In the Shadow of Blossoming Young Girls

                                                        
   I've at last reached the end of the first third of A la Recherche, a re-reading project I mentioned way back in April. Marvellous throughout, but interesting to see how Proust saves some of his profoundest reflections on art via the painter Elstir ( ironically offset by the narrator's beautifully-drawn, flirtatious liaisons with Albertine and her friends) for the last few hundred pages of A L'Ombre de Jeunes Filles en Fleur (how did Montcrieff ever get away with calling it 'Within a Budding Grove'?). There' ve been various speculations on which artist Elstir is modelled on, although this passage makes him sound rather Cezanne-like:

The effort made by Elstir to strip himself, when face to face with reality, of every intellectual concept, was all the more admirable in that this man who, before sitting down to paint, made himself deliberately ignorant, forgot, in his honesty of purpose, everything that he knew, since what one knows ceases to exist by itself, had in reality an exceptionally cultivated mind.

  All important literature (and this is the essence of its importance) imprints the reader for a short time at least with its own distinctive rhythms, syntax, perspectives and colourings - a distillation (at some remove) of the author's individual world-view. There are few books this is more true of than Proust's A la Recherche: reading it on the tube each morning and coming out at Liverpool Street during rush-hour felt like a wonderful corrective  - through sheer contrast and opposition - to the chaotic, money-minded, workaday world I was entering.
    It made me consider how Proust's mode of perception - endlessly concatenating, imaginatively generous, evasive about pinning down a thought or impression whose implications are potentially infinite - might be as impossible to sustain in our short-attention-span, quick-fix society as the kind of leisured middle- and upper-class milieu Proust depicts would be impossible now to aspire towards politically or socially.
    To borrow that rare mode of aesthetic perception, however, albeit briefly, can only amount to a beneficial widening of consciousness, a glimpse beyond the dumbed-down, black-and-white reductiveness and desensitisation we are continually, cynically fed.

Pithy Prose and Reading RIP

   Delighted to see my sequence of prose-poems posted this week on one of the best UK blogs, Gists and Piths. Thanks, Simon and George.
   On the train home I read in the Evening Standard of the passing-away of Peter Reading - no doubt he would grumble to hear himself elegised in such a Tory rag. He was one of the true originals of post-war British poetry, a quietly rebarbative presence doggedly pursuing his own hard-won, hard-edged style in the face of a dominant flaccidity. As the guy in the ES said, his current neglect among poetry-readers is shameful, yet for a writer who has dwelt so obsessively on his own mortality (later volume-titles include Last Poems, Ob and Vendange Tardive ie. late harvest) his death could perhaps not be described as untimely.

                                            

Creep Scanner/Impulse

    Just discovered the compelling music blog Creep Scanner (see Bloglist), notable as much for its acerbic, foulmouthed, misanthropic comments as for the wide-ranging, hard-edged musical choices. I presume the author-name 'Jerry Orbach' is an alias since the American actor of that name (whose photo appears on the 'About Me' area of the blog) died in 2004 and the blog is very prolific (up to 35 entries a month!) and up to date.
     Now I hate shopping as much as the next man but I feel obliged to let you know about an offer I encountered today in HMV. One of the coolest ever labels for interesting jazz, Impulse (the "House that 'Trane Built"), has done a series of 2-for-1 CDs by people like Archie Shepp, Art Blakey, Albert Ayler, Alice Coltrane and Keith Jarrett which are currently available in HMV on a 2 for £10 deal.
    Four Impulse albums for a tenner - you can't go wrong!

ultimate version

   Found by chance - and with astonishment - the source for one of the most beautiful tracks in the reggae canon, Lee Perry's haunting 'Bird in Hand'. Turns outs it's based on a Bollywood song from 1950 'Milte Hi Ankwen Dil Huwa'.Even within the versioning-friendly sphere of Jamaican music, this strikes me as an extraordinary act of cross-cultural recontextualisation by Perry as producer that's years ahead of its time, turning a Hindi love-song into what I'd always thought was a Rastafarian chant of some kind, joltingly conjoining secular and mystical resonances in a sublime dub soundscape.

   

Baume im Herbst (Trees in Autumn): Kurt Kren (1960)

Reconstruction of the Fables

             

Taken at an exhibition called Aesop's Fables by Nicola Hicks at Flowers Gallery, Kingsland Road.

wall of days

                          
Link to a review of an interesting recent novel:

http://www.bookgeeks.co.uk/2011/11/07/wall-of-days-by-alastair-bruce/

Two Responses from William Rukeyser

In response to my posting of a Muriel Rukeyser poem last week, I was delighted to receive this email from no less than her son, William:

Hi-

I saw your recent blog today and thank you for your kind thoughts about my mother.

 

The good news is that we've actually kept most of her work in print... or brought it back into print. As a matter of fact, recently there were more of her books in print simultaneously than at any time during her life.

 

Right now there's a really well done Collected which has numerous historical and biographical annotations (U. of Pittsburgh Press) and a slim book of her poems (the Library of America's American Poets Project series) that serves as a good introduction to her work.) Also, her thoughts about poetry, in prose based on her lectures at the California Labor School are in Print in The Life of Poetry (Paris Press)

 

Bill

 

William L Rukeyser

Davis CA

 

I replied that the point I was trying to make - no doubt ineptly - was that no UK edition of MR's work is extant. William Rukeyser responded:

 

My mother was acutely aware of the situation you mention. (There were exceptions, 29 Poems was issued by Rapp and Whiting; Deutsch. Her biography of an Elizabethan scientist and associate of Walter Raleigh was published as The Traces of Thomas Hariot by Victor Gollancz and The Orgy, a thinly disguised memoir about attending Ireland's Puck Fair, was published by Deutsch.) That's it in England as far as I can recall. And all those were a long time ago. She did have a number of staunch friends and advocates in the English literary establishment, but attributed the lack of publication (in addition to editors simply not liking her unique voice) to a general disinclination at that time to print American poets and women. She counted that as two strikes against her.

 

Music for Diwali

  It's Diwali this week so here's some Indian-influenced sounds from the stable of the mighty Bill Laswell.This is one of the tracks on his City of Light project recorded in the Hindu holy city of Benares (or Varanasi, as it's now called) and taking its title from the fascinating book about the sacred geography and history of Benares by Diana L. Eck, which I read many years ago when spending time in the city.
   Augmenting Laswell's vivid tambura-heavy dubscapes are an intriguing roster of contributors including (on this tune) Coil and elsewhere the Japanese electronica-master Tetsu Inoue, Trilok Gurtu and (adding sleevenotes) Hakim Bey. No doubt this would sound even better after smoking a chillum of Himalayan charras, such as is legal and openly sold in a 'Government Shop' in this labyrinthine city sacred to Shiva. I must return there one day.

New Wolf/Muriel Rukeyser

 The new Wolf is out, well up to scratch and full of substance. Good to see an old aquaintance from a poetry workshop, David Barnes, in there with both a poem and an essay: his Pound piece is enthralling and impressively researched, debunking quite a few shortsighted commonplaces about the inexhaustible yet woefully under-read Cantos.

    Niall McDevitt on Ashbery's Rimbaud versions also offers a pithy critique, especially good on foregrounding the London contexts of Illuminations - slight shame he had to posit a 'mystery woman' and turn the sequence into some kind of encrypted hetero-love-poem - a gauche literalisation which John Ashbery would surely not assent to.      

    Sandeep Parmar on Daljit Nagra I also loved - timely corrective to the uncritical and largely ethno-tokenistic praise DN has all too often garnered. As I think is the case with the hugely-overrated Salman Rushdie, priggish white reviewers seem to baulk at an honest appraisal for fear of being imputed un-PC or not down with multiculturalism.

    Marilyn Hacker, in the Wolf interview, has a few interesting things to say but (sorry to be pernickity) she's wrong to suggest that Muriel Rukeyser had nothing to do with the Objectivists- as Andrew AcAllister shows in his Intro to the Bloodaxe Anthology The Objectivists, Rukeyser was "on the fringes of Zukofsky's group, and it is clear now that (her) work stands alongside the core of Rakosi, Reznikoff, Zukofsky and Oppen".
   Rukeyser is a marvellous poet, unpindownable and ambitious but at a slant to the masculine "grand projects" of Modernism. Her parallel vocation as a political activist informs both the atypical form and searching content of the work. A quick trawl through Amazon suggests that there are no English editions of any of her books: scandalous. Here's a typically fierce and wonderful poem of Rukeyser's, its title a caustic challenge to the "time-poor" frivolousness of consumerism ( off the cuff I'm just wondering whether the phrase "mystery and fury" in the 2nd line could have been the source for Rene Char's  1948 volume-title Fureur et Mystere) :

READING TIME:1 MINUTE 26 SECONDS The fear of poetry is the fear     :      mystery and fury of a midnight street of windows whose low voluptuous voice issues, and after that there is not peace. The round waiting moment in the  theatre : curtain rises, dies into the ceiling and here is played the scene with the mother bandaging a revealed son's head. The bandage is torn off. Curtain goes down.     And here is the moment of proof. That climax when the brain acknowledges the world, all values extended into the blood awake. Moment of proof. And as they say Brancusi did, building his bird to extend through soaring air, as Kafka planned stories that draw to eternity through time extended.     And the climax strikes. Love touches so, that months after the look of blue stare of love, the footbeat on the heart is translated into the pure cry of birds following air-cries, or poems, the new scene. Moment of proof.     That strikes long after act. They fear it.    They turn away, hand up, palm out fending off moment of proof, the straight look, poem. The prolonged wound-consciousness after the bullet's             shot. The prolonged love after the look is dead, the yellow joy after the song of the sun.