Chasing the Blues

Mid-October

Another October drifts away. After Halloween and baseball's end, we'll be on the fast track to the holidays and winter. Summer, its dreadful heat, feels long behind us. Before Thanksgiving and Christmas, we'll have the huge national elections, with a lurch to the GOP in the offing.

Fall; someday soon will come the day when I'll be moved to reread Keats' "To Autumn," as I've done for years when a certain November Day matches the poem's mood of grand weather etched with foreboding. The college football season is already past its halfway point, only a month or so of games left.

The leaves have not yet changed. Two weeks or so left in another gorgeous October. Another year hurries into the past.

 

Obituaries Show Variety of American Lives

The New York Times obituary page presented two interesting deaths: Harvey Pekar and Tuli Kupferberg. Pekar, who gained extraordinary fame from a meager literary talent, proved that in America just about anyone could find his or her 15 minutes in the spotlight. Along with Charles Bukowski, a much larger talent, Pekar the writer of the comic book American Splendor reflected the triumph of the underground man, the urban lumpenproletariat, the resentful, angry, sullen drone.

Kupferberg gained fame his fame as a member of the Fugs, the iconoclastic and satiric band from New York's Lower East Side. A survivor of the Beat Generation: his failed suicide attempt by leaping from the Manhattan Bridge was memorialized in "Howl," Kupferberg kept playing his icoclastic rock, or anti-rock, until his 80s.

His passing brought strong memories of my college days. Along with Frank Zappa's Mothers of Invention and Lenny Bruce, I loved listening to the Fugs. Not as musically advanced as Zappa, the jazz virtuouso, the Fugs exhibited a rougher, less subtle brand of humor. At the same time, they were more literary with their references to ancient and modern poetry.

My favorite member of the band was its leading force, Ed Sanders, also a fine poet. I followed Sanders' career past the days of the Fugs, when he put out two great satiric albums that also lampooned country music: "Ed Sanders Truck Stop" and "Beer Cans on the Moon." Like all fine parodies, the music while satirizng country music conventions also stood on its own as great country.

Along with Sanders' short story collection, "Tales of Beatnik Glory," I also was impressed by Sanders' account of the Charles Manson trial, the best report about the case.

In my music universe, I put the Fugs in the same place as Lou Reed and the Velvet Underground, New York hipsters with a burnt-out, urban, literary sensibility. While Sanders was my main interest, I had a strong respect for Kupferberg. He deserves a place as an influential figure in rock history.

What a constrast between Pekar and Kupferberg's lives and that of the biggest death of the week, so far, George Steinbrenner. I actually liked Steinbrenner's Yankees in the early part of his ownership when he built those great teams with Thurmon Munson and Reggie  Jackson, managed by Billy Martin. But his act grew old over the years, and now I'm at place either hostile or indifferent to the Yankees.

 

Whan That April...

No fooling, April is arriving. The favorite of poets from Chaucer to T.S. Eliot, April puts the spring into spring. All of those songs, that rejuvenated feeling. Curiously, April has also brought a number of violent events. After sitting and nursing grievances though the winter, angry folks burst out in April too.

This is one of those curious years in which Easter arrives early. On Good Friday, I will once again read John Donne's "Good Friday, 1613, Riding Westward." See my Southern Bookman blog for my post from last year on this custom. With our children grown and moved away, we will have a quiet Easter, celebrating at a brunch with old friends.

Here's a bit of Chaucer's "General Prologue" from "Canterbury Tales," as fresh today as when it was written in the 14th century. I remember seeing Chaucer's tomb at Westminster Cathedral in London, paying homage to the man, along with Shakespeare, who shaped the English language.

Whan that April with his showres soote (sweet)
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,
Of which veru engendred is the flowr;
Whan Sephrys eek with his sweete breeth
Inspired hath in every holt and heeth
The tendre croopes, the yonge sone
Hath in the Ram his halv cours yronne,
And small folwed maken melodye
That sleepen al the night with open ye
So priketh hem Nature in hir corages
Thanne longen folk to goon pilgrmages,
and palmeres for to seeken strange strondes
To ferne halwes, courhe in sondry londes,
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blisful marty for to seeke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke.

Driving Down Memory Lane to Callanwolde and Back

I participated in a poetry reading Wednesday night at Callanwolde, one of my favorite Atlanta places. Over the years, I have frequently traveled the Druid Hills-Briarcliff Road corridor, whether going to events at Emory University or headed to Callanwolde.

 Heading down Druid Hills  to Briarcliff Road, I entered that dreamy state of familarity, my mind half on autopilot. I turned on Briarcliff beside a shopping center where I used to eat at a restaurant that served excellent softshell crab sandwiches. St. Charles Deli?...

I passed LaVista; with its church with a towering steeple on the corner, and a shopping center with ethnic businesses; once I ate at a restaurant there with my two brothers-in-law after a round of golf. Driving down the dark road, I noticed colored Christmas lights still shining from an outdoor evergreen. My neighbors behind me also had not taken down their Christmas lights; was this a trend?

I came to N. Decatur Road, where, if I were headed to Emory's campus, I would turn left. Continuing down Briarcliff, I passed the big, well-lit rectangle of Emory's continuing education center, where several years before I'd begun playing the piano at a course there. Then came the sign for "the Byway," a quirky DeKalb street that always recalls the late Turner Cassity, who once at a Callanwolde Poetry Weekend used it as part of a back route to get from Callanwolde to a restaurant at Toco Hill shopping center, where we enjoyed sandwiches and listened to the shy and reserved James Merrill.  At last, after several college-oriented apartment houses, I saw the glowing orange sign of Callanwolde. 

I hadn't been there for a couple of years. Earlier in my Atlanta life, I'd taken courses there in fiction writing and poetry, along with attending those excellent Poetry Weekends, which, sadly, somehow fell by the wayside after the 1996 Olympics. Outstanding national poets showed up to lead workshops and read: Merrill's reading in a barely lit auditorium was one of the best I've attended. I also remember Amy Clampitt, who had a delightful sense of humor beneath her air of refined reserve,  Paul Muldoon and Rosemary Daniels.

The poetry reading was in Callanwolde's elegant, wood-paneled library, although I wondered why it had no bookshelves. A strong crowd showed up for the open-mic reading, and my fellow poets shared wonderful pieces. I talked with a longtime poetry friend, Dan Veatch, and we shared memories of Mr. Cassity, whom I remembered sitting in that very room conducting a workshop.

With the warm glow of art and poetry enveloping me, I walked outside from the well-heated old building to the car, and embarked upon the familiar route home. Buford Highway, attached to a host of memories; East Paces Ferry, where I used to turn to go to the Lenox MARTA Station; the shopping center with the still empty  store space of the bankrupt electronics business where I'd bought many appliances over the years, including, most recently, a HD TV; Borders, where I'd spent many hours looking at books; Peachtree Road; Wieuca Baptist; Phipps Plaza; Ga. 400 overpass; and at last, down the curve to our street. 

The Future Comes Back Again

I returned from a morning appointment to an eerie emptiness. After all of the commotion, voices, laughter, music and busy-ness of the holidays, the children, now all adults, were back in school or headed off to new ventures. The day after our youngest daughter's 21st birthday, the silence in the house felt especially deep and powerful.

The first week of January, when everyone goes back to work and makes a start on those earnest resolutions, arrived clear and cold, sweeping away the past and giving hope for fresh beginnings. Good news and tidings hung in the frigid air. New careers. New jobs. New directions. New paths.

Guess it's time to pull down T.S. Eliot's "Four Quartets." Or James Joyce's "The Dead," a great short story I used to read every year at this time. Revisit epiphanies, to see if they still have validity. The forecast calls for snow to arrive: How nice it would be to sit in the warmth, with snow falling, and re-read Joyce's description of the Irish snow and the sadness and regret and happiness that ebb and flow in our lives. But today, the sun is shining bright, despite the bitter cold. Time for work, time for plans. Time to look ahead.

Let Us Go Then, You and I...

I was surprised when writing a check today and checked the date. Oct. 20. Another year quickly receding into history, or something very close to it. Already, the morning has vanished, and another afternoon has arrived. After weeks of rain, October's clear blue beaker has returned. November looms, full of light and shadow, then the horrid holidays.

In a conversation, I heard T.S. Eliot's "Lovesong of Alfred J. Prufock" quoted, an echo of my mind, since I know snatches of the poem by memory. I assume countless people do -- it's one of those works that form our that mass consciousness we call civilization, or that civilization we call mass consciousness. Prufock -- an apt character for our times, and every time.

Soon, an autumn day will arrive, bright, windy, a bit warm, the type of Indian summer day that I associate with early November, in which I will reread Keats' "To Autumn." I wanted to go see "Bright Star," the movie about Keats' love affair with Fanny Brawne, but I haven't yet, and it's probably already gone.