CZECH III ~

Milan Kundera

You know what it's like when your friendly stubble-finger mechanic turns out to be a crackerjack banjo picker in the off hours (are there still "off hours"?) ...well that's what Milan Kundera is to me. A wonder. A grounded novelist, activist, man of letters, and supreme gliding essayist. As much as his writing, there are the subjects he chooses, or which choose him to speak. He's up to job.

~ EXILE AS LIBERATION ACCORDING TO VERA LINHARTOVA ~

In the 1960s Vera Linhartova was one of the most admired writers in Czechoslovakia, the poetess of a prose that was meditative, hermetic, beyond category. Having left the country for Paris after 1968, she began to write and publish in French. Known for her solitary nature, she astonished all her friends when, in the early 1990s, she accepted the invitation of the French Institute of Prague and, on the occasion of a colloquium on the issue of exile, she delivered a paper. I have never read anything on the subject more nonconformist and more clearsighted.

The second half of the past century has made everyone extremely sensitive to the fate of people forced out of their own homelands. This compassionate sensitivity has befogged the problem of exile with a tear-stained moralism, and obscured the actual nature of life for the exile, who according to Linhartova has often managed to transform his banishment into a liberating launch "toward another place, an elsewhere, by definition unknown and open to all sorts of possibilities." Of course she is right a thousand times over! Otherwise how are we to understand the fact that after the end of Communism, almost none of the great emigre artists hurried back to their home countries? Why was that? Did the end of Communism not spur them to celebrate the "Great Return" in their native lands? And even if, despite the disappointment of their audience, that return was not what they wanted, wasn't it their moral obligation? Said Linhartova: "The writer is above all a free person, and the obligation to preserve his independence against all constraints comes before any other consideration. And I mean not only the insane constraints imposed by an abusive political power, but the restrictions—all the harder to evade because they are well-intentioned—that cite a sense of duty to one's country." In fact people chew over cliches about human rights, and at the same time persist in considering the individual to be the property of his nation.

She goes further still: "So I chose the place where I wanted to live, but I have also chosen the language I wanted to speak." People will protest: sure, a writer is a free person, but is he not the custodian of his language? Isn't that the very meaning of a writer's mission? Linhartova: "It is often asserted that a writer has less freedom of movement than anyone else, for he remains bound to his language by an indissoluble tie. I believe this is another of those myths that serve as excuse for timid folks." For: "The writer is not a prisoner of any one language." A great liberating sentence. Only the brevity of life keeps a writer from drawing all the conclusions from this invitation to freedom.

Linhartova: "My sympathies lie with the nomads, I haven't the soul of a sedentary myself. So I am now entitled to say that my own exile has fulfilled what was always my dearest wish: to live elsewhere." When Linhartova writes in French, is she still a Czech writer? No. Does she become a French writer? No, not that either. She is elsewhere. Elsewhere as Chopin was in his time, elsewhere as, later, each in his own fashion, were Nabokov, Beckett, Stravinsky, Gombrowicz. Of course each of them lived his exile in his own inimitable way, and Linhartova's experience is an extreme case. Yet after her radical, luminous declaration, we can no longer speak of exile as we have done up till now.

Milan Kundera

Vera Linhartova

EARTH ~

LEARNING TO SPEAK


As a child running loose,

I said it this way: Bird.

Bird, a startled sound at field's edge.

The sound my mouth makes, pushing away the cold.

So, at the end of this quiet afternoon,

wanting to write the love poems I've never written,

I turn from the shadow in the cottonwood

and say blackbird, as if to you.

There is the blackbird. Black bird, until its darkness

is the darkness of a woman's hair falling

across my upturned face.

And I go on speaking into the night.

The oriole, the flicker,

the gold finch. . . .

This is a new version of a classic book of poems — narrow spine, not so many pages, and every poem to remember. Atheneum first published the collection in the early 70s when it won the Lamont Poetry Prize in 1972. If it hadn't been for the re-issue, the book was on its way to disappearing. Many have, many fine ones.

It's our job to pull things back.

Peter Everwine was born in Detroit, raised in western Pennslyvania, educated in the midwest, and settled down for decades in California. When not writing his own poems he is translating from Hebrew and interpretations from Nahuatl.


~

BACK FROM THE FIELDS


Until nightfall my son ran in the fields,

looking for God knows what.

Flowers, perhaps. Odd birds on the wing.

Something to fill an empty spot.

Maybe a luminous angel

or country girl with a secret dark.

He came back empty-handed,

or so I thought.



Now I find them:

thistles, goatheads

the barbed weeds

all those with hooks or horns

the snaggle-toothed, the grinning ones

those wearing lantern jaws

old ones in beards

leapers in silk leggins

the multiple pocked moons

and spiny satellites, all those

with juices and saps

like the fingers of thieves

nation after nation of grasses

that dig in, that burrow, that hug winds

and grab handholds

in whatever lean place.



It's been a good day.





JUST BEFORE SLEEP


In the poem that comes just before sleep,

I am walking out into

the darkness of summer fields,

drawing it close about me.

What I wanted to say

was the silence of olive groves,

the longing of a road white with dust.

I speak an old language, love —

the fields rising and falling,

the small beards of light

nodding over the earth.

I am entering your hair,

coming home.





LOOKING INTO THINGS CLEARLY


The doctor smiles and comes toward me.

In a room so pure I can hardly breathe,

he opens my robe and touches the fragile

bones of my wings. "I'm glad you've come," he says

and I know I'm sick.



Something is wrong with me upstairs.

A neighbor's mouth tears like a wound, so dark

I think of a spring cupped in black roots.

The phone rings and another village is burning.

My head dreams of escaping into white stone.



"It's almost painless," he says, hiding

his hand behind his blue coat.

Only I can't see him clearly.

When I squint he seems to be

my father sidling through the halls of banks,



he is a bruised face, he is the President,

the drifting blue haze of factories,

of my own breath hovering over me.

I reach to touch him, but my fingers

enter and pass through —



he blossoms around them in a red flower of light,

petal after petal of light opens out:

I'm a window looking into a backyard.

Some men are digging what looks like a grave,

about the size of a child's.





NIGHT


In the lamplight falling

on the white tablecloth

my plate,

my shining loaf of quietness.



I sit down.

Through the open door

all the absent I love enter

and we eat.


(from the meadow: selected and new poems)





TWO POEMS BY AYOCUAN CUETZPALTZIN


I

Let the earth last

And the forests stand a long time


Ayocuan Cuetzpaltzin said this, traveling

The road to Tlaxcala

The road to Huexotzinco


Let field after field

Unfold with brown corn

Flowers of cacao


Let the earth last



II


We live in the country where things go away

Is it like this

In that country the dead wander?

Are some happy there

Among old friends?

Or is it here only that passing a face

We look into it

And speak its name?


( translated by PE from "The Aztec Poems" )





from Collecting the Animals
Peter Everwine
Atheneum, 1972

SAILOR ~

Poppa Neutrino's trans-Atlantic raft constructed of trash

Poppa Neutrino (William David Pearlman), spent his early years in San Francisco. At that time he saw a documentary on nomadic aborigines, and made up his mind: "That's the way I want to live; I never want anything more." Throughout his seven decades PN has been a young soldier, outsider/rascal/highway-department-official, circus performer, father, church founder, nomad, band and street performer, designer, raft builder, and nautical record breaker.

In the late 1990s Poppa Neutrino became the second man in history to cross the Atlantic Ocean on a raft, but his vessel was made of trash, and that's a first.

In 2008 Poppa Neutrino moved to Burlington, Vermont to set-up life and shop. This time he built a raft on Lake Champlain.

When his vessel was ready, the plan was to circumnavigation the globe, sailing away from Burlington heading south to Florida with three sailors and three dogs. They would be aboard a new craft — a 37 foot trimaran rigged with two outboards, a supplied pilot house and four cabins.

On November 9th their raft was washed onto rocks at Thompson's Point, Vermont on Lake Champlain. Everyone was rescued.

Stay tuned. And while waiting, perhaps read Alec Wilkinson's book The Happiest Man in the World. It's all about the great Poppa.

Poppa Neutrino





photo: poppa neutrino: floatingneutrinos.com

THINK BACK, PILGRIM XI

KANETO SHINDO

KEISUKE KINOSHITO

HIROSHI TESHIGHARA

EARTH ~

KENJI MIYAZAWA


This is one of my favorite poets, always was, always will be.

I found his work when a very young man in Gary Snyder's The Back Country and nothing in poetry for me has ever been the same. I loved dearly the Han-Shan translated by Snyder in Riprap, though nothing touched me as fully as the Kenji.

It was the story behind the poems and the man, the story felt within the pulse of the poems. I went and found every book I could find translated into English for years to come. I'm still looking.

I may still get Hiro Sato, the kind one, to one day allow one of his Kenji stories or group of poems to be published. Gerry Hausman did send to us a beautiful little group he translated with a Japanese friend. We put that into a glove of golden papers.

Kenji Miyazawa was born in Hanamaki, Iwate, Japan in 1896 and passed away in the same place 37 years later . Even struggling for years with pleurisy he hiked the fields he loved.

This poem has been in my tool room so long I had completely forgotten it was there. It's right even with the vise.




KENJI MIYAZAWA






photo © bob arnold
old.japanfocus.org

WITH ME ~

Nightlife. . .

written & arranged by John Zorn
in collaboration w/ a cast of characters
On golden LP: elektra/nonesuch

MAN'S BEST FRIEND ~

Sweetheart reminded me of this favorite cartoon I like stapled onto a post in my tool room. My father drew cartoons who taught me and I taught my son and I still draw and have my weekly favorites from magazines and elsewhere. Few, for me, top this one out of an old New Yorker.

If you can read the cartoonist's name — I can't — please drop me a line.

I'd like he or she to be credited.

coda: answer received from our good friend Annie in Canada:
the artist is Mike Twohy. Thank you Annie.







the new yorker

CZECH II ~

Dear G—

On a rain day this week I sat down again and watched Jan Wiener (1920-2010) in the film FIGHTER (2001) with Sweetheart this time. I figured I owed it to the man and his recent passing, your dear friend, and for us to watch this fascinating journey and story together. Curiously, while never once drifting in my respect and actual honor for JW, it's Arnost Lustig who holds up finer for me as a man and all-around individual. There is something festering in JW — no doubt his past — yet AL also had a brutal past and seems to have healed himself with a bit more humility, patience and an almost unbelievable sweetness for his often difficult friend.

The film is also deeply moving for its historical understanding and revelation. The filmmaker (Amir Bar-Lev) has an elegant and deft touch at voice-over while using impeccable choreography for the landscape, story and reasoning. There is both poetry (breadth and beauty) and terrible madness throughout the film.

Watching Jan Wiener at work, in his homeland and surroundings (Slovenia, Italy etc), one is quite taken with his tenacity at finding his way. It's a Holocaust film with two elder survivors of Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia backtracking in a half-century later. One stayed-put and took it on the chin, the other fought his way through an underground, and some would say became a spy, even a traitor, not a partisan. I say hold judgment and let the film and all individuals speak.

We are witnessing or suffering in current wars and perhaps via WikiLeaks fueled and stymied and surrounded by deceit — so much so we know wars never end.

CZECH ~

Bohumil Hrabal

Ah, the creator of the great "idiots" of world literature, often only slightly masqueraded as the author himself.

Hrabal was born in the province of old Moravia on 28 March 1914. He had a rough childhood. Milan Kundera, years later, would attend the same grammar school as Hrabal. During WW2 our hero studied law while working as a laborer in a war-torn era. The law degree came in 1946. The first book of poems in 1948, heavily influenced by the Surrealist poets. He worked at almost every basic and menial job and wrote and published prolifically, often pirated editions, mostso after the Soviets moved into Prague in the late 60s — many of his brethren went into exile, Hrabal hung in. Some accuse him of giving-in. But no, he was the wiliest of survivors. Josef Skvorecky thought Hrabal's world came from a well-oiled talk of Prague's bars & taverns. A well known raconteur who published at least fourteen volumes of a collected works, so few yet translated into English. Some of the better known (also made into films) are Closely Watched Trains (1965) and I Served the King of England (1989). Dancing Lessons for the Advanced in Age (1964) consists of a single sentence, book-length!

Like Kerouac, like Montaigne, Hrabal loved his cats. There is a mural in Prague showing him with his cats.

An imaginative and engaging satirist in a land of them — Kundera, Capek, Hasek, and close enough by, Gombrowicz (before South America).

A subversive to the end, in 1997, at age 82, while being tended to in a Bulovka hospital for back and joint pain, standing atop a table feeding the pigeons on a window sill, the table tipped and spilled our hero out the window five flights down to his death.

But nothing this good dies.

Hrabal's portraits on bottles of Postrizinske beers (BH was the stepson of a brewery manager)

Bohumil Hrabal from Too Loud A Solitude:

For thirty-five years I've been compacting old paper, and in that time I've had so many beautiful books thrown into my cellar that if I had three barns they'd all be full. Just after the war the second one - was over, somebody dumped a basket of the most exquisitely made books in my hydraulic press, and when I'd calmed down enough to open one of them, what did I see but the stamp of the Royal Prussian Library, and when next day I found the whole cellar overflowing with more of the same - leather-bound volumes, their gilt edges and titles flooding the air with light - I raced upstairs to see two fellows standing there, and what I managed to squeeze out of them was that somewhere in the vicinity of Nové Straseci there was a barn with so many books in the straw it made your eyes pop out of your head. So I went to see the army librarian, and the two of us took off for Nové Straseci, and there in the fields we found not one but three barns chock full of the Royal Prussian Library, and once we'd done oohing and ahing, we had a good talk, as a result of which a column of military vehicles spent a week transporting the books to a wing of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Prague, where they were to wait until things had simmered down and they could be sent back to their place of origin. But somebody leaked the hiding place and the Royal Prussian Library was declared official booty, so the column of military vehicles started transporting all the leatherbound volumes with their gilt edges and titles over to the railroad station, where they were loaded on flat-cars in the rain, and since it poured the whole week, what I saw when the last load of books pulled up was a constant stream of gold water cum pitch and printer's ink flowing down from the train. Well, I just stood there, leaning aginst a lamppost, flabbergasted, and as the last car disappeared into the mist, I felt the rain in my face merging with tears, [...]

from James Wood, London Review of Books, 4 January 2001:

"And a great writer. His finest book, Too Loud a Solitude, enacts an even more acute modulation, from early buoyancy to late despair. Hrabal, who himself worked for a while as a trash-compactor, creates, in Hanta, his subtlest ‘idiot’. Hanta may also represent the closest Hrabal came to a self-portrait. (Hrabal, like Hanta, rescued books from the compacting machine, and built a library of them in the garage of his country cottage outside Prague.) Hanta’s wide reading allows Hrabal to use all the mental resources of his hero, however insanely, and the result is a free-flowing prose of extraordinary flexibility, a prose with many interiors within interiors, like some of the Dutch Masters – or perhaps many false bottoms. That would be the proper, unsolemn, Hrabalian image.

Hanta is put out of work, effectively, by the arrival, on the outskirts of Prague, of a much larger, industrial-scale trash-compactor. He visits it, and does not like what he sees. It is clear that this machine does not simply compact trash, with the occasional discarded book, as his small press does, but is swallowing thousands of books. The books are lined up on lorries. It is a giant metal censor, and the harbinger of a sinister new era. But although Skvorecky describes this novel as Hrabal’s ‘poetic condemnation of the banning of books’, this is too heavy a reading. For how nimbly Hrabal describes a comic crescent around obvious political allegory. Having seen this huge machine, what is Hanta’s response? He returns to his one-man press, and tries to increase his output by 50 per cent, so as to keep his job. As usual in Hrabal, political critique is slyly neutralised by the unreliability, indeed in this case the madness, of the narrator."

photos: czsk.net

wikicommons

corbisimages.com

WITH ME ~

Listening right now

STRAIGHT AHEAD
Oliver Nelson, alto/tenor sax, clarinet
Eric Dolphy, alto sax, bass clarinet, flute
Richard Wyands, piano
George Duvivier, bass
Roy Haynes, drums
On LP: Prestige

EARTH ~

Robert Francis


Born in Upland, Pennsylvania on August 12, 1901

Robert Francis moved to Amherst, Massachusetts in 1926

after graduating from Harvard. His first book of poems

Stand Here With Me appeared in 1936.

By 1940 he began building

his home Fort Juniper on the outskirts of town, which since

the poet's passing in 1987 has become a legendary spot

and home or studio for many other poets.

Collected Poems 1936-1976 makes a fine companion.

The poem below is drawn from that collection.

I have worked with this poem with every age group,

including with strangers when reading out on the street.

It chimes.


~

SILENT POEM


backroad----leafmold---- stonewall---- chipmunk
underbrush---- grapevine---- woodchuck---- shadblow



woodsmoke---- cowbarn ----honeysuckle---- woodpile
sawhorse---- bucksaw---- outhouse---- wellsweep



backdoor ----flagstone----bulkhead---- buttermilk
candlestick---- ragrug---- firedog---- brownbread



hilltop ----outcrop---- cowbell---- buttercup
whetstone---- thunderstorm---- pitchfork----steeplebush



gristmill---- millstone ----cornmeal ----waterwheel
watercress---- buckwheat---- firefly---- jewelweed



gravestone---- groundpine ----windbreak---- bedrock
weathercock ----snowfall---- starlight---- cockrow

I-VERMONT ~

WITH ME ~

What I'm listening to right now :

my listening:
song: "Chairman Mao" by Charlie Haden
"Old and New Dreams"
on LP: Black Saint/Italy

TREASURE ~

Chris Strachwitz ~ Arhoolie Records

I've made note to Chris Strachwitz in other Birdhouse posts. One of the rarest of marvels who won't be quite recognized for the general public to jump on board — just that: rootsy, folk splendid, bluesy, down-home, ethnic, tribal, bountiful, everlasting — too good to be true.

Please read more :
see the slide show
great music

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/arts/music/28arhoolie.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&sq=strachwitz&st=cse&scp=1

SMALL ~

Windigo

I draw from rain, impetus;

from wind, if it be chill

or great enough, anger;

from snow, anxiety or,

if it be deep enough,

fear; from sun, what else?

solace, through glass,

however cold: solace.

Guy Birchard

I remember lying on the side of a hollow, waiting for L[eonard] to come &

mushroom, & seeing a red hare loping up the side & thinking

suddenly "This is Earth life." I seemed to see how earthy

it all was, & I myself an evolved kind of hare;

as if a moon-visitor saw me.

Virginia Woolf (from her diary)

Life should be an aim unto itself, a purpose unto itself. MONTAIGNE

Nicole Bengiveno/The New York Times

Small? A young couple in love in their NYC nest. Less than 400 sq. ft. to be exact. Two rooms. They both have work and keep well. She is lively (as we can see), he is a carpenter and finds his wood and material right off the streets.

Together they decorate and show heart in tough times.

Please read the New York Times article below and be sure to walk through the nest and garden via the slide show.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/28/realestate/28habi.html?_r=1&hp

"Windigo" is from the stunning Further than the Blood by Guy Birchard

(Pressed Wafer, 9 Columbus Sq., Boston, MA. 02116)

photos © bob arnold

"purple japanese iris" poem by bob arnold

sidewalk art by jacqueline laufman

"sawbuck"

"new breadboard"

I recently worked with many feet of yellow pine stair tread.

When the job was done I was left with one foot — a butt end —

nowhere to go with it except make a breadboard for Sweetheart.

~

SPY vs. SPY ~

John le Carré

Please link and listen in:

http://www.democracynow.org/2010/11/25/british_novelist_john_le_carr_on

WALKABOUT ~

drawings © bob arnold

I LET MYSELF... ~

Rosie Thomas

Hailing from Michigan like her friend Sufjan Stevens, Rosie Thomas has five albums to her name, including one on her own label Sing-Along-Records. She has performed with others (Velour 100 being one), as a duet, and a solo artist. Under the name Sheila Saputo she also side lines as a stand-up comedian, and when not there, or on the folk stage, as an actress
(Calvin Marshall).

photo: starringcapa.com

EARTH ~

Norman Schaefer

On the Summit of Cathedral Peak, 1999

EDIZA LAKE


I have wandered
far and wide
in the Sierra Nevada
but nothing like
the autumn wind tonight.

The Sunny Top of California

Dew gathers on the meadow grasses.
Deneb takes its place in the center of the sky.
Step by step around Rockslide Lake,
keeping my eyes on the radiant moon,
I call out the names of old Chinese poets,
who instruct me by saying nothing.
All my life I’ve loved high lonesome places.
Odors of moss and bark
and cones and twigs and snowmelt mud,
I feel like I’ve been coming to the Sierra
for a thousand years.
A human life is no more than a flicker of lightning,
but to die on a glacier
my bones would be pure forever.
Watching the moon begin its slow descent,
my mind quiets down
until there’s scarcely a ripple.
In the morning I’ll look for a campsite
somewhere green and steep and wild
where a wolverine might feel safe.
I talk brave,
but all I want is an autumn alone
with books and tea
and Bugler cigarettes rolled-your-own,
to be deeply enjoyed without hurry
on the sunny top of California.

YOSEMITE VALLEY

This one

dogwood in blossom

is all the spring I need.

CLEAR AUTUMN MORNING

Orion stalks the Pleiades.

Paper ~thin, a silver crescent begins to rise.

Dawn light fills Evolution Basin.

On the southern slopes of Mt. Huxley

folds and wrinkles come into focus.

Cold air drains from Muir Pass.

Frost sparkles on the grasses

white as the Milky Way.

One star by day, thousands at night,

I'm never so alive as here.

I lift a cup of tea to the alpenglow

and clear autumn morning,

alone, happy,

thirty miles from a road.

---

Norman Schaefer
The Sunny Top of California

La Alameda Press
9636 Guadalupe Trail NW
Albuquerque, New Mexico 87114

author's photo: dan pattitucci

EARTH ~

SWEET LAND

Another one of those films Hollywood shuns. It made only (only) a million at the box office. Which would be fine to most of us, but it's way below minimum-wage for Hollywood or anything else in the media. The director worked years at getting it onto the screen. Someone else complained about the chronology of the film (not liking) and I thought, hmm, that's just what I love about the film. It's flashbacks and foreshadows and lighting. Excellent actors. It isn't powerful. I believe I have become quite tired of the powerful.

We watched it by woodfire light, one simple candle and two crate tables pushed together for a Thanksgiving little feast.

EARTH ~

coda: I've got lots of smart friends; some can even spell better than little ol' me.

At least two times I have posted this Beckett quote, and each time "charitable" has been wrong.

I worked with a plumber this morning and hunkered down into his work, back to me, I heard him mumble to himself, but loud enough for the world, "dummy". About himself. A little mistake he had made. Like the one I've been making.

I even have a kind neighbor who tried to correct my ways to get the word, finally, right. "Dummy".

When a moment might be warm again (ha!), I will remount the Beckett and snap another photograph and finally have the words of Molloy right as rain.

By the way, it should be "defence". Too.

For the moment the above has all the feeling, though wrong. I'll be changing it.

And then it will be right.