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.
Comments