The Broken Estate

Being an amateur photographer, etymologically speaking, it seems ill fitted to comment on anything  I produce. However , I’m more than pleased if others are so inclined. I showed the photograph below to the marketing director at a Seattle coffee roaster and they were so impressed it will be used in future website pages and printed materials. The photograph is of a large batch roaster produced in Germany in 1938.

1938 Coffee Roaster.

The Negligible

I lie in bed listening to it sing

in the dark about the sweetness

a brief love and the perfection of loves

that might have been. The spirit cherishes

the disregarded. It is because the body continues

to fail at remembering the smell of Michiko

that her body is so clear in me after all this time.

There is a special pleasure in remembering the shine

of her spoon merging with faint sounds

in the distance of her rising from the bathwater.

– Jack Gilbert, from the collection ‘Refusing Heaven‘, published by Alfred A.Knopf, 2010.

– Painting, ‘Bather’ by Pierre Bonnard, 1935.

 

I AM GOING TO START LIVING LIKE A MYSTIC

Today I am pulling on a green wool sweater

and walking across the park in a dusky snowfall.

The trees stand like twenty-seven prophets in a field,

each a station in a pilgrimage – silent, pondering.

Blue flakes of light falling across their bodies

are the ciphers of a secret, an occultation.

I will examine their leaves as pages in a text

and consider the bookish pigeons, students of winter.

I will kneel on the track of a vanquished squirrel

and stare into a blank pond for the figure of Sophia.

I shall begin scouring the sky for signs

as if my whole future were constellated upon it.

I will walk home alone with the deep alone,

a disciple of shadows, in praise of the mysteries.

Edward Hirsch – Lay Back the Darkness

THE OLD AGE OF NOSTALGIA

Those hours given over to basking in
the glow of an imagined future, of being
carried away in streams of promise
by a love or a passion so strong that one
felt altered forever and convinced that
the smallest particle of the surrounding
world was charged with a purpose of
impossible grandeur; ah yes, and one
would look up into the trees and be
thrilled by the wind-loosened river of
pale and gold foliage cascading down and
by the high melodious singing of countless
birds; those moments, so many and
so long ago, still come back, but briefly,
like fireflies in the perfumed heat of a
summer night.

— Mark Strand

When remarking on a Mark Strand poem it often seems there’s little do: direct the reader to the page, then let the imagination, of sound, sight and mind take over. Yet a few comments are of note in this most recent work.

The title aptly indicates that nostalgia itself has an age, it is intimately bound to our reflections and sense of place.  Novalis famously wrote that “philosophy is essentially homesickness.” We find ourselves uprooted in the world, and even if the notion is merely inchoate, there is a desire to return, to find ourselves from whence we emerged, even if in our dreams alone. Strand surely knows this, nostalgia having roots in the Greek, being able to denote not only a wistful sense of a lost place and time, but also, more viscerally, to refer to an open wound, something which needs to be healed. If health is to be restored, time at least is essential. Strand is clearly a poet of ideas, but they are rooted in rich and mysterious language and images.

The nostalgic elements of youth are scattered throughout the poem, but often with a hint of their own future appearance. So the love and passion of youth are paired with leaves that are already pale and gold. The notion of time as a long flowing river is Greek as well, and again Strand strews together the wind, memory and streams of promise, all carried forwards and backwards at once, with an imagination replete with the memory of desire. And finally, as is fitting for trying to capture lost time, there is less and less of it and the memories come less often. Fading, glinting hints of traces of desire. The poem is evocative from the first line to the end, but the last four lines have the stamp of inevitability. The implication being that the word order and choice of these ending lines could not possibly be stronger. The fading memory still flares with youthful longing and the nearly ineffable expression of what it feels like to dwell in such a state. But, “briefly / like fireflies in the perfumed heat / of a summer night” is probably as close as language admits. Strand’s word choices match the fleeting experience; the time is short, even in youth, perfume fades quickly, gliding across the sensed air like the glittering fireflies , and summer is all too brief a season, the leaves are already pale and gold, and the imagined future has arrived. As Paul Valéry wrote, “The future isn’t what it used to be.” No, it is not, but it is as we imagined it.

The poem was originally published in the November 10, 2011 edition of The New York Review of Books.

Through subtle reflection upon the etymological origins of the world conversation, The Broken Estate has realized a sabbatical is due. Until the author behind this enigmatic and far ranging blog can progress with the problem of how to not only bring eyeballs to the posts but even more radically have the content be read and discussed, no further material will emerge. Profound thanks go out to my noiseless entourage for their undying encouragement and support to continue in spite of abject failure with version 1.0 of the blog. As with many first acts, the problems are now quite well understood, but the solutions are not even embryonic at this time.

The final post, should it per chance be read, concludes with the five most moving and challenging books the blog creator has read in the last decade. Much could be said on each of the books noted below, but the highest compliments I can bestow upon each is that I have read each work at least twice and given several of the titles as gifts to family and friends. Reading, one hopes, will yield personal delight and engaged conversation. One hopes.

1. The Rest Is Noise, Alex Ross, published  by Picador.
2. River of Shadows: Eadweard Muybridge and the Technological Wild West, Rebecca Solnit, published by Penguin.
3. Memoirs of Hadrian, Marguerite Yourcenar, published by Farrar,Strauss & Giroux.
4. The Broken Estate: Essays on Literature and Belief, James Wood, published by Modern Library.
5. But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz, by Geoff Dyer, published by Picador.

Final note,  much as I would like to claim as my own the wondrous expression ‘my noiseless entourage’, it is taken from a poem by Charles Simic.

Passing along a link for my noiseless entourage to the Best American Poetry site and the  wonderful literary curator behind it, David Lehman. The link is worth following for many reasons: principally Mr. Lehman himself, a fine editor as well as essayist, additionally the topics he is engaged by in his own writing, and finally, the annual publication itself. The second reason applies here with real force, Lehman is initiating a virtual dialog with Harold Bloom on a number of topics, most interestingly the question of whether the death of irony also means the death of reading. Engage.

Modifier changed in second to last paragraph and links changed to open new windows.

Sometimes the most important part of a story is what is only suggested, but sometimes stories miss their own strongest point. In this post from the Book Bench at The New Yorker, the lead isn’t only buried, it’s absent. It’s easy to be a critic and far more challenging to create, so I’ll start with what the piece gets right.

Macy Halford, author of the post, notes the passing of Borders, where all media could be consumed in strip malls, didn’t seems to matter to most of us.  The real news in the publishing world is that Amazon is starting an imprint, imaginatively named Amazon. Halford points out this is the fifth venture of this kind for the bookseller but it’s the first time they’ve signed up an author that routinely tops the Times best seller list with a series of books helping up realize that everything we need to do can be accomplished in somewhere between fifteen minutes to four hours, (Halford is very funny in making this point). So this raises the standard questions: how will this impact the independent bookseller? How will it effect the other publishing houses? Does it mean Amazon is becoming monopolistic in trying to control content, sales and distribution? All worthy questions, but the question not raised was how does this venture impact the choices available to the reader?

The Times best selling author in question is Timothy Ferriss. I’ve never read a word of his product, but every title by Ferriss that Halford cites I’m aware of, and not just because I browse the Times list. A four hour work week, four hour body and now four hour chef all have a surface appeal that is undeniable. The most precious commodity we have isn’t a commodity, it’s time. Time enables possibilities, all kinds of possibilities, maybe even a chance to become super human. Ferriss isn’t unique in offering amazing claims about what can be achieved; the self-help section of any bookstore, virtual or brick and mortar, presents our species with claims for realizing happiness in record time, and all ultimately reducible to either wishing in a very concentrated manner or simply following a repeatable series of steps. His work is an alternative to The Secret. The self-help gurus clearly split along gender lines; woman need to use their powers of intuition to bring about the life they want, whereas men need the proper set of techniques to achieve the good life. My point in citing Ferriss and self-help manuals isn’t to take out and all too easy mark, but instead to note the extreme popularity of this category of publishing.

Self-help books along with scandal filled memoirs now account for over eighty percent of publisher sales. Apparently after achieving happiness we still take pleasure in using all that extra time to read about the suffering of others, especially if they are famous. The literary quality of both these publishing categories is not even up for consideration, either by the reader or the publisher. So when Amazon decides to inaugurate their imprint with the next book from Mr. Ferriss, the impact, regardless of the success of the imprint, is significant. As Halford notes, Amazon’s command  of the reseller market share is staggering, so all the other publishers and booksellers are going to take note. Most importantly, this choice results in an already financially struggling publishing sector to become even more adverse to taking a chance on new authors or interesting or challenging works. The role of the editor in both promoting new authors as well as aiding the work of established ones becomes significantly diminished. The self-help and memoir titles are only edited as far as spell checking and clearing the legal bar to avoid potential lawsuits. Beyond that, they are not reviewed.  And so, finally, to the reader.

The reader, the curious and intelligent reader, is being cut off at the knees. The sheer number of choices available to the intelligent reading public is being throttled at the source by the success of categories on publishers lists they would probably not even consider browsing, much less taking home. This has always been the case, but never before has the climate for both publishers and booksellers been so risk adverse. So, throw up our collective hands and say it’s over? The best we can hope for is an ever dwindling number of titles that somehow are works of literary merit and still somehow managed to be a financial success? Not yet, there is a model that could work to the advantage of the independent publisher, the independent bookstore and the intelligent reader.

This model requires an active reader and bookseller, willing to commit both time and financial support. The model has already proven successful in the world of music and there’s no reason to believe it couldn’t work for publishing as well. Even further, it could potentially work for any individual artist or collective. But it demands a transformation in how we think about publishers, writers, editors and readers. They need to be seen as a mutually beneficial and dependent set of connections, a community all contributing in unique ways towards promoting new and challenging works of all categories of publishing.

But imaginary reader, that’s for another post. But if you want to get an idea of where this is heading, see the following links for Artists Share, Kickstarter and Wave Books. Also included is the link to the original post from the Book Bench.

http://www.artistshare.com/home/default.aspx

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/637783296/darshan-photographic-series-on-indian-deities?ref=live

http://www.wavepoetry.com/

http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2011/08/feeling-out-amazon-new-york.html