Indeterminacy . 177

I don’t dispute Andy’s contention that Cage’s vispo lacks the phenomenological attentiveness of things to come, but it’s still one of my favorite American road trip poems.

Road trip photos

Here I disseminate the travel photos BEFORE the trip rather than after.

I have to drive to Austin for a half week for work and back here. I have to pay my expenses and get reimbursed, but tho the innovation of flying and renting wheels there, which most of civilization favors, is economically comparable I enjoy seeing the country. Also, looking at a lot of pre WW2 Western art in places like Indianapolis, Tulsa, and Fort Worth vaguely relates to what I'm supposed to be doing.

My previous jaunt to Texas involved researching food stops along the way ahead of time but on the way I learned that it is best to hit a special place once a day and self-cater the other two meals, because of sitting in a car and the portions involved. I generally like to make painstaking plans and ignore them.

Mon 11 Sept

At supper hoping the Hare Krishnaists won’t smell the Chili Dog on my breath from lunch, or possibly stuffed cabbage instead. I used to be a vegetarian but the South and Mexico ruined this for a while. Museums in Pennsylvania all closed on Monday, hence scenic route.

Tue 12

Joseph Mallard William

I feel under no obligation to eat the chili spaghetti but it may happen. If I can hold out 'til Terre Haute there's always Gerhardt's Bierstube.

Wed 13

Stare at the Beckmanns as long as I want, maybe seeing the rest of the collections, maybe not. Saw the New York retrospective a few years back but you can’t look at his work briefly in a crowd; I can’t.

Will see how South Grand compares to Washington Street Philly for Vietnamese.

Thurs 14

Cowboys and Indians in Tulsa.

Stockyards closed Thursday in OK City so I may settle for a salad.

Fri 15

My Favorite Caravaggio


Sat 16-Wed 20

Chekhov’s dinner set, veggies.

Thurs 21

Twombly gallery, plus Rothko Chapel and the Menil Surrealist collection.

Dinner/breakfast? ..in that Mecca of indigenous American cuisine, Beaumont, TX. San Francisco, what’s that? (never been)

Sat 23-Mon 25

Borrowing a condo on the St Augustine estuary..








Wed 26

Get out of the car, stare at this:



then arrive back here.

I may change this post as the trip changes.

Anti-post

I really appreciate the feedback on the critical nuggets here, and I often like to motivate myself by announcing what I’m going to do, like essays on Mallarmé, existentialism and Jain philosophy, discussions of Hejinian’s The Fatalist, etc etc, and there were several ‘unannounced’ essays I was working on. And the two book reviews I wrote last week (on the more visited Silliman’s blog) were heartfelt and a pleasure to write.

However, it is in the same spirit of convoluted motivational tactics that I write the ‘anti-post,’ the post that says I’m overwhelmed by a (creative) work project and I need to take a break from blogging longer essays, because perhaps if I don’t post this I won’t take that break. So I do plan to post stuff, just not literary essays that take hours to research.

I’m not sure how long this will be, but definitely the next week and for the most part the rest of the year, although I hope to take some breaks from my break here and there during that time and write more here.

Not a blue one

I was reading Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird to my nephews (4 & 8) recently; they both picked at a guitar (not a blue one to my eyes) through sections 2-7, and in section 8, Owen (4yo) said “stop lying to me!” Owen insisted I keep reading, though, and the more arcane the diction got, the more they picked at the guitar.

It’s in a book about teaching different poems to children by Kenneth Koch. When I started a couple of weeks ago, Frank (8yo) didn’t know what a poem was. He asked me what they are and I said it’s when people can do whatever they want with the words. Owen doesn’t know what they are but he likes them.

Parataxis history

Concerning Jessica Smith’s assertion that In a Station at the Metro is "not ‘actually’ a haiku," the essential component of a haiku is not syllable constraints but the juxtaposition, and Pound in this poem brought parataxis to Western Literature from Japan where it had been used for many years.

The word haiku came from the phrase "playful linked verse" and the Japanese consider the 5-7-5 to be a traditional form of what can have unlimited syllabic variants.

Pound called it a "hokku-like sentence" which is "meaningless unless someone has drifted into a certain vein of thought. In a poem of this sort one is trying to record the precise moment when a thing outward and objective transforms itself, or darts into a thing inward and subjective.

"This particular sort of consciousness has not been identified with impressionist art. I think it is worthy of attention."

In summer

I spent the day digging trenches for sewer pipes, which feels good if you don’t overdo it and you don’t have to worry about whether your literary essays are ‘legitimated.’ Andy has praise for Sock Puppet Serenade, which would also be a good name for the Silliman’s Blog comments fields.