FRAGMENT - Karen Chamisso

 

Cressida, I thought of you
wasting away in Margaritaville
as the hour came on to that gray and blue
moment -click - when it is time for a girl to chill.
Do foxes not have holes? I at least have one
on Rue Quincampoix, where I’m a known quality
where I’ve come to have my fun
where I’ve drunk my quantity.
In the glint of the lounge light there
I set up with a gin and tonic
a notebook opened on the sputtering flair
of a word – the chatter here is trans-Atlantic
the gals are Cally, the guy is German
and the French sociopetally clustered in the corner
eye contact is made by a man determined
to ask me what I’m writing – if he could have the honor
-well he can’t – I’m sorry – as you know
Cress, I too dive into the wreck
- and so many wrecks from long ago
- and so many from last week
- playing phrase and fable solitaire
to find and wind my lash fine thread
through dead men’s eyes and dead men’s stares
the old old slag, the old old dread
- in particular, tonight: tart. A sweet, a pie
all the endless jar between honey and vinegar
I go to the OED, cause it don’t lie
I go to the Online, for the war
“Everyone wants a piece of the attention pie”
first came the sweet then came the bitter.
Adored the adored, but where incense upward flies
better be careful of the hitter
beneath the embrace. Cherchez la femme fatale
because she materializes suddenly,
Cress, you with the bored
drawl, cig in hand, like Lauren Bacall
that tall drink look - “will you walk in my lord”
and in a rush I see a visionary Gita
from Barbara Stanwyck to Gloria Graham
from Cressida to Nana, from Lana to Rita
from Hollywood Blv. to Iliam...

The price of scorn

 I am fascinated by a phenomenon that is a variant of the Freudian slip. Call it error infection. Anytime I truly get on my high horse and go on about an error someone has made – a journalist, a politician, a critic, etc. – my commentary will inevitably be undermined by an error I make in the scolding. My contempt for a mathematical mistake, a boggled reference, an illogical deduction, a false analogy, will spawn, in my own writing, a mathematical mistake, a boggled reference, and blah blah blah.

The unconscious is a little devil – a little printer’s devil. I have noticed this again and again, not just with myself but with others. Demystifiers and contrarians leave a fine track of misreadings and falsities behind them. This does not mean that takedowns are useless, of course. The takedown is the base of civilization, peeps! But it does mean that mercy is no superfluous virtue – it is literally the soul of wit.

Three Urns

 

1. In the preface to Urne Burial, which was published in 1658, Browne remarks largely on the “sad pitchers” lately disinterred in Norfolk. Presumably pitchers containing the ashes of Romans. Romans, as conquerors of  Britain,were technically enemies, but Browne is never stinting in his humanism, and quotes Horace: We mercifully preserve their bones, and pisse not upon their ashes.”

Pissing is not a mere random word, here, for in the burial urn Browne saw the whole anatomy of man, clothed and unclothed in all of his biological regalia, from birth, digestion and excretion to death and cremation.

The occasion of Browne’s essay is simply stated: “In a Field of old Walsingham, not many months past, were digged up between fourty and fifty Urnes.” Browne’s recent biographer, Hugh Aldersey-Williams, had the notion that he would, as it were, walk Browne’s life – go to places which Browne mentions in his works, and see things in those places that Browne might have seen, relics indeed from the 17th century. A sort of psychogeography of a life, in the manner of Iain Sinclair, but without the style.  Mostly, of course, the landscape of Sir Thomas Browne is gone: as are the Walsingham urnes. But Adersey-Williams, undeterred, went to another site that Browne went to years after the Walsingham discovery. As in some the voice-over to some reality tv show contest, A-W gives us the mood music: “The first challenge is to locate the site. Browne describes the field as ‘lying between Buxton and Brampton, but belonging unto Brampton’; that is to say within the parish of Brampton.” And he is off on the treasure hunt.

I am not sure walking Browne’s life really gets us into Browne’s life: as the biographer does not subdue himself to the biographical subject, we begin to suspect that we are going to find out more about the treasure hunting biographer than about the biographer’s subject, with whom he seems oddly out of tune. For instance, at one point he calls the Urne Burial maudlin – which seems to be his description of melancholia. Adersey-Williams is evidently not a blues fan. 

I am, though.

In a passage of  seventeenth century metaphysical splendour, Browne saw the urn as both the habitat of the dead and the figure of birth itself:

“While many have handles, ears, and long necks, but most imitate a circular figure, in a sphericall and round composure; whether from any mystery, best duration or capacity, were but a conjecture. But the common form with necks was a proper figure, making our last bed like our first; nor much unlike the Urnes of our Nativity, while we lay in the nether part of the Earth,3 and inward vault of our Microcosme.”

This is the kind of prose that will find an odd revival in the American twentieth century. Djuna Barnes, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, and Cormac McCarthy all, in their own ways, go back to the syntactical branchings of the seventeenth century masters – partly because there is something very oral about them, closer to speech than the more rational rhetoric ofthe 19th century.

2. The spring of 1819 was a great season for Keats’ poetry. Something in that season worked on Shelley and Byron too, the romantic crewe which drew such condescension from the New Criticism in the 20th century, under Eliot’s distaste for disturbances in a tradition he was making up as a bulwark against social democracy and all its fruits. For the New Critics, evidently Shelley’s great sonnet, England in 1819, showed the immaturity that was sloughed  off by “mature” poets. To me, of course, it shows Shelley had a keen eye for the idiocy of British tradition and politics.

3. Keats was living in Hampstead, in a “semi-detached villa” that he rented with a friend, Charles Armitage Brown. Fanny Brawne and her mother lived in another semi-detached villa in the same subdivision, which gave Keats and Brawne a lot of opportunities to walk and talk and kiss and not tell, I suppose.

4. More importantly for our second urn, the Grecian urn of Keats’ poem, Benjamin Robert Haydon, the impecunious painter, also lived nearby. According to Keats’ biographer, William Rossetti (Rossetti felt he was infinitely more educated and classy than the poet, and makes that known in every sentence of his book), Keats would walk with Haydon in the nearby Kilbourn meadows and “chaunt” his poems, including the Ode to the Grecian Urn.  Haydon, after all, knew something about Greek Urns. What he told Keats in Kilburn meadows would be, as Sir Thomas Browne might put it, an interesting topic for speculation, up there with the songs the Sirens sung: unknowables.

5. In an article entitled The Shield and the Urn: the search for the source of Keat’s Grecian Urn, I.B. Cauthen ponders the suggestion that there was really one urn that inspired Keats. However, he thinks this is unlikely, and that the urn was all in Keats’ fancy, an identi-kit of Grecian urns: “there has been a host of suggestions concerning the original urn. The Townley Vase in the British Museum, the Holland House Vase, the Sosibios Vase, illustrated in a four-volume collection of engravings of art works that Napoleon extorted from Italy, the Borghese Vase in Piranesi's drawings of vases and candela” all have their devotees – yet all were merely contributaries, as it were, to the one unravishable urn that Keats describes in the poem:

6. There exists a drawing of a Grecian urn attributed to Keats – which looks like the Sosibios Vase. It is as possible, even probable, that Haydon took Keats to see the catalogues of antiquities. As important as these models, I think, was the anti-model presented by the bourgeois notion of beauty of Keats friend, or ex-friend, Leigh Hunt. In a letter from 1818 to his his brother George, Keats wrote:

“Hunt does one harm by making fine things pretty and beautiful things hateful. Through him I am indifferent to Mozart, I care not for white Busts – many a glorious thing when associated with him becomes a nothing. This distorts one’s mind – makes one’s thoughts bizarre – Perplexes one in the standards of Beauty.”

The negative image, the glorious thing made nothing, is negated itself in the Ode. Against Hunt’s knowingness, Keats does not posit an argument, but a series of questions that have a supra-argumentative force:

What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

   What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

7.  Our final urn is a pot. It appears, weirdly, in that prose poem of philosophy, the Spirit of Utopia, by Ernst Bloch – composed during WWI, against which Bloch, to his eternal credit, protested. He had migrated to Switzerland, and looked back at the German intellectuals, and especially his mentor, Simmel, with a puzzled horror.

Simmel is important to Bloch’s pot. Simmel had  established the style that combined the feuilleton and the monograph, a style that finds its way through Bloch, Benjamin, Kracauer, Adorno and onward – the voice, as it were, of the Weimar era. Simmel, however, was no Marxist: he supported the German war effort and made no bones about it – like Thomas Mann. This made him an unacknowledgable ancestor, unlike Karl Kraus. Kraus was conservative too, but he hated the war and, as a great hater, aligned it with his other great hatred – the feuilleton. The poisonous posterity, as he saw it, of Heine.

Simmel, as Adorno notes in his essay on Bloch, had written an essay on the handle. Turning to this article, which was published in Philosophical Culture (a very Simmel-esque title) in 1919, we find the characteristics of Simmel’s analytic framework. Simmel begins by distinguishing the space of the painting – figurative painting is meant – from the space of everyday life. A distinct mark of the latter is its tactility. We can touch a painting, but to suppose that a painting is for touching would be a mistake – a teaching mistake, really. We are meant to regard the painting, and in so doing, we see the space that the painting, by its science of perspective, wants us to look at. The space of a painting of a pot, for instance, is never the space in which  the pot is handled.

“As a piece of metal that is tangible, weighable, and incorporated into the ways and means of the surrounding world, a vase is a segment of reality. At the same time, its artistic form leads an existence completely detached and self-contained, for which the material reality of the metal is merely the vehicle. A vessel, however, unlike a painting or statue, is not intended to be insulated and untouchable but is meant to fulfill a purpose—if only symbolically. For it is held in the hand and drawn into the movement of everyday life. Thus the vessel is in two worlds at one and the same time.” [translation found here https://www.cabinetmagazine.org/issues/60/simmel.php]

Bloch’s preface to the Spirit of Utopia is almost a direct response to Simmel’s essay – in fact, knowing that this essay existed was my way of seeing what in the blazes Bloch was doing.

Bloch’s jug – Krug in the German -  is, for one thing, definitely earthy. Clay is the matter in question, not Simmel’s metal. That earthiness is intended – the example is not simply an example, a trait that distinguishes “continental” philosophy from “analytic”. Its earthiness, its humbleness, in a sense, aligns Bloch’s jug with the “sad pitchers” dug up in English fields in Browne’s meditation. But even as this jug comes out of the past, a very Germanic past, it presents itself in the present to the writer, or to anyone who comes into its space. Space, here, cannot be stripped of location and time. And, even, of its location in the space of the text – under the more general heading, Self-encounter. Its oddness as the beginning of a philosophical text is made even odder by being the beginning of self-encounter. Instead of going down the path of introspection, we are thrust into the path of exteriority, as though the self we were going to encounter was outside of us.

“It has often been imitated. That is harmless, but there are also more expensive antique exemplars, still holding their sheen, narrownecked, consciously molded, with many flutes, a beautifully curly head on the neck and a shield on the belly, and these throw the simple jug in the shadows. Yet for one who loves it, who sees the superficiality of the expensive jugs, prefers to its brothers the brown, uncouth implement, which almost lacks a neck, with a wild man’s face and a meaningful snail insignia on the swell of its belly, sunlight signs.”

Perhaps in this return to the European peasant, to the “Nordic vulgarisation” of the Italian variant, Bloch is touching on an aesthetic that could and would go either way in the post World War I world. An aesthetic that found less and less room for “what wild ecstasy?”, substituting an irony that knows a little bit too much – that ignores, in its knowing, Keats question marks; or an aesthetic of reactionary nostalgia that forced us all to drink and drink the black milk of morning.

 

 

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.