Scale

 Imagine there's a scale, like the old fashioned kind with two suspended plates balanced against each other. On one plate we place THE MEANING OF THE WORK, on the other, THE TEXT ITSELF IN ALL ITS MESSINESS.  It is tempting to put one's thumb on the scale on the side of meaning. But this is an absurd image, if you think that mess is more interesting than some simplistic statement about the meaning. 

ME

 Coming back to work on my book after a few months of not, I felt a shock of recognition. This is how I write. This is the approach I take.  It doesn't mean that I am happy with everything I've written, but all of it bears the unmistakable stamp of having been written by me.  I feel that nobody could write the kind of thing I want to write, better than I do. There could be other books on the same subject that are better or worse, but I don't think there would be a book of the same type that would be better, avoiding the pitfalls I want to avoid more deftly. Conversely, I am dissatisfied with people who have not set themselves the same tasks. 

Everyone should work to being like that. It should be an achievable goal to meet your own standard, to get to do what you want to do.  

Grading

 Emily Skillings, in her intro to the Ashbery book, ways that he would grade the poems in a projected book, A, B, or C, or with some pluses and minuses I guess. The finished book would consist of A and B poems. He would even have others grade for him, like the poet and art critic John Yau. A B poem might still add a needed element to the collection, by complementing other poems, without being brilliant in and of itself. 

I felt a sense of warm affection and admiration for Ashbery from Skilling's introduction. It seems very genuine to me. I got a different sense of his work, too, from these unfinished projects, something more charming and quirky, more forgiving.  

***  

I've done this myself, with translations. I give them grades and then work to get the C translations to a B level, and the Bs to A, etc...  Or course, since we are grading ourselves, we have no choice but to be honest, because there is no point in giving ourselves all As. The point is to be able to see what is good and not, and why. Grading someone else is punitive, but we have to be able to perceive our own work on some level. 

***

On facebook people were talking about their distaste for bad poetry, and I thought, well, most of us write bad poetry, after all, including most participating in the thread, probably.  We have to exempt ourselves from the category of bad poetry just to write at all, to claim something of the art for ourselves.  We have to have a happy relation to our own art, even if an A+ poem by me would be a D for Ashbery.   

New Ashbery

 I'm reading the new Ashbery book, Parallel Movement of the Hands. He's been deceased for several years, but the archive includes unpublished or unfinished works, and these are being presented to us as "Five Unfinished Longer Works." They are a bit more interesting than the endless succession of books with very similar poems in them that he was publishing until the very end. He was always one of the most interesting practitioners of the long poem. The idea of unfinished works is very attractive in a writer like this. A poem promising 21 sections only has 18. Instead of changing the title to make it conform to the text, the editor has highlighted its incompleteness.  

The title comes from a (more or less complete poem) based on the titles of Czerny technical exercises for the piano. I like the idea of writing about music in this way, abstractly. The poems are not about the music or piano technique at all, except obliquely.  It is a good finger exercise for the poet.  

You are now reading

You are now reading an article by Jonathan Mayhew. Get comfortable, adjust the thermostat as you see fit. Don't get too comfortable, though. You might want to brew a fresh pot of coffee before you proceed, in fact, to ward off the inevitable afternoon sleepiness. Don't worry; the article will still be there, unchanged, when you return. Silence notifications on all your devices. Or better yet, leave them on, as an escape hatch for when the article starts to become tiresome. Like others of its ilk, this article is an awkward length: too long to read in one sitting, but not quite long enough for two complete reading sessions.

You're already into the second paragraph. Phew! Now is the time, after the idle throat clearing gestures of the first paragraph, when the author performs several crucial steps before entering into the meat of the matter. He must convince you of the importance of the subject he is studying and of the significance of his findings. He will quickly establish his authority by worrying to death certain specialized terms. He will invoke several revered authority figures, beginning, of course, with Pierre Bourdieu. He will reflect on the enormous difficulty of his task. He will skillfully size up the competition, finding previous scholars rather unsatisfying, despite their "valuable contributions." 

In the third paragraph, Mayhew enumerates for you the steps of his own original argument. Now you should probably pour yourself a cup of the coffee you have just made. After all, these rhetorical tasks, while crucial for the author and perhaps for the editors of the journal, are not really addressed to the reader at all: all you really have to do is to come away with the vague impressions that the game is being played with all of the proper formalities in place. You're not expected to be paying much attention yet, though you should watch for breaches in scholarly decorum. You could view the second and third paragraphs, too, as a preliminary exercise in throat clearing. By convention, the article cannot do anything of substance until these boxes have been checked.    

By this point, at the beginning of the next paragraph, you are getting impatient. When is the real thing going to start? You are eager to dive in, but now you see a lengthy footnote addressing tangential, but somehow urgent, details.1  At this point, any engagement with the subject matter itself, any concrete ideas about anything, would be a huge relief. If you can only get far enough into this paragraph, the time you have invested so far will all be worth it...       

***

1. You are torn between skipping the note and reading it right now. It is probably not too important, but what if it is? After attending to the note, you return to the body of the text, feeling you have done your duty.  

ME to MY

 I was listening in the car to my entire music library. I was on the ME section and many hours later, driving from Colorado to Kansas, I was on MY, so I heard several versions of My Funny Valentine and My Favorite Things, My Foolish Heart, My Heart Stood Still. I skipped through several complete versions of Música Callada, because I didn't want to fall asleep driving. I also skipped some Mozart quartets for the same reason. 

Breckenridge

 I'm in Breckenridge, CO. My daughter is in an orchestra here (NRO) and I drove from Kansas to see her play, stopping to watch birds in central KS. 

Tonight, they played the enigma variations by Elgar and a romantic-sounding and inventive harp concerto by Gliere. The harpist was fantastically good. (Two days ago, they played Dvorak 8, which had a lot of trumpet solos, admirably performed by JTM.) All the musicians are between about 21 and 30.  

Before the Elgar, a woman behind me was saying to her husband: "There are 15 of them; I hope each one is not too long; it is 7:25 already!"  The concert was over by 8 p.m., so I bet she was happy. Where else better did she have to be?