accumulations

my museum musings -- Seibert on history of tap-dancing

at the end of Eileen Myles Not Me p202 -- a note on How I wrote certain of my poems -- "I am obsessed with culture. It's my mental community...any person who lives alone knows the situation of feeling like some kind of private museum" -- For me,it's more like an old-fashioned glory-hole here, a cabinet of curiosities -- on poetics -- E Myles in Mad Pepper p166 comes op with "...You said it's female / didn't you? That the face of poverty/ is female which is a good line, it sounds/ like a good line, but it takes more than/ sound to make a good line. If you could/ get real truth in a line it would never / be a good line. That's a good line./ It sounds true, dosn't it? A good / line sounds true."

Perplexities with Systems of PayPal,Computershare Australia & Auck Uni Library simultaneously bring on misery & a lot of tinnitus. I actually had to go to town to fix the Library problem : it is not soluble on the internet. Morgan in Student Information got me sorted. Not easy. Well, that 's done now. & I get home to find the PayPal problem has been solved too - by email. & while I was in town I went to the Britomart Travel Centre [the old main Post Office building] to get my HOP card to travel on the buses, ferries & trains. First stop, the ticket office [$15] then to another office to get my Gold Card registered by woman who spent some time fiddling with computer & came up with all the answers. I'm now on their System. 

I stopped at the Music Library -- to see if there was anything useful in their free-give-away box -- then offered the librarian some 19th century printed music I have here & don't use.

New books: Brian Seibert. What the eye hears. A history of tap-dancing. Farrar, Straus& Giroux, 2015. Of course it encounters the rich annals of USA race relations & racism in the entertainment industry. Tap may have begun with clogs in UK but got caught up in Afro-American vaudeville & travelling show dancing with tap shoes. Adapted by Irving Berlin by 1914:"He had learned from a Negro ragtime pianist in New York's Chinatown in a dive called Nigger Mike's. (Nigger Mike was also a Russian Jew)". & the white adaptation - as in Paul Whiteman's white jazz & his imitator in UK Jack Hylton --"James Reese Europe's black dance band propelled the foxtrot of Vernon & Irene Castle, a clean-cut white couple who made rag-time dancing respectable". Joplin played early on in dives & brothels. Irene, Seibert says, citing the Dancing Times, explained that she took "nigger dances" & toned them down for the drawing-room -- & they've been that way ever since in British Ballroom dancing. Just listen to the bouncy Savoy Orpheans to ask do they ever consider swinging? or the miserable Strict Rhythms of Victor Silvester -- thank heavens for Rock & Roll. 

He has much to say about such wonderful dancers as the Nicholas Brothers & George Balanchine's admiration for them, when he choreographed Rodgers & Hart's Babes in Arms in 1937 & On Your toes. Balanchine's jazz-ballet choreography of Slaughter on 10th Avenue. Plenty to say about the racial mistreatment of Afro-American performers -- on stage & on screen -- the absurdity, for instance, of George Gershwin having to teach his performers in Porgy & Bess how to talk like coons.      

 

 

 

 

cafe reading -- Sunday May 22

reading more of Eileen Myles "Not Me" -- just as he's going out with wife small child & her friend he asks what I'm reading -- no conversation seems likely so I say just a book I found in the library -- young woman I've seen before there  busy writing in an A5 notebook, a couple of pages -- she tells me she can only get time to write about what's going on for a short while at weekends -- I show her what I'm reading & tell her something about the book & the writer -- she has a degree she works at a much visited tourist attraction looking after some of the exhibits -- originally wild creatures but these have been bred in captivity for 3 or 4 generations -- I guess she gets minimum wage -- a bit above she tells me but she loves the work -- she has a uni degree -- her husband works in a part of the medical service run by a charity -- I bet he has good educational qualification loves his work & gets poorly paid -- but I don't ask -- but talk with her about what she can do if she wants to get her writing out of her notebook & into a public space -- where she could read it & how to get it onto the internet -- lit mag or mainstream publishing is no longer the 1st option -- she talks enthusiastically about the work with the animals -- she doesn't write about that    

Eileen Myles - NOT ME

reading in cafe [heavy rain arrives] I sit longer - read Eileen Myles Not ME -'Hot Night' p56 -- ...I have/ no hope for/ my culture now./It prefers fictions/ over journals. It/ doesn't want/ my lives... p59 'Twentieth Century Dinosaur ....whole city seems empty/ of  love, just work/ work,work -- Bags under/ everyone's eyes, packages/ under their arms, two/ days after Macy's big/ sale & the blood/ lust still upon them...  pp 70-2'Peanut butter' ...Accidentally I/ read all the/ works of Proust./ It was summer/ I was here/ so was he. I...the Free Kelly Michaels poem 1988 --p90 ... Give/ the kids/ to the corporation/ not the/ devil-worshippers/ the corporation/ can stamp/ the child/ early. On/ her wrist/ or in her/ heart... [echoes of Jesuit education or as she says "Grammarschool nuns" & in govt charter-schools employing non-trained teachers ... 

 

Eileen Myles' Fan-Base Ignored at University of Auckland reading

Paula Green on a blog recently somewhere wanted a report on Eileen Myles reading [yesterday evg] becausee she cdnt get to hear it herself.

 

Eileen Myles Actual Existing Fan-Base Ignored ------- & damn near excluded from her public reading at Auck Uni -- fine reading! ---posters on campus & not a word on website School of Humanities -- not even NZEPC -- [not everyone interested is on Isla Selwyn's email list -- that is a fact --  I wdn't have known about it otherwise, & it was only because Michelle Leggott told her that she listed it with a recommendation from Michelle that the Reader was a good "Performer".

Look out Chris Kraus next time you come to talk/perform here -- this is not how it used to was before the neo-libs took over [wrecked the place]

the man sitting next to me had never heard of Eileen Myles & or / her New York contemporaries or in all probability the so-called Experimental Poets in NZ --- why was he there? -- PhD on behavioural cognition on sexual choices -- I cd tell he wasn't getting the humour [often aimed at social crit] poetry -- no response, seemed a bit annoyed by it --- on the other side was the professional business dressed Professor of whatever Social studies who it seems was the real sponsor. I shd have talked to her before the show, but there wasn't time....lots of applause from the 50 or so mainly young women students. I 'd like to know whether she had ever read anything by the poet-- ever heard of her before this month as a "Feminist,Lesbian" [or by Downtown New York] -- as if that accounts for her way of writing & performing [closely connected with poets & artists of previous recent generation who were of various variable genders -- e.g. John Ashberry, Frank O'Hara -- Bernadette Mayer, Ted Berrigan, Alice Notley -- Patti Smith, Tom Verlaine ..... I'm wrong? my next-seat neighbours are familiar with these figures of contemporary culture?    

Myles read a poem from "Not Me" [Semiotexte] -- University Libr. copy received 2002. Borrowed twice in 2009, twice in 2012 -- & still stiff to open & read nobody 'teaching' 1970s - 2016 New York poets lately post Ashberry/Schuyler/O'Hara? Let alone Bruce Andrews. "Chelsea Girls, 1997, Novel-Fiction Black Sparrow, has nore obviously been opened & read, but it's still in good enough nic to suppose not much more than half-a-dozen times -- can't see library date-stamps.The introducer thought it was "autobiography" which it isn't.

I've just been reading Roger Horrocks "The Re-Invention of New Zealand" -- a blow by blow account of the struggle to make anything beyond middle-brow mniddle-class entertainment arts in New Zealand for the past 60 years --- This is one more episode in the difficulty, this time in the new technical school version of education in the "Humanities" in which Poetry & Poetics Music & Painting/Sculpture have been central for at least 3000 years --- rapidly being killed off now. Well, look, Sociology was it rather than English the real sponsor it seems & not in the Arts Building but in the effin big steel glass concrete v expensivbe Business School paid for by a big-time NZ entrepreneur Glenn. There was a time when Business Studies was something you did on top of a degree or instead of a degree --- in a Busness School in which teaching was TRAINING -- no questioning the System esp NO discussion of Economics NO discussion of ethics NO discussion of social issues -- like, Labour Laws & Work & Remuneration, Housing, Food, Medicine, Social Welfare -- & NO discussion of process of thought & invention beyond the APPLICATION of existing engineering & mechanical & electronic solutions -- with NO idea how they had been thought up -- neither the theoretical basis nor the experimentation.    

Complete Failure to Recognize that there are poets & scholars outside the university who wd have been supportive of the intiative [I'm one, but not the only one] who have known & enjoyed Eileen Myles poetry for maybe 40 years -- I cd name them --- who hadn't heard about the reading -- [Downtown Scene of 1970s onwards] & who would have liked to hear her -- A PISS OFF  -- I spread the word as best I cd & actually got 'apologies' as for a meeting from hose who cdn' come --- mind you I only heard about it rather late in the piece.

[Fortunately, there is PennSound & the activities of the Kelly Writer's House. Much better than the time before the Internet, when the only source for contemporary poetry & poetics "overseas" was buying the magazines & books as they came out & recommending them to the Uni Library. But in those days, the sponsors knew who they were getting & for whose benefit. & followed through with their own teaching -- writing. !970s/80s/90s visits from Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein, Jackson Mac Low -- Chris Kraus when she was visiting on her own accord  -- Visits of Barrett Watten & Carla Harryman or of Rachel Blau DuPlessis was more like it. 

aaagh! -- [more stupid distracting politics, the whole morning gone by]