...

Thu, 12 Nov 2009 18:40:40 GMT

“The artist Hannah Wilke was born Arlene Butter in 1940 and grew up in Manhattan and Long Island. She died of cancer at the age of 52. Wilke’s output was prolific and consistent. Through constant effort she maintained a visible career. At a certain point, perhaps the early 70’s, her work began addressing the following question:
If women have failed to make “universal” art because we’re trapped within the “personal,” why not universalize the “personal” and make it the subject of our art?
To ask this question, to be willing to live through it, is still so bold.
In 1974, after producing drawings, ceramics, and sculptural wall pieces—many of which involved a “tough, ambiguous depiction of traditional female imagery” (Douglas Crimp, 1972) for 11 years, Hannah started to insert her own image into her art. I don’t know what experiences or conditions in her life precipitated this. Was she pushed towards it by critics such as Phyllis Derfner, who wrote responding to her show of cunts fashioned out of washing material lint at Feldman in 1972:
“There is some wit in this but it is swamped by aggressive ideology...The ideology is that of women’s liberation. Females bodies have been shown, but only in an oppressive, ‘sexist’ manner. Wilke’s forthright repetitious presentation of the most intimate image of female sexuality is intended to be a cure for all this. I don’t see how it is supposed to work. It is boring and superficial.”
Unlike Judy Chicago and her bloated vaginal renditions of Great Cunts In History—a show that every mother in the world could take her daughters to—Hannah never was afraid to be undignified, to trash herself, to call a cunt a cunt. “I wanted to throw back to the audience everything the world throws at me” (Penny Arcade, 1982). Hannah later told the Soho Weekly News how she’d collected ‘material’ for this work over several years by doing laundry for Claes Oldenburg, her companion at that time.”

--Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

Wed, 11 Nov 2009 01:23:58 GMT

"It's weird, I never really wondered whether I'm 'your type.' But maybe action's all that really matters now. What people do together overshadows Who They Are. If I can't make you fall in love with me for who I am, maybe I can interest you with what I understand. So instead of wondering 'Would he like me?' I wonder 'Is he game?'

--Chris Kraus, I Love Dick

Tue, 06 Oct 2009 22:11:10 GMT

This impossible position.
This position that does not even give the most pleasure.
And yet we place all our hope in this touching.

--Juliana Spahr

Fri, 28 Aug 2009 05:27:15 GMT

"I am standing in front of a precipice into which I may fall, but I am not afraid to fall and therefore will not fall. God does not want me to fall, because He understands me whenever I fall. I went for a walk once, and it seemed to me that there was blood on the snow, and so I ran, following the trail. I had the impression that somebody had killed a man, but he was alive, and so I ran in another direction and saw a larger trail of blood. I was afraid, but I went in the direction of the abyss. I realized the trail was not blood, but piss."

--The Diary of Vaslav Nijinsky

Sun, 03 May 2009 16:47:56 GMT

"Today I awoke from a sound sleep with curses of joy on my lips, with gibberish on my tongue, repeating to myself like a litany— “Fay ce que vouldras!...fay ce que vouldras!” Do anything, but let it produce joy. Do anything, but let it yield ecstasy. So much crowds into my head when I say this to myself: images, gay ones, terrible ones, maddening ones, the wolf and the goat, the spider, the crab, syphilis with her wings outstretched and the door of the womb always on the latch, always open, ready like the tomb. Lust, crime, holiness: the lives of my adored ones, the failures of my adored ones, the words they left behind them, the words they left unfinished; the good they dragged after them and the evil, the sorrow, the discord, the rancor, the strife they created. But above all, the ecstasy!"

--Henry Miller
(from Tropic of Cancer)

Sun, 03 May 2009 16:32:04 GMT

The Will To
Charles Olson

all living things

transpire: love alone

transforms

desire

the measure

of the black chrysanthemum,

that nothing

is anything

but itself, is

too much: I alone

live in the sun.

How to outrage

creation

Wed, 08 Apr 2009 22:34:42 GMT

Personals
C.D. Wright

Some nights I sleep with my dress on. My teeth
are small and even. I don't get headaches.
Since 1971 or before, I have hunted a bench
where I could eat my pimento cheese in peace.
If this were Tennessee and across that river, Arkansas,
I'd meet you in West Memphis tonight. We could
have a big time. Danger, shoulder soft.
Do not lie or lean on me. I'm still trying to find a job
for which a simple machine isn't better suited.
I've seen people die of money. Look at Admiral Benbow. I wish
like certain fishes, we came equipped with light organs.
Which reminds me of a little known fact:
if we were going the speed of light, this dome
would be shrinking while we were gaining weight.
Isn't the road crooked and steep.
In this humidity, I make repairs by night. I'm not one
among millions who saw Monroe's face
in the moon. I go blank looking at that face.
If I could afford it I'd live in hotels. I won awards
in spelling and the Australian crawl. Long long ago.
Grandmother married a man named Ivan. The men called him
Eve. Stranger, to tell the truth, in dog years I am up there.

Fri, 02 Jan 2009 15:45:08 GMT

“I say nothing to no one. Nothing about what goes through my life, the anger, the wild movements of my body towards that dark, hidden word “pleasure.” I am modesty, I am silence itself. I say nothing. I express nothing. About what is important, nothing. It is there, unnamed, untouched.”

--Margurite Duras, undated journal

Wed, 17 Dec 2008 14:07:20 GMT

The Doomed in Their Sinking
William H. Gass

Crane went sudden as a springboard. The Gulf gave nothing back. My mother, I remember, took her time. She held the house around her as she held her bathrobe, safely doorpinned down its floorlength, the metal threads glinting like those gay gold loops which close the coat of a grenadier, though there were gaps of course…unseemly as sometimes a door is on a chain…so that to urinate she had to hoist the whole thing like a skirt, collecting the cloth in fat pleats with her fingers, wads which soon out-oozed her fists and sprang slowly away…one consequence…so that she felt she had to hover above the hole, the seat (clouds don't care about their aim), unsteadily…necessarily…more and more so as the nighttime days drew on, so that the robe grew damp the way the sweater on a long drink grows, soggy from edge to center, until I found I cared with what success she peed when what she swallowed was herself and what streamed out of her in consequence seemed me.

Though Hart shed his bathrobe frugally before he jumped, my mother, also saving, would have worn hers like the medal on a hussar straight through living room and loony bin, every nursing home and needle house we put her in, if those points hadn't had to come out (they confiscate your pins, belts, buckles, jewelry, teeth, and they'd take the air, too, if it had an edge, because the crazy can garrote themselves with a length of breath, their thoughts are open razors, their eyes go off like guns), though there was naturally no danger in these baubles to herself, for my mother was living the long death, her whole life passing before her as she went, the way those who drown themselves are said to have theirs pass…a consequence, yes…her own ocean like a message in a bottle, so that she sank slowly somewhere as a stone sill sinks beneath the shoes of pilgrims and tourists, not like Plath with pills, or Crane or Woolf with water, Plath again by gas, or Berryman from a bridge, but, I now believe, in the best way possible, because the long death is much more painful and punishing than even disembowelment or bleach, and it inflicts your dying on those you are blaming for it better than burning or blowing up—during an exquisitely extended stretch—since the same substance which poisons you, preserves, you both have and eat, enjoy and suffer your revenges together, as well as the illusion that you can always change your mind.

Alvarez, observing the immense diversity of his material, wisely offers no solutions. Yet because he does not rigorously differentiate sorts, define terms, regulate interpretations, exclude kinds, but is content to report, reflect, admonish, and look on, his "study" turns out to be gossipy and anecdotal, though sometimes splendidly so, as his account of the suicide of Sylvia Plath is, because Alvarez is sensitive and sympathetic, knows how to handle a text, and writes with conscience and skill about a subject which is close enough to his own personal concerns (he is himself a "failed" suicide) that one could reasonably expect it to shake both skill and conscience as though they were rags in a gale.

Yet my mother wasn't what we call a suicide, even though she died as though she'd cut her throat when the vessels burst there finally, and my father, who clenched his teeth till neither knees nor elbows would unfist, dying of his own murderous wishes like the scorpion who's supposed to sting itself to death—no—he wasn't one either: both had a terribly tenacious grip on life…so that some suicides will survive anything, and many who court death have no desire to wed her…it mixes us up….

Should suicide be regarded as the last stage of a series of small acts against the self, since the murderer who arsenics his wife little by little is still a murderer though she takes a decade dying; or does this confuse kinds of hostility in a serious way, because harsh words aren't the same as blows or their bruises, desire isn't adultery whatever Jesus preached, not even a degree of it? Cigarettes shorten our life, but the alcoholic's fuddle mimics death (departure) in a way the smoker's never does. What can we make of that? We shall manage something.

My mother managed. She was what we call a dedicated passive…liquidly acquiescent…supinely on the go. Still, she went in her own way—the way, for instance, her robe was fastened.

Socrates acquiesced to his own execution, others demand theirs. The Kamikaze pilot intends his death, but does not desire it. Malcolm Lowry, who choked on his vomit, evidently desired his, but did not intend it. Soldiers charging the guns at Verdun neither wished for death nor were bent on it, though death was what they expected. My mother accepted.

I used to think my father was the actively aggressive one because while he sat, temporized, bided and waited, he growled, swore, and made horrible faces.

Definitions of suicide, like definitions of adultery, are invariably normative, and frequently do little more than reflect the shallowest social attitudes, embody the most parochial perspectives. Above all (Alvarez stresses this even more strongly than Choron), these attitudes are for the most part deeply irrational. Failures may be executed, for example, while the corpses of successes are assaulted. Studies of suicide, including these two, are soon elaborately confused about desire, intention, deed, and consequence, ownership and responsibility (whether we belong to ourselves, society, or God); neglect the difference between act and action; refuse to decide whether to include deaths of soul (Rimbaud?) as well as deaths of body, since holy living may indeed be holy dying, so that physical and metaphysical murders become hopelessly intertwined; and they are content to record, with a tourist's widened eyes, the sweet, sour, wise, or benighted opinions of nearly everyone.

If we are to call suicide every self-taken way out of the world, then even the Platonic pursuit of knowledge, involving as it does the separation of reason from passion and appetite, is suicidal…as are, of course, the search for ecstatic states, and longings for mystical union. It is the habit of such examinations to mess up these matters as if they were so many paints whose purpose was purely to give pleasure to the fingers.

Nowadays the significance of a suicide for the suicide and the significance of that suicide for society are seldom the same. If, according to the social workers' comforting cliché, they are often a cry for help, they're just as frequently a solemn vow of silence.

Nevertheless, it is easy to imagine circumstances under which some of our conventional kinds of suicide would be impossible—impossible because we would simply refuse to recognize them. The liver fails. The veins collapse. Sleep seizes the wheel. No suicide there. Suppose that starving yourself were a "going-home-to-God"—no suicide there—while slashing your wrists were a "cowardly-copping-out." In order to speak your piece properly you might have to shoot, hang, or poison yourself. The liberated woman must do something manly, shotgun herself at the very least, avoid sleeping pills like the devil—that soothing syrup of the oppressed sex. If you don't want the manner of your dying to be a message to mankind, if your aim is just to get the hell out, then you will have to be as clever at disarming symbols as Mallarmé. Alas, the way we think and write about suicides would provide many with still another motive, an additional despair, were they alive again and mercilessly aware.

Breeding is not out of place even here. Petronius, the critics say, had class. Cato has consistently had a good press. And we write cheery loving thank-you notes; we put our affairs in order; we do not leap on top of people, run in front of cars owned by innocent strangers, bleed in public, allow the least hint of indecision, ambiguity, or failure to spoil our aim, and avoid every form of vulgar display. The ledge-huggers want to be coaxed, for instance. That's a suicide for shopgirls. My favorites are rather theatrical. Choron tells us how Arria, the wife of a Roman senator who'd been caught plotting, in order to stimulate her husband to his duty, plunged a sword into her breast and then handed it to him with the words: Paete, non dolet (It does not hurt). Others seek the third rail; swallow combs, crosses, safety pins, fountain pens, needles, nails; they blow up the planes they are riding in, smother themselves in plastic baggies, or simply find a wall and dash out their brains. Though methods, motives, meanings differ ("Whose head is hanging from the swollen strap?" asked Crane), most can be expected to mess up their deaths exactly as they've messed up their lives. Poor folks. Poor ways.

Never mind. If you pay with your life you get a ticket to the tent: martyrs, daredevils, the accident-prone, those who cheat "justice" as Hannibal did, or are condemned by it as Seneca was; those who would die rather than surrender, even en masse, as the Jews died at Massada; those too poor, too rich, too proud, too ineffably wicked; all addicts, Cleopatras, all desolate Didos, mystics, faddists, young sorrowful Werthers; the fundamentally frigid, who cannot allow life to give them any pleasure; the incurably ill, the mad, the metaphysically gloomy; widows who go up with the rest of the property, and all those who from disgust or rage protest this life with emblematic ignitions and ritual sacrifice…it's like cataloguing books according to the color of their covers…the mourners, the divided selves (not just Cartesians, severed into bum and bicycle as Beckett's men are, but those who are cut up into competing personalities as vicious as sisters in some Cinderella); then the downright stupid, the inept and careless, the sublimely heroic, the totally disgraced…the color may be significant (the blue cover of Ulysses is), but it is scarcely a mode of classification which carves reality at the joints…those whom guilt feeds on as if they were already carrion; the Virginia Woolfs, too, who enter their own imagery, and the ones for whom death is a deer park, a convent, a place in outer space; also the impotent, ugly, acned, lonely; the inadvertently pregnant, and otherwise those who embrace their assassins, or who have felt only the hold of their own hand, thus to come and go finally in the same way…everyone welcome.

Lost in lists, in the surveyor's sweepings, borne along on conjecture like gutter water, the same act can signify anything you like, depending on the system—even the mood or the line of the eye—which gives it meaning: I cock my head one way and it appears to me that my mother was murdered; I cock it another and she seems a specially vindictive suicide; while if I face firmly forward as one in military ranks she seems to have been overcome by a rather complex illness, a chronic and progressively worsening disease. Simply examining "suicides" is like trying to establish a science of—let's say—sallescape, which we can imagine contains the whys and wherefores of room-leaving. The word confers an imaginary unity upon a rabble of factors, and the ironic thing about suicide itself, intrinsically considered (and what my little litanies have been designed to demonstrate), is that it is a wholly empty act. It is—more than Rigaut, the Dada hero, was—an empty suitcase.

And if the suicide believes his final gesture, like the last line of an obscure poem, will unite, clarify, and give meaning to all that has gone before; or if actual poems have held offhand hints

The news from Spain got worse. The President of my Form
at South Kent turned up at Clare, one of the last let out of Madrid.
He designed the Chapel the School later built
& killed himself, I never
heard why
or just how, it was something to do with a bridge.
(Berryman: "Transit")

or seemed like chilling scenarios—

We have come so far, it is over.
Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
One at each little
Pitcher of milk, now empty.
(Plath: "Edge")

so that the line between literature and life appears underdrawn (before she killed herself, Sylvia Plath put out two mugs of milk for her children); or if he has fallen for a romantic comparison like Camus's "An act like this is prepared within the silence of the heart, as is a great work of art," then at least he will suffer no further disappointment dead, because, of course, acts aren't language, and there's no poetry at all in suicide, only in some accounts of it…significance, value in this sense, belongs solely to sentences. Actions, and other similar events, have meaning only secondarily, as we impute it to them, and so may mean many things to many people. Words are acts only secondarily. They principally exist in the systems which establish and define them (as numbers do in mathematics), so while feasting may mean one thing to a Jew and quite another to a Samoan, the word "Traum," uttered anywhere by anybody, remains irrevocably German.

Death will not fill up an empty life and in a line of verse it occupies only five letters of space.

Choron's readable little handbook, with its capsule summaries of speculation, its few tables of statistics, brief histories of opinions, merely provokes its questions, instead of asking them, and touches so lightly on all its subjects, they never feel it. Totally porous, the data are simply slowed down a trifle in seeping through. It resembles Choron's earlier Death and Modern Man in being a kind of easy introductory text.

It must have seemed like a good idea to sandwich his historical and literary studies of suicide between two kinds of direct acquaintance with it, all the more so when Alvarez's dissatisfaction with most theoretical investigations lies in their natural lack of contact with inner feeling, although much the same might be said of the physical laws for falling bodies, especially when the falling body is your own. The result of this division has not been entirely happy, however. Natural reticence, moral restraint, and simple lack of knowledge make his accounts of suicide from the inside-side seriously deficient in essential data, and therefore reduce them to sensitively told and frequently moving stories, although with less excuse Choron manages to make even the expounding of a theory sound like gossip (in effect: "Do you know what Plato said? Well—you won't believe this—but he said…").

Throughout The Savage God, too, again because it has no ruling principle, details fly out like sparks from every point that's struck, to fade without a purpose. The conditions surrounding Chatterton's suicide, for example, are certainly interesting, and Alvarez recites them nicely enough, but which ones really count, and which ones don't, and how do they count if they do, and if they do by how much? Vivid details, picturesque circumstances…my mother's copter-like bathroom posture, her gap-pinned robe, miscolored toes…well, their relevance isn't clear. Perhaps they have mainly a vaudeville function—to enliven without enlightening. Throughout, my mention of my mother merely mimics the problem.

The value of The Savage God, and it is high, lies mainly in the humanity of the mind which composed it, in the literary excellence of its composition, and the suggestiveness of many of its passages—the moment by moment thoughtfulness of its author as a reader.

The world of the suicidal is, in a certain sense (for all its familiar elements: pain, grief, confusion, failure, loss…) a private and impenetrable one, hence the frustration of those who are trying to help, and whose offers to do so, as raps on the glass disturb fish, often simply insult the suicide immersed in his situation. It is a consciousness trapped, enclosed by a bell jar, in the image which encloses Plath's novel, and Alvarez's book should do a great deal to correct the sentimentalist's happy thought that art is a kind of therapy for the sick and world-weary, and that, through it, deep personal problems get worked out.

Rilke sometimes took this attitude toward the writing of Malte Laurids Brigge, but if writing kept him sane, as he thought, it was one of the chief sources of his misery as well. Plath's last poems, considered in this way, are announcements and warnings; they are promises; and their very excellence was a threat to the existence of their author, a woman whom success had always vanquished, and who was certainly vanquished without it. Not only does the effort of creation often cultivate our problems at their roots, as Alvarez notes, the rich eloquence of their eventual formulation may give to some "solutions" an allure that is abnormal, one that art confers, not life. Malcolm Lowry, that eminent drunk, perhaps put Plath's particular case best when he wrote:

When the doomed are most elo- quent in their sinking,
It seems that then we are least strong to save….

Writing. Not writing. Twin terrors. Putting one's mother into words…. It may have been easier to put her in her grave.

Tue, 16 Dec 2008 15:37:40 GMT

“I don't want to reduce everything that exists to a paralyzed slavery but to the wild impossibility that can't avoid limits but can't stay inside them either.”

-- Bataille
(from Guilty)

Mon, 08 Dec 2008 21:04:41 GMT

The Kook Who Fell To Earth: Growing Up With Captain Beefheart

By: Lester Bangs, 1977

Part One: On the 7th Day He Invented a Whole New Universe

Captain Beefheart is back. Where did he go in the first place, you might ask. which is not such an easy question to answer.

Like many things to do with Don Van Vliet - who has been around in one incarnation or another for over a decade now and is considered by many people to be one of the few authentically avant-garde artists in rock - it may devolve to a simple statement that there is the world, and then there is the captain, who even in his material and musical presence might just as well be broadcasting beast linguals through a foghorn on the dark side of the moon so far as the mainstream pop audience of any era knows or cares.

If that's the way you feel, you might as well feel free to skip this article altogether. because after a brief period of commercial compromise in the name of 'accessibility' followed by a couple of years off the set entirely, he has returned to the music and the English language on his own terms - the terms he invented almost completely alone - and has been able to school a handful of other musicians over the years, offering his rare gifts to a world which has mostly found him difficult, eccentric at best, sometimes unnerving, perhaps insane, and generally incomprehensible.

There are just some things that are not for everybody and never will be, and the consensus with the captain is that you either take him whole and revel in what almost amounts to a parallel universe, or not at all.

Beefheart and I go back a long way. Way back to 1969, when I first managed to crack into print via the 'rolling stone' record review section and still was awe-struck that somebody would actually be willing to pay me the lordly sum of $12.50 just for putting down 500 or so words about a new album. Beefheart's 'Trout Mask Replica' was about the fourth or fifth album I got to review in public, and I guess I seized the time.

For years I had been listening to rock 'n' roll and jazz of all sorts, particularly avant-garde 'free' jazz. And, while eagerly following the rock experimentalism of the '60s, I had been just waiting for somebody to combine the two in a truly effective way. I don't mean that type of stuff where the jazz and the rock were just sort of stapled together - 'blood, sweat & tears' lounge music or this bumblebee muzak they call 'jazz-rock' today, which is total garbage that compromises both its sources and remains in a dead heat for ultimate offensiveness with disco.

I mean a kind of crazed, rangy, smokestack lightning to an explosion of zagbop noise that churned and rumbled with rock 'n' roll gristomp while it found the swooping freedom of the new jazz and took that liberty not to be fettered by things like time and key: which shoot off musical skyrockets in all directions at once, gripping and holding you precisely by the alchemical way it worked this tension between earth and heavenly fire.

It seemed to me that if just one person could figure out how to link these seeming polar opposites in some natural, organic way, then we would surely have a quantum leap in our collective musical language, or at least that part of it about which I cared most

passionately. I didn't know a damn thing about music technically then - as I still don't now - but early on I could hear the atonality and primeval shrieks of John Coltrane and Ornette Coleman in the feedback exploding from all those electric guitars, especially when everybody wandered down the garden path to outer space with acid rock, freak-out jams, all that stuff.

I dallied in the eclecticism of the Beatles and mothers of invention, but as we all learn sooner or later eclecticism just basically sucks and is usually the cloak of 'geniuses' who fail to have any real ideas of their own. That’s why Frank Zappa has remained a professionally contemptuous shit-head whose only really good song ever was: 'troubled every day'. I was much more interested in the velvet underground - who took rock distortion influenced by free jazz concepts just about as far as anybody would have thought it could go in things like 'sister ray' - and maybe it was exactly because they were basically a garage band and just didn't know any better that they were able to push the music to that kind of unprecedented extreme.

I had bought Beefheart’s first two album, liked them okay and even heard a little bit of that stuff I kept hoping for in there. but the first, 'Safe as Milk', was actually a pretty conventional record, and 'Strictly Personal' - while seeming to lean out of a delta blues gully into some interesting directions - was so wretchedly produced (or, in fact, re-produced via phasing etc. by blue thumb records president Bob Krasnow to make it more 'palatable' to the 'acid rock market') as to be offensive and nigh-unlistenable.

Then, in about July 1969, came 'Trout Mask Replica'. It hit like a bomb; in fact, the shellshock stayed with me long enough to seem as natural as breathing. I went to the record store one day, and there it was: this weird looking double album with a man with a fish's face and a most peculiar hat on the cover.

On the back this same guy, minus fish, was holding a table lamp out like a lethal weapon, encircled by his cohorts who had somehow managed to be even more bizarre looking than he was. One wore a dress. I could have sworn the guy next to him had lipstick on. One looked like a mad scientist who had let his hair grow for a year and then stuck his tongue in an electric socket. Lurking under the bridge they stood on, was some insect man from a Japanese monster movie.

Still, not being overly smitten with the last two albums and bearing in mind that this guy was somehow associated with Zappa - which meant that the whole thing might well be some kind of Los Angeles goof - I remained unconvinced, and probably walked home with something like 'Illinois speed press' that day.

But those were the times when record buyers were as experimental as the musicians, and you found yourself walking home with totally unknown quantities half the time. So it wasn't long before I found myself cruising down to a local department store where it would be easier to switch price-tags; I figured that even if it turned out to be a bunch of bullshit I’d still be getting two records for the price of one. When I got it out of the car and slit open the shrink-wrap my perplexity was compounded: the four sides listed 28 songs, and almost all of them had titles like 'Pachuco Cadaver', 'Bill's Corpse' and 'Neon Meate Dream of an Octafish'.

When I got home the bomb dropped. 'Trout Mask Replica' shattered my skull, realigned my synapses, made me nervous, made me laugh, made me jump and jag with joy. It wasn't just the fusion I’d been waiting for: it was a whole new universe, a completely realized and previously unimaginable landscape of guitars splintering and springing and slinging and even actually swinging off in every direction, as far as the mind could see. it was like a mad herd of Pecos bills hooting at the moon and hand-standing on jimson weed, while this beast voice straight out of one of Michael McClure’s 'ghost tantras' growled out a catarrh spew of images at once careeningly abstract and as basic and bawdy as the last 200 years of American folklore.

The whole thing thrashed in a brambly dissonant tangle which nevertheless maintained an unique internal structure and logic of its own, the guitars occasionally rounding a particularly precipitous bend to find themselves eyeball to eyeball with a madly squawking sax which hooted and jeered right back at them. Cacophony or kingdom come, I stayed under the headphones and played 'trout mask replica' straight through five times in a row that night....

the next step of course was to turn the rest of the world on to this amazing thing I’d found, which perhaps came closer to being a living, pulsating, slithering organism than any other record I’d ever heard. next day I carted it around just as I’d done with the velvet underground, and feverishly inflicted it upon all my friends, most of whom were even less impressed with this than my last find, whom they'd considered a bunch of New York fags who couldn't play their instruments.

They couldn't come up with much of anything to say about this one, except that it was a bunch of crazy shit and get it the hell out of here. I played it for my girlfriend, a Barbara Streisand fan who'd come across for the rolling stones and found the velvets titillatingly 'perverted' - she pronounced this 'disconcerting'. Christ, here I was carrying around a box which only contained an entire new language in it, and receiving a general consensus that jabberwocky might be too kind a word.

Finally I sat down and wrote all the reasons why I thought this was the most amazing record I had ever heard, mailed it off to 'rolling stone' and damn if they didn't print it. My editor told me later that some people there liked the elpee, but nobody really knew what to do with it, much less what there might be to say about it. As near as I can recall my own review consisted mostly of hyperkinetic babblings, but it was as unqualified a rave as was ever written. So straight records picked it up and reprinted every word in a full-page ad in all the music papers, which made me very proud of course, but didn't help the record sell any more copies.

I don't think any of the early straight albums sold any copies. Alice Cooper's first album came out about the same time, and Alice was still pretty much of an oddball in those days himself, although his music was more your standard homebake psychedelic fruitnutcake. Of course Beefheart got lumped in with stuff like that and the G.T.O's and Wildman Fisher, and a certain magazine even tossed in the MC5 and called the article something like 'rock's lunatic fringe'.

As far as I knew, about the only people besides me who thought much of 'trout mask replica' at all, were a few other rock critics. And even them I was suspicious of: I knew when left to their own devices they'd really rather listen to 'Mother Earth' or 'Creedence Clearwater Revival'. For some reason they just didn't seem too interested in going berserk.

One day the phone rang. It was Beefheart, calling to thank me for the review. I was somewhat agog, but not so much that I failed to notice immediate differences between communicating with this man and just about any other human being I had known. He’d be talking along about the record and I’d be enthusiastically nodding over the phone, when suddenly - just like one of those hairpin curves in his music - he'd say something like: 'all roads lead to coca-cola' (the only one I can remember from that first conversation). And then he'd say: 'do you know what I mean?'. 'Sure', I would say. I’ve always been an enthusiastic liar.

A year or two later I finally got to meet my idol in person. I was in Los Angeles, crashing with friends and eating and staying drunk at record industry press parties, when somebody told me Beefheart was going to be doing some sessions for his third album in the cycle begun by 'trout mask replica'. This was 'the spotlight kid', starting at about 3 a.m. at the 'recent' plant.

I was so excited I could hardly wait. But the evening - as evenings in Los Angeles had a way of doing in those days - progressed through a tequila drinking contest at a press party at the troubadour theatre, where they told me I ended up turning over a table, after which three of us piled into a car and headed down to meet god. I don't remember any of this. What I do remember is sitting at a table in the bar pouring salt all over my hand and everything else, then waking from a black abyss in some unknown hallway on a waterbed. They told me later that Beefheart walked in, looked at me and said: 'who's that?' 'Lester Bangs.' I was dead comatose drunk with record company promotional tee-shirts spread out all over me like a blanket of rags. 'Oh,' he said, 'I always wanted to meet him.'

When I came to, I had no idea where I was. I stood up, saw a door at the end of the corridor, pushed through it and found myself in the record plant parking lot, locked out. I vomited in a fishpond, and then began banging feebly on the door with my fists, hollering to be let back in. naturally nobody heard me, so after a while I started walking around the building, where it seemed somehow miraculous to find an open door on the other side. I passed through it, to stumble right into the middle of zoot horn rollo laying down a particularly abrasive and intricate guitar line.

Beefheart looked up, asked how I was feeling. I asked for a beer and he said: 'why do you do these things to yourself?'. of course I didn't have an answer; in fact it didn't seem at all incongruous to me that he should be so concerned about my health while steadily swigging from a strange green bottle which turned out to be a fifth of chartreuse. I was so stupid screwed up at the time that I thought it was some kind of health food mixture.

I also met his wife, Jan, who was beautiful in every way - she had a pair of the kindest eyes I’d ever seen, and was one of those people who seem to walk around with a ray of sunlight beaming out of themselves, a kind of translucent blessedness. she never stopped smiling, then and every time I have seen her since.

Later we all got in another car and rode down sunset strip with them in the muzzy 9 a.m. hangover light. I felt like the smog had been pumped into my lymph glands. Beefheart talked non-stop, and this time almost everything he said was one of those curious, surrealistic, askew-aphoristic non-sequiturs. and every single time he dropped one he would ask again: 'do you know what I mean?'. and I just kept on wearily lying and lying. I think when they dropped me off, I was actually glad to be left to my misery alone - out of his universe.

Because this was something I was only beginning to understand: that because it is his universe, Don Van Vliet quite naturally takes command of most of the people who wander into it. there is usually little or no contest, which of course is not at all necessarily his fault. it is apparently an elemental truth - which we will forever refuse to face - that most people do not really want to think for themselves. in fact, in a sort of active passivity they will seek some sort of surrogate parental/authority figure or institution to structure their perception of reality and ultimately take responsibility for their actions.

Beefheart tends to think in terms of mobilizing people around him whom he considers talented in the interests of his various projects - once he told another writer that he wanted me to Collaborate with him on a book, which was news to me - and being the kind of small but fanatical cult that we were and indeed remain, it was only natural that all of us with media access should more or less become publicists for the captain. it didn't even seem to matter to me personally when I perceived the irony that I had been rave-reviewing every album subsequent to 'trout mask replica' and then, often as not, filing said albums away. what mattered was the fact that something like 'Trout Mask Replica' - which I still listened to and was the basis of all those reviews - existed at all. what mattered was spreading the word.

If all this sounds a bit evangelical, it's because Beefheart - like many brilliant people gifted with powerful personalities - is more than a bit of a guru. now, I don't know about you, but I personally don't have a hell of a lot of use for gurus; in general, I would equate the term with 'megalomaniacs'. of course, you wouldn't expect someone like this to be anything less than a megalomaniac. the simple fact of almost constantly saying things which seemingly make no sense at all, and getting everybody around you to agree with them, constitutes colossal megalomania on the most basic level: the level of seductively (as opposed to forcibly) restructuring the reality of anybody who comes within the parameters of your... - can I get away with saying: 'energy field'?

A mutual friend who knows Beefheart far more intimately than I finally told me that the thing to do with all those 'do you know what I mean-s?' was to respond: 'no. what the fuck are you talking about, anyway?'. then, he said, Beefheart would laugh, as if caught in his joke, open up and be straight with you.

Because it must be understood that this man has never been some demi-mansonoid svengali preying on psychic jellyfish. he always wanted opposition to his flights; it was merely that so few of us had the wit or nerves to backhand it through that straw aura into his court. When a person is so possessed by an idea that all people around him forfeit their own capacities for reasonable argument in the glare of the idea's charisma, it only makes sense that they will not only treat him as that idea instead of a person, but he will in fact become that idea. at which point - unless he's very lucky - he begins to die. meanwhile, of course, the drones may go on living off his cancerous host.

Thus it was with Beefheart and the magic band, whom he taught to play their instruments almost literally from square one. and who, according to insiders closer to the centre than I, were the type of people who in many ways lacked the mature sense of self, and would ultimately forsake the giant who had musically and in large part psychically sired them. It was nobody's fault -really - and everybody's. as I said to the captain the last time I saw him: 'man, back in those days sometimes I thought you were so pretentious...'. 'I probably was. Christ, why didn't you tell me so?' I really had no answer.

Part Two

Part Three

Fri, 26 Sep 2008 13:31:44 GMT

The Making of a Novel

I can no longer recall where it began but I know I did not start at the beginning. It was, in a manner of speaking, all written simultaneously. Everything was there, or appeared to be there as if within the temporal space of an open piano with its simultaneous keys.

I wrote with the utmost care as the narrative began to take shape inside me, and only after the fifth version had been patiently drafted did I become fully aware of the text. Only then did I begin to understand more clearly what was waiting to be expressed.

My great feat was that, out of impatience with my slowness in understanding myself, I might arrive at some meaning with undue haste. I had the impression , or rather felt certain that the more time I gave myself, the more spontaneously would the narrative begin to surface.

Increasingly I find that it is all a matter of patience, of love begetting patience, of patience begetting love.

The book came together simultaneously as it were, emerging more here than there, or suddenly more there than here: I would interrupt a sentence in Chapter Ten , let us say, in order to write Chapter Two, which I would then abandon for months on end while I wrote Chapter Eighteen. I showed endless patience: putting up with the considerable inconvenience of disorder without any reassurance that I would finish the book. But then order, too, can bring a sense of disquiet.

As always, the greatest difficulty is waiting. (I’m feeling rather odd, a woman will tell her doctor. You’re going to have a baby. And here was me thinking I was dying, the woman replies.) My deformed soul growing and swelling, while I remain uncertain whether something is about to come to light.

In addition to this tiresome waiting, it requires infinite patience to reconstitute in gradual stages the initial vision which came in a flash. Recovering that vision is extremely difficult.

And to make matters worse, I am quite hopeless when it comes to editing. I am incapable of narrating an idea, and do not know how to ‘embellish an idea with words’. What I write does not refer to past thought, but to thought in the present: whatever comes to the surface is already expressed in the only possibly words, or simply does not exist.

As I write them down, I am convinced once more that, however paradoxical it may sound, the greatest drawback about writing is that one had to use words. It is a problem. For I should prefer a more direct form of communication, that tacit understanding one often finds between people. If I could write by carving wood or by stroking a child’s head or strolling in the countryside, I would never resort to using worse. I would do what so many people do who are not writers, and with the same joy and torment as those who write, and with the same bitter disappointments which are beyond consolation. I would live and no longer use words. And this might be the solution. And as such, be most welcome.

--Clarice Lispector

(from Selected Cronicas: The Making of a Novel, May 2^nd 1970)

Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:50:08 GMT

“I am blind and so in some things I will not be as good as my father, while in others I will be better. I cannot read some of the books he could, but I have women read them to me.”

--Frank Stanford
(from A Son’s Tale)

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 01:51:14 GMT

"He told us children what to do if we were lost in a strange country. "Look for where the sky is brightest along the horizon," he said, "that reflects the nearest river. Strike out for a river and you will find habitation."

--Eudora Welty
(from One Writer's Beginnings)

Mon, 30 Jun 2008 19:45:29 GMT

“That’s what happens when you’re not being attentive. Then you are seized by suspicions about broad daylight.”

--Christa Wolf
(from The Quest for Christa T.)

Sat, 24 May 2008 00:53:30 GMT

“Sometimes she didn’t think. Sometimes a person just is. She didn’t need to be doing. To be was already a doing. One could be slowly or somewhat quickly.”

--Clarice Lispector
(from: A Report on a Thing)

Wed, 21 May 2008 20:43:17 GMT

Soulstorm
Clarice Lispector

Ah, had I but known, I wouldn’t have come into this world, ah, had I but known, I wouldn’t have come into this world. Madness is neighbor to the cruelest prudence. I swallow madness because it calmly leads me to hallucinations. Jack and Jill went up the hill to fetch a pail of water, Jack fell down, Jill kissed his crown, and they lived happy-unhappy ever after. The chair is an object to me. It is useless while I look at it. Tell me, please, what time it is, so I’ll know I’m alive at that time. Creativity is unleashed by a germ and I don’t have that germ today, but I do have an incipient madness which in itself is a valid creation. I have nothing more to do with the validity of things. I am free or lost. I’m going to tell you a secret: life is lethal. We maintain the secret because in utter silence, each of us, as we face ourselves, because to do so is convenient and doing otherwise would make each moment lethal. The object chair has always interested me. I look at this one, which is old, bought at an antique shop, and empire chair; one couldn’t imagine a greater simplicity of line contrasting with the seat of red felt. I love objects in proportion to how little they love me. But if I don’t understand what I’m writing, the fault isn’t mine. I have to speak, for speaking saves. But I don’t have a single word to say. I am gagged by words already spoken. What does one person say to another? How about “how’s it going?” If the madness of honesty worked, what would people say to one another? The worst of it is what a person would say to himself, yet that would be his salvation, even if honesty is determined on a conscious level while the terror of honesty comes from the part it plays in the vast unconscious that links me to the world and to the creative unconscious of the world. Today is a day for starry sky, at least so promises this sad afternoon that a human word could save.
I open my eyes wide, but it does no good: I merely see. But the secret, that I neither see nor feel. The record player is broken, and to live without music is to betray the human condition, which is surrounded by music. Besides, music is an abstraction of thought, I’m speaking of Bach, Vivaldi, Handel. I can only write if I am free, uncensored, otherwise I succumb. I look at the Empire chair, and this time it is as if it too had looked and seen me. The future is mine as long as I live. In the future there will be more time to live and, higgledy-piggledy, to write. In the future one will say: had I but known, I wouldn’t have come into this world. Marli de Oliveira, I don’t write to you because I only know how to be intimate. In fact, all I can do, whatever the circumstances, is be intimate: that’s why I’m even more silent. Everything that never got done, will it one day get done? The future technology threatens to destroy all that is human in man, but technology does not touch madness; and it is there that the human in man takes refuge. I see the flowers in the vase: they are beautiful and yellow. But my cook says: what ugly flowers. Just because it is difficult to understand and love what is spontaneous and Franciscan. To understand the difficult is no advantage, but to love what is easy to love is a great step upward on the human ladder. How many lies I am forced to tell. But with myself I don’t want to be forced to lie. Otherwise what remains to me? Truth is the final residue of all things, and in my unconscious is the same truth as that of the world. The moon, as Paul Eluard would say, is éclatante de silence. I don’t know if the Moon will show at all today, since it is already late and I don’t see it anywhere in the sky. Once I looked up at the night sky, circumscribing it with my head tilted back, and I become dizzy from the many stars that appear in the county, for the country sky is clear. There is no logic, if one were to think a bit about it, in the perfectly balanced illogicity of nature. Nor in that of human nature either. What would the world be like, the cosmos, if man did not exist? If I could always write as I am writing now, I would be in the midst of a tempestade de cerebro, a “brainstorm” Who might have invented the chair? Someone who loved himself? He therefore invented a greater comfort for his body. Then centuries passed and no one really paid attention any more to a chair, for using it is simply automatic. You have to have courage to stir up a brainstorm: you never know what may come to frighten us. The sacred monster died: in its place a solitary girl was born. I understand, of course, that I will have to stop, not for lack of words, but because such things, and above all those things I’ve only thought and not written down, usually don’t make it into print.

(from Where You Were at Night, 1974. Translated by Alexis Levitin)

hey you big pussy!

Wed, 07 May 2008 00:01:54 GMT

I’ll tell you the sad truth which I have been suspecting for some time, since I’ve been back. She doesn’t love me Bill. She takes it all back. A “mistake.” One of those little mistakes, you know. Oh, Bill, I can’t kid about it, and I can’t be bitter because I’m just smashed by it....and Bill, I forgot all about religion and everything else because I had Ag to worship....Aw, Bill, I can’t even write about it.

--From a letter Hemingway wrote to friend Bill Horn in 1919. The letter was written the same day he received word from girlfriend Agnes that she intended to marry another man.

Sat, 26 Apr 2008 16:47:15 GMT

Interviewer: Are you a religious person even if only from a distance?

Christa Wolf: No, if you mean a church religion.

Interviewer: Never tried to be, not even in times of crisis?

Christa Wolf: Oh yes, one tries.

(from: interview in 2005)

Fri, 11 Apr 2008 18:29:12 GMT

"She was certainly not without minor but effective talent, but this had mainly to do with her relationship to the camera; she was no Duce, and she knew it. Dietrich was, however, absolutely sui generis, and she never indulged in the petty hypocrisies of many stars. She stamped out her own trademark, lived according to her own creeds, forged an image that was a direct reflection of her own social and sexual complexity. In important ways, therefore, she was perhaps the first triumphant example of self-promotion."

--Donald Spoto
(from Blue Angel: The Life of Marlene Dietrich)

Fri, 04 Apr 2008 16:50:55 GMT

"Give me your hand:
Now I’m going to tell you how I went into that inexpressiveness that was always my blind, secret quest. How I went into what exists between the number one and the number two, how I saw the mysterious, fiery line, how it is a surreptitious line. Between two musical notes there exists another note, between two facts there exists another fact, between two grains of sand, no matter how close together they are, there exists an interval of space, there exists a sensing between sensing—in the interstices of primordial matter there is the mysterious, fiery line that is the world’s breathing, and the world’s continual breathing is what we hear and call silence. "

--Clarice Lispector
(from The Passion According to G. H.)

Sat, 29 Mar 2008 17:17:36 GMT

"It's as if life said the following: and there simply wasn't any following. Only the colon, waiting. We keep this secret in muteness to hide the fact that every instant is fatal. The object-chair interests me. I love objects insofar as they do not love me. But if I don't understand what I write the fault isn't mine. I have to speak because speaking saves. But I have no word to say. What would a person say to himself in the madness of candor? But it would be salvation."

--Clarice Lispector
(from The Stream of Life)

Sat, 15 Mar 2008 19:22:25 GMT

On the man who sold Anais Nin & Henry Miller's erotica:

"Legman is just twenty-three years old but already committed to a career in the study of sexuality: "I have devoted my life to the clitoris," he will repeat later in life."

(from The Erotic Life of Anais Nin)

Sun, 30 Dec 2007 23:39:02 GMT

Leer
Frank Stanford

The weeds give you something
you want to fall into
like a trap set with whittled cane
With holes in your body
something could blow
clean through you
and play a tune
and fade like some light saying Darling
Something like the wind

Fri, 28 Dec 2007 17:01:03 GMT

Nothing matters, and I’m sure there have been people who, looking at life, didn’t have much patience for this child that was still awake.

--Pessoa
(from The Book of Disquiet)