Along with the bag full of books, I couldn’t resist grabbing the HOWL bumper sticker by the register. City Lights is the first place I visited arriving here yesterday and the only must on my list of things to see.
Throughout my wanderings yesterday amongst the three floors of bookshelves, I was reminded why some if not many bookstores will remain and why a place like City Lights will continue to thrive.
I’m not one to bash Amazon for putting bookstores out of business. I’m to big an Amazon customer. Having just about anything I could want at my fingertips even though I live in an isolated rural community is awesome.
That being said, scrolling through hundreds of pages of on Amazon would not have duplicated the shopping experience I had at City Lights yesterday. The four books I purchased were nowhere on my mattering map when I entered the store. Instead, slowly scanning the shelves I casually found some gems.
On Earth by Robert Creeley, his last poems and an essay.
Pragmatism, A reader, ed. by Menand (I was reminded that I’ve been wanting a reference that gathered the essential essay of Peirce and James together.)
The Complete Grimm’s Fairy Tales (with Commentary by Joseph Campbell)
The Hard Facts of the Grimms’ Fairy Tales, by Tatar
The thing that really jumps off the shelves at City Lights, the thing that makes them great: unlike the large chain bookstores, their subject areas are well curated.
I guess I could provide links to these books for you on Amazon, but it somehow just wouldn’t feel right (so copy and paste.)
One last note: I’m not the tidyiest of bloggers for grammar and spelling, so I it made me chuckle that the two Grimm’s books place the apostrophe in different places…
“If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is: Infinite.” –William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell
Throughout history poets admit to the possibility of the actuality of the muse. I’m rendering here it straight up: an archetypal figure that dictates the poem to the poet. If such an experience is possible, then added to the ability to render images with words on the page we should add the ability to keep a channel open to the archetypal figures as essential to the poet’s craft.
While we are not all poets, I do believe we are all meant to relate to these figures. And for that to happen we must lay aside theories and ideas and invite encounter. All understanding of the hero archetype is bunk in the face of a figure that embodies that reality. Theory is what we have on this side of the doors that Blake speaks of, while on the other side these figures manifest, transform, invite and transmit.
A dream from my journal just over two years ago.
I’m seated on the ground looking out of a sliding glass window across a wide savanna. Large antelope are grazing. Suddenly a warrior limps into view. He is wounded badly in his thigh. I open the door for him and he stumbles in and collapses behind me. I close the door quickly behind him. Though he never speaks, I know that there is a battle off to the South. I turn to offer him assistance but suddenly a magnificent woman, her face pure white like paper, and dressed in glittering robes is at the window, pressing against it in horror at the sight of his wound. I let her in and she quickly kneels down and begins to heal the wound. I watch as her touch stops the bleeding.
Then the three of us are in a small boat and being carried by the current of a lazy river, white cranes are wading along the banks.
Charles Olson developed much of his poetry out of the annotations he made in the margins of the books he was reading. While studying his practice it was always interesting to track the stream of thought out of the given book, through notebooks and letters he was writing, at times across paper place mats from the local tavern, until the drafts of the poems would begin to emerge.
I’m struck how our interactions in social media can be of similar use. Take this conversation I had last night with feelgoodguru on twitter. In it we were both formulating, sharing from a “what if” posture. In the end I came away with a clearer sense of something I’ve been pondering.
Starting with @feelgoodguru’s question concerning what makes for quality in art, I thought of the Jungian model of transference, which posits twelve possible channels of communication when two people are in relationship:
Person A ego to Person B ego
B ego to A ego
A ego to A unconscious
A unconscious to A ego
B ego to B unconscious
B unconscious to B ego
A unconscious to B unconscious
B unconscious to A unconscious
A ego to B unconscious
B unconscious to A ego
A unconscious to B ego
B ego to A unconscious
All that can be visualized as a box with with an X in the middle, arrows at the end of each line, with the ego’s and unconscious’ each taking a corner.
Not all relationships operate through all 12 channels, but we tend to know when they do. Likewise, if we place the work of art into the equation for one of the people, we then have an interesting model to consider how the work effects us, and even more interestingly, how we effect it.
All of our interactions in social media get captured and can be searched at a later time. If we approach our interactions with a creative posture, these tools might aid our creativity in ways that we are only beginning to realize. Chris Brogan has an interesting reflection on cafe shaped conversations posted today. While he reflects on the marketing challenges of this platform, he drills down into the essence of the potential unfolding in social media. If this were Paris, I’m heading over to the Left Bank…
During my travels earlier this week I made it a point to spend part of an afternoon in Gloucester, MA. I first discovered the town in the poetry of Charles Olson who resided there while writing his epic The Maximus Poems.
Olson’s work and practice has been the single greatest influence in my life. Over [...]
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Along with the bag full of books, I couldn’t resist grabbing the HOWL bumper sticker by the register. City Lights is the first place I visited arriving here yesterday and the only must on my list of things to see.
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