marc pietrzykowski

For a few years, at the tail end of graduate school and the nose end of my post-graduate life, I wrote many reviews and essays about poetry, most of them very critical, some of them snarky, some even caustic. I’m not sure now why I chose to write that way, other than the books I was reading really did leave me feeling dry and uninspired, but soon enough the job of trashing even poems that I genuinely loathed became a chore. So, I stopped, but lately I have again felt the urge to write about poetry, instead of just writing poetry, to find some contemporary poets whose work I can dive into, read deeply, and learn something from. My only agenda is to try and stay away from the standard reviewers tool box: no poetic genealogies (unless absolutely necessary), no armchair psychology, no breathless-but-nonsensical praise; even if I dislike a certain kind of poetry, I will at least try to learn to read and judge it on its own terms. Then again, I might have another agenda, one (or more) that I’ve hidden from myself, and at least one goal of this project will be to investigate my own preferences and predilections, poetic and otherwise. I will try to do at least one a month, and if anyone has suggestions of poets I should read, please shoot me an email.

Charles Potts, Inside Idaho: Poems 1996-2007. West End Press, 2009.

Two-thirds of the poems in this collection appear culled from previous books by the author, which account for the 1996-2007 bit in the title, and also for the absence of a mention of “collected” works, since the bulk of the work here is new. The distinction between a collected works and a bundling of previous work with a substantial number of new poems is important to reading them, I think, especially considering the author here has written a huge number of books, none of which I have read. I am not reading through the entire story of Potts’ development as a poet, in other words, I am reading something about his development in a particular 11 year period, and about the choices he made to represent this period. It’s also possible that this is just a hodgepodge, that Potts didn’t have enough material for a new book so he borrowed some stuff from earlier ones, but I’m going to assume the choices were intentional.

The first two sections of the book, “from 100 Years in Idaho,” and “from Lost River Mountain,” are the previously published sections, leading me to believe they were written earlier than the rest of Inside Idaho. Already these titles indicate a strong attention to place, and to the state of Idaho in particular, and indeed most of these poems treat rural Idaho as both Brahman and Atman, so to speak, the source of inspiration and the form that inspiration takes, the diction, word choice, and so forth. Having never been to Idaho, I am further distanced from Potts’ work, but my first reaction is to assume all poetry rooted in a sense of place desires to transcend that place and seek a kind of universality, like the best work of Frost or Jeffers or Harjo &tc., but I’m not sure that reaction is correct. Perhaps rooting ones’ art in a particular geography through the use of distinctive place names, flora and fauna, cultural experiences, and so forth, is actually meant to resist universality, and my reaction is simply a prejudice that a work of art should strive to communicate something to every person. Come to think of it, resisting universality this way is in fact communicating something, and something universal: this place is unlike any other place. But now I’ve gone too abstract and in any case, the more I read these poems, the more I see that Potts is really writing about Potts, and Idaho is just where that happens:

I remember Idaho from some preposterous angles

With the good sense to leave out the private parts,

Unlike the other log cabin that Grandpa herb built near

Darlington with 1896 excised in the header

Still standing as a loafing shed with no foundation,

Or the Teppenyaki banquet after Dad’s memorial service

Where everyone went fishing for flipped shrimp in the air

(“The Homestead Act”)

Most of the poems in the first two sections—actually, most of the poems in the book—treat Idaho as a place of memories, a site for re-living, for comparing and annotating the poet’s present world:

Passing near Clyde in Little Lost

Where my mother wept and worked to teach

All eight grades in a one room school house,

Two golden eagles a mile apart,

One on the roof beam of a barn,

The other on the cross arm of a light pole,

Ignore my grand noisy motion in their panoramic eyes.

The Toyota Tacoma is too big and indelible to bother with.

(“Eagle Out”)

In each of these excerpts, Potts maintains some emotional distance from the Idaho that haunts him, which helps them succeed as works of art more than other, more directly emotional poems later in the collection. The raw emotion on display in the final section, for example (“Wild Horse”), has a more immediate effect on me because of lines like “I am responsible for children in a world about to unravel / And nothing I try to do about it seems to help” (“The Crumbs of Christmas”) and “Gone forever / But still here inside me / In my crying arms and bones” (“Wild Horse”), because they are naked expressions of pain, and thus I would like to comfort the speaker. Then I remember that I am reading a poem, and I’m not sure what to do with such expressions anymore. The poems in the final section are about Potts’ wife dieing suddenly, hit by a car while on her bicycle, but really they are about Potts dealing with that event, much as his poems about Idaho are actually about Potts dealing with Idaho, and perhaps that’s where my problem starts: such pain as Potts feels is real and palpable, and worthy of great sympathy, but when stated this plainly, it’s no longer a sad song, it’s a song that the singer has broken down in the middle of, sobbing. The idea that the song is so sad it causes the singer to break down in fact has dramatic potential, but Potts seems more interested in revealing what he felt than in creating a drama that will carry us along. The poems are, in that sense, unidirectional: he tells us something about how he feels, and we hear, but what we feel is not so important, which, in light of the tragedy, is understandable.

Understanding however, is not quite enough, as uncharitable as that must sound. The earlier poems work best when they sweep along, using sudden line breaks to propel the reader through an experience. The poems in the middle sections, “Lullaby of the Lochsa” and “Sunburnt Romantic,” take more chances with form and tone and so are more striking, both when they succeed and when they do not, and a concern with the poem as a made thing is most palpable here:

Just past a sign for Looking Glass

What about this famous Indian Chief

Rear View Mirror

Elderberries

Sung Dynasty clouds

Hanging in the tops of pine trees

Pilgrimage to Pahsimeroi

The granite on the roadside

Slick with water

(“Lullaby of the Lochsa”)

The reference to the Sung Dynasty in almost too much, given the poem’s shadings of classical Chinese poetry-in-translation, and this influence (along with classical Japanese) is scattered throughout Inside Idaho. More of it would be welcome, in fact, since a greater focus on the on objects of sense and less on what the poet was feeling or on sudden, bland philosophical ruminations (“How can beauty be so useless / Or does it have to be practical, any use at all?” –”The Wreckage from Red Hill”) would, I think, help many readers stay entranced. Again, though, I wonder if that’s the point: to my mind, good poems convey meaning while subduing the ego of the reader, hypnogogically lulling them into the world of the poet. If that idea holds, then suddenly wondering, after a fairly hypnotic section detailing a trip into the mountains, if the beauty of the world means anything has the effect of interrupting the reader in the midst of a revery with something a great deal more dull than mountains. Could this be the point? If it were done more regularly, and with more force, perhaps, but these moments are too artless in their artlessness to seem like the work of artistic intent, just as many of the poems in the final section are too focused on their own pain to seem like they are interested in comparable pains the reader might feel.

I have had little to say about the rhythm of the poems, since most of them depend on a visual, prosy rhythm, and are heavily reliant on sudden line breaks, as mentioned earlier, so the real rhythm at play here is the way the images are arranged, the way the different pictures and ideas “rhyme,” so to speak. It’s hard to imagine these poems being read, though I’m sure Potts reads them, I just have a hard time imagining what he does with them. As sets of images and impressions, the rhythms generally work, and there are enough interesting juxtapositions at play, as should be evident from the selections above, to keep me interested. I’m glad to have read these poems, and to have learned more about the person who wrote them—I worry that I have missed something, however, as I don’t have any desire to re-read them, which is something I value in a poem. Perhaps I need to learn to better value art as the transitory coalescing of sense impressions that is surely is, or maybe it’s a matter of scale. In any case, thanks for the poems, Mr. Potts.

Also, I listened to some CDs, as I continue to try and listen to all the CDs I own, in order: 528) John Prine: The Singing Mailman Delivers; 529) Kate Bush: 50 Words For Snow; 530) Andy Statman: Old Brooklyn; 531) Tom Waits: Bad as Me; 532) Marlene Dietrich: Das Beste 1929-59.

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I’ve been naughty, Santa, I have gotten so very behind listing all the CDs I’ve listened to, there are piles of them beside the computer… to recap, I am trying to listen to every CD I own, which is many, so here’s the latest batch. Sorry, Santa, don’t bring me that bottle of Scotch I asked for. No, actually, bring that, just keep the pipe cutter:

501) Dirty Three: Horse Stories; 502) Big Jack Johnson: Daddy, When is Mommie Comin Home?; 503) Funkadelic: Standing On the Verge of Getting it On; 504) Squirrel Nut Zippers: Hot; 505) A Camp: A Camp (has grown on me); 506) The Pretenders: The Singles; 507) Peter Tosh: Legalize It; 508) The Kinks: Arthur (or, The Decline and Fall of the British Empire); 509) The Stranglers: Black and White (lovely, thanks); 510) Mercury Rev: See You On The Other Side; 511) Emmylou Harris: Red Dirt Girl; 512) Brooklyn Funk Essantials: In the Buzzbag; 513) Darren Hanlon: Little Chills; 514) The Amazing Royal Crowns: The Amazing Royal Crowns; 515) Tom Waits: Heartattack and Vine (old Waits or new Waits? Cold pizza or hot pizza?); 516) Dead Kennedys: Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables; 517) Cowboy Junkies: One Soul Now; 518) Sonny Boy Williamson: Little Boy Blue; 519) The Cole Porter Songbook: Vol II (ah that’s the spot); 520) k.d. Lang: Absolute Torch and Twang (old k.d. or new…); 521) The Boomtown Rats: Best of; 522) Devo: Oh No, It’s Devo + Freedom of Choice; 523) Belle and Sebastian: The Boy With the Arab Strap; 524) Monks: Monk Time; 525) The dbs: Stands For deciBels + Repercussion; 526) Flipper: Sex Bomb Baby; 517) Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes: The Ultimate Blue Notes (follows Flipper quite well). Whew.

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…I was watching The Prisoner, cool as kitsch SciFi paranoia show from the 1960′s, and one that I remember was on my local PBS station when I was a kid, when I was struck by the idea that totalitarian nightmares are not a popular trope in Science Fiction these days. In the episode we watched, #6 had his aggressiveness “removed” by some kind of medical/brainwashing process–ok, he didn’t really, he was just faking, as is #6′s wont, but of course that’s also the premise of Clockwork Orange, that medical removal of aggressiveness is a crime against humanity. It also brought to mind Stanislaw Lem’s Memoir Found in a Bathtub, which, aside from the apocalyptic agent (a virus that eats paper, well, eats all the paper, and the world collapses into anarchy), is fabulously scary and paranoid.  But Bathub is unlikely to get made into a movie anytime soon, because totalitarianism no longer threatens people the way it did when the Cold War was a primary existential frame, and corporate power is too non-ideological. All of which is not remotely enough to make me yearn for the Cold War, but it does make me think about ways a more insidious, creeping totalitarianism manifests itself in nominally democractic societies like our own.

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I just finished re-reading F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Tender is the Night, though the last time I read it was 20+ years ago, so there wasn’t much “re-“ in the re-reading. I remembered Dick finding out Abe North died, and I remembered the “crazy” passages that were supposed to be Nicole’s stream-of consciousness… and then I was stunned to discover, on the last page, that Dick’s exile to the U.S. included a long stay in Lockport, of all places. I’m fairly sure I didn’t even know where Lockport was 20+ years ago, and now I live here. So. The page after the book’s ending, the author bio page, indicated that Fitzgerald earned enough writing that he not only lived well, but lived very well, traipsing around Europe, following the moveable feast around. The idea that one could make a living at all as a novelist, as any kind of artist, always gives me a twinge—I’m jealous, because I have had to work at other things all my life on order to have the time and space to make art. Then the feeling fades, quickly, as I realize how necessary all that other work is to me as an artist and human being, and how liberating it is to that I don’t have to sell a story or poem to be able to eat. I suppose being independently wealthy, living off the “interest of my interest,” would offer more time for creative work, but perhaps not, and in any case, such a life is far too alien to my experience for me to adequately speculate on.

The question of whether art should profit the artist enough to survive, and how that might happen, and the compromises such production would inevitably involve, is an old one, of course, and a recent article by Scott Timberg on Salon.com seems to suggest that there was, very recently, a whole set of answers to this question that failed to bear fruit. Apparently, the internet was supposed to usher in a new Creative Class… I vaguely remember folks announcing this new order was imminent, that artists and folks who worked with ideas would have the ability, unmatched in human history, to make a living from their art and ideas. Distribution would be more fluid, less capital would go to large concerns, galleries, and so forth—I remember people like David Brooks and Richard Florida announcing this new world because I knew it was a pile of shit, and because I was surprised, despite myself, that people were buying it. Anyhow, the Timberg article is pretty thin, and the discussion that follows has the usual blog comment mix of good points, bad points, null points, and blabber (mostly blabber), but it is interesting to think about why so many apparently smart people keep getting caught up in these fantasies, what sort of wish-fulfillment is operating, and on how the people that foist these fantasies do, in fact, make a living foisting them. In a way, it’s another speculative bubble, an idea bubble that has collapsed for many people, just like economic bubbles do. It’s probably better to keep your earnings out of these kinds of markets altogether.

CDs: 500) Style Council Box Set. The design is as, well, stylish as one would expect, and there are a slew of great songs here; the only thing that mars many of them is Paul Weller’s lyrical lapses, far too many of the words here are simply trite. So, I try to pretend he’s singing in Bengali at certain points, and just enjoy the melodies and eurotrash groove. Works quite well with Tender is the Night, actually.

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I went to the beach twice this year, once to Destin, FL, for a friend’s wedding, and once to Rockport, MA, just because. And that’s the part that still confuses me a bit, the “just because,” the raison de la plage, and not just the reason for the beach, but for vacations in which doing nothing is the goal. Vacations crammed with activities are equally puzzling, and the reason they confuse me has to do with what they are vacations from. If I am following correctly, the message is this: most people’s lives–your life, sayeth the adverts–are stress-filled dashes along the edge of an emotional precipice, and we need to either spend a week or two each year being vegetative, or a week or two consuming as many “fun” activities as possible. A blend of the two is optimal for some people, a morning laying in the sun, reading trashy novels, followed by lunch at some over priced and over decorated joint, followed by jetskiing, then dinner, then dancing in a schmaltzy disco so everyone else can watch you dance while you watch them dance, then…. the activities are another way of becoming vegetative, of course, but don’t most people spend a lot of time doing that already? Staring at the TV? Staring at spreadsheets? And not nearly enough time dancing just for the hell of it? I would think something more meaningful, or edifying, or at least emotionally stimulating in a different way–something other than simple adrenal rush, or the dubious comfort of somnambulance–would help us return refreshed and healthily skeptical to our day-to-day lives. Maybe we wouldn’t be so ready to take the junk fed to us like baby birds.

Of course, I’m assuming a lot about the people I saw at the beach. Perhaps many of them did find edification, new ways of looking at life, spiritual restoration, as they lay on blankets with their headphones and sunglasses helmeted on their heads. Watching children play is certainly edifying, as is playing with them, and searching for beach glass seems to draw an interesting spectrum of people, as did scuba diving. But the overall impression I got from both beaches was one of desperation mixed with anger, the idea that this was our vacation and we’d better have fun, dammit, sort of like the imperative to enjoy New Year’s Eve. And of course, the idea that one should find something meaningful in one’s vacation just smacks of more work, yet another job to do… I spent some of each beach visit reading William Cowper, nervously ecstatic nature poet of the 18th century, because I thought he might bring me closer to the world I looked at once I put down the book:

                                                        Mighty winds,
  That sweep the skirt of some far-spreading wood
  Of ancient growth, make music not unlike
  The dash of ocean on his winding shore,
  And lull the spirit while they fill the mind,
  Unnumbered branches waving in the blast,
  And all their leaves fast fluttering, all at once.
  Nor less composure waits upon the roar
  Of distant floods, or on the softer voice
  Of neighbouring fountain, or of rills that slip
  Through the cleft rock, and, chiming as they fall
  Upon loose pebbles, lose themselves at length
  In matted grass, that with a livelier green
  Betrays the secret of their silent course.

Obviously, it is in poetry and literature in general and all art, in fact, that I find my own edification, and deciding that those who do not share this fascination are somehow missing an important part of life must seem a bigotry. But they are, because what I call “art” is the fabric of culture, it is how we learn to become, how we construct our identities and learn to live, and so much of it is so very, very destructive, telling us that the way to live is to consume, or submit, or accept mere distraction as a substitute for profundity.

All we behold is miracle: but, seen
So duly, all is miracle in vain.

I’m still listening to all my CDs, in order. I am roughly 1/3 of the way through them: 489) Rufus and Chaka Khan: The Very Best of; 490) Nina Simone: The Definitive Collection; 491) R. Kelly: R. Kelly (not sure where that came from, what a waste of talent); 492) The Roots: do you want more?!!!??!; 493) Nightstalkers: Drivin’ All Night; 494) Talvin Singh: OK; 495) The Countdown Quartet: The Countdown Quartet; 496) Parliament: Tear the Roof Off 1974-1980; 497) The Isley Brothers: It’s You’re Thing–The Story Of; 498) Boris: Pink; 499) David Thomas: Monster (this should really be a box set, there’s 4 cds, each one great. Oh well).

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The sight of round hay bales in a field pleases me to no end, which helps me understand why geometry was was cornerstone of Ancient Greek thought (and Ancient Chinese thought, come to think of it, and the whole tradition of geomancy), how we get deductive reasoning from mathematics, and so forth. Our bodies are made to discern form and the contrast of forms, so of course certain sets of forms will please us; in much the same way, our bodies were made to communicate linguistically, and the form language takes is metaphorical (or metonymic, if you want to get into that argument, but really both metonymy and metaphor should be part of a single category): words mean because they represent something else, and metaphors are bald reminders of that fact, just as rolled hay bales in a field are bald reminders of how our perceptual and conceptual faculties are inseparable, and are the reason we can feel pleasure in the first place. After the hay bales was a wooden fence, also pleasing, then a quickee muffler place, less pleasing because of the simple grace of previous forms… it might be pleasing if I stopped and studied it, but driving by, it only reminded me how little most people care about just about everything.

CDs listened to: 478) Jungle Brothers: Done By The Forces Of Nature; 480) Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds: And No More Shall We Part; 481) Arctic Monkeys: Whatever People Say I Am, That’s What I’m Not; 482) Beck: Midnite Vultures; 483) F-Bomb: Who Sunk the Funk? (well, these guys helped, this is awful); 484) Urge Overkill: Exit The Dragon; 485) Guadalcanal Diary: 2 X 4; 486) The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots; 487) Boiled in Lead: Old Lead; 488) Miles Davis: The Complete Concert, 1964.

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Several apparently unconnected events connected themselves recently, or maybe I’m just glomming them together, but no matter: first, my lovely wife came to tell me there was an injured squirrel at the bottom of our driveway. Injured it was, seemed its back was broken, so though it tried desperately to get away from me, it only ended up spinning itself in a circle, like Curly did in the Three Stooges, but with the added horror of a broken spine. I had to run an errand, so I lifted the squirrel onto the grass where it would be a bit more comfortable and where I wouldn’t run over it with my car. The image of the squirrel spinning itself stayed with me as I drove downtown, coloring everything I saw: a woman crying into a cell phone, another woman crying and sitting on the steps of a church, a man limping down the sidewalk in front of the hospital for a smoke, a geeking kid in a doorway searching the empty street… I’m sure I passed happier scenes, but these were the ones I noticed, seeing the squirrel changed what my mind was letting in, altered the emotional locus of what I saw. I got home and my wife had put the squirrel in a box with some cotton and newspaper and bits of apple, and we kept him alive for 3 or 4 days, trying to find a place that might take him; by the time we found someone, the squirrel was dead, so we buried him, and the process of caring for it and then burying it seems to have freed my vision somewhat, allowing me to see more than just pain and futility and anger.

The squirrel stopped trying to get out of the box after the first day or two and resigned himself to being fed and watered by big, scary, enemy-of-the-squirrel type creatures. He stopped, in other words, being squirrely, which to my mind has always meant twitchy, erratic in a way that denotes something wrong, like the twitchy geeker I saw in the doorway—jonesing addicts are squirrely, and observation of the more mobile squirrels in my yard attest to the aptness of the metaphor. The slang use of squirrely apparently derived from the animal’s conceptual proximity to nuts, hence defining the word as eccentric, odd, strange… but these are all characteristics that I generally find admirable, especially in artists, and my own definition is pejorative, the difference between someone acting kooky and someone acting kooky because they are desperate, broken, inhabited by voices—and  need not even mean acting odd, come to think of it, only acting in a way that makes the actor stand out as trying too hard, overplaying their role, being creepily lascivious, spinning around in a circle trying to get away because their back is broken but they still believe they are whole, or are slick enough to charm people into ignoring the whole broken back thing, or because they thing everyone else is too dumb to notice. That’s a lot for one word to handle, I suppose, but I’ve been using the term for a while now and hadn’t thought enough about it, and I started thinking about it because of the squirrel in the driveway and because of Bill Knott.

Let me back up a bit. Until fairly recently, I made a little extra money doing book reviews. Most of the books I was assigned (or requested) I didn’t care for, though a few were excellent; writing reviews of books you don’t like is a sport many people enjoy, and I must admit I did find it fun for a while, but eventually the sheer volume of books I didn’t even dislike enough to want to write about became daunting, it was coloring my ability to enjoy reading the way seeing the squirrel at the end of the driveway made my mind see sadness and pain everywhere. Well, sadness and pain are everywhere, and so are bad books, but so are good books, and so is joy and kindness, so I stopped writing reviews. The same day that I found the squirrel at the end of the driveway, a friend I hadn’t spoken to in a a few months emailed to ask me what I had against Bill Knott, which confused me, since I’ve never met him, but further discussion revealed that my friend had downloaded one of Knott’s books to read, and it includes in the front matter excerpts of a review I’d done of one of Knott’s books several years ago. Knott has been releasing books for free and via Lulu for a while now, which is a move I heartily commend, but he also has been cultivating an image as a poetry iconoclast, or something; basically, he collects snippets of bad reviews and uses them as self-promotional material, hangs out on well-travelled blogs (unlike this one) making snarky, obtuse, or genial comments, and generally tries to keep his poetic brand afloat by asserting his proto-hipster contrariness as a measure of value—look, if all these people think I suck, then I must be cool, kinda like PBR.

The snippet of mine he likes to use is this: “[Bill Knott's poetry is] queerly adolescent . . . extremely weird. . . personal to the point of obscurity. . . his idiosyncrasy has grown formulaic, his obscure poems more obscure, his terse observations so terse they scoot by without leaving much of a dent in the reader. . . . There is a petulance at work [in his poetry]. . . . [H]is style has grown long in the tooth. . . . In fact, [Knott is] unethical.”—Marc Pietrzykowski, Contemporary Poetry Review, 2006(http://www.cprw.com/Pietrzykowski/beats.htm). Kyle Minor calls them anti-blurbs, and says that taking them out of context and eliding large chunks of the review “[...]seems to be part of his project,” which is his way of defending the practice, I guess. I don’t have a problem with Knott using my words*, they were paid for and published and he’s free to what he wants with them, but “his project,” if you go and read any of the original reviews, mine included, is plain squirrely, a desperate attempt at attracting attention to himself while trying to distract the reader from the fact that he has been spinning his wheels poetically since the 1970′s, which was more or less the point of my review. He also likes to claim that focusing on the way he sells himself is annoying, and that he would rather reviewers focused on the poems, which is also squirrely, since he has gone to such lengths to sell himself; it’s a bit like yelling “look at me!” and then playing the victim when no one will stop looking at you. For the record, Bill, it’s not the “project” that saddens me, or even interests me beyond this blog post, it’s the poems, which are increasingly disappointing for anyone who has read your work for a while. In any case, these events have made me think about what I should do to commemorate their confluence, and the answer I came up with was the awarding of a monthly prize to some artist who I noticed doing something squirrely, as a way to clean out my vision without suffocating in ugliness. So, Bill Knott, congratulations on being awarded July’s 2011′s Art Squirrel Award.

Now, let’s see how often he googles himself.

CDs listened to this month (as I continue listening to all the ones I own, in random order): 469) Randy Newman: Good Old Boys; 470) The Charlatans: Up To Our Hips; 471) Kronos Quartet: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind; 472) Otis Rush: The Essential Otish Rush; 473) Sidney Bechet: En Concert avec Europe 1; 474) Julian Cope: Peggy Suicide; 475) The Wipers: Is This Real?; 476) Cibo Matto: Type A; 477) Los Lobos: Ride This.

*Though I would like to point out that in the quoted review I claimed one of his poems was unethical, not that the author was, because the poem in question made a stupid ethical assertion (beat writers sucked because they used gas-powered cars to travel the country; the ethics of asserting yourself countercultural hence depend on not using gasoline) that implicates the author as well. Maybe “ethical” is not the right word…

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That are interesting to read sequentially, or at least they fell upon me that way and I found them thus:

Larry Sanger

Joseph Wood

The first article outlines a kind of anti-intellectualism exhibited by the hipster/geek/digerati tribe, and the comments section provides, not always intentionally, evidence to support the argument. The second article is about contemporary poety in the US, careerism, and ideology, and the comments section follows a similar pattern, leading me to think that the problem is less anti-intellectualism and disdain for knowledge than it is intellectual balkanization and disdain for any kind of knowledge but one’s own, at least as evidenced in the comments sections of blogs and articles. And while I don’t want to create a taxonomy of blog comment types, I do see a connection between intellectual balkanization of the type seen in contemporary poetry and the way internet-enabled crowd-based opining–maybe “cloud critique” is a better term–has sharpened social exclusion. As I recall, part of the promise of the internet was that it would expose more people to more new ideas, make them more flexible and inclusive, rather than exclusive…. whoops.  Resisting this ongoing reshaping of our discursive selves, fighting the cloud, that’s the trick….

CDs listened to: 457) D’Angelo: Voodoo; 458) Orb: Orbus Terrarum; 459) Trio: Da Da Da (love love love); 460) Quasi: Hot Shit; 461) Butthole Surfers: Electric Larryland; 462) Devendra Banhart: Rejoicing in the Hands; 463) EU: Livin’ Large; 464) Hesperion XX/Jordi Savall: L’Espirit de la Viole; 465) The Kinks: Everybody’s in Showbiz; 466) Azam Ali: Elysium for the Brave; 467) Saban Bairamovic: Gypsy King of Serbia (hell yes); 468) Joan Armatrading: Walk Under Ladders   

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I’ve noticed several friends sharing the same sentiment recently, that they are getting old, a state of being usually noticed because old patterns of behavior no longer work as well with their bodies (and by “bodies,” I also mean “minds”).  ”I cannot stay up all night carousing, instead I prefer to stay home and make tea cosies” is more or less typical of this sort of complaint, though I’m not sure it is wholly complaint, and it is only more or less typical because I don’t know anyone who makes tea cosies. I do know several semi-retired carousers, however. I say that I’m not sure it is entirely complaint because I detect a sense of relief as well as a mourning for the vitality of years gone by, a sense that one no longer has to pay attention to all the very stupid shit that accompanies being young and party-worthy, like having to go to parties and pretend each one is the best one, ever, anywhere in time and space. Part of the problem is marketing, I know, we have created a culture in the US (and, increasingly, elsewhere) that venerates images of youthfulness (because they have disposable income and lack the self-restraint necessary to not dispose of it); yes, the idea of youth is venerated across history, but we have made it something of a cult, hence the feeling, when young, that every day is like New Year’s Eve, full of stress to have a good time, haunted by the suspicion that in fact it’s not much fun at all.

I am having a fine time growing older, myself, and since my goal is to hit 100, I’m not even halfway there, so I tend to think of myself as older, but not old. My body is much stiffer and slower to recover from strenuous activity, but I’m not sure that’s such a bad thing either, as it makes me more careful–more grateful, even–than I was before. In any case, it simply feels natural, another expression of living as a human being means. I was reading an essay by David Bohm recently (“The Qualitative Infinity of Nature“) about how the ”things” we perceive are only relatively invariant structures that are actually quite fluid; I, for example, am a body in space, but I am also in a constant state of flux, transforming into something else, and I was something else prior to my birth–not in the sense that there was an “I” prior to my birth, but that my constituent elements all existed before being transformed when sperm hit egg and gestation began. That’s what I mean by getting older feeling natural, and I only wish that every age could be more properly venerated in our culture, maybe we could see how full the world is of people like these folks .

CDs listened to: 443) Fun Boy Three: Best of (wow, that was fun); 444) Bebo & Cigala: Lagrimas Negras; 445) God Speed You Black Emperor: lift yr skinny fists like antennas to heaven; 446) Sigur Ros: Takk; 447) Nick Drake: Way To Blue; 448) Django Reinhardt & Stephane Grappelly: The Quintet of the Hot Club of France(perfect following Nick Drake); 449) Allen Toussaint: The Complete Warner Recordings; 450) Lucinda Williams: Car Wheels on a Gravel Road; 451) Tom Petty & the Heartbreakers: Greatest Hits; 452) Luna: The Days of our Nights; 453) XTC: Skylarking; 454) Jimi Hendrix: Band of Gypsies; 455) John Coltrane: A Love Supreme(ahhh… that’s the stuff); 456) Django Reinhardt: Art of the Jazz Guitar

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I’m still, and will likely forever be, puzzled about the “why” of making art. Observing art, participating in another’s work, seems much more clear, an act of co-creation that pierces human isolation, connects us the way a good conversation or fight or hug or love-making session does… but making art is not the same experience, at least not for me, it’s more like broadcasting bits of experience for someone else to converse with, shooting radio waves into space. In a social and historical sense, I guess an artist is in conversation with both their predecessors and their peers, though I do think too much contemporary art of all kinds is focused on the current chatter, the easily accessed chorus of voices inching toward and away from a representative style–this is a very broad generalization, I know, and I am thinking more of poetry and prose and music than I am of plastic arts, but anyway–too much cloud thought and decision by committee and not enough listening for voices in the wind, or speaking from musty corners of history. I suspect it has been the case for some time, at least for the last few centuries in Western art, that for the great bulk of artists the salon is all, and what counts about experience outside the salon is judged by how wittily it passes muster when brought back in…
            …and this situation leads me to intuit, at least this particular afternoon, a devotional basis for my own art, an approach that posits art as a means of worship, the way a cathedral mason or ikon painter might, but without the religious totality (and I’m pretty sure the all-encompassing effects of the church on the artist during the periods I referenced is overstated in the modern mind, but anyway). Without this totality, however, devotional art seems a hazy idea–I’m not a theist, nor a deist, nor am I arrogant enough to suppose atheism (one of the most inflexible sorts of zealotry, I’ve always thought), but I’m certainly not an apatheist, so to whom should my offerings be directed? In what symbolic universe should an art of worship take shape? Perhaps ”universe” should be plural, any symbolic universe is as good as another as long as it’s intelligible to someone other than the artist. That’s a liberating notion in one way, it allows me to try, after Lawrence, to be comfortable anywhere and interested in anything, but it also requires a great deal more work to make the art that comes out coherent, if the universe does not spin in some recognizable way, it’s not a universe. At present, it feels like my artistic approach is bifurcated: I am devoted to my species and to making art to help others live, but offer it in worship to the mystery that surrounds us, engulfs us, the mystery from which we emerge and to which we return. (Ah! Now that I consider the two pieces of it, I can see them as one, I had to take them apart to realize I couldn’t take them apart.)   

Did I succeed? : recent example : another recent example

Not so many CDs this time, need to get on the ball:

438) Sarah Vaughn: September Song; 439) Love, Peace, and Poetry: Latin American Psychedelic Music; 440) Hawkwind: Hall of the Mountain Grill; 441) Calexico: Feast of Wire; 442) The Sundays: reading, writing, and arithmetic.

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