When I think of finishing the work, when I think of the finished work, a great sadness overtakes me, a sadness paradoxically like joy. The circumstances of doing put away, the being of it takes possession, like a tenant in a rented house. Where are you now, homeless heart? Caught in a hinge, or secreted behind drywall, like your nameless predecessors now that they have been given names? Best not to dwell on our situation, but to dwell in it is deeply refreshing. Like a sideboard covered with decanters and fruit. As a box kite is to a kite. The inside of stumbling. The way to breath. The caricature on the blackboard.
Dad is so close, especially on the clear nights, that he seems touchable
Teasing the porous boundary between surrealism and magical realism, Kevin Sampsell’s novel Baby in the Night, his second, constellates around a toddler who wanders the night purposefully, unsupervised and unencumbered. Tony and his mom live in a seedy part of an unnamed city, one festooned with garbage and energy. Their neighborhood isn’t exactly dangerous, but it certainly isn’t an ideal place for a small child to be traipsing around alone at night. Two-year-old Tony learns how to sneak out without his mom knowing, and he proceeds to do just that, continually; the night calls to him. “I wasn’t afraid of the dark,” reads the opening sentence of the book. Tony scours the city’s dim underbelly for a specific reason, one that might make perfect sense to a baby: he believes his father is the moon, and night after night Tony wants to commune with him. Dad is so close, especially on the clear nights, that he seems touchable. He talks too, at least to Tony. Not through language but telepathically, through feeling and presence. A mysterious fax machine that Tony finds in the street also possibly plays a role. Dad exists (or can exist) not only in one’s eyeballs, but also when Tony is alone in his room—and maybe even in the day, too.
Sitting outside in America is an Eileen Myles pursuit. Every time I do it I think of an Eileen Myles poem—from throwing open “all the doors
Sitting outside in America is an Eileen Myles pursuit. Every time I do it I think of an Eileen Myles poem—from throwing open “all the doors in my home” because “There’s a pulse outside I want to hear” in “Immanence” (Maxfield Parrish, 1995) to the “fat little Buddha” in the yard in “Sweet Heart” (evolution, 2018), ice cracking as the poet pours coke—decidedly not Fresca—into a glass (I, a Brit, once had to get them to explain Fresca to me).
The way children know what to do with trees to find their faces, and the trumpet flowers suck in the blue and even your feet are little mountains, and the most human human movement is leaping but not the one done by the dancers who make a mockery of desperation. Agape. Agape. Because you run so sweetly.
That strangeness, found in different registers in all of Duchamp’s art, is often of an enigmatic, teasing, needling kind that we need to value. He believed that art should take no role in politics. But when asked the direction he felt art of the future should take, he said that “the great artist of tomorrow will go underground.”
This is the direction he effectively took. And from the depths he shook the foundations of culture in a way no other Western artist of his era did. I can’t remember a more conservative moment in our culture than the one we’re in now, in which “classical” values are, blatantly or obliquely, being so relentlessly asserted. We need foundation-shaking badly. “Marcel Duchamp” is a timely reminder of what that can mean.
Marcel Duchamp
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“What’s up, floaters?!” The Norwegian Pearl is pulling away from Miami Cruise Terminal B, and hundreds of people are gathered on the pool de
When I catch up with Brock via video chat a few weeks after the cruise, he is carrying a honeycomb to his kitchen and trying to separate wax from honey. It occurs to me that the beekeeping apparel he was rocking on the Pearl is not just a costume. It's something he bought for actually tending to bees. "I'm a fiscally sound dude," he explains, a man who gets the most out of his items.
Brock tells me that when we spoke on the ship, I got "the hand-wringing version of the interview," but he was ultimately thrilled with his cruise experience. Sure, the schedule was demanding. And yeah, he had some awkward interactions with fans, like the guy who was trying to determine if he was present for Modest Mouse's final show with the late Jeremiah Green for clout. And yet, Brock concludes, "I walked away from that thing feeling fucking rad, man." He'd gladly do it again. Two years from now, he probably will.
In the meantime, he's getting ready to roll out a new album, his first in half a decade. He wishes Modest Mouse records would come out faster, that he could just bang them out in a weekend, first-thought best-thought. When I ask if the demands of family life slow down the process, he instead puts it on himself. Owning a studio makes it tempting to indulge every idea, so he piles on elements, then starts peeling them back, always trying to find some variable that will push a song to the next level, never sure when a track is complete. Even though he believes "the idea is usually best for the most part within the first week — honestly, within the first day," he can't help himself.
After another long gap between albums, he's antsy for this one to finally be out, not least of all because he knows the fans are counting on it. "I'm just interested to see that the record connects with people in a way that is meaningful," Brock says. "This one, I feel like there's at least a few songs that I think are useful things, tools to have in life. And I don't actually feel that way all the time about my music, but I feel like a few songs on this one actually are me doing my best job to genuinely give people fucking coping mechanisms."
Despite Brock's reputation as a misanthrope, he seems energized by the pursuit of great conversation. He can still be prickly, profane, and intensely cynical. "I just say shitty things for the fuck of it," he admits. Judging from the tangents he embarks on during our chats, he seemingly would rather talk about anything but Modest Mouse: my kids, my friends' landscape design business, the Trump administration setting vaccine research back by a decade or more. But it's clear he still cares about the band and the impact it has in listeners' lives.
For nearly seventy years, he captured the lives of modern artists for The New Yorker.
Until the very end, our friend and colleague Calvin Tomkins looked at his life with a sense of wonder and wry amusement. He died on Friday at the age of one hundred, just a few months younger than The New Yorker, his working home since 1958. Tad (he always went by Tad) was an irrepressibly energetic man with excellent hair, bright, curious eyes, and a shy, slivery smile—and yet, when friends and strangers remarked on how young he looked, he deflected, citing what he called “the three ages of man”: Youth, Maturity, and You Look Great.
Tad’s specialty was the Profile—in particular, Profiles of modern artists. For nearly seventy years, he filled this magazine with portraits of the creative imaginations who thrilled him the most, from Marcel Duchamp to, just recently, Tala Madani and Rashid Johnson. Sometimes he widened his beat and wrote about dance (Merce Cunningham), or music (John Cage), or the art of cooking (Julia Child).
Not long ago, Phaidon published “The Lives of Artists,” a six-volume collection containing eighty-two of his Profiles. Tomkins borrowed the title from a sixteenth-century publication by Giorgio Vasari, a painter and an architect who chronicled the lives of Cimabue, Michelangelo, Raphael, Leonardo, Giotto, and many other predecessors and contemporaries. Tad’s subjects were the moderns. And the more you read his Profiles—from Duchamp to Kerry James Marshall, Jasper Johns to Cindy Sherman—the more you realize that his chutzpah in echoing Vasari’s title is well earned. There is always a sheen to his writing. The sentences cut a swift, clean trail across the page—a mackerel through the water. To read “Living Well Is the Best Revenge,” his account of the marriage of Gerald and Sara Murphy, and their circle of friends which included Pablo Picasso, Cole Porter, and the Fitzgeralds, is to inhabit completely that privileged yet haunted milieu of the French Riviera a century ago. It is a perfect nonfiction companion to F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “Tender Is the Night.”
“An author who is writing specifically for a public is not really writing: it is the public that is writing, and for this reason the public can no longer be a reader; reading only appears to exist, actually it is nothing. This is why works created to be read are meaningless: no one reads them. This is why it is dangerous to write for other people, in order to evoke the speech of others and reveal them to themselves: the fact is that other people do not want to hear their own voices; they want to hear someone else’s voice, a voice that is real, profound, troubling like the truth.”
--Maurice Blanchot, “Literature and the Right to Death”
Looking at the poems in my most recent book, Army of Giants, I realized there’s not much reason to write an “In Their Own Words” about most of them, because most of them are remarkably transparent. Transparent in how they were made. Which was actually a big focus of mine while writing the book. About 90% of the poems were written in some form—the occasional iambic pentameter, or syllabics, or my at-that-time-favorite four words per line, or poems about trees shaped like trees, etc. For instance, the poem “49” was written on my 49th birthday, and each stanza is 49 syllables. That’s not much of an essay. And I like this about these poems, that they’re transparent. I’m not trying to hide that they’re made things, and I certainly am not trying to hide their content.
But one poem in there still sort of bemuses — “The Winter Sun.” This was first published years ago in a chapbook by Dikembe Press, a small press Jeff Alessandrelli started before founding the mighty Fonograf Editions. I had been playing with five words per line for years because of the amazing Rain by Jon Woodward, but felt a little guilty stealing that form from him (though I think he stole it from Zukofsky) and had been writing four-word-per-line poems for a long time. I thought: Can you go any smaller? My friend Noelle Kocot had published an entire book of poems that were only one word per line (Phantom Pains of Madness), but what about, I wondered, two words per line? It’s not great, is the answer to that question. And what about three? So I wrote this very long poem called “The Winter Sun” using exactly three words per line.
What I liked about making the poem that way was that I couldn’t really accomplish much in a line, so there was a necessary continuous energy pushing the poem forward; each line was sort of the beginning of an idea, or a continuation of a prior one, but on their own the lines didn’t usually feel finished . . . and so it pushed me forward. I’d been fascinated by how people write long poems (I usually didn’t, before this book), and I wondered what their “engines” were. How did they keep it going? Usually, I’m looking for the off-ramp as soon as I start a poem. So this was a revelation in a way, except I didn’t like it when I finished it. The lines were just too short. And too regulated. It looked bad. I liked how the constant forward movement led me to unexpected places—memories of raising my two kids as a stay-at-home dad, remembered dreams, things I saw walking through New York City, etc—but it seemed too controlled. What if I ignore how it was made, I wondered, and smooshed it all together like a “real” poem? And how would I decide how that’s done? So I started by combining the lines into groups of six words, which is less obvious to the reader’s eyes. And lots of the poem is in that form still, but I realized that many times I’d just have to ignore any sense of how I’d made it and focus on how I wanted it to sound, which is almost always the same as how it looks.
I still don’t know how to think about this conundrum, though, going forward: do we, as people who make works of art, stay true to the generative impulse and generative structure that made them, because that’s how they were made? Or ultimately is our job to make the poem work, to change it around and do whatever it takes to make it look and sound good, even if that obscures an important aspect of how it was made? What if you wrote a sonnet but realized that, actually, it would be better in a totally different form? I just said I still don’t know the answer to this question. But then I realize, no, of course I do, the answer is to make it awesome, even if that means your intentions get thrown away.
"I wrote about what I didn’t see. The experience that eluded me somehow intrigued me more than the one I was having, and this has happened to me down through the years."
