ART CRITIC

Comments on New York Times Theater Critic Ben Brantley’s "The Stage, the Screen and the Screen on Stage "

2012-02-06T09:49:00.000-08:00

Some comments on the New York Times Theater Critic Ben Brantley’s The Stage, the Screen and the Screen on Stage about that all-American conundrum & bugaboo MULTI-MEDIA.

at: http://tinyurl.com/7pv4x54 OR
http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/under-the-radar-festival/?scp=3&sq=BRANTLEY%20%20midia%20mash-up:%20a%20screen%20onstage&st=cse

B. writes:

“Can film and theater live happily together in the same room? It’s not as if they haven’t had a long relationship already, with each regularly borrowing stories and stars from the other. But now these separate but equal art forms are attempting to practice cohabitation. As in many relationships, only half of the couple is truly equipped to make the effort. Film, after all, is recorded action and exists mostly in two dimensions (even when it’s 3-D), which means it can’t invite live theater into its world. On the other hand, there’s nothing to stop theater artists from setting up a projector and showing a movie onstage, letting live performers interact with, or ignore, their two-dimensional equivalents.”

Subsequently B. provides a host of examples- described adjectivistically it is impossible to tell what filmic elements worked and why they worked. That is, B. is describing something ornamental, a trivial matter that is goosed up. In other words, he addresses an entirely secondary issue as though it were in some way of primary importance. However, it just might be a interestingly primary issue if it were more than just something to cotton to the taste for novelty.

B. is no Mahola D’Argis or Scott of the film section or up to the snuff of the fine art critics. On the other hand, the field he covers, Broadway and its musicals is more valuable as a source of ad revenue. Working his analogy for

all its worth - as though the ways of presentation [drama, film, happening, etc.] and what they represent or what they do, have not an immediate effect on the experience of each medium and whatever it happens to communicate. Brantley being Brantley writes things such as: “Ultimately of course every artistic representation of reality is imperfect,” and thus appears not to have realized in all these years that the only reality on a stage is a stage reality, which is where the “as if” enters so productively.

This happens to be a matter I have given much thought to on occasion of the kinethetic effect not only of of Handke plays but also of his texts that, among numerous technical innovations, avail themselves of the dream screen of film and the grammar and imagery of dreams for their communicative and effective purposes.

As a matter of fortunate fact, Handke’s play VOYAGE BY DUGOUT: THE PLAY ABOUT THE FILM ABOUT THE WAR solves and demonstrates the solution the multimedia conundrum in exemplary demonstrative fashion while entertaining its subject matter - in the proper artistic “as if” state.

Two directors examine the screenplay for yet another film about “the war” - the unrolling of the screenplay, the breaks during its discussion, provide multi-angled views of the war, and a variety of participants, the historian, folks who went mad , etc. appear. At the end the directors conclude that it isn’t time to to make this film about the war - it happens to be the disintegration of Yugoslavia, but the structure of Handke’s piece is very much along the lines of Brecht’s “models”, and thus is serviceable for the investigation of similar complicated events. Handke's KASPAR, which
won the OBIE for its 1972 BAM production already used video monitors, they had been left over from a production of an Alan Ginsburg play, and the producer Bob Kalfin thought they were sexy! There are more deeply sexy ways of using film on stage!

http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/under-the-radar-festival/?scp=3&sq=BRANTLEY%20%20midia%20mash-up:%20a%20screen%20onstage&st=cse

About “good reads” poetry competition

2011-12-31T14:58:00.000-08:00

A fairly longpost about “good reads” poetry competetion

http://www.goodreads.com/poll/show/58769-goodreads-january-newsletter-top-finalists-poems-please-select-on

blog

http://tinyurl.com/7odv292

or
http://www.goodreads.com/topic/show/751333?utm_medium=email&utm_source=comment_instant#comment_42407435
OR

And the poemsoffered as prize-worthy; and their judges and

administrators

I took a looked atvarious months’ selections and found them mediocre at best. Then I tried a test,the Poundian test of reading this past December’s five nominees for theDecember prize, as Prose: “a poem ought to be at least as well written as goodprose.” These five December 2011 candidates, all but one, failed miserably: inthe daylight of prose for of them revealed the barren nakedness ofunconcentrated meandering of the untalented strung together, mind farts insequence with a fancy name, for I allow of the possibility that there areartists whose every doodle manifests talent! Most easily seen perhaps in visualartists who are incapable of drawing a single inelegant line, Picasso appearsto have been like that. Handke is pretty much like that as a prose WRITER. Whenhe speaks matters can be quite different. I pointed this out and was instantlybanned from the blog. Getreuer Korreptitor then stepped in far more firmly thanI had: he too was banned but not after he had been offered to open a separatethread. He accepted the proposition but then was banned without his ever beingavailed the chance to speak his mind in a separate thread. At that point Idecided to check who this “Amy” was who did the banning and averting ofcritique, and also of the so-called judges who picked these candidates, resultof my investigation at the end, after what I have done what I did at theoriginal site: I take each poem in full, and then transform one or two stanzainto unstanzafied prose. And then I affix a few spry comments.

“Amy” accused me of“sour grapes” since my Senor Heron[see at the very end] was not nominated: I can only say, am I ever glad notto find it in that company! I am far harsher on meself than on any of these!Anyhow, in let not a moment of critique disturb this moshpit of mediocrity.There is a sixth poem, it is a kind of Yessenin porridge, perhaps I will trackdown the original, it is by far the best according to the standards of Imagismthat have been effective from the days of Li Po to Thomas Transtroemer. It isalso the poem that is getting the most votes among the 150 or so cast when Ilast looked, on Friday the 30^th of December. Thus the audience isnot as insensitive as these judges are.

¡ POETRY ! discussion

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GOODREADS NEWSLETTER CONTEST >PLEASE VOTE FOR THE JANUARY 2012 GOODREADS NEWSLETTER FINALISTS!

VOTE IN THE POLL ON THE POETRYGROUP'S MAIN PAGE! (CLICK THIS LINK TO VOTE! --> JUSTSELECT TITLE OF POEM YOU LIKE BEST!

When I Say It Felt Like Moss

You know exactly what I mean. Or like dust
Over every surface, spidercrack cast off

Toys in the crannies. Leaving one to wonder, what
Died, and how? You can make your best guess

But it will always be Miss Scarlet in a red dress
With a rope, in the bedroom. The rope

Wove from past lovers’ hair pressed
Between the plastic teeth of combs. Mister, I’m sorry

When we went to the glass house it was nothing like
What and I’m sorry for turning away at the water

So you wouldn’t take my picture and I’m sorry
For grabbing your ears giggling when you said

Beauty. If I’m careful maybe I can have some
Of your bread and maybe you will smash

A square of the yellow butter and hand it to me
Already melted. If I think about my uterus

Too much I’ll pull out my hardback, obsess
Over the female scientist who loves the swell

Of her own ovarian honeycomb, the fallopian
Tubes pink sea pens feather-dusting the egg

Down into a basket of flesh, but all you ever talk
About is your catalog of Messed Up, so I won’t

Dare pick up the book or pull back the covers
When you come in again to visit way past

The middle of the night. It doesn’t matter that I don’t
Believe half of what you say because I attend

Your freckles like they’re some kind of star
System. If we open another bottle I know

You’ll always pay me back but I’d rather find
A fountain for the two. You should stop

Reading the emails from your ex-wife and
I should stop sleeping with married

Men and we should go back to the covered
Bridge and follow the dragon green fingers

Along the dirt path rivered like a side-winder
To the stream where – hot as an engine – I

Dip my feet or lever myself in past my shirt.

--Tara McDaniel

NOW AS PROSE:

WhenI Say It Felt Like Moss

Youknow exactly what I mean. Or like dust Over every surface, spidercrack cast offToys in the crannies. Leaving one to wonder, what Died, and how? You can makeyour best guess But it will always be Miss Scarlet in a red dress With a rope,in the bedroom. The rope Wove from past lovers’ hair pressed Between theplastic teeth of combs. Mister, I’m sorry When we went to the glass house itwas nothing like What and I’m sorry for turning away at the water So youwouldn’t take my picture and I’m sorry For grabbing your ears giggling when yousaid Beauty.

Devoid of line breaks, which in factadd nothing but a semblance of the poetic, the word jumble is reduced to whatit is, some sentimental moments perhaps peeking through. The poems only gets worse as it goes along:

Men and we should go back to the covered Bridge and followthe dragon green fingers Along the dirt path rivered like a side-winder To thestream where – hot as an engine – I
Dip my feet or lever myself in past my shirt.

--TaraMcDaniel

“Riveredlike a side-winder?” What might this be? A snake? “Hot as an engine? “,spidercrack cast off Toys in the crannies. “ “lever myself past my shirt” Certainlythings are just jammed in here, and the result is incomprehensibility, but notof an interesting mysterious kind. Does Tara also talk like that?
=======================================
A Marriage

lasting this long can feel leaden,
stacked slabs in some oppressive

monument. Why don’t we feel crushed
by the accumulation of years?

They feel instead like sea-colored
pebbles collected at the shore.

Out of millions, we chose these few,
pocketed them for safekeeping.

Or they seem like layers
of light rising within us.

Every day we have cleared fields,
Levered up and sledged

stubborn rocks, lit brush piles.
We have kept pledges to stand

near each other, as birches do
under a winter moon,

interlacing branches streaked
with silver. And in you

I have seen for years now,
in countless tiny gleamings,

flecks of a deeper light
that promise gold still to come.

--David Sloan

Now the entirety in prose:

AMarriage lasting this long can feel leaden, stacked slabs [insome oppressive monument]. Why don’t we feel crushed by the accumulation ofyears? They feel instead like sea-colored pebbles collected at the shore. Outof millions, we chose these few , pocketed them for safekeeping. Or they seemlike layers of light rising within us. Every day we have cleared fields,Levered up and sledged stubborn rocks, lit brush piles. We have kept pledges tostand near each other, as birches do under a winter moon, interlacing branchesstreaked with silver. And in you I have seen for years now, in countless tinygleamings, flecks of a deeper light that promise gold still to come.

One of the problems here is that thesimiles are leaden! Overdone. And contradict each other. And we are alsoin the world of many pathetic fallacies! But the sentiment is nice enough.

=======================================
Keeping it Simple

Could be I'm an anti-deconstructionist at heart.
Sometimes I think it is better not to know --
To be content watching dust motes
aimlessly floating in a beam of sunlight
without having to think about Brownian motion.
To marvel at minnows schooling in the shallows by our dock
without mentioning to my wife how their behavior
is best explained by a set of simple rules
operating in a complex bio-system.
As I age, I wonder less about how ferns and
cauliflowers might look if they didn't have
the Mandelbrot set of fractals to go by,
or if the whirl of seeds on a sunflower's face
is made more intricate by what Fibonacci had to say.
Sometimes I'd like to believe it's impossible to know
how Monarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles or why,
how a penguin chick can find its mother
in a sea of black and white,
or how the things you love in this life
can be so dear and unashamedly beautiful
that they almost break your heart.

--John Wheeler

NOW AS PROSE:

Keeping it Simple

Could be I'm an anti-deconstructionist at heart. Sometimes I think it is betternot to know To be content watching dust motes aimlessly floating in a beam ofsunlight without having to think about Brownian motion. To marvel at minnowsschooling in the shallows by our dock without mentioning to my wife how theirbehavior is best explained by a set of simple rules operating in a complexbio-system. As I age, I wonder less about how ferns and cauliflowers mightlook if they didn't have the Mandelbrot set of fractals to go by, or ifthe whirl of seeds on a sunflower's face is made more intricate by whatFibonacci had to say. Sometimes I'd like to believe it's impossible to know howMonarch butterflies migrate thousands of miles or why, how a penguin chick canfind its mother in a sea of black and white, or how the things you love in thislife can be so dear and unashamedly beautiful that they almost break your heart.
--John Wheeler

One pathetic fallacy falling on topof the other; one awkwardness piles on top of the other, “no ear” Wheeler, “nofeel for rhythm and rime, Wheeler” as he goes oh wondering wandering among thebutterfries!
========================================
Training

I’m thinking of living forever.
I think that way I might finally
get my gig straight and solve the crosswords.
I’m considering outlasting everyone
although I know I’d have a hard time
explaining not having read Ulysses
past the first chapter.
I don’t care if death smells like nutmeg.
I don’t buy the plotline on eternal rest.
By staying alive someday
I might manage to hail a taxi,
and fulfill my father’s wish
of reaching town without a red light.
I couldn’t expect to avoid anger or brooding
or to make the journey with my beasts appeased.
But I might walk vast expanses
of earth and always be beginning
and I love beginning
or could learn
to love it.

--S. Jane Sloat

NOW AS PROSE:

Training

I’m thinking of living forever.[Are younow, darling?]

I think that way Imight finally get my gig straight [dreadful]

and solve the crosswords. I’m considering outlasting everyonealthough I know I’d have a hard time explaining not having read Ulysses pastthe first chapter. [duh!]

I don’t care if death smells like nutmeg. [come again![

I don’t buy the plotline on eternal rest. By staying alivesomeday
I might manage to hail a taxi, [appearsto indicate that the writer is dead]

and fulfill my father’s wish of reaching town without ared light. I couldn’t expect to avoid anger or brooding or to make the journeywith my beasts appeased. But I might walk vast expanses of earth and always bebeginning and I love beginning or could learn to love it.

--S. Jane Sloat

also lacking a feel for sound, isalso full of pathetic fallacies with oddities rumbling through

her mind. Yet this would seem tobe the best of a bad lot, which is not saying much, but it has a sprightlyattitude, shows life… and reads halfway allright as prose! and perhaps she canthelp it that her father’s only wish was thatshe’d reach town without a red light, although it is not clear what is meant inthis instance.: red light district? Red stoplight in town? Or inbetween???Anhow, these few lines express a mood, a self-state, no matter that the work is not all thatarresting; or rather in the wrong way when regarded closely.,

================================================

HISTORY OF THE WORLD

If it is possible to trust the love of an animal,
If it is possible to tell your grief to a stranger,
Then you can remember the love of hollyhocks
Those huge blooms primitive as the fear of snakes,
How they stared into your eyes long ago
Until the hair rose on your flesh
Like the hair of their stalks.

You can remember how the moon laid its white
Finger across your lips as you slept
How a child guards its secrets
The shoebox of feathers and stones.

You grew between your bones like a ruler
Until only sad movies could star your tears.
You wept for the censored scenes, the evidence
That your signature was becoming distinctive.

You discovered that blur could be
Defeated with magnification. All haloes
Vanished, the ghoul-closets closed.
You obeyed signs, asked directions.

But your lovers betray you. The bread
Falls from your fingers to be snatched by white birds
With hard ruby eyes. Underground graffiti
Mock your love of language. The ceilings
Are a sluice of rain, you toss sleepless
In strange beds. Loneliness
Is finding how you can’t befriend yourself.

You dream kittens mew at your threshold, fledglings
Pulse, pink and rubbery in the hidden nest,
That strangers open their arms to receive you
Pulling on familiar faces like thugs drawing nylons
Over their features. Even this dream escapes your memory

You rise to a window paling with dawn to see
A doe feeding by the fence
Trusting the season with her life.

--Joan Colby

NOW AS PROSE:

HISTORY OF THE WORLD

If it is possible to trust the love of an animal, If it is possible to tellyour grief to a stranger, Then you can remember the love of hollyhocks Thosehuge blooms primitive as the fear of snakes, How they stared into youreyes long ago Until the hair rose on your flesh Like the hair of theirstalks. You can remember how the moon laid its white Finger across yourlips as you slept How a child guards its secrets The shoebox of feathers andstones. You grew between your bones like a ruler Until only sad movies couldstar your tears. You wept for the censored scenes, the evidence That yoursignature was becoming distinctive. You discovered that blur could be Defeatedwith magnification. All haloes Vanished, the ghoul-closets closed. You obeyedsigns, asked directions…

enough I think to prove my point that the verbalincompetence and oddities disqualify… and the rhetorical opening lines don’thelp! But is seems improvable which I at least cannot say of the first three ofthese five.

--Joan Colby

=====================
I won’t turn into prose what seems tobe an imitation of a Yesenin poem or a gloss on it. It clearly does not belongamong this competition. There was a time I used to know his work quite well,but I won’t trouble to find the original which ought to have been acknowledged,and perhaps also in the original Russian.

SergeiAleksandrovitch Esenin’s Last Poem

Here’s the night table with its lit candle.
Here the looped rope dangling from a pipe
like a question mark or a passenger’s handle
on a crowded bus. I am going on a trip.

Not far away. One step. One small kick,
a little dance and the light goes out.
I am sick of the industry of living, sick
of sleepless nights. Elizaveta, no doubt

true to your word, unopened my poem
written in the wine of my blood
sits in your pocket like a worry stone.
No stitched brow. No flood

of tears. A last breath, the psyche flies.
Goodbye, my friend, goodbye. *

*The first line of Esenin’s poem

--Jane Ellen Glasser

====================================

Below praise from the mosh pit, no discernment, no taste…and poems by “Amy” and the three judges

To see what they are up to!

message2: by Andrea

Dec 28, 2011 11:25am

Iam so torn between "Keeping it Simple" and "Training". Bothare gorgeous.

message3: by Tom

Dec 28, 2011 01:27pm

Theseare a wonderful selection. I am blown away by how the quality of the writinghas improved over the last 2 years. I have to vote for "Marriage"though I could have easily voted for any of this month's finalists. Bravo toall.

message4: by Sarah

Dec 28, 2011 01:51pm

Wow,great selection. How can I ever choose one?

message5: by Ric

Dec 28, 2011 02:28pm

i'm in awe. (i'llbe too humbled now to ever submit anything again!) they are, every one, justwonderful! i wish there were links to the honorable mentions. does anyone knowhow to find them? if so, pls advise.
very difficult to choose. my congratulations to all the finalists. is it fairto base one's vote on a single line? "trusting the season with herlife" is a show stopper. "a marriage" is also just beautiful.but i would have to cast my vote for "history of the world".superb.

flag

message6: by Tricia

Dec 28, 2011 02:46pm

"Ihave seen for years now/in countless tiny gleamings/
flecks of a deeper light/that promise gold still to come."

David Sloan, you have my vote.

message7: by Ric

Dec 28, 2011 02:57pm

Michaelwrote: "i think what is needed here are a new set of judges, unlessnothing better is submitted between [1] the simply awful "When I Say ItFelt Like Moss" "Keeping it Simple" + "AMarriage"

really??? i'm fascinated michael. what is it about "a marriage"you find simply awful? or mediocre about "history of the world"?"...it felt like moss" has a pretty quirky perspective, but i foundits run on sentence style grew on me as i read. but the other 3 you dismiss ithink are just exquisite, so i am intrigued by what it is in these poems youfind so disagreeable. are you in a better mood now and willing to expand onyour comment? - ric

flag

message 8: by Farahay

Dec 28, 2011 03:15pm

am not thatMichael... I chose HISTORY OF THE WORLD. Flowing, beautiful simile andmetaphoric references with reflections of nature any history of the worldshould have. It became my favorite.

I then decided to check out what the two controllers “Amy” and the judges Wendy Babiak, AndrewHaley and Ruth Bavetta:

Ruth Bavetta does what she calls visual poetry

But you can’t make out the writing in them!

But certainly inoffensive and purty.

Two Babiaks:

Rondeau for my Wedding Night

Tonight Ihave no desire to sleep, though this day
has drained me, the family show-and-tell: my bouquet
heavy with timeless ivy, the icons' weighted stare, the so-
whiteness of my dress begging for a wine-spill of Christ-blood
the pictures, the cake, the smiling 'til my mouth ached.

I should beempty of movement, after the grey
flagstones of the Sacred Heart's foundation swayed
beneath my satin-slippered feet. I should want sleep. No.
Tonight I have no desire
for anything but this, for you to place your hand this way
and unwrap me like a wedding present, open me
like a white silk envelope, for me to wrap you in the snow
of secrets and poems and thighs, for us to go
on never sleeping, for the time never to come when I say
"Tonight I have no desire."

The Uninvited Guest

So Death comesto call; I offer him tea and
take his sickle and hide it in the closet. Its handle
feels rough on my palm. The foyer smell of cedar
chases away the moths from his empty sockets.
His robes flutter with butterfly wings.
He wears a necklace of hummingbird skulls.

In the kitchenthe refrigerator's hum
drowns out his whispered words.
I pretend he isn’t talking while
I sweeten the tea with lavender honey
but birdsong from outside
rolls in bitter on my tongue

"InEngland, Shakespeare
had no trouble dying."
Death’s voice rings out
razor sharp. I shiver
as my bare feet on the tile floor
catch February’s chill.

Rummaging inthe cupboards, I think
Now that’s just swell. Death comes to call
and I’m all out of cookies.
That’s what happens
when you forget to go shopping.
I make a note to write a poem later
on the back of a grocery list.

"God,that’s just like an American."
Death’s disgust at my lack of hospitality
rankles. The overfilled pitcher of nicety
grows too heavy for my weakened hands
and falls, crashing to bits on the floor.

Like my ownLilliputian minutemen
the shards scatter into a circle around him
barring the way against his heavy feet
while I, light with emptiness
levitate over the painted table.
Arms crossed, I address my guest:

"And nowMama-san will tell you
you presumptuous usurper
what’s up: you will take your
rough-handled sickle, fluttering robe
and ominous whispering, and depart.
And you will stay long away."

Death hangshis bony head, smooth as an egg
(his has no cracks, as ours do, for through which
birth canal did it ever pass?), already missing
the taste of my tea. I tell him I must find out first
what can’t be discovered. He laughs.
The birds outside sing Hoc opus, hic labor est.

The teacupsdance to the sound of his leaving.
Pen in my left hand and rolling pin in my right
I hear his voice as he strides, resigned, away:
"Get to work, girl, and the next time I visit
you’ll be glad for the rest." My refrigerator hums.
His parting words: "By the way, I prefer scones."

Wendy Babiak

Wendy Babiaklives in the Buckle of the Bible Belt (Shreveport, Louisiana) with her family,where she tends a butterfly and hummingbird garden which takes most of hertime. She's also the Literary Editor for The Quarterly Journal ofIdeology: A Critique of Conventional Wisdom. Her poetry has appeared in TheLouisiana Review and several places online, including Numbat andthe now-defunct Butterfly: The Journal of Contemporary Buddhism.

=============================

Several poemsby Andrew Haley

ELECTRIC

my heart is tingling at an excited frequency
listening to the lightening storm
and looking at old messages from you

my heart is the lightening storm twittering andflashing
with endocrine chemicals all bearing your scent
you lovely world dressed as a woman

risen from the ivy pond
i want you to carry my life in your womb
and dress the wounds

of my life's world with your indian hair
you are the nemesis of all the wild things
that sit still instead of lighting

the air on fire with their marvelous wings
i cannot fathom any deeper purgatory
like some vegas airport full of lines

than standing another moment without your eyes
gazing from the computer
it is a cold and mechanical world

the monkeys we fired into space
are cold features of a museum
the robots we fire into space

carry love songs from our parents generation
incised on golden disks for aliens
who will be born from frantic alien foam

millennia after the last two horses starve
curled on a bath mat in a sky scraper made ofliving glass
it is the horror of knowing that drives them upthe stairs

it is the surety of their horses hearts thatcurls them
together on the floor of the master bath
an astronomical warming

that for all the bleeding seconds of loam
and the carnivorous uncovering of the worldstrenches
has led warm to warm

for the love of all the asteroids and the blanksatellites
broadcasting episodes of friends
ten thousand years after the world ends

i want you as my astronaut wife
to climb with me into the tethered capsule
and rise above the dust

APOLOGY

in the morning
when the crows had waved their wings
and carried themselves home
his body lay in the street
bare and bones
his heart unbeating in its white unfinishedchurch

the old women passed
buying bread

the old man washed the night
from his stairs
with a hose

and the young men were sleeping
dreaming of crows
and the young women sat on their beds
hating their looms

no one stood at her window watching
as first the ants
then the centipedes
then the moths
came to carry him down
to their holes by the sea

ABOVE NEBRASKA

today you are a Nebraskan town
in a patchwork of square fiefdoms
dull with fallow or in green circles
arched inside their squares
of scorpion corn

the rain is seldom but it rains
and the water rushes from the leaves
that wrap each ear of corn
like a baby Indian

the fields sop until the soil drains
spilling in fan shapes
and open hand shapes
lacework and latticework of ferns
and fronds comingling

bleeding rivulet to rivulet
until the soil
crumbles
into a winding stream

and all the droplets draining
from the scorpion corn
become a river of shrubs
and sandbars rising like vertebrae
from the riverbed below

today I am a plane
and I pass over you
thirsting my eyes
on your low maneuvers

you are a town
girdled by square fields
earth imagined by engineers
circles inside squares
lushly and obediently watered

I pass over you in my white fatigue
with my heart shaped almondine
so small at this height
you look up from your world

and see its tiny passage
like a crystal or a freezing
rivulet on a winter window
only for a moment
for you are busy farming

BERRYMAN IN BRIDGETOWN

All my generation – those piddling four –
All my generation come to think on it
With their glitter and glass
Brood in the methane gasp

While sorry I amid the rains
Do nothing on my wide Pacific shelf
Wanting more than these dragoons
With their Beathoofian clatter

What’s the matter? Head gone wrong?
I see a shield amid the trees. Amid?
Among the trees, there,
I see a cohort’s shield hanging low

A painted dragon on it and my own
A ghost’s beard hanging from a naked face

==============================================

And now some Amy King,

http://www.amyking.org/#!read-poems

who will besubjected to the same Poundian test:

The Marble Faun

by Amy King

A tiny face of genius & tolerance

brands itself organic

abrupt vampire of himself, of health,

stoned circle of having risen—

Why the natural inclination to pet,

to be affection with a soul made of bone

on haunches among honeysuckle

and little else to dine upon?

I wasn't able to claim the backs

of my legs, and for that crime, was martyred

for modern day races.

From these trials, I learned to be true

to truths that hugged and lost and slew.

Not what makes my liver stand on end

but how to shake fists against the failings

of insects, of lambs, of castles and the fruits

of shadows that walk with us behind our backs,

swampy corners of decay united.

From old Jewish towns we embrace

the plotted demise and welcome a ghost

in born-again tatters, being all that we know

and the only face that matters. Except

a child from the lawn who watches, in stone.

We become as ripe as an earth's waiting meat,

better for sculpting to crumble

a rib-eyed dust spelling death out,

names that soften at moon, broken to rise again.

NOW AS PROSE

A tiny face ofgenius & tolerance brands itself organic abrupt vampire of himself, ofhealth, stoned circle of having risen— Why the natural inclination to pet, tobe affection with a soul made of bone on haunches among honeysuckle and littleelse to dine upon? I wasn't able to claim the backs of my legs, and forthat crime, was martyred for modern day races. From these trials, I learned to be true totruths that hugged and lost and slew. Not what makes my liver stand on endbut how to shake fists against the failings

of insects, oflambs, of castles and the fruits of shadows that walk with us behind our backs,swampy corners of decay united.

I wish that this doggerel might make Amy’s liverstand on end! But I am afraid not!

This Amy will forge on no matter what!

This is an example of a thoroughly CLOTTED poem. Clottedpoems are not intrinsically awful.

The first poem I ever explicated, Robert Lowell’s THESHAKO is clotted – but once you take it apart

It reveals wonderful parts. Here, if you unclott Amy whatyou find are entirely TRIVIAL thoughts

Merely awkwardly and ungrammatically expressed: “to be affection with a soul” meaningwhat? That

“soul”possesses an “affection” , or are we trying to saythat the soul is being affectionate?

The opening lines Atiny face of genius & tolerance brands itself organic abrupt vampire ofhimself, of health, stoned circle of having risen” … is gibberish!

This is truly awful and for this poem to grace theAmerican Academy of Poets Site

Is an even more dreadful thought.

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/22562

Amy runs the poetry competition of “good reads”, at best mediocre stuff! She gets published

With crap like the Marble Faun, even has anendorsement from John Ashberry!

Not that Ashberry is at all important or interestingto me these days. Still!

==================

WE WILL NEVER FULLY RECOVER

Because the light resembles marmalade,

the zeitgeist dips gelatinous between our ribs

and makes us speak. My sister is not gay.

My daughter is not gay. I enjoy the war

of this party. Myhusband’s not gay.

My self is not gay. I will never be as important

to you as your family. Please, more chips & aperitif.

This gathering will be finger foods only,

nothing more substantial to speak the appetite

or test one’s endurance with manners.

I don’t have a dog in this fight; my sister

is post–gay only. I’m merely a gnat sans trench coat

in a small bony space crossing letters out.

The anti-Vanna White. Even if you don’t remember,

you sleep through memory nightly. You sleep

through me and feel your Pinot Noir all the way

back to Napa Valley. Because the total square root

of heat is light that turns a grape

into strains of bottled affection, I hold you

close, stroke your estimations, even before

the growls of this party deliver its host

from the assumption of body, pull us

into her white-hot affection, and whether we

believe or only gesture the Eucharist, our sex

goes gay for all objects in contact.

My husband goes gay, his nipples get bothered,

my brother is gay, he’s a leg length in bathtubs,

my grandmother’s grave echoes with gay

her silky epitaph and flowers. Gay is the next

pro-creation, save where the bombs and guns

illuminate people harnessed by fatigues

and futures without pay, futures without gay,

death in an imminent trigger. The unemployed also

party less gay when fairies are unable to boot-camp.

If you want more of the like:

http://www.amyking.org/

How does someone with this kind of junk floatingaround her pretty little head do it – does she give good head? That atleast would be something! Bring back the“snap crackle and pop” poetesses of

of Yore of Bryn Mawr, which after all has only had onegreat poetess amongst them all:

Marianne Moore!

.====================================================================

Here my Senor Heron,


Señor Heron



Still still

There on two stilts

Reed thin in the reeds

He stands



Posing for Mr. Audubon's

Fine line pen

His light blue grey eminence

Nearly indiscernible

Within

Grey blue

Water green

Sleek reeds

His magic cap.



Thinking

"You can't see me, Senor Darwin, 

as little as you can see cousin Robin, 

I have adapted beyond all recognition

I am part sky part water."



Then he flies off, creaking in the wind,

Scrapes his way hoarsely across the sky... 
grey…  elegant metal file... 
turning into just one disappearing line.



A niche bird,

[A specialist

Nay, a super-specialist]

A solitary aristocrat

Or pair

With beaks to be picky with

To probe into the slimmest of cavities



The finest meshed nets

Nearly a foot in length

The thinnest of funnels



Zap

And another baby salmon

Zap

Another frog

Wriggles down his elongated gullet



Everything about him is elongated…

But when he start to fly and slowly begins to spread,

and slowly starts, to wave his heavy-seeming, mournful wings,

like rain curtains in the wind, oh what a leaden rhythm that is of his waving of

astonishingly wide, substantial width of wings… wide enough it seems

to lift much heavier loads than his spindly being...



No fluttering ever…

Occasionally he glides…

Just above the water

Submarine hunter

Glider...



There, he perches on the crown of the 200 foot spruce tree...

Lightning rod grey white!

  

There, he spreads those weeping wide wings,

Starts to lower his substantial spread

- cushioning, billowing, segueing into Mr. Audobon's preferred profile, has he been watching the 82^nd Airborne? -

Landing, settling on the crown, on the huge wide spread of the weeping willow,

and there he finally cries his heart out…

[c] Michael Roloff 2008-2011

[

Notes Toward a Psychoanalysis of Reading

2011-11-16T19:26:00.001-08:00

OnReading & How Reading Handke has Affected Me & On the Experience ofReading Handke on the Dreamscreen.

NotesToward a Psychoanalysis of Reading.

ForMaria Sivec

Part I

First of all, who am I,who am I as a reader, when and how did I start to read written words? I musthave seen parents and grandparents and others reading, it was called “lesen” inGerman, that is what they did and I seem to have been curiosity itself, I stillhave photos of my mother leading a pudgy two to three year old, by his harness,strapped over his upper body, like a young dog or horse being trained, fromflower to flower – did a bee ever sting my nose or am I hallucinating theexperience?

I was not supposed to clamber allover people’s laps while they were reading, which was done sitting on a chairor couch. The expression “Don’t disturb, Opa, don’t disturb your father… he isreading!” I must have heard. Perhaps I had even heard the word “auf-lesen”which means to pick up, referring to toys I strewed about, in lieu of leavingthe task to my governess. “Lesen” was something that eyes did, they pickedsomething up, a mystery. Mysterious black salad on white paper, could you readthe lines on birch bark, too? White! Near invariably. The cheaper the grayer,towards the end of the war wood pulp seemed mixed with all kinds of paper eventhe toilet rolls if you didn’t use newspapers to wipe your arse. How would eyesever decipher that black mysterious mess, what might be so fascinating aboutit, what gems did it hold, or pick out the gems that elicited smiles or cursesfrom readers of newspapers: did the raptattention, that other-worldly look of someone apparently entranced, in or by abook, keep me from molesting them, how much instinctive deference was I bornwith, was I born with the kind of manners one of my grandmother’s claimed youwere born with, a problematic equation if you doubted that you were. Or not? Reading words was not only done sittingon a chair, or couch, but in special places, say by the big fire place nookwhich had two couches and a big round oaken table, lit by candle-shaped bulbsthat shed a gentle brownish-yellow, brunette glow through wax mantles, a biground nicely grained oaken table on which people also played cards, Skat, people seemed to read the cardsthey held. Reading required light,daytimes by the veranda window. My father even had a room reserved entirely forreading, it was called “the reading room,” and was especially bright, it was acorner room on the first floor and had not just windows to the west and south,but glass bricks. It had shelves at window-sill height, behind which I found,aged ten, handsful of condoms, which I took into the living room, showed to mymother who was having tea with friends, asking what these were for, my motherblushed and lied that they were for smoking, this was the room where my fatherhad his flings with so-called secretaries when my mother had her one and onlyaffair, but this was after the war, and I am shooting about six years ahead ofmyself here.

Itwas at age four, Christmas, my mother gave me a wax tablet, wooden bordersencasing a glistening dark grey wavy reflecting substance, a moldable mass, andshowed me that if you stroked your hand or a finger over that smooth softsurface letters words, might arise out of the wax, wondrous! As she made herexplanation her head cocked at the angle from which she watched what myreactions would be, an angle that my famous peripheral vision gleaned even atthat early age. - I was hooked! A B C … Certain letters in combination could bepronounced, referred to objects and beings that I knew: Mutter, Vater, Omi for grandmother, Lite for the governess, Hund[hound] for the wire hair Terrier who had the odd given name “Poetter”.Something funny occurred inside your head when you had a name for an object,and the object appeared to become less mysterious once it had a name and it waseven stranger when that word might arise from as mysterious a substance, asnow, a computer screen.

contact me at mikerol (@) lycos.com

if you are interested in the entire piecethis is the opening to Part I.

Varieties of Experiences with Handke Texts & Plays

2011-10-31T13:50:00.000-07:00

Varieties of Experiences with Handke Texts & Playshandke-drama.blogspot = index-page-for-this-and-all-other Handke Theater Sites

I started to translate all of Peter Handke’s early plays in the late 60s, an experience I have memorialized here:
http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/
I will define now with whatever precision I am capable of the experience of the how these plays affect an audience and me.   After the performance of Handke’s PUBLIC INSULT, as I now call Offending the Audience [Publikumsbeschimpfung] in my translation at the Goethe House, 1969, a psychoanalyst mentioned that the audience had received an hour’s worth of the best group therapy in making it so utterly self-conscious. Right on! The insults at the end are the joke, the Surprise Symphony effect, the bait to get the audience to attend the scandal, but it is the hour of being addressed, being told everything it did, every thing that it feels and thought that produces self-consciousness, about being addressed, about being in the crossfire of words, about being in the world, on the world stage. In other words, P.I. has a profound didactic and psychological impact. That constitutes its experiential component. The experience of SELF-ACCUSATION, aside the enjoyment of how its series work,

QUOTE

would be of the sheer excess, to the point of utter ridiculousness that self-berating can be taken. It makes you conscious, consciously, or at least subliminally of that feature of the working of our conscience. The fact that it does so playfully works to its advantage. My Foot My Tutor, Handke’s first play of pure action but no words, demonstrates a sado-masochistic power relationship, master slave, with all kinds of sounds – sawing, water trickling, cutting – acquiring quite sinister associations. QUODLIBET [As You Like It] works on the principle of auditory hallucination – the king’s conscience it wants to catch with its ambiguities is that of the audience’s mishearing. KASPAR works as a word torture that an audience empathizes with - or not I suppose; it also functions as an education in the tragedy of the prison house, the labyrinth of grammar into which Goalie puts you, dangerously, with its first few paragraphs. Overall, these texts show us an astonishing control over language, Handke could be a prison builder for Josef Goebbels and his many kin I realized about 25 years ago. Even then, however, he could be entirely playful, a virtuoso, as in WELCOMING THE BOARD OF DIRECTORS and as he has become again, joyfully so, in his 2011 narrative DER GROSSE FALL, which is disussed in great detail at: http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2011/07/peter-handkes-latest-novel.html

     The effect of the 1970 RIDE ACROSS LAKE CONSTANCE is very different. The play presents itself as that of actors assuming the roles of older actors, a kind of KASPAR en masse on first blush, everyone wants to be “someone who was somebody once upon a time,” and they act as if; they are young and are trying out roles and they are grandiose! But RIDE is chiefly a language game where sentences are handed off and queried, a kind of wild ride of associations, the danger being that you cannot hand off a sentence, will be left without a repartee, drop the baton and that the ice of language on which you ride shatters and you will drown. Your mind will freeze up. As compared to the other early Handke plays I had not the faintest how it would play or what my experience of it would be: Handke's other early texts I knew what they would do to an audience not only because I had translated their serial procedures but because I had directed them and had seen Herbert Berghof direct them. Nor had I participated in rehearsals of Ride at the Vivian Beaumont – I was more interested in a woman and spending time with her in Woodstock. It happens. I took Max and Marianne Frisch to the premiere as well as my woman. Max did not care for the play at all. It seemed to make him angry. Was it the plays implicit promiscuity, the aggressive and sinister undertone? I forgot what Marianne’s and Cathy’s reactions were. Me, however, the performance transported into a state of pure stasis. The 90 minute juggling act, the various, sometimes sinister games that the half dozen actors playing actors had played – “The drawer is stuck”, “Let the drawer be stuck.” – had the effect of cleaning all the crap in my mind out of it. It was not a sublime experience, it was one of pure stasis, of pure being you might say, as some of Handke’s texts, too, have effected, which is why I am trying to formulate this particular experience which Handke achieves once more in the summa of his early happenings, for that is what THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING OF EACH OTHER is of all the former, what genius it takes to find that solution [!]. There, in Hour, using nothing but images, a succession of them, to discombobulate the inured mind into experiencing it as something fabulous. There is something very positivistic about that kind of experience, and it might be an instance where Adorno and Popper would find rare agreement. Handke's subsequent play, THEY ARE DYING OUT, overall is within the conventions of Austrian - Nestroy, Raimund - farce; however, its referencing of political asssociations is vestigially verbally playful and reminiscent of RIDE.
    I saw RIDE a few more times full length at the time and then only needed to go for a ten minute "hit" as it were, homeopathic, to feel liberated during its five week run. I couldn't account for the experience, as I might for a drug hit, and did not experience anything like it until what is called "a good hour" in analysis. The experience of stasis was produced by the sheer playfulness of the illogicality, or new kind of logic, of what transpired on stage, that might also be called an utter anti-boulevard boulevard play. Richard Gilman pointing out that Handke in RIDE used Wittgensteinian querying of language does not really help, and Dick wrote his piece without having seen the performance. Handke might have used legal procedures, the resulting absurdity does the trick of being utterly liberating, of wiping the slate clean. Is it the liberation from the querying that existentially is always with us? Perhaps so, if we take Handke’s great The Art of Asking as the answer that questions about when and wherefore and why are not the way questions might be posed.

»In uns die Fragezeichen sind heutzutage krank. Können keine richtigen Fragen mehr bilden. Sind deshalb in unseren Köpfen ausgebrochen als die Pein des Geredes. Welches jede Frage erstickt. Welches die Herzen auffrisst. Welches mit uns aufräumen wird, wenn wir, statt von der Wunde abzulenken, ihr nicht auf den Grund zu gehen versuchen.«

The closest affinity to Ride would be Ionesco’s absurdities, but it is a first hand, a superficial affinity only. Ioneso’s Cantrarice Chauve & La Lecon do not perform a catharsis, which is what Ride and Hour do, which are not absurd in the least. Pure playfulness is not absurd. The effect of THE HOUR WE KNEW NOTHING ABOUT EACH OTHER is the same. Clean, reborn. With the effect of Handke's texts on his readers’ state of mind, these qualities need to be a major aspect of reviewing his ever more artful and emotionally deeper works.

Theater and Reading Experiences
Handke’s plays – Ride, Hour - of course do not play on an undifferianted continuum, they have a movement, and each has that moment - the party moment, when a party has its highpoint, nearly every party has it, and it is entirely unpredictable but for the fact that is hasn’t been a party if there has not been a memorable highpoint. One reviewer in Chicago got it right, and wrote: "Just describe the experience." It is there that Handke's work intersects with "happenings" and with Susan Sontag's AGAINST INTERPRETATION and with McLuhan’s notion about medium, but the experience, say of Handke providing what Peter Strasser called "FREUDENSTOFF" [the stuff of joy], can be detailed in this instance, at least I think I can and I propose to detail the different magical experiences to be had with some of Handke’s texts, and mysticism and mystical experiences are my last resort, as it is of the great physicists with one of whom, a Quark specialist, I once worked so intensely that the little beasties, Charmers all, Muons Glouns, don’t say that physicists don’t have a sense of humor about the requeson the world is made of, entered my dreams, and whether I stand on any kind of solid ground I suppose depends on whether I also imbibed Higgs’ Boson during that intellectual adventure. [That is I hope wonderfully stupid joke!] At any event, though there may have been a limit on what was called “Kraft durch Freude”, there is no disputing that some of Handke’s texts can put his readers into a joyful state, as of about his “Slow Homecoming Period” but especially in instances of the kinds of monstrums he once claimed he would never write, not wanting these albatrosses to weigh him down, I am talking about My Year in the No-Man’s-Bay and Crossing the Sierra del Gredos.

PRIOR TO A decimation of DAVID SHIELD'S "reality hunger"..

2011-08-27T19:38:00.000-07:00

PRIOR TO THE DECIMATION OF "reality hunger"

if "all criticism is autobiography," as david shields' driveling on about how he and the authors of two books which he totally fails to review jerk each other off gives just enough impetus to complete total demolition of REALITY HUNGER, delayed because I have been engaged in on-line discussions about two recent works of the world's most capable writer, peter handke

a writer on the order of Goethe,

even Shakespeare

in whose work our reality hungry

shields of course couldn't be less interested!

http://goaliesanxiety.blogspot.com/2011/07/peter-handkes-latest-novel.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/directors-view-of-forever-storm.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/handke-immmer-noch-sturm-still-

storm.html

http://handke-drama.blogspot.com/2011/08/still-storm-introductory-thoughts-on.html

and by the time i am done REALITY HUNGER  will no longer
be alexithimic
or rather feel like Hackefleisch
in as much as Hackefleisch can be said to be impued with sansations of any kind.
If the L.A. REVIEW thinks it will make  a name for itself by
indulging the self-indulgent Mr. Shields
that  is certainly true
!

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/9286499527/still-hungry

DAVID SHIELDS

Two pieces, one a discussion of a novel published today by
BEN LERNER and the other a review of a memoir by FRED MOODY
still in manuscript (yes, that’s right).

Don’t Blink © Terry Strickland

PROLOGUE
Ben Lerner
Leaving the Atocha Station
Coffee House Press, August 2011. 186 pp.

All criticism is a form of autobiography.

I’ve never met the poet Ben Lerner, though we trade email now and then, as we’re interested in each other’s work. In my case, “interested” is a bit of an understatement. I’m obsessed with him as my doppelgänger of the following generation, my younger self, my aesthetic son. Both of us went to Brown; have traveled in Spain/speak Spanish poorly; are Jewish — i.e., have/had Jewish parents. I wasn’t born in Topeka, as he was, but growing up in a northern California suburb felt as far removed from Oz as Kansas. Both of us are writers and “critics.” Both of us have/had accomplished mothers and passive fathers. Above all, both of us are in agony over the “incommensurability of language and experience” and our detachment from our own emotions.

I admire Ben’s poetry, but I love to death his new book, Leaving the Atocha Station, which is nominally a novel but thick with roman à clef references to the author’s childhood in Topeka, his undergraduate and graduate years in Providence, his Fulbright year in Madrid, his essay on the Library of America edition of Ashbery’s poetry (a collection which includes the poem “Leaving the Atocha Station”), his poet-friends Cyrus Console and Geoffrey G. O’Brien, his psychologist-parents (his mother is the well known feminist writer Harriet Lerner); I’m going to go ahead and treat the novel’s narrator, Adam, as he if were Ben. Ben won’t mind! — and what difference does it make?

The book — as what significant book is not? — is born of significant despair; Adam/Ben wonders if his poems are “so many suicide notes.” If the actual were ever to replace art, he’d swallow a bottle of white pills. If he can’t believe in poetry, he’ll close up shop. You and me both, pal. The question I want to ask, in this prologue and the book that follows: twenty-three years older than he is, am I in exactly the same stew?

Leaving the Atocha Station “chronicles the endemic disease of our time: the difficulty of feeling,” a perfect phrase a reviewer once used to describe an imperfect book of mine. Ben never lies about how hard it is to leave the station — to get past oneself to anything at all. He incessantly wonders what it would be like to look at himself from another’s perspective — imagining “I was a passenger who could see me looking up at myself looking down.” He wants us to take everything personally until his personality dissolves and he can say yes to everything. Ben has never come anywhere near such an apotheosis. Neither have I: when I was a little kid, I was a very good baseball player, but I actually preferred to go over to the park across from our house, sit atop the hill, and watch Little Leaguers, kids my age or younger, play for hours. “What’s the matter with you?” my father would ask me. “You should be out there playing. You shouldn’t be watching.” I don’t know what’s the matter with me — why I’m adept only at distance, why I feel so remote from things, why life feels like a rumor —but my father was right: playing has somehow always struck me as a fantastically unfulfilling activity.

What is actual when our experiences are mediated by language, technology, medication, and the arts? Is poetry an essential art form, or merely a screen for the reader’s projections? I’ve lifted these last two sentences from the flap copy (surely written by Lerner). The very nature of language itself is a major part of Adam’s problem; he’s unable to settle on the right word in English, unable to understand Spanish, revels in mistranslation as a close approximation of the incomprehensible human flux. An unfortunate fact about stuttering — the subject of my novel, Dead Languages, published when I was the same age Ben is now — is that it prevents me from ever entirely losing self-consciousness when expressing such traditional and truly important emotions as love, hate, joy, and deep pain. Always first aware not of the naked feeling itself but of the best way to phrase the feeling so as to avoid verbal repetition, I’ve come to think of emotions as belonging to other people, being the world’s happy property — not really mine except by way of disingenuous circumlocution.

About the 2004 Madrid bombings (three of the bombs exploded in the Atocha Station) he says, “When history came alive, I was sleeping in the Ritz.” He wonders if he’ll be the only American in history who visits Granada without seeing the Alhambra. While Spain is voting, he’s checking email. Easy enough to judge Ben; harder to acknowledge the near-universality of such soul-sickness, c. 2011. The emblematic event of my childhood was a weekend I spent with my mother and father in Eugene, Oregon, where they helped the Peace & Freedom candidate map out his gubernatorial campaign; before we returned to the Bay Area, the candidate treated us to Sunday brunch or, rather, tried to treat us to Sunday brunch, since we drove up and down the strip, trying to work our consciences free to eat at a restaurant called Sambo’s or a cafe that once fired a Chicano busboy. The game: Top This Arcane Indignation. It would be difficult to overestimate either the length of the main drag or the number of times we traversed it. We stopped once for gas.

If Ben cares about “the arts,” it’s only to measure the distance between his experience of the actual works and the claims made on their behalf: “The closest I’d come to having a profound experience of art was probably the experience of this distance, a profound experience of the absence of profundity.” He’s “unworthy”; profundity is “unavailable from within the damaged life.” And yet he’s willing to say, somewhat begrudgingly, that Ashbery is a great poet: “It is as though the actual Ashbery poem were concealed from you, written on the other side of a mirrored surface, and you saw only the reflection of your reading. But by reflecting your reading, Ashbery’s poems allow you to attend to your attention, to experience your experience, thereby enabling a strange kind of presence. It is a presence that keeps the virtual possibilities of poetry intact because the true poem remains beyond you, inscribed on the far side of the mirror: ‘You have it but you don’t have it. / You miss it, it misses you. / You miss each other.’”

This is a lot, but is that it? Is that everything? Is that the best art can do now — be a holding tank/reflecting pool for our lostness? Maybe, maybe. Meanwhile, the words are written under water; we have nothing to say and say it into a tiny phone. Why was I born between mirrors? Picasso and the Picasso Museum guard: Ben approaches a canvas a child has touched (a miniature precursor of, or study for, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon), double-checks to make sure no one is around, and since the world is ending, touches the painting himself —

¤

PREPUBLICATION
Fred Moody
Unspeakable Joy
Ms. 292 pp.

I frequently exchange manuscripts with Fred Moody, the author of four previous books. His as-yet-unpublished memoir, Unspeakable Joy, describes his adolescent years spent in two seminaries in California. The book is framed by the national scandal in the 1990s involving the discovery of widespread priestly sexual abuse, including at one of the seminaries that Moody had attended in the 1960s. The book is written in short passages, each one separated by a triangle (= Trinity) and nearly every one just a couple of pages.

The opening of the book — Moody’s mother calling him on the phone after hearing the news, demanding to know if he was one of the abused, and he reassuring her that he wasn’t — sets a tone for what follows, framing the entire thing in a peculiar way. Moody reassures his mother that he wasn’t abused, but he doesn’t reassure the reader; if anything, I’m inclined to think he’s lying. He reflects on how troubled his adult life has been, how he has to hide in plain sight because of the horrible things within him:

Marriage, kids, house, friends, career — when you’re like me, those things are basically barnacles on a rotting pier. I suppose, for the secretive, the power of the secret has some direct correlation with the worth of the life you have: the more loved ones in your life, the more emotional equity, the more you have to lose by being found out.

All of which further inclines me to believe that he was abused, and that I’m going to hear about it, but this information is withheld, and he segues into a retelling of his entire seminarian career, beginning with his earliest, uncontrollable desire to enter the seminary because of his mortifying fear of girls and all things sexual, and his resulting resolution that “there was something deeply wrong” with him. “Joining the seminary was the only opportunity I had to flee my life, which was intolerable and frightening.” The first several chapters revolve around Moody’s unrelenting emphasis on how troubled he was as a child, how disturbed he is as an adult, and how traumatizing the intervening years were. Further, and perhaps most importantly, he describes how difficult it is for him to recall these memories, both emotionally and physically: “Memory isn’t a resurrector of past reality so much as it is a storyteller,” he muses. His wife asks him (about the manuscript I’m reading) whether he’s writing memoir or fiction, and he responds that he’s “still thinking about it.”

These two ideas, therefore, swirl around all that follows: one, that we’re going to read the story of how Moody was molested by a priest at seminary; two, that we’re going to have no way of knowing how much of what follows is “true.” Oddly enough, both of these ideas more or less drop out of the text as soon as his story begins in earnest. We’re transported not to a retrograde, medieval, Catholic hellhole, but to a largely unfun but overall not-too-bad boarding school. Interspersed throughout the chapters are snippets from other media: essays written by naive and pious pupils for the school’s journal, poems from the experimental journal started by Moody and his friends after they start reading Salinger and Ginsberg, Moody’s grade report at the end of each quarter, letters to and from parents. The essays written by the students on, for example, the “unspeakable joy” in a mother’s heart as her son is finally ordained by a priest, or on the sublime feeling that the more you sacrifice as a seminarian, the more God gives you back, demonstrate the massive gap between what Moody’s classmates seem to be experiencing and what he is; rather than growing more holy each day, Moody and his friends grow more disillusioned with religion, more rebellious and freethinking. In the later pages of the book, as Moody and his friend are hitchhiking to Dylan concerts in Berkeley and questioning God’s existence, essays by the pure of heart keep breaking in to remind us of this schism — which is not just the schism between Moody and many of his peers, but the schism between what occurs inside the seminary and the image it projects to the outside world. The snippets from various, presumably “real” sources aren’t framed as such; they’re simply inserted alongside the rest of the “normal” passages.

I all but forget about the introductory chapters to the book. And yet, of course, I can’t. The feeling of impending molestation hovers over every encounter Moody has with a Father, every time he’s alone in a room with one — not on the page, but in my mind. Every time one of his classmates has a nervous breakdown or mysteriously decides to drop out and go home, I assume abuse or molestation is the root cause, but Moody doesn’t speculate. A startling disconnect develops between the way the book is introduced and what follows. Where’s the trauma? The devastation? The “rotting pier” upon which the adult Moody’s family and marriage are to be just “barnacles?”

I’m relieved, sort of, when Moody says that his seminary is shutting down; I realize that he isn’t going to be molested there. The school closes, Moody goes home, and trauma is spared. What was the whole beginning about, then? To my dismay, I learn that Moody is going to transfer to another seminary—this one in Santa Barbara, St. Anthony’s Franciscan, which proves to be far different from the previous one. Suddenly, the chapters are numbered in Roman numerals. I meet Father Mario, the consummate disciplinarian (google him: he’s still alive). Signs of sexual abuse abound, from kids being mysteriously summoned during class to audible screams coming from Mario’s office. And after several tortured months of enduring true Catholic discipline, Moody is kicked out for giving a homily about the hypocrisy of the institution of confession.

Moody finishes school at Bellingham High, passes through college in a “drug- and alcohol-delivered haze,” and brings us up to the present. No molestation. But then he delivers his great secret, once and for all, the source of his shame: on his last night at St. Francis, Moody, accosted outside by Father Mario, pushes him over a cliff to his death. It immediately becomes clear that this fact is a fabrication. The very next passage, in the second-to-last chapter, entitled “Exomologesis” (an obsolete term meaning “a complete, usually public confession”), begins, “Novelists get a free ride, presenting fact as fiction and taking undeserved credit for creativity when they’ve simply taken down what reality dictated to them. But let a nonfiction writer try to present fiction as fact for the noble cause of inspiring and uplifting the reader, and he ends up crucified on Oprah.” The real source of Moody’s shame, I learn, is that the signs of abuse were all around him, but he didn’t do anything about it. “This is what I can’t get over: the shame over my complicity in that series of monstrous crimes.”

The “Exomologesis” chapter consists almost entirely of excerpts from court documents detailing at length the extent of Father Mario’s abuses. Victims are numbered—Victim 14, Victim 22—and the excerpts go into disturbing detail. The final chapter, “Postscript,” describes Moody revisiting St. Anthony’s with a friend. His friend shoots a photo of Moody comically trying to pry apart the bars of a gate. The final sentences are, “We entitled it ‘Prisoner of Memory.’ Then we got the hell out of there.”

I’m left asking, What was the point of all the chapters about Holy Redeemer, the “cool” seminary where Moody “found” himself, made so many good friends, had so many life-forming and -enhancing experiences? The memoir is bookended by reflections on Moody’s disturbed existence, his internal rage, and the horror of priests sexually abusing children. The bulk of the book, though, deals with none of this. Perhaps all the bad things were going on at Holy Redeemer, too, and Moody was just too young to notice. Hard to know: there remains a disturbing disjuncture between these two sides of the memoir, or novel, or whatever it is you want or need to call this book, whose title, Unspeakable Joy, almost unbearably compounds the tension.

¤

David Shields is the author of twelve books, including Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, which was named one of the best books of 2010 by more than thirty publications, andThe Thing About Life Is That One Day You’ll Be Dead, a New York Times bestseller. His work has been translated into fifteen languages. His last piece for the Los Angeles Review of Books was “Life is Short; Art is Shorter.”

Image: Don’t Blink © Terry Strickland (http://bit.ly/rnRVkV)

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A Comment on Marjorie Perloff's Review of Verntrakl in the L.A. Review of Books

2011-06-20T22:42:00.000-07:00

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/5573392428/channeling-georg-trakl

I could comment at some length, and quite critically, on Marjorie Perloff's review of Verntrakl, but will do so only on my http://artscritic.blogspot.com/ since L.A. Review’s Tom Lutz already advised me that his organ would “never never never print a letter to the editor of mine” after I made a number of comments about the journal (*). Thus I confine myself initially to the merely factual, which is the very least one might get right nearly 100 years after the poet’s death: Trakl was the son of a well to do metal merchant in Salzburg who could afford his children a French Governess, of passionate Catholic persuasion it appears, and if Trakl was poor, financially, only since he used his stipend from Ludwig von Figger, the publisher of Der Brenner, to finance his habit. His friend Roeck noted that Trakl spent two Kreuzer a day [of his monthly stipend of 200] just on drink and tobacco which sufficed for the existence of normal person! Trakl traveled in the best circles of Austrian art at the time: Kokochka etc. A poor student Trakl did not graduate with the usual matura but then from Pharmacy school which put him in an excellent position to indulge his veritable cocktail of drug habits and allowed him to volunteer as a medic at the start of WW I, and although he appears to have suffered a mental breakdown it remains uncertain whether he committed suicide or odeed, unlikely as that would seem to be if is reported from cocaine.

There appears to be little doubt that the incestuous relationship with his younger sister was consummated, who was also a beneficiary of his talents as a pharmacist, and who incurred his jealousy on fucking Trakl’s best friend Erhard Buschbeck – within the position of that continuum of possible reactions. Baudelaire was as influential as Rimbaud. However Professor Perloff might have noticed if Verntrakl doesn’t – and if Verntrakl is the chief source of her information, I say “woe” - that Trakl’s lines become heavily indebted to Hölderlin’s and thus to Greek meter as it finds its home there to accommodate a melancholy state of mind once Trakl abandons the strict quatrain verse form – which are remarkable for the conflict between form and content, new content in old bottles as it were. I imagine I need to take a look at Verntrakl itself, since it is not clear from the review whether the author who initially is said not to know German then bothered to learn it well enough to respond to Trakl texts in the original. However, both Professor Perloff’s description of the text and her take on Trakl make me suspect that we have yet another instance of American sentimental appropriation and distortion of a foreign writer, the list of which is becoming too long to mention.

Ms. Perloff mentions “Google” in her review, the German department

at Stanford, that best as I can tell has improved since my days there around 1960, is also just a hop skip or a quick jaunt in wheel chair off, and would have afforded her equal opportunity to get elementary facts straight. Trakl’s use of words of color to freight emotions bears evident relationship to the painters of those days, and into the future. His religiosity I would say differentiates him from the standard issue poet maudite; there would seem to be a connection between the imagism of those days, the general breakdown of

Victorian verse forms can be noticed throughout the West. I would guess that with his knowledge of French literature Trakl was also familiar with Mallarmé.

(*)the LA REVIEW OF BOOKS

http://lareviewofbooks.org/toc

has published so far I am fairly underwhelmed...but struck, in particular, by the persistent

insularity of this new venture...

as though Mexican literature were not next door [2 million Mexican in L.A.]

not to speak of the literature of the many language ghettos that I came to know during my eight years in that regionFARSI [500,00 Persisns], KOREAN [1,3 Million I heard the other day], CHINESE, PASHTUN, JAPANESE,

ARABIC, etc. etc. Making the L.A. Review a kind of last holdout of Anglo culture, although it bears more relationship also in its reactions to U.C. Riverside where Anglos used to go for the air in Winter when the air was still breathable around 100 years ago.

The persistent interest in such well-shelled nuts as Marylin Monroe,

the Mitford, Keith Richard, the Hollywood Sign and I could go at

considerable length... and in having its say on matters that have been raked to death...and so far I havent come one a single new voice there...

"Er braucht 200 K monatlich: 2 K pro Tag für Weintrinken und Rauchen. Wie viele Menschen l e b e n mit diesem Geld g a n zErhard Buschbeck hatte. http://www.georgtrakl.de/4-phase.htmlLudwig von Ficker

This is the e-mail address associated with
Michael Roloff's [as "Der Getreue Korreptitor"]
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/

http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html

This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html

"Degustibus disputandum est" {Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno}
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug
of filiality reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." {von Alvensleben}
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." {Dante}
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of
experience." {Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.}

http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/

http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/

ANNOUNCING A TOUGH TAKE ON SAM TANENHAUS ["OH TANENBAUM"]

2011-05-21T08:26:00.000-07:00

‘He is an 18-inch naval gun, with tremendous firepower but always missing the cognitive target.’ ”

Oh Tannenbaum Oh Tannnebaum, adjectevitis to give a person conjunctivitis, and a ghastly producer of verbiage devoid of a single actual thought [please find me a single one!] is the editor in chief of the ny times book review! Karl Kraus groans in his grave!

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/22/books/review/book-review-the-anatomy-of-influence-by-harold-bloom.html?

src=me&ref=generalhttp://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/17/franzen-in-webster-groves/?ref=samtanenhaus

A FIRST BRIEF TAKE ON TOM LUTZ'S L.A. REVIEW OF BOOKS

2011-05-15T18:01:00.000-07:00

The L.A. Review of Books is tetchy, they write me that they will never publish a single letter from me, Tom Lutz does, this for the following, specific as compared to the more general, critique of mine:

On Sun, May 15, 2011 at 1:45 PM, mikerol <mikerol@gmail.com> wrote:

http://lareviewofbooks.org/post/5131104949/life-is-short-art-is-shorter

It is apparent from David Shields ramble that there is someone although he teaches writing has no sense of a writers b r e a t h i n g, or rhythm, or of deep syntax, or the rejuvination effected through estrangement, say Handke's ABSENCE which puts you into the state of being experiencing a film, and which has the loudest tank in the world --, or the magicking that can be achieved by making a reader experience the world anew through words... alas, there is someone who will go chasing from one Magruder film after another. No wonder David, as he wrote me several times, is not interested in any of the many things that Handke's work has availed his readers. Or a more materilistic use of language.
Domage, "sing sorrow" David is stuck in the whirligig of his brain.

Mike, please ask someone at the Seattle Psychoanalytic Society to explain projection to you, and how it might apply to your last phrase in particular. We are printing a number of letters to the editor. We will never, never, never publish one from you, and I am adding you to our spam filter--go harass someone else. Tom

lareviewofbooks@gmail.com

======================================

Having read most of what has been published

so far during its first two months in the on-line

 LA REVIEW OF BOOKS

http://lareviewofbooks.org/toc

has published so far I am fairly underwhelmed...

but struck, in particular, by the persistent insularity of this new venture...

as though Mexican literature were not next door

not to speak of the literature of the many

language ghettos that I came to know during

my eight years in that region

FARSI, KOREAN, CHINESE, PASHTUN, JAPANESE,

ARABIC, etc. etc.

and by the persistent interest

in suchwell-shelled nuts as Marylin Monroe, the Mitford, Keith Richard, and I could go atconsiderable length... and in having its say on matters that have been raked to death...

and so far I havent come one a single new voice

there...

"Chicquita abracas a todos"
>MICHAEL ROLOFF
>
> http://www.facebook.com/mike.roloff1?ref=name
>
Member Seattle Psychoanalytic Institute and Society
>
This LYNX will LEAP you to my HANDKE project sites and BLOGS
>

The Hubs, the Navel to Todos Handke!

>
http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html

[and sub-blogs, handke-scholar, handke-yugo, handke-discussion; handke-watch; handke-reviews]
> http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html
>

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
> "Degustibus disputandum est." Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno
>
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug of filiality
reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
>
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
>
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
>
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of experience."
> Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov.
"mais une marée de merde en bat les murs, à la faire crouler." Gustav Flaubert

> http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
>
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/
>
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/
>http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/

"Chicquita abracas a todos"

A Thumb Nail of what was involved in Translating the Handke Plays

2011-05-15T16:00:00.000-07:00

Reply

michael roloff to George, Igor

show details May 14 (2 days ago)

Elmo Daffington Jr. Your argument implies that simple English

constructions,

limited local detail, and the absence of wordplay -- in short that

which makes for ease of translation -- also makes fiction "great"

(your term above). A dubious standard. On the other hand,

Nabokov was able to translate Lolita into Russian.

2 hours ago · 



Thomas McGonigle I have been told the problem with VN's

Russian version is that he made it into an antique...something

it is not in English.. The exper ience of ADA is probably what it

reads like...

about an hour ago ·

Thomas McGonigle

I am still interested Michael in this question
of translation so when seeing ...

May 14 (2 days ago)

Reply

mikerol to Thomas

show details May 14 (2 days ago)

some are straight translations and don't need to be
more than that since MY FOOT MY TUTOR is a score...

QUODLIBET is me who knows about auditory hallucinaton
and his FINNEGANS WAKE

RIDE is a straight translation but that the dialogue
obviously accmodates itself to NY 1970, ditto for DYING

CRYING [not happy with that at all] didn't take enough of
the QUODLIBET tack there!

PROPHECY is pretty straight but I am willing to be playful when the author is.

i think that's it in one of shorter nutshells! xx m.r

- Show quoted text -

Reply

Forward

Thomas McGonigle

A few Bulgarians who have read
THE CORPSE DREAM OF n. PETKOV in Bulgarian say...

May 14 (2 days ago)

Reply

michael roloff to Thomas

show details May 14 (1 day ago)

German is a wonderful language to translate into, it is very adaptable.
i vaguely recall somene claiming
in the 50s 50? that faulkner reader better in kraut! will look at the guyotat.

- Show quoted text -

Reply

Forward

Reply

mikerol to Scott, felstine, Krishna, Jonathan, fellinger, Fabjan.Hafner,
m.a., schwag-hot, Elisabeth, pen, egbone, PlashyFen1, carecame,
dick, becker, jungundjung, Monika, JOSEF.winkler, Jim, Steve,
findeism, Christiane, Thomas, George, Igor

show details 3:10 PM (46 minutes ago)

Tom, here is all of it, with feeling:

....some are straight translations and don't need to

be more than that e.g. MY FOOT MY TUTOR is a score..

.For PUBLIC INSULT as I now call OFFENDING THE AUDIENCE

[the American fear of abuse - oh pleas abuse me Osama

bin Laden - and its connotations prohibited what would

have been perfect!]

I needed to entirely re-invent the insult chords at

the end and did precisely the same kind of list making,

it turned out, as Handke

http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/index.html

QUODLIBET is me who knows about auditory hallucinaton and his FINNEGANS WAKE

RIDE is a straight translation but that the dialogue

obviously accommodates itself to NY 1970, ditto for

DYING where the stage version is better after working

on it with Carl Weber...

CRYING [not happy with that at all] didn't take enough

of the QUODLIBET tack there! SELF ACCUSATION again see:
http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/index.html
PROPHECY is pretty straight but I am willing to be

playful when the author is.
i think that's it in one short nutshell!

As to WALK ABOUT THE VILLAGES ...occasion to be

grateful that my nutty stepfather, Colonel Richard

Weber, was also a Shakespeare one, riding in a Crosly

[its the one that looks like a Fridge on wheels!
http://tinyurl.com/64fce4f

through the Prospect Park development in West Orange

with Dick shouting one of he many monologues by heart

and tongue - "to be or not to be" in the most precarious

position and vehicles imaginable - will sure get

Shakespeare into your guts, and if it had not been

for that early absorbtion I might have called

DAS MUENDEL WILL VORMUND SEIN .. "The servant wants

to be the Master" or something equally boring...

instead of MY FOUTRE MY TUTOR. However, although

Handke said it was a better translation than he

could have ever imagined it came a cropper at Michael

diCapua, a little ice-pick-asslicker who had advanced

to editor in chief at Farrar, Straus and who especially

objected to Handke's formulation of sexual heat.
Part of the long detailed Afterword are on-line at

the Translation site..
. The Innerworld translations are very straight

and so is Nonsense & Happiness. Innerworld I

then added some later that were only published in

magazines... The New Yorker, Howard Moss was hospitable...

pretty challenging to get some of them as right as I

could at the time...with KASPAR I initially got even

wilder than Handke in mocking rhyme and rhthm and didnt

rein it in until Peter Brook asked me to..

If anyone is interested what the experience of translating the early plays entailed, I have given a detailed account of it at:
http://www.handketrans.scriptmania.com/index.html

Posted By SUMMA POLITICO to ART CRITIC at 5/15/2011 04:00:00 PM

The Hubs, the Navel to Todos Handke!

>
http://handke-magazin.blogspot.com/2010/06/handke-magazine-is-over-arching-site.html

[and sub-blogs, handke-scholar, handke-yugo, handke-discussion; handke-watch; handke-reviews]> http://www.handke.scriptmania.com/favorite_links_1.html
>

http://www.roloff.freehosting.net/index.html
> "Degustibus disputandum est." Theodor Wiesenthal Adorno
>
"May the foggy dew bediamondize your hoosprings + the fireplug of filiality
reinsure your bunghole! {James Joyce}
>
"Sryde Lyde Myde Vorworde Vorhorde Vorborde." [von Alvensleben]
>
"Siena me fe, disfescimi Maremma." [Dante]
>
"Ennui [Lange Weile] is the dreambird that hatches the egg of experience."
> Walter Benjamin, the essay on Leskov."mais une marée de merde en bat les murs, à la faire crouler." Gustav Flaubert

> http://analytic-comments.blogspot.com/
>
http://summapolitico.blogspot.com/
>
http://artscritic.blogspot.com/
>http://seattle-vistas.blogspot.com/

"Chicquita abracas a todos"