Up for a while 3:30-4:30. Online. Went back to bed w/ John Grant, Live with the BBC Philharmonic, which is been in a stack for at least a year. Fell asleep 3 songs in. Up at 8. Read 30 p. Brecht (he’s still in exile; the awesome, righteous judgment against living one’s life is hard to take), breakfast. Left about 10:30, coffee at E77, started my friend Evan Kindley’s Poet-Critics and the Administration of Culture. Interesting model of justification in the preface. Worked at Spacious about 12-3, rewrote 1st 2 grafs of “form” section of preface, about 650 words. Stuck getting into harmony. Lunch, rode home, bought light bulbs, groceries. Read to 1/2 way point in Evan’s book on train and at home, chapters on Eliot and Moore as critics, and Auden’s The Orators. Changed light bulbs, talked some things over w/ Bree when she got home. Read 1st 2 sequences in Lawrence Giffin, Sorites - a short, 40 p. or so book that turned up while I was culling. 1st is obviously based on Platonic language, seemingly The Republic, second is a lot of play on ought/aught/naught. Barely feel as though I should say I’ve “read” this - damned if I can make out an argument, and it’s hard to feel it be worth the work. Got through what’s actually disc 2 of the John Grant — as a lyricist and vocalist, we’re in territory adjacent to Eitzel, Buckner (maybe Stephin M. too, but JG is more Sincere about his Pain despite flashes of humor), and some of the tunes are fine, but there is altogether too much Elton/Lennon rock-ballad piano plod. Orchestration adds more to some songs (“Outer Space”) than others, but the grandiosity of the presentation sets overly high expectations. Called dad. Listened to disc 1 - I don’t know, it’s like a series of inferior rewrites of “Life on Mars?” Worked on my taxes. Read through some card tricks in a Phil Goldstein book, lights out before 11.
3/6
Slept very poorly - probably up for good around 4 am. W&P. When Bree got up at 6, I moved a few things to facilitate the Goodwill pickup. Left for school before 7, listened to Rising of the Moon, best-of CD of The Clancy Brothers & Tommy Makem. Should note down titles, but there are multiple double-length ballads (eight lines in common meter, or thereabouts) w/ aaba phrase structures. Read a little Albertine, but pretty tired, listened to part of a cheap Hoagy Carmichael reissue w/ some snappy songs I didn’t know (“No More Toujours L’Amour,” “Billy-A-Dick”). At office 9:30, hastily graded a batch of hwk. Taught - ok, but I feel like I’m moving too fast to get everything covered before the midterm (2 weeks). Lunch, finished grading and recording, went to library and checked out Rogin, Blackface, White Noise + a W. Grant Still/William Levi Dawson/Ellington CD. Left 3:30, no energy for reading, listened to junky podcasts on the way home. Home around 6 - got in bed before 8 and slept until 11. Read a few pages of Coolidge, put on the Clancy Bros. again and went back to bed.
3/5
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.
3/4
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?)