Classic Coke

The Seer of Cleveland asks, "Q. Who are your favorite classical authors, i.e. authors who wrote in ancient Greek or Latin?"

Answer:  Ovid.

Longer answer:  Ovid, Catullus, Propertius.

More reasonable answer:  Well, thinking about your question I realized how much Ezra Pound shaped my notions about classical literature.  He suggested no adequate translations existed in English for most Greek literature, so I've read very little Greek literature.  (It doesn't take much to get me to chose slack over study.)  I loved Pound's translation of The Women of Trachis by Sophokles.  I never finished his version of Elektra.  The book didn't appear until I had passed out of one phase of my Pound obsession, so I didn't have the drive to finish it.  I do love the excerpt from the Agamemnon translated by Dallam Simpson which Pound included in Confucius to Cummings.  And I love Tom Lehrer's theme song to Oedipus Rex.

I love Arthur Golding's translation of Ovid's Metamorphosis and Christopher Marlowe's translation of Ovid's Amores, although I've only read each of them once all the way through.  I've read bits of Gavin Douglass's Aeneid which fortunately just came back in print.  I would like to get that.  I plan to begin rereading the Golding in 2013.

I've just begun rereading the Zukofskys' translation of Catullus.  I've struggled reading a little Catullus in Latin, but I find it very humbling.  I have trouble with the scansion, etc.  For Propertius, I've only read Pound's "Homage."

I also like some of the medaeval scholastic writers, whom I don't really think of as "classical," but they did write in Latin (at least sometimes): Meister Eckhart, Richard St. Victor, Abelard, Scotus Erigina, but I've read very, very little of them.

The Whole Tamale

The Seer of Cleveland asks, "It seems to me that an interest in or association with William Burroughs ties together much of America's avante garde writing. Do you know if RAW and Burroughs were friends, or if they ever corresponded? Do you know of Burroughs read RAW's work?"

Bob knew Bill Burroughs. They hung out at the Democratic Convention in Chicago in 1968 along with Allen Ginsberg. They sat in a bar discussing The Cantos. Bob Wilson and Bob Shea included both of them in Illuminatus! Bob told me Burroughs thought it appropriate that the great epic poem of the 20th century ended in fragments.

(ASU bought Burroughs' papers in 1983. I used to hang out in the Special Collections room of the ASU library going through them. I remember reading a cut-up Burroughs did of Canto I.  I met Burroughs in the Special Collections room on October 23, 1985, when ASU bought the papers. I found him the most intimidating person I ever met.) (I found Roscoe Mitchell almost as intimidating, and I found Richard Bandler intimidating in a different fashion. I trouble getting Burroughs or Mitchell to talk, but I felt like Bandler could see right through me.)

I talked with Burroughs about Robert Anton Wilson and Philip Jose Farmer, and he nodded his head and said he had read them, but not much else.  I certainly did not find him garrulous.

Beats me. I feel it done to me and weep.

Dr. Johnson asks, "Q: What are some of your ideas about reading poetry in translation? When I read Dante or Rumi, it's always a different English translation, and they always give a slightly different vibe from the previous translation. How much do you think is missed by reading a writer in translation? Thanks, I'll hang up and listen to the response on the air...I should add I'm a first time listener, long-time caller."

This seems like asking a virgin to describe sex.  I can barely read German, and I have less skill with Latin.  I've "read" some Goethe and Rilke, etc., in German and then read the English translations.  I have some sense of the music of German poetry, but I can only understand a word here or there in the German.  I've read even less Latin poetry.

1)  I initially have a Poundian response to this.  One can see poetry using the tools of melopoeia (sound), phanopoeia (images), and/or logopoeia (the play of words), etc.  One can translate melopoeia only in spurts (according to Pound), but one can translate a great deal of imagery (phanopoeia).  Logopoeia seems even more difficult to translate.  I've read and loved a lot of Pound's translation and those he recommends (Arthur Golding's Ovid, etc.).

2.  Rumi brings up the special problems of esoteric meanings, sufic, etc.  I don't claim to understand those esoteric meanings or how to translate them.  I think of the great bumper sticker, "God said it; I believe it; That settles it."  I find the Bible difficult to understand in English, and I have no understanding of the original languages, in their esoteric or exoteric meanings.

3.  I've become more agnostic about translations.  Read whatever works for you.  Two and a half years ago some tenth graders said they wanted to read Dante, so we put together a reading group.  I immediately thought in Poundian terms and thought of using either the Dent or Binyon translations.  My old copy of The Portable Dante had the Binyon translation, so I told them to buy The Portable Dante.  I didn't realize the more recent editions of The Portable Dante used the Mark Musa translation, who translated the poem into blank verse, which I suspect would have horrified Uncle Ezra.  Well, some kids had already bought the book when I discovered this, and it looked like both of the translations Pound had recommended had gone out of print, so I decided to go ahead with the Musa translation, and I ended up really enjoying it.  In fact, when a passage of Musa's translation of the Purgatorio really moved me, I thought I'd look up Binyon's translation to find an even better version of it, and I found the Binyon version a little old fashioned and less effective.

The Unacknowledged Legislators of Humanity

Dr. Johnson asks, "NOW: to poetry: what, to you, would be some ways of demarcation between prose and poetry? I remember sitting in a bar in a run-down industrial area of LA, very late one night, and I was 22 or so, and a guy who described himself as a "bum" but was clearly a genius, laid out a very good case for Shakespeare's plays being "poetry," for Pynchon's novels as "poetry," for Nietzsche as "poetry," und so weiter. This very expansive model or poetry has always stuck with me. What seem your thoughts?"

Well, folks like Shelley discuss this a lot.  I tend to think of stuff marked "poetry" as poetry, especially stuff not in paragraphs.  Following Korzybski one can define poetry1 as stuff written with purposeful line breaks, stuff not written mostly in paragraphs.  (Admittedly, people like W. C. Williams Incorporated paragraphs of "prose" into their poetry, but those "paragraphs" make up a minority of a "poem" like Patterson.)

Poetry2 would follow Pound's definition of literature as language charged with meaning, great literature as language charged with meaning to the maximum extent.  Shelley, etc., liked to think of Plato as "poetry" in this sense.  Shakespeare switched between poetry1 and prose, but one could model it all as poetry2.  One could certainly model Pynchon and Nietzsche as poetry2 (even though Pynchon embeds some poetry1 amongst his "prose").

Operationally, I tend to read poetry1 out loud with no music playing; I tend to read prose silently, often with music playing.  I will sometimes read Finnegans Wake out loud, but I don't mind if I have music playing.  I tend to think the rhythms of music distract me from the conscious rhythms of poetry1.  "Prose" uses what Pound calls melopoeia, but to a lesser extant then poetry1, for the most part.

My New Maybe Logic Course

The Kindly Seer of Cleveland asks, "Could you talk about your Maybe Logic course on Schroedinger's Cat? Why did you choose to focus on this work?"

Well, I just did this write-up for the kind folks at Maybe Logic:

Schrödinger’s Cat:

A Chronotransduction

“Some have even proposed that Schrödinger’s Cat is actually a manual of shamanism in the form of a novel, but that opinion is, almost certainly, exaggerated.” -  Schrödinger’s Cat, pg. 12

I first discovered the genius of Robert Anton Wilson through his three part novel Schrödinger’s Cat in 1982.  Thirty years later it remains my favorite book, one which I think repays deep inspection and contemplation.  This class will examine the book as “a manual of shamanism,” using it as a tool for transforming our nervous systems and our realities.  Bob wrote this book after the greatest crisis of his life, the murder of his daughter Luna.  In the novel characters deal with tragedy, attempting to alchemically transmute the lead of their lives into gold.  Novelist Paul Chuey called this book “a pornographic quantum mechanics textbook.”  In the 1980’s I thought of it as a modern Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, with the reader in the role of Alice, his or her reality warped by Wilson’s hologrammatic prose.  The tools Bob found useful for reimprinting the nervous system, pranayama, Joyce, magick, Beethoven, etc., each play a dynamic role in the novel, opening pathways for discovery for the attentive reader.

Well, Schrödinger's Cat an attempt to write a new kind of science fiction. New Scientist magazine, I'm happy to say, called it the most scientific of all science-fiction novels, which really pleased me very much. It pleased me so much I quote it every chance I can.

What I was trying to do with Schrödinger's Cat: Instead of going as far out as I could in my imagination, I tried to follow where modern physics is going (what are the main lines of interpretation of the universe in modern physics?) and just write about a universe that fits modern physics. And that is so mind-blowing it seems crazier than anything a science-fiction writer could invent. As a matter of fact, a lot of it does sound like science fiction.

-          Robert Anton Wilson, http://www.positiveatheism.org/writ/rawilson.htm

This class will use the one volume 1988 revision of the novel.  The eight weeks of the course will examine the text in light of the eight circuit model of the nervous system.  The text gives many practical suggestions for reimprinting these circuits throughout the text.

Week/Circuit/System/Dimension One

Begin reading Book One: The Homing Pigeons, pg. 349 – 418

Each week of this course I would like you to listen to Beethoven’s Piano Sonata Op. 106 at least once, preferably with your eyes closed.

Please try to develop a first circuit practice for the duration of this course.  This could involve a half an hour each day of martial arts or yoga, or simply walking for a half an hour each day.

Movie of the Week:  Chinatown

Week/Circuit/System/Dimension Two

Read pg. 418 - 486        

Add a half an hour of either pranayama or sitting meditation each day.

Movie of the Week:  Citizen Kane

Week/Circuit/System/Dimension Three

Read pg. 486 – 545, 1 – 10

Add a half an hour of kabbalistic study each day.

Movie of the Week:  The Magnificent Ambersons

Week/Circuit/System/Dimension Four

Read pg. 10 – 78

Add a daily fourth circuit practice.

Movie of the Week:  The Lady from Shanghai

Week/Circuit/System/Dimension Five

Read pg. 78 – 146

Add daily cultivation of fifth circuit awareness.

Movie of the Week:  Mr. Arkadin

Week/Circuit/System/Dimension Six

Read pg. 146 – 214

Add daily awakening of the sixth circuit.

Movie of the Week:  Touch of Evil

Week/Circuit/System/Dimension Seven

Read 210 – 278

Attempt to metaprogram some aspect of your perceived reality.

Movie of the Week:  The Trial

Week/Circuit/System/Dimension Eight

Read pg. 278 – 347

Awaken to the possibilities of the eighth circuit.  Bob Wilson saw the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony as a skeleton key to the eighth circuit.

Movie of the Week:  F for Fake

Eight Ways to Listen to Beethoven

I.                     As for music – where did we first hear it, who sang or hummed to us, and against what part of her body were we held? - Prometheus Rising (revised edition), pg. 48.

II.                        We are not talking about mere increase in linear IQ – third-circuit semantic cleverness.  We are talking of also the kinds of right-brain intelligence that Nicholl acquired from Jungian neurogenetic research and Gurdjieff’s meta-programming techniques.  We are talking of say, Beethoven’s intelligence, which so disturbed Lenin, who could not bear to listen to the Appassionata (Sonata 23) because it made him “want to weep and pat people on the head, and we mustn’t pat them on the head, we must hit them on the head, hit them hard, and make them obey.”  More of Beethoven’s intelligence is needed, desperately, to create a signal that the current Lenins cannot ignore, that will make them weep, and stop hitting heads. – Ibid, pg. 277

III.                The left-handed, on the contrary, specialize in right-brain functions, which are holistic, supra-verbal, “intuitive,” musical and “mystical.”  Leonardo, Beethoven and Nietzsche, for instance, were all left-handed.  Traditionally, left-handed people have been the subject of both dread and awe – regarded as weird, shamanic, and probably in special communication with “God” or “the Devil.” – Ibid, pg. 98 – 99.

IV.                      “To me, the Hammerklavier sounds like an unsuccessful attempt at Tantric sex.  And the Seventh and Eighth Symphonies sound like monumentally successful attempts.”  - Frank Dashwood in Schrödinger’s Cat Trilogy, pg. 426.

V.                         Beethoven, we remember, was left-handed.  Since the left hand is neurologically linked to the polymorphous right brain, one might say he was genetically inclined to right brain activities, that is, to sensing coherent wholes, to plunging into neurosomatic bliss almost “at will,” and to sensory-sensual raptness and rapture.  Everybody “knows” that the Sixth Symphony is “pantheistic,” but whether Beethoven was an ideological pantheist or not, that way of responding to nature is normal and natural right-brain Circuit V functioning.  That is, anybody on the Fifth Circuit will “talk like a pantheist” whether or not he has developed a “philosophy” about pantheism.  The miracle of Beethoven is not that he felt the universe that way – a few thousand fifth-circuit types throughout history have also felt and sensed nature that way – but that he mastered the third-circuit art of music with such skill that he could communicate such experiences, which is precisely what the ordinary “mystic” cannot do.   - Prometheus Rising, pg. 183.

This progression, from primate emotion to post-hominid tranquility, from “man” to “super man,” is the Next Step that mystics forever talk of; you can hear it in most of Beethoven’s later, major compositions.   – Ibid, pg.  188.

VI.                       Beethoven, to cite him one more time, said, “Anybody who understands my music will never be unhappy again.”  That is because his music is the song of the Sixth Circuit, of Gaia, the Life Spirit, becoming conscious of Herself, of Her powers, of Her own capacities for infinite progress.   - Ibid, pg. 204.

VII.                    Mind and its contents are functionally identical: My wife only exists, for me, in my mind.  Not being a solipsist, I recognize the converse: I only exist, for her, in her mind.  Lest the reader exclaim, like Byron of Wordsworth, “I wish he would explain his explanation!”, let us try it this way: If I am so fortunate as to be listening to the Hammerklavier sonata, the only correct answer, if you ask me suddenly, “Who are you?” would be to hum the Hammerklavier,.  For, with music of that quality, one is hypnotized into rapt attention: there is no division between “me” and “my experience.”  -  Ibid, pg. 219.

VIII.            Mystics stammer, gibber and rave incoherently in trying to discuss this.  Beethoven says it for them, without words, in the fourth movement of the Ninth Symphony.  The words of Schiller’s “Ode to Joy,” which Beethoven set to this virtually superhuman music, are a linear third-circuit map conveying only a skeleton key to the multi-level meanings of the 8-circuit “language” of the melodic construction itself, which spans all consciousness from primitive bio-survival to meta-physiological cosmic fusion.   – Ibid, pg. 269

"Slowness Is Beauty" - Laurence Binyon

The Seer of Cleveland asked me weeks ago, "In one of your blog postings, you mention that you and RAW mostly talked about movies and books. Can you tell me if he talked about science fiction very often, and what he said about who his favorite science fiction authors were?"

Science fiction came up from time to time in Bob's letters and conversations.  I remember talking with him on the phone about my first science fiction class in August 2000.  He said he considered Heinlein the first writing to bring sociology into science fiction.

He used to write about The Valis Trilogy by Phil Dick.  I told him I thought of Phil's last four books as a cohesive unity: Radio Free Albemuth, Valis, The Divine Invasion, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer.  He said he agreed and that he'd referred to it as a trilogy because he had an omnibus volume called The Valis Trilogy.

The Rabinowitz Factor

Dr. Johnson asks, "What are some sources for the role of FORM in poetry? I've recently been delving into the history of the sonnet form, but I wonder if you could recommend some books or sections of books or articles on all sorts of poetic forms?"

Back in 1982 the composer Robert Rabinowitz asked me to write a brief essay on form to include with the program for a recital.  The piece included two haiku, one of which I remember:

Form a butterfly
with time and caterpillar
sole ingredients.

For years I've thought of rereading G. Spencer Brown's Laws of Form and Charles Rosen's Sonata Forms and trying to come to a deeper understanding of form.  I haven't really thought about poetic form for decades.  I do have some concrete thoughts on the sonnet, though.  Ezra Pound repeatedly said to write a sonnet a day for a year.  I found this a very useful experiment, and I can think of no better way of learning about poetic form.  I tried once for about five months and stopped.  Later I did it for a full year, so I wrote over 500 sonnets in those two periods.  I think I liked two of them.  Of course, while doing that I read a bunch of sonnets and a bunch of other writing in iambic pentameter.

For the history of the sonnet, I suggest reading the pre-Dante Italian poets in Pound's Translations and in Confucius to cummings, as well as Pound's essays on Cavalcanti and Dante.  Next, read Dante Gabriel Rossetti's translation of La Vita Nuova, Dante's early poems for Beatrice before he wrote the Commedia.  (Pound suggested reading Rossetti's translation of La Vita Nuova before the Commedia, Eliot afterwards.  Eliot feared one would get a too Pre-Rafaelite image of Dante if one started with the Rossetti.)  The old edition of The Portable Dante with the Binyon translation of the Commedia includes the Rossetti.

Pound called Dante the second greatest literary critic after Aristotle.  La Vita Nuova, in addition to including great love poems, includes Dante's own analysis of their form.

After reading lots of Cavalcanti and Dante, etc., one can move on reading the sonnets by Shakespeare, The Sonnets from the Portuguese by Elizabeth Barrett Browning and a selection of sonnets by Wyatt, Spenser, Milton, Keats, etc.

Zukofsky's wonderful A Test of Poetry doesn't talk a lot about form, but I keep rereading it and learning from it.

Pound recommends translating poems to help learn about form.

I don't feel like I've completely answered your question.  Perhaps some more books or articles will creep into my mind.  Most of the stuff on form I like pops up in the middle of pieces on various poets,  Creeley's various discussions of Zukofsky's "A" for instance.