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

A Simic Poem

 

A Charles Simic poem:

Autumn Sky

 

In my great grandmother's time,

All one needed was a broom

To get to see places

And give the geese a chase in the sky.

 

               •

 

The stars know everything,

So we try to read their minds.

As distant as they are,

We choose to whisper in their presence.

 

               •

 

Oh Cynthia,

Take a clock that has lost its hands

For a ride.

Get me a room at Hotel Eternity

Where Time likes to stop now and then.

 

               •

 

Come, lovers of dark corners,

The sky says,

And sit in one of my dark corners.

There are tasty little zeroes

In the peanut dish tonight.

Charles Simic Gone

I missed this earlier this month but poet Charles Simic passed away earlier this month. A poet I admired and enjoyed. Here is an obit from NY Times:

Charles Simic, the renowned Serbian-American poet whose work combined a melancholy old-world sensibility with a sensual and witty sense of modern life, died on Monday at an assisted living facility in Dover, N.H. He was 84.

The cause was complications of dementia, his longtime friend and editor Daniel Halpern said.

Mr. Simic was a prolific writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1990 for “The World Doesn’t End,” a book of prose poems. He served as poet laureate of the United States from 2007 to 2008. “I am especially touched and honored to be selected,” he said at the time, “because I am an immigrant boy who didn’t speak English until I was 15.”

His poems defied simple classification. Some were minimalist and surreal, others determinedly realistic and violent. Nearly all were replete with ironic humor and startling metaphors.

“Only a very foolhardy critic would say what any Simic poem is about,” D.J.R. Bruckner wrote in a 1990 profile of Mr. Simic in The New York Times. “In rich detail they are all filled with ordinary objects, but they tend to leave the impression that the poet has poked a hole into everyday life to reveal a glimpse of something endless.”

Mr. Simic’s subject was frequently his World War II-era childhood in Belgrade. In a poem titled “Two Dogs,” for example, he recalled German soldiers marching past his family’s house in 1944, “the earth trembling, death going by.” In the poem “Cameo Appearance,” he wrote:

I had a small, nonspeaking part

In a bloody epic. I was one of the

Bombed and fleeing humanity.

In the distance our great leader

Crowed like a rooster from a balcony,

Or was it a great actor

Impersonating our great leader?

That’s me there, I said to the kiddies.

I’m squeezed between the man

With two bandaged hands raised

And the old woman with her mouth open

As if she were showing us a tooth.

Mr. Simic moved to the United States while in his teens. For the rest of his life he would look back on not merely his wartime childhood but on the circus of everyday life in Belgrade. His poems were full of folk tales and pickpockets and old grudges. In “The World Doesn’t End,” he wrote: “I was stolen by the gypsies. My parents stole me right back. / Then the gypsies stole me again. This went on for some time.”

But he embraced American life. He wrote verse like a man who had escaped a cruel fate and was determined not to waste a moment. His urbane and sardonic poems were increasingly filled with sex and philosophy and blues songs and late-night conversation and time spent at the dinner table.

Conversation with Rob Riemen

 

LARB has a conversation on Facism with Rob Riemen:

Like Umberto Eco, I think it’s worthwhile to address fascism as — borrowing from Wittgenstein — a “family resemblance” concept. As such, we can name constellations, groups, and regimes as “fascist” when they share, in Wittgenstein’s words, “a complicated network of similarities overlapping and criss-crossing,” but they don’t have to all share every single feature of what we might call a fascist trait — nationalism, racism, traditionalism, chauvinism, militarism, etc. — to deserve the name. I also think that, as a speech act, when we call something fascist, we aren’t just describing something, we’re also surely calling for an antifascist response. What should that look like, in your view?

In 1938, Thomas Mann arrived in New York. Originally, he was only scheduled to go to the United States on a tour for his lecture series, The Coming Victory of Democracy, but it became impossible for him to go back to Europe, since he was in exile. He spoke at these old-style American town halls from the East Coast to the West Coast, around 15 places in all, most of the time with an audience of two, three, four thousand people.

I’m still amazed. We are talking about a man in his late sixties, a European with a heavy German accent, and you have two, three, four thousand Americans listening to his lectures. The essence of what he had to say was, “Look, who am I to tell you Americans about democracy? You’re the country of Lincoln, of Walt Whitman, you’re the country of President Roosevelt. But I have a certain experience which I would like to share with you, and which is very important for you to understand. I come from the city of Munich. I was there for more than 30 years. Mr. Hitler was there all the time. I saw the whole thing happening and growing. This fascist movement is growing all over Europe. And what I realized is that the essence of a democracy is its spirit.”

He understood that the spirit of democracy involved people’s enlightenment. That’s why his conclusion was that the essence of democracy is education. The democratic experience is an appeal to “our better angels,” and for that you need education. It’s not just an American phenomenon that we live in a society of “organized stupidity.” Goebbels would be in awe of Tucker Carlson and people like him. The propaganda machine, the conspiracy theories, and the total lack of education — that is how you create a society in which these things can happen. And, again, this is not only about America; we see it here in Europe all the time.

A Month in Lima

This has most likely been the largest gap in my posting in over 15 years. I think I have been trying to avoid the news and the common thinking which resides in the States which is negativism and magical conspiracy thinking replacing any sort of critical thinking. Or perhaps its that I've been busy seeing family and getting things fixed at our apartment. Here is a first drop of fotos:

Fiasco in Texas

 

From The Atlantic,  Charlie Warzel writes:

A state compelling social-media companies to host all user content without restrictions isn’t merely, as the First Amendment litigation lawyer Ken White put it on Twitter, “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.” It’s also the type of ruling that threatens to blow up the architecture of the internet. To understand why requires some expertise in First Amendment law and content-moderation policy, and a grounding in what makes the internet a truly transformational technology. So I called up some legal and tech-policy experts and asked them to explain the Fifth Circuit ruling—and its consequences—to me as if I were a precocious 5-year-old with a strange interest in jurisprudence.

Techdirt founder Mike Masnick, who has been writing for decades about the intersection of tech policy and civil liberties, told me that the ruling is “fractally wrong”—made up of so many layers of wrongness that, in order to fully comprehend its significance, “you must understand the historical wrongness before the legal wrongness, before you can get to the technical wrongness.” In theory, the ruling means that any state in the Fifth Circuit (such as Texas, Louisiana, and Mississippi) could “mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content” and even implies that “the state can now compel any speech it wants on private property.” The law would allow both the Texas attorney general and private citizens who do business in Texas to bring suit against the platforms if they feel their content was removed because of a specific viewpoint. Daphne Keller, the director of the Program on Platform Regulation at Stanford’s Cyber Policy Center, told me that such a law could amount to “a litigation DDoS [Denial of Service] attack, unleashing a wave of potentially frivolous and serious suits against the platforms.”

To give me a sense of just how sweeping and nonsensical the law could be in practice, Masnick suggested that, under the logic of the ruling, it very well could be illegal to update Wikipedia in Texas, because any user attempt to add to a page could be deemed an act of censorship based on the viewpoint of that user (which the law forbids). The same could be true of chat platforms, including iMessage and Reddit, and perhaps also Discord, which is built on tens of thousands of private chat rooms run by private moderators. Enforcement at that scale is nearly impossible. This week, to demonstrate the absurdity of the law and stress test possible Texas enforcement, the subreddit r/PoliticalHumor mandated that every comment in the forum include the phrase “Greg Abbott is a little piss baby” or be deleted. “We realized what a ripe situation this is, so we’re going to flagrantly break this law,” a moderator of the subreddit wrote. “We like this Constitution thing. Seems like it has some good ideas.”

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Ciao Javier Marias

Javier Marias passed away this weekend before he could be given the Nobel prize for literature. Again, the irrelevancy of the Nobel shines again. Some recent influential and great writers that did receive it include: Nabakov, Borges, Cortazar, Sebald, Calvino . . . .

Here's a take on his life from The Guardian:

When Javier Marías was a student of English Philology in Madrid in the 1970s he says it was with a sense of "awe and reverence" that he would buy copies of "the then grey-spined Penguin Modern Classics. The authors ranged from Conrad to James, Faulkner to Joyce, Thomas Mann to Ford Madox Ford, Woolf to Camus. Not even Nabokov was allowed to be there." Last year Marías himself became one of just a handful of living writers to join that same list. "I must assume, therefore, that these are much less demanding times than the 1970s," he explains modestly. "But, still, I feel very honoured, even if I can't help thinking I must be a fraud."

Far from being a fraud, it is difficult to think of many other living writers who are such an obvious fit for the list. In brute commercial terms, as was noted at the time, you could say his inclusion is not a bad hedge bet from his new publisher Penguin in the event of his winning the Nobel prize, something he is regularly tipped to do. In purely literary terms there is an even more compelling case. Few writers have sustained such an engagement with the classic (Anglophone) canon. As a translator he has rendered into Spanish work by Hardy, Yeats, Conrad, Nabokov, Faulkner, Updike, Salinger and many others. As a novelist, he has threaded his work with traces of these writers, and is explicitly underpinned by an empathy with Shakespeare and Sterne, as well as Cervantes and Proust.

"I've never had a literary project and feel I have been improvising all my career," he recently claimed. "But I do recognise certain recurring themes: treason, secrecy, the impossibility of knowing things, or people, or yourself, for sure. There is also persuasion, marriage and love. But these things are the matter of literature, not just of my books. The history of literature is probably the same drop of water falling on the same stone only with different language, different manners, different forms adequate to our own time. But it remains the same thing, the same stories, the same drop on the same stone, since Homer or before."

This flair for improvisation has seen him selling millions of books that have been translated into more than 40 languages. His 12th novel, The Infatuations, is published in English next month, and work such as All Souls, A Heart So White, and, more recently, his monumental Your Face Tomorrow trilogy, have received almost universal critical acclaim. And he has not only been garlanded with prizes. Among his other titles he is King of Redonda, a real, if uninhabited, lump of Caribbean rock, the monarchy of which has been passed down through a line of writers.

"I've taken my responsibilities lightly," he smiles, "but I do follow the tradition of an intellectual nobility." He funds a literary prize and awards dukedoms to the winners, which so far have included among others Alice Munro, AS Byatt, William Boyd and Umberto Eco. "JM Coetzee was the first winner, and I was delighted that he accepted and joined in with the playfulness of it. Maybe it is time that I should start thinking about an heir. I inherited through an abdication, so I shall have to find another writer, as it is not passed on by blood but by letters."

Marías has never visited Redonda and lives in a book-packed apartment overlooking one of Madrid's oldest squares where he works on an electric typewriter, doesn't have internet and is equally old-fashioned in his prodigious cigarette consumption. He has a long-term partner, but she lives in Barcelona. "And that is usually my lot. Either my girlfriends have been married at a time when there was no divorce in Spain, or they lived somewhere else or there was something else in the way."

The Infatuations, featuring a rare Marías female narrator, is, among other things, a cool-eyed examination of love; in fact "Los enamoramientos", the Spanish title, could also be translated as "The Crushes". Maria has breakfast in the same café every morning, where she observes a married couple with the same routine. Some time after the couple stop coming to the café Maria learns that the husband has been brutally murdered, and she becomes embroiled in the life of the widow and the emotional ramifications of the husband's death.

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MAGA Republicans

 

From Anne Applebaum at The Atlantic:

MAGA Republicans are rather a threat because their leader does not accept the outcome of elections when he loses them; because he does not believe that the rule of law applies to him; because he does not adhere to the culture of restraint, tolerance, and moderation; and because he is now seeking to help elect other politicians who feel the same way. In their drive to change the political system, and to ensure that they can retain power even if they lose, Trump’s followers have verbally and sometimes physically attacked Capitol police officers, election workers, the FBI, the Department of Justice, and civil servants. He and his acolytes use violent language, and they inspire violence in return. As Biden put it last night, they “tried everything last time to nullify the votes of 81 million people. This time, they’re determined to succeed in thwarting the will of the people.”

Composer, Pianist, and Photographer Sy Johnson Has Passed Away

From the NYT:

Sy Johnson, a Renaissance jazz master — pianist, composer, journalist, photographer — who made his biggest impact as a frequent arranger, orchestrator and all-around right-hand man for the celebrated bassist Charles Mingus, died on July 26 in Manhattan. He was 92.

His wife, Lois Mirviss, said the death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of Covid-19.

The jazz critic Gary Giddins called Mr. Johnson “one of those indispensable people you never heard much about,” and few in the jazz world would disagree. He started out in the late 1950s playing piano, first in Los Angeles and then in New York. He soon branched out to arranging, working not just with Mingus but also with a host of musical luminaries including the saxophonist Lee Konitz and the arranger and bandleader Quincy Jones.

He also wrote words: He conducted a seminal interview with Miles Davis and contributed record reviews to the short-lived quarterly Jazz magazine in the 1970s. He worked on Broadway and even composed his own musical, based on the works of J.R.R. Tolkien. And all along, he toted a 35-millimeter Leica camera, crafting spontaneous, intimate portraits of the jazz scene of the 1960s and ’70s. Many of his photographs were collected in a 2014 book, “Jazz: Personal Encounters.”

Abdul Wadud Gone

Vallejo Nocturno 2022 copyright- Abdul Wadud DC Space 1977

I remember seeing Abdul Wadud play numerous times at DC Space with Julius Hemphill. The two had great synergy and could improvise creatively for hours. Yes, I think in 1977 we knew the importance of both of those musicians and the sounds they created but still after those encounters I never ran into Abdul again, I believe.
From The NYT:

For many of his contemporaries, the first taste of his instrumental prowess came via his appearance on Mr. Hemphill’s 1972 album, “Dogon A.D.” (Like many important recordings featuring Mr. Wadud, it is currently not available digitally.)

Over the title track’s unusual loping groove, Mr. Wadud supported Mr. Hemphill’s saxophone lines with crying, bluesy bowed phrases as well as some select, forcefully plucked notes. Baikida Carroll, the trumpeter on that session — and, like Mr. Hemphill, a member of the St. Louis-based Black Artists Group — remembered Mr. Wadud’s insightful questioning during rehearsals about that composition’s 11/16 meter.

“He asked Julius about the relation of the drum part and the cello part, how they hook up,” Mr. Carroll recalled in an interview, adding that he “pointedly observed” Mr. Wadud’s working methods “because I was, like, This is the cat!”

The composer, trombonist and scholar George Lewis said in an interview that he regarded Mr. Wadud’s playing on “Dogon A.D.” as a landmark of 20th-century music. He tied that performance to Mr. Wadud’s later solo recording, “By Myself,” which is currently out of print.

“There’s the electricity — he’s amplified — there’s the funk, there’s the off-meter; a lot of the stuff that turns up being crystallized in ‘By Myself’ is sort of foreshadowed in ‘Dogon A.D.,’” Mr. Lewis said. “It’s like James Brown — but I bet even James Brown couldn’t have done it if it had been in 11/16.” (A 1977 live performance of the piece is included on a boxed set of Mr. Hemphill’s work, released in 2021 by New World Records.)

Mr. Wadud did not record much of his own music, aside from his 1977 solo LP, but his solo work had an impact. Writing in The New York Times about the Abdul original “Camille,” from “By Myself,” the cellist Tomeka Reid praised him for using “the whole range of the cello” and moving “between lyrical, free playing and groove with ease, something I strive to do in my own work.” In a recent interview, Ms. Reid added, “What Pablo Casals did for the Bach suites, I feel like Abdul Wadud did for the new generation of cello in jazz.”

Around the time of “By Myself,” Mr. Lewis chose Mr. Wadud for an ensemble that performed the Lewis composition “Monads,” his attempt to “come to terms” with the graphic scores of the composer Morton Feldman.

“Abdul knew all about that kind of thing; he knew more about it than I did,” Mr. Lewis said. “That combination, of having the strong kind of Black bass and having all these other possibilities — equally strong — made him someone you could work with who was super versatile and could do anything.”

Order & Law

From Charles Blow at the NYT:

The criminal justice system — including law enforcement — is not meant to regulate the wealthy, it is meant to regulate the poor. In this way, the police are a tool of control wielded by the powerful rather than a means of controlling the powerful.

Perhaps no one illustrates this dynamic better than Donald Trump. He pitched himself as Mr. Law and Order to get elected, and he ratcheted up his rhetorical support for the police when people complained about police misconduct and brutality, particularly as it was aimed at Black people and those protesting in support of Black lives.

To Trump, the police were exerting pressure on populations that people like him thought needed to be controlled.

However, when Trump’s mob stormed the Capitol, injuring and even leading to the deaths of police officers, Trump fell silent. For days after the riots, he didn’t acknowledge the death of officer Brian Sicknick, who suffered two strokes in the wake of the violence at the Capitol.

Not only did Trump not reach out to Sicknick’s family, he also didn’t send a letter of condolence.

The only thing he did was to sign a proclamation that flags be flown at half-staff a week after the riots “as a sign of respect for the service and sacrifice of United States Capitol Police Officers Brian D. Sicknick and Howard Liebengood, and all Capitol Police Officers and law enforcement across this great Nation.” The proclamation made no mention of the fact that they died after the riots, riots he helped incite, riots that he continues to defend.

Trump has consistently minimized the insurrection, and indirectly, minimized the trauma inflicted on the officers.

The officers protecting the Capitol were, in the minds of people like Trump, trying to control the wrong population.

But the entire episode exposes the lie that people like that tell about supporting the police out of principle. In fact, they only appreciate the knife when they hold the handle and the blade is pointed away from them.

 

After Trump failed to mention Sicknick in the days following his death, one top Trump campaign aide, Matthew Wolking, texted another, Tim Murtaugh: “That’s enraging to me. Everything he said about supporting law enforcement was a lie.”

Of course it was a lie. Much of the so-called Blue Lives Matter movement was a lie. It was simply a retort to Black Lives Matter. It was an attempt at silencing rather than solidarity.

This week, Trump returned to Washington for the first time since he left office. And the speech he gave was another law and order speech, returning to the theme of empowering the police, calling for the execution of drug dealers, and describing the country as a “cesspool of crime.”

In all this, he encouraged cities to reinstate racialized stop-and-frisk policies, because “it works,” and called on them to flood the streets with more officers and pull back on accountability for those officers’ actions.

Trump said, “There is no longer respect for the law, and there certainly is no order.”

Clearly, irony escapes the man.