Response to David Antin
Norman Weinstein There's a story beginning out of Emerson's lecturing that needs to include the James gang (William and Henry in that order) & then William's prize pupil Gertrude Stein & somewhere off in the distance Charles Ives is composing his Second String Quartet, the second movement of which is a roomful of brawling voices debating what is utterly real silenced in the Quartet's third and final movement by staring from a hilltop into a perfectly clear night sky. Now while I'm hinting that the story's focal points turn literary and psychological really it's the music of Ives that gives as much story- space as is consumed thus far. Dewey could have been riding on the coattails of James (as he literally did) but that brings to mind the fact that James accused Dewey of writing terribly, possessing "a damned, even a god-damned style" unusually strong words from the typically genial James who with held such harshness from Stein even when she refused to take his Final Exam & with Stein the only Jew in this bunch a bridge to the roar of contending voices in the second movement of the Ives and "What Happened to Walter" resembling a Jewish folkloric tale of the same pedigree as Stein's "Stanzas in Meditation" which surely is philosophical reverie as are all "talk poems" but philosophy caught up in bizarre textures of experience never wholly here or there never complete always in flux as kabbalists claim all holy writ is-letters going up in flames but never really extinguished just perpetual flickers, a folk neurological map of mind on paper or mind as rustling paper or contending voices in mind each claiming authentic experience which if you read Emerson's lectures you start wondering which little Ralph Waldo is connecting to which Emer (ever) son Emerson was a crowd that gave Whitman permission to be polyphonic uni verses & James picks up Emerson and Whitman as if they were two young kids hitch hiking from & puts them into his sturdy limo & drives them to the bridge entering the city where romantically Sonny Rollins practiced all night but what exact bridge Rollins made his studio I can't remember there's something regenerating about Rollins and jazz following in the wake of the exhaust of James that calling "associational play" cheapens so "improvisation" will do as in "Stanzas in Improvisation" Stein might abide that "Stories in Improvisation" better yet "Storying Mind Improvising" where "Improvising" belongs to philosophy as psych ology and literature, not married to jazz per se. Although when Rollins finally gave a solo concert it was a texture of "false starts," never fully developed themes, but only jazz critics carp about "false starts" philosophically every shard of a full melody was true in being a complete tale which this is dangerously close to becoming unless I can remember which Ives write when: the Second String Quartet or "The Unanswered Question." But only music rolling in a mouth knows what is worth forgetting?
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