Claire poems - Karen Chamisso

 Claire poems

The lyric "I"

It must blur around the edges. Like Claire’s lipstick

So carefully and shamelessly applied

Until worn by kisses and party martinis

The lip, the girl’s lips, show.

And not like the party Doyenne

Famously ever young, whose cosmetic

Is a non-disclosure agreement

Until she goes home, where even hubby number two

Is not to be privileged with a glance

Of exposed neck, eyelash and lip.

- Damn, metaphor has led me into the particularity

Of a solitary drinker’s hilarity.

It is for you, Claire. Whose lips I’ll never again descry

Until we all meet in heaven, by and by.

Claire

Claire taught me the larger gestures

The kabuki theater of entrances and exits

In sky high boots at the Killer club

Sweeping into the backseat of the taxi at 2 a.m.

The seriousness at the center of silliness

A moral position, stoic,

Enduring the battering of ten thousand bragging boys.

Claire taught me the larger gestures but

Claire died. They dragged her body from the river.

She chose the largest exit. And though I see and feel

The moral position, I can only visit, stricken.

They buried her in Alpharetta.

Oh Claire. Honeychild.

- Karen Chamisso

That American skaz

 

In the Europe of the interwar period, there was a whole lotta interest in the telling of the tale – the system of the tongue and (as Walter Benjamin, in a brilliant illumination, realized) – the hand as an instrument of tactile pressure. This system, incidentally, is opposed to the system of the eye and the hand as an instrument of writing – the pen, the typewriter. Variations on the old oral/writing binary – but molecularly interesting variations, and not reducible to the binary mothership.

In the U.S., we already had the most brilliant of skaz texts – Huckleberry Finn. During this time, a long line of writers – W.C. Williams, Hemingway, Faulkner, Hurston, etc. – were trying to tap into the American skaz.

And then there is Eudora Welty.

Since, this summer, I am enduring and enjoying the total sun and occasional breezes of the South of France, around a pool no less, I am in a sort of American mood. Funny how these things work by contraries. I’m a little more hopeful about the Motherland – although aware that, on the edges, America is financing and providing the weaponry for the mass murder in Gaza. Any hoo, I have a little paperback stack that includes Eudora Welty’s Collected Stories. I’ve never settled my accounts with Welty. And why not do it now?

I did have in mind, before I started, the Welty that is too cute by half, the Welty of the inevitably dragged out “Why I live at the P.O.” Gertrude Stein said that there are stories that are accrochable and stories that are inaccrochable – taking her metaphor from the painters, who select for their shows the painting that can hang – that is, sell, or at least represent them – as opposed to those they paint that they can’t hang, that they just have to do, somehow. “Why I live at the P.O.” is hyperaccochable.  It is among the stories that wear out their spirit with being overhung.

So there’s that. Reading around, the lit I came upon Lorrie Moore’s essay on Welty, which is rather stinting. Moore is worried that Welty is a racist. And no doubt she is. As was the U.S. during the slave, ethnic cleansing, and apartheid eras. I think – although, in fairness to Moore, I haven’t checked this out – that if she were writing about, say, Edith Wharton, she would not be hung up about Wharton’s racism. But she was. And, I should say, I am – I, too, am a product of the white American middle class. I pre-existed before I existed, with my people, my grandparents and great grandparents, enjoying the bounties of Apartheid America and making it up through the middle class in a racist game that no retroactive sprinkling of “diversity” is going to make up for or hide.

So there is that.

Anyway, I plunged randomly in the stories and came upon one that bowled me over: The Hitchhikers. It was published in A curtain of green and other stories, where the P.O. story was also collected. The Hitchhikers is a fierce little story about a salesman, Tom Harris, some hitchhikers he picks up, one surly, one playing a guitar; and the small town he stops in with them, and the fight between the hitchhikers in which one gets killed, and the prohibition era drinking and fucking of this little Missipp town near Memphis.

The Skaz needs a traveler: a pilgrim, a knight, a bum. Or a salesman. Since Balzac virtually discovered the type with Gaudissart, the traveling salesman has done a lot of business in lit, especially Am. Lit. It began, in America, as the Yankee salesman, but in the “new South” the salesman is a bit different, a bit more ambiguous. Flannery O’Connor, who is a very different kinda writer than Welty, likes her salesmen to come with their Yankee rationality or cynicism to visit the internal exiles of Dixie (who are her knockdown characters). Welty, whose father was a salesman, has a much more level view of the kind. Tom Harris is not proving any point about secularism or nihilism. Instead, he is a man around whom excitement happens – but who is increasingly alienated by that excitement, or numb to it. It is a numbness that bothers him some.  It is not a bit folksy, the way Welty sometimes embroidered a bit with her tellers and their tales. This is, rather, the pure products of America finding their excitements growing, each year, a little colder.

I recognized that South.

The ending bits of the story are perfect:

“Harris, fresh from the barbershop, was standing in the filling station where his car was being polished.

A right of little boys in bright shirt-tails surrounded him and the car, with some colored boys waiting behind them.

“Could they git all the blood off the seat and steerin’ wheel, Mr. Harris?”

He nodded. They ran away.

“Mr. Harris,” said a little colored boy who stayed. “Does you want the box?”

“The what?”

He pointed, to where it lay in the back seat with the sample cases. “The po’ kilt man’s gittar. Even the policemans didn’t want it.”

“No,” said Harris, and handed it over.”

I love the economy of this ending, with its true American skaz way with symbols – symbols are embarrassing. That is really one of the keys to American sentimentality, the edginess with symbols, the embarrassment one feels when they are too heavily present, one’s sense that symbols lead to no good thing.

 

 

 

thoughts on Hemingway

 1.

In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway is talking about the fishermen in Paris, the ones on the banks and the bridges that fish in the Seine. They fascinate him even though, for his part, he prefers to fish in the mountains. He’s faithful to trout. He sees these people, though. He talks to these people. And, he writes, “they are good to know about.”

AMF is built on the principle of what it is good to know about. Ah, the many things – things that attract adjectives like “warm”, “fine”, “good”. Good is truly a character in these pages. But as we read Hemingway, we find that the book is built not only on a thesis, but an anti-thesis: the things that are bad to know about. The accumulated wreckage, broken relationships, drunks and suicidal tendencies, writer’s blocks and bogus posturing, these give us a four decades of what is bad to know about. Yet you don’t know anything if you don’t know what is bad to know about. The good trivializes itself, the work becomes meaningless.

When I came to France in 1981 to go to the University of Montpellier, all the Americans I was with, or at least a goodly number, knew their AMF. How could they not? We were equipped, in high school and college, with our Hemingway and Scott F. Plus various foreign films. The desire to spend a year in France has to nourish itself, in a young mind growing up in Louisiana, on some longing for the cultural monuments, such as they were.

Of course, since 1981 we are told over and over that a sea change has come, and that the old masters have been given their showtrials and exiled to used book stores. I have my doubts, however. I imagine that a goodly number of the American students who will come to France for their year abroad next year will have some passing acquaintance with Hem and Hadley and Scott and Zelda.

My generation and the one that came after might have been fed a systematically canonized Hemingway. We had to tear down that canon in order to breath, an exercise in our variously achieved enlightenments. What this meant is that what was good to think about Hemingway – his stubborn faith in the true sentence – had to overlap with what was bad to think about Hemingway – the sexism, homophobia, lust for violence, etc. – in order for us to think at all well about Hemingway.

In his preface to the book, dated 1960, we read, “if the reader prefers, this book may be regarded as  fiction.” Little did Hemingway know that the 60s would belong to these fictional non-fictions. Hemingway knew that a good way to think about fact was as fiction, he always knew that. So one reads the hateful bits about Stein and Ford Madox Ford and one reads the faux prole posturing about knowing as a boy among hobos that one needed a knife and needed to show one could and would use it to kill to prevent something awful (presumably rape sodomy) from happening and one grows to feel about this character that he is, when all things are said and done, worth the time. It works, somehow.

Or it did. It is hard for me to cast off the pathos of history, of the history since, and read it as straightly as Hemingway hoped it would be read, or hoped he would, in general, be read.

2.

Some of my friends, it turns out, are not fans of Hemingway. Which I found out posting a bit about Hem.

This is no surprise. What is good about talking up your private canon is not so much converting other people to your canon (I’m not a motherfuckin’ missionary, after all) but revisiting it privately, shaking it up, seeing how it relates to your current concerns. My concerns, at the moment, are all about the Cold War, which starts, I’d contend, in 1920, with the collapse of the White Armies. Charting the Hemingway persona and the work against the epoch of anti-communism gives one a different sense of Hemingway than, say, either the classroom idol of potential writers or the macho man of the haters.

I’m a pretty orthodox late twentieth century beast in my likes and dislikes. I also have made it a principle, over the years, to be careful in my dislikes. I have, for instance, never read any Salinger. I somehow dislike Salinger. But I can’t really comment too much on a writer who I dislike more for the atmosphere around him than for the work that I’ve never read. One day or another, I’ll probs give one of Salinger’s books to Adam to read – it is def in the teenage canon. Then maybe I’ll read it.

Having a kid is a good way to trip out of your own canonizing. From teen tv series to horror movies, I’ve followed my son’s own taste, much different from mine. I even have acquired a taste for bloody FX – shout out here to Monkey Man, y’all. Of course, eventually the empathy must find a stop – I’ll never be a fan of rap music from the 00s. The farthest I get there is Lil’ Kim.

The long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens don’ mean jest getting drunk. It is an instrument for keeping culturally alert.

Cleopatra reads T Magazine

 

- Karen Chamisso

“Where’s the soothsayer you praised so to the queen?”

Holed up in the Chateau Marmont

Our Cleo sprawls and bawls and dreams of shawls

And gazes at the latest scream

Of Paris fashion in T magazine.

Does she have a future? Does she even have a past?

To cheer herself up she clicks the “Daily Shoe”

And goes through her favorites: a bit of a blast

In brocaded boots from Stella McCartney

And jeweled Mary Janes from some London party

But this is not how Thursday should go

Un-Anthonied, untexted, floating in icy water

Like some orphan ice floe

Instead of the Exterminator Pharaoh’s daughter

- this is no way to kill time. Sexless, drugless,

or practically. Which is the why for the visit

from her favorite occult-ist, whose Tarot

will get her “out of her own way”

and into another zone and frequence

where click click click she’ll construct a sequence.

Emblemes anciennes she displays, on engravèd cards

Shuffles forth the mountebank and the Spanish Captain.

Sweet Alicia, make me a good fortune

To which she smiles and sez: I make not, but foresee

Your epoch is the mountebank’s totally

But look: the tower struck by lightning comes next!

Disaster will fructify your waste of time

For there is no waste really – the world’s a horder

There’s nothing ever missing in the end.

That’s five hundred bucks, my special friend.

Cherish the time that you waste, for it is true

That this is what time will finally do to you.

Slow (revised)

 

There’s a small village center that is reached by a winding road and a bike path from the house we are staying in. The center hosts a grocery store and a pharmacy. Voila, all the modern cons one needs! So I walked to it today to supply a few of our deficiencies (hamburger buns, tomato sauce, fries) and as I was trucking back with the sack the phrase “I come from Alabama. A fur piece” came into my head and I realized – I really did not do justice to slow, in my little post on slow that I am appending. Bela Tarr is one thing. Faulkner is another. Although both tells stories of protagonists who are prisoners of the rural idiocy.

Faulkner is a man of binaries: black/white, male/female. Not for him gender, or intersectionality. Instead, he has sex, he had race, and he has the cave-in of those binaries – the mulattoization that encroaches on the post-Confederate order and was there in the pre-Confederate order, motherfuckers!

Of sex, he has one exemplary fast woman: Temple Drake. Who emerges from a fast car wrecked by her drunken date to a race away from the rapist she recognized from the first glance: Popeye. She is fast and he is faster.

He also has one exemplary slow woman, a woman whose slowness is a force far exceeding her “sex” – which is how Faulkner and his characters classify her: Lena Grove. Lena is slow of speech, with that deep country Alabama accent, and slow of realization, and firm in her resolution. It is a combination that makes her slowness more than sufficient to match Joe Christmas, whose quickness is so baffled that it becomes his tragedy.

Faulkner sets up the match between slow and fast from the very beginning. This is Lena serenely hunting down the man who is father to her as yet unborn child: “backrolling now behind her a long monotonous succession of peaceful and undeviating changes from day to dark and dark to day again, through which she advanced in identical and anonymous and deliberate wagons as through a succession of creakwheeled and limpeared avatars, like something moving forever and without progress across an urn.”

This is slow not just as a tempo on a spectrum, but a tempo that projects its own force, or forcefield, one in which other people, caught unknowing in their own tempos, are however briefly extracted. If I were to find an equivalent in mythology, it would be Sati, Daksa’s daughter, Siva’s wife, to whose story Calasso devotes a part of Ka. This is how she talks to Siva.

“But does devotion bring us release?” insisted Sati. “Devotion helps,” said Siva, less and less interested. “Devotion to you doesn’t satisfy me,” said Sati. “You don’t need it. You are me. That is knowledge. Just three words,” said Siva. “And who are you?” said Sati, suddenly gentle, eying her lover. “I am that,” said Siva. “What is that?” Sati insisted, like an obstinate child. “That which tells us we’re talking…”

It is not that Faulkner had these legends in mind when he has Lena escape from her room by a window precisely eight times, or has Joe Christmas, that mulatto, that breaker of the official racial binary, take on different names as he travels. But slowness and devotion make their claims in, so to speak, the subsoil of the text.

We have come a fur piece.

And to this I attach the slow post. Here.

One of my favorite sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor. The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

I’ve had my experience with slowness. When I had a minor operation on my leg, I was a limper, a crutch-goer. Once, as an afteraffect of a bad case of pneumonia, I would get out of breath after a pitifully small number of paces. However, I viewed these as mere accidents to my essential gait.

Paris is a city with a considerable population of the elderly, stubbornly clinging to apartments that, as any economist will tell you, tongue hanging out, should be put up on the free market and bought by anonymous tycoons with money laundered through Cyprus. But France, shamelessly, supports its non-use population, and so here we are: on sidewalks behind old men and women going at their own pace to whereever. I stride past them, full of pluck, but somewhere in me I know that this pace is coming for me, and sooner rather than later.

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. The slow life in the metropole puts one, perhaps, in the margins, or in the subculture. But what is a major city without a subculture? In the country, especially the country night in the sticks traversed by our out of breath doctor, there’s a less kind spirit. Lamed horses are shot, cows and bulls are only allowed a certain age before they are trucked away and driven up the chute. And surely some give a slow doctor appraising looks. Yet the whole village has a sense of itself as slow, against a faster world.

This is not, I think, my fate. In my imagination, though, I do dip into it. This vacation, I am experiencing the suspended animation of a quasi-country house. Slowness for a time. But not too much time. One of my favorite sequences in one of my fave films, Bella Tarr’s Satanstango, concerns the village doctor. We watch him get drunk in his home, fall down in an apparent stupor, and then get up – after which comes the sequence, which consists of nothing more than him walking to the village inn to get more liquor.  The thing about it is, the camera follows him in real time. Since he is old, obese, and intoxicated, that means that the camera watches him make an at most quarter mile jog in about fifteen minutes. Fifteen minutes! When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it – I couldn’t believe Tarr would dare an audience to basically install itself in the speed and sensibility of one of the members of the slow cohort of the population – those users of walkers, those hobblers down sidewalks or the aisles of grocery stores, those old or impaired. Normally, we’d get a bit of slow hobbling and cut then to the doctor approaching the inn. We’d get in other words what we expect in the terms of the speedy cohort, the ones with cars, the ones who run, the ones who stride, walking their dogs, or over the beach, radiating the get it now ethos.

I’ve had my experience with slowness. When I had a minor operation on my leg, I was a limper, a crutch-goer. Once, as an afteraffect of a bad case of pneumonia, I would get out of breath after a pitifully small number of paces. However, I viewed these as mere accidents to my essential gait.

Paris is a city with a considerable population of the elderly, stubbornly clinging to apartments that, as any economist will tell you, tongue hanging out, should be put up on the free market and bought by anonymous tycoons with money laundered through Cyprus. But France, shamelessly, supports its non-use population, and so here we are: on sidewalks behind old men and women going at their own pace to whereever. I stride past them, full of pluck, but somewhere in me I know that this pace is coming for me, and sooner rather than later. 

The doctor in Satanstango lives in a village where, aside from a few cars and tractors, the fastest things are dogs and horses. Not a metropole. The slow life in the metropole puts one, perhaps, in the margins, or in the subculture. But what is a major city without a subculture? In the country, especially the country night in the sticks traversed by our out of breath doctor, there’s a less kind spirit. Lamed horses are shot, cows and bulls are only allowed a certain age before they are trucked away and driven up the chute. And surely some give a slow doctor appraising looks. Yet the whole village has a sense of itself as slow, against a faster world.

This is not, I think, my fate. In my imagination, though, I do dip into it. This vacation, I am experiencing the suspended animation of a quasi-country house. Slowness for a time. But not too much time.

 

When the GOP went all wrong: 1928

 

When Harding and Coolidge ran for President in 1920, under the slogan a “Fair deal”, their campaign printed an appeal to women. It makes interesting reading vis a vis the Republican party today.

For instance, H and C pledged that at no time and in no way would American soldiers go to war unless this was deemed necessary by an official act of the legislature. Interesting language, already cutting corners on the old Constitution. And of course regularly violated by all presidents, R and D, since then.

But the beautiful part must be quoted.

“Republican domestic policy is for the strengthening and protecting of all elements which keep life on a high plane. It has been under Republican administration that this country has been an asylum for the less happy people of Europe, the land of promise and a haven.”

The old pro-immigration Republican party! Now, the promise to extend asylum and a haven to the less happy peoples of anywhere – save I suppose Aryan Germans – would cause instant censor by the Repubs.

The twenties saw a crucial reshuffling of a party that was, up until Hoover, still the party that bragged of being the party of Roosevelt and Lincoln. Hoover, that vile man, was the grandfather of Nixon’s Southern strategy, employing the same to Catholic scare the white Dem South and nominating a well known Southern racist for the Supreme Court, one John Parker. I’ve written about this before for Willett’s Magazine.

The roots of the abandonment of Lincoln and Roosevelt were encoded in Hoover’s greatest achievement in the 1920s – his leadership of the Federal response to the great flood of 1927, when the Mississippi river flooded the Delta. As John Barry’s Rising Tide has shown, the flood had a surprisingly large impact on American politics. It was, for one thing, the largest flood ever experience in the U.S. at its greatest extent, had flooded 27,000 square miles. Much of the flooded land was in the state of Mississippi, where cotton plantations depended on a black labor force that they could pay slave wages to. The white elite was very fearful that black laborers would escape the Delta – and where then would they find such a mistreatable labor force? This fear was a powerful driver of the racial atrocities committed during the flood. Hoover was, in fact, informed of these atrocities from numerous sources.

He not only did nothing, he saw the advantage to being seen as the champion of white over black, here.

This is why, in 1928, the party of Lincoln witnessed, for the first time, a considerable desertion by the black Northern voters – the ones that is who made it around the barriers and could vote.

Then came Judge Parker in Hoover’s nadir year, 1930.  He started out as a politician in North Carolina. A republican politician in the South. It was easier to be Republican in the solid South under Hoover, due to that recent history that every black leader knew.

The racial politics of the expansion of the state into the American economy is a complex story, in which, on the one hand, democratic economic policies came about, and, on the other hand, American racism became even more anchored – as if the White working class could only be benefitted if African-Americans were sacrificed.

It is necessary to go into these details in order to understand, for one thing, why the newspaper pundit story of the Republicans being “small government” is wrong, and, for another thing, why this history crucially forgets racist moments in the development of the modern mixed economy

 

So, why Hoover would elevate a North Carolina obscurity to the post of Supreme Court justice? In Hoover’s mind, the South was now in play, and he was on a charm offensive to get Southern votes for 1932. It hadn’t yet penetrated the political mind that the Depression was for real.

Observers saw what Hoover was doing. The New Republic wrote: “it was apparent as soon as President Hoover announced the appointment of John F. Parker of North Carolina that he had chosen an undistinguished candidate for political reasons…”

And, indeed, the fight against Parker was mounted as a political campaign. As the New York World said, sensibly, in an editorial: … the Senate has every right, if it so chooses, to ask the President to maintain on the Supreme Court bench a balance between liberal and conservative opinion. This is of course true – although in the years high decorum of the neo-liberal period, this idea has been systematically mealy-mouthed away as “playing politics” with the Court.

Two forces militated immediately against Parker. One was the NAACP, which noted that Parker, though a Republican, had run a campaign in North Carolina promising to suppress black voting, because “we recognize that he [the negro] has not reached the stage in his development where he can share in the burdens and responsibilities of government.”  The other, stronger force militating against Parker was the AFL. Parker’s record as a judge was unsympathetic to labor in the extreme.

In 1971, in an essay in the NYT, William Rehnquist, who had been nominated for Nixon for a post on the Court, wrote an essay about nominee rejects for the NYT. It is a nicely written essay, centering on Parker’s nomination, which was, Rehnquist writes, “one of the most remarkable battles over a judicial nominee in the upper chamber.” Rehnquist gives a lot of credit for the defeat of Parker to Senator William Borah, a populist Republican senator for whom I myself have a lot of heart. Idaho, before it became famous as neo-Nazi vacationland, was a radical state, and elected senators who thought accordingly, from Borah to Church. I have to give Rehnquist, a standard economic conservative, a lot of credit for giving Borah credit. Most conservative scholars in this area consider Borah a dirty dog, smearing Parker by associating him with his decision on a case involving “yellow dog contracts” – contracts that impressed an obligation on the employee who signed them not to join a union. Borah, and the Union’s, argument against these contracts may seem like an issue from another era, but – in my opinion – these arguments are very relevant to the contract creep we see today, when corporations force employees to sign non-compete and non-disclosure contracts. Borah ended his indictment of Parker’s position with an excellent summation of the duties incumbent on the Senate when deciding on the President’s nominee: : “In passing upon the fitness of the nominee to that court we are bound to take into consideration everything which goes to make up a great judge – his character and standing as a man, his scholarship, his learning in the law, and his statesmanship.”Nobody at that point doubted Parker’s character and standing. It was his learning in the law – his decisions – that doomed him. Parker’s fall presaged Hoover’s own. Hoover lost every state in the South in 1932, including North Caroline, where Roosevelt beat him 497,566 to 208,344. Somehow, I think that loss must have really bit. As for Judge Parker, he went on to a fairly distinguished career. The Dictionary of North Carolina Biography chronicles the life of a state bigwig, crowned by his appointment as one of the lawyers in the Nuremberg trials. Of course, the irony of a man who believed the “negro” was not yet in a state of development to vote representing the Allied moral case at the Nuremberg trial is something I can only contemplate – hoping that by 1945 he had learned something. In 1957 he became the chairman of Billy Graham’s General Crusade committee. Then he died, and was buried with honors.

Life goes on after you are rejected by the Senate. It is all creme.

 

The solipsist's lament

 

 

“There is only one perfect place for a camera at any given moment”

sez the rapist god come down from Mount Sinai

(the mountain, all state of the art digital VFX

was diced and sliced into a number of tax deductible G & A

and everybody lunched at the Polo Lounge that day).

 

And isn’t this life itself? Your perfect place

From which to zoom out and in on

Say the fly landing on your lover’s butt

As you are doing your best to keep on fuck.

Your lens mastery, your life, your death.

 

Later you will ask yourself

(in that deflationary never-never

that epilogues all the roll-the-credits life lessons):

What if there is more than one camera?

- Karen Chamisso