The Killing Floor

Time Capsule: The København Kitties

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


The Cat of the Mediterranean
[Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, Polish-French, 1908-2001), 1949
Oil on canvas, Private collection]

The København Kitties

It’s not that a writer ever abandons difficulties, nor that one wants to, knowing the brutal beauties lie there, in wait. However, in finally pulling oneself away from such monumental figures as Olson & Still for the past few months, one’s pleased to breathe a somewhat lighter air. Look around in appreciation of just that lightness. Possibly fostering another journey without stepping out the door: in correspondence with someone in London, both of us complaining about rain, when offhandedly I mention mussels for breakfast. He says the best he had were at the Chelsea Square Diner, of all places, while I respond, “Best we ever had were at La Mediterranée, Paris, avec Champagne, + more Champagne for dessert.” Now, of course, what drew us to that particular restaurant in the center of the Odeon long ago, if 1991 is, was that Balthus liked to think of himself as the “King of the Cats,” & after a delectable lunch there, painted the Cat of the Mediterranean. Quickly, from a discussion of gastronomic tastes to tastes in art, whereupon his tastes, my Londoner*, cannot abide the prepubescent erotic teasing Balthus offers up, while for me that feminine mystique springs forth as natural.

It’s funny, some go so far as to call Balthus a pornographer, & just days before this conversation a postcard fell out of a book I was reading. No kidding: just went to retrieve it from the night table, where it’s been propped up next to the white cat & Our Lady of Lourdes: Rembrandt’s, Femme au Bain, dite Bethsabée. This great nude at the Louvre, this sole image alone defends against all possible indictments of Balthus. Tell my friend in London that my longtime mentor Guy Davenport loved his work enough to write an entire book on the artist, calling up Collette, Kafka, Meyer Schapiro, Goya, & even Gertrude Stein & Claude Lévi Strauss to make a case for validity. Found Guy’s book next to separate volumes by Sabine Rewald & Stanislas Klossowski de Rola, both titled simply Balthus; Jane Harrison’s Themis; Bette Talvaccia’s Taking Positions: On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture; Aldis Browne Fine Arts, NYC, 1981, Edvard Munch: Paradox of Woman; catalogue of exhibit, New South Wales, 1997, titled simply Body; Susan Minot’s Lust; Dany Laferrière’s Eroshima; (I once reviewed) Feminine Focus: The New Women Playwrights; Collette’s Collected Stories; Louise Bourgeois: The Locus of Memory; Hal Foster’s Compulsive Beauty; Psychoanalysis of Sexual Life by Dr. Vitali Negri, 1949, dedicated to his wife; The Optical Unconscious by Rosalind Kraus; & The Sexual Subject: A Screen Reader in Sexuality; etc. All located on the wall just above my wife’s home computer.

Now, even before relocating Guy’s A Balthus Notebook on this shelf way too long ignored, I reminisced to my friend about the scholar I met at the National Gallery of Art, a professor at both Johns Hopkins & the Universitá di Bologna, the oldest, continually operating university in the world (in existence for more than a thousand years). Anna Ottani Cavina told me she knew Balthus during his 16 years in Rome, pronouncing his name sweetly: “Balllttoooz…” Her parting gift to me over lunch on the 7th floor Gallery restaurant was a copy of Calvino’s Invisible Cities. One of her books is Geometries of Silence: Three Approaches to Neoclassical Art. So I think of my 14-year-old student, Wyatt Marks, playing with our cat in my first apartment, cat jumping at yanked-up fold in her skirt, unashamed. Here, this is what struck me hardest, however: rummaging through yet another book on the shelf I listed, Edward Snow’s A Study of Vermeer: what falls into my clutches, but an air mail envelope from Copenhagen, DK with letter inside from friend & poet, Robert Hellman, dated June 17, 1974. In it, he responds to a series of poems I wrote & sent him titled “from Travel Poems for Robert Hellman,” based on our Time together in Cape Ann, Boston, Cambridge, etc.:

“How lovely all the distractions in your poems, that day in Cambridge, from which you take away nothing to make something else, but leave it all there, still growing out of our deaths. How nice that you should remember Gusta Goodman’s daughter and my bald baby head squeezing out of the whale’s cunt.” & earlier, “Copenhagen has a charm, good vibes, even in the long dark winter, and now with the rising sun at 2:30 a.m. and setting around 9:45 p.m. and parks full of flowers, children, puppies, topless girls – oh how Durgin Park they are the København kitties, but turn and smile at the old man who feels so warm and just slightly itchy but not so it hurts.” Ten years later, according the NYT obituary, he passes away on a boat from Germany to Denmark. Wish there had been more correspondence. I wasn’t much of a letter writer back then, & let the relationship falter. Said more than once Hellman taught me a lot without my even knowing it. His letter ends asking about our cat, Justine, saying the cat we gave him, “Justine’s daughter, disappeared out of Rockport, where she’d been living with the Costellos, leaving her kitten who now has kittens.”

*Two nights after writing this, I reflected on another subject in this conversation, when asking David Anfam whether, while in Basel last month, he’d visited the painting shook Dostoevsky to the core to the extent that he gazed at Holbein’s, The Dead Christ, two days running? No, he’d seen it many times, & opted to take the tram to Fondation Beyeler to see the Bonnard exhibit, calling up an anecdote of Balthus arguing with Marguerite Duras at Villa Medici in Rome over the worth of the newly constructed Pompidou Center coupled (in my insomniac darkness) with walking out on a ramp of that museum’s architecture to watch sunset over Paris, whereupon, family in tow, we could not reenter the building until traipsing down another flight, or more, where a guard opened the locked door to the room where Bonnard’s last painting, The Almond Tree in Blossom, 1947, danced before our relieved, astonished eyes.


Thérèse rêvant (Thérèse Dreaming)
[Balthus (Balthasar Klossowski, Polish-French, 1908-2001), 1938
Oil on canvas, Metropolitan Museum of Art]

FURTHER STUDY:

Chelsea Square Restaurant
Prof. Anna Cavina
Robert Hellman
Durgin Park

Time Capsule: Constant Movement Within The Moment + A Free Man

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

  

Constant Movement Within the Moment

The train howled off across the plain in the direction
of our desires. –Jack Kerouac, On the Road

Another Sunday, when the travel section of the Times, enclosed within front-
page perturbable headlines, business week’s antics, & latest styles based on lipstick & heels, not an accompanying text, lands on the front porch with a thump before sunrise. In no position to go to Minorca this week, although I headed there once, choosing Belgrade at the last moment; nor Lyon, although I remained in rainy Paris, while my wife & kids visited brother/uncle in a one-day TGV turnaround; nor Lima, although friend David brought something back quite pure from there carved inside a candle. They make it tough traveling these days: economy, TSA, etc. So, I stay, & go. Constant movement within the moment. Here I am five hours from temptations & frustrations offered in said pages, sun fully up, & on the train scampering down the aisle before my brother could crawl out of mother’s arms, destination Philly. Step out on the platform in Marseille. Enter Guadalajara after twenty-four hours overnight in Time to witness teeming crowds try to get a glimpse of President Echeverria giving a stump speech. At one point crossing the Austrian border into Yugoslavia from Salzburg to Rijeka, Tito’s troops make a show of guns & jackboots demanding “Passports, Passports!!” (Which I can’t even afford to renew. Don’t ask me to read, again, quite yet in Scotland, Andrew!!) Paris to Cahors, & a single glass of the black wine of France at the outdoor table for 3 francs. Glad most travel is behind me by train to Kilkenny, Dublin, Glasgow, Stirling, Edinburgh, Stuttgart, Munich... Scraggly & long-haired heading into Bloomington, where most hours for three months are spent in stacks of the university library. Yesterday she decided to cancel our Sunday subscription to the Times, forcing me out at the train station in Nice for a fourth time, which hasn’t happened, yet, & where Kyung-won, violinist at l’Opéra de Nice, & Richard, director of Pierron Primitive Arts, will greet me with open arms, kisses on both cheeks, firm handshakes, & a silent nod for our belief in the future.

 

A Free Man

Patriot’s Day, whatever that is, although I shoot right now to Mary Ruotolo & other neighborhood women, on occasion, wearing hats & uniforms of the Daughters of the American Revolution, so maybe that’s it. A few more people out here during my walk, because of the holiday. Tanker Genmar Argus flying Marshall Islands flag docked across the way, while opposite, builders add a third story to a house on Munjoy Hill, calling up the fact that when the ferry docked at Peaks Island yesterday I was so ecstatic to step off the boat I left the “en” off of “enjoyable,” settling for the truncation even after I spoke. Such unusual warmth for mid-April a pregnant woman heads my way with big round naked belly cradling feotus in the sun. Today, I too am simply appreciating each step, each sun’s ray. A free man. Stones sea sky wind light vegetation: own none, & each one, in appreciation. Upon return to the car the three sleeping hobos I saw in the grass just past the last chain-link of Portland Vessel Services are now being rousted by Portland cops. One guy, whose face & visage reveal he’s still in some groggy netherworld standing in handcuffs while one officer goes through his knapsack so meager I wonder what could be found to convict him, unless sleeping on grass in broad daylight now in America is a public offense.

It’s night & day for any poet worth his/her salt, so after reaping daylight images, some of which travel back in Time well over fifty years underground in memory, night brings on texts as various as Kerouac & Kristeva, the latter on the screen via a link from Mark Woods, “An Essay in Abjection,” in which she examines attempts by writers to give voice to the abject: The abject would thus be the ‘object’ of primal repression. I get that. Then adds, One does not know it, one does not desire it, one joys in it [on enjouit]. Violently and painfully. A passion. In her critical assessment of some of my great ones, Dostoevsky, Proust, Joyce, she concludes that, Death thus keeps house in our contemporary universe. By purifying (us from) literature, it establishes our secular religion. That’s just one example of what I’ll take into bed tonight. Kerouac finally makes it to Denver. Locates Neal Cassady, & heads over to Allen Ginsberg’s basement apartment where the poet reads him his “Denver Doldrums,” & I dream:

Something lands upon the carpeted basement floor: nut, or root bole, with dangerous object sticking out of its round case, a beak, or tooth, or thorn, when suddenly this dangerous part of the object begins to grow, grow into a shoot, then longer stems, & as careful as I am in handling what is now more or less a thorn bush, I get stuck, & the venom, or ambrosia, (or juice I see as source) enters my veins, to the extent that I can feel the beginnings of the ecstasy of writing, & WANT more, so lift up what is now a bouquet of thorns (wounds) & bite into the lowest hanging root to chew & swallow IT.

FURTHER STUDY:

Opéra de NicePierron Primitive Arts Genmar Argus 

Time Capsule: The Pleasures of the Scroll Version

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons

 

The Pleasures of the Scroll Version

Back, now, from my journey, not necessarily just the foray into Denver,
where one museum holds the bulk of the Clyfford Still estate, & the other
exhibits a contemporary visual artist’s take on Kerouac’s On the Road,
appropriating whole swatches of text to suit camp tastes. No, not that, but
finally finishing up all this difficult reading on Olson & Still trying to piece
together similarities in their work, which ultimately, of course, reveal
similarities in their individualities. & yesterday feeling relieved to write the
last piece after months of tough sledding, reminding me of the poet’s
longtime fascination with Aubrey Beardsley’s deathbed comment, “Beauty is
difficult, Yeats,” synthesized in his letters into, “Time is difficult, Beardsley.”
Yes, to both difficulties. So that, now, in this immediacy, as I turn away from
every catalogue written on Still, (scattered open around three rooms here) &
every published poem, lecture, & letter by Olson, (piled high), I can turn
toward the mere pleasure of reading, flashing to my younger days under the
friendly tutelage of Robert Hellman (who taught languages at Black
Mountain & accompanied Olson on his lone visit to William Carlos Williams
in Rutherford & hung out with Creeley in Aix, etc.,) his asking if I ever read
for pleasure, & my answer up until that Time, because I had so much
catching up to do was, “No.”

So I have no trouble going to the original scroll version of Kerouac’s great
novel, a copy of which sent up to me out of the blue from down in Boynton
Beach via botanist, Dr. Edward Coher & his wife Cynthia, over four years
ago*, making this no poem at all, but more report from deep hermetic
trenches, where one can hear from no one for days at a Time other than one’s
own subject. I love finding this in one of the accompanying essays, quoting
JK’s Road Log, “‘It appears I must have been learning in the past 8 months
of work on… poetry. My prose is different, richer in texture…’ if On the
Road is to be ‘a novel like poetry, or rather, a narrative poem, an epos in
mosaic.’” The pleasures of the scroll version, which I postponed getting to
until late last night, are practically instantaneous in that the first sentence
introduces Kerouac’s father’s death, echoing the narrator in Camus’ opening
sentence of The Stranger, “Maman died today.” & just as quickly one
doesn’t have to read silly fictional names such as “Carlo Marx” (publishers at
Viking, including Malcolm Cowley scared witless they might get sued for
libel [the opposite of Barney Rosset’s courageous stance!]), where one can
now read “Allen Ginsberg” & not “Remi Boncoeur” writing from San
Francisco he can get him work on a steamer, the real “Henri Cru” + instead of
simply heading out there with a few bucks in his pocket, he’s “off for the
Pacific Ocean like a veritable Ishmael with fifty bucks…” calling down the
spirit of Herman Melville, rather than kowtowing to the publishing industry’s
powers-that-would-be.

*Evidence that it was sent four years ago is an article cut out & dated 3/11/08 from the Portland Press Herald: “Scientists studying jazz find riffs akin to dreaming” Researchers, Limb & Braun, at Johns Hopkins “hired a company to make a special plastic keyboard that would fit inside the cramped MRI … Then put six professional jazz pianists inside to measure brain activity.” They found that, “Getting creative uses the same brain circuitry measured during dreaming. First, inhibition switched off. Then self-expression switched on. A small area called the medial cortex fired up… earlier research on how language forms linked that region to autobiographical storytelling.”

 

 

FURTHER STUDY:

On the Road: The Original Scroll
Aubrey Beardsley

Time Capsule: The 1940 Census

Time Capsule is a weekly series featuring the writing of Robert Gibbons


Convent of Sisters of Ste. Chretienne, Salem, MA 

The 1940 Census

Surely, inevitable, heads-up given by fellow traveler out of similar
circumstances (although radically different destinations), David Ferriero,
his staff at the National Archives posting the 1940 Census will spur
storytelling from every corner. First of all, one needs an enumeration #,
which can be located on maps used at the time found here: http://
1940census.archives.gov. I looked up # 5-344 for Winthrop Street in Salem,
MA, where I found my grandfather, Michael J. Ruane, his wife, Rosanna,
four daughters ranging in ages, 17, 16, 15, 14, & a son, James, 12, although
the census taker at the time must have assumed it was yet another daughter,
jotting down, “Jane.” Now, I knew this info would not only intrigue my aunt,
who’ll turn ninety next month, regarding her own household, but the
neighborhood. Sure enough, her imagination traipsed around surrounding
streets of Orne Square, Broad, & Mount Vernon. Her daughter wrote that it
“gave her great joy, clapping her hands together with each discovery of the
old neighbors!” Then my aunt wrote back in the blink of an eye with her
incredible typing skills still in tact, after I mistook the Doyles for the Coyles:

The Doyles lived next door to me; Billy, Janet (Jeanette's best friend) and the middle boy, who became a Judge in California (Paul). Marguerite worked for Mrs. Doyle cleaning house when she was about 12 years old.  Mrs. Doyle was quite a woman--  took Don Curtis and me to the Empire one night because she knew he liked me a lot and after took us for ice cream in Marblehead at the ice cream parlor on Pleasant Street which is now a branch of the Marblehead Savings Bank. She also made handmade ties that were very famous. Margie worked on the ties, she would cut out the lining for them. As you know Margie became an expert seamstress like Nana who could sew without patterns -- the most difficult Vogue patterns as well. –Aunt Irene

Also wrote to my good friend & fellow writer in Gloucester, Peter Anastas,
who wrote back:

I forgot that my father’s real name is Panos. My real name is Panayiotis, meaning “Panos the younger.” Both get translated into Peter, which diminishes them. So much for Ellis Island. My mother, my daughter and I once went there and looked our family up. We found my father’s date of entry, along with that of his father and my mother’s mother and father. All of the last names had been changed. My name is actually Anastasiades. But who could deal with that? My mother's is Poulopoulos. It ended up as “Polisson.”

I have Greek on the brain because I am reading In the Neighborhood of Zero, a memoir by the Greek American Melville and Olson scholar William Spanos about his experiences in WWII. Growing up Greek in a small NH town he felt just as alienated as I did growing up in Gloucester.

I could certainly identify with Peter, what with my old man telling me they
lopped off our “FITZ” at Ellis Island, & a name I’ve written more than once
missed. Speaking of which, when trying to track my father’s side of the
family, I reported this to Peter:

My father was totally closed-mouthed about his old man, & I never even saw a photo of him. Couldn’t find hide nor hair of that side of the family, which I guess devolved quickly after my grandfather, George Gibbons, died at an early age. Although, I did, when punching in the enumeration # 5-365 for where they once lived, find who I believe was his brother, Joe Gibbons, living with Annie Putney, also named on the census as brother to her, designated head of household, she was.

At George’s wife’s funeral, my Nanzu, Eileen Gibbons, my father’s younger brother, Bern, said, sitting next to me in the living room in Peabody afterwards, alluding to my grandfather, “Someday I'll tell you the whole story,” whereupon my father shot a look across the room at him, one I was familiar enough to recognize as threatening. Bern died before telling me the whole story.

I recognize Joe Gibbons on the census by his job title, “Route Salesman, coffee/tea,” which was my grandfather’s business, selling coffee & tea, originally via horse & wagon, the former of which my father failed to tie up right one night, & the animal fell into the cesspool, for which the old man got a severe licking. 

One story went that my grandfather got clocked on the street by a kid from Harvard, story insinuating that that was partly responsible for the brain tumor killed him. Bet my uncle told me that story early on, & vaguely recall the old man denying that fight had anything to do with his death in his forties. Joe Gibbons is listed as 42 in 1940. My old man joined the Navy in ‘41-45, & again, I can’t find his whereabouts in 1940.

I’m sure, again, thanks to the efforts of David Ferriero & his diligent staff at
the National Archives, many more true stories will get shared from California
to the New York island; from the red wood forest to the Gulf Stream waters;
from Salem, Beverly, Brockton, East Boston, Harlem, Bronx, Denver, LA,
Watts, Compton...

FURTHER STUDY:

Blog of the Archivist of the United States
J. Michael Ruane Judicial Center