Eugen wrote her effusive, pining letters from home. Fatal Interview sold 50,000 copies in its first few months. This was the peak of her fame and her acclaim. Afterwards, she would be famous, even notorious, but something had begun to shift: her poetry, for all its skill and vigor, began to fall out of sync with the fashion of the age.

And the less control Millay had over others — her adoring public, whether near or far — the less control she had over herself. She began to drink more, take drugs, turn up naked in the rooms of female houseguests, asking them for “good old Elizabethan lovemaking.” Her hungers grew larger, and her ability to fulfill them less and less certain.

She was exhausted by her own performances, by the myths she made and played for herself and others. Millay — the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, the most famous poet in the world for a while, a woman who thrilled adoring audiences by radio, who jam-packed readings across America, who was acclaimed as the lyric voice of the Jazz Age, whose voice was described as “the most beautiful voice in the world,” “the sound of the ax on fresh wood” – lacked the same thing her poetry lacked: distance, the ability to step away from the grand emotion, away from the “edge of the nausea,” to drop the act and undouble herself. She was unable see things plainly, without the dulling glaze of lyricism or romance, nor to accept that certain things were outside the make of her own hands and not be destroyed by that knowledge.

In 1949, Millay’s husband Eugen — a man who had loved her selflessly, nearly unconditionally since their first encounter — died and she immediately suffered a nervous breakdown from which she never recovered. She was to follow him just a year later, emblematically, epigrammatically, just as she had written, just as she had lived. One night, overcome with the “tangible radiance” of cigarettes, wine, Seconal and a new poem, she finally tumbled over the “edge of nausea” and down the length of her staircase. Her head, on its broken birdlike neck, came to rest on a pile of books and papers, including the draft of the new poem.

It’s funny how Millay, once adored as a luminary, has so definitely had her star fall. Though she is still ranked as a major American poet, she is no longer discussed as a great one. Millay is too much the whirling dervish, the Delphic oracle, too self-conscious and theatrical to suit our modern sensibility. Her poetry is the poetry of the young, the very romantic, those who long to make and remake their own innocence. We know too well what happens when you burn the candle at “both ends.” It may “give a lovely light” but, as anyone who has ever taken a drink before noon knows, nothing ends well when you come undone.

Shahirah Majumdar is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is assistant professor of writing at the Asian University for Women in Chittagong, Bangladesh. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

My candle burns at both ends
It will not last the night
But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends -
It gives a lovely light.

In Which We Allow You To Have Your Privacy

Durga — Sat, 19 May 2012 14:26:00 +0000

The Flies

by DAMIAN WEBER

The first thing Suzanne asked when she came in was where they went and why she couldn’t go, but the girl wouldn’t tell.

“Nowhere.”

“Not nowhere,” Suzanne said, “you went somewhere.”

The girl didn’t say anything, she didn’t know what to say so she just went to her room.

“You have to tell us,” Linda said.

“I can’t,” the girl admitted, walking up the stairs.

“What can’t you tell us?” Suzanne shouted up the stairs.

After Suzanne went up the stairs and tried the door, she called down to Shirley that the door was locked. Shirley didn’t let the girls lock their rooms and when they did she always came up the stairs and told them to unlock it. But this night she let the girl have her privacy.

The girl knew she would eventually have to unlock the door for Linda, but went over to her fish instead. She picked up the little tin of fish-food and fed her goldfish, Blackbeard, who wasn’t in a fishbowl but instead in a big glass jar. Richard named him Blackbeard because he wasn’t gold at all, but black with yellow cheeks. He’s not taking Blackbeard, the girl thought, he can’t, he’s my fish.

“Let me in,” Linda whispered through the door. The girl went over to the door, unlocked it, then quickly went back to her fish and thought of different ways she could hide him. She could always put him under her bed or maybe even in the garage or even put him outside where he was born, where his mother was. Linda didn’t ask about the ride and the girl was free to wonder if she would also be leaving when dad left.

Were any of them going with him or was he leaving them all? What about Arla, would he take Arla?

Arla was a black lab, originally the property of a family named Foss who was trained as a seeing-eye-dog but failed. Arla couldn’t be trained; as Linda would say, “She has her own agenda.” Still Arla could be the mother of other seeing-eye-dog puppies who were taken from her and trained. Guiding Eyes for the Blind would keep her for a week before and a week after each litter but would pay all veterinarian bills even those not relating to the pregnancy.

The family had many names for the dog: Arla, Arla Doo, Arla Moo, Arla Girl, Arla Dog, Arla the Black, Black Dog, and Crazy Dog. When they called her she wagged her tail, when they fed her she wagged her tail, and when someone new came to the house and when someone old came. The poor dog was always being yelled at, she was always in the way or as Linda would say, “She’s always in your face.”

Arla was a ridiculous dog because she was afraid of the floor. There were gaps in the carpeting she refused to step on, bounding from one to the next, and only after she was finally safe would she sit back on her bottom. Also there were certain rooms she would not enter which usually contained her in the hallway upstairs. She wouldn’t go in the kitchen and eyed the wood floor with a look that said, “I couldn’t possibly ever dream of even thinking of going on that.” Linda would call but the dog wouldn’t come. “Arla Girl, you want to come in the kitchen? Come on Arla Dog.” It was the most ridiculous thing the girl had ever seen. The poor dog, the girl thought, if she knew how ridiculous she was she would laugh.

Maybe the house was too small for Shirley, Richard, Suzanne, Linda, Theresa, Cocoa, Peaches, Blackbeard, and a Labrador, not counting Tammy the ladybug, all the flies and all the ants. Plus there was Cuppy, but Cuppy died.

Shirley thought it wrong to not do whatever she could to relieve the suffering of all creatures, making the small house a zoo. When Richard complained she referred to Matthew.

Love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment. And the second is like it: Love your neighbor as yourself. All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments.

Cuppy, Linda’s cat, was black with a white face which Linda said made him look like he was wearing a tuxedo. The white patch on his face looked like a heart, at least it did to Linda, who always said it made him handsome even though the girl knew a cat couldn’t be handsome, only people, like her father. Linda was in first grade when he developed “this stomach thing.” The girl couldn’t remembered Cuppy because she was not yet two but later Linda would repeat the story even though she had already heard it.

“One day we looked at him and he was so thin. Dad didn’t know why, or how he became so sick, so quick. He was almost falling over, he couldn’t even lift his head to eat. Mom brought him to the vet but he said it was iffy. Then they just put him to sleep, I was at school, we were at school and came home and they killed him.”

Linda would always tell the girl she just wanted to hold him one more time. She didn’t even get to bury the body because the vet kept him. Cocoa, the oldest of the cats, was both deaf and blind and looked like he was always about to die but just wouldn’t. He had cataracts and had been losing his sight but was now completely blind. His eyes looked like marbles, cataracts covered both the iris and the pupil until his eyes were just balls of milk. The girl thought he looked like a sorcerer, a magic cat, but one that didn’t like her, a demon cat. He was Shirley’s since before the girl was born, and Suzanne was there when they picked him at the shelter. They went to look for a kitten but when they saw him they had to have him because as Suzanne said, “He picked us with his eyes.” The girl wasn’t sure what she meant but she believed it. It wasn’t difficult to convince Richard and Shirley to get him, he was a wonderful cat. Linda always said he was Richard’s cat, that dad was the one Cocoa really loved. He used to love Cuppy too, but Cuppy died. Now Richard was moving out and the cat wouldn’t have anyone.

Peaches was Richard’s mother’s cat and he certainly didn’t want another cat in the house but nobody else would take her. Shirley fed the cat when Nana went to St. Jerome’s but after they learned she probably wouldn’t ever leave again she brought the cat home. The family called the cat it even though they called the other cats respectively he or she. It was a miserable cat and hissed at anyone who came near and when the cat first came to the house Cocoa chased it from the kitchen to the bathroom and from the bathroom back to the kitchen. Peaches browned the wall trying to get away, creating the largest mess in Linda and the girl’s room but neither of them learned about it, they were at school.

Later when the girl was told about it, she could only imagine the cat running around her room, browning the walls while her mother figured out what to do. What could she have done? The girl thought there probably couldn’t have been much to do except shut the door.

The girl asked mom what could have happened to the cat to make her so unloving and so unloved. Linda said it wasn’t affectionate because Nana Manning wasn’t affectionate but Shirley disagreed, Nana Manning was too affectionate. That was the first time the girl learned her sister thought less of Nana Manning than she, later she would learn why. Maybe mom would make dad take the cat now that he was leaving.

Besides the dog, the two cats, and the goldfish, there were other pets in the house, like the ladybugs. The girl named one Tammy (she didn’t know why) and kept it all summer and into the winter and was still alive. She didn’t keep the bug in a jar however, she just let it fly around her room. There were many different ladybugs in her room but she was pretty sure she knew which one was Tammy especially since they were best friends and best friends could always find each other even if they were separated by three seas or a thousand years. She would come home from school and look all over for Tammy and then when she found her she would tell her how beautiful she was. Richard told her that ladybugs only lived two weeks but she said that wasn’t true because Tammy had been alive forever. Richard wouldn’t be able to take Tammy when he left, he wouldn’t be able to find her because they weren’t best friends.

Besides the ladybugs there were also the ants which came in the spring crawling out of the cupboards and out of the cabinets. They would even crawl in her cereal, until they put rubber bands around the bag. There wasn’t anything Richard could do, he sprayed once but it didn’t work. He didn’t use it again however because Shirley said she didn’t want him to spray poison in her kitchen.

They were fearless ants that weren’t satisfied to hide in cracks, they walked right out in the open, right up the kitchen window completely ignoring gravity, making the girl think they must be angels. The girl knew with the way dad tried to kill them he wouldn’t be bringing them with him when he left. Besides the ladybugs and the ants, there were also the flies which the girl thought were aw-ful. They stayed the longest, not leaving until after fall and when the girl asked her mother where they went for the winter Shirley told her in the garbage. After that the girl always looked in the garbage to see where they were hiding but could never find them. Richard could take the flies if he wanted. Richard, however, didn’t take Arla nor did he take Cocoa or Peaches or Suzanne or Linda or the girl or the ladybugs or the ants and the flies.

Suzanne announced dinner was ready by stomping down the hall and pounding on the door but the girl motioned to Linda not to answer. Coming down the stairs she saw dad already at the table and since Suzanne and Linda were still moving around she thought it a perfect time to ask.

“Are you taking Arla?”

Richard looked at her.

“Take Arla where?” Suzanne asked. “Where is Arla going?”

“Arla isn’t going anywhere, Arla’s staying here.”

“Who’s going somewhere?”

“I’m leaving.”

“Where you going?”

“Not far.”

“Where?”

“88 North Spruce Street.”

“For what?”

“I’ll tell you later, after dinner.”

“For what?”

“Your mother and I,” Richard started, but stopped before he used the word divorce.

Suzanne knew what a divorce was, she didn’t need to be told.

The girl didn’t say anything. She saw that her sisters didn’t know what to say and waited for Suzanne to say something but Suzanne didn’t say anything. Then to break the silence or maybe just because she wanted to,

Linda stood up, pushed in her chair, left the table, went up the stairs, and to her room. The spell was broken.

“Dad,” Suzanne said, “you can’t move.” Richard didn’t say anything.

“Just stay here, you don’t have to go.”

“I’m sorry, I have to.”

“No you don’t.”

“Why?” she shouted, “why do you have to?”

“Because I have to.”

“Because why?”

“This is crap!” she swore.

The girl let out a little expiration of air at hearing her sister swear and was left sitting at the table alone with mom and dad when Sue stomped up the stairs, stomped down the hall overhead and into her room.

“Why don’t you go upstairs,” Shirley told her, “you’re all done.”

The girl pushed out her chair, stood up, pushed in her chair, went up the stairs, in her room, and locked the door.

A few minutes later Arla scratched at the door and she let her in, watching the magnificent dog cross the room and lie on the floor. The girl went over and sat down next to the dog. Arla was big and beautiful, it was something to pet such a magnificent dog and there was no way he was going to take her.

It was only seven and not yet time for bed. Usually around eight (or if she was lucky, a little later), Shirley would come up the stairs and tell the girl to brush her teeth. But tonight she thought mom probably wouldn’t come up.

Linda was on her bed and still hadn’t said anything but then finally did. “Is dad really leaving?” she asked. “I think so.”

“You know when?”

“No.”

“Is he taking Arla?”

“No,” the girl said, “he said so.”

“He can’t take Arla.”

“No.”

“What happened after I left?” Linda asked.

“She told dad not to go.”

“Who did, mom did?”

“Suzanne.”

“Then what?

“He said he had to.”

“Do you think he’s really going to?”

“He said.”

“He doesn’t have to.”

When Suzanne knocked on the door the girl didn’t object and Linda unlocked it. She had been crying. She came over and sat on the girl’s bed and then Linda came over and sat on the girl’s bed. The girl had the smallest bed in the house besides Arla and now all of her sisters were on it with her.

“You know when he’s leaving?” Suzanne asked the girl.

“No.”

“He can’t leave,” she said. “He doesn’t have to.”

“This is such crap!” Suzanne swore. The girl gasped.

“What did dad say to you?” Suzanne asked the girl bringing up the car ride again.

“I don’t say.”

“Well, it doesn’t matter now.”

“I don’t.”

“Terry, he’s leaving, it doesn’t even matter anymore.”

“I don’t.”

“You can tell us who lives on North Spruce though,” Linda said, “Right?”

“Miss Bernice.”

“Who’s Bernice?”

“Dad’s new wife.”

“Dad has a new wife?” Suzanne asked.

The girl nodded.

“What’s she like?” Linda asked.

“She’s nice.”

“Dad has a new wife?” Suzanne asked again, “You mean they’re married?”

The girl nodded.

“They can’t be married,” Suzanne said, “he can’t be married twice.”

“I met her.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re married.”

“She seems nice. She has witch shoes.”

“She has what?” Suzanne snapped.

“She seems nice.”

“I can’t believe this!” Suzanne said standing up, “This is all such crap!”

The girl gasped again, she always gasped when someone swore.

Suzanne stomped out of the room and slammed the door then stomped down the hallway and slammed her door.

“She has witch shoes?” Linda asked.

“They’re pointed,” the girl said, “like a witch.”

“Does she look like a witch?”

“No, she’s nice.”

“He’s going to live by the school?”

“I don’t know.”

“Does mom know?”

“She was there.”

“She was where?” Linda asked. “She came with you?”

“At dinner.”

“But, does she know about Miss Bernice?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, I guess she does, right, she has to?”

The girl nodded.

“She has to,” Linda said getting up, straightening the covers on the little bed and putting the pillow back.

“Okay, go to bed, goodnight.”

Like the girl thought, Shirley didn’t come up the stairs and tell her to brush her teeth and neither did Richard which Linda said was even more than rude.

Damian Weber is a writer living in Brooklyn. The Flies is an excerpt from a longer work.

"No One Ever Sleeps" - The Walkmen (mp3)

"Line by Line" - The Walkmen (mp3)

The new album from The Walkmen is entitled Heaven and will be released on May 29th.

In Which We Are The Only Shadow You Need Concern Yourself With

Durga — Fri, 18 May 2012 15:21:00 +0000

Tim Burton Was Dead Already

by DICK CHENEY

Dark Shadows
dir. Tim Burton
113 minutes

Dark Shadows cost $150 million dollars, which is about as hard to itemize and account for as the budget of the Pentagon. If that really is how much a film set basically in one, dark decrepit mansion cost to make, then Michelle Pfeiffer potentially received a career encompassing honorarium totalling $69 million, since there is nothing in this movie that suggests that even an ounce of care went into it.

Tim Burton obviously never got his hands on a Hollywood memo that originated in the late 1980s from the office of Robert Towne, Syd Field or Robert McKee. I can reconstruct it almost from memory.

Dear Everyone,

Guys. Writing to let you know that one level of irony is no longer enough.

For example: a baseball player is afflicted with a life-threatening disease, but each time he hits a home run he feels a little better. One level of irony.

Same situation, but the baseball player is a woman. $$$$$$

An alien wants to return to his ancestral home planet and enlists the help of children (small adults) to get there. One level of irony.

Same situation, but the alien resembles a Jewish grandmother. $$$$$$

Two levels of irony, guys. (Or three if it's a remake of an old Ronald Reagan movie.)

Carry on.

I'm not even sure the concept of a vampire out of place contains any irony at all by now, although the concept of Michelle Pfeiffer looking like this at the age of 72 is certainly akin to rain on your wedding day, or a free ride when you've already paid.

you know what you have to do

Dark Shadows concerns Barnabas Collins, a lovesick eighteenth century gentleman who employs a witch (Eva Green) as a maid. Envious of the love he offers to another white girl, she enchants the woman to throw herself off a cliff. Barnabas follows in short order, but instead of dying, he just rolls around next to the corpse of the woman he loves. He's immortal, and upset about it for some reason.

Barnabas returns to the seventies and is extremely surprised by modern inventions like the television. Actually, this is the only new development he is alarmed by at all. In fact, it's almost more astonishing how little has changed since 1792. This itself might have been that elusive second level of irony, but this is Tim Burton we're talking about here. The only new thought he's had since Beetlejuice is, we should add the color purple to that.

But no, you say. Surely Johnny Depp couldn't be doing the exact same voice he used for all eleven Pirates of the Carribbean movies and The Tourist? He must have really thrown himself into the role offered by his close friend and goatee groomer! What wouldn't one dark lion do for another, unless the other dark lion was Grover Norquist?

Depp looks to be half asleep for most of Dark Shadows. It's clear he's only really trying when he's involved in a scene with Helena Bonham Carter, who is so much more beautiful than the other women in the cast that it makes absolutely no sense she's treated like an old woman who wants to replenish her body's vitality with undead platelets.

act bad everyone, act bad!

This is Burton's inner sexist at work — he gives people what he thinks they either want or don't want to see it here, because he lacks the human concept of empathy and he's colorblind as fuck. The fact that he would do this to someone he cares about in real life makes the betrayal even more disturbing.

Try to watch the original Dark Shadows on YouTube. It's hard to decide which of the two is worse, although at least the original was at the time presenting a somewhat novel concept. Dark Shadows appeared during the day like any other soap, although by virtue of the fact it was breaking the conventions of the genre, it managed to stand out and garner an audience. Today the concept itself is utterly normal; what would be genre-defying would be to have a movie not about a vampire living in modernity.

Sometimes you have to zig when others zag. Tim Burton left his first wife for Lisa Marie, and then later when he ditched Lisa Marie she auctioned off all his stuff. This was the only time he zigged, and I guess it didn't turn out too well, so he started to take the gothic thing to the extreme and acted like he made it up.

People would be like, "Tim, you know you didn't invent the whole gothic aesthetic, right?" and he would just sob and prepare a maudlin adaptation of The Bob Newhart Show before leaving it during preproduction. Have you ever seen Tim Burton's visual art? Just squint your eyes at a VHS copy of Edward Scissorhands, twist your penis slightly to the right and you'll get the fucking picture.

designing this room alone cost $40 million dollars

Perhaps the most predictable scene in Dark Shadows occurs when Barnabas manufactures some reason to get high with a bunch of young people. A scene where the main character gets high and the camera pans around the circle as in That 70s Show is now a familiar staple of every picture, I think this even happened in the Margaret Thatcher movie I refused to see because Meryl Streep makes me sad about my life. After he exchanges various insights with stoners on a beach, he murders them and drains their bodies of blood. In the theater, this "idea" did not even get a single laugh or chuckle from the audience. You can't murder someone if they're already dead.

OK see you guys later. And don't watch Veep. It's totally unrealistic.

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He is the former vice president of the United States and a writer living in an undisclosed location. He last wrote in these pages about Game of Thrones. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Home by the Sea" - Genesis (mp3)

"That's All" - Genesis (mp3)

The new album from Genesis was tremendous.

In Which We Fall Victim To Gory Seduction

Durga — Fri, 18 May 2012 03:20:00 +0000

Blown to Bits

by HELEN SCHUMACHER

In the 2009 documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, filmmakers Serge Bromberg and Ruxandra Medrea unravel 185 cans of recovered footage from Clouzot’s unfinished project L’Enfer to tell the story of the legendary French director’s attempt to make what he saw as his most important film. Given an unlimited budget by Columbia Studios and inspired by the op art of the ‘60s, Clouzot set out to make a work whose innovation would surpass that of his young New Wave rivals and once again establish him as a pioneering filmmaker.

Serge Reggiani in a scene from L’Enfer

Set in a lakeside resort town, the film is about a jealous husband Marcel (Serge Reggiani) who becomes increasingly obsessed with the idea that his wife Odette, played by Romy Schneider, is cheating on him. It is through Marcel’s visions of his wife's infidelity that Clouzot endeavored to change the visual vocabulary of cinema. The surviving footage is hypnotic and dazzling.

Schneider is captivating. A siren covered in olive oil and glitter, she patiently seduces Clouzot's camera, exhaling a cloud of cigarette smoke under pulsating blue and yellow lights — a nightmarish vision of sensuality.

Clouzot and his team of special effects engineers spent months conducting camera tests for L'Enfer. The tests sought to construct a world deformed by jealousy — a discomforting one in which the viewer loses his or her spatial bearings. Relying heavily on kinetic sculpture, op art, mod fashions, and repetition of images and phrases, the crew toiled away in experimentation, becoming what one cameraman calls "experts at optical coitus." In palette and tactility, their kaleidoscopic imagery often resembles the gory seductiveness of a Marilyn Minter artwork.

Romy Schneider during a color test for L’Enfer

L'Enfer was never finished. Reggiani quit the project, Clouzot had a heart attack while filming a scene, and the reservoir where the film was set was drained. But these were just the dramatic final blows to a career dogged by fear.

There had always been a sense of foreboding surrounding Clouzot. It started when, at the age of 27, the director was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to a sanatorium. Clouzot spent the next four years of his life reading voraciously and studying story and plot, and confronting the absoluteness of mortality.

After being released from the hospital, Clouzot found that the German occupation and the subsequent flight of France's Jewish filmmakers had left the country's film industry in shambles. However, through a contact from his previous job as a script translator in Berlin, he got work at a Nazi-run studio, the same one that would produce his first two full-length films, L'Assassin Habite au 21 and Le Corbeau.

Le Corbeau

Le Corbeau, released in 1943, is a deeply paranoid film. The psychic terror of the sanatorium and the horror of World War II had moved Clouzot's work in a dark direction. Opening on an anonymous provincial setting, a town’s new doctor begins receiving poison-pen letters denouncing him as an adulterer and abortionist. Soon everyone in town is receiving the letters, spurring forth a fervor of accusations at each other. The local psychologist compares the villagers' rising levels of fear and suspicion to a fever — a metaphor that occurs throughout Clouzot’s work. The French public was outraged over its critique of the bourgeois paranoia and informant culture of the occupation. After the war, Clouzot's work for the German studio got him blacklisted for several years.

Brigitte Bardot in La Verite

Clouzot resented this punishment, having already had his career sidelined by sickness. He made his comeback, though. The director's mastery of suspense and character earned him ranking among France's premier directors of the time. He was referred to as the French Hitchcock — mostly because of his ability to keep audiences guessing and build tension, but also because of his brutal treatment of actors.

If the script had his characters eating rotten fish (as in Diabolique), then they ate it in real life; if his character was getting manhandled by the police (as in Quai des Orfèvres), then Clouzot would slap him around before the next take. In La Verite, when Brigitte Bardot’s character was supposed to have overdosed on sleeping pills, Clouzot slipped her sleeping pills, saying they were aspirin, to get the dazed, drowsy look her character needed. His manipulation at times was sadistic. His first wife, Vera Clouzot, who — like the schoolteacher she played in Diabolique — suffered from a weak heart, was practically worked to death by her husband.

During the filming of Les Espions, Clouzot made Vera film a physically taxing scene of her character’s mental breakdown 48 times only to then use one of the first takes. She died of a heart attack a few years later at the age of 46.

Vera Clouzot with Simone Signoret in Diabolique

Vera was Brazilian, and she and Clouzot traveled to South America for their honeymoon. The trip helped inspire Clouzot to create Wages of Fear in 1953. A white-knuckle thriller trimmed of all unnecessary frills, Wages of Fear takes place in the fictional Venezuelan town of Las Piedras. In it, a group of expatriate men pass their days in the shade of the village's one bar while scheming of ways to make it out of the isolated region. Their big break comes when the Southern Oil Company, an American company in trouble for their exploitation of the native population, decides to hire a few non-union men for $2,000 to drive two trucks stocked with nitroglycerine across the mountains to an inflamed rig that needs the explosives in order to stop the blaze. Selected for the job are friends Mario and Jo in one truck and the caricatured Italian Luigi and Dutch Bimba in the other.

The majority of the film follows the four men as they rely on machismo and prayers to make it across washed-out roads, hairpin turns and petroleum bogs and claim their paycheck.

Wages of Fear

Wages of Fear seems prescient in its ability to foreshadow the career-long consumptive battle, both physical and mental, that led to Clouzot's downfall on the set of L’Enfer. In the film, again fear manifests itself as a physical ailment. Even if the men do manage to complete the journey, the stress of the mission is guaranteed to leave them changed. One prospective driver, a man from the oil fields of Texas who had seen the effects such a trip can have, ominously warns, "Once you have the fear, it's for life. Your hair turns grey and you shake like palsy."

The drivers and an oil company man before their suicide mission

Since leaving the sanatorium, Clouzot had been plagued by insomnia. As in his bedridden days, he used these sleepless nights to work on his movies. Crew members often complained about his habit of waking up them at 2 a.m. to work on the filmmaker’s latest idea. The lack of sleep made his collaborators resentful and it made Clouzot unpredictable and unstable. The anxiety that comes to one in the middle of the night can be insufferable, and it’s easy to imagine that Clouzot spent many of the nights worrying about the ridicule he had been receiving in the pages of Cahiers du Cinéma regarding his detail-obsessed filmmaking. It’s a scenario that brings to mind the conversation between elder Jo to the younger Mario during their trek where Jo tells Mario that he lacks fear because he lacks imagination. “I see the explosion; I see myself blown to bits,” says Jo.

Jo (Charles Vanel) and Mario (Yves Montand) contemplate death by nitroglycerine in Wages of Fear

While filming L'Enfer, Clouzot tried to prove that illness could be controlled, that it could be mapped like coordinates on a grid, that “madness could be conceived as an equation.” In the end, what emerges from the documentary is the story of how a master of French cinema was undone by sickness. It tells of Clouzot's eventual defeat, not to the changing style of filmmaking, but to the pathological symptoms that had plagued him since entering adulthood.

Like a cinematic Marie Curie, whose experiments in radioactivity won her Nobel Prizes in Physics and Chemistry but who later died from aplastic anemia brought on by working with the toxic elements, Clouzot became of victim of the emotions — jealousy, fear, paranoia — that, previously, he had expertly manipulated to create the work that made him such a celebrated filmmaker.

Clouzot on the set of L’Enfer

Henri-Georges Clouzot died in 1977 while listening to Hector Berlioz’s "The Damnation of Faust."

Helen Schumacher is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Brooklyn. She tumbls here and here. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here.

"Red Poison" - Sun Kil Moon (mp3)

"Among the Leaves" - Sun Kil Moon (mp3)

Among the Leaves, the new album from Sun Kil Moon, will be released on May 29th and contains seventeen songs all played on nylon string guitar.

In Which Jean Renoir Keeps The Aspidistra Flying

Durga — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:17:00 +0000

Renoir & Bazin & Godard & Truffaut

by ALEX CARNEVALE

There is a special and essential cachet attached to unfinished books. Despite their incomplete nature, the tomes naturally have an affinity with puzzles or codes, and because of this the texts themselves are often subject to more than one reading. Also because they are not whole, other individuals feel more assertive about adding or subtracting writing from the original, under the supposition that they are putting together the work the way the author imagined. It is this way with Andre Bazin's seemingly innocent 1971 appreciation of his favorite filmmaker, Jean Renoir.

Even Truffaut's introduction to the volume he edited completely obfuscates the book itself. He writes,

No one should expect me to introduce this book with caution, detachment or equanimity. Andre Bazin and Jean Renoir have meant too much for me to be able to speak of them dispassionately. Thus it is quite natural that I should feel that Jean Renoir by Andre Bazin is the best book on the cinema, written by best critic, about the best director.

Andre Bazin, whose health deteriorated year after year, found the strength to look at films and to comment on them until his last day. The day before his death he wrote one of his best essays — the long analysis of The Crime of M. Lange — having watched the film on television from his bed.

Renoir's work excited Bazin more than any other. He was working on this study of his favorite director when he died. His fragmentary manuscript has been reconstructed and completed by his friends with the assistance of his wife, Janine Bazin.

I am responsible for the final organization of the work, for its division into ten chapters approximating the chronological development of Renoir's work. Obviously Bazin would have done it differently if he had had time. I think he intended to devote a chapter to the themes treated by Renoir, another to his work with actors, another to the adaptation of novels.

In one of his last letters, Bazin wrote me,

I am circling around Renoir by reading the life of Augustus, the novels of Zola: La Bete Humaine and Nana, Maupassant... I will eventually have to approach him more directly but I am now at a point where I know either too much or not enough. Too much to be satisfied with approximations, not yet enough to fill in all the variables of his equations.

I am not far from thinking that the work of Jean Renoir is the work of an infallible filmmaker. To be less extravagant, I will say that Renoir's work has always been guided by a philosophy of life which expresses itself with the aid of something much like a trade secret: sympathy.

Before Bazin's book even begins, Jean Renoir weighs in with a foreword of his own:

The more I travel through life, the more I am convinced that masks are proliferating. I have difficulty finding a woman whose face looks as it really is. Our age is a triumph of make-up. And not only for faces, but more important, for the mind as well.

The modern world is founded on the ever increasing production of material goods. One must keep producing or die. But this process is like the labor of Sisyphus. Forgetting Lavoisier's dictum, "In nature nothing is created, nothing is lost; everything is transformed," we convince ourselves that our earthly machines will succeed in catching up with eternity. But to maintain the level of production on which our daily bread depends, we must ever renew and expand our enterprises.

It turns out that Renoir does not know Bazin very well, other than by his little French beret. He struggles with the same problem the author of Jean Renoir has — knowing too much or too little about his subject. For the final version of Jean Renoir is as much an obliteration of its subject as a celebration.

Almost every section of Jean Renoir contains the same blandishment about the director. Each section begins, "Renoir is the greatest living French director" or "Renoir is unmatched" in such-and-such field. This kind of repetition would be the first accessory sacrificed if the author had been alive to revise his work; here they serve as eerie reminders that the admiration is rehearsed.

Nana The second part of Jean Renoir amounts to lame defenses of The River and Paris Does Strange Things, two films that for various reasons seem to have offended Bazin's sense of the cinema in some way. He waves aside his own objections and Truffaut replaces them, in the book's third section, with Renoir's own autobiographical reminiscences of his days as a young, inexperienced directors, film treatments, and interviews.

Renoir writes,

What I know is that I am beginning to understand how one should work. I know that I am French and that I must work in an absolutely national vein. I know also that in doing this, and only in doing this, can I reach people from other nations and act for international understanding.

I know that the American cinema will collapse because it is no longer American. I know too that we must not spurn the foreigners who come to us with their knowledge and talent; we must absorb them. It is a practice which has served us rather well from Leonardo da Vinci all the way to Picasso. I believe that the cinema is not so much an industry as people would have us believe and that the fat men with their money, their graphs, and green felt tables are going to fall on their faces.

Jean Renoir never made another film after Jean Renoir was published. No one would give him the money.

The best part of Jean Renoir is the book's filmography, an appendix in which Renoir's various projects are taken up by a variety of critics and directors. (Truffaut himself writes the majority of them.) These short discussions of the films innovated the concept of a "recap," for they prove that simply describing a cinematic plot reveals vast differences in character and perception. This is most evident in Truffaut's rundown of The Rules of the Game:

The nine principal characters of The Rules of the Game have a sentimental problem to resolve, and since the film shows them on the eve of a crisis, we will see them behave at their worst. The only sincere person — the pilot Andre Jurieu — awkward in an unfamiliar milieu, unleashes a tragicomedy in which he is the only victim, precisely because he has not followed the rules of the game.

Ludicrous skeletons, the characters of The Rules of the Game, viewed at a critical moment in their decay, forsake the farandole ("It's nice but it's a little old-fashioned") for a danse macabre which assaults the senses. For the ostensible purpose of a party, they are led to disguise themselves, which is to say, to take off their masks. The shadows of the masters and servants mingle and merge in an image of a sybaritic life style which cannot last: man is imperfect, he is a born liar, and besides, "If love is endowed with wings, is it not to flutter?" The Rules of the Game is a profoundly pessimistic film, a bitter and prophetic carnival in which friendship itself is exposed as just another empty game.

The word game is used over 200 times in Truffaut's two page description.

game

At some point in any hagiography, the idolatry itself becomes absurd. In Jean Renoir, there is no evidence of insincerity on the part of Jean Renoir's admirers. No doubt he was their very favorite, the person whose artistic work can be credited in part for giving birth to their own, whether it be new movies or essay-length film criticism. But there is also a movement just as strong away from what Renoir has accomplished; it equates to the difference between the sympathy they admire in Renoir and true empathy.

Admiration, especially the deeply ingrained kind, eventually distances the ardor from its subject. The act of writing a book in celebration of their cinematic hero feels like filing him away in history. None of their work would exist without Renoir, Bazin & Godard & Truffaut find themselves admitting, and having said this, they have finished with the man, eight years before he died in Beverly Hills. As Eric Rohmer puts it in his review of Renoir's Madame Bovary, "the roads that lead to art and truth are different, and it is the point where they cross which has always fascinated Renoir. Each perspective is true, each is false. They complement one another."

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Peter Berg's Battleship. You can find an archive of his writing on This Recording here.

"Supermoon" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)

"Seraphim" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)

The third studio album from Simian Mobile Disco, Unpatterns, was released on May 14th.

In Which We Become A Useful Drunk

Alex — Tue, 15 May 2012 15:33:00 +0000

Substance Abuse

by ELLEN COPPERFIELD

Malcolm Lowry's biggest bout of binge drinking began when his suitcases were lost en route to New York in 1954. His wife Margerie was used to dealing with his inebriation; his other caretaker in the city was David Markson, a young novelist who had written a critical appreciation of Lowry's 1947 novel Under the Volcano. Markson later wrote,

The man could not shave himself. In lieu of a belt, he knotted a rope or a discarded necktie around his waist. Mornings, he needed two or three ounces of gin in his orange juice if he was to steady his hand to eat the breakfast that would very likely prove his only meal of the day. Thereafter a diminishing yellow tint in the glass might belie the fact that now he was drinking the gin neat, which he did for as many hours as it took him to. Ultimately he would collapse — sometimes sensible enough of his condition to lurch toward a bed, though more often he would crash down into a chair, and once it was across my phonograph.

During a subsequent party held in his honor, Lowry pre-gamed by drinking a bottle of shaving lotion. Markson recalled that during the event "suddenly, cupping his hand to his mouth, he began to make sounds that can only be called 'beeps.'"

Lowry's favorite drink was a constantly evolving subject. He was not a mean drunk, particularly, although he was always careless. His constitution was actually state-of-the-art to be able to absorb the kind of damage he inflicted on it and survived. He saw drinking not as an art, or a path to understanding, but an inescapable part of his daily existence. Once Markson opened his eyes in the morning to find Lowry leering, "Do you have the decency to offer me a drink?"

Lowry and Aiken in Spain 1932Through Malcolm Lowry's life, people were always trying to get him clean. If they liked his writing, they were far more inclined to put up with his behavior, which perhaps seems obvious, but the one thing really has little to do with the other.

When he first arrived in the United States to stay with Conrad Aiken, he carried only a ukelele and a bunch of notebooks.

with conrad aiken 1931

He absolutely despised New York. He wrote,

In my experience — odi et amo — that particular city — it favors brief and furious outbursts, but not the long haul. Moreover for all its drama and existential fury, or perhaps because of it, it's a city where it can be remarkably hard — or so it seems to me — to get on the right side of one's despair.

Acapulco in march of 1946

In his drunken state, he often wrote letters. He would usually start penning screeds to his friends, agents and publishers just when he had approached rock bottom, so they took on something of a desperate tone. Writing to his agent in 1967, he managed, "Please don't say I'm a shit...for not writing more when you have dealt so kindly with me. It's just that my mind won't work. I am having a lot to contend with right now."

Lowry believed that versions of mescal he imbibed might provoke useful hallucinations, although in reality he was making a common error. The drink had nothing to do with mescaline.

He was capable of getting in any amount of trouble while under the influence. On occasion he would drink himself under so badly that he resorted to asking witnesses if he had been violated sexually. But for the most part his tolerance was high enough that he did not black out completely.

February 1946

It seems stupid, in writing about Malcolm Lowry, to wonder why he drank so often and so much. Yet in his case, alcoholism constituted such a destructive act it almost demands an answer to a silly question.

Douglas Day wrote in his biography of Lowry that "Orally fixated types are prone to excessive drinking. Sons of austere and autocratic father are apt to express their rebellion against that parent by drinking. Guilt and fear, of sexual origin, are likely to express themselves in drinking. Reaction against a rigidly authoritarian religious upbringing may manifest itself in drinking."

March 1947

Day continues, explaining that "Lowry drank not so much because he chose to, as because he had to: from one source or another, he had acquired, by the age of eighteen, enough guilt — sexual and otherwise — and resentment and insecurity to have made it almost impossible for him to be anything but an alcoholic. He must have been an utterly miserable young man."

what became the Calle Nicaragua in "Under the Volcano"

The protagonist of Lowry's most famous work, Under the Volcano, spends about two-thirds of the novel under the influence. Even the book's most dedicated admirers seem to grow tired of this. The Consul's intoxication, at some point, ceases to be charming. He drinks primarily because he is lonely, but also because he is is afraid of sex, other people and the possibility he may be attracted to men.

Of the book Lowry argued that it was "designed, counterdesigned and interwelded that it could be read an indefinite number of times and still not have yielded all its meanings or its drama or its poetry." If only this did not sound like an excuse for his life rather than a strength of his literature.

Ellen Copperfield is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in San Francisco. You can find an archive of her writing on This Recording here. She last wrote in these pages about Elvis Presley.

"When Will I See You Again" - Lord Huron (mp3)

"Son of a Gun" - Lord Huron (mp3)

In Which We Lather Our Sensibilities At Length

Alex — Mon, 14 May 2012 14:51:00 +0000

Reading at Berkeley

I'm knocked out. I mean, I had a glass of whiskey. I said I hope nobody thinks I'm drunk. Man, I was high this afternoon, and I'm just exactly the same way now.

On July 23rd 1965 the poet Charles Olson took the stage at the University of California-Berkeley Poetry Conference, ostensibly to read a few poems. There was always an apprehension among Charles' friends whenever he attempted public speaking during his last years. The full text of Olson's remarks that evening runs over 60 pages, and it must have been evident to everyone in attendance that Olson, while somewhat cogent for him, would have to be dragged off the stage. Olson's talk that night has alternately been called "a tour de force" (by editor George F. Butterick and "an absolute travesty" (by most others). What follows are some excerpts from the text, along with private remarks during intermission transcribed by Zoe Brown.

ROBERT DUNCAN: As I think all of you, or almost all of you, must know, the man I am introducing tonight is visibly a large man. And he has to find in poetry — a phrase came up in a seminar of his: suddenly he was saying he was trying to find a position inferior to language. Every American impulse from the beginning has been to use it right away, and cash in on it, no matter what it was.

What I want to suggest is, if you find difficulties in Olson, they're because that the only thing in poetry for him is going to be found in a struggle, and because his knowledge of language is such that its usability seems everywhere, I keep thinking he'll never find how to take ahold of that so it isn't usable. We're absolutely baffled. But when he does, we have, the rest of us poets, been absolutely baffled. But when he does, we have the rest of us poets, been confronted with some amazing dimension, in which we find the — will "bedrock of poetry" do? I mean, the really resistant thign, the poem.

He has had to occupy an area in history big enough for some spirit size. You know, it's like he's trying to find clothes big enough for him. The spirit which can roam over anything it can imagine, and then imagine one that is still restless because it can't find a space big enough for it to exist in: we, this evening, will attend a poetry of this order.

One thing I find, for those of you who may really find yourself having to go along with something that will leave you feeling like you could have fitted it in a much smaller space and time, the other things he delights in sometimes are really beautiful songs.

And then you discover that, whatever the huge size in space, in time, he occupies, he also occupies beautiful and discrete, almost ordinary areas.

So, may I now get from the back of the room there, Charles Olson, who will take over.

Applause.

CHARLES OLSON: Thank you. It feels like a convention hall. And I never was running for anything, fortunately.

Oh, would somebody loan me The Maximus Poems? I haven't a copy. Thakn you.

Gee, I did it again. I left something in the room. Yeah, that's right. How the hell do you prove what you always...? Hm, wow, that's crazy. That's a funny one. Where the hell did they go? Somebody took 'em. Would by any chance, Robert Creeley, you have — ? Oh here it is. I got it.

I'd like to first read a — thank you, Robert, for that word "song." In the face of the poets that have read here, I have had an experience.

DUNCAN: Charles, would you please put the microphone on?

OLSON: Oh. Did you say that? How do you do this if there ain't...? Just connect...? You see, this is life. I mean, I either am the Hanged Man, or... Where do you put that, like? Where does that go? There's no hole! Where do you put it? You'd better show me, Mr. Baker. Able Baker. You see, security.

Thank you. That's what we got our nation for. That's why, the rest of us are, fortunately, as Mr. Creeley proved last night, free. And then there's really no worry about the land of free, cause it's been replaced. Like Allen did! Instead of drinking to you and me, I'll drink to that, hm?

But I would like to read first what for me was kind of an experience of writing a song. It's called "The Ring Of" and I hope it's, if my memory is right...Mr. Creeley? That you did...?

ROBERT CREELEY: Yes.

OLSON: Yeah, O.K., that's why. I mean that was so much a matter of support that I felt... Here it is.

It was the west wind caught her up, as
she rose from the genital
wave, and bore her from the delicate
foam, home
to her isle

and those lovers
of the difficult, the hours
of the golden day welcomed her, clad her, were
as though they had made her, were wild
to bring this new thing born
of the ring of the sea pink
& naked, this girl, brought her
to the face of the gods, violets
in her hair

Beauty, and she
said no to zeus & them all, all were not or
was it she chose the ugliest
to bed with, or was it straight
and to expiate the nature of beauty, was it?

knowing hours, anyway,
she did not stay long, or the lame
was only one part, & the handsome
mars had her. And the child
had that name, the arrow of
as the flight of, the move of
his mother who adorneth

with myrtle the dolphin and words
they rise, they do who
are born of like
elements.

Hm, thank you. I just learnt it from you last night. OK, we're off. I mean the horse is at least on the track. See if we can win.

I also wrote a poem which I'm sure neither Creeley nor I would include in anything, but I want to read it. I'm going to read three poems first — that one, this one, and then "Letter 9" of the Maximus Poems, which has to do with this same book, this beautiful book, which I love...because that design on it was done — and then I don't know how many years later, enormous years later, I, after Creeley had criticized me and taught me everything one night, when I was burned up that he let a class go to go down to Peek's to have beer, and I thought the whole of Black Mountain was going to fail if we didn't get those windows in before the freeze that night — and long after, he said, "Don't flip your wig, man."

And that made me, that brought me up to time, eh? I mean, he knocked any wig I ever had off my head that night. And it was beautiful, because he knew exactly what he was saying. And he was right. And I was not up — I mean, I was obviously, like they say, not with it, not right. But curiously enough, it was so many years after even that, that I was left alone at Black Mountain, with my wife and son, and with the beach wagon, which Wesley Huss had acquired before we closed Black Mountain, in fact, within three days I had a beach wagon.

So I feel even comfortable in reading what I consider, and I guess everybody else does, a bad poem, which I wrote as a Christmas pageant or something, a poem for Christmas at Black Mountain. Ha ha ha! Because I suppose Allen Ginsberg still thinks I'm Santa Claus. I'd like him to say,"No!" or I'll run you for whatever you — what do I want to run for, Allen?

ALLEN GINSBERG: Read the poem and I'll decide.

OLSON: That's why I'm reading it. It's called "An Ode to Nativity," and I don't believe it's ever been read. Except for this morning, I thought I'd look at it and I liked it, you know how you do. I don't think anybody has ever...By the way, did you reject, did you even bother to consider it, Bob? How far can I come with this tether?

GINSBERG: Go ahead and read it, read it.

OLSON: Oh, I'm going to do it. Look this thing is so bad, I can't ruin it. The only thing I can, as Allen says, is it might turn out to be how it sounded to me today. I guess that's really how it feels for me tonight, or this morning.

All cries.

No.

All cries rise, & the three of us
observe how fast Orion

Naah, that's too poetic.

All cries rise, & the three of us
observe how fast Orion

Jeez I'm looking it all. Big voice... Shit! You see, you shouldn't talk; you should just read the thing.

All cries rise, & the three of us
observe how fast Orion
marks midnight
at the climax
of the sky
while the boat of the moon settles
as red in the southwest
as the orb of her was, for this boy, once,
the first time he saw her whole halloween face northeast
across the skating pond as he came down to the ice, December
his seventh year.
Winter, in this zone, is an on & off thing, where the air
is sometimes as shining as ice is
when the sky's lights... When the ducks
are the only skaters
And a crèche
is a commerciality
(The same year, a ball of fire
the same place - exactly through
the same trees
was fire
the Sawyer lumber company yard
was a moon of pain, at the end of itself,
and the death of horses I saw burning,
fallen through the floors
into the buried Blackstone River the city
had hidden under itself, had grown over...

Recorded during the intermission:

OLSON: Allen, I'm just proving that oral poetry exists, O.K.? Ain't I or not?

GINSBERG: It's very good, it's beautiful.

OLSON: Isn't this oral poetry? Isn't this improvisatory, spontaneous poetry?

GINSBERG: All except one thing, when you had the cigarette in your mouth.

OLSON: And what happened? Was that visual?

GINSBERG: Couldn't hear you at the back.

WELCH: We were worried it was backwards.

OLSON: Gee, I wish it were. I needs to be backwards. That extra piece that I needed: I don't need it, I'm drunk on you guys. And I meant it.

WELCH: Hey, don't you have to pee too?

OLSON: Nah, shit pee? I never pee. The reason why I'm not a queen is I don't have to pee to prove that I'm a man. Go pee, Allen. We got over that tonight.

PAUL X: Can I have a cigarette?

OLSON: Of course, it's yours, baby. Isn't that crazy, I should be smoking your cigarettes? Goddamn it, it irritates me, but it also -

PAUL X: A broad gave them to me, so it doesn't matter.

JOHN WIENERS (introducing a girl): Just here visiting.

GIRL: Hello, how are you? I'm enjoying it so much.

OLSON: Awfully nice to see you. Pleasure. I'm glad. Will you kiss me too? You would kiss me, anyhow, but I want you to kiss me in honor, as well, will ya? In love and honor.

WELCH: That was why we did it.

SUZANNE MOWAT: What are you doing?

OLSON: I'm doing just what I ought to be doing, don't you think so?

MOWAT: I don't.

OLSON: You don't? You think I should be reading poetry? God, I got the poems, but -

WELCH: Charles, do you know John Montgomery? Allow me to introduce John Montgomery.

OLSON: I know Stuart Montgomery, the guy who's publishing Ed and me in London.

WELCH: No, he's the guy who talks so funny in The Dharma Bums, that forgotten painter.

OLSON (drinking): That's the last of it, dammit. I had one last slug.

WELCH: Don't you want to give him a drink?

MOWAT: No, I don't think you should.

OLSON: "...and John Montgomery." Let's do this thing the way it's coming out tonight. "Charles Olson and John Montgomery." O.K.? Now give me that shot. You got a whiskey.

WELCH: I brought this for you, but no one told me that you drink.

OLSON: What the hell is that? Just that lousy wine. Well, I'll just go like Jack Kerouac, right straight on to Rot Red. Drinks. It's sweety time. You, you drunken bum, have a shot. And if you don't stop drinking...

WELCH: Yeah, I know, I'm a terrible lush.

OLSON: I think the poets are ahead of the scientists now. I know they are. The decadence of the imagery of science is as shocking as James Joyce. I mean, Ezra Pound long years ago returned the presentation copy of Finnegans Wake to himself, with the word "DECADENCE" written over the cover. I mean, that takes guts, the same guts that led him to say, "I thought I knew something." I'd be proud to have been the man in this century... And like, here I am, dragging my ass after Ezra.

Two years ago in Vancouver, what did I do? I tried to read the poems? Now I could, and instead I'm telling you, "Gee I wish they were more." I'm not just avoiding it. I'll be happy to read them. I love some of them. Just like those poems I wrote longer and earlier, I bet they'll turn out to be all right. That's not the point. They're nothing by comparison to what I propose, or what I would dream I might do. Because poets only are worthwhile if they do what they dream. And there's been a few. In fact, the only ones that count are those who want to be, hm, the same in their dream.

last days of the vancouver poetry conference, 1963

And I'm like — let me continue 5, and I'll come back to 9, which I love because it talks about how a book practically is the only goddamn thing that is a dream in a society like this. And do you know it embarrassed me two years ago in Vancouver. I mean, god, Allen an activist, Orlovsky, Dunky, Creeley, everybody that was there, I feel like an old schlumpf from Gloucester. And, in fact, I'd love to read even that crazy "Tantrist sat saw Lingam in City Hall" or something, I mean, a poem I did read, you know, I'd like to read it right now, like that, like that, like.

And just make it like it felt when it was written, that's all. I am a tantrist. But two years ago I was embarrassed, and not because I hadn't been to Buenos Aires. O.K.?

I mean the universe today is a very hard thing for an individual to possess. The whole human race has it. The efficiency of the universe is in our hands. But for any one of us, as what they used to call a private soul, when I protested was a piece of piss at any public wall, in that paragraph, in that opening paragraph of Projective Verse, but you know, it comes out that the private soul — and if I could cry like the cock at the birth of day - which is all I'm doing tonight — that's the only thing that's more than public and private. And like that great thing we've been talking about and we discussed in seminar. Isn't it nice, really? This is the private soul at the public wall. Charlie Olson. Closed verse. Not even bothering to play the music.

I got the music. I mean, it's like scores, Beethoven and all those things, John Keats' letters in Harvard's library. I read 'em. In fact, I wrote a fourteen line sonnet. You know, it's powerful. I was talking to Ed Dorn recently. Probably I shouldn't have eaten supper...

CREELEY: Please read the poems.

OLSON: All right, Bob, I heard you.

July 23rd, 1965

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