City

I'm walking the dog home across a city that bears little relation to the real one, as if Robert Moses had succeeded in his nefarious scheme to plow an expressway through lower Manhattan. On a quiet Greenwich Village street I notice a small garden with a few plants and decorations, and I say to myself, "A real hippy must live there." Up ahead, a pickup truck approaches; as it passes I see a young woman standing in the back. She's singing these words:

I'm proud to be a New York City hippy
I'm proud of dirty feet and dirty hair
I'm proud of living with the cock-a-roaches
I'm proud of living in a garbage can*

I recognize the song, and the woman is stunned when I join in halfway through. The truck keeps going. There's nothing left for me to do but pick my way east through the cloverleafs and dead ends, heading home.

* Actual song by David Peel, c. 1972.

The Impossible Book

The CD insert for a radio play by Peter Belgvad and Iain Chambers, from the limited-edition version of The Peter Blegvad Bandbox. Astute listeners may recognize the voice of the distinguished British actress Harriet Walter in the role of Agatha Christie, as part of a cast that also features XTC founder and longtime Blegvad collaborator Andy Partridge. The insert design and art are by Blegvad.

Blegvad in a Box

Chris Cutler's ReR Megacorp has just released a snazzy boxed set bringing together the four albums that Peter Blegvad has recorded for the label, packaging them along with a two-CD compilation of live performances, previously unreleased tracks, and "eartoons" entitled It's All 'Experimental,' as well as an attractively designed illustrated 70-page booklet of notes and musings*, and (if you've plumped for the limited edition) an autographed CD of a radio play entitled The Impossible Book.

I came to Blegvad's musical output (he's also a cartoonist and graphic artist) first via Choices Under Pressure, a mostly solo recording from 2001 that I love but that many aficionados are lukewarm about, and then moved on to his fine 1990 Silvertone CD King Strut and Other Stories. The ReR recordings in this Peter Blegvad Bandbox, loosely focused on a core trio of Blegvad, Chris Cutler, and John Greaves, meticulously document one of the most sustained partnerships of his career, and contain much of his best work as well as some material that is perhaps only for the true devotee.

The most recent of the four ReR CDs, Go Figure, was reviewed briefly in this space when it was released last year. Of the other three, Just Woke Up , from 1995, seems the strongest, both musically and lyrically. Hangman's Hill, from 1998, is the weakest (despite the likeable title track), and 1988's Downtime falls somewhere in the middle. (The last features several Blegvad compositions that were originally recorded by Anton Fier's Golden Palominos during Blegvad's association with that shifting ensemble; by and large the Palominos versions are stronger.) The two-disc It's All 'Experimental' is a valuable omnium gatherum featuring, among other things, two versions of "King Strut," two versions of "Shirt and Comb," and a Blegvad-sung rendition of "A Little Something," originally sung by Dagmar Krause when she, Blegvad, and Anthony Moore made up a trio called Slapp Happy.

As for The Impossible Book, it will have to wait until the CD player in my car starts functioning again.

* The designer is Colin Sackett of Uniformbooks, and the booklet includes liner notes and annotations by Blegvad, Chris Cutler, John Greaves, and Karen Mantler, as well as photographs, Blegvad drawings, and whatnot.

Life force

Images for a prospective re-reading of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, July 2018.

It was on a dreary night of November that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.

Betrayal

These are not normal circumstances. Nancy LeTourneau:

What we are watching is a complete reorienting of the foreign policy of the United States, and most Republicans are going along because they're too afraid of blow-back from their base. It just so happens that this reorientation is exactly what Vladimir Putin has always wanted. It not only weakens our allies, it weakens us and turns Russia into a player on the global stage. At some point, we all are going to have to recognize that either Trump is a madman swinging wildly in a way that could destroy this country, or he is, as Hillary Clinton once pointed out, a puppet of Putin's. Perhaps some of both.

Our founders attempted to provide us with tools to deal with a situation like this. What they didn't count on was that an entire media apparatus would be developed to enable this kind of madness and that a political party would sit back and watch it happen because they were too drunk with power and/or too cowardly to do anything about it.

"Why Would Trump So Viciously Attack Angela Merkel?," from Washington Monthly.

It's now sadly impossible to avoid the conclusion that the US president has become, for motives that can be speculated on if not known with certainty, the instrument if not the engineer of a conspiracy designed to destroy liberal democracy. One doesn't need to be a particular admirer of Angela Merkel — or Hillary Clinton, for that matter — to understand that everything we ought to value in common — government by consent of the people, human rights, equal treatment under the law, compassion, reason, our own future — is being betrayed. And the right wing in this country is cheering it on. Stay alert.

Summer in the woods

The longer days of late have meant that I'm spending more time outside, often in the early hours before the temperature hits the 90s, and as a result (and, to be honest, also a bit from lack of inclination), I've been posting infrequently here. What interior landscape can match these outlandish colors and patterns?

From top: efts, box turtles, Laetiporus, Russula, unidentified mushroom, possible Tubifera magna slime mold.

Like Blood from a Cut

You've got a lie underneath your tongue where it can't be seen
'Cause you wanna put the truth on a guillotine
But you might as well put out a fire with gasoline

Well you can serve dirty water from a golden cup
You can try to lock up the truth but the door won't shut
'Cause the truth just keeps comin' out like blood from a cut

Buddy and Julie Miller are a married couple who have been making records, together and separately, since 1980 or thereabouts. He's a fine guitar player, singer, songwriter, and producer who has worked with Emmylou Harris, Richard Thompson, and many other people; she's a gifted songwriter and performer who originally emerged from the Christian music scene, though much of her work has a ferociousness and grit that is anything but stereotypically "churchy." She seems to have retreated from the limelight in recent years for health reasons, but Buddy is still very much active.

"Dirty Water," one of a number of Miller compositions that employs imagery involving fluids, first appeared on the couple's self-titled 2001 record. I've taken the lines above out of context, but they seem germane at the moment.

A Point of Crisis

Former Border Control agent Francisco Cantú, writing in the New York Times:

No matter what version of hell migrants are made to pass through at the border, they will endure it to escape far more tangible threats of violence in their home countries, to reunite with family or to secure some semblance of economic stability ...

The logic of deterrence is not unlike that of war: It has transformed the border into a state of exception where some of the most vulnerable people on earth face death and disappearance and where children are torn from their parents to send the message You are not safe here. In this sense, the situation at the border has reached a point of crisis — not one of criminality but of disregard for human life.

We cannot return to indifference. In the aftermath of our nation's outcry against family separation, it is vital that we direct our outrage toward the violent policies that enabled it.

"Cages Are Cruel. The Desert Is, Too." (June 30, 2018)

Further reading: Jason De León, The Land of Open Graves.

Of related interest: "The Real Story Behind a Janitor's Border Photos of Combs, Toys and Bibles" (NYT, July 2nd, 2018)

The Last Thing

I've always had a soft spot for this song, but I've never seen this live version before. Tom Paxton is now eighty and has recorded more than sixty albums. After more than fifty years "The Last Thing on My Mind" still holds up just fine.

Hope in the Mice

The narrator of W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants visits a shuttered sanatorium for mental patients in Ithaca, New York, seeking traces of a relative who died there decades before. Its retired superintendent indulges in a gleeful fantasy of annihilation:

Besides, said Dr Abramsky, all of the material on file - the case histories and the medical records Fahnstock kept on a daily basis, albeit in a distinctly cursory fashion - have [sic] probably long since been eaten by the mice. They took over the madhouse when it was closed and have been multiplying without cease ever since; at all events, on nights when there is no wind blowing I can hear a constant scurrying and rustling in the dried-out shell of the building, and at times, when a full moon rises beyond the trees, I imagine I can hear the pathetic song of a thousand tiny upraised throats. Nowadays I place all my hope in the mice, and in the woodworm and deathwatch beetles. The sanatorium is creaking, and in places already caving in, and sooner or later they will bring about its collapse. I have a recurring dream of that collapse, said Dr Abramsky, gazing at the palm of his left hand as he spoke. I see the sanatorium on its lofty rise, see everything simultaneously, the building as a whole and also the minutest detail; and I know that the woodwork, the roof beams, door posts and panelling, the floorboards and staircases, the rails and banisters, the lintels and ledges, have already been hollowed out under the surface, and that at any moment, as soon as the chosen one amongst the blind armies of beetles dispatches the very last, scarcely material resistance with its jaws, the entire lot will come down.

Dr Fahnstock was Abramsky's predecessor at the institution. Sebald, who was evidently well acquainted with the geography of New York State, may have borrowed the name, with a slight variation in spelling, from Clarence Fahnestock Memorial State Park in Dutchess and Putnam counties a few hours to the east. If so, he may or may not have known that the park's namesake was also a physician (photo above), one who died of pneumonia in France in the closing weeks of World War I.

Photo credit: Bobby Kelley

Memento mori

Along the trail, May 2018.

Tower

In the office on the 73rd floor, high above the city, the president of the company passes me a handful of letters to mail and a note with the deli order for lunch. "Quickly!," he shouts, and I rush to the elevator, which swiftly descends the great steel and glass tower until its doors open at the ground floor. A rush of wind hits me as I exit through revolving doors, and the letters are blown from my hand and scattered. Pedestrians hurrying in and out of the building trample the letters and leave their footprints on them. I gather them up and enter the deli, but there's a crowd ahead of me struggling to be served and in the confusion I drop the letters again. Now they're torn, soiled with beef blood and grease. I run outside looking for a mailbox, for a place to wash my hands, but all in vain...

Notes for a commonplace book (22)

Pablo Neruda:

It is very appropriate, at certain times of the day or night, to deeply observe objects at rest: the wheels that have covered long, dusty distances, bearing heavy loads of vegetables or minerals, sacks from the coal yards, barrels, baskets, the handles and grips of the carpenter's tool. The contact of man with the universe exudes from these things a lesson for the tormented poet. The worn surfaces, the wear that hands have inflicted on things, the often tragic and always wistful aura of these objects, lend to reality a fascination not to be taken lightly.

The confused impurity of human beings is displayed in them, the proliferation, materials used and discarded, footprints and fingerprints, the permanent mark of humanity inundating all objects from within and without. That is the kind of poetry we should strive for, worn away as if by acid from the labor of hands, impregnated with sweat and smoke, smelling of urine and lilies, and seasoned by the various professions that operate both within and outside the law.

A poetry impure as old clothes, as a body, with its food stains and shame, with wrinkles, observations, dreams, vigilance, prophecies, declarations of love and hate, beasts, blows, idylls, manifestos, denials, doubts affirmations, taxes.

"On Impure Poetry," as translated by Mark Eisner in his biography Neruda: The Poet's Calling.

Man or name?

Two translations of the last lines of Pablo Neruda's "Ars Poetica," from Residence on Earth:

but the truth is, suddenly, the wind lashing my chest,
the infinitely dense nights dropped into my bedroom,
the noise of a day burning with sacrifice
demand what there is in me of the prophetic, with melancholy
and there's a banging of objects that call without being answered,
and a restless motion, and a muddled name.

(Mark Eisner)

but the truth is that suddenly the wind that lashes my chest,
the nights of infinite substance fallen in my bedroom,
the noise of a day that burns with sacrifice,
ask me mournfully what prophecy there is in me,
and there is a swarm of objects that call without being answered,
and a ceaseless movement, and a bewildered man.

(Donald D. Walsh)

Leaving aside the other differences between the versions (I generally prefer Walsh's, from the New Directions edition, to Eisner's, which is quoted in his new biography of Neruda), there's a significant disagreement that has nothing to do with translation methods or styles; it has to do with the text of the Spanish original. The last words in the Spanish text that Walsh is translating (his edition is bilingual) are un hombre, a man; Eisner is evidently following a text that reads un nombre, a name. Spoken aloud they would be indistinguishable (the h is silent), but which text is correct?

I find hombre a more satisfying conclusion to the poem, with the catalogue of objects and motions ending up producing, wittily, a confused man, but the other reading isn't implausible either, given that Neruda, throughout Residence on Earth, frequently juxtaposes adjectives and nouns in seemingly inscrutable combinations. Eisner seems to be following the text of the 1999 Obras completas I edited by Hernán Loyola. At least one scholar (Tim Bowron) regards Loyola's "un nombre" as "an obvious error," but further research is needed.

On Robyn Hitchcock

I have loved you from a distance
Loved you from up close
Like the tiny frog that breathes
I can nestle in your cloak

I'm a bit of a latecomer to the Robyn Hitchcock party, having discovered him in 2004 (i.e., some thirty years into his career) as a result of Spooked, which he recorded in collaboration with Gillian Welch and David Rawlings. I played Spooked regularly for a while, but I hadn't listened to it all the way through for years until I dusted it off again after seeing Hitchcock perform live a week ago (he was great, by the way, polka-dot shirt and all).

Hitchcock is also a painter, in a surrealist vein matching his songs; the image above is the full version of the piece that was cropped to serve as the cover art for the CD.

Hard-core Hitchcock fans don't necessarily like this collaboration (too brooding), but I think it holds up. He played only one song from it ("Full Moon in My Soul") at the gig I attended; I like that one well enough, but I think "Television" — the ultimate ode to the seductions of the medium — and "Flanagan's Song" are my favorites. Here they are:

On the Cultivation of Mushrooms

Leonora Carrington:

I had received a royal summons to pay a call on the sovereigns of my country.

The invitation was made of lace, framing embossed letters of gold. There were also roses and swallows.

I went to fetch my car, but my chauffeur, who has no practical sense at all, had just buried it.

"I did it to grow mushrooms," he told me. "There's no better way of growing mushrooms."

"Brady," I said to him, "you're a complete idiot. You have ruined my car."

From "The Royal Summons," in The Complete Stories of Leonora Carrington (Dorothy Project, 2017). Carrington, a British-born painter as well as the author of mischievous tales, was the daughter of a wealthy industrialist and actually was presented (though very much against her will) at the court of England's George V. She left the country at the first opportunity and spent most of her very long life in Mexico.

On Friendship (Elena Poniatowska)

Elena Poniatowska's Leonora is a biographical novel that closely follows the eventful life of her longtime friend, the artist and writer Leonora Carrington, who, like Poniatowska, was European-born but Mexican by choice or accident. (Carrington died in 2011, aged 94, and Poniatowska, one of Mexico's most distinguished writers, is now in her mid-80s.) In the early 1940s, following the fall of France and a traumatic stay in a mental institution in Spain, Carrington migrated to New York City alongside a host of artistic luminaries, including her former lover Max Ernst, who by that time was romantically involved with the wealthy arts patron Peggy Guggenheim. Poniatowska's chapters covering this period are peppered with the familiar names of her fellow emigrés Marcel Duchamp, André Breton, Luis Buñuel, and Marc Chagall, but the appearance of one name in particular caught my eye. Carrington and Ernst remain close, and often spend the day together exploring Manhattan. Poniatowska writes:

They wandered the shores of the Hudson, along which steamed long freighters that Bell Chevigny saw pass by from her window on Riverside Drive.

Chevigny is not otherwise identified, and in fact never mentioned again, but I recognized her name, because many years ago I took a college course taught by one Bell Chevigny, a literary scholar and the author of a biography of Margaret Fuller. She would have been a young girl in the 1940s, and as far as I know had no direct connection to Carrington and the surrealist exiles in New York. So what is she doing in the pages of Leonora? One of her other areas of interest is modern Latin American literature (as it happens, I translated a few pages for a book on the subject that she co-edited) and she and Poniatowska have apparently known each other for years. Perhaps Poniatowska remembered Chevigny telling her how the ships would pass by her family's window when she was a child, and slipped her name into the text by way of a friendly wink.

Drue Heinz 1915-2018

Drue Heinz, the former publisher of Antaeus and the Paris Review, has died. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette has a lengthy obit.

The past year or so has seen the deaths of two of my favorite writers, Charles Simmons and Harry Mathews (and no doubt others I've forgotten for the moment), as well as New York Review of Books editor Robert Silvers. For better or worse, the literary and intellectual world I grew up in is dwindling to an end. Something will replace it (though not for me). Time moves on.

My appreciation of Antaeus can be found here.

Black Dogs

Kaye Blegvad's Dog Years is an appealing self-published illustrated story about her lifelong battle with depression, personified as a black dog (an animal associated in folklore with various nefarious doings). It originally appeared in Buzzfeed last fall, and has been made available in a hardcover edition through a Kickstarter campaign and probably via her website. It only takes a few minutes to read, and is worth a look.

Curiously, I have a dog who resembles Blegvad's, except for some white markings — but my dog is quite literal. He's actually rather sweet, although he is a handful.

Fans of Peter Blegvad's comic strip Leviathan may possibly recognize a small stuffed rabbit in one of Kaye's panels.

Farewell, Liam

The great Irish piper Liam O'Flynn has died, according to RTÉ and other sources.

I owe my interest in Irish music directly to O'Flynn, whose uilleann piping on Planxty's "Sí Bheag, Sí Mhór" from their debut album released in 1973 caught my ear when I heard it on the old Pacifica Radio program Echoes from Tara.

With their long hair, Balkan time signatures, and exotic bouzoukis, Planxty were a fairly radical group within Irish music when they started out, but no matter how far they strayed O'Flynn was always there to give them trad cred. He once said, of his fiendishly difficult instrument:

The old pipers used to say that it takes twenty-one years to make a piper: seven years of learning, seven years of practicing and seven years of playing. I think there's a lot of truth to that because it's a complex instrument and requires a lot of co-ordination to play a tune. You're learning all the time.

Below is another clip of Liam and Planxty, from a reunion concert in 2004, with O'Flynn playing a set of pipes that formerly belonged to another great piper, Willie Clancy, as well a documentary from a few years back (mostly in Irish, with English subtitles).

Update: The New York Times now has a nice obituary of O'Flynn.