I was looking for this quote in Ezra Pound:
"I have, on the other hand, found also in Homer the imaginary spectator, which in 1918 I still thought was Henry James’ particular property.
Homer says, ‘an experienced soldier would have noticed’."
I saw this recently in Beckett: "To the imaginary stranger the dwelling appears deserted." I use this too in my parody novel. Beckett has his imaginary stranger knock on the door!
Going through old blog posts I discover things about how I used to think. It wasn't radically different from now, but I discovered I knew what certain piano voicing were in 2007, when I only started playing piano in 2015. So my preparation must have been a long one!
I was much more into poetry from the inside, craft and all that. It's not that I don't care about that, but my interest has shifted. I was into "song studies" back then, but did not sing.
I remember how I used to play conga drum outside on campus.
The indifferent wind ran through the Aeolian saw-blades of the former mill-town. Thick wet mud left only a few roads passable in the surrounding countryside. Big-boned, intrepid Anna braved narrow gravel passageways to deliver firewood and sarcastic cheer to the acne-scarred denizens of Acacia Country. They bought their guitar magazines and treatises on apophatic theology in the convenience store run by the unenigmatic Miles. Taking off her gloves, Anna answered his muttered greeting with a withering look--there was no other kind of "look" in the county, no other kind of "greeting" for that matter.
Artificial owls, an ineffective deterrent to English Sparrows, guarded garages and carports. A stranger finding himself unexpectedly in these environs might well be struck by the material and aesthetic impoverishment of the population. Garden-gnomes, rusted pickups, the aforementioned plastic owls, the aforementioned guitar magazines, seemed designed by some callous creator to present the image of a non-too-genteel indigence. Or maybe not... The marijuana farms, the artisanal distilleries, the mountain bike trails (when the mud dries out enough to make them usable), narrate a different account, for the more astute observer, attuned to the allusive repartee of those browsing the wares in Miles' establishment. Two or three weeks suffices to gain a superficial appreciation of the difficulty of the problem. It was three or four months after my own arrival, in fact, that I realized ...
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I found this in old blog post. Apparently I wrote it.
DQ and Sancho are talking. DQ uses a metaphor for death: the actors in a comedy, after they are finished with play, take off their costumes and they are all equalized, with no difference any more between kings and peasants. So it is in the grave. Then Sancho says he has heard this before and says that he has a similar metaphor: in the chess game the different pieces have a different status, queens and kings, knights, or pawns. But after the game the chess pieces are just thrown into the same bag. DQ congratulates Sancho on his discretion: he is getting smarter! Then Sancho attributes his own increased discernment to his travels with DQ. The dialogue is perfectly sane; the two friends seem equally wise and adept at handling rhetorical commonplaces. So Cervantes himself is a compendium of such wisdom, expressed both through Sancho's proverbs and DQ's more erudite discourse. And, of course, many other people with whom the come into contact.
I was in some kind of literary gathering. A person there, though supposedly connected somehow to NY School poetry, had never heard of Alice Notley's Descent of Alette. I approached this person and was mock-indignant. I happened to have my copy of it in my backpack and I brought it out and began to pontificate in a kind of obnoxious way about it. I pointed out that many people didn't like the quotation marks around every phrase, but that these had a prosodic effect, etc....
I like the kind of reading (poetry) that allow me to read a bit and then ruminate for a long time. The kind of reading that involves being absorbed for hours in someone else's reality (novel) is not as attractive for me. Even novels, I will read in this more ruminative way. I picked up the second part the Quijote, read about his death. Cide Hamete addresses his own pen! Burying DQ means that there will be no apocryphal version like that of Avellenada, no more sallies. DQ is sane, "Alonso Quijano el Bueno."
A friend of ours was playing piano, a Beethoven Sonata that I myself play. In real life this friend is musician but doesn't play piano or classical music, but guitar. Then he stepped over to a set of drums and began to play a raucous solo; a cymbal came crashing down.
Earlier, I had thought to mention that my mother was buying musical instruments for all her grandchildren, but I couldn't find the proper break in the conversation to say it. She was buying a violin for my sister (who doesn't play violin), and I was thinking she needed it to compose music for strings. It doesn't make too much sense because in waking life my sister can't do much of anything any more, but she was an accomplished musician before dementia set it.
