No beams to weave the linen
For chlorotic laundry maids
The earth has plucked them all
The moon is not its glow
But the thing seen
All the gloomy black moths
Have massacred the sun
Pierrot checks his frock coat
Floating on a water lily
Without the glowing rudder

(after Giraud, pdf)

Autumn songs

I found a translation of the 8th Century T'ang era poem by Zhang Ji that Mahler's second song Der Einsame im Herbst ("Autumn Loneliness") of Das Lied Von Der Erde is based on:

Autumn sky, jade-like frost drifting
Northerly wind carries lotus fragrance
With love, weaving till the lonely lamp fades
Wipe tears, fond memory, long cold night
Eaves edge, blue clouds pure like water
Rising moon, roosting birds caw; geese soar.
Whose young wife is weaving love birds on her loom?
Deeply concealed by silk curtain and inlaid screen
Listening to falling leaves by the white jade window
Pity the woman, chilled and alone without company.

The fashion for Chinese poetry in Paris that prompted Pound to invent Imagism and get parataxis into Anglo poetry had spread to Vienna by 1907, where Hans Bethge had popularized reworkings of translations that had previously been published in German, which were, in turn, based on two translations into French. All the Europeanized versions of Zhang Ji's Long Autumn Night seemed to be somewhat similar, beginning with Judith Gautier's French version, but they all differed significantly from the original Chinese version in two ways:

1. The original T'ang version makes reference to scent (line 2), sight (line 3), tears and memory (line 4), hearing (line 9), and the body's reaction to cold (lines 4 and 7). Gautier's version and the subsequent French and German versions notes only tears (les larmes) and all sensory provocations have expired or been covered by frost, wind, or darkness.
2. Zhang Ji is thinking about a "young wife" "chilled and alone" while all references to such an object of thought are struck from the European versions.

T'ang poets were highly attentive and deliberate about line arrangements, and Long Autumn Night features 1. Nature (lines one and two), 3. a visual representation of love relating to the visual experience of night, 4. tears and memory coupled with the experience of cold, 5. Nature again, lines 5 and 6, both the visual and aural experience of birds, Line 7, the "love birds on her loom," 8. the image of line 7 "concealed," 9. her aural experience of nature, 10. commentary on subject of poem. Zhang Ji doesn't note the action of his own senses but rather what is perceived, while the woman's perception of the leaves listened to, the temperature, and the birds on the loom is stated. As Taoism has used the image of weaving to demonstrate the unification of life and death, the exact same symbol recurring in the Upanishads and Plato, "love" weaves in line 3 and is woven in line 7.

The parataxic structure of Chinese poetry was conducive to Mahler's creation of the first-ever symphony composed entirely of separate songs. Mahler never heard it performed and much has been written about his having just been diagnosed with heart disease after his daughter had died in accordance with his earlier premonitions and he had been forced out as the music director in Vienna due, in part, to anti-Semitism, an event which marked the decline of the artistic golden age of Vienna. Adorno attributed the use of Chinese forms to Mahler's move to New York: "The inauthentic Chinese element, sketched with extreme discretion, plays a similar part to that of the folk song earlier: a pseudomorph that does not take itself literally but grows eloquent through inauthenticity. But by replacing the Austrian folk song by the remote, an Orient approved as a stylistic means, he divests himself of the hope for a collective cover for what is his own…Mahler’s exoticism was a prelude to emigration." (Mahler: a Musical Physiognomy) Where Debussy had recently been influenced by Javanese gamelan, Mahler uses a continuous, spiraling string melody onto which fragmentary motifs are added, including the vocals:



(Jessye Norman mezzo, Simon Rattle conductor)

While certain types of Hindustani raags are performed in autumn while others are for monsoon season to bring the rain, Tom Jobim's bossa nova classic Waters of March uses ascending and descending scales to depict the rainy season in the Southern Hemisphere's autumn. Jobim, quite the student of literature as many Brazilian songwriters are, endeavored to write an English language version which referenced Spring and didn't include any Latin roots, an Oulipoesque move which perhaps sought to give the song a North Pole free from Romance languages, although some of the words did have Latin roots. As with Mahler's Der Einsame im Herbst, the raga-like continuous motif supports fragmentary lyrics in which the "waters," the rains, unify the fragments of the season. Instead of Wallace Stevens thinking on a Sunday morning "Death is the mother of beauty," for Jobim all things like deaths, hopes, traps, voids, sunsets, emotions, sicknesses, body parts, animals, plants, mud, broken down cars, comprise the object being described simultaneously in a synesthesiatic pattern, making up one of the best lyrical pop songs ever. Supposedly Elis Regina disliked Jobim's intellectualism but decided she needed the song as much as the song needed her.

Sampling duets

Andrea Parkins samples for Ches Smith


Ikue Mori samples for Zeena Parkins


DJ Oktopus samples for Dälek


Marty McCavitt samples for Darius Jones

New on dvd

Don't know why this took so long, but should be worth..

The fall issue of OnandOnScreen is out, with works by Bill Berkson, Rodrigo Toscano, Emily Dickinson, and of course yours truly the antediluvian progenitor of the text-reel poem.

The birds aren't here, because I can't hear them. I am thinking about myself, they should know that, not clear on what they know, not because I have to, because I want to, now that is, it is too late for the birds, their ideas, I am not ready for them, especially here. Where are the birds?

Making the rounds as result of Roberto Bolaño's new New Directions collection is his reaction to Mallarmé's "Sea Breeze," one of the most straightforward and rhetorical of Mallarmé's poems. Mallarmé's first line [“The flesh is sad – and I've read every book”] is both catchy and imprecise, the sort of declaration – like the lines that Rimbaud crossed out - that you wouldn't find in later Mallarmé, which gives Bolaño the opening to take him to task in his edgy stylistic evocation of Céline and the Beats which the Anglophone world can't seem to get enough of:

How could anyone declare that the flesh is essentially sad, that la petite mort, which doesn’t last even a minute, casts a pall over all lovemaking, which, it is widely known, can last for hours and hours, and go on interminably? If the line had been written by a Spanish poet like Campoamor, it might have meant something like that, but such a reading is quite at odds with the work and life of Mallarmé, which are indissolubly linked, except in this poem, this encoded manifesto, which Paul Gauguin, and he alone, followed to the letter (as far as we know, Mallarmé himself never listened to the sailors singing, or if he did, it certainly wasn’t on board a ship bound for an unknown destination). And the claim to have read all the books makes even less sense, because although books themselves may come to an end, no one every finishes reading them all, and Mallarmé was well aware of that. Book are finite, sexual encounters are finite, but the desire to read and to fuck is infinite; it surpasses our own deaths, our fears, our hopes for peace. And what is left for Mallarmé, in this famous poem, when he desire to read and the desire to fuck, so he says, are all used up? Well, what is left is travel, the desire to go traveling. And maybe that’s the key to the crime. Because if Mallarmé had concluded that the only thing left to do was pray or cry or go crazy, maybe he’d have come up with the perfect alibi. But no, what Mallarmé says is that the only thing left to do is travel—which is like saying “to sail is necessary, to live is not necessary,” a sentence I used to be able to quote in Latin, but that’s just one of the many thing I’ve forgotten with help of my liver’s traveling toxins—in other words he sides with the bare-chested traveler, with Freedom (who’s bare-chested too), with the simple existence of the sailor and the explorer, which isn’t so simple when you get right down to it: an affirmation of life, but also a constant game with death, and the first rung on the ladder, the first step in a certain kind of poetic apprenticeship. The second step is sex, and the third, books.

“Sea Breeze” was written by Mallarmé when he was 23 and had married Maria Gerhard two years previously, who'd given birth to his daughter Geneviève: “Nothing can hold this heart steeped in sea-/ not my lamp's desolate luminosity/ nor the blank paper guarded by its white/ nor the young wife feeding her child..” He was in this period both an apprentice poet imitating elders and the poet he was becoming, formulating his own poetic revolution, as his first draft of The Afternoon of a Faun was written at about the same time. A year and a half later he would write: “I am terrified because I have to invent a new poetics, which I could best express in these words: 'Paint not the thing itself, but the effect it produces.'” As Walter Benjamin has written, the representation of consciousness was a project set forth by Baudelaire, a project that Mallarmé indeed created a new poetics to realize.

This poem "Sea Breeze," however, is a rather clumsy and unoriginal amalgamation of poems and sentiments of Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier. From Gautier we get a romantic maritime drama of what the soul requires: Mallarmé's poem ends with “..my soul, listen to the sailor's song!” which may contain Gautier's longing in “Sea Gloom” for the sound of the ocean to take pity on his soul and transform it and his grief into a shipwreck. Mallarmé paints a scene in “Sea Breeze” where “storm winds buckle above shipwrecks cast/ away.”

Starting a new sentence in line 10 with “Un Ennui, ..” is about as Baulelairean as it gets, as the term occurs with emphasis and famously as the conclusion of "To the Reader" but also several times in "Le Voyage," which Gauguin did, in fact, cite in his journals, the poem that appears to be the most direct antecedent to “Sea Breeze.” Baudelaire's uses of it here are crucial: it illustrates both the naïve wanderlust of the tourist and the realization, at the end of the poem, that “the world's monotonous and small; we see/ ourselves today, tomorrow, yesterday,/ an oasis of horror in the sands of ennui!”

We should consider that Baudelaire's only experience of travel was when at age 20 his domineering stepfather put him on a boat bound for India to apparently separate him from his druggie friends (“the least senseless../ Flee the great herd penned in by Destiny/ And take refuge in a great opium!”) and the boat was damaged by a storm and returned after landing in Mauritius and Reunion, perhaps inspiring a confrontation with death, the final journey of the poem (“to drown in the abyss – heaven or hell,/ who cares? Through the unknown, we'll find the new.)” Baudelaire begins by saying “the true travellers are they who depart/ for departing's sake” who “dream/of spacious pleasures, transient, little understood,/ whose name no human spirit knows” then describes the soul as a ship in which the voice atop the mainsail cries out “Love.. glory.. fortune,”* “the poor lover of chimerical lands.” He then describes the traveller as they who “gladden the ennui of our jails.” At 21, Mallarmé in his earnest poem “The Windows” uses a dying man looking out the window of a hospital room as a metaphor for his desire to escape his life for art and mysticism: “can I flee with my featherless wings-/ and risk falling through all eternity.” Baudelaire goes on to describe the “monotonous and small” world, in which our travels are a visualization of the race against time, at the end of which “if sea and sky are both black as ink,/ you know that our hearts are full of sunshine.” The equation of the discovery of “the new” with death contains all the irony of his embrace of modernity and everything else.

The “spacious pleasures whose name no human spirit knows” may have taken an entirely new form in Mallarmé's masterpiece The Afternoon of a Faun. The refrain “There, all is order and beauty;/ luxury, calmness and beauty” from Baudelaire's more idyllic “Invitation to the Voyage” appears to turn up in Faun as “..fringes of a placid mere in Sicily,/ plundered” by Mallarmé's “sun-rivalling vanity,/ silent beneath the blooms of brilliant night.” It is also where the soul goes: “void of words and heavy body slowly/ fall before noon's haughty calm.” Wherever Mallarmé was right then, he'd left the others behind.

* If there were finalists for the worst translations of all time, Robert Lowell would field several entries, but his Le Voyage (from the New Directions collection) should merit serious consideration. “«Amour... gloire... bonheur!» Enfer! c'est un écueil!” becomes “"Here's dancing, gin and girls!" Balls! it's a rock!” and “Partout où la chandelle illumine un taudis” becomes “we see Blue Grottoes, Caesar and Capri.” In both cases, his attempts at humor convey the exact opposite of what the poem is communicating, in key moments of the poem.