Author: Ivan Kreilkamp

You can contact me at ivan812 AT gmail.com

In the Puppet Gardens

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My friend Jonathan Bolton has edited and translated (and written an afterward for) a selection of poetry from the long career of the Czech poet Ivan Wernisch, In the Puppet Gardens: Selected Poems, 1963-2005.

I was immediately drawn into these strange & memorable poems. Sometimes they reminded me a bit of Marianne Moore, perhaps because they are filled with eerie animals (a “dead frog-mouse,” a “blind lioness” who “will snatch anyone who shouts”). They also contain quite a number of puppets and other uncannily animate objects that made me think of the stop-action animation of the Svankmajers.

“I Arrived at Nangah Sibau at a Bad Time” describes the arrival of a hair-growth tonic merchant in a small riverside town in Indonesia. “Who knows who was shooting whom/ Beyond the shadow of a doubt/ I wouldn’t be selling much hair-growth cream in this place.” He is writing to his lover, describing the “floating flowers, ilong-ilongs with blue-violet calyxes.” Someone keeps filling up his glass; “I fell asleep for a moment and dreamed that I was dreaming all this.” He decides to stay, but in the final lines we hear no more of our protagonist, just his wares: “Further on they say there are people with tails and horns/ And a suitcase with ten dozen jars of hair elixir stayed behind in Nangah Sibau.”

Several poems describe an uncanny moment in which a speaker doubts he still inhabits his own life. “Is this the continuation of someone else’s story, or am I finally returning to my own life?” In another poem, a man is handed a message which is then snatched away: “Go where you are going, go, this message is not for you.” The message, it is implied, was to mark his own death, which he has for some reason been spared, for the moment. Wernisch is drawn to images of death, or of freeze-frame stasis, within life. In another poem about a group shipwrecked, thankful that “the natives are letting us live,” “not a single leaf has moved from the time the last people were here.” One poem reads in its entirety: “They are still waiting,/ The fish frozen in the ice,/ to see when it ends.” The title “Death is Waiting for Us Elsewhere” [click link for this poem] could have named the entire collection.

“When the old man, marching, steps in the water, the branches start swaying and the little mechanical animals on them come alive Aha, now I know: this is a shooting gallery from which we can hit a different world”

A single expletive

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A funny example of the professoriate’s role in explaining/interpreting baseball’s magical thinking.

The article quotes professors of Early Modern history, comparative literature, and anthropology on the question of the efficacy of the David Ortiz jersey buried (and then dug up) outside Yankee stadium — an attempted curse on the Yankees apparently thwarted, or perhaps not. E.g. “To Michael Seidel, a professor of comparative literature at Columbia, Ortiz’s jersey presents an obvious parallel — the armor of Achilles, of course. “Who has the shield? Who has the armor? That’s the whole issue of ‘The Iliad,’ ” he said. “It’s a kind of talismanic power of the thing worn. What happens to it can create all kinds of havoc in classical literature.””

“Ortiz, who had heard of the buried jersey, was able to sum up his thoughts with a single expletive before adding, “I don’t pay attention to any of this.””

Wordy profs, when will you learn how to sum up your thoughts “with a single expletive”?

ABC Debate

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Check out this amazing question from George Stephanopoulos , 2:24 in:

“If you get the nomination, what will you do when Rev Wright’s sermons are played over and over and over again?”

What will you do when pundits bring this up over and over and over and over again?

Also note Hillary practically licking her lips and saying “oh goody!” when the moderators immediately bring up the “bitter clinging to guns” issue.

Invisible restaurants: Sir Taj

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I am stealing/ paying homage to my blog-buddy Don Quixote Was a Steel Drivin’ Man’s recurring feature, Invisible Restaurants, “Capsule Reviews of Restaurants No Longer in Existence.”

Actually I do not know for sure that Sir Taj is no longer in existence. I am probably spelling it wrong anyway. This is/was an Indian lunch place maybe on East 41st street or something… is my geography completely wrong? Jon and I worked as badly-paid glorified receptionists editorial assistants at a publishing house near the Flatiron building. Sir Taj had good, generously-portioned chicken tandoori for some ridiculous price, maybe $3.50 or something? Initially my colleague (and old friend) Jon and I would only go there once a week or so — after all it was almost a 15 minute walk and we only had an hour lunch break, officially anyway. But that winter, I started going there 3 or 4 times a week, by myself if necessary. Somehow it seemed absolutely impossible to bring my own lunch; I was totally poor; and the cheap options close by work were lousy. The guys who worked at Sir Taj were impassive-faced as they handed over my tandoori and would never nod or in any way acknowledge me as a regular. I found out later that George sent a letter to me care of the restaurant, describing my appearance on the envelope, saying that I always wore a long scarf and was there several days a week for lunch. Of course, I never got it, I’m sure they threw it out.

French Theory

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Stanley Fish’s column on the new book by Francois Cusset, French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. (Uggh, the hundreds of comments are irritating.) Also see Scott McLemee’s column in Inside Higher Ed.

In “a particularly sharp-eyed chapter titled “Students and Users,”” McLemee writes, Cusset “offers an analysis of how adopting a theoretical affiliation can serve as a phase in the psychodrama of late adolescence (a phase of life with no clearly marked termination point, now). To become Deleuzian or Foucauldian, or what have you, is not necessarily a step along the way to the tenure track. It can also serve as “an alternative to the conventional world of career-oriented choices and the pursuit of top grades; it arms the student, affectively and conceptually, against the prospect of alienation that looms at graduation under the cold and abstract notions of professional ambition and the job market….This relationship with knowledge is not unlike Foucault’s definition of curiosity: ‘not the curiosity that seeks to assimilate what it is proper for one to know, but that which enables one to get free of oneself’….””

Ironically (?), this made me think about my experience teaching “theory” in our Intro to Theory and Criticism course. I had assumed that students would find the straight theory stuff to be a difficult pill to swallow, and that the literary criticism would seem comparatively clear and straight-forward. But in fact they found, say, Vendler on Keats to be impossibly dense, allusive and insular, but if I effectively framed something like Jameson on postmodernism, or Irigaray or Judith Butler on gender, the students ate it up. One option for the final project in that class was to use theoretical models we’d encountered to analyze a work of popular culture. I remember well two wonderful papers I got on the fan cultures of anime, and about the Transformers phenomenon (specifically, the way the old Transformers toys were repurposed and marketed to a new generation in the 1990s).

My insight was that the students could really get into theory if it were presented to them as a kind of philosophy for living in postmodernity. Maybe even as “affective and conceptual” armor for the challenges (and let’s face it, the sometimes-grim prospects for a new college graduate) of life in 21st century capitalism.

Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks “Out of Reaches”

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My favorite song on the excellent Real Emotional Trash — a beautiful dirgy ballad that recalls some of Pavement’s more crushingly melancholy moments. I’ve been puzzling out what it’s about. I did a blog search and only came up with one person who really tried to interpret it, suggesting some persuasive-seeming ideas about the whole album being (possibly autobiographically) about “familial anomie” and a marriage in trouble (“taking out the wife,” “daddy’s on the run”).

The song seems to be about an affair with a woman who believes in signs & portents, astrology and tarot (or maybe it’s the marriage, not an affair). “You’ve got omens that are tailor-made for every situation that you’re conjuring… So pull your little crystal from the boulevard.” This made me think of that great Go-Betweens song “The House Jack Kerouac Built:” “With your kittens on the patchwork quilt,/ Oh no, what am I doing here, in the house jack kerouac built./ There’s white magic, and bad rock’n’roll,/ Your friend there says, he’s the gatekeeper to my soul./ The velvet curtains/ The chinese bell/ With friends like these; you’re damned as well./ Keep me away from her.” I always took that to be a kind of anti-scuzzy-rock-and-roll song and a statement of purpose on the part of the Go-Betweens, a pop band in the heart of Stooges-loving Australia. Also a song about distrust of bohemia in a certain guise (linked with self-destructive behavior and stupid aesthetics).

That doesn’t seem to be what’s going on in Malkmus’s song, though; maybe the mockery of the crystals and omens is just incidental. The song and maybe the album definitely seem to be about intimacy and its failures. On the one hand, “gale force intimacy/ every time I get some I feel oh so near,” but on the other, the title phrase: “out of reaches.” Given that Malkmus repeats the latter phrase many times, you end up feeling that this sense of intimacy with the witchy woman blew in and then out again like a passing storm, leaving him (/the singer) frozen and sad, out of reach. “Point me in the direction of your real emotional trash.” And of course there’s the other devastating (albeit bouncy) chorus, “I am a cold…. son.” Some kind of male father/son/husband guilt coursing through the album.

On the other hand, a lot of it is just funny, catchy, and silly too (“Gardenia”).

Oh and be sure to check out the hilarious Malkmus interview on Fox TV.

Boss donkey

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not an actual donkey we sawSarah and I and the girls went to visit some donkeys and a horse at a nearby stable. They had gone last week without me. I wasn’t sure it was necessarily OK to wander in and feed the animals, but Sarah was confident this was all right. There were 7 or so donkeys and a horse, also a sweet barn cat who followed us out to the field and acted as if she wanted some celery and carrots too. The donkeys were very adorable; they seem miniaturized like a puppy or kitten. There was one boss donkey who wanted all the food and definitely wanted to be in charge of who got the food when. There was a bit of boss-donkey-management required — one of us had to tempt him away to one side with some good carrot pieces and then the other subservient donkeys could quickly be fed a few pieces.