Identity as a Zero Sum Game - Watten's Essay in Grand Piano 8

In a previous comment on the Grand Piano project, I asserted that the unpleasant reality, the embarrassing but revealing event would be precisely what readers of this "collective autobiography" would NOT get. The construction of identity involves the favorable organization of experience into an aesthetic artifact, fashioned out of preferred models of an ideal self-regard, as well as fear, loathing, conceit, and all the other mental influences that affect individual memory.  

In Grand Piano 8, Watten speculates generally about the relationship of geography and poetic inspiration, of the connection between what he calls "oceanic feeling" (the West)--associated with the San Francisco Bay Area, symbolized by the Golden Gate Bridge--and the quotidian facts of his, and his co-conspirators', lives.

As an obfuscation of identity, the essay conceals all the relevant facts of a given life, in preference to abstract conceptualizations. The dominant tendency in Watten's work has always been the alienation from self, a romanticized de-personalization played out as surreal tapestry, or aesthetic disorientation. We come to realization through unfamiliar or mysterious phenomena, presented as an intellectual nightmare: Metaphorically as Ishmael, the astonished witness of a fallen world. In Melville's Moby Dick, the narrator Ishmael tells the reader that he has turned to the sea out of a feeling of alienation from human society. In the last line of the book, Ishmael also refers to himself symbolically as an orphan. Watten's spiritual alienation from his American roots--coming (backwards) from East to West--

"The image of myself at age twelve, returning from the East, everything yet to come, through the Golden Gate." 

--condenses as a desire for self-understanding through the experience (and use) of language--"looking not outward toward unbounded infinity--but in". The natural expectation from such an enterprise ("looking...in") would be of an exploration of self through a concentration upon family, relationships, friendships, archetypes, childhood, marriage, parenthood. The pattern of first adopting, worshipping, then rejecting archetypes of ideal behavior, would be an inevitable symptom of the alienated self, preceded or accompanied by unfavorable Oedipal outcomes, sexual obsession, colossal gorgons of ambition and jealousy, and primitive infantile rage. 

The refusal to come to terms with the hidden agendas of self and experience is the hallmark of all autobiographical writing. Maturation in most instances is the fashioning of a shield of protection against the revelation(s) of unwanted exposure(s). Hence, Watten asks us to accept the version of himself as a fully formed projection, in medias res (in the middle of a literary "scene" (milieu) in the San Francisco of the 1970's), without a past, without a personal identity, without, in effect, any of the intimate sentimental baggage we associate with real life. 

What didn't occur to me initially in my reading of the Grand Piano was that Watten was its progenitor and de-facto editor; that had I known this, I would have better understood how its content was self-directed. What the original program hinted at, was the possibility of a synergistic interaction among primary players, dedicated to a revelation of an interpenetration of life and art that might suggest productive patterns or frameworks for creative activity. But inevitably, invariably--precautions. 

"The dispersal of the San Francisco Language school began with its poetics of elsewhere. Oceanic feelings from which we might try to stage a return, from originary displacement to retrospective construction--but it would never be the same."

Already, nostalgia replaces truth, and the self, coated in its synthetic protective skin of illusive language, gloats privacy.

One of my early poems, paraphrased here from its original imitation-of-Creeley format, read: 

"My name to me is a kind of blank, empty place in the air. When called aloud it is as if a voice surrounded it, a pause before sound followed, falling. The Greeks had a deity, "Echo," a nymph who fell in love with Narcissus, but was by him repulsed."

My own spiritual orphanhood, which began with the revelation of my adoption at birth by my Mother's second husband, produced similar aesthetic and literal dislocations. The desire to construct a preferred, viable identity out of the shards of rejection and persecution had clear affinities with Watten's bitter, alienated isolation, his need for place, friendship, purpose.

 

Watten's concept of a "non-identity"--a negative force in the dialectic triad of becoming a person through the defining process of writing, leads directly to the form of his work. Writing thus becomes the preferred mode of experience, where all significant alternatives--of acceptance and belonging, work and play, hunger and sustenance, boredom and interest, truth and falsehood--are mediated. Since writing is by definition a public act, a telling revelation, the persona of his work is always in consequence suppressed, in favor of a covering fig-leaf--

"I apologize in advance for the nature of the confession that must be elided here. Condensation, displacement. The moment memorialized in a missed encounter preserves the advantage that itleaves everything yet to come."

Nothing ventured, nothing gained. The refusal to describe, to elaborate upon the underlying issues and relationships, which characterizes the Grand Piano accounts throughout, guarantees that the result will be a total fulfillment of its creator's intention. Ironic flirtations of the above kind are like footnotes reminding us of the subtext. Lift up the skirting avoidance and what is one likely to find? 

Watten pays lip service to the Rilkean notion of a transformative poetics: "...it is never later. It is always the moment of the act." Which echoes similar, earlier imprecations from his poetry. But writers are not born complete, finished, from the head of Zeus; they have pasts, they have lives--in order to "change [your] life" you must first learn to accept who and what you are, to come to terms with it. That is the first duty of autobiography, the stated purpose and meaning of the Grand Piano project.       

In rendition, interrogation techniques presume that a subject will not "break" (or reveal substance) until he realizes that there is no alternative to capitulation. The self's stubbornness (refusal) to reveal is probably on an equal level of intensity as that of any persecuted detainee. If creative endeavor is about the search for truth, then autobiography is about being given the permission to confess, first to oneself, then to a supposed (imagined) audience. The irony, of course, is that almost anyone inevitably loses track of the truth of their own past, even when they're committed to understanding it. Either you belong to a place, or a people, or you are an alien. Otherwise, you must find it (like Tom Jones, a foundling). A creative identity, again, is not to be confused with an actual one. The allure of idealized versions of oneself is endlessly seductive (think of Byron, Wilde, Kerouac, Hemingway, etc.). Until or unless the writers of the Grand Piano project are willing to address the deeper levels of their consciousness, as well as the difficult details of their mutual (and all other) relationships, what they have to tell us about their Grand Piano days will be of only passing interest.                   

Soccer is Un-American & The Most Boring Spectator Sport in the World

Americans have little native skepticism. Our collective naivete takes many forms. One kind is a certain receptivity to foreign ideas, especially when they're presented as pleasure, or play. 

I expect to get a lot of flack for posting an Anti-Soccer diatribe, which would be wonderful. We need a national debate about this backward foreign sport, before it overwhelms our home-grown, and much more interesting and enjoyable, sports attractions. 

 

Soccer is the stupidest popular game ever invented. Accounts of its origin go all the way back to the Ninth Century in Asia. It was refined in the British Isles--from where it was exported all around the globe during the latter period of England's centuries of colonial dominance. 

       

In America, we have baseball (invented here in the late 19th Century), American football (a superior hybrid form of European football, adapted and refined in the 19th & 20th Centuries), basketball (invented in the late 19th Century in America), and ice hockey (refined and adapted in North America from earlier versions played on ground surface in Europe). These sports are known as the "big four" in common parlance, and command the lion's share of fan support and interest in America and Canada.

It's unclear why a sport based on the exclusion of the use of the hands and arms (except by goal tenders) would become popular. Human physiology developed from quadrupedal locomotion, and our pre-human ancestors began to walk upright when they "dropped out of the trees" to occupy their place as eventual masters of the earth. Three distinct physiological advantages made this possible: The enlarged brain, the opposable thumb, and the use of our fore-limbs to manipulate objects (rather than just walking on them). In other words, our arms and hands are to a large extent, what makes us human--as opposed to dumb animals. Four-legged animals, and some two-legged animals and birds, are generally faster and more agile ground creatures than man. In sport, the use of the hands to manipulate objects and engage opponents is what makes contention, in effect, "human." 

Why would humans invent a form of play which thwarted their primary asset in the physical world? To frustrate themselves? Why not a game in which the only "weapon" was the head, in which players butted each other like mountain goats cracking their horns together? Or one in which stepping on the opponents' feet to control or disable them was the object? Why not wrap the arms about like a constrained mental patient, or tape the mouth shut to prevent speech?  

Setting up artificial resistances is part of what we might call game theory. Good team sports involve the coordination of bodies towards a goal. The best aspects of human intelligence, coordination, force, endurance, and manipulation of an object are brought into play, in order to achieve a desired end against a defending opponent. All the major (4) North American sports express these principles. They are all tributes to our ingenuity, physical agility, and strength. 

Soccer, on the other hand, is much more fluid. The ball is more or less continuously in play. The primary contenders are not allowed to touch the ball with their hand, but must move it about primarily with their feet. Alignment is in a state of constant flux, with players constantly shifting position in anticipation of a change of possession or the forming and reforming of strategic phalanxes. Very little scoring generally takes place, because the movement of the ball is so difficult. This frustration, this thwarting of the human ability to hold and manipulate, to move the object, creates an overall sense of impatience. Impatience and frustration, in fact, seem the primary emotions one sees in the players during soccer matches. Why? Because they're striving against an artificial limit, one that prevents them from expressing their true human potential. If a man (or a woman) is "athletic" and possesses great gifts of coordination, agility, focus, concentration, etc., preventing them from using their hands and arms, hampers them from expressing their human abilities, forcing them down, to this degree, the evolutionary ladder to a position of an ambulatory bird (like the ostrich), whose wings are merely vestigial appendages. 

The movement in America to expand soccer in the schools and professional venues is regressive. Believing, perhaps, that soccer is more fashionable and "universal" than our homegrown sports, middle-class parents and public schools have allowed soccer to shoulder aside traditional sports. Everywhere you look today, you see stripe-shirted youngsters running in circles in the grass. Hardly understanding what's happening, they spin around and dart back and forth, aimlessly, as the parents and "coaches" scream instructions to them. 

People will say that children get more exercise playing soccer, but exercise per se has never been the main point of sport in general. And for players in childhood years, soccer participation lacks focus, as the tots wander from place to place on the field, trying to understand how to engage in the action. Because it's a game more about "position" than engagement, anticipation and accident are more important than any kind of physical skill. 

Soccer is a ridiculous game, regressive and idiotic. Audiences typically become so frustrated and angry that fights and mob riots frequently occur (abroad). Do we really want to adopt this Old World anomaly as our national pastime? I earnestly hope not. We already have four of the best team sports in the world. We don't need soccer.                                                  

The World of Donald Evans

As a boy, I was introverted, shy, and fascinated by miniaturization. I had an active fantasy life--not the kind often referred to these days when people speak of Tolkien and Rowling fans--i.e., imagining dwarves and munchkins and complex, cozy Medieval societies--but I tended to think small: Armies of rubber men--WWII soldiers, cowboys and indians and lincoln log forts on the frontier, frogmen, spaceships, cavalry, etc. Later, it became postage stamps, chemistry sets, model airplanes. Following the popular examples of the time, I subscribed to Boy's Life, The National Geographic, The American Geographic Society ("country" booklets by subscription, with illustration stamps to paste in). Typical American childhood accoutrements.         

I belonged to the first wave of post-War American babies ("boomers") who overwhelmed the American public school systems, and, later, the American college and university systems. 

Living in relative physical and cultural isolation in suburban America, I, like many of my contemporaries, imagined the world through the tiny window of my hobbies. Countries had colors. It was a snapshot world, vicariously offered up as confirmations of the superiority of our middle-class life. 

Stamp-collecting presented a specific, strange template of the actual world, which had begun sometime in the early 19th Century with Britain's issuance of the "penny black" bearing the profile of Queen Victoria. Postage stamps had a practical side--to facilitate the payment for postal duty on letters and parcels--but they also had a purely commercial-aesthetic side, as governments in small jurisdictions issued special elegant stamps designed to attract collectors and investors (as with coins), e.g., Monaco, San Marino. There was a lot of history in stamp collecting: Colonial occupations, Fascist regimes, religion, sports, heritage events, etc. 

Still, postage stamps weren't like the "real world"--only its vague, eccentric reflection. It probably never occurred to me then that an imaginary world might be constructed out of an adjunct collection of fake postage stamps; one rather "like" the real postage stamp universe, but wholly fictitious:  Invented countries, currencies, events, scenes. 

Could such an invented "world" made out of imaginary postage stamps be as convoluted and ambiguous as the "real" postage stamp universe? 

It turns out that one of my generational contemporaries, Donald Evans, who was born and grew up in New Jersey (1945-1977), had been inspired to do just that. Evans, a precocious and precious-minded child, conceived of and created his first sets of invented postage stamps in early adolescence, but abandoned the hobby to study architecture at Cornell. As his career in architecture developed, he realized that he was more interested in perfecting a personal artifact than in designing spaces. He tried making abstract expressionist canvases, painting theatre sets. Answering some deeper need in his nature, he abandoned design, and, on a whim, traveled to Holland. There, perhaps inspired by the same qualities which had interested the great Dutch painters such as Vermeer, Hals, de Hooch, van Eyck, etc., he resumed his imaginary stamp art production, further elaborating his vision, inventing more exotic "foreign" locales, and exploiting specific interests and daydreams, relationships, and personal fetishes--creating, in effect, a wholly consistent and perfected private world, which he recorded in his "Catalog of the World." This shadow world of make-believe and fussy detail, with its emphasis on craft, reductive scale, is like a childhood fantasy. 

                      

Here are childhood's fascination with the small, the toy-like; the unique or reproducible copy; the timid investment in safe versions of "real" adult life; the interest in manageable strangeness, the contained exotic; ultimately in the preservation of (or creation of) the innocence and safety of protected childhood itself, as the regressive symbol of arrested personality/development. 

The World of Donald Evans was published in 1980 by Willy Eisenhart (shown below).          

Our fascination with Evans's work--its preciousity and cuteness and obsessive taxonomic elaboration--has other dimensions as well. As the expression of a craft (copying traditional engraving technologies, which once gave postage stamps their qualitative intensity and finish), the work is impressively vivid, varied, and sweet.   

 

In Evans, we see the same obsessive escapist tendency as in Darger--a closed, perfected world of idealized objects, situations, relationships, a world with its own laws, preferred terms, and theme-park transparency. Also, perhaps, a little of the elaborate Proustian tapestry of edited experience.         

It is also a world of exile, of spiritual and personal alienation. The imaginary "exchanges"--of sending and receiving, of passages and transformation symbolized by post-marks, of communications with other (imagined) dimensions and remote eventualities--of commerce and affection perpetually post-poned, relegated to ineffectuality. 

Evans's stamps and postcards are like the marginalia to an ambitious unwritten fantasy narrative, a footnote to an alternative universe very much like our own, but cleansed of the messy, poisonous, destructive complexities of actual human existence.    

      

Ironically, Evans died in an apartment fire in Amsterdam at only 31, a victim of a real event more terrible, and improbable than any he might have imagined for himself. It's been over 30 years since Evans died, but his work appears as fresh, as unintimidating as it did when I first discovered it in the early 80's. There are a number of images floating around the internet, for those interested in seeing it, but the monograph by Eisenhart is the best introduction to his work.

Evans's still-born career--like the arrested fantasy world he created--will always remain symmetrically closed, like the life he chose for himself, just a little bit smaller than the real world we live in.  

On a Minor Poem of Philip Larkin

Philip Larkin, who lived a life of quiet desperation, working as a librarian nearly all his adult life, managed to achieve the status of best-loved poet in England over the last half of the 20th Century. Larkin was not an attractive man. His poems are modest, his assertions cautious, his manner self-effacing (even self-deprecating). Nevertheless, Larkin can be moving. One of my favorites, which I first read as an undergraduate at Berkeley in the Sixties, is

 

                                    Here

 

Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows

And traffic all night north; swerving through fields

Too thin and thistled to be called meadows,

And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields

Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude

Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants,

And the widening river's slow presence,

The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

 

Gathers to the surprise of a large town:

Here domes and statues, spires and cranes cluster

Beside grain-scattered streets, barge-crowded water,

And residents from raw estates, brought down

The dead straight miles by stealing flat-faced trolleys,

Push through plate-glass swing doors to their desires--

Cheap suits, red kitchen-ware, sharp shoes, iced lollies,

Electric mixers, toasters, washers, driers--

 

A cut-price crowd, urban yet simple, dwelling

Where only salesmen and relations come

Within a terminate and fishy-smelling

Pastoral of ships up streets, the slave museum,

Tattoo-shops, consulates, grim head-scarfed wives;

And out beyond its mortgaged half-built edges

Fast-shadowed wheat-fields, running high as hedges,

Isolate villages, where removed lives

 

Loneliness clarifies. Here silence stands 

Like heat. Here leaves unnoticed thicken,

Hidden weeds flower, neglected waters quicken,

Luminously-peopled air ascends;

And past the poppies bluish neutral distance

Ends the land suddenly beyond a beach

Of shapes and shingle. Here is unfenced existence:

Facing the sun, untalkative, out of reach.  

 

 

Having fed myself a steady diet of Spender, Auden and Betjeman (among the English), I initially found this writing to be unambitious, clipped, cowed, even timid.  

 

Why, then, did it speak to me? What was I responding to? The superficial mannerisms of the style seem so stolidly dull--like so much of the careful, stodgy versifying that characterized the dutiful, respectful Fifties--that it's hard to see how Larkin makes it work so well for his purposes. Perhaps it's precisely Larkin's self-deprecating stance that makes such lines a kind of simultaneous burlesque of that tended conservatism of form, a resigned, reluctant indulgence in mediocrity, limited possibility.           

The music of the poem made a claim on my admiration, partly, I think, through its apparent forsaken quality of sentiment. I imagined the speaker to be driving, perhaps desperately, seeking escape--from what didn't seem to matter. Driving all night, possibly, through the mixed countryside of industrial Britain, towards a seaside town, sea air, "unfenced existence."   

 

The catalogue of sights and landscape is accurate, but depressingly uninspiring: The messy edges between urban settlement, and a scrawny Nature that is anything but poetic in the Victorian sense. What a hopeless vision of 20th Century civilization it gives. This is the Britain of The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, bleak, drab, and pointless. How shall the speaker define himself against this inertia of crumbling monotony? 

Britain was once a seafaring nation, an island nation. And it still is. How many generations of young men, hemmed in by the narrowest of expectation and custom, longed to escape to another reality? This is the symbolic tendency in the poem, its seaside vantage the launching point for a thousand--a hundred thousand--dreams of adventure.

But Larkin was a librarian, and no adventurer. He didn't travel, was socially somewhat inept, homely--the compass of his life was circumscribed by the predictable, the bland. So perhaps the poem serves as a kind of gesture, a quixotic turn. "Loneliness clarifies"--the phrase almost overemphasized by its placement at the line break to the subsequent 4th stanza, the heavy accent upon "CLAR-i-fies"--suggests that the value in such an exercise, a spin to the coast over familiar terrain, is in the confirmation of the limits we may know by heart, even despise, but must ruefully accept, maybe even welcome. This precarious balance between the rejection and the acceptance of what modern life may offer us--not the fake version, but the real tawdry one of our daily round--is what animates Larkin's best poems. We may long for the rawness and bracing challenge of direct experience, but we know in our bones how much we cherish the modern paradigm of limited comfort.          

Caltrans & its "Solutions" - Who's in Charge ??

The lead front page story in The San Francisco Chronicle this morning is "S-curve crash shows why changes needed". Reading this block type, you'd probably figure they were suggesting that the new S-curve structure on the East side of the Treasure Island splice of the two-part San Francisco Bay Bridge ought to be redesigned, and reconstructed, but you'd have been wrong. Caltrans' "changes" include lowering the speed limit, putting in radar speed-displays, and perhaps road-bumps to alert drivers to the approaching hazard. 

The history of the Bay Bridge isn't complicated. It was constructed in the 1930's, to replace ferries (which was how people once got from Oakland-Berkeley to San Francisco and back). It was a sound structure, given the state of engineering in its time, and it admirably served its purpose. The lower deck originally was built for the old yellow "F Train" track, the rail system we had in place before the Teamsters Union persuaded Bay counties to scrap it in favor of upper and lower vehicle service. (We had to wait 20 years later for the idea to be resuscitated as the BART system!) 

After the Loma Prieta Earthquake in '89, engineers told us we had to rebuild or retrofit the old bridge, lest a catastrophic failure occur in a really big quake (of the '06 proportions). Engineers and geologists in California have been conducting a little cottage industry of chicken little warnings for the last half century here, all doom and gloom about the dire consequences of not investing millions upon millions of dollars in structural retrofits and disaster planning. No one ever questions how effective or thrifty all this expenditure may be, or why the construction trades industry and engineering professions might have a vested interest in stirring up all this fuss. If another earthquake occurs, there is little doubt that structures built out of unreinforced brick, or sited atop (or near) known faults, will likely suffer considerable damage. But the fact is that the greatest damage from large earthquakes, here, is likely to result from fires and explosions in and around gas-mainlines. Installing a little triangular bracing on traditional foundation platforms in housing and business structures is comparatively cheap, but any earthquake strong enough to cause houses to shiver off their foundations would make such "mitigations" pretty irrelevant in the event.               

   

It may indeed sound presumptuous for a non-professional to question the advisability of building a completely new bridge to replace one that was constructed 70 years ago, but there has been preciously little debate about the issue, at least in the press. 

The Bay Bridge "retrofit"--which turned out to be a completely new span on the Eastern section, has been plagued by design reviews, disagreements, delays, and construction snafus from the beginning. Now we learn, to our dismay, that the ultimate design includes a preposterous re-routing of traffic exiting the island tunnel on the East side away from the old eastern span hook-up, radically left to the new span, about 500 feet to the left (North), in the form of a violent "S-curve" immediately upon exiting the tunnel entrance. Experts have predicted significant delays of as much as 30% for all traffic flowing in both directions, as a result of this crazy design feature. In addition, the curves are so sharp, and unexpected, that they've already caused a number of serious accidents in the very short time since it was opened.

How could a professional team of designers and engineers make such a stupid mistake? Couldn't they see that building the new span 500 feet to the North of the old one would require a redesign of the connection between the North side of the island tunnel, and Western edge of the new span? This is a problem even a 5-year old could have foreseen in a nanosecond.

Caltrans has made blunders in the past. The connection between I-80 South to the Nimitz/580 split was botched 10 years ago, and has never been fixed: Drivers, especially those unfamiliar with that split, are forced to negotiate a rapid eccentric turn to the left. Scrapes and impact scars by the dozens along the concrete barriers are testament to this poorly conceived "solution." 

There is little doubt that the new "S-curve" will have eventually to be rebuilt, somehow. The sooner this is initiated, the better off we'll be, in the long run. Resigning ourselves to another dangerous, confusing and inconvenient structural anomaly for another half-century doesn't make sense.    

California drivers deserve better. We pay billions for our highways and bridges, supposedly designed to facilitate our advanced transportation system, upon which our economy and convenience depends. Why don't we get first-rate design and engineering? It's a mystery, and a disgrace.

     

The Demise of Powell's Books in Portland, Oregon

Powell's Books, of Portland, Oregon boasts that "Powell's City of Books is a book lover's paradise, the largest used and new bookstore in the world. Located in downtown Portland, Oregon and occupying an entire city block, the City stocks more than a million new and used books. Nine color coded rooms house over 3,500 different sections, offering something for every interest, including an incredible selection of out-of-print and hard-to-find titles...68,000 square feet packed with books...you'll find more than 1,000,000 volumes on our shelves...what the Washington Post called 'perhaps the best bookstore in the world.'"

To anyone who knew the store in its heyday--from the 1970's through the 1990's--this description of "the best bookstore in the world" could not by any stretch of the imagination be construed as accurate. Powell's in Portland, which was started as a satellite of its original store in Chicago, was originally conceived as a used book store, with some selected new books (a formula which was widely used in the trade during the 1970's and 1980's). 

However, the inception of the internet as a trading venue, caused a convulsive change in Powell's business model, as it had/has done throughout the book business. When I first "scouted" Powell's in Portland as a used/rare book dealer in the early 1990's, it was a virtual wonderland of inventory. Powell's financial position enabled it to acquire fine used books at an astonishing rate; the company became active in acquiring liquidated stocks from stores and collectors all over the country. Browsing its shelves took so long, because virtually every category was rich in rarities. Not satisfied with running a world class emporium on Burnside (the main location), Powells' expanded to the Hawthorne Street location on the East side of the river, and in Beaverton (in addition to separate technical books and cookbooks locations). Making the pilgrimage to Portland might involve renting a van just to accommodate the acquisitions that one might feel obliged to purchase. Powell's put Portland on the map of important places in the world for finding good stock.  

Sometime in the late 1990's, all this began to change. Like many other dealers, Powell's began to segregate its better acquisitions, culling out higher priced items and sequestering them "off-site" in warehouses, listing them on the internet to the growing larger audience of the world wide web. This trend has continued. As late as 2000, it was still possible to find used and new stock in about equal proportion on the general store shelves. There was the "rare book room" on the top floor, and locked cases on the main floors which required the assistance of a hovering employee. The mean average price of books displayed to the general public steadily declined, as did the percentage of used stock. Browsing the in-store shelves of the main Burnside store recently, we noted the total percentages were something like 85% new, 15% used. The new stock was predominantly "quality paperbacks"; the proportion of used material was comprised primarily of damaged, x-library, or multiple remaindered copies. In other words, what the store was offering in its flagship store was about equivalent--in general quality--to what one would be likely to find at any Half Price Books outlet. And the story is no better at the Hawthorne or Beaverton locations. Hawthorne used to boast one of the finest used and rare book inventories (for its size) in the world; today it's nothing more than an ordinary neighborhood general bookstore, comparable to a small Borders. 

So what has Powell's gained in compensation from its conversion from a world class used bookstore, to an internet giant? Anyone who's browsed Powell's online site, or noticed its listings on the "big A" megasites, has noted the amateurishness, and vagueness, of its descriptions. In addition, one might have expected that the truncation of rare/expensive versus quotidian/cheap would result in a high concentration of quality material in the warehouse listings. But this is not born out. Along with the steady decline of quality used books in the stores, there has been a continuous decline in the quality of the online listings. 

How is it that an operation of this magnitude could have declined this rapidly, and precipitously, in just a decade? Are we to assume that Powell's analysis of the changing book market has resulted in a calculated targeting of the lowest end of the market, with an emphasis on cheaply produced mass paperback reprints and remainders, in total preference to traditional quality hardcovers and collectibles? If Powell's is still acquiring the liquidated stocks of failing used bookstores around the country, where is it hiding the better material? Or has the better material become so scare that even Powell's is unable to find any?

This seems hard to believe. In short, it's now obvious that, by accident or design (or both), in the antiquarian and rare book trade, Powell's is no longer even a marginal player. The pressures that traditional new and used book stores came under beginning in the 1990's and 2000's were easy to comprehend: Customers could find cheaper bargains from online big-box marketers like Amazon, more conveniently, and this transfer of loyalty destroyed the margins of most provincial operations. But Powell's was a big entity, with lots of capital behind it. They could afford to acquire better material on a continous basis, which might have insulated them from the market squeeze.  

But it didn't. Powell's has become, in effect, a kind of small "Amazon" book store, comparatively large, even regional in its influence. But it has abandoned its local clientele in favor of the web audience. It is no longer a special place, with inspired merchandise and sophisticated taste. It's just another pedestrian bookstore, no different, and no more ambitious--despite its size and impressive organization--than any typical corporate outfit. 

A once great bookstore has quietly died.          

On Two Poems by Robert Bly

For those of my generation--who came of age in the 1960's--the work of Robert Bly has been a lightning rod, of sorts, for the preoccupations of the age. Bly, who was born in 1926, and was in the U.S. Navy at the end of WWII, studied at Harvard, then, after a four year hiatus, attended the Iowa Writer's Workshop, along with Donald Justice, W.D. Snodgrass, among others. In a generation of polite versifiers, Bly's inspiration was doubtless stifled in this setting, which may account for the late blossoming of his career (his first book, Silence in the Snowy Fields, Wesleyan University Press, was not published until 1962, when he was 36). Bly, as can be seen in retrospect, had carried a tremendous burden of spiritual and personal baggage, which prevented him from finding a voice. His extensive efforts in the area of translation, and promotion of foreign literatures, facilitated through his editorship of The Sixties (& Seventies) poetry journal (& books), his high-profile anti-war activities during the Vietnam years (& later), and his later pursuit of new age psycho-social guru-ship as a spokesman for the "man" movement, etc., all testify to his expanding concerns for extra-literary matters over the years. Bly, it seemed, never was content to think of himself as a mere writer of poems, but sought to push himself into other, larger, areas of concern. Nevertheless, he has always had an intensely private side, an attachment to his Minnesota roots, and a monkish dedication to solitude and private meditation which is the source of much of his poetic inspiration. Many of his poems are clearly written out of this condition, in a small writing hut on his property outside of Minneapolis.

Bly's first collection, Silence in the Snowy Fields, was something of a revelation. The poems in it are quiet, relaxed, direct, unrhymed, and patiently descriptive--nearly all of them suggesting the country of Northern Minnesota. They don't explain, but merely report and declare. Here are two of the shortest of them.

Driving to Town Late to Mail a Letter

It is a cold and snowy night. The main street is deserted.

The only things moving are swirls of snow.

As I lift the mailbox door, I feel its cold iron. 

There is a privacy I love in this snowy night.

Driving around, I will waste more time.

This is the simplest kind of writing imaginable. It seems to lack a complex strategy, though its clarity and economy of means suggest a careful approach. Unlike most polite poems of the 1950's, it isn't intended to impress you with its means, its mastery of phrase and form, or the profundity of its thought. It pays homage to Williams, with its concentration upon things, rather than abstract ideas, but its sentiment is, on the contrary, Eastern in feeling. "Driving around, I will waste more time." There's a kind of rashness, of greedy hunger for unfocused experience, which is an acknowledgment, and even a celebration, of mortality, and the hopelessness of striving and care. These are not the prevailing social mores of the immediate post-War period, not the middle-class optimism of acquisitiveness and pedestrian respectability which characterize so much traditional poetry of that era. The coldness, too, of the Northern climes, is embraced, almost as if embracing death itself.

The other poem has become a lightning rod for the conservative reaction to the "naked poetry" of the 1960's, as Howard Nemerov--an arch-conservative American poet, and contemporary of Bly's, who taught for many years at Washington University in St. Louis--used it in a high-profile negative review to condemn the tendency towards abbreviation, and unadorned formal structure. 

In a Train

There has been a light snow.

Dark car tracks move in out of the darkness.

I stare at the train window marked with soft dust.

I have awakened at Missoula, Montana, utterly happy.

The sense of surprise, here, is achieved in a way that is common to Chinese haiku, brief lyrical observation intended to reveal and disclose buried feeling. To begin with, we have no bearings: The poem only lets us know at first that it has been snowing, but where? Dark car tracks "move in" out of somewhere--"the darkness"--but what darkness? Clearly, this darkness surrounds us--it's either night, or it's heavily overcast, in "snow light," that sort of deep, fuzzy blueness you get when it's snowing. Then there's a train window--are we inside the train, or out? "I have awakened"--okay, so we see the speaker is inside the train, looking out the window. "Awakened"--so he's been sleeping. Is this an old-fashioned "sleeper-car", or has the speaker just fallen asleep, sitting upright? Probably doesn't matter. But he's arrived in Missoula, Montana--from somewhere else (wherever, it doesn't seem to matter), "utterly happy." Why so happy? Does it matter? We aren't given enough information to cloud our apprehension of the simplicity of this feeling. For anyone who has ever slept on a train, and wakened while the train has stopped at a station, our emotional feeling is specific in a generic way. This generic emotional quality is precisely what Bly is trying to capture. As in the earlier poem, it is Winter, it is snowing, the speaker is forsaken by his vague feeling of isolation, but this isolation, and the coldness (suggesting death) aren't the occasion of loneliness, or sadness, but of exhilaration. Has Bly taken the train from Minneapolis to Missoula to give a poetry reading at the University of Montana (in Missoula?). It isn't important that we know this. Dry facts (details) only tend to obscure what is, indeed, a common, but vivid, sensation. 

What would have irritated Nemerov so much, was the arrogance of assuming that the reader--any reader--would be satisfied with this bald statement of event. Its presumption, that the speaker's happiness was sufficient in itself to justify our interest and participation, without explaining, in greater detail, or with more craft and skill, what reason there might be for us to share in that exhilaration. We must be convinced through prosody and rhyme and carefully considered argument, that the experience is worth our time and attention. Nemerov would say it's the poet's duty to provide these things, rather than relying on the naked statement, unadorned with detail or explanation. 

In the years since Silence in the Snowy Fields was published, Bly has often taken a position of authority to his various audiences, has preached and prodded and pestered his readers and listeners to follow the right path, as he sees it, to accept his version of the deeper truths of consciousness and experience and tempered wisdom. The old Bly--the Bly of modest, humble means and simple revelations, expressed through direct language, without pretension-- this is my favorite Bly. By the end of the 1960's, he had turned to propagandist, using his role as public speaker and spokesman on the Left to devote his second collection, The Light Around the Body (Harper &  Row, 1967), to an attack on the Johnson Administration and its Vietnam War policies. He has never turned back from this pontificating stance, moving from cause to cause, confident in his own righteousness, pompous and secure in his choices. 

                                

        

Poets--writers in general--so often turn away from early accomplishments, frequently editing and revising themselves (and their work) in an attempt to "correct" earlier excesses or youthful naivite. Bly's career has gone on so long, by now, that it hardly matters what people may remember from that early book. He's probably published 1000 pages of poetry since Silence in the Snowy Fields, and he continues even now. But none of this changes the quality of that early work, for me. It's still his best. None of the wild Third World surrealism, none of the "Father" stuff or "Men's" work or anti-War sanctimoniousness has changed that one iota.