Book club

 

Here is the reading list for a book club my mom led from 1971 through 2020. 

Meter la pata

 I was in the attic, closing windows for the winter. You can't step on the ceiling itself, but you have to walk on planks. I accidentally stepped off the plank and put my foot through the ceiling of one of the guest bedrooms, creating a huge hole and a mess, with boards, dust, and plaster and insulation everywhere. . , This is not my house (I live in an apartment), but rather my girlfriend's house. Naturally, she was not happy.  It will be extensive cleanup and expensive repair.  

The worst thing is that I feel that this is a huge personal failure, even though I have gone up to the attic to do this more than 20 times over several years with no incident, twice a year for 15 years, with a few times that someone else was hired to do it. I had gotten complacent. I fully admit to being maladroit.    

Specific to vague

In this dream I was creating a certain number of characters, people of representative kind. The clarity of their definition was high, and each was distinctively different.  I could hold them all in my head at once. When I awoke, I had nothing. Not a single detail or even a good way of explaining what I had built in my head.  

Kenyon

 I went down to Fort Scott for a bird watching trip last weekend. It started to rain, so I went from the nature preserve to the downtown and there was a used book store. I bought the collected poems of Jane Kenyon. She is not the usual kind of poet I admire, but she is respectable and I thought I would give it a try.  I reviewed a book of essays by David Shapiro, and he has a review of Donald Hall (married to Kenyon) that made me reconsider why I have always considered Hall a total mediocrity.  Maybe I was also giving short shrift to Kenyon as well.  

Part of the intention here is to examine my own responses. I find her work understated, unpretentious.  She's talking about her experience without trying to make herself sound superior to other people, in the way Mary Oliver does. She can bring off an ironic effect, but without calling attention to it. You could almost miss it. Sentimentality is rare in this poet.    

The writing is uneven. Sometimes she has simile-itis, where you just put in a simile because that is expected in a poem, rather than from a true artistic necessity. But there are sharp visual observations, attentiveness to what's going on in the immediate surroundings.  

The poems are different enough from one another, so that the effect is like getting to know a person. 

God only knows

 Somebody was saying that "God only knows" in the famous song of that title was a grammatical error. It should be "Only God knows." But obviously that is an idiom so it would be wrong to say it any other way.  

***

What I like in the Levertov translation of that Nahuatl poem is the weird rhythms created by words of varying length. The whole text has an improvised, jerky feel to it, and the words come in a surprising order. It would be easier to have a smoother version of it.  

Pygmalion

 I was going to play the role of Henry Higgins in Pygmalion. I drove to the theater but realized I had left my costume (a suit) at home, so I dropped the actress playing Eliza Doolittle there and drove back. Then I realized that I had not memorized my lines either, so I never made it back because obviously I wouldn't be able to do it. Later, I was hearing some people  saying they had seen the play with an understudy doing the part, because the actor had flaked out.  I felt really bad about not having done the part, even though I knew at some level I was dreaming. I stayed asleep and within the dream had to take responsibility and hear the actress scold me for irresponsibility.  Obviously we had never rehearsed. Somehow I had assumed I could do the role just by the force of my voice and personality.  

The Artist

 

I've like this Denise Levertov translation from an old Toltec poem, since I read int Rothenberg's Shaking the Pumpkin in the 1970s. 

The artist: disciple, abundant, multiple, restless.

The true artist: capable, practicing, skillful:

maintains dialogue with his heart, meets things with his mind.

The true artist: draws out all from his heart,

works with delight, makes things with calm, with sagacity,

works like a true Toltec, composes his objects, works dexterously, invents;

arranges materials, adorns them, makes them adjust.

The carrion artist: works at random, sneers at the people,

makes things opaque, brushes across the surface of the face of things,

​works without care, defrauds people, is a thief.

It seems to convey an idea of aesthetics as responsibility to the world. The good artist just does things right doing art badly is a form of fraud. I think I'm looking for a kind of universalism. There are universal principles of aesthetics, just that they manifest themselves differently in practice and those impede us from seeing their connections.