Mountain*7 - Music, Books, Culture

It was cold and windy, scarcely the day
to take a walk on that long beach
Everything was withdrawn as far as possible,
indrawn: the tide far out, the ocean shrunken,
seabirds in ones or twos.
The rackety, icy, offshore wind
numbed our faces on one side;
disrupted the formation
of a lone flight of Canada geese;
and blew back the low, inaudible rollers
in upright, steely mist.

The sky was darker than the water
--it was the color of mutton-fat jade.
Along the wet sand, in rubber boots, we followed
a track of big dog-prints (so big
they were more like lion-prints). Then we came on
lengths and lengths, endless, of wet white string,
looping up to the tide-line, down to the water,
over and over. Finally, they did end:
a thick white snarl, man-size, awash,
rising on every wave, a sodden ghost,
falling back, sodden, giving up the ghost...
A kite string?--But no kite.

I wanted to get as far as my proto-dream-house,
my crypto-dream-house, that crooked box
set up on pilings, shingled green,
a sort of artichoke of a house, but greener
(boiled with bicarbonate of soda?),
protected from spring tides by a palisade
of--are they railroad ties?
(Many things about this place are dubious.)
I'd like to retire there and do nothing,
or nothing much, forever, in two bare rooms:
look through binoculars, read boring books,
old, long, long books, and write down useless notes,
talk to myself, and, foggy days,
watch the droplets slipping, heavy with light.
At night, a grog a l'américaine.
I'd blaze it with a kitchen match
and lovely diaphanous blue flame
would waver, doubled in the window.
There must be a stove; there is a chimney,
askew, but braced with wires,
and electricity, possibly
--at least, at the back another wire
limply leashes the whole affair
to something off behind the dunes.
A light to read by--perfect! But--impossible.
And that day the wind was much too cold
even to get that far,
and of course the house was boarded up.

On the way back our faces froze on the other side.
The sun came out for just a minute.
For just a minute, set in their bezels of sand,
the drab, damp, scattered stones
were multi-colored,
and all those high enough threw out long shadows,
individual shadows, then pulled them in again.
They could have been teasing the lion sun,
except that now he was behind them
--a sun who'd walked the beach the last low tide,
making those big, majestic paw-prints,
who perhaps had batted a kite out of the sky to play with.

Elizabeth Bishop

This first appeared last July.

I do seem to have rather fallen for Elizabeth Bishop recently - and not just for the spare warm wisdom of her poetry. After reading a small piece about her somewhere I went looking; and in the gaps between these three anecdotes and in the poem at the end there is something quietly beautiful, worth finding.

The first piece comes from an interview Bishop gave to the Paris Review in 1978, just a year before her death, and is about her time as a student at Vassar in the 30s and her early thoughts on becoming a poet:

I probably wasn’t a good roommate either, because I had a theory at that time that one should write down all one’s dreams. That that was the way to write poetry. So I kept a notebook of my dreams and thought if you ate a lot of cheese at bedtime you’d have interesting dreams. I went to Vassar with a pot about this big – it did have a cover! – of Roquefort cheese that I kept in the bottom of my bookcase…

The second is also from the Paris Review interview and is about the circumstances of Bishop, then living in Brazil, receiving the news of her Pulitzer Prize win for North and South in 1956:

We lived on top of a mountain peak – really way up in the air (Rachel Cohen in her wonderful book, A Chance Meeting, has it that in this peak-top house which Bishop shared with Lota de Macedo Soares, they would often sit and read for hours and hours and clouds would drift in through the open windows). I was alone in the house with Maria, the cook. A friend had gone to market. The telephone rang. It was a newsman from the American embassy and he asked me who it was in English, and of course it was very rare to hear someone speak in English. He said, Do you know you’ve won the Pulitzer Prize? Well, I thought it was a joke. I said, Oh come on. And he said, Don’t you hear me? The telephone connection was very bad and he was shrieking. And I said, Oh, it can’t be. But he said it wasn’t a joke. I couldn’t make an impression on Maria with this news, but I felt I had to share it, so I hurried down the mountain half a mile or so to the next house, but no one was at home. I thought I should do something to celebrate, have a glass of wine or something. But all I could find in that house, a friend’s, were some cookies from America, some awful chocolate cookies – Oreos, I think – so I ended up eating two of those. And that’s how I celebrated wining the Pulitzer Prize.
The next day there was a picture in the afternoon paper – they take such things very seriously in Brazil – and the day after that my Brazilian friend went to the market again. There was a big covered market with stalls for every kind of comestible, and there was one vegetable man we always went to. He said, Wasn't that Dona Elizabetchy's picture in the paper yesterday? She said, Yes it was - she won a prize. And he said, You know, it's amazing! Last week Señora (Somebody) took a chance on a bicycle and she won! My customers are so lucky!
Isn't that marvellous?

And finally an anecdote taken from an essay Bishop wrote on the death of Marianne Moore her great friend and mentor:

I got to Madison Square Garden very early – we had settled on the hour because we wanted to see the animals before the show began – but Marianne was there ahead of me. She was loaded down: two blue cloth bags, one on each arm, and two huge brown papoer bags, full of something. I was given one of these. They contained, she told me, stale brown bread for the elephants. Because stale brown bread was one of the things they liked best to eat. (I later suspected that they might like stale white bread just as much but that Marianne had been thinking of their health.). As we went in and down to the lower level, where we could hear (and smell) the animals, she told me her preliminary plan for the circus. Her brother, Warner, had given her an elephant-hair bracelet, of which she was very fond, two or three strands of black hairs held together with gold clasps. One of the elephant hairs had fallen out and been lost. As I probably knew, elephant hairs grow only on the tops of the heads of very young elephants. In her bag, Marianne had a pair of strong nail scissors. I was to divert the adult elephants with the bread, and, if we were lucky, the guards wouldn’t observe her at the end of the line where the babies were, and she could take out the scissors and snip a few hairs from a baby’s head, to repair her bracelet.
She was quite right; the elephants adored stale brown bread and started trumpeting and pushing up against each other to get it. I stayed at one end of the line, putting slices of bread into the trunks of the older elephants, and Miss Moore went rapidly down to the other end where the babies were. The large elephants were making such a to-do that a keeper did come up my way, and out of the corner of my eye I saw Miss Moore leaning forward over the rope on tiptoe, scissors in hand. Elephant hairs are tough; I thought she would never finish her hair cutting. But she did, and triumphantly we handed out the rest of the bread and set off to see the other animals. She opened her bag and showed me three or four coarse, greyish hairs in a piece of Kleenex.

And then this beautiful wild song: across streets, across ages, channelling Whitman in full throated cry:

'An Invitation to Miss Marianne Moore'

From Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.
In a cloud of fiery pale chemicals,
please come flying,
to the rapid rolling of thousands of small blue drums
descending out of the mackerel sky
over the glittering grandstand of harbor-water,
please come flying.

Whistles, pennants and smoke are blowing. The ships
are signaling cordially with multitudes of flags
rising and falling like birds all over the harbor.
Enter: two rivers, gracefully bearing
countless little pellucid jellies
in cut-glass epergnes dragging with silver chains.
The flight is safe; the weather is all arranged.
The waves are running in verses this fine morning.
Please come flying.

Come with the pointed toe of each black shoe
trailing a sapphire highlight,
with a black capeful of butterfly wings and bon-mots,
with heaven knows how many angels all riding
on the broad black brim of your hat,
please come flying.

Bearing a musical inaudible abacus,
a slight censorious frown, and blue ribbons,
please come flying.
Facts and skyscrapers glint in the tide; Manhattan
is all awash with morals this fine morning,
so please come flying.

Mounting the sky with natural heroism,
above the accidents, above the malignant movies,
the taxicabs and injustices at large,
while horns are resounding in your beautiful ears
that simultaneously listen to
a soft uninvented music, fit for the musk deer,
please come flying.

For whom the grim museums will behave
like courteous male bower-birds,
for whom the agreeable lions lie in wait
on the steps of the Public Library,
eager to rise and follow through the doors
up into the reading rooms,
please come flying.
We can sit down and weep; we can go shopping,
or play at a game of constantly being wrong
with a priceless set of vocabularies,
or we can bravely deplore, but please
please come flying.

With dynasties of negative constructions
darkening and dying around you,
with grammar that suddenly turns and shines
like flocks of sandpipers flying,
please come flying.

Come like a light in the white mackerel sky,
come like a daytime comet
with a long unnebulous train of words,
from Brooklyn, over the Brooklyn Bridge, on this fine morning,
please come flying.

Thomas de Quincey

In the Sinclair/Will Self talk at the V&A we linked to a couple of weeks back, Sinclair gives an explicit nod to Thomas De Quincey - essaysist, sometime muse/albatross of the Wordsworth's and legendary opium addict - as the father of the art of psychogeography:

I think the whole tradition goes back to De Quincey and one particular phrase that he uses: the ‘north-west passage’ [see chapter 3, Confessions of an English Opium Eater -ed][2]. He describes, in the English Opium Eater, finding himself within the labyrinth of the mind, within the labyrinth of London. There is a concept called the ‘north-west passage' -- which is like the thread in the maze, like Ariadne's thread -- which could lead you out of London if you contact it. And he makes reference to Frobisher's voyages, the idea of actually navigating a passage through the ice to find a way out, to find a way between the Atlantic and the Pacific. And of course people attempting this disappear, they fall prey to cannibalism or scurvy or whatever.
De Quincey is the one who sees that this is a metaphor that applies perfectly to London, and that notion he floats is then taken up by later romantics like Arthur Machen and Edgar Allan Poe. They they sift it and test it.

This Radio 4 show from back in May whilst never explicitly about De Quincey's link to the genesis of psychogeography, is very much about his love of walking and his phenomenal stamina. (The urge to walk became psychopathological later in his life and fired by his laudanum addiction he was driven to walk incredible distances - when he lived in Edinburgh he apparently measured out his back garden and walked over a 1000 miles in a 90-day period).

The programme is presented by James Crowden who inherited De Quincey's walking stick which had been in the Crowden family since De Quincey's last landlady had presented it to Samuel Crowden back in the 1870s. The programme traces Crowden's last walk with the stick as he returns and donates it to its spiritual home, Dove Cottage - home to William and Dorothy Wordsworth and where De Quincey lived after they had left.

Download (from the marvellous Speechification): Thomas De Quincey - Walking A Stick Back Home

The Stringed Theory

Artist: The Stringed Theory
Album: Universal Relativity
Label: Stadtgruen

When the site blew up last year much was lost - dissolved like light into the blinding hole of webspace. One thing that I've been meaning to re-up was this short review of a gorgeous (and free) record from last year so...

The Stringed Theory is the project of Dustin Frelich who projects his warm pulses and fuzzy drones into space out of California - but releases music on the Web-only label Stadtgruen, a German label which, with no recourse to the piss-taking masses, pitches itself boldly into the fray with a manifesto that seeks to explore the divisions between culture and nature and is named after the urban green spaces of Berlin. Frelich's own project is remarkably apposite to this in that it utilises the language of particle physics and the medium of electronics to create what is essentially a sound full of soothing bucolic warmth. It's difficult to listen to this album, especially loud with headphones, and not feel a certain enveloping heat-haze fall over you, or to feel buoyed up by a real sense of pulsing levitation. In many respects ;i>Universal Relativity feels (and it is an album that you absorb as much as hear) close to the textures the shoegaze bands explored at the beginning of the early 90s - not so much the raw volume of My Bloody Valentine but the sonic cave cathedrals of the very early Verve recordings, or what Slowdive were trying to do with Pygmalion: it has a similar sense of dynamic space and at times it feels like the surface of drones and oscillations are going to part and reveals obscure nascent songs. A gorgeous album. And to top it all, it's available as a free download from the label.

Download: The Stringed Theory - Universal Relativity

The drifting white downy clouds are to the landsman what sails on the sea are to him that dwells by the shore,—objects of a large, diffusive interest. When the laborer lies on the grass or in the shade for rest, they do not much tax or weary his attention. They are unobtrusive. I have not heard that white clouds, like white houses, made any one’s eyes ache. They are the flitting sails in that ocean whose bound no man has visited. They are like all great themes, always at hand to be considered, or they float over us unregarded. Far away they float in the serene sky, the most inoffensive of objects, or, near and low, they smite us with their lightnings and deafen us with their thunder. We know no Ternate nor Tidore grand enough whither we can imagine them bound. There are many mare’s-tails to-day, if that is the name. What would a man learn by watching the clouds? The objects which go over our heads unobserved are vast and indefinite. Even those clouds which have the most distinct and interesting outlines are commonly below the zenith, somewhat low in the heavens, and seen on one side. They are among the most glorious objects in nature. A sky without clouds is a meadow without flowers, a sea without sails. Some days we have the mackerel fleet. But our devilishly industrious laborers rarely lie in the shade. How much better if they were to take their nooning like the Italians, relax and expand and never do any work in the middle of the day, enjoy a little Sabbath in the middle of the day.

From Henry David Thoreau's Journal - 24th June 1852

We Were Promised Jetpacks (photo by thomas hermoso)

More blistering, effortlessly great straight head guitar music from Scotland. Which isn't damning with faint praise as much as stating the obvious. We Were Promised Jetpacks (which might just be the best/worst name binary at the moment - inspired and trying to hard all at once) have got a template for sure - partly Postcard jangle, part tight-sprung Blondie rhythms (it's in that insistent tst-tst-tst of the hi-hat) - but much like their peers Frightened Rabbit they transcend their influences with sheer emotional force. There's nothing on release as yet, and their only EP was a freebie given out at gigs which is certainly elusive (if anyone has a copy and wants to trade or whatever then get in touch!) but the few songs that are out there are well worth tracking down. This track, 'Moving Clocks Run Slow,' is over at Paper Thin Walls - reviewed by...yes, Scott Hutchison of Frightened Rabbit.

Download:We Were Promised Jetpacks - Moving Clocks Run Slow

Listen: We Were Promised Jetpacks - Moving Clocks Run Slow

Nothing is as vast as empty things - Francis Bacon


Moselely Baths

Ten thousand years in the future, long after the Côte d’Azur had been abandoned, the first explorers would puzzle over these empty pits, with their eroded frescoes of tritons and stylised fish, inexplicably hauled up the mountainsides like aquatic sundials or the altars of a bizarre religion devised by a race of visionary geometers - JG Ballard


Victoria Baths

More abandoned swimming pools at Polar Inertia

Iain Sinclair (picture by Simon Crubellier)

I've been wondering about the transcript of this for some time, and now I see from the mighty Ballardian that it's finally appeared - Iain Sinclair and Will Self discussing the relative merits and histories of Psychogeography at the V&A. It's a mess, but an engaging, intruiging mess, with Self getting buried under the usual Sinclair blizzard - who is becoming the consumate orator. On some level it's odd that Sinclair has accepted Self's popularising of the psychogeography tag, as he's been scathing of it, and him, in the past. But what I think this points to is a tacit acknowledgement that the psychogeographic movement, in its latest incarnation at least, has reached some kind of end-point and will shortly disappear underground once more, the haunt of edge-worriers and tunnel-creepers, which to be fair is what Sinclair has always been anyway. Where Sinclair goes from here is anyone's guess - his book on Hackney, his lifeswork one supposes, is out next year...

Also from Sinclair - this scabrous rant in the latest LRB about the Olympic Park complex in the East End.

This is East London, four years short of that 17-day corporate extravaganza, the ‘primary strategic objective’ to which we are all so deeply mortgaged.