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

Bewildered Male Cabal

Letter from Kenword Emlsie to Lucia Berlin:

 

Calais, VT

June 28, 2000

Dear Loosha—

The stabile home fotos are DEE-lish, so comfy, you all the way, love seats everywhichaway, art on the floor, which is where I leave it, sometimes. Very home-minded today, as there’s a Lady Party in the house. Pauline Camp, huge bod, erratic flesh flow, unsunned tallowy skin tone, prizefighter cauliflower nose, squinchy eyes, enormous misshapen ears, mouth down-turned, down-trodden—quite a beauty in a survivalist way, to my eyes. An Original, she’s doing summer cleanup volunteerism with Patty Padgett, who is barefoot, much to Pauline’s recurrent amazement and not-so-hidden shock. Harold, Pauline’s hubby, and I have formed a bewildered, helpless male cabal, in the thrall of this empowerment that old-fashioned “real” women are supreme at—Cleaning Up Menfolk Muss.

I’ve been in a reading-reading-reading mode, a pattern of adolescence, when all I did just about was read, that solo occupation that replenished me, offered luscious and reliable escape, and, though narrative was the hook, I did respond to the twists of language. My favorite rerun this summer so far has been A Handful of Dust.²

I grew to loathe [Stendhal’s] The Red & The Black. Fell for a Colette shortie, The Other One, and the standard Frenchy trio: wife, mistress, drippy boulevard playwright–hubby philanderer they both care for and decide to share. They’re so fond of each other, jealousy isn’t a problem. I got jealous at the theater world details: dress rehearsal, the performers, the routine I feel exiled from.

So adroit. Plus a [Marguerite] Yourcenar historical fiction novella, spare and gorgeous. Between novels, I dip into you to see how your stuff holds up, which it does, all the way—that Gothic Romance slays me, how it refracts out into politics, power plays. Beautiful and natural, nothing forced or gussied up, doomed feudal grandeur dealt with simply via virginal eyes.

Yesterday, raced through a Graham Greene potboiler I wearied of—suspense, yes, but not nearly as gripping as his true-life safari through the unmapped interior of Liberia, so terrific made me lust for more Greene.

Switchover to Harold, who has plunked himself down by my desk, rattles on whatever I’m doing at the processor.

HAROLD: “So I picked up a new belt, only charged me four dollars, now I’m going to eat dinner. Down to the last set now—then we’ll have some sharp blades. Got rid of the rubbish. This spring I got rid of it. I have a rubbish man comes right to the door, all the stuff the girls throwed away from the storage. He’ll get rid of it, he won’t mind, got one of those big crushers, pushes it right up, then when it’s full, gets rid of it. We’ll go eat some dinner, then this afternoon get the rest of the mowing done down there. The peonies are really growing, three bunches of lupinia. You never know, never know what’ll happen, but it’s been a good year for flowers.”

Me, again.

Glad flecks of happy dust have fallen on you off that great Swizzle Stick in The Sky. Hope the flecks continue steadily, now you’re resettled. Congrats from your boondocks pen-beau—and a Happy Fourth!

[…]

Time to see what the Ladies are up to in the house.

Love,

Kenward

Some Recent Photos

Vallejo Nocturno 2022- September

Morton Feldman Interview-In art, we must pursue anxiety.

Last night I had difficulties entering sleep so I put on Morton Feldman's For Bunita Marcus hoping that its infrequent and sparse pacing would help me reach the waters. But the opposite happened as I tried to deduce the structure of the pieces which seem to litter the darkness of the room. This morning I said I'd want to learn more about how this guy thought. Here he is in a 1983 interview:

TM: What new or emerging trends or composers do you feel have been important for the ’70s and ’80s?

MF: Nothing, we had nothing in the ’70s. We had —

TM: Or even the ’60s?

MF: We had popular music, like Steve Reich or Philip Glass, but they’re show business. Serious stuff, if I may use that word, experimental stuff, if I may use that word, nothing, nothing. Cage and myself are still doing the most interesting work. The young people are a disaster.

TM: Why is this?

MF: They shouldn’t be in the field. It’s a field that requires immense talent. They have no ideas. What the hell they’re doing there, I have no idea. I taught a seminar on my own—I mean I loved the kids, I suppose. They’re not kids anymore, they’re your age, doctorate program. I said, “You like those crazy Arabs that tie yourself up with dynamite and you crash into a building?” I said, “My God, you’re not going to crash in here.” I said, “We have it fixed — it happens about ten years after your doctorate degree.” I want everybody to get out of music. It’s too difficult. It requires immense talent for ideas, when not to use ideas. And a feeling for instruments, and a feeling for sound, and a natural feeling for proportion, not a didactic feeling for proportion, all these things. It’s very, very difficult. It’s very, very difficult. Music is very, very difficult. I don’t even think it should be taught in universities anymore.

TM: Well, what should happen to it?

MF: I think it should disappear from academic life, because the tendency is to be very academic even without academic life.

TM: You yourself teach!

MF: I teach … I don’t know what I do. I don’t know what I do. What is teaching? Teaching is in a sense what happened with Hindemith. This is the story about Hindemith and Yale: He says to somebody, “You know, I invented a system where you can be stupid and get good results?” That was the whole idea—finding ways to make it democratic. It’s not democratic. I mean, composition is not democratic.

TM: You don’t teach that way, I hope.

MF: No, I don’t teach like that, but I let them hang. I teach by not teaching. In a way, I would play things, and I would be a devil’s advocate. I would ask a question, “What do you think about it?” I teach one thing, actually. I don’t teach composition per se, but I go at composition by way of its acoustical reality. That is, I teach orchestration.

More