Showing posts with label Gabriel. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Gabriel. Show all posts

2014/03/30

Pull My Chin, Stroke My Hair, Scratch My Nose, Hug My Knees, Try Drink, Food, Cigarette, Tension Will Not Ease, I Tap My Fingers, Fold My Arms, Breathe in Deep, Cross My Legs, Shrug My Shoulders, Stretch My Back - but Nothing Seems to Please




  • Those of you who had 24 hours - like me - for as long as I could go without posting would have lost but all of us who bet I couldn't go the weekend win. Song above explains.
  • Uncle Bill was Bajoran?
  • Towards global authoritarianism.
  • For example.
  • davidly gets screwed trying to buy Kate Bush tickets, reacts with letter, great Kate Bush song.
  • As much as I like much of the New York Review of Books I sometimes forget a certain hawkishness - here's someone calling Obama a pussy towards Putin - in foreign policy articles. 
  • Maggie's weekly links.
  • Bryce played three hours of Robert Ashley this past Friday.
  • I've been re-watching - it feels more like watching for the first time - Deep Space Nine on the recommendation of friends. Watching on Netflix allows me not only to miss commercials but to skip the interminable opening. Last light I saw the episode with Uncle Bill. Jody, Buffy, and Cissy were mutes, their tongues cut out by Cardassians. There was no sign of Mr French. I got to wondering who is the actress who plays Major Kira Nerys, which allows me, to my giggling delight, to play an Ashley piece and use this gag:






  • Yes, post today because I need contact, but mostly because I can't sit on that gag for another 24 hours.
  • Another Moby Dick book acquired.
  • { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
  • Tom introduces me, via her poem, to Nin Andrews. In comments it turns out she lives in the traffic jam called Nova.
  • Long playlist from Prunella.
  • My favorite road in MOCO. Fuck the Pattons, you bought there knowing, assholes.
  • A contemplation on Ashbery's poetics: I sort of seized upon this quote with a ridiculous kind of “yes!” because I felt like it was describing in a wonderful prescient and powerful way the poetics of Ashbery.  In Ashbery’s poems, the page is a kind of experimental and experiential laboratory, in and through which new meanings, new metaphors, are attempted.  Through this process, the “meaning of the present” is amplified, and we are taken so far out of (and so near towards?) our customary thinking that we are then able to think more clearly about our present values, preoccupations, habits, beliefs, etc.  It is in this sense that we can think of Ashbery’s work as an exploration of what a moral imagination means, which is another of saying that Ashbery attempts to give us the most robust, diverse, and rich possible answer to this question.  His poetry is therefore an unprecedentedly moving and powerful example of the moral imagination at work, while at the same time it teaches us the importance and relevance of the imagination as the primary means by which we actually think and live.
  • Below Durutti Column, without doubt the most-posted poem here ever.






VAUCANSON

John Ashbery

It was snowing as he wrote.
In the gray room he felt relaxed and singular,
But no one, of course, ever trusts these moods.

There had to be understanding to it.
Why, though? That always happens anyway,
And who gets the credit for it? Not what is understood,
Presumably, and it diminishes us
In our getting to know it.

As trees come to know a storm
Until it passes and light falls anew
Unevenly, on all the muttering kinship:
Things with things, persons with objects,
Ideas with people or ideas.

It hurts, this wanting to give a dimension
To life when life is precisely that dimension.
We are creatures, therefore we walk and talk
And people come up to us, or listen
And then move away.

Music fills the spaces
Where figures are pulled to the edges,
And it can only say something.

Sinews are loosened then,
The mind begins to think good thoughts.
Ah, this sun must be good:
Doing a number, completing its trilogy.
Life must be back there. You hid it
So no one could find it
And now you can't remember where.

But if one were to invent being a child again
It might just come close enough to being a living relic
To save this thing, save it from embarrassment
By ringing down the curtain,

And for a few seconds no one would notice.
The ending would seem perfect.
No feelings to dismay,
No tragic sleep to wake from in a fit
Of passionate guilt, only the warm sunlight
That slides easily down shoulders
To the soft, melting heart.



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2014/02/13

Our Interior Cavities Brimming with Snow





When I paid off my DC United season tickets Monday I was encouraged to please attend the annual Winter Season Ticket Holder Event, this year this Saturday from 2PM-5PM at the new hipster bowling alley Pinstripes in Georgetown. It's not my kind of thing, I said (I've had season tickets for more than a dozen years, I've never attended a single Season Ticket Holder event though I have used the lounge at RFK only season ticket holders can use). I then asked, Is there any news about a new shirt sponsor? (VW didn't renew its contract.) There's a big kit announcement at the event, an unveiling, a big deal. So they do have a new sponsor, I asked. I'm not sure about that, he said, but I think there's a new kit with a new template. Here's a photo of a leaked tease - I can't save it to post it - I sure hope that's on the pants and not the crest on the shirt, cause if yes, the fuckity.

I used to post a recap after every DCU game. Not gonna happen this year, don't worry, there may be some, it certainly won't be all. I used to post a lot more about soccer than I do now. Don't worry, it will not ever be again as much as once. I can't imagine my attempts to rekindle my affair with soccer will succeed but if I get halfway there I'll be happy. Hey! Peter Gabriel is 64 today!






  • Last year I wrote that Gabriel's music had stalled for me, but this year the love is back. See the tie-in with the soccer, hmm, hmm? Here is My Standard Sentence for Gabriel's birthday: I say this every February 13, the November 14, 1982 Peter Gabriel concert at the Warner Theater, holyfuck, one of the best nights of my life. I passed him forward on his wave back to the stage.
  • It needs saying: Fuck snow. Though fortunately I have a wife who likes shoveling snow, all I need do is make her breakfast, an excellent deal.
  • Let's keep talking about Stuart Hall. 
  • Who cares about history?
  • Onto-cartographical hope springs eternal!
  • Wittgenstein's happy world. Tom's latest.
  • Someone's favorite Dickinson poem. Despite honest efforts, this has not turned into the year I read Dickinson, at least not yet.
  • Last night's post of new Sun Kil Moon songs (in case you're linking in to this post not the main page).
  • Poetry's complex pleasure principle.
  • Yes, for me, my Gabriel are the great first four solo albums, Car, Melt, Scratch, Security. Richard (who recommends this) made a case for So last night on twitter, there are great songs on So (and some truly awful songs), the below, his homage to Anne Sexton, is one of my favorite Gabriel songs.


*



ILL-ADVISED LOVE POEM

John Lau

Come live with me
And we will sit

Upon the rocks
By shallow rivers

Come live with me
And we will plant acorns

In each other's mouth
It would be our way

Of greeting the earth
Before it shoves us

Back into the snow
Our interior cavities

Brimming with
Disagreeable substances

Come live with me
Before winter stops

To use the only pillow
The sky ever sleeps on

Our interior cavities
Brimming with snow

Come live with me
Before spring

Swallows the air
And birds sing



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2013/08/28

What Can We Expect from Personism? (This Is Getting Good, Isn't It?) Everything, but We Won't Get It.













   
PERSONISM: A MANIFESTO

Frank O'Hara

Everything is in the poems, but at the risk of sounding like the poor wealthy man's Allen Ginsberg I will write to you because I just heard that one of my fellow poets thinks that a poem of mine that can't be got at one reading is because I was confused too. Now, come on. I don't believe in god, so I don't have to make elaborately sounded structures. I hate Vachel Lindsay, always have; I don't even like rhythm, assonance, all that stuff. You just go on your nerve. If someone's chasing you down the street with a knife you just run, you don't turn around and shout, "Give it up! I was a track star for Mineola Prep."

That's for the writing poems part. As for their reception, suppose you're in love and somebody's mistreating (mal aimé) you, you don't say, "Hey, you can't hurt me this way, I care!" you just let all the different bodies fall where they may, and they always do may after a few months. But that's not why you fell in love in the first place, just to hang onto life, so you have to take your chances and try to avoid being logical. Pain always produces logic, which is very bad for you.

I'm not saying that I don't have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? They're just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I've stopped thinking and that's when refreshment arrives.

But how then can you really care if anybody gets it, or gets what it means, or if it improves them. Improves them for what? For death? Why hurry them along? Too many poets act like a middle-aged mother trying to get her kids to eat too much cooked meat, and potatoes with drippings (tears). I don't give a damn whether they eat or not. Forced feeding leads to excessive thinness (effete). Nobody should experience anything they don't need to, if they don't need poetry bully for them. I like the movies too. And after all, only Whitman and Crane and Williams, of the American poets, are better than the movies. As for measure and other technical apparatus, that's just common sense: if you're going to buy a pair of pants you want them to be tight enough so everyone will want to go to bed with you. There's nothing metaphysical about it. Unless, of course, you flatter yourself into thinking that what you're experiencing is "yearning."

Abstraction in poetry, which Allen [Ginsberg] recently commented on in It Is, is intriguing. I think it appears mostly in the minute particulars where decision is necessary. Abstraction (in poetry, not painting) involves personal removal by the poet. For instance, the decision involved in the choice between "the nostalgia of the infinite" and "the nostalgia for the infinite" defines an attitude towards degree of abstraction. The nostalgia of the infinite representing the greater degree of abstraction, removal, and negative capability (as in Keats and Mallarmé).

Personism, a movement which I recently founded and which nobody knows about, interests me a great deal, being so totally opposed to this kind of abstract removal that it is verging on a true abstraction for the first time, really, in the history of poetry. Personism is to Wallace Stevens what la poési pure was to Béranger. Personism has nothing to do with philosophy, it's all art. It does not have to do with personality or intimacy, far from it! But to give you a vague idea, one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love's life-giving vulgarity, and sustaining the poet's feelings towards the poem while preventing love from distracting him into feeling about the person. That's part of Personism. It was founded by me after lunch with LeRoi Jones on August 27, 1959, a day in which I was in love with someone (not Roi, by the way, a blond). I went back to work and wrote a poem for this person. While I was writing it I was realizing that if I wanted to I could use the telephone instead of writing the poem, and so Personism was born. It's a very exciting movement which will undoubtedly have lots of adherents. It puts the poem squarely between the poet and the person, Lucky Pierre style, and the poem is correspondingly gratified. The poem is at last between two persons instead of two pages. In all modesty, I confess that it may be the death of literature as we know it. While I have certain regrets, I am still glad I got there before Alain Robbe-Grillet did. Poetry being quicker and surer than prose, it is only just that poetry finish literature off. For a time people thought that Artaud was going to accomplish this, but actually, for all their magnificence, his polemical writings are not more outside literature than Bear Mountain is outside New York State. His relation is no more astounding than Dubuffet's to painting.

What can we expect from Personism? (This is getting good, isn't it?) Everything, but we won't get it. It is too new, too vital a movement to promise anything. But it, like Africa, is on the way. The recent propagandists for technique on the one hand, and for content on the other, had better watch out.



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2013/07/26

The Afternoon Will Fold You Up, Along with Preoccupations that Now Seem So Important, Until Only a Child Running Around on a Unicycle Occupies Center Stage




Google kept sending me emails telling me to renew my domain name or lose it and the blog, I said last night at Thursday Night Pints to K's question of what the google drama was last week. Google was no help, I said, they provided a button to a link for supposed renewal but google wouldn't recognize my log-in and password. Their help forums are useless. A Kind reader gave me workarounds, they aren't foolproof, they rely heavily on google being both incompetent and indifferent - safe bet there, said L - and my due diligence. Bleggalgazing continued briefly, K and L each offered a version of should this blog disappear I'll live quite nicely and more profitably should I survive withdrawal. L said, there are other ways to be an attention slut, you know. Hilltop talk, much of which can't be shared here but discussion of Hilltop's expansionist ambitions in general and bid to build a campus on the old Walter Reed campus (I could add a link to the Hilltop blog with the story, but, er.... no, google if you're interested). I was given grief that my liberal Maryland congressperson voted no on NSA amendment, their liberal Virginia congressperson voted yes. I've always said, I said, I could live in the People's Republic of Arlington if I had to. L asked, I've seen new stuff at your other places, are you going to shut them down now that you think the main one is safe? Probably not, I said, maybe VNTY'SGRVYD (though I like the name), maybe the tumblr (though I like I can't see if anyone is reading it), not DRGDKCLB. K asked, are you going to link to them tomorrow? Are you going to post the new poems? Yes, I said, and probably.


















LIKE A SENTENCE

John Ashbery

How little we know,   
and when we know it!

It was prettily said that “No man
hath an abundance of cows on the plain, nor shards
in his cupboard.” Wait! I think I know who said that! It was . . .

Never mind, dears, the afternoon
will fold you up, along with preoccupations   
that now seem so important, until only a child   
running around on a unicycle occupies center stage.   
Then what will you make of walls? And I fear you   
will have to come up with something,

be it a terraced gambit above the sea
or gossip overheard in the marketplace.
For you see, it becomes you to be chastened:
for the old to envy the young,
and for youth to fear not getting older,
where the paths through the elms, the carnivals, begin.

And it was said of Gyges that his ring
attracted those who saw him not,
just as those who wandered through him were aware
only of a certain stillness, such as precedes an earache,
while lumberjacks in headbands came down to see what all the fuss was about,
whether it was something they could be part of
sans affront to self-esteem.
And those temple hyenas who had seen enough,
nostrils aflare, fur backing up in the breeze,
were no place you could count on,
having taken a proverbial powder
as rifle butts received another notch.
I, meanwhile . . . I was going to say I had squandered spring   
when summer came along and took it from me   
like a terrier a lady has asked one to hold for a moment
while she adjusts her stocking in the mirror of a weighing machine.   
But here it is winter, and wrong
to speak of other seasons as though they exist.   
Time has only an agenda
in the wallet at his back, while we
who think we know where we are going unfazed
end up in brilliant woods, nourished more than we can know
by the unexpectedness of ice and stars
and crackling tears. We’ll just have to make a go of it,
a run for it. And should the smell of baking cookies appease
one or the other of the olfactory senses, climb down   
into this wagonload of prisoners.

The meter will be screamingly clear then,
the rhythms unbounced, for though we came
to life as to a school, we must leave it without graduating   
even as an ominous wind puffs out the sails
of proud feluccas who don’t know where they’re headed,   
only that a motion is etched there, shaking to be free.


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2013/02/13

Sixty-Three Today



       
I've hit a run of birthdays for writers, poets, and musicians who I once and will always hold dear but whose work had aged badly for me. The one consistent here is me, so all fault is mine. The second consistent is this time through the cycle I remember why I once and always will hold them dear, so grace is mine. I say this every February 13, the November 14, 1982 Peter Gabriel concert at the Warner Theater, holyfuck, one of the best nights of my life. I passed him forward on his wave back to the stage. Here are the first four solo albums, the core of my Gabriel, I like Gabriel Genesis, I like some of what came after the four, but the four, Car, Scratch, Melt, Security, are what I listened to over and over.
                 













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