Helen Vendler on reading poems

RIP. As a reader of novels and poetry, I find this exactly right: 

I don’t believe that poems are written to be heard, or as Mill said, to be overheard; nor are poems addressed to their reader. I believe that poems are a score for performance by the reader, and that you become the speaking voice. You don’t read or overhear the voice in the poem, you are the voice in the poem. You stand behind the words and speak them as your own—so that it is a very different form of reading from what you might do in a novel where a character is telling the story, where the speaking voice is usurped by a fictional person to whom you listen as the novel unfolds.

(Interviewed in Paris Review)

Reading roundup

Sabbatical... Good time to get some reading done... 

In Ascension
Martin MacInnes

This 500-pager is at its best at the beginning, as we learn about the protagonist-biologist Leigh and her troubled childhood; and in the approach to the somewhat freaky and ambiguous ending. I love alien contact plots, and this book has one... sort of... but the central 2/3 of the novel wastes way too many pages on hard sci fi and algae farming.

Homelessness Is a Housing Problem
Gregg Colburn and Clayton Page Aldern

Yes, it is... the title may qualify for the biggest "duh!" of all time. But as the authors note, the discourse around homelessness has often centered on the individual economic and behavioral traits associated with being unhoused, as well as debates over policy priorities, such as transitional shelter vs. permanent housing, "housing first," vs. services, tough on crime vs. liberal drug and vagrancy laws, etc. Colburn and Aldern make a simple but essential point: Individuals who are more vulnerable– whether due to poverty, mental illness, substance abuse, or other traits– are more likely to be "selected" into homelessness in any given community, but the size of the homelessness problem is a function of conditions in that community's rental housing market. One can think in terms of a bell-shaped distribution of vulnerability across individuals, with the cost of housing determining the vulnerability cutoff between being housed and unhoused, and therefore the size of the homeless "tail."

The book relies on fairly simpleminded statistical evidence: essentially a series of bivariate scatter plots of the rate of homelessness (as measure by point-in-time surveys) against various potential determinants (such as poverty rates), in a cross-section of cities or regions. Chapter by chapter, they dismiss most of the standard accounts until they get to rents and housing supply. The economist in me wanted to see a big multivariate regression table at the end, estimating a "horse race" between the various potential determinants simultaneously, and they claim in the text to have done this, with no substantive change in the findings. I believe them, but it would be nice if they could share their data somewhere. Then, if I assign this book in a class, I could have the students replicate and tweak the analysis. 

The book's core recommendations flow from the findings: Basically, build more affordable housing. Of course, it's easy to say that, but they do offer some good discussions of the practical politics and political economy of housing development. They particularly advocate subsidized increases in housing supply at the low end of the rental market, although their cross-city comparisons seem to affirm that a more elastic overall supply of market-rate housing might do the trick. So: More money to help the most vulnerable in our communities! But also... Build baby build!

The Niagara River
Kay Ryan

Very short, very clever poems. At her best, her internal rhymes, para-rhymes, and wordplay bring both delight and epiphany. At times, they veer over the line into precious. But late at night just before I turn out the light, almost the whole lot hit the spot.

Piano women

Earthwise Productions is a labor of love run by local Palo Alto impresario Mark Weiss. Mr. Weiss has fantastic connections in the jazz and indie music world, but rather limited marketing skills. Or maybe there is not an audience for first-rate, sometimes edgy improvisers in sleepy, tech-y Palo Alto. 

Last Friday's show at the Mitchell Park Community Center was a case in point. An audience of– generously– 20 listened to two sets: Marta Sanchez on solo prepared piano, and the piano-clarinet duo of Myra Melford and Ben Goldberg.

Sanchez was performing a multi-day mini-residency with Earthwise, apparently preparing for a recording of the pieces she was performing. I knew of Sanchez as the pianist in David Murray's current quartet. Murray is the best jazz musician alive (sez me!), and he has very good taste in pianists (e.g., the late great Don Pullen), so I was definitely looking forward to Sanchez. Well, she is clearly talented, but the solo pieces came off a bit noodly, and the prepared piano was not really prepared enough: the hardware under the hood seemed mostly to have the effect of distorting the tuning of a few notes toward the middle of the keyboard, and adding some weak buzzes up top. I was not sure what the point of it was, really. 

Myra Melford I have heard many times, and she is simply one of the great jazz pianists of her generation. The set with Goldberg, who is an excellent player but a bit reserved for my tastes, was fine, but over-composed. Need I say that my favorite piece of the evening allowed Myra to stretch out, banging and whipping at the keyboard with the knuckled glissando that she learned, I believe, from none other than the aforementioned Don Pullen?

Keep up the good work, Mark; and all you Palo Altans, get your asses out to support live music!

Richard Serra, RIP

His sculptures seem like the work of natural forces while at the same time being intensely human. NYT obit.

Cats and birds

This blog post by Maximilian Auffhammer about how much people (de)value the view of a wind turbine from their house mentions another oft-heard critique of these big windmills, namely that they kill birds. Which they do: roughly 250,000 birds per year, according to an estimate from about ten years ago. More turbines today, so probably more dead birds. Sad! The same source puts the number of birds killed annually by cats in the United States at... hmm... 2.5 billion, or 10,000 times the number killed by windmills.

How is that possible... 2.5 billion?! Let's do a back-of-the-envelope calculation. There are an estimated 60 million pet cats, and perhaps 50 million feral cats in the United States. Many of the pet cats are outdoor cats, eagerly prowling the neighborhood picking off songbirds just for the fun of it. But let's stick to the feral cats. My lazy, inert indoor cats consume about 5 ounces of cat food per day each– pure meat and calories. A typical junco, the abundant, smallish sparrow that is the most common bird in my suburban neighborhood, weighs about 0.67 ounces, and some of that is feather and bone. But anyway, let's round up to a somewhat more substantial bird, 1 ounce of meat apiece. Assuming an active feral cat needs as much meat as my inert cats, that's 5 birds per day. For the U.S. feral cat population, that comes to 5 x 365 x 50 million = 91 billion songbirds per year. Of course, they will eat some mice and rats and garbage instead of birds, and some will be fed by well-intentioned human enemies of songbirds. But 2.5 billion seems utterly plausible. Out of a total bird population of... 10 billion? Busy, hungry, cruel, destructive kitties!

The N'Gustro Affair, by Jean-Patrick Manchette

I feel a little guilty confessing how much I loved this high-energy piece of toxic political cynicism, Manchette's first novel (1971). I found it un-put-downable, with its very clever narrative structure driving the action forward, and its manic, profane humor. Politically incorrect, no doubt, but Manchette is an equal-opportunity hater, and the intermittently brutal and fascistic (and ever-opportunistic) protagonist and narrator Henri Butron definitely gets what's coming to him. The novel is based loosely on a true story of post-colonial shenanigans, as explained in Gary Indiana's insightful introduction. Translated in all its gloriously hard-boiled and colorful prose stylings by Donald Nicholson-Smith. An entertainment on the level of, say, Scorcese's Goodfellas. Enjoy!

Nice and damp at Hidden Villa

Along the Long Bunny Loop Trail... Hericium coralloides (coral tooth fungus) with some other stuff; Schizophyllum commune; and Toxicodendron diversilobum (look but don't touch!).

Reading roundup

Some good ones... one not so good... 

My Ántonia
Willa Cather

Fine story-telling, beautifully written. It is simultaneously two coming-of age stories – of the main characters, and of the frontier prairie society they inhabit and build. Cather's admiration for the immigrant farm girls who move into town and grow into strong and remarkably independent American women is evident, even if the most willful of them all, Ántonia herself, is the one who through unfortunate circumstances returns to the farm, devoting her life to bearing and raising an enormous brood of future farmers.

The Ruined Map
Kobo Abe

Abe's excellent 1967 novel is a noir in full-on existential mode. Our narrator is a private detective hired to find a woman's husband, who left one day and never returned. Hubby seems to have been messed up in something criminal, possibly involving his brother-in-law, but the clues, such as they are, lead in various directions with no real resolution. All angst and atmosphere, the book features moments of humor as well, such as when the detective describes in great detail his special method for examining a photograph through binoculars to discern the inner thoughts and feelings of its subject. The translation, which reads flawlessly, is by E. Dale Saunders. 

The Jinn-Bot of Shantiport
Samit Basu

I quite enjoyed Basu's debut, The City Inside, a plausible near-future romp in post-Modi India. His follow-up, a more distant-future riff on the Aladdin story, has its moments, but bogs down trying to describe a bizarre and ultimately unconvincing mash-up of AI bots, modified humans, and mysterious aliens. Of course, be careful what you wish for! 

The Less Dead
Denise Mina

Another reliably well-written and entertaining thriller with a conscience from Mina, this time featuring a sympathetic portrayal of sex workers.  

The Selected Poems of Po Chü-I
Translated by David Hinton

Po Chü-I (Bai Juyi) was a Tang poet born in 772, not long after the deaths of the great generation of Tang masters: Du Fu, Li Bai, and Wang Wei. I have enjoyed reading Po enormously, in this exquisite translation by David Hinton. Many of the poems are contemplative, reflecting Po's interest in Taoism and Zen Buddhism. But his social commentary could really bite...

Songs of Ch’in-chou
7. Light and Sleek

Riding proud in the streets, parading 
horses that glisten, lighting the dust... 

When I ask who such figures could be, 
people say they're imperial favorites: 

vermillion sashes— they're ministers; 
and purple ribbons— maybe generals. 

On horses passing like drifting clouds 
they swagger their way to an army feast, 

to those nine wines filling cup and jar 
and eight dainties of water and land. 

After sweet Tung-t'ing Lake oranges 
and mince-fish from a lake of heaven, 

they've eaten to their hearts content, 
and happily drunk, their spirits swell. 

There's drought south of the Yangtze: 
In Ch’ü-chou, people are eating people.