The High Ones Die, They Die (and "People have had enough of Paris")

Sad news from Warsaw this week: the death of writer Ryszard Kapuscinski, one of Poland's national treasures. He was 73: a heart attack after an operation on the intestine. Fine writing. The record of a magnificent, compassionate, poetic mind plunked deep in the world-- in some lovely, and as he himself called them, some really wicked places too. A few titles: Another Day of Life; The Soccer War; The Emperor; Shah of Shahs; Imperium; Travels with Herodotus (new, in Polish only now, coming in English translation later this year). Apparently, he was readying himself to write a new book encompassing the whole globe, a sort of a report from one day of life on earth, starting from a description of a sunset over Lima, The Sahara, Florence and Tibet.

A friend in Kraków wrote this week," in Kapu's first book of poems from 1986 there was a line where he said that only he will survive who created his own world."

Ryszard Kapuscinski will survive, then.

These excerpts are from Imperium, his moving journey through the post-Soviet Union. The story at the end about the bathroom and the French newspaper I have re-told (roughly, not so elegantly) to countless people since I read it last spring. The chapter is called "Jumping Over Puddles"--it's short, but like the best of RK, this ordinary encounter, with a girl in the street jumping puddles, with the taps in a bathroom in the Siberian town of Yaktusk, embrace the entire reality of our entire world. I'll give you two bits, one short, one fairly extended. Here's something Kapu learns from a chat with ten-year-old Tanya who lives in this oil-rich, Siberian "Kuwait" (Yaktusk)--

**One can recognize a great cold, she explains to me, by the bright, shining mist that hangs in the air. When a person walks, a corridor forms in this mist. The corridor has the shape of that person's silhouette. The person passes, but the corridor remains, immobile in the mist. A large man makes a huge corridor, and a small child--a small corridor. Tanya makes a narrow corridor because she is slender, but for her age, it is a high one--which is understandable; she is after all the tallest in her class. Walking out in the morning, Tanya can tell from these corridors whether her girlfriends have already gone to school--they all know what the corridors of their closest neighbors and friends look like.

Here is a wide, low corridor with a distinct, resolute line--the sign that Claudia Matveyevna, the school principal, has already gone.

If in the morning there are no corridors that correspond to the stature of students from the elementary school, it means that the cold is so great that classes have been canceled and the children are staying home.

Sometimes one sees a corridor that is very crooked and then abruptly stops. It means--Tanya lowers her voice--that some drunk was walking, tripped and fell. In a great cold, drunks frequently freeze to death. Then such a corridor looks like a dead-end street. **

And later in same chapter, this scenario:

**I return to Oktiabrska Street, to my hotel. I'm in room number 506. To open the door, one must try turning the key a number of times. It takes from eight to sixteen attempts. Expecting results at attempt number 8 is optimistic, for by the sixteenth time the door will open for sure. The worst thing is that it cannot be locked from the inside, and it is hung is such a way that, unlocked, it opens of its own accord on the corridor. I had no choice but to ask the tenant from the adjoining room (a Buryat, technician) to lock my door for me. (We developed a ceertain ritual: I would knock at his door, my neighbor would come out, together we would open my door, my neighbor would lock it.)

In the little bathroom, there is both cold and hot water form the faucet above the washbasin, but in the shower there is only hot. Not knowing this, I turn on the shower. Seething, boiling water gushes forth with a roar. Because it is cold in the bathrrom and in the room itself, thick clouds of steam form instantly. I cannot see. I throw myself at the shower, but it won't turn off. I make a dash for the window, to let out the steam, but the window does not open; it is sealed up with adhesive plaster--and, anyhow, the handle for opening it has been removed. If I open the door of the room, the steam will burst out into the corridor; I will create confusion and scandal. But why scandal? How am I at fault here? I'm already thinking about how to explain and defend myself. Everything in this country is somehow thought out, arranged in such a way the the man on the street--no matter what he is doing, in what situation he finds himself, in what straits and difficulties--will always have a feeling of guilt. Because (as I said) it is cold in my room, the steam immediately condenses on the walls, on the windowpanes, or the glass of a little picture frame, and on the sliver of a mirror. I make a final, heroic effort and turn off the shower, swearing to myself to touch nothing else. It is damp, water is everywhere, but for a moment it is also warmer.
I walked out into the corridor to check whether anyone had noticed the cataclysm that had just shaken my room. But it was empty, dead. A television set was on in the common room, but no one was watching. The writer Vladimir Solouhin was saying: "Because of Lenin a river of blood flowed in the Soviet Union, an ocean of blood was spilled." He said that sixty-six million people died, not counting the victims of the Second World War. "All this," said Solouhin, "was done in the name of creating paradise on earth." And he concluded: "Paradise! Ha Ha! And today we are walking around without pants."
After a laborer came on, who, despite the fact that Lenin no longer counts, announced with pride that he had just read five volumes of Vladimir Ilyich in just several evenings. "It's very simple," he said, clearly pleased with himself. "I read each volume for no longer than one hour. I simply knew that Lenin wrote the most important things in his texts in italics. I recommend it to everyone!" he encouraged the empty room at the Hotel Yaktusk.
At the end of the program, Yuri Lubimov, the director of the Moscow theater Taganka, said in a critical but also depairing tone: "We have lost our minds, we have lost our conscience, we have lost our honor. I look around and I see barbarity!" Lubimov's powerful, theatrical voice filled the common room, spilled out into the corridor and lobby.
At the newstand in the lobby, the only foreign newspaper on sale was the French L'Humanité. I bought it for the sake of one photograph, to which normally I wouldn't have paid the least attention. But now I sat in my room and stared at this picture on the last page. It showed an elegant and clean highway, L'Autoroute A6, along which stretched unending lines of elegant and clean cars. All this suddenly fascinated me: the white stripes on the road and the large, distinct road signs, and the bright light of the lanterns. Everything was washed; everything was clean; everything went with everything else.
"Le grand week-end pascal," said the caption, "est commencé."
People have had enough of Paris; they want to rest.
This is so far away, I thought, looking at the photograph. As if on Venus.
And I started to mop up the bathroom floor. ***

Baby, you can never hold back spring

The JK Ensemble, which is always on the radio here in Cutehall between half two and half four weekdays, played Tom Waits singing this song (From Orphans, his newest recording), and here is the proof if you needed any. From the garden here.

Residencies: Peter Reading's "Marfan" (2000)

"

First the photos: Marfa, Texas where poet Peter Reading did a really interesting residency, read on below for more. The interior shot is Donald Judd's permanent installation of steel boxes in a disused factory and the other is a Prada "store" in the middle of nowhere, put there by the Milanese fashion house and the Marfa Arts Foundation. (photos thanks to Jane Lyons).

Residencies": these things that uproot creative types to different places--do they yield anything of real worth? August Kleinzahler is savage on them: his poem "The Art Farm" (in The Strange Hours Travelers Keep--FSG 2003/Faber 2004) is a case in point. Here's an excerpt:

..."Like a caravan, the Toyotas, Saabs and 4 x 4s
head south, breaking up among the interchanges
north of Boston and heading their separate ways:
some to the nation's colleges,
where they take up their residencies once more,
even with the thunder of the football season upon them;
some to the warrens and fastnesses of Brooklyn,
where the young, these days, position themselves.

Behind them, a cold front from Canada moves in
across the wooded peaks and ridges, settling
among the many valleys and turning to mush
the late vegetables, finishing off
what's left of the blackberries, deep in their brambles.
Beauty is difficult. Yes, yes, of course it is.
How would it be otherwise? Of course, of course.
But what a lot of good talk about process

and stimulating tete-a-tetes. Energized, inspired, even,
one leaves this peaceful place. Fructified:
yes, that would be the word, exactly.
Reluctantly, one returns to the world
and all its quotidian bother, fructified.
And with them goes their art, these cheerful,
satisfied customers, packed safely away
in their trunks and back seats: the rolled canvases
and tools; manuscripts-in-progress
safely transferred to hard disk and awaiting

application of all that encouragement and sound counsel:
ready for that final, determined drive
to completion and a great big FUCK YOU for you know who"...

I'm with Kleinzahler in a lot of what he's doing here: the phrase "position themselves" is just right, the whole picture of self-satisfied "consumers" of art process returning to the factories of "education" where poets are "turned out" or the art "world" of Brooklyn where they chase "success"--all this is necessary to be seen for what it is. Mostly. There are the rare exceptions. But I think Kleinzahler's point of view is essential in keeping the big picture in view and in causing us to ask the right questions: what does it take to make art? What is the "art world"? What is success in art/poetry terms? And so on. So many of these things are not challenged enough, and it takes the contrarian/marginalized voice to wake us up. (By the way, on this subject, I was surprised and delighted to hear the voice of poet Trevor Joyce on national radio here in Ireland the other day. He was talking about why poetry is a necessary art as it can do and say things that language can't do in any other way, and he was talking too about the corporatization of book-selling and how it has made most good (challenging) poetry inaccessible to punters. It was on Lyric FM. I'll try and find a link for you.)

Which brings us to poet Peter Reading (who trained as a painter), a contrarian if there ever was one. And three cheers to the Lannan Foundation for giving Peter Reading a literary residency in, of all places, Marfa, Texas. The resulting book, Marfan (which could be pronounced as "Martian" if you treat the "f" as the old English sibilant--Bloodaxe 2000) is just wonderful. It makes me laugh, deeply. I love poems that embrace humour--not chuckling, Billy Collins/Carol Anne Duffy-type humour mind you. Darker stuff. "Marfan" is full of dark humour.

No better man to plunk in the Texan desert (geographical and cultural). A poet who loves to use ancient metrical forms, who loves Latin, an expert in birds and geologic history. And he's forced into the Marfan public library("The Wisdom of West Texas, a slim vol."). Forced to read the local paper, The Desert Candle. All the while, blue-chip sculptor Donald Judd's "compound" lurks (he bought a huge disused factory complex there in the 70's where his gigantor steel, minimalist works are displayed).

Here's some of what Reading wrote during this "residency":

"Across the windswept, Pronghorn-browsed brown grass
Judd's row of concrete, seven-foot-high boxes
stretches a mile north-south, signifies zilch.

Some days I've seen Antilocapras shelter
from noon sun of a hundred-and-some degrees
in those cute sculptures--yes, and shit in'm too."

That's another beauty of this residency for Reading's work: the Texan talk seeps in
(as in the last line above) or it just takes over the poems completely as in:

"Th BP boys is doin wayl agin-
th Marfa Sector pulled in three more on em,
Undocumented Spiks lookin fer wk."

Or the sound of someone being taken over by a dialect, a sound, a "mind set".

"Sunset is like a busted-up fried egg."

"The indigineous can fuck off outa here."

"When this gets published I shall have to be
beyond the City Limit on a Greyhound."

++++
Yes, residencies good.

Winter in Cutehall, where the roads are made of water

Where the phrase "disdain for false authorities" comes from

Philadelphia, 1984 (if memory serves). I was a newcomer to the city, and I had that fresh, beginner's excitement about living in a city for the first time (having been a suburban Jersey
girl most of my life until then). I was thinking about going to art school but had only a vague notion of what it was I wanted to do in art. It was on Market Street, I think, that I came across an exhibition of paintings in a large, disused store-front. I remember two of the painters on exhibit: Bo Bartlett and Vincent Desidario. Both had recently finished at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art and both had taken up a style of big, long, slightly macho, History-inflected painting. Influenced, no doubt, by Sidney Goodman who was teaching at the Academy then.
The name of the exhibition was "Disdain for False Authorities"--a phrase that sort of seared itself into the brain pan. It describes, I think, a very healthy stance to adopt when one is thinking about going to art school where there are all sorts of folk trying to sell you their brand of the "truth" in art.
I wasn't grabbed by the paintings in the show, really. But what did endure was a recognition and respect for painters who take seriously the making of paintings, the craft of the art. Love of materials is a big, big thing. See also Albert Goldbarth's poem, "1400", in the October issue of POETRY (Chicago), which takes on the subject of the stuff of paint and the alchemy therein that all painters hope for (even the ones with the bumps in their cheeks--that's their tongues--come on folks, admit it....you do!).

Paintings that don't smell like the art world

Visit Norbert Schwontkowski's website and browse through the work ("bilden") or click on the long rectange above this text and you will see one of the paintings I refer to in the next sentence. Poodles on pianos, eyeballs on chairs, a monk contemplating a row of washing machines, his laundry basket empty at his feet. He showed last year in Dublin and caused a little ripple of excitement among a few people I know who love painting. The whiff of the authentic about them. They feel as if the painter is freely thinking; he's not standing in the way of allowing anything into the paintings. Schwontkowski says he is "putting the logic of the visible at the service of the invisible." One art writer (Christa Burger) about NS's painting wrote: " He paints as if he were devout."

Nun Body (a back-to-teaching-at-art-school poem)

Nun Body

Norbert Schwontkowski, thank you
for "Nun in the Damp", a title
you dropped yet she is a religious
in a fugitive swamp of chalk,
anti-fouling, copper paint,
linseed oil, iron chloride, turpentine oil,
water and tea.
You concocted a "fundamental source"
and squished her in up to her neck.
She doesn't look too bad off,
can't raise that ruler to swat
Billy Tripodi, can't
answer the black phone
calls from God.

A Bit From a Wonderful Stand-Up Routine

A house is just a pile of stuff with a cover on it. You can see that when you’re taking off in an airplane. You look down, you see every-body’s got a little pile of stuff. All the little piles of stuff. And when you leave your house, you gotta lock it up. Wouldn’t want somebody to come by and take some of your stuff. They always take the good stuff. They never bother with that crap you’re saving. All they want is the shiny stuff. That’s what your house is, a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more stuff.
—George Carlin, 1981