Jenny Diski fanmail

It's graduation weekend, which means they've planted brand new, grown trees in front of the vacant lot that a year ago was a library and has been a demolition site with dinosaur machines chewing up concrete and spitting out rebar for most of the year; and sheathed the kiosques normally splattered with student notices for dicey activities in university-logo printed red plastic.

The latest London Review of Books has yet another installment in the Jenny Diski saga that I binge read the minute it enters the house (it takes a long detour via Paris). She is an amazing storyteller, and I am waiting to buy the book when it gets finished and read it all at once which, since she says she has terminal lung cancer, will likely be the last Diski--but in the meantime there is this incredible pleasure of reading her every two weeks in the LRB, which also has a wonderfiul Michael Hofmann review of the new Heaney Selected. Hofmann has just published a book of essays I haven't seen, but if they are a compilation of his reviews, I want that too.

Red sky to the west, blue above, stars coming out, airplanes circling, vague murmur of commuter traffic on highway 101 to the south. 

Rain and country music

Faint patter of drops on the skylight and a gust of wet air through the window: cause for celebration. Also this article about my daughter's set designs for the Nashville Country Music Awards today.

Desktop

I'm quite fond of my new desk. It's in the bedroom between two windows (more on the view later) and it's one of those folding tables people rent for events. I bought it from Amazon for something like $39.00 and what's great about it is the size--about six feet long, some kind of pebbly grey-ishwhite plastic surface on grey metal legs. At one end there's a computer screen my son salvaged for me. I use it when I'm proofreading a book manuscript: I can have my original translation text on one screen and the copy-edited manuscript on my laptop. Or vice versa. But right now the extra screen has two postcards taped to it: a Chardin still life I am particularly fond of from the Louvre, and a Cezanne postcard I also like (of his wife, full frontal, sitting in a chair). And also a sheet of paper with Goya's 'Third of May 1808'. Quite a different kettle of fish, Goya, as compared with Chardin or Cezanne. I like to think about how they can be so different and so great.

In front of the screen there is a pile of books, never mind which, then a goose-neck lamp from Ikea that looks like a mike, a tangle of cables, a two-volume Webster's Universal Dictionary of the English Language (A-LITH and LITHISTIDA-ZYX) from 1937. I took it from my parents some years ago. It is leather bound, in red and an orangey-yellow, with a lot of Moorish-looking tooling. The pages are yellow and have a good old-book smell. It's not pristine, it looks as if it had been used. Occasionally it's useful for some historical research, but otherwise I mostly use my computer's dictionary. In Paris I have an OED compact, but that's another story. The dictionaries are propping up the ten or so books I need for book reviews that haven't yet appeared in print, and a bunch of Poetry Book Society bulletins that I keep there because I haven't really figured out where else to keep them and I'm afraid I might forget where I put them otherwise. Then there are some file folders in which I try to keep the disorder of my correspondence, bills, charity solicitations, at bay, and then a printer, which is out of ink at the moment.

That's the back layer. The front layer: printer paper, both fresh and already-printed-on-one-side. A stapler. A letter from a French organisation telling me they received my change-of-address in the Etats-Unis-d'Amerique. A glasses case without any glasses but with a soft cloth for keeping them clean. A cup with pens and pencils and a pair of scissors with yellow handles. More cables. A place for my laptop, which is on my lap.

Two wheels better

My biking husband having rammed a car from behind and suffered mild damage to a knee and having been told to stay off his bike for a while, which means he needs the car to get to work, I have become more dependent on my bike for transportation. Which I find I enjoy.

I've been exploring routes to the places I go. I have traded my short-but-riddled- with-car-traffic route to campus, for a longer route that lets me glide under the train tracks we now live on the wrong side of, instead taking the automobile overpass. The friendly little bike and pedestrian tunnel leads to a bike path along the tracks. Sometimes a homeless man settles there, a kind of itinerant peddlar, with colourful bundles spread around him, hailing passersby. A fixture. Sometimes a train whistles by, on the other side of a wire fence you'd have to be pretty determined to get over (some people are). The bike path runs behind a medical centre, a shopping mall and the high school football pitches. It takes me almost the whole way to an opening in a fence with direct access to campus, via more sports fields (grass hockey, baseball, volleyball, a collection of swimming pools and a sport I don't recognise played with polo-type bats).

I could probably get to Ikea on my bike too, but I may not be ready for that yet. No train in that direction, but a 6-lane interstate highway to cross. And how would I get my big boxes back home?

Frank Bidart, "The Fourth Hour of the Night" (Poetry Magazine, May 2015)

(from Part X, the Taoist Master to the Great Khan)

Because you could not master whatever

enmeshed you

you became its slave — 

You learned this bitterly, early.

In order not to become its slave

you had to become its master.

You became

its master.

Even as master, of course, you remain its slave.

I was listening to Bidart read his poem this morning and when I came to these lines they felt like a commentary on the argument I was having with myself here yesterday: mastery versus refusal of mastery (or is it the appearance of the refusal of mastery?) or Yeats and Auden versus Beckett and Zbigniew Herbert. I suppose mastery is another word for power, over words, over people. Blanchot in The Book to Come, which I am still reading, has a chapter on Beckett in which he analyzes Beckett's silences, that I think is relevant, too, although I only partly understand it. Bidart's poem is a take on the whole existential problem of why write--and a lot of other things--being itself the performance of this argument in a long narrative poem ostensibly about power, or mastery. I was skeptical when I began to listen to it; by the end I felt Bidart had--had what? Well, he moved me.

"All changed, changed utterly: a terrible beauty is born."

I am rereading Yeats' "Easter 1916" along with a commentary on it, and thinking about how the words "terrible beauty" came to mind looking at the ruins of the Twin Towers and  video of 9/11. The fascination people ("we") feel, replaying the event mentally, our total recall years later of where we were when, the promptness with which pretty much everyone can remember and recount "their" 9/11. What's the compulsion to say "I was there'?

Here's what Langdon Hammer has to say about "Easter 1916" in a Yale University lecture I happened upon:

"How can something be changed utterly? [...] I said that Yeats looks on the modern with a sense of both horror and a fascination, a compulsion almost. Well, it's a "terrible beauty" he sees that draws him in this way. He sees, specifically, the passion of the revolutionary's act and he finds it beautiful. Yeats aestheticizes their political action. He finds beauty in it, it seems even or especially because it is terror-filled... ".

No one could write a poem like "Easter 1916" or even Auden's "September 1, 1939" today. Not using that tone. Many more layers of irony--and a different kind of irony from either Yeats's or Auden's--are required. You'd have to examine much more closely, and more skeptically, our fascination with the terror and the beauty, the passion of people ready to die for what they believe. Yeats believes in heroes, even as he questions his own admiration and their actions; Auden knowingly left his shield on the battlefield and writes about that, and then later, tellingly, about "The Shield of Achilles." Zbigniew Herbert, whose position and language I feel sympathy for, in "Five Men" shows us prisoners the night before they are to be shot, talking about "an escapade in a brothel / of automobile parts /...how vodka is best / after wine you get a headache...":

          five men 

          two of them very young 

          the others middle-aged

          nothing more

          can be said about them

Yeats and Auden, like Paul Muldoon, are virtuoso writers of verse. Herbert has another esthetic--Herbert couldn't have written the poems he wrote using the vision and highly-wrought language of Yeats, Auden or Muldoon. Beckett had to bar that language too. Where am I going with this? 

May 1 in the south of France

Strange how you can be here and there. Here, California, where my neighbour's tree is casting large shadows on the back of his very blue house (I've only ever seen a man about). There, the Vaucluse, where my daughter is spending a few days, and sends another picture of flowers, a rose and an iris. The scorched lampshade is a remnant of family history.

Wild flowers, the Vaucluse

Somewhere, recently, I read how John Cage, living in a cacaphonous place, decided to use the noise, not hate it.  

I think of this when I think of the differences between the sounds of living in a Bay Area suburb (commuter train whistle, leafblowers, birds, dogs, a bicycle swishing past) and living in downtown Paris (jackhammers, bells, honking cars, loud arguments, one-sided (cell phone) or two (homeless person with passerby). On the whole I prefer the multi-layered city noises...

My science writer daughter (@catBrahic) is in the south of France for a few days, picking field flowers, even if--I think--the weather has been wet and/or windy. Here's today's bouquet: