Monday, August 31, 2009

Visual evidence the Ovid marathon really happened


I am still shaking my head that The Pulitzer Foundation of the Arts threw open its doors for two days of the widest variety of St. Louis people reading from Ovid's great poem of change, the Metamorphoses. Before I realized that ink pens were verboten, I made this crude sketch of my friend the poet Stefene Russell reading from the epic.


Stef's huband Thom Fletcher took a shot from the same angle during a different reader's performance.



He also snapped his beloved boning up on her Ovid. I am supposing she was trying to divine where she might come in, based upon how far the marathon had progressed by that point. All any of us knew going in was where in the list of 74 readers we would be doing our 15-minute stint, so there was no reliable way to rehearse.


I also sketched K. Curtis Lyle, who read right after Stefene. He objected that this was more of a likeness to The Wolfman than to himself, but everybody is a critic. Note that both Curtis and Stefene signed my sketches of them during the impromptu happy hour out back at The Pulitzer.

Stefene, Curtis and I all serve on the Poetry Scores board; we have scored Stefene's work and hosted an Art Invitational for poems by both of them; and I am the organization's creative director. So, given that all three of us read in the Ovid marathon, I'll call this almost a collaboration between the monied Pulitzer and the scrappy us.

We plan to shoot for a more official collaboration in the future. After all, we translate poetry into other media, and they host poetry readings in connection to a painting exhibition. We're right there with the thoughts ...

More on the Ovid marathon in subsequent posts, including: Now that we know Rachel Storch wants Jeff Smith's open Senate seat, and now that we know precisely what stretch of the Metamorphoses she read, what does the great poem of change have to say about upcoming changes in her political career?

Sunday, August 30, 2009

Dante, Cromwell & the phenomenon of the century



I have invited myself to show in the 2009 Poetry Scores Art Invitational, and though I'm not yet sure if I will accept my invitation, I have begun making "work" for the show - if you can call it work to draw a caricature of an historical personage with a Sharpie by copying off a portrait displayed on a laptop screen subsequent to a Google image search.

The premise of our Invitationals is that artists have to make work that responds to the poem we are scoring and is titled after a verbatim scrap of the poem. This year we are scoring The Sydney Highrise Variations by the Australian poet Les Murray, which has a movement that meditates on the phenomenon of the century as a concept for a unit of time. He decides it's a modern invention.

The Nineteenth Century. The Twentieth Century.
There were never any others. No centuries before these.
Dante was not hailed in his time as an Authentic
Fourteenth Century Voice. Nor did Cromwell thunder, After all,
in the bowels of Christ, this is the Seventeenth Century
! *
Since it's kind of my thing to draw faces of people, I thought it would be fun to draw Dante and Cromwell, name the drawings after those verbatim quotes from the poem - "Dante" and "Cromwell" - and import the funny things Les writes about the poet and the Lord Protector as a caption and a speech bubble.

My technique, if you can call it that, resembles the bad drawings in coloring books used in Sunday school, and in fact I have my six-year-old Leyla coloring my discards. They look quite a bit better than my untinted drawings, so if I do accept my invitation, I'll probably put out a stack of Leyla's colorations near my "work".

If I accept my invitation, it won't be the first time. Last year I drew the Cuban revolutionary Che Guevara as a banker, an image in K. Curtis Lyle's poem Nailed Seraphim, subject of our 2008 Invitational.

The Sydney Highrise Art Invitational is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts. It will have plenty of real, actual artists making real, actual art; if anything, I'll provide a little comic relief.

More in this series

Edmondson to make pinewood derby for Invitational
Dana Smith confirms for 2009 Art Invitational
Colin Michael Shaw confirms for 2009 Art Invitational

* Free mp3

I really like the way we scored this part of the poem, by the way, in the song “The C19-20” (Les' name for the hybrid century that he considers the first century). That's the poet himself fronting Three Fried Men, with Yo La Tengo's producer Roger Moutenot on drums.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

Edmondson to make pinewood derby for Invitational


This arrived in the email yesterday - it's a fanciful pinewood derby car made by the artist Greg Edmondson. He calls the contraption "Blinky Palermo," after the German painter who, in turn, adopted the moniker from an American gangster and prizefighting promoter.

Greg made the toy car on a lark for Pierogi a Go-Go, a 15th birthday party for the influential Brooklyn gallery, where artists will race (on a 60-foot track) little cars, powered by gravity alone, that they have crafted from a kit consisting of one 6 x 2 x 3 inch block of wood, two axles and four wheels.

Greg is really getting into the spirit of event - serious artists making childish cars that will be exhibited in a gallery in New York after they have been raced. He even made a poster for the occasion.



This poster is purposely crude in execution. As a tour of Greg's website will make clear, he is more than capable of making art that is beautiful and impressive when that is what he sets out to do. Here, he is just goofing around.

I really want Greg to contribute to the Poetry Scores Art Invitational this year, as he did last year, but I also know he is pretty fed up with the St. Louis art scene (again) and not exactly itching to show in this town.

So last night, as we drank beers at The Tap Room and he yarned about Blinky Palermo - "it may not be the fastest car, but it does glow in the dark!" - it hit me that the poem we are scoring this year, The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray, begins atop a bridge, in a car .

So we're sitting over our sick beloved engine
atop a great building of the double century
on the summit that exhilarates cars, the concrete vault on its thousands
of tonnes of height, far above the tidal turnaround.
"I know!" I told Greg. "Make another car for the Invitational! Make another pinewood derby car! You can title it 'sick beloved engine' or 'exhilarates cars'" (work for our Invitational needs to be inspired by the poem and titled using a verbatim quote from it).

"I like 'sick beloved engine,'" Greg said.

"Yeah! And then your piece will be at the very beginning of the show!" (we display the pieces based on where in the flow of the poem the language used for their titles appears). "We can even rig up some kind of a track and take it for a spin!"

By the end of the night, I actually had talked him into it!

*

More in this series

Dana Smith confirms for 2009 Art Invitational
Colin Michael Shaw confirms for 2009 Art Invitational

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

THE SYDNEY HIGHRISE VARIATIONS



The text of Les Murray's poem is posted for the benefit of visual artists contributing to Poetry Scores' 2009 Art Invitational. Contributing artists will make work in response to the poem and title their piece using a verbatim quote from the poem. We will then hang the work in the space according to where in the flow of the poem the language chosen for the title appears. The Invitational is scheduled for Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts.


THE SYDNEY HIGHRISE VARIATIONS
By Les Murray

1. Fuel Stoppage on Gladesville Road Bridge
in the Year 1980

So we're sitting over our sick beloved engine
atop a great building of the double century
on the summit that exhilarates cars, the concrete vault on its thousands
of tonnes of height, far above the tidal turnaround.

Gigantic pure form, all exterior, superbly uninhabited
or peopled only by transients at speed, the bridge
is massive outline.

It was inked in by scaffolding and workers.
Seen from itself, the arch
is an abstract hill, a roadway up-and-over without country,
from below, a ponderous grotto, all entrance and vast shade
framing blues and levels.
From a distance, the flyover on its vaulting drum
is a sketched stupendous ground-burst, a bubble raising surface
or a rising heatless sun with inset horizons.

Also, it's a space-probe,
a trajectory of strange fixed dusts, that were milled,
boxed with steel rod mesh and fired, in stages,
from sandstone point to point. They docked at apogee.
It feels good. It feels right.
The joy of sitting high is in our judgement.
The marvellous brute-force effects of our century work.
They answer something in us. Anything in us.

2. View of Sydney, Australia, from
Gladesville Road Bridge

There's that other great arch eastward, with its hanging highways;
the headlands and horizons of packed suburb, white among
bisque-fired, odd smokes rising;
there's Warrang, the flooded valley, that is now the ship-chained Harbour,
recurrent everywhere, with its azure and its grains;
ramped parks, bricked containers,
verandahs successive around walls,
and there's the central highrise, multi-storey, the twenty-year countdown,
the new city standing on its haze above the city.

Ingots of sheer
affluence poles
bomb-drawing grid
of columnar profit
tunnels in the sky
high window printouts
repeat their lines
repeat their lines
credit conductors
repeat their lines
bar graphs on blue
glass tubes of boom
in concrete wicker
each trade Polaris
government Agena
fine print insurrected
tall things on a tray

All around them is the old order: brewery brick terrace hospital
horrible workplace; the scale of the tramway era,
the peajacket era, the age of the cliff-repeating woolstores.
South and west lie the treeless suburbs, a mulch of faded flags,
north and partly east, the built-in paradise forest.

3. The Flight from Manhattan

It is possible the heights of this view are a museum:
though the highrise continues desultorily along some ridges,
canned Housing, Strata Title,
see-through Office Space,
upright bedsteads of Harbour View,
residential soviets,
the cranes have all but vanished from the central upsurge.

Hot-air money-driers,
towering double entry,
Freud's cobwebbed poem
with revolving restaurant,
they took eighty years to fly here from Manhattan
these variant towers. By then, they were arriving everywhere.

In the land of veneers,
of cladding, of Cape Codding
(I shall have Cape Codded)
they put on heavy side.

The iron ball was loose in the old five-storey city
clearing bombsites for them. They rose like nouveaux accents
and stilled, for a time, the city's conversation.

Their arrival paralleled
the rise of the Consumers
gazing through themselves
at iconoclasms, wines,
Danish Modern ethics.

Little we could love expanded to fill the spaces
of high glazed prosperity. An extensive city
that had long contained the dimensions of heaven and hell
couldn't manage total awe at the buildings of the Joneses.

Their reign coincided
with an updraft of Ideology,
that mood in which the starving
spirit is fed upon the heart.

Employment and neckties and ruling themes ascended
into the towers. But they never filled them.
Squinting at them through the salt
and much-washed glass of her history, the city kept her flavour
fire-ladder high, rarely above three storeys.

In ambiguous battle at length, she began to hedge
the grilles of Aspiration. To limit them to standing
on economic grounds. With their twists of sculpture.

On similar grounds we are stopped here, still surveying
the ridgy plain of houses. Enormous. England's buried gulag.
The stacked entrepot, great city of the Australians.

4. The C19-20

The Nineteenth Century. The Twentieth Century.
There were never any others. No centuries before these.
Dante was not hailed in his time as an Authentic
Fourteenth Century Voice. Nor did Cromwell thunder, After all,
in the bowels of Christ, this is the Seventeenth Century!

The two are one aircraft in the end, the C19-20,
capacious with cargo. Some of it can save your life,
some can prevent it.
The cantilevered behemoth
is fitted up with hospitals and electric Gatling guns
to deal with recalcitrant and archaic spirits.

It rose out of the Nineteenth, steam pouring from venturi
and every man turning hay with a wooden fork
in the Age of Piety (A.D. or B.C.) wants one
in his nation's airline. And his children dream of living
in a palace of packing crates beside the cargo terminal:
No one will see! Everything will be surprises!

Directly under the flightpath, and tuned to listening,
we hear the cockpit traffis, the black box channel
that can't be switched off: Darwinians and Lawrentians
are wrestling for the controls,
We must take her into Space! We must fly in potent circles!

5. The Recession of the Joneses

The worldwide breath of Catching Up
may serve to keep the mighty, slowing
machine aloft beyond our lifetime:
nearly all of the poor are blowing.

The soaring double century
might end, and mutate, and persist;
as we've been speaking, the shadows of
bridges, cranes, towers have shifted east.

When we create our own high style
skill and the shadow will not then part;
as rhetoric would conceal from art
effort has at best a winning margin.

The sun, that is always catching up
with night and day and month and year,
blazes from its scrolled bare face: To be
solar, I must be nuclear --


Six hundred glittering and genteel towns
gathered to be urban in plein air,
more complex in their levels than their heights
and vibrant with modernity's strange anger.

*

Sydney highrise photo from somebody's Flickr.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Dana Smith confirms for 2009 Art Invitational

Dana Smith confirmed for the 2009 Poetry Scores Art Invitational, which made me really happy. I wasn't exactly surprised, since Dana has helped us out before, but I reserve the right to be happy even when I am not surprised.


Maybe I was surprised because of what I remembered of Dana's work. I wouldn't want to admit to limiting the artistic range of a friend unfairly, but because I associated Dana with painting musicians and other human figures I really hadn't figured him as a vertical space, architectural artist.


What does that have to do with anything? The 2009 Poetry Scores Art Invitational is devoted to the Australian poet Les Murray's great meditation on modernity and vertical space, The Sydney Highrise Variations.


What's more, Dana chose as the subject and title for the painting he will submit to the show a phrase that disguises the phallic (Freudian) character of vertical space archictecture: "Freud's cobwebbed poem".

For our Art Invitational, artists make work in response to the poem we are scoring and give the work a title that is drawn verbatim from it. The poem then in effect hangs the show, as we place work on the walls based on where in the flow of the poem the language used for the title appears.

The Invitational will be held Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts, 4900 Reber Place at South Kingshighway, right across from Tower Grove Park and a block and a skip from The Royale, where we will have the afterparty.

*

All images from Dana Smith paintings.

Sunday, August 23, 2009

Colin Michael Shaw confirms for 2009 Art Invitational




Colin Michael Shaw confirmed yesterday that he will participate in Poetry Scores' 2009 Art Invitational, which will be devoted to the Australian poet Les Murray's great meditation on modernity and vertical space, The Sydney Highrise Variations.

These are just sketches of his, rather than fully realized paintings, but I love them - I love sketchbooks, and even the idea of a sketchbook - so I popped them on up here.

Colin read the poem and said he was struck by some of the imagery toward the end, when Les writes about "600 glittering and genteel towns," so perhaps he will work on something for that imagery, though he has not yet given me a title.

For our Art Invitational, artists make work in response to the poem we are scoring and give the work a title that is drawn verbatim from it. The poem then in effect hangs the show, as we place work on the walls based on where in the flow of the poem the language used for the title appears. So, if Colin sticks with imagery that comes late in the poem, his piece will appear toward the end of the show.

I was gratified to hear that Colin embraces our approach of providing a low opening bid for work going into the Invitational, where we sell the art on silent auction and split proceeds evenly three ways (artist/venue/Poetry Scores). He said he often struggles with galleries complaining that he prices his work too low. Especially when everyone is so broke, I see no other way to go.

The Invitational will be held Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts, 4900 Reber Place at South Kingshighway, right across from Tower Grove Park and a block and a skip from The Royale, where we will have the afterparty.

Other than Heather Corley, whom I roped in some time ago, Colin was my first confirmed artist for the show, though I believe Poetry Scores board president Dianna Lucas already got a yes from Jon Cournoyer and there are a number of us making invites. In fact, I got another yes today that I'll tell you about tomorrow. I'll keep you posted, literally, as the confirmations come in!

Saturday, August 22, 2009

Mockup for Sydney Highrise Variations poetry score


As we begin our final, frenetic push toward completing the recordings for our poetry score to The Sydney Highrise Variations by Les Murray, it becomes time to assemble ye olde dread online mockup, so as to have - all in one place, for everyone working on the project to consult - a snapshot of where we are now for each of the 27 tracks that will go on the final record.

We will release the final CD on Friday, Nov. 13 at The Luminary Center for the Arts, along with an Art Invitational where artists respond to the poem. The work will be sold on silent auction, with proceeds split equally between artist, venue and our organization Poetry Scores.

The Sydney Highrise Variations























*

My coproducer Matt Fuller and I will shuttle through this mockup this evening in a phone conference and assemble final notes on what we need to do to finish this thing. It's ever a challenge, when the core musicians for the project are dispersed between St. Louis, Nashville, Los Angeles and Chicago.

*

The image is an architectural drawing by Lij, which will form the basis of the cover art.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Six band songs to track in Nashvegas in October


Poetry Scores has settled upon The Luminary for our 2009 Art Invitational, which is devoted to the poem The Sydney Highrise Variations by the great Australian poet Les Murray. The date of the invitational is set for Friday, November 13, which makes that our deadline to have copies of the CD to our poetry score back from the printer.

It's going to be a blur, getting from here to there; but we are committed to getting there.

Large chunks of the score are finished or close to finished, thanks to a wildly successful tracking session in Nashville and several nights working with archival materials in Adam Long's St. Louis studio. But we still have six band songs to track from scratch, in addition to quite a bit of overdubbing and mixing.

Here are sketches of those last six songs, with notes on how we might arrange them (the titles open to mp3s).

*

"The new city standing on its haze"

This sketch is a pretty good indicator of what the final track should sound like: the poet reading over slide guitar with Lij humming over his guitar part. In the best of all possible worlds, Lij will work this up on his own in advance, then we can just overdub Dave Melson's bass when we get to Nashville for our final October 16-18 session; not convinced we need drums on this one.

*

"Repeat their lines"

This, however, needs to be a full-blown rock band song. Here are the lyrics from Les' poem:

Ingots of sheer
affluence poles
bomb-drawing grid
of columnar profit
tunnels in the sky
high window printouts
repeat their lines
repeat their lines
credit conductors
repeat their lines
bar graphs on blue
glass tubes of boom
in concrete wicker
each trade Polaris
government Agena
fine print insurrected
tall things on a tray
The poet has already provided the hook here, "repeat their lines," and as elegant as it is to have precisely the number of repetitions he uses in the poem, the temptation is strong to repeat the hook many more times, almost after every line. The melody I have in mind for this text is closer to rap than to song, so we may end up chopping and screwing the poet's reading for most of this and just singing the hook, "repeat their lines".

*

"The peajacket era"

This song also comes across in the sketch pretty close to what we need to achieve, though Matt and I hear a simple band backup to the acoustic guitar figure that the poet reads over. On the phone today Matt and I agreed this is one we might farm out, to make our final Nashville session more achievable; I could do a good enough job with Tim McAvin.

*

"A mulch of faded flags"

When you hear me blurt the title of this song over Lij's slide guitar sketch, that's not an indication of how we will use the phrase from the poem; it's just me noting the use I wanted to make of the music as I was flipping through songwriting tapes. On the final track, we will sing the phrase repeatedly. I am hoping for an effect like what The Lettuce Heads can achieve with multiple male voices. In fact, this is another one we might farm out, if Mike Burgett and Carl Pandolfi and company can be persuaded to help us.

*

"Might end and mutate and persist"

Another full-bore, full-band rocker. On the sketch I am just feeling my way around with the melody, but this comes pretty close to working.

*


This song has a spoken word part by the poet that I didn't drop onto the sketch, which only has the sung text, the very last bit. Here is the complete lyrics for the piece:
The sun, that is always catching up
with night and day and month and year,
blazes from its scrolled bare face: To be
solar, I must be nuclear
--
Another rock band song, for sure.

*

This post was mostly intended as working notes for the various musicians who will be helping to complete these songs, but anyone making plans to attend The Sydney Highrise Variations CD release and Art Invitational should note that The Luminary Center for the Arts is located right across the street from Tower Grove Park, Reber Place at Kingshighway, a short walk from The Royale, where we will repair for the afterparty following the event on Friday, Nov. 13.

*

The photo is of Dave Melson, Matt Fuller and Lij tracking in Lij's studio The Toy Box during our previous Nashville session for the score.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Ovid as oracle: Rachel Storch's political future


The other day I was wondering if State Senator Jeff Smith would still read Ovid in public at The Pulitzer with rumors of resignation, indictment and incarceration hounding him.

The answer is no.

According to the updated list, Smith has been replaced in the number five hole by a nobody named Matthias Waschek.

That's a joke. Waschek directs the place.

Unfortunately, in my sense of things, the director stepped into the embattled politicians' slot before I could talk my contact there into slipping in State Rep. Jamilah Nasheed, one of the presumed contenders for the throne if Smith does resign. The political set would have got the point.

The lineup already includes another player who might very well want the 4th Senatorial District job: State Rep. Rachel Storch. She reads not long before me, at 2:45 p.m. on Sunday.

Since my math and guesstimation were what told me - fatefully - that Smith would have read the Phaethon story about the reckless young man who tries to fly too high and flames out, I thought I'd try the same trick on Storch to see what she might be reading and how that augurs for her fate in this ever-changing world.

She reads 57th in a field of 74, putting her at .77 of the way through the poem; and since the poem is 299 pages long (in my edition of Rolfe Humphries' translation, which is far superior to the one The Pulitzer picked), Rachel should start reading at about 230 pages in.

Storch, the pig entrails of Ovid bode ill for you. Here, roughly, is where you will come in:
So Hymen left there, clad in saffron robe,
Through the great reach of air, and took his way
To the Ciconian country, where the voice
Of Orpheus called him, all in vain. He came there,
True, but brought with him no auspicious words,
No joyful faces, lucky omens. The torch
Sputtered and filled the eyes with smoke; when swung,
It would not blaze: bad as the omens were,
The end was worse, for as the bride went walking
Across the lawn, attended by her naiads,
A serpent bit her ankle, and she was gone.

If Jeff Smith is out, and Ovid is an oracle, then the smart money is on Nasheed in the 4th.

*

Storch pic from The Royale Flickr.

Wednesday, August 19, 2009

"Woman with new hat"


Here's another promising rock lyric from a late section of Joyce's Ulysses, where everything is presented in Q&A format. This entire lyric is presented (in paragraph form) as an answer to the question: "Example?"
"Woman with new hat"

She disliked umbrella with rain,
he liked woman with umbrella,
she disliked new hat with rain,
he liked woman with new hat,
he bought new hat with rain,
she carried umbrella with new hat.
Yeah, you could do pretty much anything with a lyric like that.

*

Picture from Joyce Images.

Tuesday, August 18, 2009

Poems & blunders: Metamorphoses & Jeff Smith


I see that The Pulitzer Foundation for the Arts has now published its list of readers for A Marathon Metamorphoses, a two-day live performance of Ovid's twisted epic (Saturday and Sunday, August 29 and 30). I am listed as reader 61 in a field of 74, starting with my one-time teacher William H. Gass and concluding with the Rev. Frank Krebs, a pastor in the Old Catholic tradition that separated from Rome after the First Vatican Council of 1870.

It makes sense to start with Bill Gass, who ranks as a sort of eminence grise of St. Louis letters; and why not end with a pastor in a faith that ditched Rome? After all, after wowwing the metropolis with his verse, Ovid was involuntarily separated from Rome and died in somewhat mysterious exile on the Black Sea.

The Pulitzer people tell us to "keep checking back for up-to-date listings," and it is only fitting to recognize the likelihood of change when we are talking about Ovid's great epic of change. But I wonder if we will see any changes in the number five slot? As of now, state Senator Jeff Smith is scheduled to read in that hole, at 11 a.m. on Saturday.

But a lot has changed for Jeff Smith since he accepted that invitation to read from the great poem of change. As Tony Messenger of The Post-Dispatch reported in detail on Sunday, Smith is now considering resigning from the state Senate as old allegations about election fraud may come back to haunt him.

Jeff Smith told me an investigation is ongoing and he can't comment, but my Jefferson City sources told me much of what Messenger heard (from sources he didn't name either). They went one further to suggest Smith may be indicted for obstruction of justice charges. They say he may have lied in affidavits submitted during the voter fraud investigation, which was concluded in 2007 without any judgment against him.

The initial claim was that Smith did not properly acknowledge that his campaign paid for postcards and flyers delivering an ad hominen attack against Russ Carnahan, his opponent in the 2004 Democratic primary for Missouri's 3rd Congressional seat. These campaign tools attacked Carnahan for allegedly being lazy and missing "more votes than all but 4 of his 163 colleagues in the State House" that year.

Carnahan won the primary and general elections, of course, and now serves in the congressional seat once held by Missouri political legend Dick Gephardt. Jeff Smith won his next political campaign, for state Senate, and his future has been a subject of speculation ever since - with the presumption that he would only continue to rise.

Now the young state senator's name is all abuzz in St. Louis, and not in a good way, what with his possible resignation and rumored-to-be-pending indictment appearing on the front page of the daily paper. Will he still read Ovid in public in August?

If he does, doing the rough math and guesstimation, the ambitious young man would likely read the first few pages of the Phaethon story. This is the story of the young son of the Sun God who tries to drive the Sun God's chariot when he is too young and reckless and perishes in the attempt.

If he reads at The Pulitzer, Jeff Smith - who ran for Congress at age 30 with no previous political experience outside of the classroom - could find the following speech from the Sun God to his son in his mouth:
What you want,
My son, is dangerous; you ask for power
Beyond your strength and years.
By the way, Ovid was exiled before his time, by his own admission, for "a poem and a blunder".

*

Painting of Phaethon flaming out by Gustave Moreau.

Monday, August 17, 2009

"Restless. Solitary." (maybe after Samuel Barber)


More songwriting fun with verbatim excerpts from James Joyce's novel Ulysses!


"Restless. Solitary."

Solitary hotel in mountain pass.
Autumn. Twilight. Fire lit.
In dark corner young man seated.

Young woman enters. Restless. Solitary.
She sits. She goes to window. She stands.
She sits. Twilight. She thinks.

On solitary hotel paper she writes.
She thinks. She writes. She sighs.
Wheels and hoofs. She hurries out.

He comes from his dark corner.
He seizes solitary paper.
He holds it toward fire.

Twilight. He reads. Solitary.


This is from a late section of the novel where everything is presented in Q&A format. This entire lyric is presented (in paragraph format) as an answer to the question: "What suggested scene was then constructed by Stephen?"

I see that Samuel Barber already beat me to the idea of scoring this passage, which he did under the title "Solitary Hotel," a damn fine title - probably too perfect of a title for the oddball kind of record I want to make.

I haven't listened to Barber's song, but will track it down - who knows, maybe even license and record it and be done with this part of the score. Before I discovered his piece, I heard in my head a piano/vocal composition, maybe Carl Pandolfi on piano and Heidi Dean on vocals.

But since I also am always trying to work with Frank Di Piazza, I have to think of the song "Solitude" by his band The Imps (the link opens an mp3 of the song), produced by Adam Long, who mixes and masters all of our poetry scores. Maybe Frank would take a crack at it.

*

My stand-in for the Solitary Hotel is St Louis' own Bevo Mill, from Thom Fletcher's Monstromo Flickr.

*

More in this series

"I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea"
"Pretty pretty petticoats"
"Music without Words, pray for us" (instrumental, or not)
"SIGNOR MAFFEI: (With a sinister smile)"
"Sad music" (instrumental)
"Monkey puzzle" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"What kind of a present to give"
"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

Sunday, August 16, 2009

"I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea"


This one is different than the other lyrics I have whittled out of James Joyce's Ulysses. So far, I have only presented verbatim excerps, without any changes other than breaking up the lines to suggest how the words might be sung as rock lyrics.

The following bits, on the other hand, are excerpted from a stretch of six pages of the narrative, when Murphy the drunken red-hedded sailor regales Bloom and Stephen with tales of his travels inside the cabman's shelter on the verge of Nighttown.

As with all sailor yarns, Murphy is not entirely to be trusted. But if you pluck out some of his more flavorful claims, you have the making of a good fragmented raconteur story song, a form perfected, most recently, by Tom Waits.

"I'm tired of all them rocks in the sea"

I seen a crocodile bite the fluke off an anchor
same as I chew that quid.
And I seen maneaters in Peru
that eats corpses and the livers of horses.

Look here.
Here they are.
A friend of mine sent me.

Know how to keep them off?
Glass. That boggles 'em. Glass.

I seen a Chinese one time
that had little pills like putty
and he put them in the water
and they opened, and
every pill was something different.

One was a ship,
another was a house,
another was a flower.

Cooks rats in your soup,
the Chinese does.

And I seen a man killed in Trieste
by an Italian chap.
Knife in his back.
Knife like that.
It went into his back
up to the butt.

I'm tired
of all them rocks in the sea,
and boats and ships.
Salt junk all the time.

There was a fellow
sailed with me in the Rover.
Went ashore and took up a soft job
as gentleman's valet at six quid a month.
Them are his trousers I've on me and
he gave me an oilskin and that jackknife.

I'm game for that job,
shaving and brushup.
I hate roaming about.
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Tattoo by by James Jacobs (Bushido Tattoo; Calgary, Alberta) from the Flickr of William Schaff, based on a drawing by Schaff.

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More in this series

"Pretty pretty petticoats"
"Music without Words, pray for us" (instrumental, or not)
"SIGNOR MAFFEI: (With a sinister smile)"
"Sad music" (instrumental)
"Monkey puzzle" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"What kind of a present to give"
"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Carl Pandolfi and pretty pretty petticoats


During a two week sojourn in Ghana, when I was unable to update this blog, a truly encouraging development bloomed at home: Carl Pandolfi began to score one of the lyrics I have carved out of James Joyce's Ulysses, "All future plunges to the past".

This is one where, in the blog post, I mused in some detail about an imagined song structure, so of course I will be keen to see if Carl hears the same structure as he begins to puzzle chords and melody out of Joyce's brilliant language.

Among many other things one could say about this talented character, Carl is one of the songwriters in The Lettuce Heads. Over the years, I have managed to enlist his collaboration on several Poetry Scores projects, most spectacularly the arrangement of and performance on "Little boys and fat men" from the poetry score to Go South for Animal Index.

The good news from Carl on the Joyce score project reminds me to go back to inputting my suggested lyrics from Ulysses; I have notes for a dozen more. Here is one.

"Pretty petticoats"

Pretty
pretty pretty
pretty pretty pretty
petticoats.

This bit is said (in an hallucination) by Lipoti Virag, grandfather of Leopold Bloom, as he flaps noisily against a mauve shade in the Nighttown brothel section of the novel. A sexually motivated outburst by your grandfather, imagined as a moth in an hallucination at a whorehouse? - there seems to be scope for rock & roll in such a thing as that.

I am imagining a particular kind of song that relies upon tricky, numbers-based repetitions, over a really seductive riff and a beat that makes you want to march, or do a march-like dance. These riff parts, which carry the lyrics, would be offset by instrumental interludes with a very different character, to keep the composition interesting.

In a successful song of this sort - my friend Will Johnson of Centro-matic and South San Gabriel is good at writing them - when you look at the lyric sheet, you are amazed at how few words went into the song. It had seemed like so much more was going on!

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Image from BuckarooBob's Flickr, from the streets of La Paz.

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More in this series

"Music without Words, pray for us" (instrumental, or not)
"SIGNOR MAFFEI: (With a sinister smile)"
"Sad music" (instrumental)
"Monkey puzzle" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"What kind of a present to give"
"Fires in the houses of poor people" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Christfox in leather trews" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"All future plunges to the past" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"She was humming" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Silly billies:" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"Happy Happy" (Fuller, Joyce, King)
"A sugarsticky girl" (Joyce, King, A Better Guitar Player Than Me)
"Everybody eating everyone else" (Joyce, King, You)
"Blood not mine" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Sell your soul for that" (Joyce, King, Your Name Here)
"Over the motley slush" (Joyce, King, Whoever Helps Me)
"My childhood bends" (Joyce, King)"
"Don't you play the giddy ox with me!" (Joyce, King)