"I have nothing to say and I am saying it." - John Cage
When I attended the Ezra Pound Centennial at the University of Maine, Orano, in 1985, I brought along my copy of Was That a Real Poem and Other Essays hoping to get Robert Creeley to sign it. He signed it "Thinking of story John Cage tells - 'If you don't know, why ask?'" (I grabbed the book off my shelf of autographed books to get the quote right. I hadn't opened that book for years, although it greatly influenced me back in the 80's. It helped guide me to Zukofsky.)
Thinking of Proust's birthday tomorrow, I remember Pound's notion that he wanted to make poetry as vital to the culture as the prose of Flaubert and Stendhal. The challenge today might seem to make poetry as vital to the culture as the prose of Joyce and Proust, but does even their prose seem vital to our post-literate culture? I've toyed with the idea of writing a book called Remedial Reading for the Post-Literate World. It wouldn't give the reader a reading list. Rather, it would recount my attempts at remedial reading for myself.
I hope you all read Mike Johnson's recent blog posts at Overweening Generalist. My chronological trek through film history has reached 1947. I started watching Kiss of Death and then listened to some Charlie Parker and Bud Powell recordings from 1947. Part of my mind dwells in 1913, the year Proust's Swann's Way came out, and most of my mind dwells in 2014. Of course, I write this in a month name after Julius Caesar. Bob Wilson and Phil Dick both wrote about how the past remains with us. I wonder how to best navigate the years to come.
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ReplyDeleteThis post flooded in memories of 1947 for me, even though that year was long before I was born. In the past 15 years I've become a student of post-war American films noir, and 1947 was a bumper crop of 'em. With these films I became very interested in the "mood" in the US after "isolationist" US got into the 1914-1918 War, after Prez Woodrow Wilson got us into it after promising not to. Then the Depression, then the rise of fascism, then Hiroshima...There's a tremendous book I keep re-reading: _The Noir Forties_, by Richard Lingeman, which came out a couple years ago. The subtitle is "The American People from Victory to Cold War." Lingeman did some sort of spy work in Japan near the end of the war, and he intersperses discussion of select noir films as reflecting the mood of the time: the psychological residue of the war distorted political culture. At times the book verges on a "what America would have looked like" if certain things hadn't swung one way rather than another. The character and fate of Henry Wallace in the book seems hugely poignant to me.
ReplyDeleteThen yea: the rise of be-bop, the CIA, US PR makes USSR into monster state out to get yo mama and baby sister, turn a commie mind-control ray-gun on all of us and make us chant helplessly, "From each according to his ability..." Just hellacious stuff.
Lingeman was at NYT Book Review and then senior editor at The Nation. RAW mentions him in _Sex, Drugs and Magick_, because Lingeman wrote _Drugs From A to Z: A Dictionary_; Lingeman's first book.
Thanks for the bump!
As I kid, I loved films from the 1930's, Doc Savage novels, Duke Ellington, etc. My parents and their friends wondered about this nostalgia for an era I hadn't experienced.
ReplyDeleteThe Lingeman book sounds interesting