Giorgio Morandi - "Nothing is More Abstract Than Reality."

Giorgio Morandi was an Italian painter and etcher [1890-1964] whose reputation among the art community has steadily gained momentum over the last fifty years. Though he lived through the Fascist period in Italy, he escaped untainted, holding an art teaching post for 26 years, and continuing to practice his exacting style throughout the latter half of his life. The quotation above is by him.   

The Photographer Frederick Sommer said something almost the same:  "Reality is greater than our dreams." These two dicta could stand as philosophical principles for a whole school of thought in the Modern Age. They strike me as a reaction to the meta-science of psychology, in that, despite the importance we may place upon the "super-natural" quality of fantasy (dreams), or the power of the human imagination to create and recreate, universal phenomena is ultimately of greater interest and complexity than anything we could offer as an alternative.

 

Sommer and Morandi are two artists who sought to explicate, using very modest means, how this is true. (I will deal with Sommer's work in future posts.) You can see it in the work reproduced above, from 1912. Morandi was heavily influenced by Cezanne, in particular the feeling of object-status imparted through the construction of volume and depth through contrasting textures; it's very much as if the "subject" (or "object") being represented is of subsidiary importance to the effects being sought. Morandi will paint or etch the same retinue of objects over and over, in constantly changing arrangements or views, in subdued, "quiet" light, creating dozens of versions with an almost religious precision, dedication and patience. The reduction of subject-matter has been called "minimalist" by some critics, in an attempt to explain the power of his vision.

 

Also, nearly all Morandi's works seem suffused with an obscure light, almost as if he had sat in the darkness for long periods, letting his eyes adjust to the dimness, then studying the effect this mutedness or subtraction could have on objects of varying reflectivity or density. The choice of available objects mirrors the decision to employ only available light: Harry Callahan once said that a photographer could make great photographs by photographing anything between two and twenty feet distant, no matter where he was. The implication of which is that the "search" or the "quest" for adequate subject matter is paradoxically futile: Reality, or possibility, is as close as your writing desk, or your paint tray--or, as in Morandi's case, as near as the wine bottles and crockery of his own studio-kitchen. 

Morandi's studio in Bologna had a monkish air. It's been restored and photographed by archivists. He lived with the utmost simplicity, dedicating himself to refining and perfecting his art. In the post-War art scene of popular American art, such concentration and reductivism probably seems a little flinty. The spirit of Abstract Expressionism, of Pop, the "messy" extravagances and indulgence of so much Modern and post-Modern art, seems antithetical to Morandi's solitary labor, his understated metaphysical investigations. For me, it echoes certain East Asian art, Zen imagery--the almost hypnotic quality of simple objects which acquire the resonance or oscillations of trance or nirvana.  

The pleasure one gets from looking at Morandi's work is a kind of intellectual sensuality:  The studied exactitude of line, the warmth and deftness of textures, the caressing delight of shapes evoked through delicate modeling, the muted atmosphere of intense focus on simple forms. I've looked at Morandi's etchings for the last 40 years, and they never get old. Each time I return with renewed fascination in their comfortable density, their mastery of means. 

The only other artist whose work carries the same kind of seriousness, perhaps even gravity, is de Chirico. A few of Morandi's canvases are clearly influenced by the canonical Italian surrealist, as here:

      

La pinacoteca impossibile ['The Impossible Gallery" still life, 1918]

To me, this is as good as anything in de Chirico, though it bears the same narrow, slightly claustrophobic, intensity, of all of Morandi's work. 

The Lessons of History Have Not Been Learned

Following the end of the Vietnam War, journalists and historians spent the next 25 years trying to explain why America had been drawn into a war "it couldn't win" and why it had been so reluctant to admit this unassailable realization. 

In the 1960's, when America first became involved in Indo-China, Americans still believed in the invincibility of their military might. America had prevailed against Japan and Germany only 20+ years before. In Korea, it was felt that we would have overcome North Korea if China hadn't intervened. We thought our superior firepower, and our "can do" military, would surely prevail against a small, vulnerable Communist satellite. We hadn't any experience fighting on the Asian mainland, and we'd never before had to deal with a thoroughly "embedded" guerrilla force, which made it difficult to know who was a friend and who was not. But as that war dragged on, and the atrocities piled up, we discovered that what had worked in Europe and the Pacific, didn't in Vietnam.

The lesson of Vietnam was that, short of employing "weapons of mass destruction" it was unlikely we could overcome an indigenous revolutionary army through the usual ground offensive tactics, especially in the tangled terrain of tropical Southeast Asia. America's failure there, and our open admission of that failure, left a festering scar on our national pride. We had made a big commitment to "liberate" a nation, to preserve its possible future as a model Western-style democracy, but we had utterly failed, in large part because we had ended up nearly destroying a country we were trying to "save." Our indiscriminate use of Agent Orange, "cleansing" the countryside village by village of embedded Viet Cong volunteers, our pragmatic support of a corrupt puppet regime, the killing of hundreds of thousands of blameless civilians--these were the consequences of our adventure in Indo-China.  

Today, 40 years and four wars later, we're trying again to establish "democracy" in Northwest Pakistan, whose proxy government military is attempting, with American support, to eradicate the "Taliban" rebels from mountain villages and towns where they've been hiding, since we subdued Afghanistan. The parallels between our efforts in Pakistan and Vietnam are striking. This morning, reports of villages being shelled and "liberated" are producing the familiar pattern: Thousands of refugees, piles of rubble, disillusioned populations. Once more, we're leveling the countryside in order to "save" it. 

After America left Vietnam (in disgrace), we eventually came to accept the "inevitability" of the unification of Vietnam under a Communist regime. Today, we have diplomatically friendly relations with that country, and our citizens actually travel there with few restrictions. We trade with them. 

The lesson of Vietnam was that you can't bludgeon a country into submission and expect it to cooperate with your agenda, to follow your example of Western style democratic government. There are many objectionable aspects to Islamic fundamentalism, it is diametrically opposed to the way of life we enjoy in parliamentary democracies dominated by capitalistic enterprise. It is perfectly possible to make compelling arguments about how, as a way of life and government, Islam is regressive and harmful. 

But Islam is inextricably interwoven into the fabric of many Asian cultures. It has been a part of their lives for generations. The notion that we can dissect out the "bad" aspects of Islam--to remove it or kill it or "persuade" it with force to back down--is naive. Indigenous peoples, with their own centuries-old culture, can't be expected to adopt our ways and follow our example overnight. Attempting to force them to do so is a recipe for disaster. 

9/11 happened because we ignored all the clues and warning-signs of impending danger. 9/11 couldn't, really, have been much easier for Al Quaeda operatives. Clearly, America has done exactly what Osama bin-Laden wanted, stomping around like an elephant in Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan, crushing fragile, suspicious populations with sophisticated weaponry and door-to-door street sweeps. 

Vietnam, Iraq I and Iraq II, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, have all been wars of "choice". In each instance, we've told ourselves we could go in, clean out the bad guys, be welcomed as liberators, and leave the place better than we found it. Instead of Communism--the evil we sought to defeat in Vietnam--we now have "international terrorism" as the bad guys. We continue to think that military intervention can be used as a short-hand to bring about rapid, favorable changes in indigenous cultures. But history teaches us that you can't do that. 

Imagine how Americans would feel, for instance, if China--which promises to be the world's next great superpower in this century--were to try to impose itself militarily here. Would any amount of bombing, martial rule, house to house searches, hostage-taking or torture, be likely to blunt our patriotism, subdue our desire to resist, make us compliant hosts to an invading foreign power? 

We can't invade and destroy countries to save them from their own cultures, no matter how extreme or backward or heinous they may seem to us. We cannot succeed in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Short of a full-scale indefinitely open-ended occupation, requiring 450,000 troops, there is no way we can insure our interests will be served there. Britain, and later the Soviet Union, learned that lesson the hard way. Do we really need to repeat the mistakes of history, again?        

Allen Covici - Memory of a Friend & Neighbor

When my wife and I bought the house which originally sat on the lot we still occupy * in Kensington in 1976, we didn't know any of the neighbors. This neighborhood had been settled in the late 1940's and early 1950's, and many of the residents were the original owners. Most of their children had grown up and left home by that time; we were the harbingers of the second wave of "settlers" (baby "Boomers") following the post-War boom years. They looked down their noses at us. It's certainly no surprise, then, that I wouldn't have known that a man named Don Ross lived two blocks South along our street, straddling the edge of the Sunset View Cemetery. Ross had been smart with real estate in the '40's and '50's, buying up lots and building rental housing on them. Eventually, he owned enough to live off the rents. It turned out that Ross's best friend was Brett Weston, the son of Edward Weston, and a world-class photographer in his own right. Ross's next door neighbor, and his renter, was Allen Covici. 

In the 1990's, as my career with the government began to wind down, I envisioned becoming a bookseller. I was already a collector, spending most of my discretionary money on rare books. Sellers in the trade, recognizing my useless obsession, encouraged me to consider going into the trade myself. "Collecting books is really pretty stupid, Curtis" Peter Howard of Serendipity Books would say, "but becoming a book dealer will enable you to own and handle thousands of wonderful books you'd never be able to have access to, otherwise." One day John McBride, a bookseller at Moe's Books in Berkeley, suggested I give my "neighbor" Allen Covici a ring, as he was one of the most well-known collector/traders in antiquarian books in the area, though notably low profile. I'd never heard of Allen, but the name Covici rang a bell.  

Somewhat uncharacteristically, for me, I did just that. Before long, Allen and I had become fast friends. I'd go over to his place and we'd talk for hours about books, and about some of his life experiences. We often went to lunch together in Berkeley. Allen was the nephew of Pascal Covici, who had been Allen's Father's Brother. Allen's Father had died when he was very young. Pascal, who owned a bookstore in Chicago, would eventually go into the publishing trade as an editor, starting a firm which became first Covici, then Covici-Friede,** and ultimately an important editor with Viking (famously associated with Steinbeck and other figures of note). Allen had grown up in the Chicago of Studs Lonigan, among sharply defined ethnic neighborhoods. 

Allen became interested in books at a young age, but had little money (these were the Depression years). After working briefly in a war materiel factory, he ended up in the U.S. Army, following the invasion force into Northwest France. One of his favorite anecdotes involved a three day pass he'd been given when his company had been stationed near the German border after V-E Day. Allen went to Paris, bringing along booty (chocolate, nylons and cigarettes) with which to tempt the luxury-poor French shopkeepers. He stopped in several bookstores, and acquired first editions of Henry Miller and Anais Nin, among others. Returning to camp, he stored his finds in his big green canvas bag. The day before his unit was to be sent out, the company was ordered to report for formation outside barracks. An hour later, the men returned to discover that thieves had ransacked all the bags, but of course they hadn't taken Allen's rare books, because they had no idea what they were! Allen was full of stories like this.

After the war, he'd gotten a librarianship degree and moved to Berkeley to work for the UC Library system. He'd been living in the lovely Japanese house belonging to Ross since the late 1960's. Not being married, and having no outstanding obligations, he began to acquire rare books from local bookstores and library book sales, etc. This became his chief interest in life. By the time I met him, he'd built up a world class collection of first editions, most at rock bottom prices, and he'd already begun to sell some of it off through antiquarian dealers in San Francisco. He told me of acquiring Nathaniel West's Miss Lonelyhearts in dustjacket for five dollars, and a copy of Samuel Beckett's Whoroscope for almost nothing! He kept a card catalogue itemizing all his books, updating their values over the years as each new generation of mail order catalogues arrived in his mailbox. The retail value of his collection was well over a million dollars. 

Allen's sister (1913-2008) had led quite an interesting life. A social organizer spawned in the Leftist-leaning '30's, she went to Spain during the Civil War. After her husband's death in 1959, she started a whole new life, securing a graduate degree in Social Work and spending the next 30 years in the San Francisco Bay Area teaching (at SF State), and working as an organizer. By the time I met her, she'd moved to Portland, but was as feisty and active (in her Eighties) as anyone I'd ever met of that age. 

Eventually, Allen decided that he wanted me to serve as his "literary executor" though of course it wasn't a guardian or administrator of copyrights that he needed (having published very little during his life), but as the overseer of his grand book collection. An attorney drew up the papers, but just a few weeks later, Allen and I had a falling-out and he cancelled all those plans. As he approached 90, I suggested to him that he might want to get someone to help him with chores and errands, but he was reluctant. He'd always lived alone, and had a fierce independent streak.  

Eventually, he moved to Portland and entered a rest home, where he died peacefully, and somewhat obliviously, as I was given to understand, at age 92. His sister Virginia Malbin succeeded him two years later, at age 95. 

Wishing to preserve some of his memories and opinions, I conducted a series of recorded interviews with Allen in 1997-98, thinking that I might someday publish them. The verbatim is over 60 pages long. 

I was sorry our friendship had to end, but I have no regrets. Allen taught me much about books: If I have any integrity as a bookseller, it's due in considerable part to him. He did, briefly, sell books, under the name Invisible Bookman, though never with much conviction; he loved his books too much to part with them before he had to. One of Allen's gifts to me, was his collection of an almost complete run of Margie Cohn's House of Books catalogues from the 1940's-50's.                     

                     

Don Ross has since died, and the properties sold. I lived here for 18 years before knowing about either Ross or Covici. When I became a large format photographer, in 1985, little did I know that Brett Weston (my HERO!) was developing negatives in Ross's garage just a few hundred feet from my front door! Or that Allen Covici, one of the world's great book collectors, was also a neighbor who would one day figure prominently and intimately in my last career. 

*We had the the old house demolished in 1991, and built a new one on the same lot, designed by Jacobson-Silverstein, a Berkeley architectural firm.

**Donald Friede eventually went on to marry M.F.K. Fisher (see my post on Fisher).   

The New Sentence - Style or Method ?

I've been trying to understand what Ron Silliman means by "The New Sentence" and how his writing, since he declared this as the harbinger of an uniquely potent new prose technique, finds its possible fulfillment in his own published work(s). It may be unfair to expect the creative work of any serious critic to serve as an exemplar of primary principles of value, but Silliman has made it his special mission to explain, if not justify, the whole vast program of "Language Poetry" in its various manifestations, marshaling references and citations from linguistics, philosophy, literary criticism and literature itself. 

To telescope the presentation, one could say that Silliman's first principle is that Language "centered" writing employs the use of the decontexualized signifier uncoupled from the tyranny of the signified. Which means, at a very primitive level, that what words and sentences refer to, point to--mean, in effect--is less important than the possible extra- or non-referential expedient connotations which may be generated through alternative techniques of composition. 

Silliman has never resorted to fragmentation at the level of grammar in his work. With the exception of a few minor minimalist experiments early in his career, his work is grammatical, syntactically predictable and correct. Since the appearance of Ketjak [1978], his work has been marked by a continuity, a homogeneity of method and style which makes the writing at any point over the last 30 years essentially indistinguishable.

 

There has always been a question of historico-literary continuity--at least, for me--in discussing the sources of LangPo. Michael Palmer, and Clark Coolidge, for example, who together edited a short-run magazine, Joglars, way back in the early 1960's, and whose respective oeuvres have always been linked, in my mind, to the development of a kind of writing which has lately been claimed by the Watten-Silliman & Co. hegemony as their territory, eventually were "disassociated" by LangPo.  Not only these two figures, but a host of other "peripheral" figures (such as Eigner, Raworth, Greenwald)--one could make equally compelling arguments of these figures, for a disorganized, but nonetheless substantial "movement" of common concern, preoccupations and interests. Indeed, Coolidge's and Eigner's work were held up early on as a textual models by Watten in early issues of his magazine this. Though later tacitly disavowed, such allegiances and models clearly precede the critical theorizing (now referred to as "the turn to language") at 80 Langton, Grand Piano and after.    

In the work of Clark Coolidge, in many ways the original seminal figure of the language poetry movement, the traditional defined meaning of words is altered, in the interests of new constructions. After his early period of non-syntactical abstractions in Ing, Space, The Maintains and Polaroid in the 1960's and early 1970's, he turned to a style using sentences and sentence fragments (phrases) that have an ostensible grammatical logic, though using words in a way that deflects their common meaning, in favor of novel connotations and spins. De-coupling of signifier from signified occurs in a fairly predictable way; once you get used to Coolidge's later style, there isn't much challenge in its method, it's like a catalogue of possible changes given the potentials of his imagination, within that form. He's been very consistent with that. (This later style roughly parallels the period of Silliman's "new sentence" work (1978-present). Doubtless, Coolidge's independent development (as well as other surviving figures from the 1960's), without group affiliations, continues to present as an unaccommodated complication to an historical version of LangPo as an immaculate conception.)     

But Silliman's work has never been about such non-syntactical or novel significations. His structures are invariably built out of quotidian statements, drawn from a wide variety of contexts, their parallel, non-hierarchical flatness suggesting simultaneity and accidental relationships. Each sentence stands alone in a waste land of disconnection. The interest level of his sentences varies, but there is no priority we might assign to them, since they aren't constructed around "topics" or "themes" the way prose traditionally is. They don't "build."

If you spend any time around Ron, you immediately observe that what he notices, the phenomena that draws his attention, is how seemingly unconnected events or shapes or expressions intersect, or interact, creating ironic fill-ins in an immense matrix of data. It's a rather obsessive process of linking and borrowing, of accretion and transposition. Mountains of perceptions are heaped up, non-stop, overwhelming the text. The implication is that sensory overload is simply getting tuned-in, the generator of data (a rapid word machine) running at top speed, as we watch in amused consternation or delight. 

"A sentence in the evening. Today the boxscores are green. Tonight the boxcars are growing in the railyard, The indexical items are not coreferential. Hollywood caenfidential. You made Cheerios number one.

Mock snow: white petals from the plum tree swirl in the wind. I was working on a different poem. The dark patches to the clouds' glare are all we have of depths to this sky. The shudder of the laundry down in the basement. A small table in one corner of the kitchen. White petals from the plum tree twirl in the wind. I slip in a pair of diskettes...." [from Paradise, pp17-18, Burning Deck, 1985]

Etc. At one level, there's a fairly off-handed wit going on, simple puns or casual linguistic relationships are set up, but without much resignation. They're just flying by, odd figments of diversion in the flow of daily stuff.  

In his essay The New Sentence, reprinted in an essay collection of that title, [The New Sentence, Roof Books, 1987], Silliman lays out the groundwork for an understanding of his concept of this new compositional style. It begins by noting the failure of traditional linguistics to furnish an adequate definition of the sentence as a unit of language, leaving that function, therefore, open to possible elaboration or appropriation (by writers). Modern criticism, which is based on the apprehension of literature as read, can't serve as a basis for a model of writing as practice. The New Critics de-limit the field of discussion of poetry as frames of referentiality (image, metaphor, symbol, myth). Silliman's key proposition is here:

"...the modes of integration which carry words into phrases and phrases into sentences are not fundamentally different from those by which an individual sentence integrates itself into a larger work." 

Silliman's use of the word "carry" is an interesting diversion. Inside it one might place all the functions of grammer, in addition to all the non-rational and mental versions of sense and expression to which human apprehension may be subject. This is a heavy burden for a definition this broad to bear.  As an impertinent objection, one might observe that words outside of sentences, isn't the same as sentences outside paragraphs, or whole works.

It goes without saying that traditional conservative critical definitions of the word, and the sentence, have been inadequate to describe the key literary works which form the basis of the Language Poetry movement, particularly Stein's experiments, whose de-mythologizing of words for use in(side) non-narrative, non-referential structures is the primary foundation of LangPo. Silliman's oft-repeated reference to Grenier's canonical exclamation "I HATE SPEECH!" may be seen, then, as defining the primary division between a literature of reference, and one in which words (and sentences) are freed from their obligation to traditional formal (integrated) meaning. 

The systematic undermining of the foundation of language as story, song, explanation, description, argument, leaves only gratuitous mediations as residue. In an earthquake, firebombing, or other natural or "artificial" disaster, all that is left standing is the rubble of previous edifices. Brick, wood, girders, bolts, nails, plaster, insulation--lie in heaps. But the fundamental laws governing the construction of objects in space, on the planet--to extend the metaphor--still involves the manipulation of requisite masses and forces, following the inherent laws that apply:  Gravity, tensile strength, light, conductivity, balance, and the amount of energy and tools needed to manipulate them.

"The sentence is a unit of writing. Yet the utterance exists as a unit of speech prior to the acquisition of writing." This inescapable fact belies any philosophical or linguistic evaluation that might be applied to the sentence. And that would include all literary critical assertions which fail to include or acknowledge it.

The possibility of a prose which would replace the strictures of dictated poetic form (preconception) and still retain the density and interest common to poems, developed in the 19th Century, notably in France (not in England, or America). Prose seized the initiative relinquished by poets. In the late 19th Century, and early 20th, the breakdown of narrative prose begins with James, proceeds with Stein and Ford Madox Ford and Hemingway, and continues in Joyce. The importance of Finnegans Wake [1939] lies in its obdurate opacity to apprehension, tangled up in a sea of sung reference. In this respect, it is so much like Stein's The Making of Americans, though in a different guise. Both works use language in a way that resists the time-line of narrative.

If Stein is the measure by which the "new sentence" is to be defined, then we must look to her work, not to her pronouncements about it. Silliman quotes Stein that "sentences" are not emotional wholes whereas paragraphs are. Despite the fact that Stein does not--cannot--speak accurately or intelligently about how grammar operates, or what it is that she actually does, except in the most generalized and non-specific way, in her own work, Silliman chooses to employ her definition of prose (the sentence) as the cornerstone of his theoretical definition of his new sentence.

What, exactly, does this theorizing about "the sentence" tell us about Silliman's technique? The Alphabet, his long, dense poem of some 1026 pages, has just been published by the Uinversity of Alabama Press.  

The Alphabet is not "poetry." It's a collection of prose sections. Essentially without variation, the technique consists of successive "sentences" of varying lengths, recording daily event and observation interspersed with meditation, queries, speculations, etc. Its general mood is upbeat, percolating with humor, curiosity, ironic asides, and unusual insights. Rather than striving for firm convictions or elegant designs, it's satisfied with surprising notation, dogged attention to detail, and constantly changing perspectives. 

Sentences of varying length follow each other with no apparent logic or narrative sequence. This is the same style employed by Barrett Watten in Progress. It would appear that there is no difference between one form and another; the only requirement of a Language Poem is that the structure be determined in advance, that its sequential series of statements not be organized into an apparent argument. Sentences (statements) bear only loosely tangential relationships to each other. 

Silliman's formal statement (indeed, his manifesto) consists of eight descriptive definitions:

1) The paragraph organizes the sentences;

2) The paragraph is a unity of quantity, not logic or argument;

3) Sentence length is a unit of measure;

4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity;

5) Syllogistic movement is (a) limited; (b) controlled;

6) Primary syllogistic movement is between the preceding and following sentences;

7) Secondary syllogistic movement is toward the paragraph as a whole, or the total work;

8) The limiting of syllogistic movement keeps the reader's attention at or very close to the level of language, that is, most often at the sentence level or below.

       

Beside such a program, one might put the following:

1) The sentence is composed of words;

2) Grammar is the defined relationship of the usage of words;

3) The sentence is a unit consisting of words in grammatical order; whose length is not infinite, but dictated by spans of attention and grammatical perfection;

4) The paragraph is an arbitrary set (number) of sentences, organized towards a specific topic;

5)  Paragraphs may be composed of sentences which are not organized towards a specific topic to create interest; 

6) Sentence structure (grammar) may be altered (violated) to create interest;

7) Adjacent sentences relate to each other; paragraphs relate to the work as a whole;

8) Language as subject is never far from view.

    

This is another way of saying that you can make grammatical, or ungrammatical sentences, place them in any order you like, without respect to their contextual or logical relationships to each other, and call the result an aesthetic object. There need be no underlying organizing principle except as stipulated arbitrarily beforehand. All other formal intention or design is arbitrary--i.e., there is no inherent relationship between the assigned structure and the "content" of the words. 

This permits the construction of prose sequences with multiple contexts. Subject-matter, in the traditional sense, is external to, or irrelevant to, such constructions. It simply does not apply. A text, therefore, is not about anything, but is at least partly a/the subject of its own duration. 

It would be interesting to suggest possible examples of this kind of composition. Certainly all of Stein's abstract work, after The Making of Americans, would qualify. Ashbery's Tennis-Court Oath. Coolidge's later prose works. Berrigan's Sonnets. As well as many works by the putative members of LangPo, specifically Silliman's The Alphabet. 

 

In this, Silliman's version of the history of avant garde writing, poetry, at least as far as we might think of it pre-1978, has passed into history. Writing organized according to musical segments of duration, or size and dimension of line (or page), or based upon metaphors of voice, body, attention or sense (logic) are all now extinct. The "poem" may survive as a curiosity, perhaps as recreation, or a "minor league" preparation for "the Show" but it has no viability as serious literature, any more.           

Judge Prejudices Hearing - BART Shooting

The San Francisco Chronicle reported this morning that Judge C. Don Clay suddenly suspended the pre-trial hearing in the case against BART Police Office Johannes Mehserle for the shooting death of Oscar Grant at the Fruitvale Station in the wee hours of New Years'. Right in the middle of testimony being conducted by Mehserle's Defense Lawyers, with an expert witness, regarding intepretation of the video, the judge raised his hand and said "There's no doubt in my mind that Mr. Mehserle intended to shoot Oscar Grant with a gun and not a Taser."

 

Several weeks ago, the topic of Taser use was initiated on this blog. The widespread adoption of their use by police authorities across the nation has raised many grave concerns. One of the most crucial, is the potential for confusion between electronic "stun guns" and regular service revolvers (pistols).

The video does nothing to establish conclusively exactly why or whether Mehserle "decided" to shoot Grant in the first place. Amateur video recordings of the event, taken from a distance of perhaps 30 feet, appear to show several officers attempting to subdue a group of African American teenagers who had been detained following a ruckus on the BART system. There is screaming and shouting from dozens of patrons on the platform and standing in the open train-car doorways. There's an atmosphere of raucousness and menace. Even a professionally trained peace officer, would have had trouble not feeling intimidated under these circumstances. Was any of these unruly young thugs carrying weapons? The officers certainly wouldn't have known, without searching them first. In the mood of the hour, it would have been prudent to assume that almost anyone at the scene was armed, and, given the angry confusion, capable of opening up on the the officers. 

There are only three possible ways one can assume the shooting occurred:

1) Mehserle thought Grant might have a gun tucked into his pants, and that he was squirming around trying to get into position to pull it out, and pulled out either his Taser or pistol in self-defense. 

2) Mehserle, unable to get Grant's hands into cuffs, got frustrated and decided to Tase him, reaching mistakenly for his gun (instead) and plugging him in the back.

3) Mehserle, aroused and upset by all the shouting and scuffling, and Grant's uncooperativeness, lost his temper (or his cool) and simply decided to shoot him. 

Under circumstances like these, it's important to remember that people don't always act rationally. Surrounded by half a dozen Black youths, all of them drunk or high, "acting up" and threatening, half-resisting arrest, blurting out racial epithets, with dozens more by-standers screaming and dancing around, is it any wonder that an officer might become confused, scared, angry, frustrated, or simply disoriented?

In order to buy the "deliberate" shooting version, you'd either have to accept that he actually thought that Grant was packing (is that an implausible suspicion, given the circumstances?), or that Mehserle simply went berserk. 

Considering the range of possible interpretations of the incident, and looking at the available video versions, it's highly prejudicial for any officer of the court to conclude, privately or publicly, that Mehserle's actions, insofar as they are known to us at this point, lead to a conclusion that he "intended to use his gun." Judge Clay's statement in open court, and his peremptory suspension of the hearing, are clearly prejudicial in every possible sense.

Judge Clay should be reprimanded, and the whole matter should be re-tried. He has probably ruined any chance that Mehserle can be fairly tried in the immediate area. 

This isn't justice, it's a lynch-mob mentality. 

Erik Satie - Imposter or Genius ?

Of all the important Modernist composers, Satie has probably the largest influence and fame, relative to the number of, and musical ambition of, his compositions. 

In my youth, I was much taken with Satie's compositions. Short, witty, occasionally quite wistful and sad, at other times lugubrious, at still other times insolent, ridiculous and wicked. 

As early as the late 1880's, he had begun to compose (and publish) some of his revolutionary pieces (Gymnopedies, Gnossiennes, etc.). These works sound, even now, completely contemporary to our ears--clean, unburdened with any Victorian muddle, any thick harmonies. The piano was perfectly suited to Satie's modestly conceived music, which is characterized by simple lyrical lines, brevity, quick changes--a kind of short-hand.

What distinguished the spirit of Satie's inspiration--what makes him almost unique for his time--was a pre-Dada, pre-Surrealist approach--absurdist, nihilistic, crudely humorous at times, parodistic, mocking, and occasionally innocently lyrical. All these qualities--some might call them extra-musical, even anti-musical in feeling--have been enormously influential on later trends and composers. 

"Classical music" as it is now popularly regarded, has several discrete threads from the late 19th Century and throughout the 20th: Symphonic music, based on the participation of large urban orchestral groups, church and liturgy, chamber music, the virtuoso tradition, opera, atonal music, music hall, folk music and country, jazz, and many, many others. Part of what Modernism means is the accommodation of such non-traditional elements into "serious" music. Satie was an early explorer in imagining that the edifice of serious 19th Century academic music should be, and could be, shaken to its foundations.  

Satie thumbed his nose at the figure-heads of French academicism: Berlioz, Saint-Saens; and the "geniuses" the German-Viennese European taste: Wagner, Liszt.

His most famous piece, Trois Morceau en forme de Poire (Three Pieces in the Shape of a Pear) [1903], for piano duet, sounds crisply modern to our ears, while retaining an aura of sweet nostalgia reminiscent of Paris in its twilight, pre-WWI heydays. 

Later, Satie went on to write more ambitious works--including some ballets--though his limited skills at orchestration prevented him from achieving more substantial performance pieces. The vast majority of his works were for keyboard solo, and were accessible to the untrained amateur. After WWI, Satie became associated with the Dadaists and Surrealists, whose principles of shock, revolt, defiant humor, and mystery were all ideas he had been thinking about for 20 years or more.  

Among the pieces of his I love--in addition to almost all the piano works, which finally began to be generally available over the last two decades--is Socrate [1918], for voice and small orchestra (or piano reduction). It has a kind of liturgical monotony which is quite suited to the seriousness of the "dialectic" text (from Plato). Also, he was a master of children's music--pieces of pure lyrical simplicity, but with great feeling. 

After he died, Darius Milhaud and a friend went to his dusty little suburban apartment and found a treasure-trove of memorabilia, unpublished compositions and letters. In addition they found seven velvet suits, which Satie had worn during his "velvet gentleman" period. 

When Virgil Thomson went to Paris in the 'Twenties, he says that he went out and bought a three inch stack of Satie's keyboard music; which became the foundation for his attitude and style of composition. There was no other composer whose work more clearly and definitively embodied the spirit of the age.  

When I went France in the 1990's, I visited the Erik Satie birthplace in Honfleur. The town has a beautiful tiny rectangular harbor surrounded by period houses. I fantasized little Erik scurrying down the town's narrow alley-ways in the 1870's. Our hotelier was a very stuffy fellow, and when I asked him about Satie, he straightened up pretentiously and replied "I am not an admirer of the work of Monsieur Satie!"     

Southern Belle - Here's the Recipe !

**Spoiler Alert**    **Spoiler Alert**

For those averse to alcohol or dead set against the evils of demon drink, exit now or forever zip closed your fly! 

While the taste is still swirling around my consciousness, here's my latest prurient concoction from the zinc bar:

In the coming Summer months, when the heat overcomes the temperate moderations, here's a respite for the weary mind or soul, in need of relief from wayward degrees of calorie. 

The Southern Belle:

(By proportion)

3 shots of Kentucky Bourbon

2 shots of Galliano

1 shot of peach Schnapps

Juice of one lemon

Juice of one wedge of orange

Shaken hard and served up in an iced cocktail glass.

This is bound to seduce your sensibility. 

Conversation is sure to follow, solving the entangled knots of political dissension, or titillating the libido with thoughts of possible adventure.

Wife and I had planned to go to Spain this Spring, then cancelled on account of prior commitments to fulfill an editing job for a large university press. But, perusing the color plates of a large coffee-table book on the French Quarter, reawakened our memories of New Orleans, and hence the summons to a sweet Bourbon mixture in keeping with our joint inspiration.

Beware the power of nostalgia! 

Ennui and fond evocation!