Up at 6:30. Charged devices/recorded expenses (which I should have done last night), answered a few emails, scanned my old Manny Farber essay for a possible reprint. Started looking at Drew Gardner’s anthology introduction. Out just after 10. Read Mieville on train and over coffee; caught up in poetry daybook (2 p.). Therapy. Finished Mieville over lunch (thought it would take longer, but the last 50 p. of the ebook are a glossary, reading list, and index. Point of the retelling seems to be to emphasize the complexity of struggles among several political parties at the time, and the univitability of (a) the Bolshevik takeover, just then and in just that way. And that it wasn’t “written in the starts” that Leninism would lead to Stalinism. My favorite line is a paraphrase of Trotsky’s paraphrase of Marx: “History doesn’t clean up after itself” (42). Content nearly aside, I could learn a lot from Mieville’s crisply paced sentences and way with an image (I think he’s often drawing on the photographic record). Found, oddly enough, issue #3 of Prelude in a Housing Works. To library around 2:30, paid deposit on recording dates (Nov. 5-6), dithered online. Worked 3:30-7, added about 550 words to publishing section, though it will ultimately have to be cut down. Finished Blauvelt on the train home – no poem more than a page, w/ sonnets (or 13/15 liners) dispersed through the book; the gimmicky technique starts to wear, and many lines and phrases could be in one poem as well as another (though that’s something you could also say about some late Ashbery). Started glancing at Leonard Feist, Music Publishing in America. Met Bree at Kitchen 79; “twisted stink bean” with shrimp. Saw our neighbors Honor & Joe; chatted. Home 9:30. Remembered to look up the Hélio Oiticia show at the Whitney; it closed yesterday. Read a few pages of the Feist, listened to some 1928 Ellington (I bought a bunch of chronological CDs in L.A. this summer). I love his solo “Black Beauty”/”Swampy River.” Lights out 10:45.
10.1.17
Up 7:30. Watched SNL – “satire” basically empty, except perhaps for Michael Che. Don’t know why I bother. One of Jay-Z’s songs was O.K. Worked on misc. to-do list; communicated w/ band and studio (Figure 8 in Brooklyn) about Nov. dates. Out at 11:30. Read about 25 p. of China Mieville, October on train to Lincoln Ctr. Saw The Crimes of Monsieur Lange (Jean Renoir 1936) in NYFF. Deceptively light film that interestingly prefigures Breathless in the on-the-lam hero’s fascinating w/ American pop culture (here, Westerns), and advocates collectivizing your workplace and killing your boss. Cinematically, it’s not The Grand Illusion, but the penultimate death sequence is great, w/ the protagonist rushing past windows at the edge of the screen as we watch the action in the square. Jacques Prévert has a writing credit. Ran into Eric Meyers just after. Used hr. between movies to respond to another round of logistics on rec’ing dates. Went back for One Sings, The Other Doesn’t (Agnes Varda 1976), which had opened the festival 40 years ago, w/ the director speaking briefly before. Complicated (and perhaps overlong) work, but basically an avowedly feminist quasi-musical about abortion rights, child-rearing, and domestic arrangements seen through the eyes of two friends, one (the singer) more bohemian (and an evident alter ego for Varda), one less. The agitfolk chansons sung by the protagonist and an apparently real group called Orchid, w/ words by the director, have not dated well, but the handling of her disappointment w/ an Iranian husband was subtler and more self-critical than it looked like it would be at first. Headed to Chelsea, passed a boomer saying to another, “The Stones’ songs have stood up time better than the Beatles’—they were just pop.” Got a bite, finished day’s quota (50 p.) of Mieville, found a coffee place (Variety on 25th at 7 Av, worth remembering), made myself start a graf on music publishing so I can get into it tomorrow afternoon. About an hr., just over 200 words. Walked over to Sid Gold’s, heard Joe McGinty sing his own songs at the piano, w/ violin, cello, sax/clarinet. Train home, read ½ of of Catherine Blauvelt, Here High Note, High Note, from Prelude, that odd poetry imprint run by n+1. Rather “pure” torqued-syntax lyric (“For likeness, we are massy, one leap and close.”), pastoral/”gurlesque” (still a thing?) vocabulary, sunny tone (for contemporary poetry). Reads quickly if you’re not looking to ferret out the subject matter/lyric occasion. Motto: “The image has the last word.” Near home, swung by Espresso 77 to catch the end of an art opening w/ music, but it was over; just as well. Home just after 10, Bree getting ready for bed. Lights out by 10:30 (though I should have charged devices/recorded expenses).
Skipped poetry notebook, didn't listen to a record. Otherwise, had the day I meant to have.
August/September reading
August:
Ross Gay, Catalogue of Unabashed Gratitude
The Other Fifties: Interrogating Midcentury American Icons, ed. Joel Foreman
Steve Waxman, Instruments of Desire: The Electric Guitar and the Shaping of Musical Experience
Chiuna Achebe, Things Fall Apart (re-read)
James Baldwin, Giovanni's Room + "Sonny's Blues"
Tom Raworth, Tottering State: Selected and New Poems 1963-1983
Joes Segal, Art & Politics: Between Purity and Propaganda
September:
Alan Shapiro, Night of the Republic
Rob Bowman, Soulsville U.S.A.: The Story of Stax Records
Barbara Guest, The Red Gaze
John Ashbery, As Umbrellas Follow Rain
Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, From Approximately Coast to Coast, It's the Bob and Ray Show
Bob Elliot and Ray Goulding, The New! Improved! Bob and Ray Book
Susan M. Schultz, Dementia Blog
Fred Moten, In The Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition
Kit Robinson, Leaves of Class
Samuel R. Delaney, Dark Reflections
David Pollock, Bob and Ray, Keener Than Most Persons
John Wriggle, Blue Rhythm Fantasy: Jazz Arranging in the Swing Era
John Ashbery, Shadow Train
Sarah Schulman, Conflict Is Not Abuse: Overstating Harm, Community Responsibility, and the Duty of Repair
Elizabeth Willis, Alive: Selected Poems
Anthony Kwame Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics In a World of Strangers
Julie Agoos, Echo System
Alfred Corn, Contradictions
July 2017 reading (slow/tough month)
Julie Carr, Think Tank
David Salle, How To See
[redacted - MS for academic review]
J.H. Prynne, The White Stones
Douglas Crimp, Before Pictures
Natalie Angier, The Canon: A Whirligig Tour of the Beautiful Basics of Science
Andrew Flory, I Hear a Symphony: Motown and Crossover
Ross Gay, Bringing Down the Shovel
June 2017 reading
Richard Peterson, Creating Country Music: Fabricating Authenticity
Lee Jacobs, Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film
Mark Kingwell, Fail Better: Why Baseball Matters
John Wilkinson, Ghost Nets
Richard Wright, Black Boy
Kelly Dean Jolley, Brown Studies (MS)
Percival Everett, Assumption
Jason Morphew, What To Deflect When You're Deflecting (MS)
Zach Savich, Century Swept Burial
James Shea, The Lost Novel
Percival Everett, Damned If I Do
Alison McCracken, Real Men Don't Sing: Crooning in American Culture
James Baldwin, Go Tell It On the Mountain