Thursday, July 30, 2009

San Francisco Winter: Patty & Patti

There were two big events for me in San Francisco in early 1976: 1. I attended several sessions of the Patty Hearst trial (more on that in a future post).* 2. I saw Patti Smith perform at The Boarding House.

I snatched this poster from the wall of a laundromat on Polk Street.


I recently watched a documentary about her: "Patti Smith: Dream of Life" -- you could go to YouTube and in "Search" type in "Patti Smith Indictment of George Bush" and hear her speak a great poem.
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*At work I was talking to a young Americorps worker who grew up in San Francisco. I mentioned having gone to the Hearst trial, but she had no idea of who Patty Hearst was (is)! I was flabbergasted, then humbled, realizing that my era was not, as I had thought, the center of history; was, in fact, falling into a state of disregard, while the young Americorps volunteer's era was budding, ready to flower, however unlovely or lovely its bloom may prove to be. I am recovering from the shock.

Tuesday, July 28, 2009

Self Times Four

Sometimes I have nothing better to do than to snap four pictures while waiting for an elevator. This was at the excellent National Art Gallery in Ottawa. And sometimes I have nothing better to do than post them on a blog. This was at excellent home in Wellfleet.

Saturday, July 25, 2009

Happy Birthday to Richard English

On a dark and snowy evening in February 1961, at an Army post in Germany, I'd gone to the Mess Hall office I worked in to use the government-issued typewriter to compose a long letter about a trip I'd just made to Zurich, Florence, and Rome, with my friend Henry Bradbury Coons III. There was a rap at the window. I looked up. It was a soldier I'd seen around; he was sort of new to the base. I unlocked a door to let him in. I'm glad I did. We became friends. I have not had, over these many years, a more loyal friend.

One time (before the 1965 picture above was taken near Saugatuck, Michigan) he told me he wanted to be a painter but he didn't think his imagination could be confined within the boundaries of frames.

After stints as a merchant seaman on the Great Lakes, Richard would arrive at my Ann Arbor apartment with fat wads of cash; he was the first person I knew to buy an entire pound of weed at once. He dumped it on a spread-newspaper on the floor for sorting; it was an astonishing volume of contraband to one like me who was accustomed to nickel bags, dime bags. (The newspaper on the floor would have been The Ann Arbor News -- a good newspaper; it printed its last issue just the other day.)

Several of my Michigan friends migrated to Provincetown, a fishing village/artists colony at the tip of Cape Cod. Richard, hopping onto a Greyhound bus with another of those wads of cash in his pocket, was the first of us to do so. He wanted to become "a simple fisherman" as he'd heard John Lennon say he sometimes longed to be. In Provincetown, as evidenced above, Richard came to accept the boundaries of frames. He also caught a few fish. I've had mako shark just once ... it was at Richard's table. I love fish ... I've had some amazingly good fish, but that mako shark was the best ever.

Happy Birthday my friend!

Friday, July 24, 2009

Walter Benjamin - Part III

Last night Mark and I went to see the movie "Bruno". It was outrageous and hilarious and delightfully politically incorrect.  In text-message lingo I could say "lol" but I don't know if it means "laughed out loud" or "lots of laughs".  Either I guess.  Both.

I came home.  I fell into bed.  I randomly opened the Walter Benjamin book: Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings.

Apropos of what I quoted from Marcel Proust and Orhan Pamuk the other day regarding the memoirist's accuracy, I came upon this in Benjamin's essay "A Berlin Chronicle":

What Proust began so playfully became awesomely serious. He who has once begun to open the fan of memory never comes to the end of its segments; no image satisfies him, for he has seen that it can be unfolded, and only in its folds does the truth reside; that image, that taste, that touch for whose sake all this has been unfurled and dissected; and now remembrance advances from small to smallest details, from the smallest to the infinitesimal, while that which it encounters in these microcosms grows ever mightier. Such is the deadly game that Proust began so dilettantishly, in which he will hardly find more successors than he needed companions.

Intellectually ill-equipped for such depths of thought I fell asleep.

Monday, July 20, 2009

Walter Benjamin - Part II


Walter Benjamin experimented with hashish, opium, and mescaline (as, it now occurs to me, I have also); I believe he recorded his impressions in journals, but various people have gathered these entries and concocted various and variously titled essays as if they were a work completed by Benjamin.

Wanting to give an example of his prose, here is one of his journal entries written after using hashish and going to a restaurant in Marseilles; it strikes me as amusing and authentic:

First I ordered a dozen oysters.  The man wanted me to order the next course at the same time.  I named some local dish.  He came back with the news that none was left.  I then pointed to a place in the menu in the vicinity of this dish, and was on the point of ordering each item, one after another, but then the name of the one above it caught my attention, and so on, until I finally reached the top of the list.  This was not just from greed, however, but from an extreme politeness toward the dishes that I did not wish to offend by refusal.

[Also] I have forgotten on what grounds I permitted myself to mark the beat [of the jazz music heard from down the street] with my foot.

Wednesday, July 15, 2009

Walter Benjamin; July 15, 1892 - Sept. 27, 1940

One morning in 1992 I dreamed that I was not me, but was, rather, one Walter Benjamin.  It was one of those dreams that stays with you throughout the day, you can't shake it off. 

I'd just read a biography of the French philosopher Michel Foucault who wrote that the dream "is the birth of the world, the origin of existence itself." Foucault's biographer, Jim Miller, explained: "The dream must therefore be approached, not as a psychological symptom to be analyzed, but rather as a key for solving the riddle of being."

Having become Walter Benjamin was a riddle alright. The name itself was but vaguely familiar to me, from one of the essays in Susan Sontag's Under the Sign of Saturn, which I'd read eleven years earlier.

Benjamin was a German Jew, an essayist himself. He spent much of his life in Paris, most of his time in the library.

I was happy to consider becoming him. Frankly, being me had become tiresome. Now, simply during a night of sleep, I'd come upon a way to avoid myself.

Naturally curious about my new self, and wondering how I should conduct myself, I re-read Sontag's essay about Benjamin. Then I spent a Saturday in bookshops in Amherst and Northampton, buying a few volumes:  Benjamin's essays; his letters; and a biography of him.

I read that Benjamin died in 1940.  I happen to have been born at one-fifteen a.m. on the first day of 1940. What if he had died on the day I was born? Soul-transference? If that turned out to be so, then I was really onto something. (This was before Wikipedia, before Google; I'd have to make some effort before learning the actual date of his death.)

Then on the Sunday after my dream a reference was made to my new self in the then current issue of The New York Times Book Review. This leant me a prestige which my previous self had not achieved. It happened, too, to be the first time I'd noticed the name of Walter Benjamin in print sine reading the Sontag essay those eleven years earlier. This seemed both peculiar and timely.

Cosmic?  Maybe I'd at last made contact with my guardian angel.

Then, a week later, in the same periodical, I beheld yet another reference to me!

So it seemed just short of astonishing when, on the following Sunday, a third reference to me was printed!

I was somebody!
*
I'd recently re-read a little book I'd bought thirty years earlier, an essay on Baudelaire by Jean-Paul Sartre. There was a quote from one of Baudelaire's own essays: It is at once by and through poetry, by and through magic that the soul catches a glimpse of the splendors which lie on the other side of the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to our eyes, these tears are not the proof of excessive enjoyment; they are much more the sign of an irritated melancholy, a nervous postulation, a nature exiled in an imperfect world which would like to take possession at once on this very earth of a revealed paradise. Thus the principle of poetry is strictly and simply human aspiration towards a higher beauty and this principle appears in an enthusiasm, an elevation of soul; an enthusiasm which is completely independent of passion, which is the intoxication of the heart, and of truth which is the field of reason.

I'd felt a close spiritual kinship with Baudelaire; I recognized a soul-mate, and I underlined passage after passage of Sartre's descriptions of Baudelaire which reminded me, for better or for worse, of myself. Like Baudelaire I possessed an irritated melancholy, and I was a postulant at the back door of the house of youth and love. And, god knew, I was, like Baudelaire, exiled in an imperfect world.
*
Then, returning to the Benjamin books, I read that he actually considered himself to be a spiritual descendant of Charles Baudelaire.  I had to set aside the book when I read this fact.  The word uncanny drifted into my mind.  Now I was thinking that Walter Benjamin was my spiritual father and Charles Baudelaire was my spiritual grandfather.  It took me nearly half an hour before I could compose myself mentally so that I could continue reading.
*
I dug out Susan Sontag's book and re-read "Born Under the Sign of Saturn," her essay about Benjamin.

"Slowness is one characteristic of the melancholic temperament," Sontag writes of Benjamin. "Blundering is another, from noticing too many possibilities, from not noticing one's lack of practical sense. And stubbornness, from the longing to be superior -- on one's own terms."

That is me, I thought. And that's me. And that's me too!

In The Origin of German Traverspiel, Benjamin refers to himself as "apathetic, indecisive, slow"

Those are me too. Boy are they ever me.

A mark of Benjamin's temperament, writes Sontag -- and she's writing about me as well --"is the self-conscious and unforgiving relation to the self, which never can be taken for granted. The self is a text -- it has to be deciphered .... The self is a project, something to be built .... And the process of building a self and its works is always too slow. One is always in arrears to oneself."

Further, Walter Benjamin and I are "dissimlative" and "secretive." We have "complex, often veiled relations with others." We have "feelings of superiority, of inadequacy," and we are "baffled" about getting "what we want," baffled even at "properly (or consistently) naming that want."
*
Walter Benjamin "kept numbered lists of all the books he read." I do this too except mine are dated, not numbered.

For Benjamin, as for me, books are not just books, but are "contemplative objects, stimuli for reveries."
*
In his essay Agesilaus Santander, Benjamin "feels not that life is worth living but that suicide is not worth the trouble."

That sentiment rings so true to me; I wish I had thought to express it with exactly those words.
*
When I eventually learned that Walter Benjamin had not died at exactly one-fifteen a.m. on the first day of 1940, but rather late in September of that year, I quickly rationalized: of course, it would take some months for a suddenly released soul to find the new body it wants to reside within; and, after all, Benjamin's soul had had to find its way all the way from Spain, where he died, to Indiana, where I was born, and where, as a consequence of such a long journey, I spent the first nine months of my life without a soul.

It was temptingly easy to make everything make such marvelous sense.
*
In Agesilaus Santander, again, Walter Benjamin writes, "I came into the world under the sign of Saturn -- the star of the slowest revolution, the planet of detours and delays ...."

I too was born under the sign of Saturn.

After a while I came to believe that, yes, there must be something to astrology after all, though I'd have been hard-pressed to articulate my beliefs, for I knew next to nothing about the subject except that I am a Capricorn and Walter Benjamin was a Cancer and we both were born under the sign of Saturn; therein must lay the explanation for my special kinship with the man whose very identity I had felt impelled to steal for my own use.

After a couple months of trying out my new identity, I became tired of thinking of my new self, and it was hopeless to explain it to others.  How could I introduce them to a new self which was difficult even for me to become accustomed to?

I foreswore that new self and went back to being just me -- a nobody, once again, and that was just fine; I'm good at enjoying myself.
*
Despite having once felt that suicide was "not worth the trouble," Benjamin did, in horrible circumstances that he can't have foreseen, take the trouble. According to Peter Demetz, the editor of one collection of Benjamin's writings:

Benjamin crossed the French-Spanish border with a small band of
fellow exiles, but was told on the Spanish side by the local
functionary (who wanted to blackmail the refugees) that Spain
was closed to them and that they would be returned in the morning
to the French authorities who were just waiting to hand them over
to the Gestapo. Benjamin -- totally exhausted, and possibly sick --
took an overdose of morphine, refused medical help, and died in the
morning, while his fellow refugees were promptly permitted to pro-
ceed through Spanish territory to Lisbon.

*
I am a groupie for authors.

I admire them like other people admire movie stars.

I love Walter Benjamin. He's one of those rare few whose books you
can open to any page, begin reading anywhere, and be carried away to
wonderful places. Sontag referred to him as "a prince of the intellectual
life." However ridiculous my pose, how can I not have thoroughly
enjoyed, off and on for a while, imagining myself as him?

"The melancholic's intensity and exhaustiveness of attention set
natural limits to the length at which Benjamin could develop his ideas,"
writes Sontag. "His major essays seem to end just in time, before they
self-destruct."

This is one of my major essays.

Note to Simon

It's not Proustian except that he may have laid eyes on it but something that sticks in my mind from recent time in Paris is an amazing from-the-period Art Nouveau styled restaurant called Restaurant Julian at 16, rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis (nearest Metro: Strasbourg-Saint-Denis).  You don't have to eat there but just step in and look around at this amazing from-the-period place; I've never seen anything like it.  It should be a museum but its a working restaurant.  And of course I had forgotten to bring my camera when the hotel desk clerk sent us there.

Sunday, July 12, 2009

Smoking in the Boy Scouts - Part II


In my April 29th post I related the incident of my buddy Nick and me getting kicked out of the Boy Scouts when the Scout Master, Wayne Tombaugh, discovered
us smoking behind the altar in the Methodist Church.

A couple of years later on a hot summer day I was moseying back from hanging out along the creek, and had reached Main Street. It was one of those boring days. Nobody needed any work done ... no lawns needed mowed, no hay bales needed unloading and stacking, no chicken farmers needed any chicken shit shovelled. My buddies must have been busy or I'd have been with one of more of them. Then, as I moseyed along, Wayne Tombaugh called to me from across the street. "I got something I wanna ask you," he said.

"The Scouts are going to Brown County State Park and Turkey Run State Park to camp for five days next week," he said. "And I've got a problem ... nobody wants to share a tent with Eric Reed (not his real name) because they think he's too weird, and I was wondering if you'd maybe come along and buddy-up with him and help me keep an eye on him?"

What horseshit. Eric Reed, a couple years younger than me, was bright and fun and way ahead of everybody else in some ways. He had his own cool. I agreed to go along when Wayne Tombaugh said he'd consider it a favor and I wouldn't have to pay the fee that everyone else was having to pay. And, like I said, I was bored.

Turkey Run State Park is famous for deep ravines riven by glacial behavior thousands upon thousands of years ago. On our very first day there, after pitching our tent dangerously close to the edge of a ledge, which was Eric's idea of fun, we decided to wander away from everyone to sneak a smoke. With me leading, we made our way through dense undergrowth, reaching our arms out front and pushing the bushes and small trees aside to clear a way. You couldn't see ahead at all through the dense growth. As soon as I thought we were a good distance from the rest of the troop I lit a cigarette. I fought ahead for a couple more paces. All of a sudden then I stepped ahead not onto ground but onto air. I tumbled and then, flat on my face, slid down the gravelly side of a fifteen- or twenty-foot deep ravine. Finally, at the bottom, I came to a halt in a heap. I reached up and touched my face where it hurt. My hand came away bloodied. My forearms and the heels of my palms were abraded; they hurt like hell. Eric called, "George! George! Where are you?" "Down here," I yelled back, and added, "Be careful, there's a big drop-off." I looked around to see if there was an easier way to get back up than the steep route I'd come down. I checked to see if my arms still worked, if my legs still worked. I expected Eric would maybe crawl to the edge and look down to see what had happened, but I didn't see him. Shortly enough, about fifteen feet off to the left from where I'd fallen I saw his hands reach into the air and create an opening in the growth. He looked down. "Oh, no!" he gasped. "You didn't put out your cigarette, did you? That was our last match!"

The rest of the week went fine. Eric was a lot of fun.
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(These quotes and these stated distances are, of course, merely as exact as my memory's idea of them. The Turkish Nobel winner Orhan Pamuk, whose Istanbul is absolutely one of my favorite books, wrote, "What is important for a memoirist is not the factual accuracy of the account but its symmetry." I hope this bit of memoir has good symmetry.
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(And, for that matter, my main man Proust wrote: The places that we have known belong now only to the little world of space on which we map them for our own convenience. None of them was ever more than a thin slice, held between the contiguous impressions that composed our life at that time; remembrance of a particular form is but regret for a particular moment; and houses, roads, avenues are as fugitive, alas, as the years.)

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Sylvia Plath - Part III (Edward Butscher: Trailblazer)

I give Edward Butscher a lot of credit. I think this was the earliest truly comprehensive study of Sylvia Plath and her poetry. I noticed it in a bookstore in Michigan in 1977; I already knew Plath's poems, had already read Alvarez's essay on Plath's suicide, but wanted to know more and more, and this book told me a good part of that more and more that I wanted to know. It was what amounted to a godsend to one poised to fall into an obsession. What amazed me then and even more now is that while doing a tremendous amount of research for this book, and with continual frustrations dealing with the Plath estate over permissions to quote from her work and other matters, Butsher was simultaneously teaching English at a high school on Long Island; despite all the difficulties he got the book written. There were at the time just a few books about Plath. Today there must be close to a couple hundred. In my opinion, all of Plath's subsequent biographers owe Butscher gratitude; he cleared many trails. ((Sylvia Plath: Method and Madness was updated by Butscher and re-issued in 2003.)

I wrote Butscher after I read the book in early 1977, complimenting him and, apparently, pointing out an error; I no longer remember what the error was.

Sunday, July 5, 2009

William J. Miller - July 5, 1912 - March 26, 1989

William Miller was an editorial writer for Life magazine and for the New York Herald Tribune; he also wrote political books (in the days when there weren't a hundred such books published weekly ... in the days, in other words, when quality counted).  He had his photo taken with President Johnson; the latter inscribed it, autographed it, and gave it to William Miller.

William's wife, Anna, was esteemed by no less than Adlai Stevenson!

The Millers, whom I never met, are buried down the road from where I'm living.  These pictures hang on the wall of the home of one of William and Anna's greatest creations, their daughter Madeline.  Madeline has a world-class giggle, a world-class laugh, a world-class good nature, a world-class good humor, and a world-class good heart!  She's not only all that but she is also my good friend.  I'm glad the Millers created her!


Friday, July 3, 2009

Juanita Luckenbill Harmon - July 3, 1921 - July 30, 1998

Happy birthday to my Aunt Juanita, my mother's youngest sibling. Juanita was fun and funny. At my mother's wake in 1989 the room became very crowded when the ladies from the Rosary Sodality, along with the young Father DeVolder, came to say the rosary. The room, airless with all these people crowded into it, and with the doors closed against any intrusion upon our supplications, became closer and closer as our fingers moved slowly from bead to bead, through decade after decade, and as my mind meandered through memories of the joyful mysteries and of the sorrowful mysteries and of the blessed mysteries and of the mysteries that are just plain.

Just as Father DeVolder's starring role was coming to an end, Aunt Juanita suddenly crumpled to the floor in a faint; it was as if she'd stolen the priest's exit.

Recovering on the sofa, vacated now for her repose, and daintily resting the back of her hand against her forehead, she was miffed to hear it said that she had fallen.

"I didn't fall," she snitted. "I got down on the floor because I could feel it coming on and then I fainted."