Monthly Archives: November 2005

Great day for interesting emails

XF said in the middle of his—-

2)  Ravelstein (the Alan Bloom character) says, "When
I do it, it isn’t gossip.  It’s social history."
–That’s you!

2.5) Don’t post this on your goddamn blog.

But how can I not, now I ask you?  I was too honored by his comparison.

WK reports from the west coast from time to time—-

Wierd visit to wife’s relatives in Sacramento, Calif.  That’s the city
were the blood began to drip from the statue of the Madonna at the
Vietnamize Church of the Martyrs.  I went to check it out, and it was
an amazing experience.  Rainy day–out on the fringes of the city where
all the low rent Churchs go. 5 miles down the road from the Russian
Orthodoxy Mission.  About fifty Pilgrims gather around a beautiful
little white statue.  Flowers and candles set up on folding tables. I
walk right up to the fence and look for the blood so clearly seen on
the photograph.  Nothing.  Move around to the side closer to her eyes.
Still nothing.  Move to the front the statue suspecting the rain must
have washed it off.  Stand there looking at her face, seeing something
but not knowing what it is.  Look to the eyes, no blood. Then it hits
me: there is a rust colored stain on the front of her dress!  So my
eyes follow it up and there at the center of her chect, blood is coming
from her heart.  This wasn’t in the newspapers.  Stange epiphany–like
those 3D pictures that suddenly lock into place.  Mover around to the
side, and now there are clearly tracks of tears upon her face. Very
awesome. I don’t know if its a fraud or not, but it was certainly good
theatre if nothing else. A form of liturgy?  Probably the way the
church once taught its mysteries–through magic.

   I’m reading
Baudrillard’s book on The Intelligence of Evil–I like him as a
stylist– sounds so certain, feels so true, but we all know better.
Also reading Illich’s  Rivers North of the Future–more blood on the
Madonna–convincing but is it real–and then again does it
matter–shift in vision–epiphanies?

EC finished architecture school in Kansas last year, has been working lately in
an architectural firm in Nashville and doesn’t much like it—

To answer your question about architecture, it truly is about 2 or 3
percent (if that) design and the rest is like technical writing in
pictures.  That really is a good way to state it, now that I have.  It
is 98 percent producing construction documents.  For this, also, you
must use AutoCad and 8 hours a day of staring at a computer screen.  I
have come to realize, this is just not what I am cut out for…

Nonetheless,
I think I have made a breakthrough this week deciding to stick it out
for another year-and-a-half.  At that point, I will have completed my
Internship and will be eligible to take the licensing exam.  I figure,
I might regret not completing this internship someday.  So I will!!

Now,
my plan is to get back into teaching and spend this year deciding what
subject.  I am actually thinking math.  I know that I could teach
creative writing someday, but never literature.  So, I did discover I
am good at math through this architecture thing… Mainly, I just want
to teach and help influence young kids to generally be prepared for
this crazy world… I want to hopefully land a job at a private school
(either high or middle) in Nashville, maybe even the one that V
works at… that would be really great.

I can always take the
licensing exam on my own, or not, should I decide I want to get back
into architecture… If I did, it would just be small scale,
design/build.

You see, my main delemma with arch. is that I
really wanted it to be just a job.  My main passion is still my music.
Architects "are" architects.  Or, at least for me, it is too all
consuming.  Honestly, I am not even sure how much I like the design
part of it…

So, there is your long answer!!  Sorry to ramble
on… And, you are quite right about Gherry, he is a wonderful person,
but much of his work is self centered.  His buildings, in my opinion,
are self-centered. Rather, buildings should respond to what is around
them in a dialogue of some sort.  YES, Calatrava is very good.  Also
look at Peter Zumthor, Lake Flato Architects, and Herzog & de
Meuron.  Personally, the most wonderful new building I’ve ever been in
is a museum in Berlin by I.M. Pei.

Otherwise a rainy and dreary day here, so these newses from the greater world cheered me much.  Or  items of social history!

Just finished reading William Packard’s unknown gem of a novel, Saturday Night at San Marcos.  What a delightful book it is.  A satire of writers conferences and of writing novels that is funny, consistently funny, all the way through.  Earlier this fall I read Jonathan Ames’s hilarious novel about writing novels and a writers conference, and it was as hilarious as the thirteen claims to hilarity listed on the back cover.  Packard belongs to a different generation and different era and so his book is not quite hilarious-hilarious but it is very funny and a laughed and laughed at many places—as well as quietly laughing all the way through.  He skewers writers and writing conference types as surely and quickly as Ames does.  Both have a tender regard and compassion for all humans as well, an an especially soft place in their hearts for fellow-writers, so while they are ridiculing all the weird oddities of the writing life they are also celebrating said life so much so that you think, gee, I’d always wanted to be a writer too and so maybe now this funny book has encouraged me enough to finally write like I’ve always wanted to and write the books that I know are deep within me waiting to come forth.  Packard was a poet who edited the New York Quarterly for years and established that journal as giving us a cluster of poetic tastes somewhere between Charles Bukowski and James Dickey and on the other extreme, say, Richard Eberhart or Stanley Kunitz.  I could not have so easily summoned up those period names, I will confess, had I not had the back cover of Packard’s book, published in 1985.  Instead of thirteen quotes of "hilarious" from thirteen newspapers, Packard’s book has just three blurbs and they are so well written and so fully conjure the period in which he flourished (which must have been the period in which I went to college and grad school, roughly) that I must quote them in full.  First, from Richard Eberhart, a poet perhaps not much remembered these days, but a really fine one, very much a Pre-Ashbery kind of poet.  Eberhart says of Packard’s novel

"Swift would have relished the savagery of WP’s satire on Writer’s Conferences, on people and on style itself, and Dante would have noted his deliberated hell without purgatory or paradise.  The forcefulness of this tour de force is based on methodical exaggeration.  Viciousness of life is reported with faithful integrity.  It is a book which is unique in its serial exploits of brutal comedy.  Behind all those words is a novelist in masterful control of what he has to say."

Next Bukowski:

"Well, yes, those Writer’s Conferences, they continue and the best thing I can see about many of them is their menus, the dinners and brunches and drinks . . . . What stuns my filament is the Poets, long grizzled into Fame, who continue to arrive at all these Conferences, to speak, to instruct, to be seen, to huddle together, and to ultimately piss-gossip themselves into mutual nullity.  Pardon me, but I always thought writing meant ‘to write.’"

Dickey gets the last word:

"Packard has a fine ear and a marvelous sense of imagery.  American literature is praised to have him."

Leonard Cohen makes this most interesting comment about religion:  Pico Iyer has been talking to him about why he visits a Buddhist monastery outside Los Angeles so often, for such long periods of time these days.  Cohen is now 71; the essay was written in ’98. 

        "What [else] would I be doing? Finding new drugs, buying more expensive wine?  I don’t     know.  This seems to me the most luxurious and sumptuous response to the emptiness of my own existence.

"I think that’s the real deep entertainment," he concludes. "Religion.  Real profound and voluptuous and delicious entertainment.  The real feast that is available to us is within this activity.  Nothing touches it." He smiles his godfatherly smile.  "Except if you’re courtin’. If you’re young, the hormonal thrust has its own excitement."

                                   Page 32 of Iyer’s book Sun After Dark: Flights into the Foreign

Not often to hear religion spoken about in such terms, the practice of religion, and it would be fun to hear the far right evangelicals respond to the notion that they are enjoying the ultimate sumptuous entertainment available to humans.  But Cohen’s comment gives me the reply I’ve been looking for to Saul Bellow’s final book, Ravelstein.  (Both Bellow and Cohen are Jews from Montreal.  Can’t find much to make of that at the moment.)  Bellow has his main character achieve great worldy success, the professor who strikes it rich, so to speak, after having been hailed and beloved as a great teacher.  And pretty much all he can find to have him do is buy extremely expensive wines and dinners and clothes in Paris.  Is that all?  I guess it was the old religious youngster in me who wanted Bellow to come up with something more.  Maybe it is also the Faustian archetype that demands more.  Cohen’s appreciation of Buddhist tradition and practice does seem to fit the archetype much better.  And the last time I saw Allen Ginsberg he was doing a retreat at the Zen Mountain Monastery over in New York state.  He was a regular there.  Another Jewish Zen poet part-time monk.  Yesterday in Boston I was talking to my friend Ed, who is now happily engaged in the Quaker community on Cape Cod and publishing religious stories with the Quaker press.  Another happy formerly jewish Quaker poet weekend monk of sorts.  So Cohen seems to be onto something here.  Sumptuous and voluptuous.  Sounds like developing a taste for opera or something.  That’s what some of my other friends now in their 60s and 70s have been doing.  Great deal of similarity, actually, between religious practice and opera devotion. 

Long talk with my sister, Anne, on Thanksgiving evening.  They are back in their house now and feeling very lucky.  They had to put on a new roof, re-build some interior wallsand clean out the mold (bleach) but otherwise had no damage and no water actually got into the house!  All around them quite a bit of damage, even right across the street and in the neighborhood.  They have only two grocery stores open in the area, two mile drive.  All of their immediate circle of family and friends have no houses to return to, either gone entirely or damaged beyond repair.  A very posh big house of a friend that they stayed in in Lake Charles after Katrina and before Rita was very badly damaged.  Fema has sent everyone a $2000 check and otherwise people are waiting for insurance company checks (slow in coming) and lots of people are moving out, staying out, planning not to return.  She said if they were ten or fifteen years older they probably would stay out too.  Driving to and from her house, around the city, she said it looks like a war zone, the destruction just total and unbelievable.  They are in Orleans parish, out by the Lake but still in the city.  Basile’s job with the Casino is still good and his private law practice.  The court system is now in Baton Rouge.  The Casino hopes to re-open in February.  It was not damaged but they can’t find places for workers to live in.  One of their friends, a doctor, commutes now from Shreveport every day, a three hour drive.  They took a weekend away last weekend in New York and loved being there but at the same time had that survivor shock of looking around and seeing life being normal and wanting to say to everyone, hey, how can you carry on like this, don’t you know what we’re living in.  Back home they have also felt that survivor’s guilt of being in rather good shape, luckily, while all their friends are in much worse shape.  She sounded good, but wanted to talk a long time and I think just below the surface of her voice you could hear the shock of it all, a kind of deep, long-term shock that will take a while to live through.