I finished Barth [hilariously bad NYTimes review here] and began 2: both via int'l mails. The kind Dom Maltempi has forked over to me Octavio PazThe Double Flame, and Detlev Fischer has bequeathed David Sudnow's Ways of the Hand: the organization of improvised conduct Seoulward. I haven't made too much headway in the Paz, but the Sudnow is fascinating (in a surprisingly boring way. Just so...methodical). It doesn't interest me in a musical sense at all, but in a 'mind/body' sense as well as in its general approach, my intrigue grows. "Phenomenological" is the appropriate descriptor (the bibliography includes Husserl and Merleau-Ponty ah), passages like:
My handful knowledge of the terrain is not a knowledge of places that a photograph would depict, and an Ab scale is an Ab way, in this terminology, if it is present for 'the hand' for secure targeting: for the 'whole hand,' for 'some of its digits,' for a 'single finger,' and, even more than this, for I can use a pencil to play an Ab scale wayfully. 'Its distances' are known not just to 'fingers,' but to a 'system of spatializations' that may not be reduced to properties of a photographed or filmed characterization (and measurements thereby facilitated). Indeed, the very notion of a handful way, not having separable existential properties.
Surely... goodness. Mercy.
Additionally, I performed with Marvin Gardens on the street of Hong-Dae, Seoul on Sunday. Me making music and he reading verse (from memory, no less). He did some of the ones on his page (Paul Perry I and Correctional Facility among them) and some new things I hadn't seen/heard. It was great to see an old friend in my new city, and my my the girls love him. At one point, I think he was improvising, but I could be wrong. I sure hope I'm not!
Paul Perry I: Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?
We have to call it by some name -
and if we are looking for new things we shall
find them more easily in (but less easily than) the ancients.
You have heard your own story, you recognize your children,
will you reward the poet?
What usually happens in dreams happened to me.
I abounded in happy curiosities; why should these things,
every one of them, in all their hues and semi-hues,
in all their fades and coita, be faithfully represented
by an arbitrary system of grunts and squeals?
Please do not read reprobation or disdain in the foregoing words.
Surely the merchant did not lie this time.
We, who do not look at one another, will be able to contemplate
the treasures that the stars have promised.
The time will come to count the bodies - but we are
impenitent and even unaware of the implications.
-Marvin Gardens
