Last year’s poetry was the product of deep depression, fueled by joblessness and boredom in Queens, NY. Writing these poems wasn’t so much cathartic as it was like trying to put out the fire in my head with a eyedropper. I know that’s kind of a cliché about writers and writing, but lo and behold… I’ll post one each day until I run out (shouldn’t take long). Here’s the first:

Diametrical Progression

1. H – C
Hot and Cold

2. H – C
Helado y Caliente

3. C – H
Caliente y Helado

4. C – H
Cold and Hot

Slow, Low Humming
By Matt on July 10, 2010 3:09 PM

Yesterday I went out in the evening with friends, J and S, to see the Charles Burchfield show, Heat Waves in a Swamp, curated by Robert Gober. It began at the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles and is currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Burchfield was a painter from northern Ohio and, later, Buffalo, New York. He is often associated with the Depression-Era American Scene painters, having imbued his humble local surroundings with magical intensity. Included are landscapes of woods and small towns and industrial scenes. The show conversely dispels and acknowledges aspects of nostalgia inherent in Burchfield’s oeuvre. These aren’t simply pretty pictures (even though they are pretty): they are finely balanced portraits of internalized landscape, or externalized psyche.

In the unfinished bottom margin of a large painting of trees blooming on a spring day is a handwritten placeholder, “Very Dark Pit”. Burchfield’s paintings are full of contrasts like these. He often depicts the Sun as a blue-grey disk emitting bright yellow rays; it is an index of the limits of sight and a Promethean attempt at capturing unbearable light. Emanating from the paintings is a pantheist view of a world that is at once majestically benevolent and ultimately annihilating. They are pervaded by aloneness.

We went out for dinner and drinks in Bushwick. “This is what the Whitney should be doing,” said J, and we nodded in agreement. While Robert Gober and the Hammer Museum were primarily responsible for the show and its catalog, Heat Waves in a Swamp illustrates that there are dozens of small museums across the country that could very well pool objects from their collections together to shed light on the careers of great American artists whom we often take for granted.

Let’s dig up primary sources. We package historical awareness in new art; and we put our old art into storage, like the legendary gold of Fort Knox, rarely seen by a few individuals, backing up the cultural capital of new art.

While having our second or third round, the question arose, “What is the distance in light years from the Sun to the Earth?” I do not recall the origin of the thought, but it was consuming. For it seemed remarkable that we did not memorize or even have the faintest idea of how old the light and heat from the sun is when it reaches us. We looked around at the crowd and determined that there were probably no astronomers at the bar.

We walked about fifteen minutes to J’s place in Ridgewood, Queens. We looked up the distance from-Sun-to-Earth on the internet: about eight seconds. We watched some inane videos. I suggested “hippopotamus shitting,” (I know from experience that this is humorous) which led to an amateur video of a bull elephant mounting his mate at a zoo.

S and I missed our two a.m. bus back to Sunnyside, and we determined that we could walk back to our place. Most of the two-and-a-half mile walk cut through an industrial area. No one else around but night-shift workers at the warehouses there. At one point, a freight train–a black hulking mass punctuated by bright headlights–lumbered toward us.

This afternoon, in the shower, I recalled this poem by D.H. Lawrence. It is titled, “The Elephant is Slow to Mate”

The elephant, the huge old beast,

is slow to mate;

he finds a female, they show no haste

they wait

 

for the sympathy in their vast shy hearts

slowly, slowly to rouse

as they loiter along the river-beds

and drink and browse

 

and dash in panic through the brake

of forest with the herd,

and sleep in massive silence, and wake

together, without a word.

 

So slowly the great hot elephant hearts

grow full of desire,

and the great beasts mate in secret at last,

hiding their fire.

 

Oldest they are and the wisest of beasts

so they know at last

how to wait for the loneliest of feasts

for the full repast.

 

They do not snatch, they do not tear;

their massive blood

moves as the moon-tides, near, more near

till they touch in flood.

Back to the Beginning: R. Crumb’s “Book of Genesis”
By Matt on March 5, 2010 12:33 PM

R. Crumb’s entire Book of Genesis Illustrated is on display at David Zwirner Gallery (thru 4/24). That is “Genesis” from the Bible. Crumb has spared no detail–the magic, politics, sex, and gore that we have hitherto only had the opportunity to read about in thinly veiled, old-timey English translations of ancient Hebraic texts–all of this is lovingly rendered in a true masterwork.

I hate to read into things more than is necessary, but that is what I have been trained to do (kind of like a chimp that hates to ride the little tricycle but just can’t help himself when he sees the red ball). Moreover, that this is a religious text only compounds this inclination. On the three long walls of the gallery, the nearly two hundred pages of the graphic novel are hung in two rows. In the middle of the gallery, we find a display of ephemera, source material consisting of illustrated Bible stories, old ethnographic photos from Western Asia, and screenshots from movies like The Ten Commandments. Crumb’s Genesis is an homage not only to the writers of this twisted epic, but also to the artists of the Twentieth Century who have been so bold as to render the story of the Beginning in pop media.

Crumb’s Genesis is hardcore humanistic. His work does what religion so often fails to do. It shows humanity as it is: depraved, lustful, violent–but also hopeful beyond reason (the secret to success). That the story is in graphic novel form returns to it its fluidity and continuity; we are compelled to read and keep reading. Any incentive to take passages out of this context is blown out of the water by rapturous aesthetic pleasure. We see the entire unfolding of events, the outward spiral of creation, as a vision befitting those prophets of yore.

Special thanks to Andy Lane for making this screed possible.

I also recommend The Cartoon History of the Universe, by Larry Gonick.

On the eve of the New Year, I am attempting to make a fresh start and a straight path for this site’s newly formatted web log. It’s still under construction, but I’ll start by posting the content of last year’s blog… Here’s the first entry, titled “Time and Space Have Conspired…”