A few of my favourite autodidactical poets and writers:

Robert Graves is a mass of eccentricities and resentments. He erects an entire anthropology on personal grievance. I have loved few books more than The White Goddess. I came to it on the wings of I, Claudius and Claudius the God. The cover promised an historical grammar of poetic myth. Immersed as I was in Eliot, Pound, Joyce, and Jung, this seemed like an amazing treasure trove. I didn’t know I would be reading an exceedingly difficult book, a book that was in fact a poem in prose with footnotes. Graves wrote the book based largely on his Irish grandfather’s library. (These titles can also be ferreted out of Finnegans Wake, where much of the same lore, particularly tree alphabets, has been found by Guy Davenport, another prodigious projector of dreams). Graves was pained by criticisms of his scholarship; he wished to be beyond the reproach of the professors he felt were destroying culture. (Pound always reserved his greatest vitriol for professors, while Joyce laid in wait for them, fangs bared and dripping, at the umbilicus of a labyrinthine joke). Graves’ thesis is that the myths of Europe record the systematic destruction of Paleo-Matriarchy by Aryan, trinitarian patriarchs from the steppes of Russia. Like Soviet apparatchiks these horse riding Patriarchs were airbrushing out all references to the Great Goddess and her rituals. The ritual was out of another amazing anthropological myth maker with a great library, Sir James Frazer, whose Golden Bough (where on earth did Frazer find the time to write it?) Graves felt didn’t go far enough. The myth was the ritual murder, later wounding, of the god-king consort of the goddess. There is nowhere in the storehouse of myth and lore from Europe, Western Asia and North Africa that Graves doesn’t find this pattern, and any syllable that deviates from it is an interpolation by devious Aryans. Thus there is a second order of myths, that of the dispute or war between devotees of the goddess and the Apollonian quislings of patriarchal priest-kings. Had his thinking remained in the bewitching yellow cover of The White Goddess it might have slept undisturbed except for the occasional curious and vulnerable poet. But it found its way into his novels (King Jesus, Hercules, My Shipmate, Watch the North Wind Rise) and then, Graves wrote The Greek Myths 1&2. This book was so encyclopaedic and well written it was duly assigned to generations of college students, with the proviso that they totally ignore his interpretations! I love Robert Graves. He taught me everything I needed to know about being a poet, except for how to write poetry. That task fell to another autodidact, Ezra Pound.

Pound wasn’t content with a single theory, nor was his autodidacticism confined to traditional poet subjects. Economic theory, a theory of history, a theory of language, a theory of translation, all these and more were duly adumbrated by Pound in angry, sarcastic essays. If Marx introduced the tone of polemic into social theory, and Freud into psychoanalysis, it is Pound who discovered the war-path in all things literary. Remember, Pound had a Masters Degree. His Master’s Thesis is still in print, The Spirit of Romance. The Spirit of Romance contains his translations from Provencal, and it is as a translator that Pound is both controversial, and brilliant. Controversial because he did not do literal translations, or even scholarly ones, but poetic ones. Unfortunately, Pound was always willing to extend his expertise way beyond what the situation warranted. His translations from Latin and Chinese are amazing, but his theory of the Chinese language, which informed so much of his poetic output, from Imagism, through Vorticism, to the Cantos, was wrong. I didn’t know that, being an autodidact, and I came to learn that, when my auto-didactitude led me to read the Chinese language scholar John DeFrancis’s The Chinese Language: Fact and Fantasy, Honolulu, University of Hawaii Press, 1984. If a poet tells you that Chinese is an ideogrammatic language, built on images and single ideas (which fits in nicely with Pound’s Imagism and Vorticism), cry, Nonsense! And cite DiFrances. The Chinese, whatever the historical origins of their characters, read language and think the way all people do, with the characters representing the sounds of words and parts of words. Despite all of this Pound made great use of Fenollosa’s cribs and a comparison of any of his translations with scholarly ones holds up. Does he get words and ideas wrong? Sure. But his translations are great English poetry that wouldn’t have existed had he not carried them over from a language he badly misunderstood. Anyway, I believe Pound’s greatest poems are his mis-translations. I don’t care if they are fidele or not. Which brings me Kenneth Rexroth, another great liar and autodidact who mistranslated the Chinese and Japanese classics. Pound’s theory of translation is now standard for poets, many of whom undertake translations in languages they don’t know. Pound himself said, “I’m no great shakes as a Latinist.” I don’t know if he said it before or after Homage to Sextus Propertius. I don’t care. You don’t have to agree with his theory that you can judge the greatness of a civilisation by the quality of its coinage, or that Jewsevelt was destroying said civilisation to be moved to tears each time you read the final lines of Exile’s Letter. And it is the path beaten by Pound that Rexroth follows, more consistently, brilliantly and accurately. Rexroth is a treasure trove of prejudice and opinion based on an enduring auto-didactical attitude.

From Rexroth’s Autobiographical Novel:

“At the Bug Club I met a man who I suppose was then a small determinative influence in my life. His name was Walter Freeman Cooling. He had once been a police magistrate and was always referred to as Judge….He had created singlehanded an all-encompassing system of dissent. With the intelligence of an Aristotle or an Aquinas he disagreed all along the line with all organized thought.

“He had elaborated a system of total eccentricity which encompassed practically every department of thought known to man from ontology to mechanics to cookery. Philosophically he called himself an Aristotelian, but his interpretation of Aristotle was as odd as a cabalist’s interpretation of Genesis. The core of his system was a fantastic cosmology. This involved his own special physics, astronomy and geology and led to a religion which was outlandish beyond belief….He wasn’t just a crackpot who thought these things up out of thin air. For most of his life he had been writing a great book of many volumes—a complete exposition of his system, organized with the rigor of the Summa Theologica. He kept this in about a hundred old-fashioned letter cases and several steel files. They were chock-full of photographs, diagrams, mathematical equations, thousands of quotations in all the civilized languages past and present, most of which he read fluently. It was wonderful to hear him in the twilight, under the trees in the park, get up and attack a Catholic or a Socialist or a Darwinian. He would rattle off a series of hair-raisingly incongruous ideas, all tied together in a sorites of irrefutable syllogisms and end with a long quotation from Homer, the Rig Veda, or the Zend Avesta in the original language and in the sonorous tones of a Welsh revivalist or labor leader. I might mention that he had special dissident theories on the correct pronunciation of Greek, Sanskrit, and ancient Persian, and I must admit that he always sounded better than the professors at the university. One night, to make a point, he quoted a long passage that sounded vaguely like Hiawatha in Japanese. “What is that, Judge?” I asked. “Why,” he said, “I’m surprised you didn’t recognize it. That’s the Kalevala, the great Finnish epic.” I have known a lot of polymaths in my life, but I don’t believe even Carl Jung, who was always talking about the Kalevala, ever bothered to learn Finnish to read it.”

Well, today almost everyone in the arts has been tamed by college and post-graduate work. Knowledge can be checked instantly. Jonathan Lethem is the only prominent novelist today who didn’t complete college.

First off, I apologize to mentally retarded people, developmentally disabled people, mentally-challenged people, differently-abled people: you did nothing to deserve the insult of being compared to Republicans. In my mind your honor is intact, I simply note that RINO can stand for something else. It was the Glenn Beck rally that got me thinking about this. Because in the Republican Party, for every true believer (retard), there are at least two cynics and perhaps one co-dependent. A co-dependent Republican is a moderate who is deluded into think he or she can moderate the cynics and retards. And these co-dependents quickly become cynics, or they look for new work, because they are RINOs. Colin Powell is the most famous and saddest example. Snarlin’ Arlen Specter. Or Christie Todd Whitman, if anyone cares. The fact is, of course, Beck and Limbaugh and the rest of them, Cheney et al, are RINOs. I suspect even Tom Delay and Newt Gingrich are RINOs, though it’s hard to tell. A guy with 3 wives is a definite RINO, while a guy who writes alternate history books about the civil war may be a genuine retard. To listen to Newt talk about history is like listening to an intelligent 8 year old talk about history. See, Newt has read a lot of books. He just hasn’t absorbed the contents. Alone, any of these groups is dangerous, but combined, you get a total effect. You get the ultimate retardation and cynicism fed through the system by co-dependents. The result is not fascism, no. The result is whatever the fuck it is we’re living through now.

So, from now on, to save time, when Republicans talk, I will ask myself: Retard or RINO? When Michelle Bachmann, responding to claims that the recent Rally for Shame had between 78 and 98,000 attendees said, Rep. Michele Bachmann (R) of Minnesota, at her own rally held on the edges of Mr. Beck’s event, said,

“We’re not going to let anyone get away with saying there were less than a million here today because we were witnesses.”

ask the question: Michelle Bachman, Retard or RINO? Or when a person who attacked Obama for attending the church where Jeremiah Wright preached goes on to assert that Obama is a Muslim…Retard or RINO? Which is it? Cut taxes? Greatest Health care on Earth? Weapons of mass destruction in Cuba? Obama a fascist communist? Georgia a vital US interest worth starting WW3 over? Mexicans with leprosy? Polluting trees? Ketchup a vegetable…Hillary killed Vince Foster…Reatard or RINO?

For our part, we had a beautiful day, perfect an every respect. The ceremony took place on a lawn, with a view of Seneca Lake. The sun was low in the sky, it was hot, but with a breeze. Elizabeth and Scott were radiant. I felt as happy as I have ever been in my life.

FOR ELIZABETH AND SCOTT ON THEIR WEDDING DAY

a pastoral

because I love you both and see
beyond this afternoon, beyond the past
the things that should be

that we together, this family
are constellations of your love
by love did your voice grow
from cries to words,
the light and water of the heart
the earth of our desire
and aspiration beyond the hour

upon the words you utter now
lives are built, breath by breath
they are the soil that receives and gives
and may my blessings go as seeds
into that ground and may a father’s
wishes for his daughter’s day
grow tall as these vermillion sunflowers
and stand a long as this lake’s water

may we together build a tower
words and love for bricks and mortar
and fill its halls with veils of laughter
and surround its walls for ever after
with lawns and flowers and the sounds
of children weaving wedding crowns

On False Naivete

Not long ago i sent my curmudgeonly friend Philip a Kimya Dawson song I like, and he sent back a curmudgeonly reply, to the effect that he loathes Kimya Dawson and all of her ilk because he loathes false naiveté. I do still love the song I sent (Underground) but find his analysis to be indisputable. Kimya Dawson, in The Moldy Peaches and as a solo performer, is responding to the endemic, or epidemic, irony, cynicism, nihilism and faux sophistication of her older contemporaries with raw, earnest, literal, naive expressionism. Taken too far it is sappy, sentimental and as false as the things she’s rebelling against. My friend Philip also bemoans the rapidity with which things in the arts are co-opted and commercialized. He points out that it took many years for the East Village to go from a genuine bohemia to a totally Disney fake bohemia, while the same process occurred in Williamsburg in a relatively brief period of time. Good things die almost before they are born. Kimya Dawson is a typical Williamburg product. Or Portland, Oregon. Or wherever. But this leaves open the question of, where do you go? How do you counter faux cynicism without embracing faux naiveté? How the hell do you even know what to do or think when every road appears to be not just marked off but cut off? If playing until your fingers bleed is a cliché, and so is its opposite, then paralysis sets in and nothing gets done at all.

I am thinking about this both in my own life and when I consider a poet I like quite a bit, Dorothea Lasky. I saw Dorothea read. She was great, invigorating, funny, direct, explosive and in love with words, with the rush of words and feelings. She was in love with emotion, that most despised word in art. Nearly all serious poetry holds emotion in contempt. It equates feeling with cliché and sentimentality. Not Dorothea. But I feel far more analytical when it comes to poets as opposed to pop singers. And what my friend says of Kimya Dawson I sense in Dorothea, and it is alarming. Dorothea it seems to me writes too much, and is too in love with her own sense of emotion. The things i find liberating and beautiful in her poems can easily turn into false naiveté. I have Black Life in my hands, her new book. Dorothea is an east coast poet, from Philadelphia. She has a lot of fans. She is riding the crest of a wave that is opposed to post-lang po and lang po sophistication, with its crossword puzzle word games, minimalism, intellectualism, abstraction and conceptualism. She isn’t going to write poems based on the first three letters of every fifth car she sees. She isn’t out to transform consciousness through ironic self-awareness of ideological linguistic structures. She isn’t out to destabilize anything. She isn’t locked in an agon with a tradition that hasn’t existed for a hundred years. But she is not a boring old ‘School Of Quietude’ bird watcher either. Her birds are nasty pigeons. She writes on the fly, the way Frank O’Hara did, but unlike O’Hara she seems to pretend she doesn’t know things that she does. Frank O’Hara wasn’t naive about anything. He just delighted in being a jaded old queen at night and virgin in the morning.

The Legend of Good John Henry

When my dad got Alzheimer’s all the plants died
In the nursing home there are no plants
There is nothing to live for
Dogs circle the pink painted building
The orderly staff waits with the bleach
Asking me where the diapers are

As I flip through this book I find all of the things I love about her poetry, but I also sense that it has become mannered. I go back to Awe (which is not in my office, as I write, so I can’t quote it) and see how when I first read her, heard her, I felt the flame of Blake running through her work, a wayward, religious light she was unembarrassed of, and which guided her on her hijinks. It is full of humor, self-mocking, to be sure, and unsettling, but still, I knew she wasn’t joking when she talked about God. I am not a religious person, I am an atheist, but I am tired of knee-jerk atheism. It bores me. It renders the world incomplete. It is not sophisticated or intelligent. Lasky seemed to be saying, ‘I’ve read Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman and Louis Zukofsky and I understand and I don’t care, this doesn’t speak to me, their world is not my world.’ And I was thrilled, because this is how I feel. And this is how poetry works. You search and search for a poet who thinks and feels as you do. Or I do. Anyway.

Then I read something like this poem, from Black Life:

EVER READ A BOOK CALLED AWE?

Have you ever read a book called Awe?
I have. I wrote it. That’s my book.
I wrote that book. I wrote that one.
Some people read it. they said,
We will makle your book.
I said, Really? I love you.
They said, We love you, too.
I said, Good then
I will love you forever.
They said, Great! And looked scared.

It isn’t right to judge a book by its worst poem, but I think Dr. Johnson said something along the lines that your contemporaries will judge you by your worst work, and posterity by your best. Or something like that. Poems like this are a waste of my time. They remind me of Kimya Dawson’s song about her mother dying. It starts out hauntingly, but by the second chorus she’s talking about Bert and Ernie and Mr. Hooper. She’s writing like a child. It’s not childlike in the sense that Matisse and Picasso were after, a shedding of sophistication a search for spontaneous and simple beauty rooted in design and color. It is childish in the sense of Blake’s Thel, of innocence as a refusal to be adult, to work through to the other side. Dawson confronts her mother’s death and runs to childhood, which is exactly what Thel does in The Book of Thel. Thel runs around essentially asking of all things, ‘Are you my mother?’ as in the child’s book. She gets to a worm, a cloud and a clod of dirt. They all assure her that they will die. Then the tone of the poem changes from innocent pastoral a harrowing invocation of the pit:

The eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar:
Thel enter’d in & saw the secrets of the land unknown.
She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots
Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:
A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen.

It is interesting that in Black Life there is a strong current of sexuality, of sex, of boy friends, ex husbands and men that is not in Awe, and that loss of sexual innocence is also the underlying loss in Thel, that sexual innocence and death are linked, there as here, in this case her father’s illness and (I suppose) death. It is the refusal of knowledge of sex and of death that condemns Thel to an eternal childhood, a senility that is sterile and frightening, the sterility of one who refuses to become conscious and live. A clinging to childishness in the face of cynicism is the same move. To go against artistic sophistication doesn’t mean refusal to BE.

THAT ONE WAS THE ODDEST ONE

That Robbie Wood is so weird
He seriously makes me want to fuckl  his brains out
Oh fuckable man, why do you have to do and say such
Strange things?

I LOVE A MATHEMATICIAN

I love a mathematician
Not a man who lives by himself in a minivan, which one is he?
Masturbating to my picture on the internet, just like the fat one in the basement
Masturbating and masturbating, oh how I love that
And would love to drain the blood from his face too
In person 

O how I would identify with the sickly nature of love
And sweet sticky kisses
That never go away.

I want to travel with Dorothea through all of this. But poem after poem in this book, wherever I turn, there is this false note of childishness.

The Animal

My heart belongs to a lion
I love his pelt and covet his heart
O animal, your heart is wise beyond your years
I cut your paw and tell you in a whisper
To never leave this place

I want Dorothea to write like she writes, in the end. I don’t doubt her sincerity. And it is a struggle to get from art to sincerity without losing the art. She has decided to be herself, a modernist and a romantic who is unafraid of unadorned feeling, and simple statement. But preciosity is as much a problem as the tone deaf minimalist philosophizing of so much serious poetry. I love Oppen but there are times when his ear utterly fails him, as it does Creeley, as it does Delillo in prose, and Pynchon, and David Foster Wallace. Yet time and again i read their ears praised, that they have a great ear for the language. If they do then you have to have a great ear for them.

Lasky isn’t afraid of the old art of poetry. She isn’t afraid of gushing. But I think she writes too much. This is Blake’s The Book of Thel :

The Book of Thel

THEL’S MOTTO
Does the Eagle know what is in the pit?
Or wilt thou go ask the Mole?
Can Wisdom be put in a silver rod?
Or Love in a golden bowl?

I

The daughters of Mne Seraphim led round their sunny flocks,

All but the youngest; she in paleness sought the secret air,

To fade away like morning beauty from her mortal day;

Down by the river of Adona her soft voice is heard,

And thus her gentle lamentation falls like morning dew:

“O life of this our spring! why fades the lotus of the water?

Why fade these children of the spring, born but to smile & fall?

Ah! Thel is like a watry bow, and like a parting cloud,

Like a reflection in a glass, like shadows in the water,

Like dreams of infants, like a smile upon an infant’s face,

Like the dove’s voice, like transient day, like music in the air.

Ah! gentle may I lay me down, and gentle rest my head,

And gentle sleep the sleep of death, and gentle hear the voice

Of him that walketh in the garden in the evening time.”

The Lily of the valley, breathing in the humble grass

Answer’d the lovely maid and said: “I am a watry weed,

And I am very small, and love to dwell in lowly vales;

So weak, the gilded butterfly scarce perches on my head;

Yet I am visited from heaven, and he that smiles on all

Walks in the valley and each morn over me spreads his hand,

Saying: ‘Rejoice, thou humble grass, thou new-born lily flower,

Thou gentle maid of silent valleys and of modest brooks;

For thou shalt be clothed in light, and fed with morning manna,

Till summer’s heat melts thee beside the fountains and the springs

To flourish in eternal vales.’ Then why should Thel complain?

Why should the mistress of the vales of Har utter a sigh?”

She ceasd and smild in tears, then sat down in her silver shrine.

Thel answered: “O thou little virgin of the peaceful valley,

Giving to those that cannot crave, the voiceless, the o’ertired;

Thy breath doth nourish the innocent lamb, he smells thy milky garments,

He crops thy flowers, while thou sittest smiling in his face,

Wiping his mild and meekin mouth from all contagious taints.

Thy wine doth purify the golden honey; thy perfume,

Which thou dost scatter on every little blade of grass that springs,

Revives the milked cow, & tames the fire-breathing steed.

But Thel is like a faint cloud kindled at the rising sun:

I vanish from my pearly throne, and who shall find my place?”

“Queen of the vales,” the Lily answered, “ask the tender cloud,

And it shall tell thee why it glitters in the morning sky,

And why it scatters its bright beauty thro’ the humid air.

Descend, O little cloud, & hover before the eyes of Thel.”

The Cloud descended, and the Lily bowd her modest head,

And went to mind her numerous charge among the verdant grass.

II

“O little Cloud,” the virgin said, “I charge thee tell to me,

Why thou complainest not when in one hour thou fade away:

Then we shall seek thee but not find; ah, Thel is like to Thee.

I pass away, yet I complain, and no one hears my voice.”

The Cloud then shew’d his golden head & his bright form emerg’d,

Hovering and glittering on the air before the face of Thel.

“O virgin, know’st thou not our steeds drink of the golden springs

Where Luvah doth renew his horses? Look’st thou on my youth,

And fearest thou because I vanish and am seen no more,

Nothing remains? O maid, I tell thee, when I pass away,

It is to tenfold life, to love, to peace, and raptures holy:

Unseen descending, weigh my light wings upon balmy flowers,

And court the fair eyed dew, to take me to her shining tent:

The weeping virgin trembling kneels before the risen sun,

Till we arise link’d in a golden band, and never part,

But walk united, bearing food to all our tender flowers.”

“Dost thou O little Cloud? I fear that I am not like thee;

For I walk through the vales of Har and smell the sweetest flowers,

But I feed not the little flowers; I hear the warbling birds,

But I feed not the warbling birds; they fly and seek their food;

But Thel delights in these no more, because I fade away,

And all shall say, ‘Without a use this shining woman liv’d,

Or did she only live to be at death the food of worms?’”

The Cloud reclind upon his airy throne and answer’d thus:

“Then if thou art the food of worms, O virgin of the skies,

How great thy use, how great thy blessing! Every thing that lives

Lives not alone, nor for itself; fear not, and I will call

The weak worm from its lowly bed, and thou shalt hear its voice.

Come forth, worm of the silent valley, to thy pensive queen.”

The helpless worm arose, and sat upon the Lily’s leaf,

And the bright Cloud saild on, to find his partner in the vale.

III

Then Thel astonish’d view’d the Worm upon its dewy bed.

“Art thou a Worm? Image of weakness, art thou but a Worm?

I see thee like an infant wrapped in the Lily’s leaf;

Ah, weep not, little voice, thou can’st not speak, but thou can’st weep.

Is this a Worm? I see thee lay helpless & naked, weeping,

And none to answer, none to cherish thee with mother’s smiles.”

The Clod of Clay heard the Worm’s voice, & raisd her pitying head;

She bow’d over the weeping infant, and her life exhal’d

In milky fondness; then on Thel she fix’d her humble eyes.

“O beauty of the vales of Har! we live not for ourselves;

Thou seest me the meanest thing, and so I am indeed;

My bosom of itself is cold, and of itself is dark,

But he that loves the lowly, pours his oil upon my head,

And kisses me, and binds his nuptial bands around my breast,

And says: ‘Thou mother of my children, I have loved thee

And I have given thee a crown that none can take away.’

But how this is, sweet maid, I know not, and I cannot know;

I ponder, and I cannot ponder; yet I live and love.”

The daughter of beauty wip’d her pitying tears with her white veil,

And said: “Alas! I knew not this, and therefore did I weep.

That God would love a Worm, I knew, and punish the evil foot

That, wilful, bruis’d its helpless form; but that he cherish’d it

With milk and oil I never knew; and therefore did I weep,

And I complaind in the mild air, because I fade away,

And lay me down in thy cold bed, and leave my shining lot.”

“Queen of the vales,” the matron Clay answered, “I heard thy sighs,

And all thy moans flew o’er my roof, but I have call’d them down.

Wilt thou, O Queen, enter my house? ’tis given thee to enter

And to return: fear nothing, enter with thy virgin feet.”

IV

The eternal gates’ terrific porter lifted the northern bar:

Thel enter’d in & saw the secrets of the land unknown.

She saw the couches of the dead, & where the fibrous roots

Of every heart on earth infixes deep its restless twists:

A land of sorrows & of tears where never smile was seen.

She wanderd in the land of clouds thro’ valleys dark, listning

Dolours & lamentations; waiting oft beside a dewy grave,

She stood in silence, listning to the voices of the ground,

Till to her own grave plot she came, & there she sat down,

And heard this voice of sorrow breathed from the hollow pit:

“Why cannot the Ear be closed to its own destruction?

Or the glistning Eye to the poison of a smile?

Why are Eyelids stord with arrows ready drawn,

Where a thousand fighting men in ambush lie?

Or an Eye of gifts & graces, show’ring fruits and coined gold?

Why a Tongue impress’d with honey from every wind?

Why an Ear, a whirlpool fierce to draw creations in?

Why a Nostril wide inhaling terror, trembling, and affright?

Why a tender curb upon the youthful burning boy?

Why a little curtain of flesh on the bed of our desire?”

The Virgin started from her seat, & with a shriek

Fled back unhinderd till she came into the vales of Har.

i have loved lies
the I’s of deception
remote and infinite

there is no gesture
that can brink it
and so the circle closes

not a halo
but a worm hole
out of Dr. Who

stretching from one
devastated planet
to another

from a planet of dust
formed from the crumbs
of ingested matter

to a planet of curfews
formed from the dust of crumbs
of ingested matter

but our bees
don’t chew metal
the sky does

framed by the shirt
she cannot kiss back
his bad groping taste
between them like a bloom
of ocean algae

with snarling lips his cheeks
roar up and down
red nails in a fist
awkwardly stiff
his hands hang on
to her shoulders

Lydia, out of nowhere, called to say she was in Chicago and would be arriving late the next night or early the morning after. She still had her key. We looked at her bed. It was the same bedding that had been there when she left. With no real enthusiasm we stripped it, flipped the futon and put on clean sheets and clean blankets. I liked making a bed with Sally. I liked smoothing out the sheets, lifting the futon to tuck them in, then opening the blankets, and slipping the pillows into cases. I watched her as she worked, as she clamped the pillow beneath her chin, and bent over and stretched her arms across the surface of the bed, stood up and fluffed the pillows.  

Lydia arrived the following night in good health, boisterous. Her face was a little lined but her dark brown eyes were bright. She was in jeans and a jean jacket, her hair cut into a bleach blond crew cut and she wore a white t-shirt. She put down two duffle bags and her bracelets slid into her wrist. Maureen in a brown bomber jacket followed her in with backpacks and shopping bags.

“There’s more in the lobby,” Maureen said. Her round glasses were fogged-up white and her cheeks were red from the cold.

“Where’d you get a car?” Sally asked. “What is it?”

“A Hawnder of course, what else. I got the car in Phoenix for 600 bucks. So Mo and me met up in San Francisco and I worked at the halfway house and we crashed at this girl’s place in the Mission. But I stayed clean. I went to meetings every fucking day. All day long was a meeting.”

“Are you parked?” I asked.

“Yeah yeah, just up the street. I’ll ditch the car I guess at some point. But I mean, six hundred bucks.” She took off her coat and tossed it across the piano bench. Her arms were strong from working out and she had flames tattooed on both biceps

“But you didn’t know how to drive.”

“I learned that. That was one of the things I had to do in Phoenix. Driving up to San Francisco was a little scary at first. I’ve never done things like that sober. You don’t think about it much, till you try it and everything is different in the way you feel. But who cares about that, listen to me.” She looked around, turned to face each wall, looked at the big painting in the living room, checking for changes. The figures then were quite large; what had started out as embryonic forms emerged as these enormous, multilayered Olmec-like faces, and it looked like they were all paddling a canoe made up of discreet layers of color. When she got to her part of the room she said, clasping her hands to her cheeks and making a face, “Oh you made my bed! Thank you. That’s something else I have to do every day. Where’s Roy? How is he?”

“He’s fine, as always,” I said.

“Well let’s call him up and go out for dinner.”

We made a plan for dinner the following night at a Japanese place in the East Village on First Avenue. We got there first, Sally, Lydia, Mo and me. “So what’s he like?” Lydia asked.

“Everyone sits waiting for him to blow up and abuse them,” Sally said.

I said, “He has ok days. He’s like a nut about me going to school. I’d like to stay off it.”

“He’s a fucking asshole. He’s trying to talk Alex out of leaving town. He’s basically using everything to badger him into staying.”

“Here he comes,” Lydia said.

Roy entered briefcase in hand, dressed in a black suit with a tie, sporting a mustache of sorts. He scanned the room for us, lockjawed, till he caught my eye and nodded, then turned around and opened the door to the vestibule, where, evidently, Dawn had been waiting.

She came in looking a foul mood and shook her face a little as she followed him past the host and to our table.

Lydia stood and got out from behind the table and hugged him. “Oh Roy, hi.”

He kissed her cheek and head and smiled. “They let you out finally?”

“Eh, they ain’t let me outta nuttin’.”

We sat down and looked through the menu.

“I don’t know why we come here,” he said.

“Cause it’s close by and it’s cheap and it’s good,” I said.

“Whatever, fuck it, I’m spoiled. I go out to these places with these people, man.”

“Sounds very uh, specific, man” Lydia said, flipping the menu over.

“So what, are we getting any appetizers? Dumplings?” he asked.

“Hijiki,” I muttered, “and that eggplant thing–”

“With the miso paste,” Sally said.

“Yeah, how about the calamari?” Lydia asked

“Oh, I love that,” said Dawn. “Let’s get a whole tempura appetizer.”

“You can’t order hot food first,” Roy said.

“Says who,” Dawn asked.

“Go ahead, it’s like asking for cheese with fish in an Italian restaurant. But go ahead. These people are just freaks, whatever. Spoiled little fuckers from the suburbs. Let’s just get a giant platter full of sushi and sashimi and eat it all. It’s on me. And sake all around?”

No one said a word.

Roy called the waiter over, a bored, 25 year-old Japanese guy with a rockabilly hairdo. “I’m ordering. Four sakes with cups for everyone. Hijiki, two orders of eggplant appetizer, the fried squid, one mixed tempura appetizer and 3 shumai. Then I want a sushi and sashimi platter for the whole table, maybe three, four deluxes? With seaweed? Just tell the chef to make one up for us.”

The waiter scribbled down the order looking world weary and left.

“So where were you living? I heard San Francisco,” he said to Lydia.

“For six months. I may go back. I got into this whole performance poetry thing there. It’s funny, all you gotta do is start talking about shit you did and they laugh. That’s really all I do. War stories. With hallucinations. Sometimes, I make ‘em feel reeeeaallly baaaaaaaad.”

“It’s like these apartments I’m trying to buy to rent to out of towners. I can make thousands a day on that alone if I can talk my way into it. You know I know these people,” he rubbed his face, “ha ha.”

“Whatever that means,” Lydia said.

“Did you ever hear the story of Mr. Ha Ha the baboon?” Sally asked.

Roy looked at her strangely. “No.”

“That is what you were quoting, is it not?”

“Not. I don’t know.”

“Oh, never mind then.”

“I know that story of Mr. Ha Ha the baboon from somewhere,” Dawn said. It was the first sign of interest she had shown.

“Bosse-de-Nage, ole bottom face, the baboon who accompanies Dr. Faustroll on his exploits,” Sally said.

“Dr. Faustroll!” she said. “You know about him?”

“The Eminent ‘Pataphysician.”

Dawn looked at her oddly and then smiled. “I read that at UGA. I lived in this house and that book was in the bathroom. Alfred Jarry. The Exploits and Opinions of Dr. Faustroll, Pataphysician. I must have read it twenty times. That’s why I read Rime of the Ancient Mariner, and The Flowers of Evil, and Huysmans! How could I forget that?”

“I was just reading Frost at Midnight.”

“If that’s Coleridge I didn’t read it. Nope,” Dawn said, “I only read the Rime.”

“The Rind of the Ancient Marinara,” I said.

“Whatever,” Roy said. He pounded the sake and put his face close to Lydia’s. “I haven’t been to San Francisco in a while. It’s a hippy town. The girls there still don’t shave. I hope you stay home. That’s what I’m trying to talk these two into doing. Maybe you could give it a whack.”

“Why would I do that?” she asked. They put down the dumplings and the other appetizers and we dug in.

“Am I the only one?” he asked, his nostrils and neck throbbing iambically.

I found myself saying, “It is scary giving up an apartment in NY.” It felt like a slightly lose tooth that has just enough wiggle to cause you to check and loosen it, day by day, till it breaks free.

Lydia and Sally both burst into anapests at once, “Do you have to bring up that apartment again?” Roy’s beeper went off. He checked it and put it back.

The waiter cleared the plates and lowered this monstrous collection of raw fish and seaweed to the table. We surrounded it and began to reach our chopsticks in and pluck forth the fish, the red bricks of yellow fin tuna, and my favorite, wedges of Spanish mackerel. I stirred a dab of wasabi into the soy sauce and dipped a piece in. It has a dark, oily taste, but milder than sardine.

“I want some more shumai,” Lydia said. “Getting out of this place for a while’s the best thing that ever happened to me. You get some perspective. Shit you thought you never could do is easy. Like learning to drive. I thought it was some big deal but you get out west and it’s like taking the subway. And in Phoenix they take more antibiotics than anywhere else. And Phoenix is America’s fattest city. California’s not like that. In California, they hate you if you’re fat. I had to lose twenty pounds just so they wouldn’t hate me. Didn’t mean they started to like me. Only the dikes. The guys are like ‘Look at the fat chick.’ Ha ha. Now who’s the baboon. But you can’t even walk there. In San Francisco, you walk.”

“I don’t think anyone in Dallas doesn’t drive,” Dawn said.

Mo asked, “Why would anyone ever want to live in such a place?”

“I mean–” she looked confused. “What can I say? I left. There ain’t nothing to love there, not even my parents. But I want to defend it for some reason. Don’t you ever feel that way?”

“Sure,” Sally said, eating a dumpling and washing it down with Sake. “When I was overseas and people would talk about America as if we had all voted for that asshole. I felt defensive and foolish both.”

“That’s just it.”

“Only you can make a joke about your mother,” Mo said.

“No mother jokes,” Roy said. And then, “Your mother’s so fat that when I fucked her ass my dick never went inside her asshole. She’s so fat my father and I both fucked her and we couldn’t tell her tits from her ass.” 

I savoured the shoyu and wasabi on a piece of tuna. Roy picked at his mustache. It was a ratty, cheap mustache. All his life he went in for skeevy facial hair. He hadn’t eaten much at dinner, but he was going to pay for it. No one could pay for a thing when they were with Roy now. His eyes worked us over robotically. He jerked them back and forth between Sally, me, and the briefcase on the floor by his foot. His beeper went off. He stood, grabbed the briefcase and marched to the pay phone.

“Hoo,” Lydia said. “Is that relaxed for him? Cause he’s wound very tight.”

Dawn looked to make sure he was on the phone and said, “He’ll pretend to go do something and just listen to what you’re saying. Once, he took me to Vegas and spent the whole night playing cards and fighting with anyone he could find. I won’t touch that shit anymore. It makes you crazy. My husband’s gonna kill someone some day.”

Lydia was about to say something but Roy returned and snarled at his sake cup. “Don’t worry about money. No one here worries about money again. There are three things fueling this economy,” he said, counting off with his fingers, “Real Estate, Money Market Funds, and you know what the other is. I’m heavily invested in all three. We don’t worry. We take charge. All those assholes, who think they’re so goddamned cool, are putting me on top. And that will send us all to college.”

Sally touched my shoulder and said into my ear, “What is he talking about?”

“I don’t know.”

Lydia tried to order more shumai, but the waiter wouldn’t stop. “I just can’t stop eating them. The rawr fish isn’t floating my boat tonight.”

“We need more sake, where is that guy?” Roy craned his neck around and his face turned bright red. “Look,” he said, turning towards me, his eyes hardening in their sockets and jabbing his two fingers, “look. You at least apply here in the city and that way if she gets into Yale or Penn you can live here and commute. Not those other ones, the one in Provincetown.”

“Providence,” Sally said. “Brown.”

“Oh yeah, the color. They aren’t right for him and not you either. I know. I’ve been to those other places, those little cities, and there is nothing but murder and abuse in them. You can see them on the street, the survivors.”

A harried waiter in red sneakers ran past and Sally literally grabbed him. He wheeled around, his face a portraict of wrath. Roy bared his fangs. The tension circulated between them in little packets of energy ready to explode. Hair by hair, a chill creeped up my neck. For a moment the waiter and Roy were paralyzed by each other’s eyes. They were two ludicrous space creatures forged in the depths of galactic anger. And they were both so stylized–the bad mustache and acid burned skin of a cocaine addict versus the wild albino fury of the East Village waiter, overworked and overpaid, constant victim of the snide, unruly impulses of people who were in the habit of behaving as if they were always on vacation. Sally asked for two orders of shumai. The waiter let down, his face relaxed. Roy disengaged and said, “Four more Sakes.” The waiter nodded and took off and Roy said, “What the fuck was that all about? Did he hurt you?”

I touched his shoulder. He flinched and his eyelashes did battle. I said, “She touched him. He was in a hurry. It freaked him out. There was nothing personal.”

Sally said, “It was nothing. I’m fine,” and for the first time ever she smiled at Roy. I felt again the prick of jealousie, just like that day in Flint Park when Roy caught Tammy Markham’s eye.

“That wasn’t nothing. That was something. Did you see his face?” He made a guttural sound. Then he shook his head and laughed. “Did you see his face? Something or nothing? Is everybody done?” The beeper went off.

Lydia said, “No. We just ordered more shumai.”

“Right.” He marched off on his steel rods to the phone.

Volume 2 of Victor Lieberman’s Strange Parallels, Southeast Asia in Global Context, Circa 800-1830 is out. Volume 1 is one of the most extraordinary books of historical scholarship I have ever read. It builds upon and expands vastly theoretical and conceptual approaches pioneered by Anthony Reid. It’s been too long since I have read volume 1 to review it here. Lieberman’s ‘strange parallels’ are resonances between ‘east’ and ‘west’, the evolution of the state, trade, political and cultural centralization during the period when these two regions of the world are supposed to be undergoing separate and unequal development. When I was doing a lot of reading, years ago, (renewed recently), I started to feel that the European reformation, and nascent capitalism, and changes in the European state paralleled similar changes in Southeast Asia, and that developments in world trade might be the stimulus common to both. The rise of a neo-Confucianist state in Viet Nam following the defeat of the Ming (15^th century, see John K. Whitmore’s The Development of Le Government in 15^th Century Vietnam, his Cornell dissertation, and Vietnam, Ho Quy Ly, and the Ming (1371-1421)), the rise of the Islamic trading states in Malaysia, and similar changes in Thailand and Burma suggest that there were global events before global conquest. Modernity is not just indigenous to the west but the result of an interaction which at times took the form of competition. William McNeill in his books pursued this idea some, especially his world history and The Pursuit of Power, the follow up to the eccentric and brilliant Plagues and Peoples.

Lieberman is much more in the world systems school of meta or global history than McNeill, who is no Marxist and doesn’t go in for theory so much as a mapping out global environmental constraints and stimuli to history. But Lieberman brings the empiricist’s eye to the proceedings, and his background is in Burmese history. He is able to focus simultaneously on the details of local histories and the vast conceptual abstractions of world system theory.  I can’t wait to read volume 2 and would urge the first volume on anyone who wants to get both a granular and global perspective on Eurasia from 800-1830.