Strout

 Some women I know were talking about Elizabeth Strout the other day.  I downloaded one of her books on kindle, and I think I have serious allergy to middle brow earnest realist fiction.  To me, it's not well written at all. Some of it is just flat, but then there will be a purple patch or a misconceived simile.  This is a wildly successful writer who has shows and movies made of her work. 

Superstition

 There is something else I'm trying to track down: Kenneth Burke notes at one point that the rain dance is done right before the rainy season begins. It is not that people believe, naively, that the dance causes the rain; instead, the dance is a ritual preparation for the coming showers.  

We might think there are many kinds of magical thinking. Other people's behavior manifests itself as magical, from our perspective, but our own kind of magic is invisible to ourselves because it is integrated into our behavior and thought patterns in a seamless way.  

[Update: I've found a reference to Wittgenstein's critique of James Frazer along these lines.  I'm not sure if Burke makes the same critique or if I was misremembering.  Burke does talk about Frazer as well.  The idea is that the Western mind talks about rain dance as a kind of cause effect relation, but its real meaning is "let's celebrate the beginning of the rainy season."]. 

Music

 Suppose an alien civilization does archeology on us and tries to figure out what music is.  Suppose this civilization has culture of different kinds but does not have the sense of hearing. Biologically speaking, these creatures simply lack ears.  Intellectually, they can figure out that music has to do with vibrations of air perceived in a particular way, but they would not ever possess music experientially.  

They could develop theories. Some would see music as a branch of mathematics.  Others, as a system of cultural prestige or a strange adjunct to sexual selection.  There would be debates about what music is, with whole schools of thought standing in opposition to one another. There would the economic musicologists, the mathematical musicologists. The only thing there wouldn't be would be the musical musicologists.  

Until one day, a young scholar under the sway of the mathematicians wakes up one day with a kind of epiphany... Yet this person's theories can never be accepted: they are based on accepting as real something that everyone else agrees is a kind of phantom: sound itself. 

Berta García Faet

 I was reading this book by a new (to me) Spanish poet. She says at the very end that everything that Ben Lerner thinks about poetry (in the Hatred of Poetry) is the opposite of what she thinks. Ben's thesis is that people like the idea of poetry more than actual poems, which inevitably disappoint.  Nothing can live up to that Poetry with a capital P.  

So I'm assuming Berta like poetry lower case, as it actually is, more than big P Poetry.  I was thinking about this and I agree. It's not that all or most poetry is worthwhile, but that the worthwhile stuff really does surpass expectations. I'm not saying that Ben's idea is wrong: there could be people who never find poems that live up to what we want.  What I enjoy, though, is the hunt. 

SUMS

 Another Vitale poem:

SUMS

One plus one, we say. And think:

one apple plus one apple,

one glass plus one glass.

Always the same things. 

What a change it will be when

one plus one is a puritan 

plus a gamelan, 

a jasmine plus an Arab,

a nun plus a cliff,

a song plus a mask. 

a garrison plus a damsel (again)

one person's hope

plus another's dream. 

The epigraph is "horse and horseman are now two animals" JD García Bacca. 

The reference to garrisons and damsels is to Pablo Neruda's "Arte poético": Entre sueño y espacio, / entre guarniciones y doncellas."    

Sparrow

 Here's another one:

Three absurd sparrows

sing in the fog 

smelling like lemons.

The afternoon is empty 

of the sad human hustle

and bustle. 

Alone, the birdlike glory 

gives meaning, 

against everything, 

to the world.  

Ida Vitale

 

I took a stab at translating a poem by Vitale:

FALL 

Fall, a dog 

with an affectionate, impertinent paw

shakes the leaves of books, 

demands we notice 

its fascinations 

shifting in vain from green

to gold to red to purple. 

Just as when, distracted,

you lose le mot juste

forever.