A depressing vision of the future is on display here.
Wal-Mart replacing bookstores? Sad on several levels, including the fact that I won’t shop at Wal-Mart.
Slam Poetry
I read Ron Silliman’s blog. Of course I do. Everyone interested in poetry who isn’t cut off from the internet either does or should.
Today, he wrote about slam poetry.
Tangled up in what his post – a mixture of poetics and film review (a documentary about four participants in the Louder Than Bombs youth slam competition) – are admiration, doubt, and concern for the future.
I have tried in the past to express my mixed feelings about slam poetry and I’m not sure that I managed to explain my own tangled opinions better than Silliman did (who could not come up with a final conclusion – which is not intended as a negative comment, merely an indication of all the factors involved).
You look at young people participating in slams and feel amazement and joy and hope that poetry will take root in their lives.
But then…
You ask if the slam participants read the poetic canon. You then ask yourself who created the poetic canon, with all its biases, and is it valid. You ask if the original question is not a little insulting. You ask if the formal aspect of poetry is lost in the slam tradition. You ask if it is a good thing for poetry culture in America to have competition based poetics take up so much space within our poetry culture.
I am of a certain age and socio-economic class where the literary culture was based on the written word, not the spoken word.
I was read to as a child, but as a transition to teach me to read quietly on my own, like the grown ups did. I was encouraged to speak and express myself and my thoughts and opinions, but nonetheless, our home was not a place of oral culture. Wisdom was to be found in books.
My own poetry, though it can be (and often is) read aloud and (I hope) holds its own in that scenario, is still deeply tied to the written word. Ultimately, it is not meant for slams. Which means any opinion I may have about slams could be tied up in jealousy. I participated in a lot of slams in my teens and twenties, but only won a competition once. I now longer compete because my poetry is not suited. Is it sour grapes at the feeling that maybe I am being left behind?
Like Silliman (if I read him correctly), I love what slams are doing. I question what slams are doing. I doubt and respect what slams are doing.
Also, check out this piece from Harriet the Blog.
Kenneth Rexroth, Ezra Pound & Anti-Semitism
Kenneth Rexroth, godfather of the various renaissances of San Francisco and Northern California poetry in the years after the Second World War, was one of the inspirations for diving into the Cantos.
It is impossible to overlook Ezra Pound’s influence on Rexroth. Those great and sometime sprawling efforts to incorporate all his vast corpus of knowledge into poetry. The deep relationships with and advocacy on behalf of other poets (though perhaps no poet can truly match Pound in the tirelessness, efficacy, and importance of his advocacy of other writers). Each was very political and deeply influenced by their politics, yet neither is particularly known for their politically tinged poetry.
But Rexroth, with his liberal politics (veering in anarchism and communism – famously saying, ‘I write poetry to seduce women and to overthrow the Capitalist system. In that order.’)could not countenance Pound’s politics at all.
Regarding the Cantos, he once said:
Of course that’s not true. But sometimes there is something to the third sentence – ‘They are a long survey of history and the point to them is that what is wrong with the human race is usury.’
I have seen something almost Rand-ian about the Cantos thus far, but instead of ‘Producers’ versus ‘Looters,’ it is ‘Producers’ versus ‘Financiers.’
One can also feel the seduction of that. Not the Anti-Semitic undertones which infected so many discussions of the financial system in the twentieth century. Those are unforgivable.
But the anger, the mistrust towards the financial system. After the financial collapse of 2008, who can fail to feel angry towards Wall Street financiers? Nor fail to see the correspondences between the 1929 financial collapse (which Pound lived through) and the recent one that still holds our economy in thrall?
Ezra Pound: Canto XXIV
The Twenty-Fourth Canto begins with one of Pound’s depictions of fifteenth century Italian record keeping and logistics. A little more interesting than usual (they are epistolary) and then followed by several pages of narrative and descriptive poetry:
And he in his young youth, in the wake of Odysseus
To Cithera (a. d. 1413) ” dove fu Elena rapta da Paris “
Dinners in orange groves, prows attended of dolphins,
Vestige of Rome at Pola, fair wind as far as Naxos
Book Reviews
What is the value of professionalism in book reviewers? How much more valuable are they, if at all, than amateur book reviewers? What are the criteria for ‘professionalism’ in book reviewing?
As blogs (like this one) and other new media invested in books proliferate and as Amazon’s customer reviewers rival the New York Times for influence, this becomes more of an issue.
Though I am clearly on the amateur side (with sad pretension of more, but that is all) in terms of my own reviewing, I come down on the side of ‘professionalism’ in reviewing as a necessary aspect of maintaining our culture.
It is not just a question of gatekeepers. It is also a question of specialized knowledge and education and the benefits they impart.
Read this article for more on the suggested limitations of a reliance on sources like Amazon reviewers.
Ezra Pound: Canto XXIII
The Twenty-Third Canto is a mixture of high and low art. Some irritating colloquialisms (mimicking uneducated language by spelling ‘Italian’ as ‘Eyetalian’). But also some beautiful stanzas:
Leaf over leaf, dawn-branch in the sky
And the sea dark, under wind,
This one also had the most lines and stanzas in foreign languages of any Canto thus far. I identified (if didn’t always understand) French, Latin, and Greek.
The Decline of Paperbacks
As e-books become a larger and larger part of the book market, it seems that the biggest target will be mass market paperbacks.
For what this article calls a “book reader” (as opposed to a “book owner”), e-books are an obvious replacement for mass market paperbacks.
Purchasing hard cover books and even trade paperbacks is more of an event buy. One is putting down a little bit more money for the unique experience of a desired physical book. But mass market paperbacks are the books printed to be read on subways and airplanes or impulse buys because they monetary outlay isn’t great. As a result, they are the closest competitors to e-books.
I’d hate to see them go. If you, like me, are a genre fan, then you have spent a lot of time with the mass market paperback. In my case, it’s science fiction and fantasy, where only the biggest names see the light of day as a hardback tome and where thousands of new books are produced as those small paperbacks that populate my shelves.
There’s something wonderfully egalitarian in the nature of the sci fi paperback, as well as an attachment to its history in the pulps. It’s inexpensive nature made it so easy as a young man browsing the shelves at Waldenbooks or B. Dalton’s in some mall or other to take a chance on an unknown writer based on a combination of cover art and the description on the back.
New Conan Movie Will Be Terrible
The new Conan is inevitably going to suck donkey balls. There’s no way around it.
The original short stories, written by suicidal masculinist Robert E. Howard, were masterpieces of high pulp. In theory, this new movie would hew much closer to Howard’s vision of the character – a wily, wary, and highly mercenary creation.
The 1982 movie freely abandoned most aspects of the story save a few names and the main character’s physique.
Nonetheless, its crazy right wing subtext; weird, pseudo-Nietzschean mythology (how many men my age first discovered that German grump from the quote opened Conan the Barbarian?); and utter self-seriousness was, in retrospect, the only way to capture the spirit of an outdated (especially in its racial and gender politics).
That an Austrian body builder with compensated for his almost complete verbal unintelligibility and the sort of bad acting normally associated with Keanu Reeves by means of Schwarzenegger’s incredibly improbably charisma.
Instead, we are likely to soon suffer through the bland antics of a beefed up pretty boy starring in a cut rate Kevin Sorbo knock off.
To brilliantly conclude, let ask you this one question:
What is best in life?
The Cantos Are on Hold for a Few Days
I am in Philadelphia for a few days and will not be keeping up with my daily reading of the Cantos. The book was simply to heavy and too thick to bring up. Instead, I brought my new Virgil and my Nook.
I’ll return to Pound when I get back. Technically, that’s Sunday night, but let’s be honest – Monday is a more realistic deadline.
Used Books
The annual Flower Mart was taking place at the National Cathedral the other weekend. A wonderful used book sale was also taking place on the Cathedral grounds underneath a long tent.
I found some lovely books and LPs, though I missed out on an anthology of stories by John Campbell, better known as the editor of Astounding Stories, where he ushered in the Golden Age of Science Fiction, publishing early stories by Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, A.E. Van Vogt, Robert Heinlein, and Andre Norton. I would even go so far as to say that Campbell was the Maxwell Perkins of sci fi – driving his writers in the direction of more and better characterization and hard science. Of course, after the Golden Age era of the late thirties and the forties, both he and the magazine he edited became better known for crackpot conservatism, new age-y hocus pocus, and a racism that was both weirdly expressed and unforgivable.
What I did pick up included Virgil, Jorie Graham, Otto Rank, and Goethe; along with vinyl records including a Glenn Gould performance of Bach’s The Well Tempered Clavier and Leonard Bernstein conducted performances of Mahler and Beethoven (which, much like reading Heidegger on Nietzsche, one listens to more for Bernstein’s vision than the composer’s).
Will I live to see the day come when printed books, like vinyl, are only available used? Or else in limited release, deliberately anachronistic editions that merely supplement the work in some other form (like REM’s orange tinted vinyl pressed single of Orange Crush, released to help generate buzz for the album on which it appeared, Green)?
After all, I am still old enough to faintly remember the days before cassette tapes fully replaced vinyl LPs.
In such an event, it becomes to easy to envision one’s self as a cantankerous old recluse, surrounded by the detritus of a dead age: manual typewriters with each ribbon wrung dry of the last particle of ink before being replaced, fountain pens, mouldering books with brittle pages, and vinyl records etched by time with deep scratches, skips, and crackles.
the coffee philosopher 