CruelestMonth.com

Josipovici on Modernism

I can't say really how those three words make me feel (especially "on") -- giddy, I guess.  I was unable to attend the talk on account that I was in New York (like I would be anywhere else).  But I had the vicarious pleasure of sorting through the reactions and comments of those who did -- and what a charming choir of bloggers they are!  Ellis of The Sharpe Side provides as comprehensive a recap as one could hope for (I'm going to attempt a recap later today; it promises to be difficult) and the bubbling wit of This Space expands the conversation.

And don't forget to enter the Buk contest.  Details below!

Z. Herbert tonight at New School

Just another quick reminder about the Z. Herbert tribute happening tonight at the New School in downtown New York.  For those of you in the area, which may be few, it would be wonderful to see you there.  Here's a link the event poster: link.

Also, don't be shy about the Buk contest.  I won't be the only one judging the entries so you can expect a fair shake.  We'd love (notice how I used first-person plural) to see what you can come up with.

A Contest - The People Look Like Flowers At Last

As I alluded to in yesterday's post, I'm giving away three copies of Charles Bukowski's final collection of new poems, The People Look Like Flowers At Last.  I realize that saying that this is it from Bukowski may be hard to accept as true.  This will be the fifth collection of new poems released since his death in 1994, but we swear, we know John Martin, we know Linda Bukowski, as far as we all can tell, this is it.  (Except for the Selected Buk that we'll be publishing next year, edited by John Martin, but that's irrelevant.)  In order to procure your copy, please write me at [email protected].  Include your name, address, and...here's the catch: to win a copy you must write, what you think, would be Bukowski's final poem. 

Will he muse on the fickle and violent love of women, the fellowship of whisky, the anarchy of Los Angeles, the slow, ineluctable approach of death?  Will he be lewd, comic, sorely profound?  It is up to you.

I'll choose 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place winners--each will receive The People Look Like Flowers At Last and other goodies commensurate with their place.  Each winning poem will be posted for a day on the CM.  The deadline is Wednesday, March 21st and please include the poem in the body of your e-mail.  That should be plenty of time considering Buk's methods of composition. 

In the meantime, to help get you started, here's a long one from his final collection:

"sadness in the air"

here I am alone sitting
like some wimp

listening to Chopin

the night wind blowing in
through the
torn curtains.

won $546 at the track today but
now I'm thinking that
dying is such a strange and
ordinary thing.

I just hope that I'll never need
false teeth before I
go.

Some events...

...that I have my eye on this week.  I've even printed out directions and such.

Wednesday, March 14

• 7pm - Mark Doty reads from his new memoir Dog Years at the B&N Chelsea.  They don't just host great events, they have New York Burger across the street.
• 8pm - Ellis Avery reads from The Teahouse Fire at Amanda Stern's Happy Endings reading series.  The series itself is always a riot.  The bar is dark.  And I'm currently transcribing an interview I had with Ellis two weeks ago.  It'll be up at Small Spiral shortly.

Thursday, March 15

• 6pm - Anything but an Angel: A Tribute to Zbigniew Herbert.  Will happen at the New School's Swayduck Auditorium.  Presented by the Transregional Center for Democratic Studies and the Writing Program of Eugene Lang College.

Sunday, March 18

• 7pm - Chris Adrian, author of the  The Children's Hospital, will read at KGB. 

Also, tomorrow: Buk, giveaway.  Be there.

"Annals of Poetry"

Well, the fashionable debate over the Chicago-based Poetry Foundation continues with David Orr's essay, "Annals of Poetry," appearing in this Sunday's NYTBR.  The essay comes in response to the lengthy New Yorker article by Dana Goodyear ("The Moneyed Muse") that criticized the policies, or public manifestations, of the Poetry Foundation in view of the $200 million donation it received from Ruth Lilly in 2001.  Orr cites some interesting facts not mentioned in Goodyear's article, namely that Goodyear's poetry has appeared in the New Yorker more often than a bucketful of venerated masters (Czeslaw Milosz, Jorie Graham, Derek Walcott, and "every living American poet laureate except for W.S. Merwin").  This would speak volumes for Goodyear if one ignores that she was David Remnick's assistant.  While that can stand as is, Orr raises issue with the poems themselves:

And then there’s the question of the poems the magazine chooses to run. Granted, picking poems for a national publication is nearly impossible, and The New Yorker’s poetry editor, Alice Quinn, probably does it as well as anyone could. (Quinn is also liked personally, and rightly so, by many poets.) But there are two ways in which The New Yorker’s poem selection indicates the tension between reinforcing the “literariness” of the magazine’s brand and actually saying something interesting about poetry. First, The New Yorker tends to run bad poems by excellent poets. This occurs in part because the magazine has to take Big Names, but many Big Names don’t work in ways that are palatable to The New Yorker’s vast audience (in addition, many well-known poets don’t write what’s known in the poetry world as “the New Yorker poem” — basically an epiphany-centered lyric heavy on words like “water” and “light”). As a result, you get fine writers trying on a style that doesn’t suit them. The Irish poet Michael Longley writes powerful, earthy yet cerebral lines, but you wouldn’t know it from his New Yorker poem “For My Grandson”: “Did you hear the wind in the fluffy chimney?” Yes, the fluffy chimney.

In general, I never turn to the New Yorker for the what's new in poetry.  They were keen enough to run a few of Herbert's poem--were they some of his stronger ones?--I'm not qualified to comment.  Orr sees no reason to relent, however, and ends with the following question:

Poets may get frustrated with the Poetry Foundation; they may complain; they may disagree with certain projects. But the Poetry Foundation, however misguided or impolitic, hasn’t given up on poetry. The question is: Has The New Yorker?

Barcelona and Modernity at the Met

At 4:15 on Sunday, I made a mad dash to see Barcelona and Modernity: Gaudi to Dali at the Met.  As per usual with special exhibitions, most recently Americans in Paris, Cezanne to Picasso: Ambroise Vollard, Patron of the Avante-Garde, and Glitter and Doom, there was an intense crowd.  I, unfortunately, had a backpack and knocked a few people about, mostly smallish women and children.  The wake of glares and sniffling was well worth it, however.  Organized by The Cleveland Museum of Art and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, in association with Museu Nacional d'Art de Catalunya, Barcelona, the exhibition "explores the diverse innovative work of Barcelona's artists, architects, and designers in the years between the Barcelona Universal Exposition of 1888 and the imposition of the Fascist regime of Francisco Franco in 1939."  Beginning with Ramon Casas, among others, at the turn of the 19th century, the exhibition tracks Catalan society's sweeping plunge into modernity and the chaos of war.  Picasso (represented in this exhibition most notably by Blindman's Meal and La Vie from his Blue Period), Dali (The Dream and Soft Construction with Boiled Beans, above), and Miro (Hunter-Catalan Landscape) take over the show.  Ingeniously abstract, allegorical, Freudian, and new, this trio had museum-goers entrenched only inches from the canvases.  The dense push of those waiting their turn made me engage with the works that much more, just so I could ignore the many breaths on my neck.  Counter-movements, architecture, and propoganda displayed throughout helped to recreate the violent senses of the time that inspired the art.  I was flush.

Do you have a drink that can quench the thirst?

I feel great.  Spent a night out with Vollmann, I recall what I can here.  That said: the NBCC winners were announced last night.  The winners are:

• Fiction: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
• Non-Fiction: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama (edited by the lovely MIllicent)
• Memoir/Autobiography: The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by David Mendelsohn
• Criticism: Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler (Is it strange that I posted about him yesterday and now here we are?)
• Biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
• Poetry: Tom Thomson in Purgatory by Troy Jollimore

The title of this post refers to a man standing in line at the B&N cafe.  It's all he wanted to know.  Thanks to Jeremy for being there.

And finally, for lack of words:

Convergence of convergences converging

Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences was released from McSweeney's a little over a year ago, back when I was still a paying book club member.  I no longer receive those sturdy packages from the left coast, but I drop in on the conversation from time to time.  Contest Winner No. 28, whose entry compares a scanning-electron-microscope image of sand grains and a NASA image of Phobos ("one of the moons of Mars"), reminded Lawrence Weschler "of a verse potrait from one of the great masters of 20th-century Polish poetry:

Pebble
By Zbigniew Herbert
(Translated by Peter Dale Scott
and Czeslaw Milosz)

The pebble
is a perfect creature

equal to itself
mindful of its limits

filled exactly
with a pebbly meaning

with a scent that does not remind one of anything
does not frighten anything away does not arouse desire

its ardour and coldness
are just and full of dignity

I feel a heavy remorse
when I hold it in my hand
and its noble body
is permeated by false warmth

—Pebbles cannot be tamed
to the end they will look at us
with a calm and very clear eye

I suggest you visit the link above for a contextualization of this poem.  I'm just happy that I can serve both the company and the interest of readers.

And yet...

Links for breakfast...

Wow.  I can't believe I just came up with that post title...amazing.

The Vollmann Club "is an online collaborative effort to read all of William T. Vollmann's books and place Mr. Vollmann's work into perspective. Participating sites include Black Market Kidneys, Conversational Reading, The Happy Booker, Rake's Progress, and Return of the Reluctant."  If you read Ed Champion, you probably know about it.  But considering that the man himself will visit the office today (at least he's expected to) before his event at NYPL, I thought it was relevant enough to mention.  He'll also be at the B&N Chelsea tomorrow night (Thursday, 3/8, 7pm).

Waggish.org is a phenomenal site that posts essays on philosophy, art, and literature.  The contributors vary and the comments just roll in.  Definitely worth a visit if you have a little free time.

And the perpetually excited/ing Mad Hatter's Review has a few event this month.  Tomorrow, 3/8, they'll be at 192 Books.

MAGNIFICENT READER

I didn't know what to post today -- work being the relentless slog that it is -- and then Rudy Bang sent me THIS (click here for an image with graphic integrity):

I wasn't sure what to think at first.  My eyes, as they invariably do, went straight to the mention of the Cruelest Month.  Pleased by the very arrangement of its letters, I was tickled.  But what was really going on here?  I read the comic, a graphic documentation of one Rudy Bang's day on March the 5th, and actually had a few good laughs.  I was even appetized (still am, and will request a recipe at a later date) by the "celery pear soup" Rudy had for lunch.  At that point I was thinking the content was great, but what about the form?  I exported the image to a .pdf and in a spasm of delight realized that you could print it out and fold it up into a little booklet!!!  Rudy, you sly, sly creature you!

As she he describes, she he had "tried" to procure a free Zbigniew but was DENIED by yours truly. Not that I did it without a heavy heart.  The line needs to be drawn somewhere.  And so it has been...by Rudy.

You will receive your free copy...your free copy TEN-FOLD!!!  Wait, no.  Maybe just the free copy and a few other goodies.  In the future, and this goes for everyone, if there is an Ecco title you want that I'm not giving, appeal to the whims of my inner Narcissus and you shall be redeemed!

Thanks, Rudy. You've made me giddy