[ Milch video ]

Here is a video of a presentation Milch did at MIT - April 20, 2006. In it he talks about his family and in particular about his father.

[ Sal on TV ]

[ Susan Howe visits ]

Susan Howe chats with Rivka during the break in our 3-hour session with her this past Monday.

[ NYPD Blue episodes to watch ]

We will all watch and write about - and be ready to discuss - the following NYPD Blue episodes from seasons 1 and 2.

season 1
1: pilot
2: 4B or Not 4B
3: Brown Appetit
4: True Confessions
[Watch episode 4 a second time, listening to commentary by David Milch.]
5: Emission Accomplished
9: Ice Follies
10: Oscar, Meyer, Wiener
11: From Hare to Eternity
16: A Sudden Fish
20: Good Time Charlie
21: Guns 'N' Roses
22: Rockin' Robin

season 2
1: Trials and Tribulations
2: From Whom the Skell Rolls
3: Cop Suey
4: Dead and Gone
5: Simone Says
6: The Final Adjustment
7: Double Abandando
8: You Bet Your Life
15: Bombs Away
18: Innuendo
21: The Bank Dick
22: A.D.A. Sipowicz

And watch the documentary, "Season 2: A Season of Change."

[ Hill Street Blues season 3 episodes written by Milch ]

Click on the image above for a larger view.

[ Bed Hangings ]

Granary Press published Bed Hangings - text of the poems in The Midnight along with illustrations around the poems by Susan Bee. "In Bed Hangings, poet Susan Howe and artist Susan Bee collaborate for the first time. This series of poems explores the themes of colonial America and its decorative arts, religion and Puritanism through a visual and verbal investigation of the metaphysics of beds, curtains, and hangings. The poems and pictures play off each other in a humorous, mystical and occasionally mischievous manner." Click here for more. And here is a short review by Marjorie Perloff.

[ "Souls of the Labadie Tract" audio ]

PennSound is now making available Susan Howe's recording--with the music of David Grubbs--of "Souls of the Labadie Tract." Click here for a link to the Howe/Grubbs PennSound page.

[ Milch's new show ]

The Hollywood Reporter runs an update today on Milch's new television series, "Luck." Here's your link.

[ Joyce visits ]

[ recordings of Howe reading our poems ]

Here is a list of poems--poems we'll be reading--in the PennSound archive that were recorded by Howe at various readings over the years:

1. "The Secret History of the Dividing Line" - link

2. "Thorow" - introduction - part 1 - part 2 - part 3

3. "Articulation of Sound Forms in Time" - link

4. "Melville's Marginalia" - link

[ Howe set to music ]

Thiefth is a musical performance composed by David Grubbs in collaboration with Susan Howe and recorded in 2005. It consists of a reading, set to music, of "Thorow" and "Melville's Marginalia." It has just now been added to PennSound here.

Below is a photograph taken during the recording of this piece:


Susan Howe and David Grubbs, Thiefth (Blue Chopsticks BC15)

Thiefth is the first collaboration between poet Susan Howe and musician and composer David Grubbs. The two were brought together when the Fondation Cartier proposed a collaborative performance. Grubbs had been an ardent reader of Howe’s for more than a decade, and the opportunity to work with Howe’s poetry and her voice immediately intrigued. In late 2003, the two set about to create performance versions of “Thorow” and “Melville’s Marginalia,” two of Howe’s longer poems.

Drawing from the journals of Sir William Johnson and Henry David Thoreau, “Thorow” both evokes the winter landscape that surrounds Lake George in upstate New York, and explores collisions and collusions of historical violence and national identity. “Thorow”
is an act of second seeing in which Howe and Grubbs engage the lake’s glittering, ice surface as well as the insistent voices that haunt an unseen world underneath.

“Melville’s Marginalia” is an approach to an elusive and allusive mind through Herman Melville’s own reading and the notations he made in some of the books he owned and loved. The collaging and mirror-imaging of words and sounds are concretions of verbal static, visual mediations on what can and cannot be said.

“Thorow” (15:08)
1. Introduction 2. Part One 3. Part Two 4. Part Three
Susan Howe: reader
Mats Gustafsson: baritone saxophone, fluteophone
Nikos Veliotis: cello
David Grubbs: computer

“Melville’s Marginalia” (19:46)
Susan Howe: reader
David Grubbs: piano, computer

Recorded by Ross Bonadonna at Wombat Recording Company, Brooklyn, with additional recording by Tim Iseler at Soma, Chicago, and Mats Gustafsson in Gustavsberg, Sweden. Mixed by DG at Black Faurest. Mastered by Doug Henderson at Micro-Moose.

© 2005 Susan Howe and David Grubbs. Published by Gastr Virgo Music (BMI), administered in Europe by Rough Trade, Ltd.

[ Howe and Grubbs make music ]

David Grubbs & Susan Howe
Souls of the Labadie Tract
CD

Susan reads. David plays. Further sounds from this duo set on stretching your mind to its limit. Studying poetry has never been so rewarding.

The Drag City is one source for this performance.

Now Wire (subtitled "Adventures in Modern Music") is making this work available in streaming audio here.

[ sources for Wild Nights! ]

Kristen Martin on sources for Oates' Wild Nights:

In Wild Nights! Joyce Carol Oates reveres some of her influences—namely Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway—in a disturbing way. Though unsettling, Oates’ evocation of these writers’ voices and retelling of their last days doesn’t appear to be a departure from her other works. The element of morbid fascination is prominent in these stories—despite the heavy ick factor, I couldn’t help but read on and wonder what was real. For my project, I referred to the sources that Oates used in constructing Wild Nights! and found out (to my horror) that much of the background is true.

***

Edgar Allen Poe
Oates reimagines Edgar Allen Poe’s single-page manuscript “The Light-House” as “Poe Posthumous; or, The Light-House.” Poe began “The Light-House” shortly before his death on October 7, 1849; he never finished it. George E. Woodberry, who also assigned the tale its title, first published it in 1909 in The Life of Edgar Allen Poe.
Poe’s “The Light-House” is set somewhere near Scandinavia, in stark contrast with Oates’ choice of Viña de Mar. Both pieces take the form of diary entries, but Poe’s begin on New Year’s Day 1796 and continue only through January 3rd, whereas Oates begins on October 7, 1849—the date of Poe’s death. Oates borrows (and mutates) other details directly from Poe’s manuscript. The narrator’s companion, Neptune, becomes Poe’s Mercury, and in both tales, the lighthouse has the exact same dimensions.
More crucial, however, is that Oates’ tale displays the same key sentiment as Poe’s—loneliness. Some of the most resounding lines of “Poe Posthumous” are actually just paraphrased from Poe’s manuscript. For example, Oates’ “For in the night…there came hauntingly to me, as it were mockingly, an echo of alone: strange how I never observed till now how ominous a sound that word possesses: alone” (7-9) is a rephrasing of Poe’s “Besides, I wish to be alone……It is strange that I never observed, until this moment, how dreary a sound that word has – ‘alone’!”
Also of note is a passage in “Poe Posthumous” which alludes to the mysterious circumstances of Poe’s death: “…on a rain-lashed street in a city not familiar to me, I slipped, fell, cracked my head upon sharp paving stones, and died” (5). In fact, the 40-year-old Poe was found delirious and disheveled on the streets of Baltimore; he died shortly after.

***



Emily Dickinson
Oates’ source material for “EDickinsonRepliLuxe” is Dickinson’s poetry and letters (http://www.theatlantic.com/unbound/poetry/emilyd/edletter.htm), as well as photographs from Jerome Leibling’s book The Dickinsons of Amherst. Though it is the most clearly fictional of all the Wild Nights! stories, “EDickinsonRepliLuxe” still does have ties to Dickinson’s biography.
Dickinson’s correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson provides background for Oates’ story. Oates gets the details right, down to her characterization of Dickinson’s handwriting as a “small neat schoolgirl hand that was perfectly legible, if you peered closely” (55). Higginson similarly described her penmanship as “cultivated, quaint, and wholly unique.” She borrows the physical details of EDickinsonRepliLuxe from Dickinson’s own description of herself to Higginson in July of 1862: “I am small, like the wren; and my hair is bold, like the chestnut bur; and my eyes, like the sherry in the glass, that the guest leaves.” Even the bit that EDickinsonRepliLuxe enjoys baking is factual. When Higginson first met Dickinson on August 16, 1870, she spoke to him of her household chores, including baking bread and making puddings.
Oates’ characterization of Dickinson in her thirties in “EDickinsonRepliLuxe”—as “always nursing sick relatives. She was an angel of mercy in her household, dressed in spotless white!”—is also accurate (Wild Nights!, 42). Indeed Dickinson was known for only wearing white during this period of her life. The white dress that EDickinsonRepliLuxe wears toward the end of the story is accurately described—Jerome Liebling photographed the famed garment at the Dickinson Homestead (http://www3.amherst.edu/magazine/issues/02fall/authors/dickinsons.html).

***

Samuel Clemens/Mark Twain
“Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906” draws from three sources: Mark Twain’s Aquarium: The Samuel Clemens-Angelfish Correspondence 1905-1910, edited by John Cooley; The Singular Mark Twain by Fred Kaplan; and Papa: An Intimate Biography of Mark Twain by His Thirteen-Year-Old Daughter Suzy.
Mark Twain’s Aquarium is the key text here—the volume collects letters between Clemens and various schoolgirls during the last five years of his life. Clemens began accumulating surrogate granddaughters in 1907; in 1908 he started calling them “angelfish” and inducting them into the formalized Aquarium Club (Cooley, xvii). From December 1905 to his death in 1910, Clemens wrote to or received from the angelfish some 300 letters—at times the correspondence was as frequent as sending/receiving several letters a week. Clemens even referred to the Aquarium as his “chief occupation and delight” (Cooley, xi.).
So, Oates’ story, though a work of fiction, is not at all farfetched. In fact, the introduction of “Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish, 1906” is a reinterpretation of remarks Clemens made in his autobiographical dictations on February 12, 1908: “I suppose we are all collectors, and I suppose each of us thinks that his fad is a more rational one than any of the others…As for me, I collect pets: young girls—girls from ten to sixteen years old; girls who are pretty and sweet and naïve and innocent—dear young creatures to whom life is a perfect joy and to whom it has brought no wounds, no bitterness, and few tears. My collection consists of gems of the first water,” (Cooley, xvii).
The Aquarium Club period of Clemens’ life is little noted and indeed in stark contrast with how the writers’ final years were originally portrayed. His daughter, Clara, and his official biographer, Albert Bigelow Paine, originally preserved Clemens’ devoted family man image, but in reality the Clemens family crumbled after Olivia Clemens’ death in 1904 (Cooley, xviii). Clemens’ angelfish correspondence served as a refuge of happiness in his otherwise painful existence. Oates’ story picks up on these biographical details, highlighting Clemens’ loneliness and despondency.
Save for a name change and some other reworking, the correspondence between Clemens and Madelyn Avery in Oates’ tale is based on Clemens’ relationship with his first surrogate granddaughter, Gertrude Natkin. Clemens met the then fifteen-year-old Natkin in December 1905, while leaving Carnegie Hall (Cooley, 1). Nicknamed “Marjorie” after the writer Marjorie Fleming, Natkin was a pre-Aquarium Club conquest (differing with Oates’ Madelyn, who proudly wears her angelfish pin) (Cooley, 1). The tone of Clemens’ letters to Natkin is void of affection after her sixteenth birthday; the exact same shift takes place in “Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish.”
Oates mimics Clemens’ epistolary style in her version of the letters—disappointingly, Clemens’ phrasing in the original letters repetitive and canned. She borrows some phrases directly from the Clemens-Natkin correspondence: “This from your oldest & latest conquest—“ (Cooley, 9; and Wild Nights!, 86). The repeated closing, “I am the little girl that loves you,” and the sending of “blots” also come from Natkin, (Cooley, 9).
Suzy Clemens’ biography of her father, mentioned in “Grandpa Clemens & Angelfish,” does exist and was abandoned mid-sentence, as Oates states (Wild Nights!, 107).

***

Henry James
Oates based “The Master at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, 1914-1916” off The Complete Notebooks of Henry James, edited by Leon Edel and Lyall H. Powers; and Henry James: A Life, by Leon Edel.
Oates takes the crux of “The Master of St. Bartholomew’s”—James’ attitude toward World War I and his volunteering at the hospital—from James’ biography. Oates portrays James’ view of humanity in the last months of 1914 as fatalistic: “He did not wish to think that, from this new wartime perspective, all of the Master’s efforts might be seen as but the elegant flowering of a civilization that had, all along, been rotting from within, and was now in danger of extinction” (Wild Nights!, 144). Indeed, in August 1914 James wrote to his friend Edith Wharton of the “crash of civilization. The only gleam in the blackness, to me, is the action and the absolute unanimity of this country” (Edel, 694).
Horrified and paralyzed by the war, James found it necessary to create his own “counter-reality” and immediately became involved in Belgian relief, eagerly accepting an invitation to volunteer with the wounded soldiers at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital (Edel, 695). He visited at St. Bart’s almost daily through 1915, when his health declined. His pocket diaries from the end of 1914 through 1915 read like a military roster—he records the names of his soldier acquaintances and his visits with them. James took extreme interest in these soldiers’ well-being, going so far as to pay for the dental care of two men (Edel and Powers, 412).
Oates takes these details to the extreme in her story, but yet again, her retelling is not without biographical basis. Though it is doubtful that James sexually obsessed over the soldiers, his behavior toward the armed forces was extremely (and oddly) reverential: “[James] stopped soldiers on the street and astonished them by emptying his pockets of small change for them. He couldn’t keep away from the windows of his flat if he heard the sound of a bugle…”(Edel, 696). These details, coupled with the fact that many thought James to be homosexual, provide background for Oates’ reimagination.
Other details from Oates’ story are also borrowed: James really did rely on nitroglycerine tablets for his heart, he had most of his teeth extracted in early 1914, and he was indeed living at Lamb House in Rye during this time, and (Edel 693-694). James also did become a British citizen in 1915, stating “Hadn’t it been for the war I should certainly have gone on as I was” (Edel and Powers, 413).

***

Ernest Hemingway
For “Papa at Ketchum, 1961,” Oates bounces off of Hemingway by Kenneth S. Lynn. The bulk of Oates’ story is corroborated by this biography.
For example, Oates’ meticulous description of how Papa planned to commit suicide comes directly from biographical details. During Hemingway’s last years at Finca Vigia, his home in Cuba, he talked often about committing suicide and would even act out his planned method. Hemingway would “sit in his chair, barefoot, and place the butt of his Mannlicher .256 on the fiber rug of the living room between is legs. Then, leaning forward, he would rest the mouth of the gun barrel against the roof of his mouth. He would press the trigger with his big toe…” (Lynn, 583).
Much else of what Oates chronicles in “Papa at Ketchum” is based on fact. In late 1960 at Ketchum, Hemingway’s mental state was deteriorating quickly. He frequently voiced fears that the FBI was after him and that the Castro government would not allow him to live in Cuba (Lynn, 583). In November 1960, Hemingway was admitted to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota, where he underwent electroshock treatments. He returned to Ketchum in January of 1961 and continued to work on A Moveable Feast, waking early each morning to write and taking a break in the mid-afternoon to walk along Route 93 (Lynn, 584-585). Soon after, though, Hemingway lapsed into a deeper depression. After an incident in April 1961, when his (fourth) wife Mary found him holding one of his shotguns, ready to load it, he was hospitalized again, placed on suicide watch, and given more electroshock treatments (Lynn, 589-590). In late June, Hemingway was released from the Mayo Clinic yet again, having deceived his doctors into believing that he was well. On July 1, Hemingway and Mary dined with friends at a local restaurant; during the dinner he was paranoid and convinced that fellow patrons were members of the FBI. Late that night, he retrieved the key from his gun cabinet from the kitchen windowsill, pulled out a twelve-gauge, double-barreled shotgun, loaded it, and shot himself (Lynn, 591-592).

[ snack schedule ]

January 25: Jess R.

February 1: Nicky B.

February 8: Sanae

February 15 (Oates visit): Molly & Liza

February 22: Colette

March 1: Jared

March 15: Jess Y.

March 22 (Howe visit) Cecilia & Rebekah

March 29: Lily

April 5: Alex

April 12: Vicky

April 19: Kelly

April 26: (Milch visit) Kristen & Sarah

[ before Frank confesses ]

Screen shot from the end of "Trial by Fury," Hill Street Blues, episode 1, season 3.

[ Fanny Howe on Mark DeWolfe Howe ]

“The presence of our missing father trailed us everywhere.”

“Our father was the only reason we were anywhere then; and he was nowhere. When the snow came, the blood-red brick of the city grew white and the ice on the river was a stiff winding sheet that led out to the Atlantic and across to Ireland. The sky was dramatic and emotional at every hour of the day. The war contributed to every shadow and drop; consciousness of its force was made up only of objects and loose parts, of animate and inanimate, of constant motion, wind, rain, hope, dread, and expectation. / That war was like an immense umbrella held high in the air and shadowing our every move. (Even now I can feel its shade, even if only a corner is left.)”

"At that time I had only one memory of my father from the top of the stairs in Buffalo. He was in a uniform and he was saying a hesitant goodbye. Otherwise there were few photographs. He had left his job as dean of a new law school at Buffalo and had left behind his work on the letters and life of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. He was thirty-seven. He had been to Europe only once before, as far as Ireland, where he had met his in-laws and where he vowed never to return. He was known to have a dread of travel yet he was gone longer than most fathers."

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