Up 8:30. Weight 215.4.
Recuperation/regrouping day + mundane tasks. Coffee: Updated to-do list and calendar, cut email inbox by half, worked on the cassette liner notes. Macgregor and Kristin (and their baby) came in, chatted a bit. Came home around noon, read Hartman and napped.
I can’t recall doing anything of note until 5. Since I don’t expect to have another free afternoon soon, took a ride out to Astoria to check out Hi-Fi, a record store/café I’d noticed while looking up the address of the bar of the same name. Bought a sealed cast recording of The Gospel at Colonus, Cuttin’ the Blues, a 2LP boogie-woogie comp on New World (always reliable), and a mystifying South African-themed musical from 1966, billed Leon Gluckman’s Wait a Minim! Not a great indulgence - $14 for the three, but put back several $8-10 records I might have bought for $5. Espresso machine, but nowhere to sit, so I got my coffee a couple blocks away, but didn’t stay there long either. Walked down Steinway through the heavily Egyptian section to a cheap gym I haven’t used in over a year (nor the closer one I’ve joined since) and had a surprisingly easy time cancelling the auto-pay. This has to be considered the day’s major accomplishment.
No: there is one other. I said no to accompanying Bree at an acquaintance’s wedding; she’ll find another pianist.
Finished the Hartman on the train back, except for the substantial end notes. Informed, makes some useful distinction, but it’s odd that he makes very little of disjunction and fragmentation, as opposed to non-metrical rhythm control, as an earmark of modernist poetry until nearly the end of the book. His comments on the “argument” of “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror” and why Ashbery is different than what came before are reasonable enough, but I don’t think I quite get why the poem’s greatly-loosened pentameter correlates w/ said argument. (It’s certainly not a radical prosody, as the langs have complained about everything past Tennis Court.) Also a fair chunk of Massey. This (the entirety of a page) is great: “Ice fastens/caution tape (summer/wrung the yellow out)//to weeds wrapped/around a mound of/crushed cans.” Elsewhere, “No ideas but in parking lots,” which of course is one; “perception’s a process” (with results). Hartman’s discussions of imagism and Levertov, coincidentally, are good reminders of what line Massey’s working in.
Could one be nostalgic for the post-modern?
Daybook, fairly late, put ducks in a row for tomorrow (return to daily book work, I hope for a stretch of 3-4 weeks). Lights out about 1 am.