Author Archives: weinberg

art, F&F

so many of my dearest friends are so spread out

“But of all my complaints, the most legitimate and depressing is that so many of my dearest friends are so spread out from Belgrade to Amsterdam to Paris to London to North Carolina to Toronto to Chicago to Santa Fe to San Francisco to Seattle to Fairbanks that I don’t get to see most of them once in two years. […] It’s the price many of us pay for picking our friends from among those we have most in common with professionally, rather than those who happen to live in the neighborhood…”

– From Kyle Gann’s PostClassic tribute to his friend, the recently deceased composer Art Jarvinen. This postscript on what it’s like to lose a dear but faraway friend reminded me, very much, of Ron Allen, and others.

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books, ideas

why characters in novels act as they do

“…One already sees the “application” of “results” from the neurosciences and evolutionary biology to questions about why characters in novels act as they do or what might be responsible for the moods characteristic of certain poets. People seem to be unusually interested in what area of the brain is active when Rilke is read to a subject. The great problem here is not so much a new sort of culture clash (or the victory of one of C.P. Snow’s “two cultures”) but that such applications are spectacular examples of bad literary criticism, not good examples of some revolutionary approach.

If one wants to explain why Dr. Sloper in Henry James’s novel, “Washington Square,” seems so protective yet so cold about his daughter Catherine’s dalliance with a suitor, one has to begin by entertaining the good evidence provided in the novel ─ that he enjoys the power he has over her and wants to keep it; that he fears the loneliness that would result if she leaves; that he knows the suitor is a fortune hunter; that Catherine has become a kind of surrogate wife for him and he regards her as “his” in that sense; that he hates the youth of the suitor; that he hates his daughter for being less accomplished than he would have liked; and that only some of this is available to his awareness, even though all true and playing some role. And one would only be getting started in fashioning an account of what his various actions mean, what he intended, what others understood him to be doing, all before we could even begin looking for anything like “the adaptive fitness” of “what he does.”

If being happy to remain engrossed in the richness of such interpretive possibilities is “naïve,” then so be it.

– “In Defense of Naive Reading,” NYT

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art, theater

possessing the “idea” behind the piece

“At what point did acquiring performance art switch from owning objects associated with the actions, such as videos and photographs, to possessing the “idea” behind the piece? Berlin-based artist Tino Sehgal has evidently turned collecting criteria on their heads. He sells his performance art pieces by means of verbal transactions in the presence of a lawyer with no written contract. Instructions on how to re-enact his works are delivered literally by word-of-mouth, with collectors under strict orders never to photograph or video his “constructed situations”. Yet they sell in editions of four to six for $85,000 to $145,000 each, according to The Art Newspaper. “

“Performance Art in the Marketplace.” Via AJ.

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Baltimore, poetry, the chorus

from the lighthearted department

Spent the ||8ve session this week on four Robert Herrick poems–there’s nothing to make you stop thinking about Poland like a good half-hour spent directing “Upon Julia’s Clothes.” O, how that glittering taketh me. It is really good to be silly–it’s better still to take silly things seriously, and serious things in humor.

J and I spent time after the actual rehearsal working on some administrative stuff for the group. We’re being serious–speaking of taking more silly things seriously–we made a FB page, registered a domain name, created a to-do list, and J actually sketched a logo in a notepad in Subway.

And…(drumroll)…

today is the birthday of Parallel Octave. He is six months old, having been born on April 10, and is probably too young for Julia’s clothes or being upon them. The news is next. From National Public Radio in Washington, I’m Karl Castle.

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books, quotes

delectatio morosa

“The classic result of all sudden ruptures and reversals is the rumination on one’s own worthlessness and the desire to punish oneself, known as delectatio morosa. I would never have been cured of it had it not been for the beauty of the earth. The clear autumn mornings in an Alsatian village surrounded by vineyards, the paths on an Alpine slope over the Isère River, rustling with dry leaves from the chestnut trees, or the sharp light of early spring on the Lake of Four Cantons near Schiller’s rock, or a small river near Périgueux on whose surface kingfishers traced colored shadows of flight in the July heat–all this reconciled me with the universe and with myself.
      But it was not the same as it had been in America; it was not only nature that cured me. Europe herself gathered me in her warm embrace, and her stones, chiseled by the hands of past generations, the swarm of her faces emerging from carved wood, from paintings, from the gilt of embroidered fabrics, soothed me, and my voice was added to her old challenges and oaths in spite of my refusal to accept her split and her sickliness. Europe, after all, was home to me. And in her I happened to find help…”

– Czeslaw Milosz, “Tiger 2,” Native Realm, 293

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books, poetry

!!

An unpublished Hughes-Plath letter from “Birthday Letters,” which wasn’t included in the collection, has been discovered. I’m extremely interested. BL has become more and more important to me over the course of my time in the MFA (I read the earthenware head poem as the lead-in to my reading on Monday). I am very, very, very excited to read this poem, as soon as I can get ahold of a copy of the New Statesman.

Also, Mario Vargas Llosa has won the Nobel.

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Baltimore, theater

accidentals

Reading of play in progress at CenterStage tonight: ran into two people who I know from Planet Theater, one only by email and another an old friend. I like how small our world continues to be.

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poetry, Uncategorized

this [long] weekend,

like the [long] eighteenth century, I did a lot of writing and revising for a reading Monday. We also held a Parallel Octave session where, for the first time, we discovered a poem that seems to “want” to be spoken in unison all the way throughout (Hart Crane’s “My Grandmother’s Love Letters.”)

The reading itself was very good. I read a revision of a new poem and a revision of an old one, a very emotional one, that I hadn’t shared with anyone in over a year. People responded to it well. I suppose *some* sentiment is something that is wanted.

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books, quotes, writing

it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire

“Here’s a secret. Many novelists, if they are pressed and if they are being honest, will admit that the finished book is a rather rough translation of the book they’d intended to write. It’s one of the heartbreaks of writing fiction. You have, for months or years, been walking around with the idea of a novel in your mind, and in your mind it’s transcendent, it’s brilliantly comic and howlingly tragic, it contains everything you know, and everything you can imagine, about human life on the planet earth. It is vast and mysterious and awe-inspiring. It is a cathedral made of fire.

But even if the book in question turns out fairly well, it’s never the book that you’d hoped to write. It’s smaller than the book you’d hoped to write. It is an object, a collection of sentences, and it does not remotely resemble a cathedral made of fire.

It feels, in short, like a rather inept translation of a mythical great work.

The translator, then, is simply moving the book another step along the translation continuum. The translator is translating a translation.”

– Michael Cunningham, “Found in Translation,” NYT

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