the coffee philosopher

Posted on August 6, 2014August 5, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto LXXIX

Pound is on a roll. This was a fun one. The opening tastes of The Wasteland – or, rather, the Pound who contributed so much to the final form of The Wasteland.

Though he still peppers it with Chinese characters and uses the Roman names of some deities, the feel is very Greek (and he does pepper it with many Greek words).

and on the hill of the Maelids
in the close garden of Venus
asleep amid serried lynxes
set wreathes on Priapus

I’m not entirely sure why Pound seems obsessed with lynxes in this one. He’s really obsessed.

O lynx, guard my vineyard
As the grape swells under the vine leaf

Posted on August 5, 2014August 4, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

‘Jejuri’ By Arun Kolatkar

I’m not sold on this collection, on the whole, but then something like ‘Chaitanya’ reaches out and grabs you by the throat.

Chaitanya
sweet as grapes
are the stones of jejuri
said chaitanya

he popped a stone
in his mouth
and spat out gods

But a few, really great poems don’t detract from my overall impression: these are not particularly masterful poems. Maybe it is because these were written in English (not translated into English) and his poems in his native Marathi account for his small fame.

Or maybe I just don’t get it.

Posted on August 4, 2014August 1, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

The ‘Poundian Form’

Having just re-begun reading The Cantos, it was appropriate that I came across a reference to the form of his masterwork that pulled me up sharply and made me take notice:

The intertextual reference to Fray Durán, alongside the phrasal fragments and use of colons to separate images, takes a Poundian form, that of the Cantos Pound — the poetry coheres through a series of disjunctive sutures — demonstrating what Perloff means by her question about taking up the experimentation of the early twentieth century. This is an ideogrammic method applied to Mesoamerican mythology. The poem is crammed with vagueness, and its strokes lend only the slightest impression of its context.

That’s from an article in Jacket2 about avant-garde Latino poetry. It made me think about my struggled with Pound and whether the remark about cohering through ‘a series of disjunctive sutures’ could be a skeleton key of sorts? And the pit about Marjorie Perloff’s remark reminded me of how important Pound’s experimentation was to the younger me and how eternally relevant high modernism remains.

Posted on August 3, 2014August 1, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Posted on August 2, 2014August 1, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

‘The Usual Suspects’ Revisited

I rewatched The Usual Suspects for the first time in many years. Still a great movie. Still the only worthwhile thing Stephen Baldwin has ever done.

My better half guessed the big reveal pretty early (much earlier than I ever did), but still had that moment when she realized that, of everything we had seen, only the very beginning and the very end could be known to be ‘true’ within the context of the movie.

I had forgotten how gorgeously shot and composed everything was. Also, the antithesis of the ‘Bourne’ style of jumpy, fast cut and sped action sequences that make it difficult to understand the geographic relationship between characters (Nolan’s Batman movies, particularly his first two, are egregious examples of poor editing of action sequences, leaving them almost completely incomprehensible). Even in the final action sequence in the claustrophobic confines of the freighter, the spatiality of the characters is clear. In some ways, that’s the point: by making the location and actions of the characters cinematically clear, it heightens the shock when you realize that it is very likely that almost none of it ever happened. Everybody is visible, comprehensible, and ‘real.’

Posted on August 1, 2014July 7, 2017 by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto LXXVIII

This Canto was a lot more fun to read than its immediate predecessor.

This poem is ultimately about and the unintended consequences of even good intentions.

Near the beginning:

Cassandra, your eyes are like tigers,
with no word written in them
You also have I carried to nowhere
to an ill house and there is
no end to the journey.
The chess board too lucid
the squares are too even…theatre of war…
” theatre ” is good. There are those who did not want
it to come to an end.

And then the very end:

In the spring and autumn
In “The Spring and Autumn”
there
are
no
righteous
wars

Is Pound feeling regret? How does this Canto reflect changes in his attitude? Or are there changes? He could still be a monumental fascist ass, yet oppose war, couldn’t he? That’s not a statement; it’s a question.

Posted on July 31, 2014July 31, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Steak Fry

I just realized: this year will probably be the last ever Harkin Steak Fry! If you don’t know what I’m talking about… well, you’ll probably never understand.

Posted on July 30, 2014July 7, 2017 by the coffee philosopher

Ezra Pound: Canto LXXVII

Obviously, this is my first Canto for some time. Not really the best one, if you’re going to dive back in.

It starts out with some of Pound’s Gertrude Stein-like efforts to mimic American colloquial speech, like:

” I’ll tell you wot izza comin’
Sochy-lism is a-comon’

But the rest is interspersed with Chinese script and, oddly, one bit of Persian, which I believe comes with a reference to the Persian epic, The Shahnameh. There is even a little glossary of the Chinese characters, not that I entirely trust it (you can see why in the picture – ‘bi gosh’).

Most of the rest is a series of name droppings: Cocteau, Daudet, Voltair, Goncourt, etc.

Posted on July 29, 2014July 30, 2014 by the coffee philosopher

Detroit Institute Of Art

With the seemingly constant threat of Rick Snyder’s appointed lackey selling off the collection of the Detroit Institute of Art (DIA) in order to fund a new stadium for the Red Wings (and I’m not kidding – the more than $200 million cut to employee pensions is almost exactly the amount that is being given to pay for a new hockey stadium – and they’re still talking about selling of the DIA collection in order to… well, I assume in order to give away more money to Rick Snyder donors), I had to go view the museum before this part of the city’s heritage is irreparably broken.

We learned some things about personal tastes. First of all, while I understand the art of the Dutch Golden Age is amazing… it’s just not for me. The ones I liked the most, the ones that really spoke to me, where those that most resembled Italianate landscapes from the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

We also learned that I love Art Nouveau. I especially loved a great little painting but Odilon Redon and this painting of the girls on the couch (also – kind of erotic, isn’t it?).

The DIA is probably best known for its collection of enormous Diego Rivera murals. They are breathtaking and overwhelming, but the space they are in, though cavernous, still feels too cramped for such massive and powerful pieces. I was too overwhelmed to appreciate them.

Finally, Detroit’s clearly got some cool art going, so I’ve added some pics of just cool stuff from around town.