Anthony Hecht, Algeria

I've been reading  Anthony Hecht or, more exactly, I've been reading a lecture Christopher Ricks gave at Bard College on Hecht's borrowings or allusions or whatever you want to call them, from Eliot and others. Hecht is one of the poets who fascinate and repel me equally (Robinson Jeffers is another).  Why?  Probably because he does things I both do and don't want to do, writing, and on subjects that fascinate me as well, viz, the intersection of violence and eroticism.  I gorge on his poems and feel sick.  They make me think of over-furnished rooms, with moldings, parquet ("parquet-moulures-cheminées," as the French say of Paris's c19 Hausmanian style), gilding and lots of expensive bibelots (="inanités sonores")--see Hecht's caustically sensual poem on the 16th arrondissement and the Algerian War, "The Deodand."

Algeria, the Sahara, clean as an ocean.  Saw an aerial view, recently, of Ghardaia.  Looked down at the flat roofs and tried to pick out the place we stayed in as students on a Canadian university-sponsored trip in the summer of....  Too hot to sleep.  We wrapped ourselves in wet bedsheets and climbed up to the roofs.  There were no other visitors; it was the end of the Algerian war.  

Keywords:

• Anthony Hecht
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• Christopher Ricks
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• Robinson Jeffers

Calvino, by Calvino

In an article I'm reading (Sergio Blazina, "Italo Calvino:  Un Linguaggio fra Scienzo e Mito"), quoting Calvino on the language of science and what it can bring to the language of literature (my quick translation):

  "...the model of mathematical language, of formal logic, can keep the writer from the repetition into which words and images fall through their false use.  ...The writer must not believe he has found something absolute, however; here too the example of science can help:  in the patient modesty with which it considers each result as part of a perhaps infinite series of approximations."

(This is the/a key to Calvino's story, "L'avventura di un fotografo." )

 And also:

"In Palomar...a continuous need of real knowledge has led me to limit the field, descend ever further into the details.  In the end this type of research shows itself inexhaustible." 

  The game of language, in Calvino, a serious game, with serious objectives, despite the skepticism, despite the irony, is a grate of light (see his story, "The Count of Montecristo,") in the wee hours feeling of "what's the point"? I want to see it as a way out of Beckett.

Keywords:

• Italo Calvino

Pierre Boulez

Pierre Boulez at the Louvre. Went back to see it again this afternoon. Two rooms, a few drawings, water colors (Delacroix, Degas, Klee, Kandinsky, Giacometti), four glass cases of musical scores (Boulez, Stravinsky, Wagner, Berio...), a copy of Mallarme's "Coup de Des," four blocks of text about the sketchy, the unfinished, the ongoing, the fragment, the part for the whole, the erasure.

Keywords:

• Boulez
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• contemporary art
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• Louvre