February 2009

February 12      Memoir Fantasies

I've been thinking this week of writing a memoir of life in a 60s commune. It might give me a thread on which to start stringing some tales and anecdotes. So I've started to look around to see how many have actually been published. Looks like two or three on Amazon in addition to Boyle's novel Drop City.

This is probably because I'm deep into Doris Lessing's novel "The Good Terrorist." She describes a radical group who are living in a squat in London. My memoir would be fake, imaginary, maybe a little political, not so much druggy as idealistic, not to say naive.

February 15     Day Off

Yesterday by myself in Boston. Bad lunch on Newbury at Bouchée. Bought books and magz at Trident and Borders. Saw Joanne Mattera's encaustic pieces at the Arden and good stuff as always by Bernd Haussmann at the Chase. Lots of empty store fronts on the street but people out in the sunlight as though nothing has happened. Got out to Waltham and got lost but got to the Rose about forty minutes before it closed. Asking for directions I chanced into a chat with a guy who works in the president's office at Brandeis. I said Listen, I hope it is not true that you are getting ride of the Rose. He said, Well, & shook his head, hand leaning on my car door, the window of the passenger side down. That was a Hoorrrible news item I said, about the closing. The light changed and I said I had to go. But at least I hope I got some sort of message sent into the president's office. At the Rose itself the front windows were plastered with protests signs by the students complaining that the president was selling the soul of the place for fast cash. Best protest sign---'ATM" in big red letters right over the front door.

February 16       What do I know?

Maybe the art collection at Brandeis is really not that great? In the art world, the collecting world, could be that it is a fairly mediocre collection. Just don't know.

February 19                                                 Barthelme and Beckett

Now that I am back to Beckett I took special interest in Louis Menand's piece in this week's New Yorker on Donald Barthelme. Seems DB felt that he was working under the influence of Beckett, extending, expanding, developing from what Beckett had started and accomplished. Menand makes clear (reviewing Tracy Daugherty's new biography) that Barthelme got permission from his readings of Beckett to experiment with prose collage as he did in his own work. Lucid Menand look at how much Barthelme worked with the visual artists of the day---Rauschenberg in particular. But by the end of the article I was not at all clear that Barthelme's sense of prose was really under the inspiration of Beckett. What that would be I'm not yet sure. Somehow I wonder whether what Beckett found to do with language (and feeling + some thought) is necessarily echoed in collagist writing. But then what is? Perhaps anything could be. Perhaps not. (Just learned that "perhaps" was a favorite word for Beckett.)

February 24     winter goes on

Strange sense of time warp all day today. Heavy snow last night, so there's that. We're still in Winter even though the slant of the sunlight every day sings more and more Spring Spring Spring (Cole Porter version, if it exists).
The Oscars last night. Weird show, also a bit time warpy?

And this evening after skimming more of Susan Cheever's memoir I finished Doris Lessing's novel The Good Terrorist. Liked it a lot but by the end I wondered if I had not read it years ago. It is from 1985. Could be that she just captures that period so well----IRA bombings in London. She captures well I think how an odd group of young misfits could end up bombing the front of a big hotel, rather like what happened in Mumbai a few months ago. Differing ideological fogs perhaps but her novel would say, well, but the interior psychological weather at work within terrorists may not be as different from culture to culture as we might at first assume. Lessing's treatment of her characters, their motives, is as subtle and complex as any "post-modernist fabulist" would want yet she writes firmly within the tradition of literary realism. Psychological realism without any doctrines or guiding dogmas---at least none detectable.

The result is not a tragic novel but a moving and sad one. Lessing manages to make us sympathetic with this cluster (these days we would use the more hip term "clusterf*ck" of spoiled middle class revolutionaries and fully exasperated with them at the same time. I can hear her saying, well, yes, that is the point of "realism" in the first place, isn't it? Make sure you look up the video on YouTube of hearing the news that she has won the Nobel Prize---after all these years. "Oh, Christ," she says, walking from a cab to her front door as a group of reporters tells her.

John Lukacs, my history prof from freshman year at LaSalle, has a new book out this month. Ordered it. Continues his memoir. A reprint, I found out on Amazon, of his earlier book, "Confessions of an Original Sinner," has a striking photo of himself as a young man, maybe early to mid-thirties, probably soon after he arrived in this country from Hungary? I did not know until I looked at his Wikipedia article that he had had to work in a Hungarian labor battalion for converted Jews because his mother was Jewish. I did know he had deserted the Hungarian army to get out before the Russians arrived and managed to get to the States.

His book is called Last Rites.

February 24      Beckett comments on today's market and the banks

It's the old story, they want to be entertained, while doing their dirty work, no, not entertained, soothed, no, that's not it either, solaced, no, even less, no matter, with the result they achieve nothing, neither what they want, without knowing exactly what, nor the obscure infamy to which they are committed, the old story. You wouldn't think it was the same gang a a moment ago, or would you? What can you expect, they don't know who they are either, nor where they are, nor what they're doing, nor why everything is going so badly, so abominably badly, that must be it. So they build up hypotheses that collapse on top of one another, it's human, a lobster couldn't do it. Ah a nice mess we're in, the whole pack of us, is it possible we're all in the same boat, no, we're in a nice mess each one in his own peculiar way.

The Unnamable 372

February 25       just how dire things have gotten

In Wal Mart this afternoon I checked out the new issue of GQ.

The extent of our economic crisis hit home within the first twenty pages.

A whole page, color photos, devoted to telling us that could shine our own shoes.

Also noted that short sleeve shirts are now in stock. I read the

opening page of Danielle Steele's new book.

Found out too, in N Geo, that a better light bulb than the current florescent things which give a terrible light and use dangerous mercury that you know too many people will release by breaking the things, is coming. The LED bulb.

February 26     Larry Poons Talks About Art

an interview with Robert Ayers.

When Larry Poons left high school in 1955 his ambition was to become a composer. Despite his art teacher telling him he could “do something in art,” he was convinced that he couldn’t draw and decided to attend the New England Conservatory of Music. It was while he was there that he began to take his painting more seriously, and he enrolled at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.  He had his first New York exhibit at the Green Gallery in 1963 and has enjoyed widespread artistic and critical respect ever since. He first came to attention with a series of vividly colored pictures that he now refers to as “dot paintings,” and then – as his art was drawn further into the discourse being developed by Clement Greenberg and other formalist writers – he made a sequence of radical “throw paintings” in which the physical substance of paint, and its natural properties of running, dripping, and congealing, seemed to be the art’s content.

Poon: Paintings are mistakes. You put a mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50 or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished. People say, “Oh, that’s a nice romantic thing to say.” But it’s not romantic. It’s like saying that physics can be finished. Real art is never finished. With applied art at least you can say, “OK. You’ve learnt this lesson.” Illustration doesn’t even get into this no-man’s land. But that’s the only place that art lives, if it’s any good.

Read the interview in its entirety on Robert Ayers’ blog, A sky filled with Shooting Stars.

via Poons, Letting it Rip « Slow Muse.

Poons has a show at the Danese Gallery in New York (until March 14).