Chekhov's Mistress
Marginalia: Heather McHugh, Emerson String Quartet, Russell Banks
Reading time has been difficult to come by lately because searching for a new apartment has been all consuming, emotionally and physically draining and financially marginalizing. I can hear echoes of Sam Kinnison’s old (politically incorrect) skit on the Ethiopian’s famine: “Get out of the desert!” Only in my nightmares he’s saying “GET OUT OF THE CITY!”
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I enjoy randomly, that is, unexpectedly, finding great poems and poets, so I typically avoid “best of”, “top,” “favorite,” and all those other nebulous designations where the randomness is pre-planned and therefore not really random. But that doesn’t mean that those collections are void of good stuff. Last week, the editor of 32 Poems posted a note on her blog about a poem that Paul Muldoon, guest editor of the 2005 Best American Poetry Anthology chose, among others, Heather McHugh’s “Ill-Made Almighty” (available on Verse Daily). [a long winded sentence, but no fewer than seven links to good places].
I’m not too good at explaining what I like about a particular poem, but McHugh fuses her words together in unexpected ways, but not so much that you are distracted from the whole. I’ve said too much already.
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And speaking of not explaining things too well, I noticed that iTunes has a recording by the prolific Emerson String Quartet of Mendelssohn’s Complete String Quartets. As much as I enjoy classical music, and particularly chamber music, I never feel like I “get it,” a least to the point that I can verbalize what I think I think about the music. I’m sure there are many like me. So, to help me and others like me out, Eugene Drucker of the ESQ has recorded an entire album explaining the Mendelssohn quartets. Sounds like a geeky kinda fun idea to me. But listening to the samples on iTunes it sounds almost comical, as if Mr. Drucker is trying to remind us with his flat tone how difficult the subject must be while at the same time he’s trying to simplify it.
It’s not really fair of course, to judge by a short sample, but it’s funny when in track four he tells us “notice how the introduction erupts into the allegro vivace” and because of the 30 second sample, we just never get an eruption. If you’re going to use the word eruption, something really ought to erupt and there’s no mistaking that. [this sounded funny to me before I wrote it, but now…not so much.]
Mendelssohn’s Complete String Quartets
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I did finally read the Russel Banks interview at Identity Theory, which I mentioned admiringly last week from a quote I saw. The interview was interesting, but I feel, as it often happens, a little left out when Mr. Banks glorifies the young writing students whose “life could be completely upended by a book read over a weekend. You give them a book to read – they go home and come back a changed person. And that is much more interesting and exciting.” Hey, can’t forty-year-olds be changed by a book? Can’t we change our lives? Maybe I’m being sensitive.
Well, I did appreciate it when, talking about writing programs, he says “We can’t just go to Paris or go to London and find all those things there; at one time you could go to New York and find all those things. Now you can’t get out of the economy if you go to New York.”
So true.
Read widely, think well, and write often.
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