Rae Armantrout, taking notes

Rae Armantrout is for me a consistently engaging and inventive American poet. She is also a notetaker:

I carry a blank book journal around with me most of the time and jot down things I see and hear, especially if they seem puzzling. . . .

Anyway, I end up with a lot of unconnected journal entries. I know a poem is really on the way when I see how two or more of these separate notes might have some inner likeness, might connect. (I prefer improbable connections.) That’s why so many of my poems are divided with asterisks or numbers.

“My Poetry Isn’t Built on Hope: An Interview with Tom Beckett,” in Collected Prose (San Diego: Singing Horse Press, 2007).

In case anyone out there reads World Literature Today : I have a review of Armantrout’s most recent book, Just Saying, in the November-December 2013 issue. Lines from one of the book’s poems, “Circulating,” reference the notebook habit: “See something, say something. // Jotting in a notebook.” There’s Armantrout’s wit at work, converting a national-security mantra into a poetics.

Kurt Vonnegut, advice for students

From Letters of Note, Kurt Vonnegut writing to high-school students in 2006:

Practice any art, music, singing, dancing, acting, drawing, painting, sculpting, poetry, fiction, essays, reportage, no matter how well or badly, not to get money and fame, but to experience becoming, to find out what’s inside you, to make your soul grow.

Seriously! I mean starting right now, do art and do it for the rest of your lives.

Other Vonnegut posts
“[B]eautiful and surprising and deep”
E-mail from Stefan Hagemann
Kurt Vonnegut, Manager
Kurt Vonnegut on English studies

Orson Welles, language maven

Orson Welles, on The Dick Cavett Show (July 27, 1970):

“You know, there are too many long words in the world nowadays. And the younger the people are, the longer the words are. Have you noticed that? It’s a very funny thing. They have a wonderful new hip language, which is really our old Harlem language that I used to know when I was running a theater up there, with a few new phrases, and they’re great and very colorful, but everything else is terribly long. Nobody says ‘I see a thing a certain way.’ They say ‘I envisage it.’ Nobody says, under thirty, ‘I would like to think up an idea.’ They say ‘I have conceived something,’ or ‘This is my conception,’ or ‘This is my relationship.’ Everything is four or five syllables long.”

Cavett’s priceless reply: “You know, there's a veracity in what you’re saying.”

Other Cavett Show posts
John Huston on James Agee
Marlon Brando on acting

[“When I was running a theater up there”: in 1936, Orson Welles directed Macbeth for the Federal Theater Project’s Negro Unit.]

Aww

[Family Circus, October 28, 2013.]

If we are ordering words by length, fall comes first. But alphabetically, it’s autumn. I know though that Billy is asking a different question. I know too that fall is the most beautiful and most poignant of seasons. The beauty of fall is the beauty of things fading away.

A related post
Family Circus homophone catastrophe

[If you cannot name all four Family Circus children, you need to spend more in the funny papers.]

Breyer on Proust

From an interview, conducted in French, with Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer, speaking of Marcel Proust:

Proust is a universal author: he can touch anyone, for different reasons; each of us can find some piece of himself in Proust, at different ages. For instance, the narrator of the Recherche is obsessed with the Duchesse de Guermantes. To him, Oriane embodies a slice of the history of France and glows like a stained-glass window, wreathed in the aura of her aristocratic lineage. Now, however different the situations may be, we have all of us — in our childhood, our adolescence, or later in life — admired from afar someone who has dazzled us for this reason or that. And when we read Proust, we get a glimpse of ourselves. In fact, I think that the only human emotion he never explored — because he never experienced it himself — was that of becoming a father.

What is most extraordinary about Proust is his ability to capture the subtlest nuances of human emotions, the slightest variations of the mind and the soul. To me, Proust is the Shakespeare of the inner world.

Read it all: Ionna Kohler and Stephen Breyer, On Reading Proust (New York Review of Books).

Related reading
All Proust posts (Pinboard)
David Souter and Proust

Huston on Agee

As a guest on The Dick Cavett Show (February 14, 1972), John Huston told a story about James Agee having a first heart attack, at a resort in California. It was 1951:

“I went in and saw Jim, and the doctor was still there. And as soon as the doctor left, why, Jim said, ‘Would you give me a cigarette?’ And I said, ‘Of course not.’ It’s the worst thing in the world that could be done after a heart attack. And then — I forget whether it was that same night — I don’t suppose it was, but a couple of days later Jim said, ‘For God’s sake, give me a cigarette.’ I said, ‘Jim, I can’t do that. It’s impossible. And when you get well and you pull out of this, why, you’ve got to, you know, behave a little differently.’ Jim looked at me very straight and smiled [laughs], and I knew that he would never behave any differently.”

James Agee died of a second heart attack in 1955.

Another Cavett Show post
Marlon Brando on acting

Recently updated

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The worst sentences in Salinger

These sentences, from the introduction and last page, seem to me finally the worst, not for the quality of the writing but for the sloppiness of the thought. From David Shields and Shane Salerno’s Salinger, pages xv and xvii:

This is an investigation into the process by which a broken soldier and wounded soul transformed himself, through his art, into an icon of the twentieth century and then, through his religion, destroyed that art.

Religion provided the comfort he needed as a man but killed his art.

[H]e gave himself over wholly to Vedanta, turning the last half of his life into a dance with ghosts. He had nothing anymore to say to anyone else.

Got that? And now turn to page 575:

Salinger’s chronicles of two extraordinary families, the Glasses and the Caulfields — written from 1941 to 2008, when he conveyed his body of work to the J. D. Salinger Literary Trust — will be the masterworks for which he is forever known.

These works will begin to be published in irregular installments starting between 2015 and 2020.

So religion destroyed Salinger’s art, and yet Salinger was working, as late as 2008, on masterworks that will bring undying fame? That’s the kind of blatant self-contradiction one might see in a hastily assembled freshman-comp essay. The problem involves not a few sentences but the biographers’ basic sense of their subject. Did anyone at Simon & Schuster notice? Did anyone care?

Sara Nelson, Amazon’s “Editorial Director of Books and Kindle,” from the company page for Salinger: “This book says more than most about the world of writing, celebrity and American culture in the twentieth century.” Yes, but make that the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. This book — in other words, the fact of the book as published — says more than most books about the cynicism of trade publication in our time. Dolla dolla bill.

Other posts about this biography
The worst sentence in Salinger so far
The worst sentences in Salinger so far
The worst sentences in Salinger so far

[This is my final post about Salinger. Borrow the book from a library if you must.]

Domestic comedy

“I don’t know how I know that story.”

“Probably because I’ve told it before.”

Related reading
All domestic comedy posts (Pinboard)

[The story: William Parker’s gift of a bass to Henry Grimes.]

The William Parker Quartet

Gelvin Noel Gallery
Krannert Art Museum
Champaign, Illinois
October 24, 2013

Lewis Barnes, trumpet
Rob Brown, alto saxophone
William Parker, bass, wooden flutes
Hamid Drake, drums

The William Parker Quartet is one of the great ensembles in jazz. Its instrumentation recalls Ornette Coleman’s first great quartet (with Don Cherry, Charlie Haden, and Ed Blackwell). The members of the Parker quartet have been playing together for thirteen years, with an intimate understanding that Parker likens to a marriage.

Last night’s performance began with an episode for flutes and drums (blessing the space, Parker later explained), followed by “Deep Flower” (dedicated to the pianist Andrew Hill), “Ridley Me Do” (dedicated to the trumpeter Michael Ridley), and “O’Neal’s Porch,” with genial themes (at times reminiscent of Coleman and Thelonious Monk) giving way to free improvisation. Those who insist that music must swing to be jazz never seem to understand that swing does not require a preëstablished structure of measures and chord changes. These musicians swing mightily, in a way that might be called abstract expressionist. And: in a way that draws upon varied elements of jazz history: slapped bass, the unison front-line statements of bop, the shifting tempi and interplay between horns of Charles Mingus’s groups. The quartet’s music is truly “in the tradition,” not recreating the past but drawing on it to make something new.

My favorite moments: Barnes and Brown walking off to play from opposite sides of the gallery; Parker playing his bass from top to bottom, getting two-note chords by plucking above and below the bridge; a thunderous drum passage, after which Drake apologized for his volume, to general laughter and applause; a funny junket into three-quarter time.

Whenever I hear great live music, I cannot sleep well. I barely slept last night.

Great thanks to Jason Finkelman for continuing to bring great music to east-central Illinois.

[In the Tradition is the title of a 1978 album by alto saxophonist Arthur Blythe. I hope I have the title of the second piece right. A correction, from any quarter, is welcome.]