We Must Have Heard the Same Dogs Barking, or: Tricky Work Sometimes Not to Smell Yourself, Ferment Being Constant, or: I Had All These Precious Things to Burn, or: Theme Songs December 2013

HARD WORK

Roddy Lumsden

Tricky work sometimes not to smell yourself,

ferment being constant—constant as carnival sweat

(a non-stock phrase I palmed from a girl from Canada,

a land where I once saw this graffiti: life is great).

And I have tasted myself, especially when I spilled

sinigang all down my arm in a Pinoy workers' caff

in Little Manila. I drank sinigang (is soup drunk?)

in Big Manila too, with all its dead skyscrapers.

Seen myself? In looking glasses or, looking down,

stocky as a shift working cop, maybe a Mexican cop

full of beans (frijoles, I mean, not vim), paunch full

of sopa de vigilia, pulling over a sozzled bus driver.

Heard myself speak fluently in my own language,

have heard myself too described as hard work

(as hard to get through as Scotch broth), though once

someone rather bladdered told me I was magnetic.

And I may as well admit that I have touched myself

(who hasn't?). In a forest, on a train, in New York

and Paris with unparalleled handiwork, sinning   

as I go, merry as an office boy spooning onion soup.

and having spent some moments thinking of the vision that accommodates all that is unforeseen

Friday on his message board during his Friday show I asked Bryce for advice on works and musicians to continue my latest compulsion for field-recordings, I don't know if he did it for me or because of me but the last set of the show was KABOOM! thanks! I posted a Forcucci piece yesterday, below is one of the Yannick Dauby pieces he played, above one I found. Holy the fuck, I have never listened to sound better in my life, I have never been hungrier for sounds I've never heard in my life, and everything is music. I was trained to categorize and discriminate. I'm unlearning that shit.

• Music is feeling.
• A photo-tour of Ostkreuz. 
• Maggie's weekly links.
• { feuilleton }'s weekly links.
• New Inquiry's Sunday links.
• The first thing the baby did wrong.
• Trapped inside the novel. A response to this Tim Parks' piece I posted Friday: This conviction puts me decisively in the camp represented by Parks, the camp that admires Beckett and Bernhard.  But I wish this camp spent less time on Dawkins-like denunciations of its outgroup, a libidinal investment that leads it to mistake friends for enemies and to narrow its canon unduly. Fine metaphors abound.
• On the roll out of the new Arcade Fire album. Know what, fuck it. I'm tired of being a scold, of administering purity tests, my ears are sluts, who am I to judge? An added benefit? I care less about passing the purity tests I used to apply to and then worry about myself.
• Different mileage, mind, here and there, more or less, now and then, more failure than success, but there is a project in progress.
• What you can buy me for Giftmas.
• An anti-Best of 2013 Best of 2013 list.
• Figures in a landscape, III.
• I haven't forgot Britten's centenary in twelve days:

UNDER THE SIGN

Ann Lauterbach

Having dreamed of my dead sister
raging with urgent

need, she
conducting us through intolerable

passages, now forgotten, I
have burned my right hand

after sunset
small dark clouds above

the river I cannot see
while listening to

a scratched CD of a Haydn
piano sonata so that

certain passages
rapidly repeat

and having spent some moments
thinking of the the vision

that accommodates
all that is unforeseen

as the world now
becomes without sequence.

hearing all bells at once instructs the final exhale

As promised, Chris Watson's Weather Report this weekend. I know I know one person (not counting me) and think I know more two people who might dig this. Hope you do. Back Monday (probably) barring kaboom (there are no Egoslavian Holy Days this weekend). Last week Bloggod tested me kaboom with Lou Reed, I'm hoping Bloggod takes the weekend off too.








READING STARLIGHT WITH ONE EYE LIKE CREELEY

Ca Conrad

hearing all bells at

                              once instructs the final exhale

                              Camelot in thimble of  the gods

                              Marilyn Monroe’s ambulance

lost on the way to the palace of  temperament

a branch of government for the magical arts

                              punch wall of forest for

                              an oaken

                              desk

                              another dream we

                              needed agitating the

               sentence as it rows across a

               newly destroyed heart folding

               following tormenting one another

                              we were all once young and

                              beautiful squandering everything

                              it’s what we came here to do

                              cut off engines to the child

                              registering disposition of the

                              cat in the dark as the

                              size of the darkness

DREAMS

Wisława Szymborska

Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh and Stanislaw Baranczak

Despite the geologists’ knowledge and craft,

mocking magnets, graphs, and maps—

in a split second the dream

piles before us mountains as stony

as real life.

And since mountains, then valleys, plains

with perfect infrastructures.

Without engineers, contractors, workers,

bulldozers, diggers, or supplies—

raging highways, instant bridges,

thickly populated pop-up cities.

Without directors, megaphones, and cameramen—

crowds knowing exactly when to frighten us

and when to vanish.

Without architects deft in their craft,

without carpenters, bricklayers, concrete pourers—

on the path a sudden house just like a toy,

and in it vast halls that echo with our steps

and walls constructed out of solid air.

Not just the scale, it’s also the precision—

a specific watch, an entire fly,

on the table a cloth with cross-stitched flowers,

a bitten apple with teeth marks.

And we—unlike circus acrobats,

conjurers, wizards, and hypnotists—

can fly unfledged,

we light dark tunnels with our eyes,

we wax eloquent in unknown tongues,

talking not with just anyone, but with the dead.

And as a bonus, despite our own freedom,

the choices of our heart, our tastes,

we’re swept away

by amorous yearnings for—

and the alarm clock rings.

So what can they tell us, the writers of dream books,

the scholars of oneiric signs and omens,

the doctors with couches for analyses—

if anything fits,

it’s accidental,

and for one reason only,

that in our dreamings,

in their shadowings and gleamings,

in their multiplings, inconceivablings,

in their haphazardings and widescatterings

at times even a clear-cut meaning

may slip through.

Not That Anyone Will Care, but as I Was Sitting There on the 8:07 to New Haven, I Was Struck by Lightning

   

Bryce played parts three and four of Chris Watson's El Tren Fanstama yesterday. Here are all ten parts of the work (though they are not labeled so on youtube screenshot). It's... love. 

Over the past year I've gone back and listened to Bryce's show archives and and Jeff Mullan's show archives not only for the composed music but for the field recordings they play, it's a new obsession, field recordings, I've spared this blog, until now.

   

Here: In his book Civilizations, historian Felipe Fernández-Armesto focuses on man’s overriding impulse timpose its will on the world, "a relationship to the natural environment, recrafted, by the civilising impulse, to meet human demands". This process lies at the very heart of El Tren Fantasma, a composite document of a train ride across Mexico, describing a passage "from Los Mochis to Veracruz, [from] coast to coast, Pacific to Atlantic". While Chris Watson’s previous sets – such as 2003’s critically acclaimed Weather Report – have generally concerned themselves with this planet’s myriad beasts and habitats, this narrative inevitably bears an anthropological mark. Indeed, the first voice we hear doesn’t belong to a cuckoo or coyote, but station announcer Ana Gonzalez Bello putting out one "last call for the ghost train". It’s an unusually contrived opening gambit, from which point the listener is jettisoned into a collision of screeching brakes, rolling stock rattle and hot hydraulic huff. Over half of El Tren Fantasma’s tracks (pun definitely intended) are given over to locomotive sound – gears shifting, hoots, bells and whistles – climaxing with El Divisadero, where Watson manipulates the monolithic machinations into a surging, phantasmal bellow, like a choir of angels struggling to be heard over the rumbling thrum of running gear. Imagine if Phill Niblock had scored Different Trains instead of Steve Reich and you’d be somewhere close.

   

I knew of Watson as a member of Cabaret Voltaire, a band I don't play here enough, and I'd already owned Weather Report, which is - and this is high praise from me though it may not sound like it - always listened to when I have a high fever (but not listened to only then, why, it's being listened to right now as I type) and will be posted here next weekend and all weekends hence will have at least one field recording.

   

I'll start with the weekends, I said this past Thursday at Thursday Night Pints when I was asked about the blog and blogging and then was allowed to answer at length. K asked, why do you feel compelled to post every day and I said I'm an attention-slut, duh, though it's getting harder finding content now that I don't feel like documenting the daily instances of my political disillusionments, pointing and repeatedly screaming See! See! We're So Fucked! L said, you told me that's what drives new readers to the blog. And keeps most of the regular readers, I said. I just posted a song that mentions Jack Spicer (twenty minutes before we met) and some Spicer poems, not a single link to aargh, those posts aren't why most people visit. K said, but you still do it anyway, the aargh every day. I'm trying to stop, I said, I'll start with the weekends.

   

So, weekends. One post only barring major birthdays and Egoslavian Holy Days or exceptionally kaboomy clusterfuck kabooms. Conlow Nancarrow and Sylvia Plath have birthdays tomorrow, I'll see if I can wait until Monday to post Nancarrow pieces and Plath poems. Field recordings. No links to topical instances of clusterfuckery though there can be links to good reads. Bleggalgazing, or not, depending on weekend, confronting and embracing the self-indulgence.

THE TRAIN

David Orr

Not that anyone will care,

But as I was sitting there

On the 8:07

To New Haven,

I was struck by lightning.

The strangest thing

Wasn't the flash of my hair

Catching on fire,

But the way people pretended

Nothing had happened.

For me, it was real enough.

But it seemed as if

The others saw this as nothing

But a way of happening,

A way to get from one place

To another place,

But not a place itself.

So, ignored, I burned to death.

Later, someone sat in my seat

And my ashes ruined his suit.

 

IN THE LOOP

Bob Hicok

I heard from people after the shootings. People

I knew well or barely or not at all. Largely

the same message: how horrible it was, how little

there was to say about how horrible it was.

People wrote, called, mostly e-mailed

because they know I teach at Virginia Tech,

to say, there’s nothing to say. Eventually

I answered these messages: there’s nothing

to say back except of course there’s nothing

to say, thank you for your willingness

to say it. Because this was about nothing.

A boy who felt that he was nothing,

who erased and entered that erasure, and guns

that are good for nothing, and talk of guns

that is good for nothing, and spring

that is good for flowers, and Jesus for some,

and scotch for others, and “and” for me

in this poem, “and” that is good

for sewing the minutes together, which otherwise

go about going away, bereft of us and us

of them. Like a scarf left on a train and nothing

like a scarf left on a train. As if the train,

empty of everything but a scarf, still opens

its doors at every stop, because this

is what a train does, this is what a man does

with his hand on a lever, because otherwise,

why the lever, why the hand, and then it was over,

and then it had just begun.

   

On the below piece: Penultimate track 'El Tajin' begins with a cacophony of animal and insect sounds, oppressive and seemingly recorded at night. Without the certainty of the train, all this undefinable noise leads our minds into fear of the unknown. Watson is recording the landscape before it was tamed by the demystifying, 'civilising' influence of our technology. 

    

A SECOND TRAIN SONG FOR GARY

Jack Spicer

When the trains come into strange cities

The citizens come out to meet the strangers.

                                        I love you, Jack, he said

                                        I love you, Jack, he said

                                        At another station.

When passengers come in from strange cities

The citizens come out to help the strangers.

                                        I love you too, I said

                                        I love you too, I said

                                        From another station.

The citizens are kind to passing strangers

And nourish them and kiss their lips in kindness.

                                        I walk the unbelieving streets

                                        I walk the unbelieving streets

                                        In a strange city.

At night in cold new beds the welcomed strangers

Achieve in memory the city's promise.

                                        I wake in love with you

                                        I wake in love with you

                                        At last year's station.

Then say goodbye to citizens and city

Admit this much—that they were kind to strangers.

                                        I leave my love with you

                                        I leave my love with you

                                        In this strange city.