Hey Bob,

I’m back in E. Cornburg, and glad for it.  S. CA was lovely and nice, and in MO I saw my friends and family (including 5 nieces between 14 and 24 who are each as desirable as anything god/nil every made).  The poem I mentioned before–the protagonist of which was our adonais, Claude Alexander Corsair Dumont (or thereabouts)–is in the Failure-with-Promise category right now (taxonomically, ’tis the category within which I also reside–et tu Fancypants).

I hope you’re well or scheming thereward,

Here is a discussion of Beckett from Deborah Barlow’s site  Slow Muse
Is Endgame too bleak for these times? Well, maybe. But it is also hauntingly exacting in its archetypal austerity. And for me personally, it is a default measuring device for how the force fields of my life have shifted. I first saw it performed in the 60s in San Francisco during a time when life as we knew it was being ripped open and replaced with an unleashed wild energy of change. That shift was intoxicating, exciting and personal, and Beckett was a clarion reminder of the profundity of the revolution at hand. Or so it seemed to a wide eyed, teenaged idealist.

Twenty years later in Cambridge, the center of gravity of my life had turned domestic, having just had three children in three years (and yes, we did finally figure out what was causing that.) At that point in my life, the existential angst of Endgame felt more theatrical than a desperate call from an inchoate world consciousness.

Now, 25 years after that viewing, I watched the play last night and felt as though I had circled back into a world where catastrophic change is rampant and ubiquitous, where the unknowns are winning out against the knowns. Bleak and intense, Endgame has proven itself to be a play for all seasons—certainly in my life anyway.

A few excellent quotes on Beckett are provided below thanks to the dramaturgy work of ART’s Heidi Nelson:

One has to give up the comfort or security of a single interpretation of Endgame, recognizing that the play does not work towards the clarification of meaning but, rather, towards the clarification of the impossibility of meaning.

Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The radical simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature of the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties that plague the minds of his characters.

—Charles R. Lyons

At the root of his art was a philosophy of the deepest yet most courageous pessimism, exploring man’s relationship with his God. With Beckett, one searched for hope amid despair and continued living with a kind of stoicism.

—Mel Gussow

I suppose many would say that these paintings are far too bright and joyful to serve as the scene for Beckett’s plays. But I am especially taken with the words Lyons uses above.

Beckett’s unequivocal refusal to discuss his plays, clarify intentions or comment upon the meaning of his work must derivce from his own awareness that the significance of his dramas depends upon their exercise of indeterminacies, not from their representation of experience that can be translated into interpretations of human behavior. The radical simplicity of the environments he creates and the ambiguous nature of the time he imitates force his spectators to confront the very uncertainties that plague the minds of his characters.

Is it too much of a stretch to say that Poons creates a visual simplicity through complexity, ambiguity and indeterminacies.  The colors vibrate, move, but there is no clear image, no formal composition to speak of;  Poons speaks of his process as the art of the mistake.  

Paintings are mistakes. You put a mark on a canvas, and it’s a mistake. Of course it’s a mistake, otherwise it would be wonderful, because it would be finished. But it’s not. After maybe 50 or 60,000 mistakes, you give up. Like Leonardo said, “Works of art aren’t finished, they’re abandoned.” That’s absolutely true, art is never finished. People say, “Oh, that’s a nice romantic thing to say.” But it’s not romantic. It’s like saying that physics can be finished. Real art is never finished. With applied art at least you can say, “OK. You’ve learnt this lesson.” Illustration doesn’t even get into this no-man’s land. But that’s the only place that art lives, if it’s any good. 

And in this next passage—could this be a description of what it is to try to read Beckett?

You sense it. Very quickly you reach a wall of impenetrability. It’s like you’re reading words and there’s nothing there. You can’t penetrate it. And then you do – not all at once, but maybe in a week, or a year, or ten years, and when you do, when it finally pours over you, it’s just like anything else in art that you are really moved by. When stuff resonates with you, then you’ve got a Bach or a Schuman or a Brahms.  You’ve got one of them. 

I’m trying, maybe too hard, to use Poons work to figure out whether I really like Beckett or just think I should like him.  For the moment I like this notion, that Poons is painting he perfect “scrims” for any and all productions of Beckett’s words.  Beckett loves sounds and loves silence.  He reduces voice to “minimalist” extremes.  Poons does something similar in paint, trying to  use only color to generate resonant light.

Almost every time I come back to one of these new pictures, I almost don’t remember it. It looks different every time. I don’t understand it. We’ll, I do understand it because I see it, and seeing is understanding when we’re talking about painting. There’s no gap between seeing and understanding. 

When you’re painting, then you’ve got nothing to paint until there’s something there, that first mistake. But once you see something – you’ll see a flow or a shape – ­then that’s what you’re painting, and that’s where paintings come from. And you just try to make them real. And they’re real when they look like they’ve been done all at once. When something happens so that everything that I’ve been looking at in the painting becomes something else very different. All of a sudden little things are visible, things that were invisible before, and the painting doesn’t look like it has a beginning or an end. Where did Cézanne begin a painting? Where did Titian start? You can’t tell. You just don’t see it. But in paintings that don’t arrive at this “colored moment,” you can always tell.  

 

Beckett’s works have this sort of fluidity, don’t they?  They change on us even as we try to read and re-read them to pin down what they mean and don’t mean.  

Ah yes, there’s great fun to be had from an eye, it weeps for the least little thing, a yes, a no, the yesses make it weep, the noes too, the perhapses particularly, with the result that the grounds for these staggering pronouncements do not always receive the attention they deserve.  (The Unnameable 373)

Is Poons painting the Color of the Perhapses?  In the dark foreground of their light is Beckett speaking their silence?

This past week I was in a bookstore browsing through a thick book about Wright and learned that he was the son of a minister and had grown up reading a lot of transcedentalism, courtesy of his mother.  Somehow his mother decided that he should become an architect, and little FLW complied with mom’s vision of the future.  I hadn’t known any of that, but as I looked over the photos and sketches of his work, I was struck more than previously  by how cold it all was – all straight lines and minimal everything.  Which got me wondering what attracted you when we were in high school to FLW.  I well remember you telling me about FLW when I not only didn’t know of FLW but hardly knew what architercture was.  So (1) how on earth did a 14-year old in Cumberland in 1959 discover this guy, and (2) what about Wright’s very stark and linear designs attracted that teenager?

My Reply:
1) pretty sure it was browsing in the public library up on Washington street.  I did a lot of that & I can still see the books by Wright that I firsst took off the shelf there.  It was indeed a revelation because—

2) the drawings were stunning.  Maybe probably I had never really seen architects’ renderings of their projects before—certainly nothing beyond houseplans in magazines.  And Wright—as I later learned—was famous even in his day for his drawings.  Many who did not respect him at all much always had to acknowledge that his renderings and blueprint drawings were exceptional works of draughtsmanship and artistic drawing.

What also blew me away after I tried to read his texts was the discovery of transcendentalism, though I did not know the proper name for it for a long time afterwards.  But having had Catholic doctrine poured down my gullet endlessly for 13 years, it was amazing to find that one could speak about spiritual things without C doctrine at all and still make sense of things that that doctrine claimed to be the only way to make any sense about such things.  I was bowled over by Wright and poured over the books for both the images, the buildings and the philosophy he claimed was behind it.

{ My parents it turned out actually knew someone who lived in a Wright house—-the I. N. Hagans, owner of the Hershey ice cream company.  They had a house just down the same road from the extraordinary Falling Water house over in Pennsylvania only their house was built in the late 50s, not the 30s, and was on top of a mountain they owned, not down in a hollow.  Eventually I got us to get an invitation to go visit them in their house, but I think it must have been after I tranfered from LaSalle in Philly to Maryland in College Park, and by then I had had the shock described below.}

Now in as little time as four years later—five to be exact I guess—I would be 1) deeper inside the Catholic sphere by being in the religious order formation schooling at LaSalle college and wearing a habit and 2) living there in Phila in a loose replica of a famous Tudor house in England, Compton Wynyates, andl living within a half hour’s walk from that house of one of Frank Lloyd Wright’s great buildings—reputedly great I guess I’ll add—the Beth Shalom Synagogue in Elkins Park, PA.

After I got to know the neighborhood and realized that this building was a stone’s throw away, I walked over to it many times, any time I had some free time and could get away that first fall I was up in Philadelphia.  It was the first Wright building I had ever seen in person.  It was a bit of a shock and a disappointment but it took me a long time to admit to the latter feeling and recognition.  In drawings the building looked just extraordinary and magnificent.  There is a famous drawing Wright did of the projected structure as it would look at night—so the whole image is black and the “temple” of light is illuminated from within.  Really dramatic.  Wright wrote all this stuff too about how he had re-read parts of the old testament and talked with the Jewish congregation about what they wanted and his genius had yielded the inspired notion of a building that would hold the congregation in a space like God holding his chosen faithful in the palm of his hand.  So inside the floor slopes in gentle angles imitative of a slightly open hand and then above that rises an immense open space imitative of Mt Sinai.

It was remarkably easy for me to look around the building on a Sunday mid-afternoon or even an early Saturday afternoon.  I had no sense of when the congregation might use it and no knowledge about Jewish practice.   I was able to walk all around it and go inside and really explore it on my own.  It is a stunning building as so many of Wright’s are.  I would see the Guggenheim in New York only years later.
But I got to like the Beth Shalom from the inside much more than I liked it from the outside.  Inside it had beautiful woodwork, lush sand colored carpeting, soft filtered light and a very dramatic semi-translucent sort of atrium-tower rising far above your head.  It fit the sense of what a sacred space and place of worship should look and feel like.

Outside however it felt very different.  The scale was much more squat and small than I had expected.  It sat lower to the ground and felt much more ordinary and suburban than I’d expected. (Years later in a tour of Fallingwater I learned that Wright, sublime egotist, insisted on using his own very short stature as the measure of all scale for his buildings.)   I guess I wanted it to look as monumental as St Patrick’s cathedral or the National Shrine in Washington DC.  And what bothered me most of all was the whole mt sinai construction.  Wright had worked very hard in the fifties to come up with an engineering solution that could give him a large interior space with as little visible scaffolding and structural bridgework as possible.  He had worked out some system of cast aluminum for the structure and then covered that with corrugated fiberglass.  Those were “cutting edge” technological advances in their day, no doubt.  But by the early 60s, a decade after the building had been built, the exterior aluminum had been painted repeatedly with aluminum paint—and you know how tacky that comes to look on any metal.  And the corrugated neutral fiberglass panels were semi-translucent but in the sunlight they now looked like yellowed and aged plastic and also very tacky.  So the whole building looked like a garden storage shed trying hard to morph into a faux egyptian/etruscan cathedral of some sort and seriously not making it, not even coming close.

Each time a went back to the college dormitory I then lived in more disappointed in the great Wright and more willing to consider the architecture of this very fake suburban Philadelphia mansion copied after a five-hundred year-old Tudor house.  I did not know all of that then.  I knew only that it was vaguely tudor in style.  Years later I found out that indeed there was a Tudor original and it still exists.  In 1998 while on sabbatical I went to visit Compton Wynyates and for a long Sunday afternoon in October the owner, Spencer Compton, Earl of Northampton, entertained me with a wonderful lunch and then gave me leave to wander by myself all through the house.

Magnificent essay by Marielo Ballvé on the work of César Aira.   This is a really long excerpt, I couldn’t resist.

• from
  The Literary Alchemy of César Aira

  Essay by Marcelo Ballvé
  . . . . . .
  In my opinion, An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter is one of the great works of world literature from the last 25 years of the last century, as good if not better than W.G. Sebald or Roberto Bolaño. But to really know César Aira as Argentines know him—as a writer who constantly risks making a fool of himself in his search for the essence of literature—one needs to read How I Became a Nun.
  
  III.

  Aira’s novels tend to begin straightforwardly, immediately immersing the reader in the climate of the story. These beginnings are done with a natural self-confidence, the entrancing self-possession of the best oral storytellers. Aira understands that to begin a story, no fancy words or purple prose are necessary. Nor are complex situations meant to be presented as such at first. The job at hand is to begin. The story must be allowed to unfold first, before it can be refolded by the author into something strange, with infinite folds—an origami monster.
  . . . . .

  Every time the action threatens to reach a plateau of routine or narrative equilibrium, Aira introduces a destabilizing element. Other authors use plot surprises to create rising action (the soap opera-patented device of revealing unexpected blood ties, for example). But Aira does something different. In each of his novels, events and narration typically swirl into denser and denser configurations that challenge the postulates of verisimilitude, reason, or good taste—or all three. Like the climate before a storm, when barometric pressure drops and the air seems to be buzzing with a desire for relief, Aira’s novels arrive at a point at which the reader is pleading for resolution. How is all of this going to come together?

  IV.

  It should be said that, in the opinion of some critics, Aira’s books usually don’t come together at all. This opinion is not just held by the occasional reviewer abroad who has no context in which to place Aira’s books; within Argentina itself there are influential writers and critics who believe Aira is overrated and a malign influence on younger Latin American writers who look up to him.

  . . . . . .

  In this, Aira’s stories might again be usefully compared to folk tales. They have the same compressed nature, the same power to suggest a universe of meaning despite being short texts. Each of Aira’s miniature novels include a multiplicity of fictions. Aira himself has referred to the work of literature as analogous to the creation of Russian dolls, those bulbous wooden ones that fit one inside of the other until one arrives at the final miniature doll, its features nearly illegible. The final doll, of course, is always a disappointment: the Russian dolls game is in reality a metaphor (another popular one is “peeling the onion”) for humankind’s congenital incapacity to get to the center of things. Aira’s fictions, like the Russian dolls, are about folding worlds into worlds to the point of absurdity. In doing so they simulate a kind of search for the essence of story, of anecdote—of the tale in its purest essence.

  Aira’s literary universe brings to mind an open alchemical laboratory in which the guts of storytelling are prodded, weighed, and examined. It is a lab in which Aira, or Dr. Aira (as he once called himself in another novel) is madly searching for the Philosopher’s Stone. Or we might call it the Storyteller’s Stone, the key which might allow him to effortlessly produce an endless stream of literature spun from the drab material of ordinary life. Of course, Aira, like the medieval alchemists, suspects his attempt is doomed to failure from the start, but that doesn’t keep him from trying. He is incorrigible: he has the blind optimism of a dreamer.

  V.

  According to Aira, he never edits his own work, nor does he plan ahead of time how his novels will end, or even what twists and turns they will take in the next writing session. He is loyal to his idea that making art is above all a question of procedure. The artist’s role, Aira says, is to invent procedures (experiments) by which art can be made. Whether he executes these or not is secondary; Aira’s business is the plan, not necessarily the result. Why is procedure all-important? Because it is relevant beyond the individual creator. Anyone can use it.

  Aira’s procedure, which he has elucidated in essays and interviews, is what he calls el continuo, or la huida hacia adelante. These concepts might be translated into English as “the continuum,” and a “constant flight forward.” Editing is an abhorrent idea in the context of Aira’s continuum. To edit oneself would be to retrace one’s steps, go backwards, when the idea is to always move forward. To judge yesterday’s writing session, to censor a lapse into the absurd or the irrational, to revive a character your work-in-progress sent tumbling over a cliff—all of these actions go against Aira’s procedure. Instead, the system prioritizes an ethic of creative self-affirmation and, I would say, optimism. To labor to justify previous work with more strange creations that in turn establish the need for ever more artistic high-wire acts in the future—this is the continuum, the high-wire act the artist must perform when he refuses to submit to any rule that is not his autonomously chosen procedure. It is an act performed with deep abysses yawning to each side of him—conformity, market pressures, conventionality, self-repression of all kinds . . . In other words, Aira’s literary career, embodied in each of his 63 novels, is a reckless pursuit of artistic freedom.

  Aira says that when he sits down to write his daily page or two, he writes pretty much whatever comes into his head, with no strictures except that of continuing the previous day’s work. (The spontaneous feel of his stories would seem to back up this claim, but I’ve always asked, can anyone write as well as Aira does while simply letting the pen ramble?)

  True, his books are very short. Aira says in interviews that he’s often tried to make his novels longer, but they seem to come to a natural rest at around the 100-page mark. Technically, much of what Aira has written would have to be classified in the novella category, but it’s hard to classify Aira’s work within any genre, be it story, novel, or novella. In my mind, Aira’s creations are something different altogether. They are stories, pure and simple, which Aira has managed to ennoble by seeing them into publication in the form of a single book. What he has done is put stories into circulation as objects, which is a defiant feat when seen in the context of a global literary market that demands hefty, sprawling, “big” novels.

  The key to Aira’s curious career, I think, is to be found in his conception of literature as something with more affinities to the realm of action than the inner world of reflection. Literature is perhaps nothing more complicated and glorious than the act of writing and publishing, and publishing again and again. Editing is dispensable, so is the search for the “right” publisher. (Aira publishes seemingly with whomever shows any interest in his manuscripts; at least a dozen publishers, most of them small independents, in Argentina alone.) The idea seems to be: publish first and ask questions later.2

  . . . . . .

  Aira is now entering the late stage of his career, and it seems he has begun to take stock. La Nueva Vida, Aira’s latest novel, is another loosely autobiographical tale that explores his first steps in publishing. The novel tells the story of a publisher/author relationship in which a Kafkaesque publisher is forever putting off the promised publication of the author’s novel. Here in a typically contradictory manner Aira is referencing his own career.

  In a sense, though, Aira has always been chasing his own tail. All his books revolve around the basic questions haunting art: What is it? How do I do it? It was the same questions medieval alchemists asked: What is the essence of matter, and how do I master it? Like a true alchemist, Aira does not despair about the answers that always slip away: he enjoys the dizzying running around in circles, the constant asking. I only wonder how long he will do it for. I wonder whether he might not be nearing the point at which his search for the source of literature might come to a natural conclusion. The history of philosophy, literature, and art is full of examples of great thinkers and artists who abandoned their search once they felt they had explored all its potential. For a time, Wittgenstein abandoned philosophy and became a schoolteacher. Duchamp abandoned art for chess. Rimbaud gave up writing. The great Brazilian artist Lygia Clark drifted from painting to installation art and collective performance pieces, but ended her career practicing sensorial therapy on patients.

  Aira himself has spoken, implicitly, about the abandonment of art as the culmination of an artist’s career. In his 1988 lectures at the University of Buenos Aires, he advanced the radical idea that writers of genius don’t in reality need to write a word. They might manifest their particular genius simply by being. Their actions, inevitably, would leave the appropriate mark upon the world. Their particular manner of approaching life would have its impact. Their novels or paintings would exist, but in virtual form, as potential contained in the texture of their lives. Their art might be deducted, virtually, from the manner in which they live. In Aira’s writing there’s a constant emphasis on this question: life—and, more specifically, action—as the real work of literature and art.

  At the end of this lecture, citing Argentine writer Alberto Laiseca, Aira compared the writer to a magician: “The greatness and efficacy of a magician is measured by his refusal to use magic. The true magician, the greatest, is the poorest and most unfortunate of all mortals. Because between his magic and his person forgetfulness takes shape, in the form of the world.”

  Literature, perhaps, is only what all of us flawed, deluded authors do when we’re still pursuing answers, convinced they are there. Aira seems to be close to lifting the veil on this search and realizing it is only a way to pass the time. For now, he’s still writing his fictions dictated by his mutant imagination, carried forward by an irrepressible momentum, drunk on imperfection. One day, perhaps, he’ll stop writing. We’ll be left with his novels, which are stepping stones, a trail of crumbs leading to a place as close to the molten heart of creation as it is possible to come without burning up.

  ____
  1In my view the book is a self-conscious imitation of the Noble Prize-winning high literary style; it is an imitation done so well it transcends parody—as Don Quijote does when it parodies chivalric epics—and becomes even better than the real thing.
  2In fact Aira’s mentor, the deceased Argentine poet and novelist Osvaldo Lamborghini had a saying: “Publish first, write later.”

  Marcelo Ballvé lives in Buenos Aires, where he edits the literary magazine Sancho’s Panza and the community newspaper El Sol de San Telmo.

The experience left SB exhausted and with a conviction of his dereliction as opposed to the “authenticity of vocation” of others (Knowlson, 234): but it had been a “necessary journey” (21-22)

I am reading the Grove from A to Z. Seems an interesting and different way to review everything while picking up stuff about Beckett. Seems a suitable way to handle the problem of the massive scholarship.

While I read the works. Finished watching the Beckett on Film series this afternoon. Can see why Beckett thought Godot was not that great even though it got him his first wild brush of fame.

Friday in Boston at the MFA was delighted to see a Dubuffet sculpture on display across from the cafe, one of his little logological figures, about four feet high, un homme.

Virginia is at work on her second book, called “Andanzas,” “Ramblings,” and so the new mac is “hers” for the project.  She uses it on the downstairs table, big window to the left, so we got the non-glare screen. Works beautifully so far.

Love that sense you get that your life is now in Beckett land, you can see how nearly every move would look to an audience watching a Beckett play, if your life were a Beckett play.

Which of course in enough ways that count, it might well be.  Might as well be.  Is.

Whether you like that or not.

As if you had a say.

A choice.

A word.

where Boston brain scientist– Neuroanatomist — Jill Bolte Taylor describes what it was like when she had a stroke herself nine years before this lecture –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyyjU8fzEYU&feature=related

Jay Ramsay: Why is important to publish poetry that most people don’t want to read? (‘Most people ignore most poetry because most poetry ignores most people’ – Adrian Mitchell)

It’s important because the arts leaven society. I don’t believe they change people directly – that is punk rebel songs don’t bring governments down, but human beings need music, writing, song, dance, theatre, painting, to live balanced lives, to be truly healthy. More than ever Western capitalist society is homogenized and whilst pretending to offer more choice actually offers less. I am very optimistic that the web and small publishers means poets can work around and outside the established booktrade to find a readership. I’m quite happy for that readership to be small and spread out rather than seek (or expect) mass sales. I’ve always had to deal with the fact that my paintings find a home on someone’s wall and are gone; with poetry that doesn’t happen, one gets to keep the manuscript, or typed finished version, and sell a book with it in, post it online etc.

I like Adrian Mitchell’s work a lot, and he’s a great performer, but if you take his poem that you quote too far you end up writing rhyming doggerel, which is what most people want to hear. And in fact, you can see that most big poetry publishers facilitate this, with shaggy dog narratives if not rhyming doggerel (though sometimes it’s both). Lowest common denominator is not the answer to anything except making a lot of money in the pop charts. But as I’ve said above, even the music industry are starting to realise that music per se is not commodifiable any more, thanks to online file-sharing. One can get depressed about that (especially if you’re a musician) or take it as a positive. I’m inclined toward the latter.

The question then for me becomes: do Simon and his co-writers/producers/directors know what they’re talking about.  My take is: no, not exactly.  I’m always skeptical about cynics.  To me, their view is always too jaundiced.  Not that yellow doesn’t exist in this world.  But cynics like Simon think everything is

 yellow.  Or rather, everything above a certain level in society is yellow.  Being good lefties, Simon and his buddies portray the workers at the bottom of the heap as the only decent people around – victims of “the system.”  Personally, I think it’s more complicated than that.  When I look around I see a lot of yellow workers.  Moreover the world I see seems far more multi-hued than Lefties seem willing or able to acknowledge.  So, while a former crime-beat reporter and a former policeman see a lot of yellow, their explanation of the yellowness comes, I think, from their idealogical viewpoint rather than their actual knowledge.  But since their idealogical viewpoint is popular with a lot of people of people these days, those in the entertainment and newspaper business, Simon’s viewpoint is assumed to be “hard hitting” and “realistic.”   And up to a point it is.  But only up to a point.  Cynics, in the end, are just one more variety of true believer.