Woke up before 6, listened to the rest of the R. Flack best-of. “Back Together Again” (one of many Donny Hathaway duets) has a great live-disco arrangement I should keep in mind for “Breath on My Cheek.” W+P. Started Viv Albertine, To Throw Away Unopened. Cleaned up, put on a CD of obscure Sousa orchestral works — “The Dwellers in the Western World” (1910) in three movements: “The Red Men,” “The White Men,” The Black Men” (w/ a cakewalk section) and “Three Quotations” (1895), followed by songs from a musical “Teddy and Alice” (about the Roosevelts) for which a modern composer (the conductor) and lyrics adapted Sousa tunes. Competent - the attempt to set “Stars & Stripes Together” as a campaign speech is interesting. Left with Bree a little after 10; rest of the day was devoted to personal activities, not represented here. Had a break at 1 point at read 30 p. Coolidge: “that poem was actually a blues with a bridge” (86!) Home around 10:00, prepped some things for tomorrow, read to about p. 50 in Albertine before bed. Lights out just before midnight.
3/3
Up 8:30. W&P - calculus, history, divorce. Brecht - well into Svendborg poems, some effective songs in there. Why don’t workers fight a war for themselves? Is it just the resources? Breakfast, left for Spacious (co-working space in Midtown, pretty empty Sundays), worked on copyright section from last night about 11:45-3. 3 grafs, I guess I’ll call this section done (except for footnotes). Move on to form(alism) section; doubt I’ll have much time to work before Wed. afternoon. Grabbed a bite, read Michael Rogin’s 1992 article on The Jazz Singer. Difficult amalgam of film theory/psychoanalysis/social theory; not that useful on Berlin/“Blue Skies” as such, but I guess I’ll have to read the book it became (Blackface, White Noise). Also read, quickly, Charles Hartman, “Dylan’s Bridges,” from New Literary History 2015, which Eric Lott told me about last week; it overlaps with comments in Hartman’s Verse: An Introduction, which I already cite. Not so much wrong (though I could nitpick) as limited in scope. Called my dad. Read 20 p. Coolidge, went across the street to MoMa to see The Yellow Ticket (Raoul Walsh 1931), which refers to a special passport prostitutes (including persecuted Jews like heroine Elissa Landi) could use in pre-Revolutionary Russia. Or so the story claims. Worth it for Lionel Barrymore. A guy about my age engaged me in conversation about Walsh, etc. on the way up the escalator, didn’t stop ’til the Jackson Heights. I guess I’m not much less monomaniacal in the right frame of mind. Home a little after 8. Shifted some boxes around, put on new shoelaces. Checked tomorrow’s weather conditions (school snow day, but is City Hall open?); inconclusive. Listened to Kirsty MacColl, Tropical Depression, her last (2001) album - sort of a less self-regarding Rei Momo, though some standouts (“Autumngirlsoup”) aren’t “Latin.” I note that Ruts/Aztec Camera drummer Dave Ruffy is the producer, and there are a couple co-writes w/ Graham Gouldman (“For Your Love,” “Bus Stop,” 10cc). Read 40 p. Coolidge (20 earlier while waiting for movie): He asks, “How many times can I use the word/poem without sinking the poem?” (130), a fair question but the books works because there’s too much of it. He’s settled mainly into sonnet-size page-poems by the 2/3 mark, but invention keeps up: “Benny Hoover had a collection of pirate shit/he turned into a poem” (171; naming in Coolidge is a whole ‘nothing thing); “the socialist party had now room for poems/vaudeville sometimes was a poem” (172). And yet: “collected works empty words/never home never done” (186). Put on The Best of Roberta Flack, lights out 11-ish.
The Pearlstein quote (Kimmelman, 160) is “Lucky artists are the ones who hook into a problem beyond solution.” Does this partly explain Brecht’s fecundity (in the likely event that his revolutionary goal was quixotically unachievable at the time)? (Then what explains Coolidge?)
3/2
Up at 9 (had accidentally unplugged alarm clock last night). Listened to Klymaxx, Meeting In the Ladies Room (1984). Never realized/noticed they were an all-woman band — seems like the material was mostly original, w/ various collaborating producers (Jam/Lewis). Went out for diner breakfast, read quota of W&P. Moving if stage-managed scene of Prince Andre wounded alongside his romantic rival Kuragin. Bought packing boxes nearby. Back about 11. Read 40 p. Brecht - poems in exile, 1937-1938, many fragmentary. Poetics: “If we want to stand the test before the lowly/We must not, of course, write in a folksy manner./These folk/Are not folksy.” (644) Wish someone would have told Woody Guthrie. Bought a shirt for Monday at Banana Republic outlet (glad this wasn’t more difficult), shoelaces at local cobbler (I guess that’s still the word), had lunch. Bree went out around 3, I could or should have left to write somewhere, but stayed in culling and boxing books and CDs for Goodwill, & picked out a smaller batch to sell at Codex or Unnameable. It’s a drop in the bucket, but it all be a relief to divest myself of some post-language poetry and philosophy of mind that’s being weighing me down since the late ‘90s/early ‘00s. Listened to one disc (the only one I have) of a Judy Garland box; couple of nice piano-only Rodgers & Hart songs (verse of “The Most Beautiful Girl”), then CD 1 of Champs, one of many extant Monochrome Set retrospectives. (I enjoyed it, but decided to skip their show in Jersey City - if I’d already been out, I’d have gone the rest of the way; or if their original guitarist Lester Square were still playing.) Bree back around 7. I read to about p. 175 of Kimmelman - boring chapter on an Arctic photographer, interesting one in the “Philip Pearlstein paints a picture vein.” There’s a line in there I want to copy down, but it’s in the bedroom and Bree’s asleep. Took out recycling, went out for groceries. Typed up lyrics to “Our Hearts Do,” in the version I played Thursday - 1st song I’ve completed this year, it’s “done” but some weak lines could be improved. Listened to a few songs from Jon Caramica’s new-songs roundup in the Times. Solange, Summer Walker (both in a not-very-hooky R&B vein, I’m sure I’ll hear the Solange album at some point), Jackie Mendoza (no strong impression), Weezer (decent rock bridge), a 10 min. Branford Marsalis track w/ long Tynerish piano solo, Our Native Daughters (project w/ Rhiannon Giddens), Went out to Starbuck’s around 8:30, worked 90+ minutes on end of the copyright section of my preface, just to get my gears unstuck on the book after a few days off (plan to work several hrs. tomorrow, which didn’t happen today). Home, read 60 p. Coolidge. “poem composed of plankton [ ] poem made of rice” (96) - this, other moments about the ontology or mode of presentation/distribution of the poem, and the (unusually for Coolidge) corrosive doubt about the point of the whole project, surprisingly recalled that Anne Boyer piece about absurdly inconvenient ways to publish. (I think it’s in her UDP prose book, which I should read, but also need to take by on radical/revolutionary negation in light doses after DuBois’ Telegram). Stayed up pointlessly (online). Put on Craig Taborn, Avenging Angel, lights out 2:30.
3/1
Up before 6; quite tired from playing at Espresso 77 last night. Commuted to Purchase, read Michael Kimmelman, The Accidental Masterpiece on train. Non-academic art criticism by Times writer, w/ chapters on Bonnard, Ray Johnson, Charlotte Salomon. Smoothly written, bourgeois. Had some thoughts about a song, “Back to Basic” (as in, “I’m not gonna go…”) while waiting for shuttle from White Plains to campus. Did a little paperwork before class, shared a video of “Pilot Light” from last night w/ Jay Sherman-Godfrey on gtr. Taught; uneventful. Left campus for commute back about 12:30, kept reading. Had a bite in Grand Central Station, wondered whether to look for a dress shirt in Banana Republic or something but didn’t go in. Home around 2:30. Napped while Bree was out, watched remainder of The Oscar (Russell Rouse 1966), scripted by Harlan Ellison (& others), w/ Stephen Boyd, Tony Bennett, Elke Sommers, Milton Berle, etc. Terrible film; camp value only. Chatted w/ Bree, talked about plans for the weekend & when we’re going to put together some furniture. Listened to cast recording of 1962 revival of Anything Goes - odd I’ve never heard it. Orchestrations are a bit tacky and I can’t help but reflect on how much a revival like this was pitched to comfort NY’ers the counterculture passed by, but the female lead, Eileen Rodgers, projects some personality w/o imitating Merman outright. Haven’t read the liner notes, but both Wodehouse/Bolton and Linsay/Crouse had a hand in the book. Went to Caffe Bene for a bite at 8:30, read quota (20 p.) of War and Peace, and 60 p. (1/5) of Clark Coolidge, Poet, 300 pages apparently touched off by David Meltzer’s When I Was a Poet (which I read last month). Man, Coolidge is great: “all these years of poems/and then there’s more!” Came home, tried on some shirts looking for something I can wear a tie with w/o choking, no luck. Read 50 p. of the collected Brecht (having missed a couple days). “Once you have got behind you/The difficulties of the mountains that’s/The point when/The difficulties of the plains begin.” Put on mindfulness podcast, lights out about 11:30.
February 2019 reading
Edward Berlin, Reflections and Research on Ragtime
Catherine Wagner, My New Job
Chelsey Minnis, Baby, I Don’t Care
A. Doxiadis, C. Papadimitiou, A. Papdatos, A. Di Donna, Logicomix: An Epic Search for Truth
Samuel Beckett, Mercier and Camier
Diana Hamilton, The Awful Truth
Jonathan Culler, Theories of Lyric
Elisa Gabbert, The Self Unstable
Rachel Cusk, Outline
Eric Lott, The Disappearing Liberal Intellectual
Stanley Fish, How To Write a Sentence
David Meltzer, When I Was a Poet
Tiger Roholt, Groove: A Phenomenology of Rhythmic Nuance
Tyehimba Jess, Olio
Franck Andre Jamme, The Recitation of Forgetting
Eric Lott, Black Mirror: The Cultural Contradictions of American Racism
Jill Magid, Labor
Houston A. Baker, Jr., Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance
Art Lange, Evidence