Recently I've re-read Between Life and Death, by Nathalie Sarraute. It was one of the most satisfying re-reads of my shallow-ass life; when I read the first time, I absorbed it (if I did) through some sort of osmosis, so this time it was as new as the first, which was only a few short years ago. I went shopping for books yesterday and came home with Finnegan's Wake, The Pound Era, and Jacques Derrida, by Geoffrey Bennington and JD himself, which I'm now reading. It has been great lately, I'm on a winning streak with the word; so many good and useful books lately. Being here, living alone, having so few demands on my time, I've had mucho opportunidad to hit the bookuz.
Musically, I'm still in isolationist mode here. I'm slated to play with Alfred over at his space soon, and I'm looking forward to it. My daily program lately has been to wake up around 9 or 10, open my windows to the corruscating sounds of construction sites (I'm sandwiched, you see), pick up my horn and play with the machines. It's my daily dose of [junk] percussion-ensemble textures. I've been playing a lot, this way, and it's great but it'll get old eventually.
I'm trying to convince my friend Kevin Parks (computer/tape musician/composer) to improvise with me, but he hasn't done such work in a long time and has expressed trepidation. I think it'll be more likely to happen if we can drum up a couple others to fill out the mix, taking the perceived 'pressure' off a little (a pressure I don't recognize, of course, but one to which I'm beholden by proxy).
Of course there's always playing in the streets, but it doesn't go over too well here and the weather's really getting chilly. In addition, I'm already infamous in my neighborhood as the weird foreigner who *gasp, how pitiful* reads in bars. The common sentiment seems divided: either I'm some sort of obsessive scholar or a maladjusted and lonely social weirdo with an addiction to big fat books. Add to that my predilection for humiliating myself by making incomprehensible sounds in public on a raggedy cornet and well you see I've lost my face, I suppose.
Re: Pound:
Ezra Pound, aged eighty-seven, died in the night of November 1, 1972, released at last from a long, agitated silence ("but the mind as Ixion, unstill, ever turning"). For ten years, haunted by despair, contrition, or some other, nameless, more complicated sentiment, he had spoken very little. "I ruin everything I touch," he told an Italian journalist in 1963. "I have been mistaken, always¡¦I have arrived at doubt too late¡¦." He thought The Cantos were "botched," and confessed to Allen Ginsberg (in a conversation reported by Michael Reck in Evergreen Review) that his worst mistake had been "that stupid, suburban prejudice of anti-Semitism."
