Short Conditional Take on Anne Carson

If I attended “An Hour with Anne Carson,” at the Vancouver Writers Festival yesterday.

If Aislinn Hunter introduced her, using the unlikely but nifty words “betweenity” (purloined from the Brontës’ letters, she said) and “blacksmithery” (source unclear).

If Aislinn Hunter spoke of Anne Carson’s writing’s “fierceness, a fearlessness framed in exquisite craft.”

If Anne Carson then said she had never had an introduction that used the words “betweenity” and “blacksmithery.”

If her miked voice had what seemed to me to be intensity in restraint.

If Anne Carson said she was glad to be back in Canada if only to get a proper bran muffin.

If she then read an essay written in a kitchen in Ontario in winter.

If it was called “Merry Christmas from Hegel,” and if it was, post Nox, a meditation on stillness.

If she admitted, perhaps untruthfully perhaps not, to not understanding Hegel.

If she said she will paraphrase Hegel badly.

If the essay described, with what seemed to me to be aching restraint, what she called “snow-standing” amid the stillness of conifers.

If the text only mentioned Hegel briefly.

If she wrote something like, “The world subtracts itself in layers.”

If she also described that subtraction as something like, “shadow on shadow in precise velocities,” which might be an image of Hegelian negation.

If she said afterward that she wouldn’t be able to answer any questions about Hegel.

If people applauded because it was a beautiful essay and her reading was very beautiful.

         If she then read an essay on a painting by Betty Goodwin.

If the essay was called “Betty Goodwin Seated Figure with Red Angle,” and if it was written for an issue of Art Forum.

If the right title is “Seated Figure with Red Angle (1988) by Betty Goodwin (by Anne Carson).”

If Anne Carson said, “The form is kind of whacked out.”

If by form she meant her essay not the painting.

If she also said that she wanted to find a form or a syntax that suited her own inability to have an opinion about Betty Goodwin’s painting.

If she never said, Ut pictura poesis.

If the form she chose was to write the whole thing in conditionals, seventy-three of them she said, including mention of horses and Freud, each of the seventy-three beginning with the word “if.”

If the idea was to open up to the sentence “the space in your mind that is prior to opinion.”

If I heard in her sense of “opinion” what Plato calls pistis, “belief,” a subordinate form of doxa, “opinion,” but she did not say this, and I may be both pretentious and wrong.

If she said her conditional essay “was fun to do but will be intolerable to listen to.”

If no one believed her when she said this.

If it wasn’t intolerable, not at all.

If she wrote, “If body is always deep, but deepest at its surface.”

If this made me think.

If she also wrote, “If artists tell you art is before thought.”

If by that she meant Betty Goodwin specifically, but I also took it to mean herself.

If everyone applauded again because she was wryly brilliant and provocative.

If she went on to read from Autobiography of Red and red doc>.

If there was more heartfelt applause.

If she took a bow.

If people asked her questions.

If she took another bow.

If she autographed my book, “Respectfully, AC.”

If I could thank her.

Short Take on Paul Muldoon Talking, a Précis

Paul Muldoon was interviewed by John Freeman on stage at the Waterfront Theatre at the Vancouver International Writers Festival this afternoon, and he'll be reading as one of eight poets at the Poetry Bash tonight at Performance Works on Granville Island. He was asked right off the bat to talk about his collaboration with Warren Zevon, which resulted in a song, "My Ride's Here," the title track on Zevon's last record (and was then covered for a posthumous tribute album by none other than Bruce Springsteen). Mr Muldoon said he "kind of went to school with Warren Zevon," noting "just how difficult it is to write a song" to make it sound so effortless, and praising Zevon's genius. He found himself, in composing his lyrics, trying to locate a raw, emotional "angle of entry" into a song. Asked to differentiate between poetry and song, he said:  "I suppose at some level the pressure per square inch in that [Muldoon's lyric, 'You Say You're Just Hanging Out . . .'] isn't quite what it could be in one of the poems." At the same time, he said how he wants to realize his own desire for directness and clarity, which lyrics can so better "at some level." He said he was still "struck by Seamus Heaney's (I think) successful attempts to pick up Yeats's suggestion that 'Myself I must remake,'" and also declared that “poems are more evidently (not necessarily more truly) made out of the core of one’s being.” He described the impact of BBC radio on his desire for clarity and “the need to be direct.” At John Freeman’s request, he read “Wind and Tree” from his first collection: “In the way that most of the wind / Happens where there are trees, / Most of the world is centred / About ourselves.” He read from Madoc, noting as well that he was a “big fan of our friend Laurence Sterne” and how he had also derived a “fascination with lists” from Robinson Crusoe, Defoe’s interest in “stuff.” He said he encouraged his students to develop “a sense of the resonances of every word in a poem,” the specificity of language. He read his song-lyric, “Elephant Anthem,” and noted how he used to pore over lyrics printed on lp sleeves.

Audio: Carnets de Routes Improvisées

Here is an audio capture of a paper I delivered on Thursday, September 5, 2013 at the Colloquium of the Guelph Jazz Festival, which took place at the MacDonald Stewart Art Centre at the University of Guelph. It’s called “Carnets de Routes Improvisées: Transcultural Encounters in the work of Guy Le Querrec and the Romano-Sclavis-Texier Trio,” and, like the title says, it connects a number of recorded improvisations by a European trio around the African photography of Magnum photographer Guy Le Querrec to certain concepts of decolonization and latter-day ethnography. I try to suggest, in a limited utopian vein, how viable transcultural encounters might be realized through improvisation – not only musical, but visual as well. I also refer to the compelling historical work of Julie Livingston around biomedical practices in southern Africa, particularly her book Improvising medicine: An African Oncology Ward in an Emerging Cancer Epidemic (2012). This paper formed part of a two-person panel on media and transculturalism; the other presenter was Alan Stanbridge of the University of Toronto. The moderator for the session, whom you can hear offering an introduction at the beginning of this recording, was Nicholas Loess.

Here is the abstract for the paper:

Sponsored by French cultural institutions, the improvising trio of clarinetist Louis Sclavis, bassist Henri Texier and drummer Aldo Romano formed in early 1990 to undertake a tour of central Africa, including performances in Chad, Gabon, Congo, Cameroon and Guinea. Other tours would follow in 1993 and 1997. Despite both appearance and funding support, this group wasn’t engaged in officially-sanctioned cultural promotion, but had been conceived as an artistic and cultural project by Magnum photographer Guy Le Querrec, who appears to have wanted to chronicle in images the encounters of European jazz musicians with mostly rural African audiences. Le Querrec had already taken numerous photographic trips to North Africa—in 1969-71, 1978 and 1984, for example—trips that had produced significant images in his portfolio concentrating on both the troubling appropriations of ethnographic image-making and the complex challenges and impediments to transcultural understanding. His work with the Romano-Sclavis-Texier trio, now seen in retrospect, constitutes a deliberate post-colonial cultural intervention, a re-engagement by both aesthetic and documentary tactics in parts of the world from which colonial France had withdrawn. Le Querrec curates this particular tour of leading voices in French free jazz—he is listed on the recordings as a fourth member of the trio, not merely as a courtesy but as an active if tacit participant in the performances—for two main reasons. First, Le Querrec is one of the preeminent jazz photographers in Europe, and several of his collections centre on historic images of canonical jazz musicians. A 1997 show in Paris saw musicians (including Texier and Sclavis) improvising to projections of Le Querrec’s work; the show’s title, Jazz comme un Image, suggests how closely Le Querrec links his photography to improvisational musical (and visual) practices, a connection he further clarifies in an artist’s statement for the performance:

Être jazz c’est avant tout une manière de vivre, de se promener sur le fil du hazard pour aller à la rencontre d’un imaginaire qui contient toujours l’improvisation, la curiosité, qui oblige à écouter les autres, à les voir, à être disponible pour mieux les raconter en manifestant sa propre poésie.

This complex sense of likeness, at play in the overlap between rencontrer and raconter, to encounter and to give account, traces itself back in the context of French colonialism and ethnography to the Dakar-Djibouti expedition of 1931-33, and particularly the poetic-documentary writing of Michel Leiris in L’Afrique fantôme and L’Âge d’Homme, the latter of which in particular focuses on the Afrological substrata of jazz. Second, both the trio’s music and Le Querrec’s photography investigate the give-and-take, the tensions between re-appropriation and creative misprision inherent in this jazz-based transcultural model. The music on the three compact discs released by the trio (Carnet de Routes, 1995; Suite Africaine, 1999; African Flashback, 2006; each accompanied by booklets collating Le Querrec’s photographs from their 1990, 1993 and 1997 tours) does not come from their live performances, which seem (apart from the photographs) to have gone undocumented, but consists of recordings in a French studio after the tours were done, improvised reactions to the photographs as well as compositions that emerged from their African experiences. The “poetry” of imaginative encounter that Le Querrec describes is enacted musically (and even visually) in the extemporaneous negotiations of difference, and the creative troubling of Eurocentrisms, that these improvisations offer. Rather than reproduce the exoticism and even nostalgia that shapes late colonial, modernist ethnography, these audio-visual “records” investigate performatively how a transculturalism of shared differences, a contingent community of unlikeness, can be brought extemporaneously into being.

Philip Glass and Kronos Quartet: Music is a Place

Last night Christina and I attended “Kronos at 40,” a sold-out concert by Kronos Quartet at the Chan Centre at the University of British Columbia celebrating the string quartet’s 40^th anniversary as a working unit. The programme, a gathering of contemporary work and commissioned arrangements of folk and roots music, was fairly typical – if anything Kronos does can be said to be typical – of what has become the quartet’s cultural mission: a strong commitment to fostering new, sonically-arresting, cutting-edge composition and to disseminating those often challenging soundscapes to as wide an audience as they can draw. That commitment was powerfully evident last night, for me, in the taut rhythmic virtuosity that each member of the group – David Harrington, Hank Dutt, John Sherba and new cellist Sunny Yang – brought to every piece they played. Whatever a composer’s method, approach, aesthetic, they were on it, utterly and unflinchingly. And after forty years, absolutely nothing about their energy, enthusiasm or dedication to all kinds of new music has diminished.

         Highlights from last night’s performance included a brief but wonderfully nuanced version of an arrangement by trombonist-improviser-composer Jacob Garchik of a blues by the little-known Geeshie Wiley, “Last Kind Words.” The unresolved subtleties and the powerful timbres of Wiley’s voice that ghost through the song’s surface-noise-laden original recording (from around 1930) are translated by Garchik into gently interlacing dissonances across a palette of strings, with Harrington’s violin taking a kind of vocal lead, weaving in and out of the other lines with a give-and-take that offers a present-day mirroring of the collaborative call and response of traditional African-American form. It worked brilliantly, I thought.  There were fine arrangements, too, of Iranian, Ottoman and Jewish songs, as well as electronically- and instrumentally-augmented compositions by Canadians John Oswald and Nicole Lizée, and by Serbian-born Aleksandra Vrebalov. They played three encores, arrangements of Greek and Columbian melodies and a killer version of what was has been their signature piece, Jimi Hendrix’s “Purple Haze,” complete with light-show and rumbling feedback: they rocked the house, really.

         The centerpiece of the concert was the world premiere of Philip Glass’s String Quartet No. 6, commissioned for Kronos’s 40^th anniversary, as (according to the composer’s notes) “the most recent result of a long and ripening friendship between myself and the Kronos Quartet.” Before the concert, Eleanor Wachtel interviewed Philip Glass on stage at the Chan; the interview was being recorded for broadcast, she said, on CBC Radio on November 19, on Ideas. Their conversation concentrated on Glass’s history of collaborating with Kronos and with filmmaker Godfrey Reggio, particularly Glass’s soundtrack to Reggio’s The Visitors, but Glass also talked – very warmly and personably – about his own aesthetics, and his compositional style. He noted how Kronos’s “love and dedication” to the form “were unparalleled,” and said that the string quartet as a genre could create the “most intimate expression of a composer’s work,” allowing for “a maximum of density and clarity at the same time.” The quartet is “a prism through which the light of music can shine and be broken into colours.” He also noted how he has a difficult time extricating himself from the aural world of his music, of hearing his compositions – such as this new string quartet – from an objective outside: “I’m probably the person who knows least about what they sound like.” He also said he has been concerned with thinking about “where music comes from,” with “what music is,” and has decided that “music is a place . . . a real place,” defining “a consensual reality” that can be inhabited in composing and performing: in music, we become “citizens of the same country.”

         His String Quartet No. 6 opened a door into that place. The performance was about half an hour, and consisted of three movements, at tempos (maybe allegro -andante – allegro) creating a kind of envelope or frame that seemed to reflect a classical formalism; Glass mentioned Haydn in his earlier remarks, and there is something of Haydn’s structural symmetry carried forward in Glass’s writing. Glass also referred to the dynamic feel of Bartok, and it’s important to recognize that this sixth quartet also enacts a certain loosening in its textures, particularly around the dynamics; the hurried contrapuntal minimalism of his early work is moderated in this work into waves of surge and release, which Kronos managed brilliantly. In the third movement, I thought I kept hearing echoes of MGM-style film music, but afterward Christina told me she thought those were traces of Aaron Copland’s folk idiom and I think she was right – whether Glass intended these echoes or not, the work communicates a sense of a late Americana that is both moving and engrossing. It was a true privilege to be able to hear this music, and to hear Philip Glass speak.