v a l l e j o n o c t u r n o

Ted Berrigan's DIY

Ted Berrigan’s “Blueprint for a Poem to Be Written Spontaneously in the Act of Reciting It to Me and at Least Three Others”:

Title:           (The name of the last book (not poems) you read or
                            are reading / or of the last movie you saw, or
                                  any movie you really want to see, or book
                                        you want to read but haven’t yet)

Dedication:           (To:   any female not present)

Line 1   (any line from some poem, not your own, that you like)

         2   (sing any line from a folk song you can sing)

         3   (any apologetic explanation (e.g. Eng. equiv. of “Pardonne” etc.)

         4   (look at one of the audience and say something sarcastically
                    personal to them. Don’t use their name)

         5   (recite either the alphabet or the numbers 1 to 26 slowly and with
                    heavy sarcasm)

         6   (any line from one of your current poems (not this one))

         7   (a one line critical judgment on the previous line)

         8   (say something as if you were just proven right about something
                    you knew to be true but that others doubted)

         9   (any four banal phrases (e.g. “guess I’ll hit the hay”). Clichés!)

       10   (any line from a movie . . . imitate the actor or actress)

       11   (any seven or 8 words you want, to be said in absolute monotone)

       12   (any phrase to indicate that the poem is now finished)

       13   (ask someone present (not me) how they liked the poem)

       14   (ignore them as soon as you ask. Say something very pompous, then
                    sing the line from the folk song, used above, then try
                    to make up a spontaneous good line quickly).

Terrance Winch

Admonition

I have been three kinds of dog: Border

Collie, Wolfhound, Black Mouth Cur. I remain

talented at herding and hunting. I have also been

an owl, a raccoon, a rat, and a monkey.

 

There’s so much history inside my head it’s hard

to keep it straight. The Barbarians at the Gate,

the False Popes, Hammurabi’s Code,

the Potato Famine,  the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand. 

I even saw Victor Mature kill a lion barehanded.

 

These days I travel mostly by time machine, though

I have a really bad sense of direction.  I crash into

the past, careen into the future. It’s so confusing.

I tried to warn President John Fitzgerald Kennedy

not to go to Dallas on November 22nd, 1963.

 

But I got off at the wrong exit.  Not that he would

have listened. I saw him once, in Manhattan, in 1962.

It was the Columbus Day Parade and he drove by

in a convertible, beautiful, tan, godlike. “Don’t go

to Dallas next year on November 22nd!” I shouted.

But he just waved, smiled, and drove on.

[from Malpais Review, Spring 2013]

Oleg

Vallejo Nocturno 2013- at An die musik

Jeff Hamada

Jeff Hamada

Mary Burger's All New Yorker Stories

All New Yorker fiction pieces stop at the point where the person makes a bad discovery about himself or herself or the world. That he is or she is a failure personally—in love, usually, romantic love or familial love—or that the world is a failure toward his personal or her personal sensitive nature—that the world is violent, that unequal distribution of power causes pain and unhappiness, usually to the less powerful, but sometimes to the powerful as well.

Regardless of its narrator, its characters, its particular conceits or conflicts, what anchors each story is the sick feeling at the end. The same feeling that comes after a radiation treatment for cancer. The queasy realization that all this, the technological sophistication, the aggressive preservation of human life, is merely its own reward, not a means to anything.

This is how the melancholic condition of privileged passivity confronts itself. When a grown man behaves mercilessly towards his humble, bewildered parents; when a wealthy young Latin American woman is threatened with kidnapping and even death, right in front of her own gated home, right inside her private limousine; when the mostly likable gay neighbor, in the midst of his theatrical, flamboyant prime, withers suddenly and agonizingly, and dies. When an urbane, not quite young writer, supplementing her New York lifestyle with a teaching job in the heartland, falls in love with a simple, decent man, neither a New Yorker nor a writer nor even in any way ironic—and simply leaves him, his marriage proposal, his simple, open face, to return to her lair in the crowded city, her archly urban self in the witheringly sophisticated intellectual world.

In "withering," a possibility that what is socially belittling might also be personally devastating. That the intricate architecture of social standing might collapse occasionally, like a poorly braced studio set, to reveal something more like an experience arrived at through contemplation.

When the modestly privileged, moderately young childless couple who attend the adoption picnic focus on the same large-eyed, attractive kid (that is, the querulous wife focuses. The ironic husband, whose disavowal of the thing expected of him mimics Kevin Spacey's in "American Beauty," instead alights for awhile with an aloof, jaded teenager, whose unflinching lack of delusion contributes to the reader's own worldliness), that is, the moderately young, uncomfortably nervous wife alights on the same doe-eyed little boy attended to by an imposing Texas judge and his Barbara Bush-edition wife. It is an orphan fair. Like all bazaars, the most attractive goods are fought for, the least attractive are left behind to grow even dingier.

In this version, the judge and his wife are the cunning players. They are powerful, and they are malevolent. The judge and his wife invite the more modest couple to their lair, a large house on a large piece of land by a lake.

With "lair," variously, the idea that the seeming impotence of the self-conscious intellectual (the New York writer snagged in the loneliness of her cleverness, the cleverness of her loneliness), the rueful split between the life of the heart and the life of the mind, is a familiar condition, the condition that seems to be most easily recognized as a sign of distress, of all not being right with the world. The dissonance between what you know and what you need—this is the price charged for entry to the club. And who complains? Does a young gymnast object that her muscle-strapped torso and thighs set her apart from other girls? The world-weariness might be counted as a privilege; anyway it's displayed often enough to be interpreted that way.

Through the battlefield drills of drinks, dinner, after-dinner segregation of husbands and wives, the older couple's battle plan emerges. The Texas wife begins an oblique attack, a narrative of a foster child they'd had, a black toddler taken from an addicted mother. His mounting health problems and learning disabilities, together with the difficulty in keeping a nanny—when enough details had been laid out, the concluding sentence wasn't needed.

The off-register comments from the Texas wife about her foster child, about finding the boy a nanny "of his own kind" and a school with "all different races, the Mexicans and the Chinese and the Indians and all that," created another clear space in the story, a way to tell what is right.

In the kitchen, away from the women, the judge's assault was direct: he confronted the husband with ammunition gathered from his labyrinthine legal connections: evidence of the husband's expulsion from college 15 years ago for selling pot, evidence that the judge, with a final flourish of legal muscles, had already inserted into the husband's case file at the adoption agency. This in the few days since the couples met.

But since the cunning of great power isn't really the story, or enough of a story, it was necessary for the judge to punch the husband in the nose and knock him down before the couple, and the story, could leave the judge's house.

The women's exchanges, happening at the same time, were far less direct than the men's but resulted in arguably more damage, like a barbed hook that's slipped smoothly into the skin and then twisted.

It's true too that the young wife and husband wanted different things (as different as a doe-eyed youngster from a disaffected teen), a further cause of dissatisfaction.

The obliquity of the wives and the passive irony of the young husband all form a rueful cognizance that weighs down to the point of paralysis. And yet it's that ruefulness that cradles its hands around the narrative's delicate crown jewel.

Like a lead musician the fiction narrator repeats and elaborates a single sensitive melody line, or crescendos on a particular note of knowing regret, a middle-aged loss of innocence, though evacuated of any possibility that the afflicted might be rescued from the cause of their desolation or even, astonishingly, change their own lives.

This somber performance seems to be the provenance, or the penance, of the fictional narrator only. For the non-fiction narrator, the feat is more acrobatic, if not therefore also more precarious.

The non-fiction narrator is permeated by a sense of ambiguity impossible in her counterpart. While the fiction narrator lives with the certainty that moral rectitude is real, that extreme power is obscene, the non-fiction narrator is instead subject to the wild cards, false leads, and missed signals of a lived life.

The non-fiction narrator tends to have an intimate relationship with squalor, or danger, or pleasure, an intimacy marked by unguarded revelations of vulnerability. She exchanges the reassurance of an intricately self-referencing universe, in which each element contributes clearly and inevitably to the whole, for rapport with the volatile, the off-balance, the unpredictable. Her familiarity with squalor becomes its own sophistication, her fluency in the idiom of disorder, with its free-jazz syncopation and arhythmia, its own seductiveness. The effect holds our attention like a sudden, beckoning whistle coming in through the window of a quiet room.

In this version, the non-fiction narrator is free to both love and despise her volatile, negligent parents, her alcoholic mother who disappears on binges and returns home to demand attention and threaten suicide; she's free to both admire and resent her slightly older, vastly more sexually experienced sister; she's free to fear and adore the coltish, sanguine boy she's had a crush on since age six. The non-fiction narrator elides between bewilderment and passion for her own still strange sexual feelings and for the obvious, pronounced desire that persists between her parents even in the midst of their pitched battles.

While the fictional narrator breathlessly cradles a fragile egg, the non-fiction narrator darts in and out of the room bouncing a rubber ball.

In the photo, a snapshot salvaged from one of those summers that were both vacant and teeming, she is 15. Her long hair blown a little into her face, head tilted a little to the side, lashes lightly mascarad or just naturally thick and dark—she is the early 70's icon of innocent sexiness, the womanly girl, what Ali McGraw, "Love Story," and John Denver's "Sunshine" all immortalized, but what she seems to be without trying, maybe without even really knowing.

It's that not knowing, or anyway not always needing to know, that the non-fiction narrator settles for, but that the fiction narrator battles like a riptide.

The one bobs in a tight ship just off shore, pulled between the current and the undertow, while the rest shout and lunge in beach volleyball, play with children, play with dogs, play radios, nap. She imagines her voice as faint, or inaudible, from shore. The other shipwrecks in the shoals and scrambles from her splintered raft. Her escape is always in progress.

How Available?

From Rain Taxi, an interview with Mary Burger;

KK: Do you think about how available your texts are to readers?

MB: I do think about it, and I think that it's something that a lot of experimental or theoretically-informed writers think about. It's a very self-conscious community that we create and the texts can be exclusive, they can require a certain kind of education or a certain introduction. I don't think that should be seen as exclusionary. I think it means that we need to bring an impulse to educate along with the texts, and rather than throwing them out there and saying, “Take it or leave it,” that we're sort of proselytizers, or envoys, because hegemonic ideologies, totalitarian ideologies, are very invested in missionary work, in proselytizing and recruiting and absorbing and extending their reach. We have to be just as invested in extending another kind of reach—a reach toward connectivity and away from tyranny.

My sense of readership for the book I think is, of necessity, a particular community within the large community of literary readers, but I don't want to intentionally limit it. I think that the people who are interested in this kind of work come out of all kinds of communities, and you can't predict why someone will be interested in certain work. I think it's important just to make it available, to make readings happen in as many places as possible on a really pragmatic level. One gratifying thing is seeing the people who emerged in innovative writing communities, the New York School and St. Mark's Poetry Project for example, now having their works more widely distributed. Maybe it's a matter of larger communities being able to develop a relationship to the work over time and not instantly.

KK: I think Gertrude Stein said it takes forty years. Would you say your approach of erupting the form and making choices based around the subjectivity of the text are more in conversation with experiencing yourself in the world or experiencing yourself through literature?

MB: I guess I don't really make a distinction. Literature is something I came to in part because I needed tools for thinking about how to live, how to understand a place in the world. But I guess there's always a sense of conflict or anxiety about how experience relates to literature or to any creative work. We've been talking in the workshop about how a text navigates social space or social identity, looking at the work by Renee Gladman and Truong Tran and others. One way to talk about those texts is to look at how the writer places themselves in the social world, what they notice, what they engage with, what is relevant to them, what they problematize. So, I guess the intersection is often at the point of problem and anxiety. The impetus to write comes because there's something that isn't completely tranquil. I think the impulse to create doesn't come out of tranquility or resolution or satisfaction, I think there's an unrest that underlies it.

KK: How do you create adequate room for the subjectivity that a reader might bring to the text?

MB: I have a real impulse towards ellipsis. It comes up when I feel that I am being too explicit. It's not necessarily an urge to “say as little as possible,” but “don't say anything that over-explains,” or that shuts down the possibility of multiple readings. I think there is definitely a tension, if you're interested in narrative, if you're interested in creating a notion of a subject in time and space, social space, there's a danger in under-representing, under-explaining, a danger of just losing energy. But generally—sort of like touching a hot stove—when I feel that I've said too much, when I feel that the text becomes static or oppressively over-explained, that is when I'll draw back. I think that's such an interesting space to work in, to try to explore—when is ambiguity generative and when is it obfuscating?

KK: What about your interest in time? Is there any tension between the way that you are socially conditioned to understand time and the different ways that you have come to perceive it? Or is this question just some personal bullshit I think about?

MB: No, it's not. That's something that I try to talk about, or try to think about. One of the fascinating things about text is the way it enables you to experience simultaneous, multiple scales of time or relationships to time. In the workshop we looked at Kathy Acker's essay “The Killers” in Biting the Error. She talks about the different relationships to time that happen in a text. There's the immediate moment of interacting with the text—reading the text or hearing the text—and the physical time of the writing the text—when was the writer actually creating these words—and also, the various levels of conscious time that are being explored within the text and the many movements between those.

I think what we colloquially refer to as “time,” the linear, one-way sequence of events, is something that we measure through our biological lifespan as organisms. The fact that an organism is born, that it comes into being and eventually dies, is a linear process. I mean, whatever Buddhist or Hindu notions of reoccurrence you might have, there is a particular organism that lives and then dies. But beyond that, there are variations in our experiences of time, changes in scale, speed, and duration, shifts in perspective, simultaneity, recurrence, deja vu—the “uncanny”—that belie a simple linear model of time.

Creating a narrative text is for me not only about trying to understand what it is to experience the passage of time, but also about trying to understand the representation of time, how slippery that is and how complicated it is and how hard to pin down exactly what it is that makes narrative—what makes a series of sentences into something that represents or enacts or performs the passage of time. What is the difference between experiencing time and experiencing the representation of it, or is there a difference? I mean, sort of the Lacanian notion of the unconscious as a text or the unconscious as a language. Is written language another representation of the kinds of experiences—subconscious, psychological experiences—that we have of time? There's a multitude of questions to ask about how that works, like, what values, what philosophical values or political values are we enacting by making certain kinds of representations of time? Our representations of time have a lot to do with how we view connections and relationships to others — values are revealed in what we incorporate about other beings in our representations.

Village Understudies

Vallejo Nocturno 2013 -Window Dressing

A Step Forward?

From Stephen M. Walt's blog:

In fact, the real issue isn't whether Iran gets close to a bomb; the real issue is the long-term balance of power in the Persian Gulf and Middle East. Iran has far more power potential than any of the other states in the region: a larger population, a fairly sophisticated and well-educated middle class, some good universities, and abundant oil and gas to boost economic growth (if used wisely). If Iran ever escapes the shackles of international sanctions and puts some competent people in charge of its economy, it's going to loom much larger in regional affairs over time. That prospect is what really lies behind the Israeli and Saudi concerns about the nuclear deal. Israel and Saudi Arabia don't think Iran is going to get up one day and start lobbing warheads at its neighbors, and they probably don't even believe that Iran would ever try the pointless act of nuclear blackmail. No, they're just worried that a powerful Iran would over time exert greater influence in the region, in all the ways that major powers do. From the perspective of Tel Aviv and Riyadh, the goal is to try to keep Iran in a box for as long as possible -- isolated, friendless, and artificially weakened.

But from the U.S. perspective, that's neither a realistic nor a desirable long-term goal. As I laid out last week, America's main strategic interest in the Greater Middle East is a balance of power in which no single state dominates. In such a situation, U.S. interests and leverage are best served by having good relations with as many states as possible and at least decent working relations with all of them. America's long-term interests are best served by helping reintegrate Iran into the global community, which is likely to strengthen the hand of moderate forces there and make Iran less disruptive in other contexts (e.g., Lebanon). Managing this process will require reassuring existing allies, but this development would also force current allies to listen to Washington a bit more attentively, which wouldn't be a bad thing.

Over the next six months, the fine details of a long-term nuclear deal will receive enormous attention and debate. Given the attention that Iran's nuclear program has received over the past decade or more, that level of scrutiny is unavoidable. But in the end the nuclear issue doesn't matter that much; what matters is whether an agreement on that issue will allow relations between Iran and the United States and the rest of the P5+1 to normalize in the months and years ahead. And it is that development that opponents of an agreement will be desperate to prevent.

Best Music of 2013-Hera / Hamid Drake

 

From Free Jazz :

Germany’s standard work on jazz, Joachim-Ernst Berendt’s and Günther Huesmann‘s “The Jazz Book”, claims that in the last 20 years jazz has become world music, a hybrid. Of course, jazz actually has always been world music since New Orleans was a cultural melting pot of nationalities, races and cultures, but in times of migration and globalization jazz has indeed established as the improvised music between the cultures more than ever before. Today, in our interlinked world, music of the most various, overlapping, different, even competing styles has been colliding. Moreover, you don’t even have to be from – say – India to play ragas, you can find great – in this case – raga musicians almost everywhere (especially in the big cities). And many of these musicians speak of themselves as members of the jazz community.

An excellent example of this theory is Hera, a Polish band consisting of Wacław Zimpel (clarinet, bass clarinet, harmonium), Paweł Postaremczak (soprano and tenor saxes, harmonium), Ksawery Wójciński (double bass) and Paweł Szpura (drums). They have always been one of this blog’s favorites, Stef has rightfully talked of their debut album and “Where my Complete Beloved is” in glowing terms. But while these albums, which were recorded with a completely different line-up, are either clearly in the Coltrane tradition or knee-deep in Zydeco (or both), Zimpel and his collaborators try the big strike with this release, which is why the band has expanded and is now augmented with Rafael Rogiński (guitar), Maciej Cierliński (hurdy-gurdy) and American master percussionist Hamid Drake.

“Seven Lines” includes Polish folk songs and Jewish klezmer (something you might expect when you see Zimpel and Rogiński in the line-up) but also music from the Far East, Sufi chants, blues sprinkles, African funk or free jazz elements.

Especially the harmonium and Maciej Cierliński’s hurdy-gurdy provide for a very oriental mood in “Sounds of Balochistan” before a repetitive blues riff comes up so that the reeds can kick off melancholic lines and the guitar can add shredded intersperses. Even here they have got you, from the very beginning the music develops a vibrating, vortex-like quality, it overwhelms the senses with an almost psychedelic force. The rhythmic propulsion provided by the double drums reinforces the trance-like, hypnotic character of the tracks, there are so many magical moments in this music, it is an omnipresent experience of sound, rhythm, atmosphere and melody, it takes you by the hand and leads you to a musical Garden of Eden. Just listen to the mourning interplay of the reeds at the beginning of “Roofs of Kyoto”, the meditative spirituality of Drake’s voice in combination with the drums and the harmonium in “Temples of Tibet” or the funk groove outro of “Afterimages” which can match with Drake’s Wels quartet (with Brötzmann, Gania and Laswell) on “Long Story Short”. 2013 has been a very good year for the music we love so much, there have been lots of brilliant albums so far. “Seven Lines” is definitely among them.

Interview Waclaw Zimpel by Stef:

What does the album's title refer to? 

Wacław Zimpel : The title refers to lyrics of the Seven Line Prayer - a buddhist prayer to Guru Rinpoche-Pandmasambhava, which is a very important prayer in the Dzogchen tradition. I heard this prayer for the first time when I met Hamid Drake in 2010 at the Lublin Jazz Festival in Poland. We played a double bill gig then. He played a beautiful set with Pasquale Mira and he sung the Seven Lines Prayer accompanied by his frame drum. It was so beautiful that it stayed with me. The same night we played a long jam session with Hamid, getting the feeling of receiving an initiation into deeper forms of music. With this energy we went to Poznan and we recorded "Where My Complete Beloved Is" our second album. That's why I asked Hamid to sing this prayer one more time with us. After that I decided that "Seven Lines" would become the title of our third CD, also because our band had become a septet.

Indeed, why would you add new instruments to the band, if the previous albums were so successful? Why change a winning team? 

Wacław Zimpel : The idea of adding people to the group started with the second CD, which already features Sara Kałużna on tampura and Maniucha Bikont as guest musicians. Later on I started a concert series in Warsaw called "Hera at Skład Butelek", which refers to the name of the jazz club. The idea was to play every Friday with Hera but with invited musicians. Thats how we started playing with Maciej Cierliński on hurdy-gurdy. Guitarist Raphael Rogiński also used to show up during those sets, a musician I've known for a very long time and with whom we've had many projects.  At that time I started writing music which really needed more instruments. I especially needed and independent drone that would allow me to build  sax and clarinet lines over it. The hurdy-gurdy was perfect for this and together with the drone itself, Maciej plays beautiful lines on the instrument, so I could compose three voice structures over bass and drums. The hurdy-gurdy is a string instrument with a bow, so we now had a string section with double bass and wood wind section. It gave me a lot of possibilities. The larger band and the new instruments allowed for repetitive structures and a natural way of exploring sound possibilities and different forms.

What was the prior musical preparation with Hamid Drake? Did he just join or did you rehearse? 

Wacław Zimpel : We met Hamid  several times between Lublin and Krakow. All those meetings were very powerful for us and for our music. He gave us much wider perspective of creating the sound. So when it become possible to play with him at the Krakow Jazz Autumn I was very happy. I wrote pieces for this large ensemble. We did two rehearsals one day before the performance and one during the soundcheck. We ate dinner together and had some wine which was probably as important as rehearsals!

 

On writing

Interview with Jacques Rancière by Pablo Bustinduy:

PB: I was thinking that, during the years of  your philosophical training, writing became the object of a certain suspicion or mistrust. This attitude could take the form of the critique of ideology, of certain psychoanalytic precautions, of the practices of genealogy and deconstruction…in general, all these seemed to have in common a sort of critical distance towards the effects of writing itself, as well as an exploration of the blind spots that intervene in the very operation of reading, as a reader “translates” a text into a specific regime of visibility and intelligibility. Is there a connection between the risks of misinterpretation in the translation or the reception of a text—the gaps or margins that you just spoke of—and such a suspicion of the limitations, excesses, or dangers of writing?

JR: I don’t know if there was such mistrust and precaution towards the dangers of writing. One needs to remember that, on the contrary, there was a sort of faith, a somewhat materialist faith in the signifier. My youth coincided with this epoch of great faith in the materiality of the signifier; I would say that the mistrust was mostly directed towards images, towards anything that “made images” or “turned into images.” Against that, I would say that there was a contrary sort of trust in the text: the idea that one needed to stare at the text, to look at it up close, to read at a distance that could let the text appear as a pure signifier, a text without image, while at the same time there was obviously a whole  network of images being developed in and around this vision. In those years, I don’t think there was a proper critique of writing; between 1960 and ‘70, structuralism was in a certain way a philosophy of truth, of the truth of writing.

PB: What do you understand by “image” as it relates to the act of writing? Is all writing a production or a manipulation of images?

JR: I was not making a personal statement about writing. I was just summing up the structuralist belief of that time: truth was put on the side of the signifier -on the relation of one signifier to other signifiers- while the signified was  put on the side of ideology, or, in Lacanian terms, on the side of the imaginary. Everything that involved the relation of the signifier to a referential reality was suspected of being an “image,” a reference to the self-evidence of the given. Think of the criticism of the “reality effect” that Barthes opposes to the self-organization of the text. Such a criticism rested on the assimilation of the image to the appearance. If you think instead of the image as an operation, as I tried to do in The Future of the Image, it is clear that writing uses images, and conversely, that there are tropes in visual art.

PB: One could say that this faith in a text without image is in itself pretty old; one could trace it in the analytic dream of a writing without noise or style, the idea of a philosophy that could reduce itself to a series of transparent signs, pure acts of thought and communication.

JR: Yes, it is the old ambition to reach a language that would say exactly what it says; it is the drive and the pretention to define; it is this completely crazy idea, which inspires a trend within analytic philosophy, of making coincide beginning and definition. This is an ideology that our Hegelian training, I may say, has completely kept at bay. Despite everything, and in so far as we were raised as dialecticians, we were shaped into a way of thinking that is aware of the fact that beginnings have nothing to do with definitions, that definitions come at the end, that nothing is in itself in the word, and that concepts are only in the mode of a motion, that they are the result of a process. Already in the structuralist moment there was a clear opposition to this analytic position, but there was, nonetheless, a deep faith in writing itself too. And there was that other front as well, related to the world of psychoanalysis, this idea according to which truth is something that is written, even written on the body. This was certainly not my main aspiration back then. But when I became more sensitive to the fact that words are never definitions of things or states of things but are like weapons exchanged in combat, in dialogue, I naturally found myself very far away from such a conception of language.

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