A Leak In The Safe

To all my legion of fans: we’re heading north to the big island for the 4th so there won’t be any new content on this site or those affiliated for about a week. Why not take that time to look back to some of your old favorites in the archives? I know it’s not the same but perhaps it will ease the pain somewhat (if in fact anyone notices that there’s nothing new). AT ANY RATE happy 4th — I leave you with the first part of my latest boffo story, a little number that I call

 

SWAY

She watched the shadows of the branches sway on the sidewalk outside, her forehead pressed against the cold window. There was nothing else moving on the empty street – all the husbands, like her husband, had gone to work, and all the children, like her children, had gone to school.

When had her life become becalmed like this, she wondered, submerged in the current of other people’s lives. When she was younger she’d wanted nothing more than to be free, independent, to not owe anyone anything. She’d been determined to leave home as soon as possible, realizing early on that she was the proverbial "accident," the reason her parents had to get married so early and then work so hard for so many years. Then later when they were in their thirties and really ready to have children her brothers had come, one after the other, and she’d found herself a babysitter and mother’s helper in her own house. She’d dreamt of getting as far as possible from that house, from her brothers’ banging and shouting, her father’s demands, and even her mother’s passivity, but yet here she was, less than fifteen miles from it, still picking up after a pack of wild young boys and humoring an irascible older man.

At first she’d convinced herself that her husband was one of a kind, unique, the only man in the world worth trading her single life for, but lately she’d had to admit to herself that he really wasn’t that different from all the rest, exactly the kind of guy she’d always been attracted to, big, from money, the kind who liked to acquire nice things and considered them his due. Almost despite herself she’d always been drawn to confident, even cocky guys, the ones who aggressively pursued what they wanted, and more times than she cared to remember, she’d found it only too easy to give in to them. She was the sort of woman, however, that men didn’t just want to sleep with but to own forever, and forever, was the one thing she couldn’t provide. She’d always been able to avoid complete capitulation, often extricating herself only at the last moment, the moment when it all changed, when the men who’d been so determined to possess her instead found themselves possessed by her, unable to let go, the moment when whatever affection she’d maintained for them quickly curdled to disgust.

Like almost everything else, the instant printing revolution has two sides to it. The dark side, and to my thinking the misuse of the new technology, is the fact that ANYBODY with a few bucks can have their scribblings printed, resulting in a dramatic proliferation of worthless, half-written new "books" that rightly would never have been published before because of their sheer incompetence. This has also created a horde of typists who because they’ve had something "published" (most times at their own expense) consider themselves authors, with all the attendant rights and privileges. This is not just UBU being curmudgeonly – bookstores are swarmed by wannabees who demand that their ugly volumes be carried or, even worse, think that they are owed a book signing. The same is true of conventions and conferences where they clog the positions of honor reserved for the real thing. I know a writer who calls such pests POD people for "print on demand."

But the bright side is that great, or even just interesting works of the past can be more easily reprinted. In a world with very little sense of history and book/music/stationary stores run by grocery clerks who treat literature like a perishable commodity (and even public libraries are shoveling older books out of the back door as fast as they can to make room for crowd pleasing computers), it’s wonderful to have so many of these hard to find volumes available again. This is the way the new information technology should be used, to help bring more of the rich panorama of human culture to people rather than fresh self-absorbed babble. Kessinger (www.kessinger.net) is one publisher that has made thousands of scarce and hard-to-find books available. I’ve been able to find works by Gautier, Musset, and even an esoteric loony like Paschal Beverly Randolph from them and there are many, many more. Wildside Press (www.wildesidepress.com) is another purveyor of the neglected and way cool.

What inspired this little rant’n’rave is a guy named Jens Peter Jacobsen. I first heard about him, as I’m sure a lot of people have, through Rainer Maria Rilke, who said "of all my books, I find only a few indispensable…the Bible, and the books of the great Danish author Jens Peter Jacobsen." Well, seeing as Rilke’s Duino Elegies is a book I find indispensable I’ve always been avid to read Jacobsen. Of course in those benighted days there was no www.abebooks.com (No internet at all actually), no Jacobsen in the public library (a lot to ask – he hadn’t been translated since 1919) and I had no access to the University Library, so I was quite elated to hear that a new edition of his most famous work Neils Lyhne was coming out. Sadly, once I did read it I wondered what all the fuss was about. It seemed a fairly conventional sensitive young man coming of age story to me, lyrically written, but without the resonance of Jacobsen’s fellow Nordics Strindberg or Hamsun.

What brought him to mind again was the new Penguin Classics edition. I was hoping that maybe the Fjord Press edition I read was a bad translation that missed the magic but this version uses the same 1990 text. I’m going to give it another go – I don’t think I’m any more savvy than I was sixteen years ago (dumber probably) but sometime set and setting are crucial. But this new Penguin made me wonder if I could get any of his other work, and lo and behold, thanks to Kessinger and Wildside I could. Jacobsen died young (always attractive to Rilke) and produced a small body of work. His most famous novella "Mogens" is available with three other stories in a volume by Wildside, and it’s a pretty good read, with that hard to translate lyricism and keen eye, marred somewhat by the nineteenth century tendency to melodrama and happy ending. You can get his other novel Marie Grubbe from Kessinger, and I enjoyed it as well. It’s a historical novel, set in the late 17^th century, but happily without the usual historical novel folderol, that traces the life of the titular aristocratic beauty’s slow descent from high society to penury, but also to a strange, perverse kind of fulfillment. Once again I appreciated Jacobsen’s style, his pantheistic appreciation of nature, and his keen sensitivity on what goes on between men and women. The book also has a more contemporary appeal in that it presents the tenuous, powerless position of a woman of the time, and engages with the lively feminist debate of Jacobsen’s time. The wayward plot may be forgiven as the novel is based on actual characters and places and largely true to them. It’s grown on me, but I still don’t see what Rilke was raving about. I’ll read Neils Lyhne again and see if I can figure it out.

Anyway what I REALLY wanted to do for you today dear reader is to present a few passages from Marie Grubbe that rang my chimes:

 

…it has seemed to me that this was whence my bitter sorrow welled, that I touched a string which must not sound and its tone has sundered something within me that could never be healed. Therefore I could never force open the portals of life but had to stand without, unbidden and unsought, like a poor maimed bondswoman.

 

It had so little desire, so much fear and worship, and yet so much desire. A wistful, feverish languishing for her, a morbid longing to live with her in her memories, dream her dreams, suffer her sorrows and share her sad thoughts, no more, no less. How lovely she had been in the dance, but how distant and unattainable! The round gleaming shoulders, the full bosom and slender limbs – they took his breath away. He trembled before that splendor of body which made her seem richer and more perfect and hardly dared to let himself be drawn under its spell.

 

…it was not without a certain intoxicating sense of power that she heard herself called the lord of life and death to so strange a person…

 

DIG IT

YR PAL

UBU 

Stationary Chaos

 

brought to you by THE ANN ARBOR QUESTION AUTHORITY

 

                       "The nymph of false moonlight"

                               – Catullus

 

                        1.

 

The waitress older than she seems

The business woman running between cars

The school girl learning to parallel park

The bank teller’s dress

The hypnotic coat of the woman

With an ice scream scoop

In her back pocket

Japanese shoppers in

The Night of the Yellow Thighs

Which of my Lord’s blessings

Would you deny?

                

 

                   2.

 

Applegate alike in black halter

Backwards LA Kings hat

The sweep of her hair

As she leans forward like a cowgirl

Snatching a handkerchief

With her teeth

Invitation sitting on a wall

Tights worn at the knees

Her will a shadow of

This homunculus desire

One of the deepwater ladies

An A-student acid head

Holding my wrist to

Steady the lighter

Smoke over the madonna

The roof dripping

In the abandoned mall sunlight

The strangeness of which

There is no previous experience

 

 

            3.

 

The loathly damsel

So clearly from hell

Dazing

Practicing casting her stony glances

Her gesture’s careless passing

And lack of note

The consumptive who

Consumes the viewer

With all the attributes

Of a beautiful woman

Except beauty

 

 

       4.

 

Trees creak

Like opening doors

As I wait to meet you

By the woods

The Fox Chapel park

Filled with nannies and grannies

The rainbow curve

Of the sprinkler

Over very green lawns

Let’s trash utopia!

Put the squirrel

On the barbeque

 

Till soon, my

Lady Grey

 

Q:

Can this poem by improved?

A:

No, but it can be made totally incomprehensible.

 

THIS INFORMATION WAS THE END OF HISTORY

 

The garden court

 

Posing as Dr. Chaos

 

To create something near consciousness

Its meaning stated in its existence

 

The oven Sylvia Plath put her head in

 

A mythic morning with the playmate of your choice

 

The graveyard was almost empty

 

With masks we are a family

That naked we can never be

 

All the eggshells breaking

 

Judy Aloof

 

I knew that god would lead me to your cookies

 

Our endless end

 

The terror of your will

The strength of your terror

 

Stuck in mid-day

 

Meatbird

 

Her earing fell to the floor by my knee

 

February’s frozen valentine

Thawed in months of Mondays

 

Falling in the company of the rain

 

Kill money for cops

 

Point you cannot see through

Wound you can see through

 

Growing edges

 

Rats & Photographs

 

I don’t think we’ll see anything this bright for a long time

 

The sweet smelling Yalie

 

Amount of beauty in the world is constant

 

God as event

 

The beautiful organist’s daughter from New York

Whose Volvo had broken down

 

If you want sanctuary

If you want green for danger

If you run out of NoDoz

 

A long walk for a fat chick