My copy came in the mail via my wonderful father, who, after congratulating me, said, “try as I might the poetry is too high for me.” Aww. I can’t wait to give him a big squeeze when I go home for the winter.

There are lots of people in the anthology that I know and am excited to see and lots of people I don’t know and am excited to discover. I don’t know that the book is available in the States, but it would be nice if it were.

I’ve been sending work out again, post-MFA (which is how I now define my life), and have been lucky to get accepted here and there. Structo Magazine recently included a poem of mine in their ninth issue. I also have a poem in the most recent issue of The New England Review, which is available in print and online. Later in the year, I’ll have three poems in The Iowa Review, and next spring, I have a poem in Blackbird.

I have also begun reviewing! It is deeply frightening, particularly since my job is to review translations, which can sometimes be more complicated to discuss. On the other hand, I am the poetry editor of a very exciting translation journal, so I should put my money where my mouth is. This is my review of a selected volume of Amina Saïd‘s poetry, translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker. There will be another poetry review in the next issue of Asymptote, which is shaping up to be utterly fabulous comme d’habitude.

What else? My life is filled with teaching and reading these days. I have fantastic students. They’re all super shiny and very smart.

Currently, I’m making my way through The Origins of Free Verse by HT Kirby-Smith — it’s a breeze. O_O

Then I’m also reading Praise by Robert Hass, which truly is a breeze even as you stop and consider everything absolutely glorious going on in his poems. I can’t believe I hadn’t read him properly before this. Shame on me.

And why aren’t there enough book covers like this anymore? So elegant:

I’m also reading Virginia Woolf‘s A Room of One’s Own, which is one of those books I assumed I had read and then thought about it and realised, no, I havne’t, it just feels like I have; and Samuel Beckett‘s Malone Dies.

I have also picked up Keith Waldrop‘s Transcendental Studies from the library, which I’m supposed to be reading along with a poet-friend so we can compare notes.

Beverly Dahlen: A-Reading Spicer & eighteen sonnets (2004)

H.D.: Collected Poems: 1912-1944

H.D.: HERmione (1981)

Jorie Graham: Erosion (1983)

Emmanuel Hocquard: Conditions of Light: Elegies (tr. from the French by Jean-Jacques Poucel)

Bhanu Kapil: Humanimal: A Project for Future Children (2009)

Rainer Maria Rilke: Letters to a Young Poet (tr. from the German by Stephen Mitchell)

My Vocabulary Did This To Me: The Collected Poetry of Jack Spicer (2008)

American Hybrid: A Norton Anthology of New Poetry (ed. Cole Swensen & David St John, 2009)

L. Lacambra Ypil: The Highest Hiding Place (2009)

*this includes books I bought, books I got for free from the publishers and a gift from a friend (L. Lacambra Ypil, the author of the last book)

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Books I read in April and May

• Frank Bidart: The Book of the Body (1977)
• Christine Garren: Among the Monarchs (2000)
• Jorie Graham: The End of Beauty (1987)
• Geoffrey Hill: Mercian Hymns (1971)
• Brigit Pegeen Kelly: Song (1995)
• Marni Ludwig: Little Box of Cotton and Lightning (2012)
• Carl Phillips: Double Shadow (2011)
• Rainer Maria Rilke: Duino Elegies (1923, tr. from the German by Stephen Mitchell)
• Amina Saïd: The Present Tense of the World: Poems 2000-2009 (tr. from the French by Marilyn Hacker) — review forthcoming in Asymptote‘s July issue
• CD Wright: Deepstep Come Shining (1998)

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Movies I watched in April and May

(in order from best to worst)

1. Robert Bresson: Journal d’un curé de campagne (1951, France)
2. Miklós Janscó: The Red and the White (1967, Hungary)
3. Atom Egoyan: The Sweet Hereafter (1997, Canada)**
4. Bruno Dumont: Flandres (2006, France)**
5. David Cronenberg: Videodrome (1983, Canada)*
6. Chris Newby: Anchoress (1993, UK)
7. Neils Arden Oplev: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009, Sweden)
8. Daniel Alfredson: The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2009, Sweden)
9. James Ivory: Howard’s End (1992, UK)
10. Joss Whedon: Serenity (2005, USA)
11. Christopher Monger: The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain (1995, UK)
12. Joss Whedon: The Avengers (2012, USA)
13. Roger Kumble: Cruel Intentions (1999, USA)
14. Adrian Lyne: Fatal Attraction (1987, USA)
15. John Schultz: Drive Me Crazy (1999, USA)

**not a first viewing

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A bit of news

Marni Ludwig: Little Box of Cotton & Lightning (2012)

 One of the best things about being in an MFA program is that you get to know actual poets who are actually amazing who actually go on to publish things in beautiful ways. I was in workshop with Marni last year and completely in awe of her. You can read the title poem at Jerry Magazine and purchase a copy of the chapbook here.

Also look out for her first book, Pinwheel, picked by Jean Valentine for the 2012 New Issues Poetry Prize.

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Other poetry I picked up in April:

H.D.: Helen in Egypt (1961/1974)

This is the 1974 New Directions edition of Helen in Egypt, which was first publised by Grove Press in 1962. I am in the midst of reading it and it is spectacular. It begins:

We all know the story of Helen of Troy but few of us have followed her to Egypt. How did she get there? Stesichorus of Sicily in his Pallinode, was the first to tell us. Some centuries later, Euripides repeats the story. Stesichorus was said to have been struck blind because of his invective against Helen, but later was restored to sight, when he reinstated her in his Pallinode. Euripedes, notably in The Trojan Women, reviles her, but he also is “restored to sight.” The later, little understood Helen in Egypt, is again a Pallinode, a defence, explanation or apology.

According to the Pallinode, Helen was never in Troy. She has been transposed or translated from Greece into Egypt. Helen of Troy was a phantom, substituted for the real Helen, by jealous deities. The Greeks and the Trojans alike fought for an illusion.

Saskia Hamilton: As for Dream (2001)

I’ve read this before; just got a copy for myself.

Matthea Harvey: Pity the Bathtub Its Forced Embrace of the Human Form (2000)

Matthea Harvey will be visiting Washington University in the Fall; exciting!

Marie Howe: The Good Thief (1988)

I have a special attraction to books published in 1963 and also 1988, the year of my birth. Not that that’s why this book is lovely.

Spencer Reece: The Clerk's Tale (2004)

I think I might teach this book in the fall. You can read the title poem here.

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I’d read some poems by Conchitina Cruz, a Filipina poet, in a journal and then tried looking for her books, but this one is most easily available straight from the Philippines. So my friend Allan who lives in Manila sent this book to me via another friend. I just read a few of the poems and they’re incredible.

Conchitina Cruz: Dark Hours (2005)

This is a review copy, which I’m already enjoying:

Amina Said: The Present Tense of the World: Poems 2000 - 2009 (tr. from the French by Marilyn Hacker)

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Fiction:

Bought for a quarter at the library, someone I’ve always wanted to read:

Jamaica Kincaid: The Autobiography of My Mother (1997)

The first book of Tanizaki‘s work I ever read, not knowing who he was when I found him in a library; I fell instantly in love:

Junichiro Tanizaki: Seven Japanese Tales (tr. from the Japanese by Howard Hibbett, 1981)

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Nonfiction, also by Tanizaki:

Junichiro Tanizaki: In Praise of Shadows (tr. from the Japanese by Harper & Seidensticker, 1977)

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Some personal news:

I have graduated from my MFA program in poetry and am officially a Master. I also got a third-year fellowship, so I will be staying in St Louis for another year, teaching a class each in the fall and spring semesters.

Asymptote April 2012 is illustrated by the wonderful Hugo Muecke!

As poetry editor — please note that I have always wanted to begin a sentence like this — I’m excited to be curating, in addition to the regular translated poetry section in every issue, two special poetry features for our July and October issues, the guidelines for which are as follows:

For the first special feature in our July 2012 issue, we invite submissions of translated Romanian poetry (up to 10 pages). Deadline: 1 Jun 2012

For the first special feature in our October 2012 issue, we invite submissions of original English-language poetry that explore the foreignness of a word or phrase, or even a larger body of language. What, in fact, does foreignness mean? Is it Freud’s notion of the uncanny? Is it silence in the midst of cacophony? The cacophony in silence? How is foreignness felt in the body when one travels to a new place? We are interested in work that thinks, rethinks and unthinks along these lines (up to 10 pages). Deadline: 1 Sep 2012

If you are a Romanian poet/translator (July issue) or a poet working in English (October issue), I’d love to hear from you (submission guidelines here).

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I should’ve said this a long time ago on Blotting paper: I’m always so excited with our work at Asymptote. Sure, more people know about us than did a year ago; but it still astonishes me the amount and kind of work we manage to collect every three months. Yes, three. We put out four issues every year filled with the best translated literature we can find, the best art, the best critical thinking about the work of translation.

Here’s a shoutout to the poets and poetry-translators featured in our most recent Spring issue:

Let’s start with the Russians: I’m very thrilled to have Igor Pomerantsev (translated by Frank Williams), Osip Mandelstam (translated by Olga Kamensky) and Vladimir Mayakovsky (translated by Alex Cigale) together in one issue. Each is a stalwart of a different era, Pomerantsev being contemporary, Mandelstam Acmeist, and Mayakovsky Futurist.

Then the newcomers: This issue features for the first time the Faroese, K’iché and Danish languages with poet Agnar Artúvertin (translated by Matthew Landrum), excerpts from the sacred book of the Mayans, the Popol Vuh (translated by Michael Bazzett), and poet Jens August Schade (translated by Thomas E Kennedy) respectively.

Here’s an excerpt from a poem by Flávio de Araújo, a contemporary Brazilian poet, translated from the Portuguese by Rachel Morgenstern-Clarren:

She was dressed in gray, like the squall.
Crustaceans of a thousand colors crowded
her long hair, and she had the luminous skin
of a woman who scrubbed with spices,
but was not beautiful at all.

The fishermen’s faces grew saltier
like the fish they salted, liquid
poured from their eyes and settled
on their cracked lips
recalling the taste of brine.
Their minds clamored for the strength
of Jesus’ blood.

A woman’s body—
that much they knew.
The waves pulled her into a dance
with no music.
She didn’t appear aged,
had no identifying marks.
One only heard, my God!
Over and over again, my God!
My God!

A woman’s body floating
but never part of the sea.

(from ‘The Floating Body’)

Perhaps our most daring translation is of Gérard de Nerval‘s ‘Myrtho,’ whose French Jenne Le contemporises and renders in English as ‘Matthew.’

Three contemporary poets and one ancient: the German Werner Lutz (translated by Marc Vincenz); the Italian Steven Greico (who translates himself); the Chinese Li Li (translated by Eleanor Goodman); and the sixteenth-century Sanskrit poet Vallabhācārya (translated by Mani Rao).

Wonderful, yes?

Please read, contribute, spread the word!

P.S. This is our tumblr.

All periods of time have ends to them, and these fatal endings we anticipate. A period of time–a day, an hour, a year–and this will end, we say; all this will end, the season will turn, and all will be over. We look in vain for some eternal moment, for happiness, felicity, that state of bliss that will go on for ever and ever. Is not happiness defined only when no term to its extent is imagined? So Rimbaud thought, it seems to me. His seasons are those stretches of time that open unawares and close painfully in our lives. That summer, those two years in the city, this love affair, that month in the country–these are the true, the organic epochs of our lives; the dates that mark their endings are our true anniversaries. Are not these the seasons Rimbaud wrote of: the implacable turning of season, and the denial of happiness implicit in their movement?

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Aptly, spring has begun. The sun is hurting. And I have just turned in my thesis.

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LIST ONE: BOOKS PURCHASED IN MARCH

First set: Works by Beverly Dahlen, my latest, and certainly an, enduring obsession

These would be (in order): A Reading 1 — 7 (1985, Momo’s Press); A Reading 11 — 17 (Potes & Poets Press, 1989); A Reading 8 — 10 (Chax Press, 1992); and A Reading: Birds (2011, little red leaves textile series).

Some notes: A Reading 1 — 7 cost me quite a bit, as it’s a rare first edition that is also signed (as I said, I’m obsessed). A Reading: Birds is a lovely chapbook that is available here. Dawn Penderghast curates and makes these lovely cloth-sewn chapbooks; I highly recommend them (and Dahlen).

Second set: Poetry books I’ve read before and love and therefore wanted to, and now do, possess

These are: Selected Poems by Anna Akhmatova, translated from the Russian by DM Thomas (Penguin Classics, 2006); As for Dream by Saskia Hamilton (Graywolf Press, 2001); Lunch Poems by Frank O’Hara (City Lights Books, 1964); and Prose Poems by Pierre Reverdy, translated from the French by Ron Padgett (Black Square Editions & The Brooklyn Rail, 2007).

Notes: I haven’t actually read the Akhmatova book in its entirety, although (a) I have read a larger selection of her translated works by Stanley Kunitz and Max Hayward, so I have read these poems in a different version and (b) I once went on a massive hunt for translations of one of Akhmatova’s most famous poems (‘Lot’s Wife’), found eight or nine, and discovered at the end of it that my favourite version was the one I had encountered in college — the version by DM Thomas. So I’m certain to treasure this book.

All four of these books are wonderful, but my favourite is by Reverdy/Padgett.

Third set: Fiction

Fairly obvious: The Waves by Virginia Woolf (Hogarth Press, 1931) and The Happy Failure: Stories by Herman Melville (Harper Perennial, 2009).

Note: I don’t actually possess a first-edition Woolf; mine’s a reprint by Penguin from the . . . ah . . . aughties.

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GOING BACK TO RIMBAUD AND SCHMIDT FOR A SECOND

Paul Schmidt is one of Arthur Rimbaud‘s many translators. John Ashbery is another. I recently completed reading his (Ashbery’s) translations of the Illuminations, published last year by WW Norton. It’s gotten rave reviews, mostly for being extremely ‘faithful,’ by which, I suppose, the reviewers mean a high lexicographical equivalence between the source text and the translation.

I have a difficult relationship with Rimbaud translations — not because I can read the original language, but because Rimbaud was one of the first poets I ever read with any kind of seriousness and because I keep looking for an English text that’s suitable to keep the French company.

But Rimbaud is particularly hard to translate. Yes, all translation is/should be hard, or it isn’t worth doing, but with Rimbaud comes the problem that what he wrote was so unimaginably groundbreaking that any translation aiming to offer a similar effect in, say, English, must fail.

Unlike Ashbery, Schmidt translates the French prose poems of the Illuminations into lineated free-verse English. To account for this, he writes in his introduction:

The prose poem seems possible in French partly because the canons of French prose style are so strictly defined. A piece of writing that seriously distorts the norms of French sentence and paragraph structure is no longer prose, though it may well be poetry. But English prose structure is not so rigidly codified; so poetic a style as James Joyce’s we easily define as prose. A prose poem in French is poem first and prose secondarily; a prose poem in English is in the opposite case. Do we falsify this French poetry by presenting it as English prose?

It’s an interesting question. Forgetting for an instant what Schmidt says about prose poems in English (which seems too simple), the problem restated seems to be: if in translating Rimbaud’s prose poetry into English one does not attempt to create a radical shift from the standards of English prose which is parallel to (though obviously different in nature from) the shifts made by Rimbaud from the standards of French prose, is one not failing at the translation in some significant way?

Schmidt’s way of solving the problem was to ‘make an equation between sentence and line the major formal device of [his] translations.’ This to me is an admirable attempt. I’m not sure lineation is the thing necessarily to do with Rimbaud, but for what it’s worth, I think Schmidt comes a lot farther than Ashbery, whose translation seems rather puritanical.

It seems to me that someone trying to translate Rimbaud should attempt to exceed Rimbaud, fall short, and in so doing, create a good translation. Instead what seems to happen often is a kind of terrible obsequiousness in the face of someone greatly admired. Sometimes I think one has to hate the author one translates a little . . . hate and demean, the violent effects of which bolster the right sort of recklessness necessary to produce the translation.

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LIST THREE: BOOKS READ IN MARCH

Poetry

• Beverly Dahlen: A Reading: Birds (2011)
• Ayane Kawata: Time of Sky (1969/2010, tr. from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu)
• Arthur Rimbaud: Illuminations (1875/2011, French & tr. from the French by John Ashbery)

Nonfiction

• Jorge Luis Borges: On Writing (2010, tr. from the Spanish by various)
• Frances Mayes: The Discovery of Poetry: A Field Guide to Reading and Writing Poems (2001)*
• Maggie Nelson: Bluets (2009)

*This book looks silly in the list, but I actually quite like it: it’s a good teaching book for beginner poetry classes.

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MAGGIE NELSON’S BLUETS

This lyric essay begins:

1. Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color. Suppose I were to speak this as though it were a confession . . .

And so it is: the confession of an obsession as well as an attempt to understand the object of the obsession, the colour blue.

Maggie Nelson‘s methodology includes consulting texts like Goethe’s Theory of Colours and Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, receiving ‘reports’ from correspondents (various artists and friends of the author) on the appearance of blue in texts and the world, as well as mining her own life in the deepest ways for what this fascination with blue can yield.

The form of the essay is masterfully used. I can never forget that to essay is to make an attempt. Nelson is attempting to understand something: blue, and also her obsession with blue. I often believe that the best essays fail, and this one fails beautifully. The more obsessive Nelson’s research becomes, the less she understands blue. But while this particular attempt at understanding fails, what overrides  the essay is the nature of the obsession itself.

The numbered structure of the essay delineates the various attempts, but also allows the author to leap across time and texts. It is a kind of intelligent wandering. The numbering also enacts obsession: this is a list; things must be kept track of. It also suggests pillow book (Nelson herself mentions Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book: a moment concerning blue, no doubt, but also a moment of reflection of the form of the writing). The structure is not unlike religious meditations to me (St Augustine, Hildegard von Bingen), and so there is a blessedness to the enterprise.

Why would a reader uninterested in blue in the way Nelson is read this book? Because in the end it is not about blue, it is about obsession, and that the reader does have.

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LIST THREE: MOVES WATCHED IN MARCH

• Aleksey Balabanov: Brother (1997, Russia)
• Aleksey Balabanov: Cargo 200 (2007, Russia)
• David Cronenberg: Eastern Promises (2007, UK)
• Werner Herzog: Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972, West Germany)
• Luis Mandoki: White Palace (1990, USA)
• Sergei Paradjanov: The Color of Pomegranates (1968, Soviet Union)

Notes:

1. Cargo 200 and Eastern Promises were rewatches. They are two of my favourite films ever.

2. I can’t believe I’d never seen Balabanov’s Brother before! This was the movie that catapulted him to fame (in Russia, anyway). It’s about a 20-something Russian kid, come home from the army and sent to his older brother in Leningrad to ‘learn how to be successful’. Turns out his older brother is a hit man and the kid gets caught up in all this dangerous mob stuff. This could be the plot of an average Hollywood blockbuster, but . . . it’s not.

It’s weird to have to say this, but the kid brother in this movie reminds me of my own brother: looks, awkward charm and all. Sadly, I am not a hit woman.

3. I had actually seen half of Herzog‘s Aguirre before. And no, I did not give up out of lack of patience. It was a screening for class when I was in college. For some reason, we had to stop the film and were given the promise that we could watch the rest later. But when it came time to watch the rest, the class got lazy and didn’t want to watch it. Bitches. Anyway, this is dangerous and amazing.

4. White Palace — what to say? Firstly, this is not in the league of the other films in this list. But . . . it has (cougar hot) Susan Sarandon and (young hot) James Spader in it. That’s the first reason to watch it. The second is that it’s a pretty well-scripted standard-issue romantic drama about the unlikely and passionate love that grows between a 40-year-old burger-joint waitress and a 27-year-old ad executive. It is also set in St Louis! I never thought I’d be so excited to see a movie set (and shot) in St Louis. Tons of movies are set in New York and I’ve walked by a million iconic film locations. I even ate in that deli in which Meg Ryan fake orgasms for When Harry Met Sally. It slid off me like a duck (what?). But watching White Palace, I was all OMG! That’s the Arch. OMG! That’s the Fox Theatre. And OMG! That’s Dog Town. I even discovered that Sarandon’s scenes in the burger joint (called White Palace) was shot in a local restaurant that changed its name to White Knight after the movie came out to capitalise on the movie’s success. I am determined to eat at this restaurant, disgusting as the food may be.

Oh, and did I mention there are spectacular sex scenes int his movie?

5. Color of Pomegranates is Georgian filmmaker Sergei Paradjanov‘s masterpiece. It was made in the Soviet Union and banned for several reasons, but now you can watch it on Netflix. It is the story of the life of Armenian poet Sayat-Nova, but the story is told like a poem. In fact, if you read poetry, you are likely to yield to this film very easily. If you’re unwilling to let go of the expected norms of cinema, you will have difficulty watching it. This is a stunning, stunning film.

]]> http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?feed=rss2&p=3179 0 http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3204 http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3204#comments Sun, 11 Mar 2012 06:35:28 +0000 Aditi http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3204 RELIGION. I have taken to reading the Bible again, and by that I mean Pessoa‘s The Book of Disquiet. It is a monumental work and, in Richard Zenith‘s curation, rather a mammoth one too. So I read it on and off, though I ideally I tell myself I should read a passage every day as one does, if devout, a Bible. But maybe I am more devout in spirit than in practice, and therefore a true Catholic towards this book.

Pessoa: So why do I keep writing?

Pessoa: Because I still haven’t learned to practise completely the renunciation that I preach.

(A Factless Autobiography 231)

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DIVERS. For three years I have written monthly posts about the books and movies I read and watched in that time. I’ve become more and more lax about the writing of these, being both late and unhelpfully brief about them. The point was to force myself to think carefully about what gives me pleasure and what doesn’t. Laziness is bad for thinking.

Now that I’ve become less invested in writing a blog that is read and more interested in having a place that keeps track of my interests and complaints and confusion, I’ve decided to switch to this format for my blog writing: a (hopefully) fortnightly gathering of my thoughts and readings. This first divers post of 2012 will have to summarise two months instead of just two weeks, so bear with me.

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Street art in Prague: Kafka's Metamorphosis (via Flavorwire)

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MUSIC. I don’t ‘follow’ music. I don’t buy albums or go to concerts or keep up with the trivia. I’m pretty uncouth in this area of the arts, but I do have my favourite songs. Usually I just play them over and over on youtube. My earworm this past month has been Kate Bush‘s ‘And So Is Love’ (where worm refers something that turns into something beautiful like a dragonfly).

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BOOKS. This is what I read in January and February:

Fiction

• Raymond Queneau: Exercises in Style (1947, tr. from the French by Barbara Wright)

Poetry

• Frank Bidart: Golden State (1973)
• Beverly Dahlen: Out of the Third (1974)
• Beverly Dahlen: The Egyptian Poems (1983)
• Peter Gizzi: Artificial Heart (1998)
• Peter Gizzi: Threshold Songs (2011)
• Linda Gregg: The Sacraments of Desire (1991)
• Jorie Graham: Hybrids of Plants and of Ghosts (1980)
• Claire Hero: Sing, Mongrel (2009)
• Brigit Pegeen Kelly: To the Place of Trumpets (1988)
• Brian Teare: Pleasure (2010)

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CINEMA. This is what I watched in January and February:

• Ingmar Bergman: Persona (1966, Sweden)
• Catherine Breillat: Sex is Comedy (2002, France)
• David Cronenberg: A Dangerous Method (2011, Canada)
• Tom Hanks: That Thing You Do (1996, USA)
• Eric Rohmer: Triple Agent (2004, France)
• Iain Softley: The Wings of the Dove (1997, USA)
• Billy Wilder: Sunset Blvd. (1950, USA)
• Andrei Zvyagintsev: Elena (2011, Russia)

So let’s organise these films somewhat.

A fun B-list movie that I’ve watched before: Hanks‘s That Thing You Do

An OK novel-to-cinema adaptation: Softley‘s The Wings of the Dove (based on the Henry James novel)

An OK film by a director who has in other instances been very brilliant: Breillat‘s Sex is Comedy

Bergman film: Persona — I’m not sure how else to categorise this. I liked it, but Bergman isn’t quite as compelling as other filmmakers for me.

A Hollywood classic: Wilder‘s Sunset Blvd. — I quite loved this; I should’ve seen it a long time ago. Much of American cinema shifted into place after I watched this. It also made me think how underused, and even poorly used, the voiceover is in contemporary cinema.

A stunning political film: Zvyagintsev‘s Elena — This is a pretty good review.

A great living filmmaker makes another:  Cronenberg‘s A Dangerous Method — When I asked my (ex-)film professor whether this was any good, he said it was ‘very watchable but still the work of a tired man, who has grown old gracefully.’ This seemed true when I watched the film myself. It’s a wonderful movie, beautifully, even painfully, made about Carl Jung’s (Michael Fassbender) relationship with his hero Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen), and also with Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley). Spielrein was a patient of Jung’s, as well as his lover; later she became a child psychologist.

Fassbender was fine. Mortensen was astonishing — I would never have thought anything of him if he hadn’t started working with Cronenberg. I don’t know how to explain it, but he does these things with his face, so subtle, that must be Freud. Keira Knightley surprised me. I thought she was wonderful.

Last note: I watched A Dangerous Method in a movie theatre (my first time for a Cronenberg film as I’ve never before been in a place where his movies were showing) in a very strange mall with a group of poets. We were the only people who showed up to watch the movie.

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TV. I watch a lot of television, usually on my computer (paradox?). This is probably not reflected on my blog because I hardly talk about it, but . . . I need TV. I need carefully timed parcels of distraction to punctuate my work day; otherwise my mind explodes. It’s hard to know where to begin talking about what I have been watching off late, because just in this past week I have completed several Masterpiece Theatre miniseries. That’s how bad it is.

Instead of saying what I loved, let me make a complaint about the watching of TV. One of my worst habits is recommending movies and TV shows to people, even when I know that the recipient of my recommendations (a) does not give shit  or (b) is feigning interest, but does not give a shit. Recently, however, it’s happened that some of my friends (and acquaintances) have started watching shows that I’ve previously recommended (though it probably has nothing to do with my endorsement).

But that is not the complaint. The complaint is that now I have to participate in/overhear conversations about said shows. By ‘said shows’ I actually mean ‘a particular show’ known as Downton Abbey. This is another Masterpiece Theatre BBC production, but not based on a work of literature as these productions usually are. It’s set in the house of a British aristocrat, Lord Grantham, in the early part of the twentieth century. It starts out as a pretty standard entail drama — third-rate Austen, in other words, but set in a different time period and generally a lot of fun.

I’d been watching the show as it came out in the UK, before PBS started showing the episodes here in the States. I mostly enjoyed the first season, but by the second season, the show has become the worst kind of soap opera, filled with spurned soon-to-be-ex-wife-now-villains and burn victims claiming to be dead relatives. The show has many, many problems, but the two biggest ones seem to be:

1. that it is not based on a work of literature and is the creation of someone living now (Julian Fellowes) looking at the past; intentionally or not, the focus is on the changing times, early feminist struggles, class struggles, that sort of thing. The view is so restrospective and unsubtle that characters gradually lose what little interiority they had and become cardboard placards with writing on them that says BENEVOLENT MASTER, WICKED LADY SERVANT, PORCELAIN SLUT and so on. What you have then is utter tripe and some of the best British actors in the business today swimming in it.

2. that it has gone beyond other BBC miniseries in becoming shockingly popular, in the UK as well as in States, and probably other parts of the world.

I deeply regret ever mentioning that I liked the show because now I have to listen to Dowager Countess (one of the better-written characters, played by Maggie Smith) references every five minutes. The show used to be a bit of fun for me, but now that it’s become an American phenomenon, I have to bite my lip whenever people act like it’s the most intelligent show to grace our TV sets. Dowager Countess, indeed. I bet you could fart in public, yell ‘Dowager Countess!’ and you’d be considered the most intelligent person in the room. That’s the world we live in.

In better news, my new favourite of the Masterpiece Theatre is The Forsyte Saga (2002), based on the John Galsworthy novels. I’ve watched the first season. It’s all beautifully done, but Damian Lewis . . . Damian Lewis who plays Soames Forstye, one of the protagonists of this saga and the most execrable man you will ever meet (in, I suppose, a John Galsworthy novel), is brilliant. He and Gina McKee, who plays Irene Heron (sp?), command my attention completely. I want to use that cliché to describe them: consummate actors.

Here is a clip from the first episode and one of their early interactions:

 *

RECENT ACQUISITIONS. These are very recent; if I include all of January and February’s purchases, this page would take much, much longer to load.

*

LOVE. “. . . when circumstances mischievously led me to suppose that I loved and to verify that the other person truly loved me, my first reaction was of bewildered confusion, as if I’d won a grand prize in an unconvertible currency. And then, because no human can avoid being human, I felt a certain vanity; this emotion, however, which would would seem to be the most natural one, quickly vanished. It was followed by an uncomfortable feeling that’s hard to define but that was composed of tedium, of humiliation, and of weariness. . . . I finally understood a phrase of Chateaubriand whose meaning, because of my lack of personal experience, had always eluded me. Chateaubriand writes of René, his personification, ‘it wearied him to be loved’ — on le fatigait en l’aimant.” (The Book of Disquiet, A Factless Autobiography 235)

]]> http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?feed=rss2&p=3204 4 http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3180 http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3180#comments Sun, 04 Mar 2012 01:14:18 +0000 Aditi http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3180 Lots of movies, not all of them bad.

Robert Altman: 3 Women (1977, USA)

An utterly strange movie, as I’m sure the still above suggests. I love Altman’s work, but I’m not sure about this one. The first half is excellent: Pinky (Sissy Spacek) is a young girl, seemingly from nowhere, who moves to California and starts to work at a spa for the elderly. She’s awkward and childish and starts looking to older, wiser Millie (Shelley Duvall) for her social education. Eventually she moves in with Millie, but it quickly becomes apparent that for all her talk, no one really likes or even notices Millie. There’s something . . . ill about these two women. After an accident, things get worse as their identities begin to blur. The third woman is Willie, the wife of the Millie’s landlord. She’s pregnant and paints these amazing, weird images (see still).

The bit about identities blurring sounds a lot like Bergman’s Persona, which was, I think, an inspiration for Altman. I really like Altman’s version, especially the first half, and also where the film lands as its final point. Between the middle and the end, there’s something that needs resolution. I think it might be that the film falls into fantasy more so than psychosis, and that troubles me. Still, this is very worth watching, just for Sissy and Shelley. They don’t make ‘em like that anymore in Hollywood.

Wes Anderson: Rushmore (1998, USA)

Ugh.

Brian de Palma: Blow Out (1981, USA)

John motherfucking Travolta at his best. Also best ending ever. Also: John Lithgow makes a much more frightening serial killer here than he does in that bore of a fourth season of Dexter. Also: John motherfucking Travolta.

(The movie is loosely inspired by an Michelangelo Antonioni film, which in turn is based on a Julio Cortázar short story.)

Hector Dhalia: Adrift (2009, Brazil)

Standard electra complex film.

Tom Ford: A Single Man (2009, USA)

Uhhh . . . where to begin? First, maybe, let’s talk about this: Tom Ford.

Tom Ford should’ve been the first sign pointing me away — far, far away from this movie. But I just thought, Tom Ford? Can’t be the fashion designer. Must be someone else with the same name. WRONG. This IS Tom Ford the FASHION DESIGNER making a MOVIE.

The second sign should’ve been that the Oscars were all over this. But I haven’t been keeping up with the Oscars, so I didn’t know.

ANYWAY. Tom Ford made this shitty movie, based on what is presumably a shitty book, about a man who wants to kill himself because his lover died and he’s alone and he’s gay and no one knows. Ordinarily this story would have my sympathy. However, if you decide to tell this story in  unsaturated colour and then have images flash into full saturation to show that the suicide is unthinking his suicide every time he sees a little child or a hot man in tight jeans, and if you have him decide at the last moment to not kill himself and then have him die of a heart attack, then no. NO. ABSOLUTELY NO.

Also, I do not understand this whole thing about Colin Firth. No, I don’t think he’s the perfect man. And I’ll say it: I did not think he was the perfect Mr Darcy in that BBC miniseries of Pride & Prejudice (Liz was lovely, though).

Will Gluck: Friends with Benefits (2011, USA)

If you remember correctly — and this argues terribly with my previous admission to not knowing anything Oscarly — this was Mila Kunis‘s Oscar throwaway for that abomination Black Swan. An Oscar throwaway is a silly blockbuster-type (often a romantic comedy) movie that a person involved in an Oscar-type movie does so that everyone — low-hi, hi-low, low-low — sees promotions for his/her two equally terrible movies everywhere they go which seep into their dreams and hypnotise them into championing their win at the Oscars.

Of the Black Swan roster, Natalie Portman did a romantic comedy called No Strings Attached with Ashton Kutcher, and Mila Kunis did Friends With Benefits with Justin Timberlake. These two movies are shocking in that go beyond the usual similarities that romantic comedies share with one another in order to have EXACTLY THE SAME STORY (a man and woman try to fuck without romance but realise eventually that they want the romance and the fucking) with EXACTLY THE SAME VANILLA MALE HEART THROB (I call him Jushton Kutlake). It’s INSANE.

The Mila Kunis one is better, by the way — she is after all less annoying of the two. Also, Will Gluck seems more talented and funnier than whoever made the other movie.

One last thing: something I’d forgotten about romantic comedies is just how ‘quirky’ they make the woman in order to make her seem interesting and therefore above all the other equally beautiful, size-zero women in the very size-zero cast of the movie. In the aughties, this element of romantic comedia has morphed ‘quirkiness’ into ‘damage’. So Mila Kunis keeps saying she can’t be in a relationship because she’s ‘damaged’ and you have to keep squinting at this incredibly beautiful, witty, successful, stable-seeming woman Kunis plays in the film and wonder, ‘Damaged? Huh!’

Raja Gosnell: Never Been Kissed (1998, USA)

Oh, horrible.

Lisa Gottlieb: Just One of the Guys (1986, USA)

Horrible, forgettable, and the actors aren’t even attractive, which I thought was a basic requirement of this sort of thing.

Shekhar Kapur: Elizabeth (1998, UK)

Um, no.

Patrice Leconte: Monsieur Hire (1989, France)

Oh, yes. This was lovely. No one makes thrillers like this anymore, in which every event is perfectly plausible (no running on rooftops with a microbomb thing that will destroy the world) and every human perfectly human in that they’re equally selfish and selfless in their loving and in their crimes.

Masterful in every way, Monsieur Hire is based on a Georges Simenon novel and features two classic French actors — Michel Blanc and Sandrine Bonnaire — in the cast.

Steve McQueen: Hunger (2008, UK/Ireland)

Er . . . much as I adore Michael Fassbender, no. He really did starve for this role, though.

Kimberly Pierce: Boys Don’t Cry (1999, USA)

Hard to watch, always, even though it’s not the best filmmaking.

Rob Reiner: Misery (1990, USA)

Watched this on Christmas night with my roommate. I want more Christmases like this, that are completely un-Christmas-like. We ate chicken parmesan (that I made), watched a Stephen-King-novel-based horror movie, then went out to a bar.

Misery is my favourite Stephen King novel and will probably always be, since I don’t plan on reading on any more King. Kathy Bates is amazing.

Mark Waters: The House of Yes (1991, USA)

Utter rubbish.

]]> http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?feed=rss2&p=3180 3 http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3196 http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3196#comments Sun, 19 Feb 2012 04:39:14 +0000 Aditi http://www.toothsoup.com/blottingpaper/?p=3196 *sigh*

Fiction

• Samuel Beckett: Molloy (1951, tr. from the French by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author)

Poetry

• Arun Kolatkar: Jejuri (1976)
• Carl Phillips: From the Devotions (1998)
• Rosmarie Waldrop: The Reproduction of Profiles (1987)

All of these are highly recommended . . . although — fighting words — I did wonder if Jejuri was quite as good as I remember it to be.

Rosmarie Waldrop is my new goddess. I can’t wait to read her translations of Edmond Jabès.

The dead are our children and we must coax them to eat.
Ah   Ah   Ah   Ah   pointing to the mouth, touching
the food: the bull’s leg, the heart.

The dead are our gods. We must pry open their mouths.
They cannot live without our sustenace.
We bring hammers and chisels.
We crack their throats.
Our words fly open above our heads:
stone clouds of owls, lines of water
rippling, geese.

The gods are our children.   Eat.
Eat the heart, the leg, the thigh,
all the parts.   Take into the darkness of your mouth
this eye.   It will be enough light.
It will light you
forever.

from The Egyptian Poems (1983)

__________

I’ve recently discovered Beverly Dahlen (b. 1934) thanks to a wonderful friend of mine who asked me to look her up for him. I now have scans  (library sanctioned) of The Egyptian Poems, a chapbook produced by Hipparchia Press in 1983, and will soon be in possession of a used copy of Dahlen’s first book, Out of the Third, which appeared in 1974 from Momo’s Press.

Dahlen is known perhaps more widely for her ongoing series of ‘readings’ (A Reading 1-7, A Reading 11-12, A Reading 8-10, A Reading Spicer & Eighteen Sonnets, A Reading 18-20), none of which I’ve read yet, but soon, soon . . .

The poem I’ve posted above is the first from The Egyptian Poems, a set of 8 poems that I don’t know to describe except to say they are brilliant. Brilliant in the purest sense: the shine from every chiseled edge. They are unbreakable and powerful and awe-inspiring.

In his afterword to the chapbook, Robert Duncan writes:

. . . the ancient Egyptians too spoke of Thoth’s demand that the witnessing soul speak with his heart in his mouth, or with his tongue rooted in the heart. ‘Take into the darkness of your mouth / this eye,’ the first poem in the sequence says. What do you see?

These are poems evoking, and in return belonging to, a mystery. The dead and the gods addresst in this mystery may once have been powers of a religious cult, but they are now eternal persons of a poetry–a poetry drawing upon myth and history–upon what the poet has read–in part, but more importantly, upon dream. ‘Three gods appear before me. / I have seen their face in dreams,’ she tells us in ‘The Gates.’

It seems to me that this final poem (‘The Gates,’ from which Duncan quotes) witnesses the becoming of a god. Not unlike other great journeys in literature, this one ends before the gods. The speaker, when questioned, answers with her life, and

. . . in the instant I pronounce these words, [I] draw them out of the darkness
and entire into their company.

__________

Here is another poem by Beverly Dahlen:

BLACK TRAIN

My backbone is a black train.
I start on the grass. It mores for me.
It will lay down and burn for me.
You will see its smoke for years and years.
It will lay out in one direction
in the wind
yellow against the blue sky.
I will lick it with my sides.
It will not hold me.
It will fall away forever towards the mountains.
I will cross the river. I will come
to black trees. They will stare at me.
I will carry them.  I will carry them.
I will carry them down
to the ocean. You will see them
gone white in the sun. They will be
quiet. Their eyes will float out to sea.
They will not know me. They will not know my name.
I will make a voice. It will be alone.
You will hear it all night long falling away
towards the west. It will carry you.

Speaking of this poem from Out of the Third, Duncan asks:

What is the nature of this voice in poetry?

and answers:

It is compelling. It comes from ‘below’–a speech below speech; it comes from behind speech.

__________

TWO INTERVIEWS

Beverly Dahlen in conversation with Paul Jaussen and Emily Beall (Jacket 40)

12 or 2o questions (second series) with Beverly Dahlen (Rob McLennan’s blog)

__________

BEVERLY DAHLEN

Samuel Beckett (1951, translated from the French by Patrick Bowles in collaboration with the author)