Archive for the ‘Autobiographica’ Category

Entry 741 — Tottering On

Thursday, May 17th, 2012

My latest medical problem is an aching jaw.  My dentist today gave me a kind of mouthpiece that’s to help it relax back in place.  I think it’s helping.  Meanwhile, I’ve now gain five pounds back of the twenty or so I lost after getting the kidney stone.  I still feel run-down, but only about as run-down as I did before the stone.  That’s enough for me to be too tired after seeing my dentist to say much here.  I thought I’d only post another example of the media’s inability to underswtand the difference between correlation of events, and one event’s causing a second’s.  A widely-circulated article says that coffeee-drinkers–surprise–live longer than those who don’t don’t coffee, which the media (and probably people in medicine) think means that coffee causes people to live longer.  Maybe so, but it never occurs to these people that drinking coffee and living longer are due to some shared cause, and that coffee has nothing to do with living longer.  My theory: the biggest life-extending attribute is low energy.  Women have a lower basal metabolism than men, and live longer.  People who starve themselves tend to live longer to–because their lowered energy causes them to live slower.  Now, then, who drinks coffee?  People needing an energy boost.  That is, people whose energy level is naturally low.  So their increased life expectancy is due to their slow living–in spite of the coffeee they take to get going faster.  Me?  I don’t drink coffee–hate the taste of it.  But make up for it with Mountain Dew.

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Entry 739 — On Diving into Oeuvres

Tuesday, May 15th, 2012

I’ve been thinking, again, about the many culturateurs  (i.e., artists and verosophers [i.e., seekers of significant truths]), mostly dead before I was born, who have been responsible for–possibly–most of the pleasure I’ve gotten out of life.   Interesting question, that concerning where my pleasure in life has come from.  I have clearly attributed too much of mine to other culturateurs.  I have to say that I myself, making poems and coming up with ideas, etc., have given me more pleasure than other culturateurs–maybe.  Then there’s Mother Nature.  Not to mention all the non-culturateurs and the love and friendship I’ve somehow managed to get from them.  And the cats–and Patsy and Gigi, the two family dogs who have been in my life.  And the computer!  I’m sure I’m overlooking many other sources.  Still, those previous culturateurs  have been responsible for a great deal of my life’s pleasure.

Since they’ve all given me pleasure through their writings and what has been written about them in books, I suddenly realized the other day that people who don’t read–perhaps the majority of people in America?–go through life without this pleasure.  How horrible.  But many of them, I suppose, get some kind of analogous pleasure from people in the news and/or on television.

Be that as it may, I don’t know how I would have gotten through my own life if not for all the culturateurs’ lives I’ve dived into, sometimes staying immersed in their lives on and off for over a year.  I’m speaking of those a large portion of whose oeuvres I’ve devoured, and then gone on to read biographies, and autobiographies if available, of.  Excluded, unfairly, would be my first culturateurical heroes, because I encountered them before knowing about biographies–and without the experience to become interested in favorite writers automatically after becoming interested in their writings.  Before, that is, I knew myself as a writer–or involved in any vocation.  Hugh Lofting, Dr. Doolittle’s creator, for example.  The fellow who wrote the first twenty or so Hardy Boys books, whose name I can never remember although I did as an adult read his autobiography.  Carl Barks, who wrote and drew the best adventures of Donald Duck and his three nephews (and Scrooge McDuck and Gladstone Gander), and so may others responsible for the comic book stores I loved.  Jules Verne and Robert Lewis Stevenson.

As I’ve written, my first cultural heroes as an adult, or near-adult, were writers of comic essays like Robert Benchley and James Thurber.  And authors of science fiction whose names I can’t just now remember, except Isaac Asimov’s, whose name I remember for other reasons.  Well, Ray Bradbury, too.   Mystery writers, too–like Ellery Queen (actually two men whose names I can’t remember) and the author of the Charlie Chan mysteries.  But I was still too young to dive into their lives as well as their works.  That too often there was little about their lives available to dive into was another factor.

I believe Oscar Wilde, when I was 17, was the first author I truly dove into the oeuvre and life of, and then quickly into George Bernard Shaw’s.  About a year later come my first poet, because I was slow to mature beyond simple appreciation of prose in literature–clear prose–and representational visimagery, and marches in music, was John Keats.  Wilde wrote some fine poems but I still think of him mainly as a dramatist–an essayist and novelist, too, but a poet as a sideline.  H. L. Mencken and Nietzsche were two others.  C. P. Snow, Dostoevski (and not Tolstoi), Shakespeare not as soon as one would have thought he’d be, perhaps because I was first exposed to him in school.  At the same time, I read many other authors with enjoyment but didn’t dive into.  Turgenov, for instance.

I’ve mentioned most of my literary heroes elsewhere, so won’t go on with my list here.  I just want to emphasize my main point, which is that some culturateurs got to me to such an extent that I needed to read just about everything they’d written, and as much as possible about their lives.   Which is why my greatest hope now is that others will eventually dive into my oeuvre and life the way I dove so often, and still dive.  Or do I?  I still read a lot, but it’s been a while since I discovered a new writer I wanted fully to devour.

Outside of literature, there have been almost all the standard composers of classical music through Shostakovich and Prokofief, and Glass but not too many contemporaries I’m ashamed to admit.  And I’ve not read too many bioigraphies of composers.  I’m not sure why that is.  I have read quite a few biographies of painters.  Cezanne probably the most although he’s not my favorite painter.  The painters I would have bought thousands of dollars worth of books containing reproductions of their work if I could have afforded it have been Klee, Pollock, van Gogh, Marc, Renoir, Monet, Picasso, Durer . . . Again, there are many others I really liked, but didn’t like as much as the ones mentioned.  Or as Homer, Hopper, Chagall . . . so many others.  Only a few architexts.  Wright, maybe Gehry.

Contemporaries whom I’ve dived into, principally by publishing them, are Scott Helmes, Guy R. Beining, Karl Kempton, Richard Kostelanetz, Kathy Ernst, Marton Koppany, Marilyn R. Rosenberg, Geof Huth, John Vieira, John Martone, Bill Keith, Carol Stetser, Joel Lipman, John Bennett . . . many more–but none like I dove into Wallace Stevens, because so comparatively little critical and biographical matter is available on them, which is disgusting.

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Entry 720 — Automatic Writing

Thursday, April 26th, 2012

Considering that I’m only an anti-biotic and having to take naracotic pain pills for how crummy and achey the anti-biotic has me feeling, I should have no trouble taking care of this entry with automatic writing.  Happened into it a couple of days ago for a few minutes.  Nothing since, though.

Just read a something Denis Donoghue said in this month’s The New Criterion about the best rhymes being those made by different parts of speech.  Makes sense: they’d be more different from each other than two words different only in meaning, so finding them the same the way rhyming words are the same would be more unexpected.

Just two more days of the anti-biotic left.  I hope  to be a little more alive by Sunday.

Note: this was ready yesterday but, as I too often do, I forgot to hit the icon that allows it to become public until just now.

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Entry 707 — Grey Thoughts about Creativity

Friday, April 6th, 2012

I often feel I’m a magnificently creative artist–until I consider how few ideas, devices, images or other poetry materials I use.  How many, I wonder, are there?  And how many of the original ones can I claim are mine?  Take my pwoermd for today:

It’s just one more of my dozens of exploitations of the silent gh I stole from Aram Saroyan, slightly modified (for the better, I hope) by its emptiness (a trick I’ve also used more than once before).  Then there’s to enlarged O that’s central in more ways than one in my Odysseus sequence.  That I got, I think, from Johanna Drucker, a poet I have a very low opinion of.  I first used it long ago in “The Word.”  Of course, I did more with it there and this time than she could have thought to do, by using it as a window on another text.  Not that big a deal, and probably not a trick new to me.  I have been first to insert many mathematical operations significantly into poems, but is that many tricks or just one, the use of a mathematical operation in a poem?  In any case, someone else preceded me with that.  (Dunno who.)  So, are there more than maybe ten or fifteen sorta original devices in my poems?  As many as a hundred significant devices of any kind?  That’s not many–not that any other poet is likely to have had more.  Pound, maybe.  Cummings?  My friend Richard Kostelanetz may well have the record for being the first or tied for being the first with a great many infraverbal maneuvers, but most of them seem to me to be too little different from one another to count as full inventions–which isn’t to belittle them: many are extremely effective, and far beyond the capacity of any visible poets of our time.  I’ve elsewhere claimed Cummings for the most inventive, significantly inventive, poet of all time–by a lot.

Someday a grad student will list and describe mine, I’m sure–probably a year or two before the hundredth anniversay of my death when the professor in charge of him realizes, possibly after reading this, that it’d be a good subject on a Certified Poet not that many have researched yet.  I hope it will turn out that I’ve been first with a handful of good new devices.  Originality is far from everything in any art, but it’s essential for the advance of an art, even when at first ineffective.  Which mine NEVER is.

Jus’ gabbin’ another entry together.  It’s not yet ten in the a.m.  I may actually do some writing of at least minor importance before I go to bed.  I’m opiated for the second time this week.  I’m coming to the view that the stress of poetry for someone as serious as I about doing it well and creatively (craft = repeating existence, art = enlarging existence) finally was too much for my terribly sensitive ahtist’s nervous system five or ten years ago, and that I require my pain pills to get anything of any value done.  I do think my performance as an opiated neurological cripple is as good as it was before I needed help.  Certainly I relaxes me enough to strewdle along indefinitely like I’m doing now.  Gotta stop and try to get a final draft of my latest Small Press Review column done.
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Entry 701 — Odd ‘n’ Ends

Saturday, March 31st, 2012

I just made my latest three columns for Small Press Review available for reading in my pages section: November/December 2011, January/February 2012, March/April 2012.  They’re worth a look, I think.

Meanwhile, I have a little more to say about John Vieira’s still life: that it seems to me to celebrate the miracle of exuberant life, its exploding out of just about nothing, not only simple lines, but out of no color beyond the simplest one, black.  I think if John had somehow used color in his piece, he would have lessened its effect by half or more.  I might add that while I consider life a miracle, I don’t consider it more of a miracle than whatever it is that stones do.  (One of my earliest epigrams is, “Stones are as alive as we: their moments are just not so luridly constricted as ours.” Or something like that.)

Now my cat story–from an e.mail to my friend Linda, which I later put into my diary entry of Wednesday: “A mostly white cat has been living in this house since around 6 this morning. Was at my door when I went out for the paper—I backed up and she (I think it’s a she) walked in and investigated the entire house while I went about my early morning business. I petted her a few times. She accepted the attention without making anything much of it. Finally, I went back to bed, hoping for more sleep. She jumped up beside me, and suddenly became a purring bedcat. Since then she’s spent time asleep in a box in my computer room while I worked, and asleep next to me when I later tried for a second nap in my bed. Weird. I had seen her twice before around my lanai. About a week ago, I surprised her at night when I arrived on my bike at my lanai door, and opened the door to put my bike in. Suddenly she was at my feet scrambling to get out of my way. I guess she had been in my lanai—there is an open screen into it. But then she started to dart back into the lanai through the open screen, which isn’t far from the door. She changed her mind and left. But today it’s as though she decided I could her be her slave—or one of her slaves–who knows why. I think she’s the neighborhood cat Monica told me about—Monica being the woman in Gertrude’s house whose name I may have wrong. I’m not sure what to do. She hasn’t asked for food or water. She right now is on my bed, asleep on my pillow.”

It is now four days later.  The cat is still spending most of its time in my house.  She never asked for food or used the litter box, probably taking care of litter box duties outside.  But today I discovered that yesterday she had gotten into some food Linda brought me that her fussy cat, Morgan, won’t eat, so I left out a dish of it for her, and shut the other food up in my cupboard.  Ideally, I could get out of feeding her, letting her get food from whoever has been feeding her to this point.  She seems quite healthy and well-fed.

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Entry 691 — About my Piano Mathemaku

Wednesday, March 21st, 2012

I’ve brought back the above because one of my friends in visual poetry brought it up back-channel, inspiring the following beginning attempt at an explication (although it’s only mine, I have to emphasize, and I’m not being sarcastic):

A lot of what I do is surrealism: multiplications, for instance, that make surrealistic sense to me. The basic idea of the above is that a piano and all it represents (music, the creative process, self-expression, something to play, etc.) times a mountain and a fortress that is merged with the mountain and what it represents—power, unchangingness, seriousness, intimidation, etc., or the antithesis of what the piano represents, equals a painting of boats that represents a sea journey, but also a musical composition (theme and variation, a kind of fugue in spots–think of the boats as melodies), a game, happiness, as well as various associations with Paul Klee, from whom I stole the boats (although I’ve changed them)—also a progression from dimness into color. This journey, I contend, is similar to the brook’s journey to the spring flowers the brook’s water will nourish into being. All the journey of boats needs, surrealistically, exactly to equal the coming of spring, is the remainder, which is the word “mystery” made mysterious and added to by other words and elements—a magic word, you might say. I feel I’m ignoring scientific logic for emotional logic. Can’t help it, is my only defense. But I hope an engagent will find my dividend to be a pleasant short poem, and the graphic a pleasant picture—at least in its final larger size—and touched up.

A thought: what if someone played a mountain fortress on a piano, and the music that resulted came out as pictures? What would they look like? The whole idea is absurd, but . . .

Meanwhile, today I broke free of my egocentricity to come up with the Truly Brilliant, However Simple, Idea that I can use my new gallery (in my dentist’s waiting room) for exhibitions of works other than my own!  That way I could work up from the classics of visual poetry almost anyone would like to what I and my most advanced friends are doing in the field.  Basically, I have three walls.  What I think I may do is devote one to classics like Cummings’s falling leaf poem; the second to my earliest, most accessible visual poems, and the third to my “Odysseus Suite,” if I can get it to satisfy me, something I’m still working on but making progress, I think–and two other recent ones.  The one above and my “Seaside Mathemaku,” which several people have liked.

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Entry 689 — My Dentist

Monday, March 19th, 2012

This morning I had two cavities filled.  This would not have been worth reporting here except that my dentist offered me the use of her waiting room as a gallery!  It’s not the Guggenheim, but it’s step up for me–up from my current exhibition, I feel, because permanent–or at least for many months.  And I’ll be able to wander in to make changes.  The first piece I think I’ll hang is this one:

A version of this was here recently, but this version is slightly different, and final, I hope–except that I intend to outline the Klee images in black. What excites me about it is that I have some good ideas for a commentary on it that I hope will reach people. I’m especially hoping Dr. Angela, my dentist, and/or her associates, will connect to it, and be good explaining it to any patient curious about it. Next will be my “Odysseus Suite”–also with an explanatory commentary. I think a great advantage of this show will be that I’ll be able to insert pieces one at a time, so will have time to make good choices, and work on accompanying materials.

So, things are going well for me right now–and at a good time–yesterday I learned all my three submissions (including the piece above) failed to make the cut into a 30-piece online exhbit.
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Entry 685 — Education Way III

Thursday, March 15th, 2012

Here are the last of the photographs of my current exhibition, finishing with a view from the end of it back to where one comes in, to the left at the other end: 

 


 

 


 

 


 

 

 

 

 
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Entry 684 — Education Way II

Wednesday, March 14th, 2012

Some photographs of the works in my current exhibition:

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Entry 683 — My Education Way Exhibition

Tuesday, March 13th, 2012

I have a new camera that I used to take some pictures of my current exhibition, which I am now calling my Education Way Exhibition because that’s the name of the street the building it’s in is on, early this afternoon.  Naturally, I had all kinds of trouble getting my pictures from the camera into my computer.  I finally did it, but am too tired to do more with them here than download a few.  First, a view of the building they’re in:

I was going to have four views of my exhibition here, but I had so much trouble uploading the picture above, that I’m just going to have one more picture–and it won’t be of the exhibition, but of some wild flowers in my front yard that I don’t know the name of although I’ve been told it more than once:
 

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