USED BOOKS: Sartre, Italo Calvino Tim O'Brien

Nausea
-Jean Paul Sartre
Invisible Cities
-Italo Calvino
Tom Cat in Love
-Tim O'Brien

Sartre's Nausea is a gripping, twitchy little novella confirming the ways one person of unpleasant station can make them self sick , nervous, an odious presence by lingering long on the ambivalent shrug .No one else could write a better tale of an intensely self-aware intellectual whose physical discomforts translate into a changed worldview. Not a lot of laughs, but Sartre does insert his descriptions of bad faith of an intellect aware of his stagnation but whose dread saps strength, and will from him, makes him powerless to do even the simplest exchange. There is, of course, transcendence of a sort, but none are comfortable with its results. The peculiar interest here is the lingering on the problem and an inspection of the illness that infects the spirit as a cumulative consequence of an individual denying their potential and getting by with a bare minimum of engagement. Sartre’s fiction and his plays are for those who have an avid interest in those who live in just one room of the many in life’s vast mansion.

Still, we mut assume that some of us like to get out of the house, let alone leave our room, and enjoy a book reflecting a similar attitude. Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino appeals to Universal wanderlust, the tourist who wants to transcend the visitor status and gathers an intriguing set of tales. Marco Polo telling tales of his travels to fantastic cities to Kublai Kahn, who is stupefied and enthralled, until he queries Polo of the veracity the tales, and the veracity of language, becoming, finally, a dialogue between not which representation is real, but which one is more useful in a scheme of things that presents itself only a line at time, charts on an unfolding map.

Spinning tales of where one has been and what one did while they were there is an fine , delicately balanced craft where the plausible context and the impossible coincidence must balance each other in that strange space of gravity that keeps the reader in suspense, wondering what is real and what is of made up of whole cloth. Tom Cat In Love Tim O'Brien ‘s novel of a very smart guy who’s incapable of telling the truth the first time he tells an anecdote, is a superb comedy of manners. A college novel, a grandiloquent professor of linguistics puffs up his chest as he brags of his genius and his conquests of the ladies, until he is exposed, over time, as a liar who has comic complications that might rival Harry Crews worst southern dysfunctionals. Funny, bitter. There is not, though, a sympathetic personality in the lot. O'Brien, however, writes a very fine, faux- Nabokov prose of self-puffery.

Tim Russert, RIP

NBC host of Meet the Press Tim Russert died today of a heart attack. He was 58 years old, too young.

He was a firebrand interviewer, famous for making Republican and Democratic politicians squirm with this jabbing questioning style. Anyone who'd watched Meet the Press couldn't help but feel sympathy for the guest who showed up unprepared, without a plan or a consistent history of policy thinking who found themselves being expertly dissected by Russert's questions; Russert's reputation as a passionate, thorough yet fair inquisitor was legendary, and one was left to wonder why any politico, elected or otherwise, would bother showing with less than their best game.

His effectiveness had something to do that he seemed to do his homework , and his staff was very good at finding past guest statements about issues that contradicting more recent utterances where opinions and agendas were at least mollified, softened, or at least soft pedaled. No one was better in revealing politicians who desired power for its own sake rather than use for doing the people's business.Tim Russert will be missed, and one hopes NBC has the good fortune to replace him with some of similar punch.

A kiss that cannot end : a blues poem

a blues poem

Pick gripped tween thumb and index finger
a curling current loops up the steel string,

a blues in an odd key on similar Saturdays
after the lights go down

tires roll in an adhesive hiss
like a kiss that cannot end on a bad note

nothing else that gets written
at the desk equals the soft, keening

note growing larger with each breath
one takes as the moon rises higher

over the bars that are locked and
the windows are dark,

a down stroke, a pass at the frets,
cat fight feedback creeps under the garage door,

lo, the rain and the fog
rolls over the distinctions,

a drug store, a parked car,
a street besot with an ashy patina,

Muddy Waters says he's ready,
Little Walter tells us everything's gonna be alright,

Mayall tries to bring it home
but drops the bag

and now there's only broken bottles
in a wet paper sack,

while upstairs
the radio goes off
a hand closes the window
and then pulls down the shade.

"Blue", a good jazz poem by Peter Balakian

I'd normally put this poem at the bottom of things to be read and evaluated, given that it is yet another poem in a long string of tributes to jazz legends; the results I've read or heard from thirty years of open readings, workshops, and editing anthologies are that most of the attempts to get to the core of the improviser’s art are ham-handed and none-to-fresh (nor particularly musical). Davis, Parker, Ellington, all have had their names evoked and their legends dragged through a white jazz critic's generalizations about music, suffering, and black folks and their innate "soulfulness" and rhythm, through which a sort of benevolent racism can be viewed, the mythical good intentions of the humane plantation owner who sought to be kind to "his children". It's not a topic category that's ever yielded much in way of revelation or poetic effect for me; the revisionist poems, ostensibly written by mostly white poets to honor a black American art form, made me think of the stale paternalism that was, after all, is said and done, merely another attempt to define non-white traditions within American history and defuse them of any quality a group might take to define their experiences in terms other than what the Caucasian canonThat said, I think Peter Balakian’s poem “Blue” almost works as the poetry equivalent of the sound of Davis’ trumpet. Void of the generalizations and ersatz sociology that have made this sub-genre in urban poetry a laughable species of verse, Balakian approaches the poem much the same as Davis might have approached his solos, focusing on the mood of the moment, the suggestive textures of a note bent against a modal piano figure and the quiet rumble of bass and drums creating a host of alluring shades, tones and coloration , a space that is about the problematic personality rising above and over defects of character and external hindrances to happiness and creating those series of moments that are sublime, pure, unaffected bits of harmony and beauty, albeit a loveliness tempered with the doings of a scornful cityscape. Balakian chooses interesting words for his impressions of listening to the Davis group; the city is transformed, it becomes something new, if briefly, for Balakian’s rhapsodic narrator and this must be the transcendence Davis himself must have felt when this music was played.

Light we pulled into a string of glass

that seeped out of the long vibration

of Miles' Blue in Green

like slow time in the empty lot

after soot and rain and rush,

the Ferry out of sight,

my bones electric with the hum

of the cable of the Bridge at 3 a.m.

and the dying lights of the Bowery.

Bill Evans making the rain thin

to a beam of haze before the

horn comes back from underwater.

New York seems lovely and quite habitable even by the timidest of us; it becomes not the most sophisticated and elegant place in the world, but rather, with the music from Miles' transubstantiating phrases, is the world where each and every crook, thief, liar, cuckold, and cheat assumes grace, finds a place, blends in with a rich backdrop of wise, somber hues that make up the thick and awe-inspiring skyline. The city with its traffic, racist cops, crowds, posers, slums, jerks, geniuses, writers and money-grubbing capitalist becomes transformed, cast in a softer light, rinsed with soft rain, tall buildings seen in water puddle reflections and blurred neon nightclub signs burning away the mist just enough for you to who is furnishing the soundtrack. This is a cityscape that exists only in black and white photographs carefully framed to produce an effect, but Balakian is writing about how Davis’ music from this period made him feel about the quality of his life in a dense urban center. That he does it with a modicum of hyperbole is a wonder, and the final lines about Bill Evans clearing away the rain and Davis’ horn resurfacing after an absence is the subtlest description of a jazz group’s interaction I’ve read in years. Of course, it makes no literal sense. It’s a poem, and a good one.

USED BOOKS: The Gates of Eden

The Gates of Eden
stories by Ethan Coen (Delta)

A lifetime of reading means a lot of cheap paperbacks with busted spines that one must eventually take to the used book store, the idea being to clear space in both one's apartment and in one's head. One is moving out and moving on, but not without a summation of sorts of a few plot convolutions and the writers who typed them. Ethan Coen likes to take the convolutions one has left at the curb and smash to bits with a heavy, wicked hammer. His collection of short fiction,The Gates Of Eden, offers this collection of odd-lug short stories, collected from various magazines from where they've been published previously. Uneven, as with any collection, though there are some nice slices of dialogue, and some potent descriptive writing, but as a film maker, Coen's descriptions of things seem like film treatments at best, hurried and breathless, like the film pitches we witnessed in The Player, and our laughs are too dependent on our knowledge, even reference, of tired genre forms. But "Hector Berlioz, Private Investigator" is a Philip Marlow/ Sam Spade send up that results in some honest hoots, and 'Destiny" is a particularly vicious laugh at the boxing trade, with a Coenesque hero eating fists over and over as a direct result of his own miserably rationalized choices.

About The Noise

A screaming comes from the balcony of the apartment next to you, some one else is drunk under the summer moon again, the armies of the night troll the residential streets looking for the cars they parked for their pub crawls on the business strip three blocks away. More screams, yelling, every clumsy curse word you ever on the play ground said this time with no relish or daring, just animal sounds an animal makes when you poke it with a stick. I'd been working late, writing away on some issue or the other, Bill Evans playing sweet and brittle piano through my head phones as I let the screen swell with paragraphs praising Mailer, DeLillo, Joyce Carol Oates, yet again, for raising the conciousness of the era, or at least inspiring me again to write late into the evening.But then the writing is over and the computer goes off, and when I take off the headphones, helicopters swoop over the roof, police radios crackle along a wet, dank street, drunk males are scrambling over the fences to avoid the Long, Arthritic Arm of the Law.

 Thank god for His Miracle Invention of Ear Plugs. At a younger age I would be in someone's face, making threats, chest puffed for a fight.What can you do? There's a minute of satisfaction telling some to shut up when they've woken you up more than once, late at night. But then comes the idea, the cold and sobering realization that the only thing you've done is come off like a cranky old geezer who's ready to choke on his congealing sense of comfort. There's a principle at stake, yes, but it has everything to do with my sense of what's right for me, of what I think I'm owed in small measure rather than the application of any greater good.

I just want the nights to be as quiet as the likes mom and dad enjoyed before they decided to have us kids. There is the on going irony of aging, getting older, that the original night owl alkie is now a middle aged working stiff who requires his sleep, and feels the creaks and groans of the joints and the disposition if he hasn't the fabled eight hours, give or take. That much annoys the fuck out of me, and it's not uncommon to find myself using it as a way of making the noisy kids somehow correct in their pestering ruckus.

The facts remain, though, that it's most likely that I'll continue to wave my shoe like grandma used to , and make the harrummmmpphhing noise when it comes down to my will or nothing at all. Sometimes I wonder if I was born or merely set aside in another dimension of newspaper grey and was launched into this world because what ever the case was running low on the premium designs. It's a habitual thought, a shudder of doubt when staking hands or crossing streets or visiting people who and which are so familiar, so complete in intimate nuances and shared knowledge that they seem alien and strange, like specimens under glass in a museum I keep visiting for a lesson that just keeps turning the corner to the next gallery when my hard shoes hit the tile. Everything I look for is just out of focus, short of the designs I see and have drawn.

Believing the world is seeing beyond the box scores and trusting what it says on the certificate; the biography has already been started, a page of facts that have gotten absurdly complicated, in love their own inventory of details that are pressed now in their uniqueness, creased and pleated, ready for rough waters I imagine await at the end of the map, where boats fall off and drift with sails full of solar wind until I wake up and yawn and scan the items on the table, the newspaper, the dirty bowls, someone else's pack of Marlboro 100s. The universe is reassembled, seamless as death itself.

Years ago I wondered if there was life on other planets precisely at the time when she left me, or asked me to leave, I wondered who else in this darkness knows this hurt as well as I?, and I stared for hours at her apartment as if trying to make the walls fly away, to lift her off the sofa, away from her meal , and bring her into my arms where I stood in the dark, next to a payphone, with out change to call out far enough to the wilderness where there is only wind and tall grass, maybe houses at the bottom of canyons that you see from jets leaving your home town before you enter the clouds that will drag on the wingspan, I would stare and the walls would stay where the carpenters intended them to remain, there was nothing to see, but I stared harder, right through the building, to the stars I knew were there, receiving radio waves, TV shows, thoughts of strong desire translatable only by action, hear me, hear me, who else shivers in a dark corner in unique misery, genius of articulated regret, who else speaks when no language gets the purity of the idea right, just right, thus forcing one to live in craziness, at the end of the alley, drinking from bottles I've pealed the labels from? As usual, the stars don't answer, they don't say a word.

Whoroscope by Samuel Beckett

The rickety and decidedly repetitive rhythms of Samuel Beckett's plays and novels suggest modernist poetry itself. As literary art shifted from universal declarations of world spirit and dwelt more on the interior life and the inability of the individual to convincingly make totalizing remarks about the makeup and purpose of existence. One is always waiting for something to happen to make the body's labors and the mind's intellectual achievements cohere with a serenity that comes only when imagination coincides with actual fact. 

Beckett's characters are not much less than obsolete machines that still make noise and can move their gears involuntarily, at crossroads awaiting the arrival of an unannounced re assignation, cloistered in boxes responding to daylight and sound with responses mimicking the slow grind of old gears. Beckett's novels and plays are in various demonstrations an acute set of visions of when the machinery of habits breaks down and grind against one another. His poetry, those few stanzas he actually wrote, get to the despairing and darkly funny heart of his matter in an even colder, more challenging light. This is the case with Whoroscope, one hundred lines of click-track short-circuiting referencing a gripe of Renee Descartes grousing over the nutritional value of an egg that had been served him. An extract from the poem, with Beckett's own notes:

WhoroscopeBy Samuel Beckett

Extract:

What's that?An egg?By the brother Boot it stinks fresh.Give it to Gillot
Galileo how are youand his consecutive thirds!The vile old Copernican lead-swinging son of a sutler!We're moving he said we're off - Porca Madonna!the way a boatswain would be, or a sack-of-potatoes charging PretenderThat's not moving, that's moving.
What's that?A little green fry or a mushroomy one?Two lashed ovaries with prosciutto?How long did she womb it, the feathery one?Three days and four nights?Give it to Gillot
Faulhaber, Beeckmann and Peter the Red,come now in the cloudy avalanche or Gassendi's sun-red crystally cloudand I'll pebble you all your hen-and-a-half onesor I'll pebble a lens under the quilt in the midst of dayTo think he was my own brother, Peter the Bruiser,and not a syllogism out of himno more than if Pa were still in it.
Hey! Pass over those copperssweet milled sweat of my burning liver!Them were the days I sat in the hot-cupboard throwing Jesus out of the skylight.
Who's that? Hals?Let him wait.
My squinty doaty!I hid and you sook.And Francine my precious fruit of a house-and-parlour foetus!What an exfoliation!Her little grey flayed epidermis and scarlet tonsils!My one childScourged by a fever to stagnant murky blood-Blood!Oh Harvey belovedHow shall the red and white, the many in the few,(dear bloodswirling Harvey)eddy through that cracked beater?And the fourth Henry came to the crypt to the arrow.
What's that?How long?Sit on it.
A wind of evil flung my despair of easeagainst the sharp spires of the onelady:not once or twice but?(Kip of Christ hatch it!)in one sun's drowing(Jesuitasters please copy).So on with the silk hose over the knitted, and the morbid leather-What am I saying! the gentle canvas-and away to Ancona on the bright Adriatic,and farewell for a space to the yellow key of Rosicrucians.
They don't know what the master of the that do did,that the nose is touched by the kiss of all foul and sweet air,and the drums, and the throne of the faecal inlet,and the eyes by its zig-zagsSo we drink Him and eat Himand the watery Beaune and the stale cubes of Hovisbecause He can jigas near or as far from His Jigging Selfand a sad or lively as the chalice or the tray asksHow's that, Antonio?
In the name of Bacon will you chicken me up that egg.Shall I swallow cave-phantoms?Anna Maria!She reads Moses and says her love is crucified.Leider! Leider! She blomed and withered,a pale abusive parakeet in a maistreet window.No I believe every word of it I assure youFallor, ergo sum!The coy old fr?r!He tolle'd and legge'dand he buttoned on his redemptorist waistcoat.No matter, let it pass.I'm a bold boy I knowso I'm not my son(ever if I were a concierge)nor Joachim my father'sbut the chip of a perfect block that's neither old nor new,the lonely petal of a great high bright rose.
Are you ripe at last,my slim pale double-breasted turd?How rich she smells,this abortion of a fledgling!I will eat it with a fish fork.White and yolk and feathers.Then I will rise and move movingtoward Rahab of the snows,the murdering matinal pope-confessed amazon,Christina the ripper.Oh Weulles spare the blood of a FrankWho has climbed the bitter steps,(Ren頤u Perrron?!)and grant me my secondstarless inscrutable hour.

NotesThese notes were provided by the author.
1. Rene Descartes, Seigneur du Perron, liked his omelette made of eggs hatched from eight to ten days; shorter or longer under the hen and the result, he says, is disgusting. He kept his won birthday to himself so that no astrologer could cast his nativity. The Shuttle of a ripening egg combs the warp of his days.
2. In 1640 the brothers Boot refused Aristotle in Dublin.
3. Descartes passed on the easier problems in analytical geometry to his valet Gillot.
4. Refer to his contempt for Galileo Jr., (whom he confused with the more musical Galileo Sr.), and to his expedient sophistry concerning the movement of the earth.
5. He solved problems submitted by these mathematicians.
6. The attempt at swindling on the part of his elder brother Pierre de la Bretailli貥--The money he received as a soldier.
7. Franz Hals.
8. As a child he played with a little cross-eyed girl.
9. His daughter died of scarlet fever at the age of six.
10. Honoured Harvey for his discovery of the circulation of the blood, but would not admit that he had explained the motion of the heart.
11. The heart of Henri iv was received at the Jesuit college of La Fl裨e while Descartes was still a student there.
12. His visions and pilgrimage to Loretto.
13. His Eucharistic sophistry, in reply to the Jansenist Antoine Arnauld, who challenged him to reconcile his doctrine of matter with his doctrine of transubstantiation.
14. Schurmann, the Dutch blue stocking, a pious pupil of Vo봬 the adversary of Descartes.
15. Saint Augustine has a revelation in the shrubbery and reads Saint Paul.
16. He proves God by exhaustion.
17. Christina, queen of Sweden. At Stockholm, in November, she required Descartes, who had remained in bed till midday all his life, to be with her at five o'clock in the morning.
18. Weulles, a Peripatetic Dutch physician at the Swedish court, and an enemy of Descartes

What's striking is how this foreshadows the late William Gaddis' final novel Agape, Agape, where a dying man holds forth on a scrambled, stewing monologue about the history of the player piano and how that was an omen of how technology would invade our private lives and monitor the stirrings of the soul. Pouring over a lifetime of research, notes, papers, he rails between the sources of his misery and the increased misery he made for himself, trying to diagnose the cause in anticipation of a cure. Beckett has no such irony; his speakers are crushed by routines that have taken over the spirit. 

It is the weariness of someone too exhausted to know the world on terms other than the sheer effort to form a vowel. Gaddis' unfulfilled researcher at least retains his belief that his ideas mattered even if they were ignored or not acted upon; the frustration he feels, painfully aware that he is out of time, causes him to rage at the world, technology, himself for perceived failures to change the ten of his time. Anger animates the monologue. Beckett's language is post emotion altogether. The long discourses of his plays and novels are not monologues as they are imagined transcriptions of sounds one might have made when the genuine feeling was still possible. The lines are shown here in "Whoroscope," with their fowl references and interventions upon arriving at a point of recognizable memory or sensual sensation, are made of static signifiers, weathered billboards on an abandoned road.

I'm a fan of Beckett's poems, and it's impressive to find out how fresh and contemporary these abrasive lines still are. Beckett's speakers are those for whom the effort to contain their rage within the conforming protocols of civil nee rational language is as herculean as any physical labor. The topics are lost as the sentences stop, break, take fantastic leaps from idea to idea to view. This is the narrative of a man trying to resolve many particulars of his life and finds that having that secret history to himself for so long finds that there are no resolutions for his contradictions that he can speak to. This is the state where words lose their ability to shape the world and become something like animal sounds, the equivalent of grunts, moans, and snorts to signify the internal grinding of a mind that can no longer be molded.

Prostitutes, abortions, issues with sexuality, guilt, self-recrimination, the objectification of women, mother issues, religious torment, the gaping gates of hell welcoming the self-consumed sinner? All that is in there and good stuff for poems and literary prose to deal with. You, though, seem to have issues above and beyond experimental writing. I will simply say again, briefly, that his kind of obscurantist, indirect writing is difficult to do effectively, and Beckett does it brilliantly. There is a reason why his name and work still provoke controversy and heated discussion. There is something he tapped into that still filters through the current age. His work still resonates with readers who choose to read him. Great writers have that effect.