* (rerun)
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Turntablist and artist Christian Marclay created an album — using a 4-track in New York City, March 1985 — composed of other records. All seems pretty normal, but the thing is, Recycled Records’ Record Without a Cover was sold without a jacket or cover, and it even came with the instructions “Do not store in a protective package.” Marclay’s concept was to let the natural ageing process make each individual record unique. Through scratches, and dust caught in the grooves, the record’s deterioration make it constantly evolve. If it could be described, think: a warped history of the universe.

 

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German genius Peter Lardong came up with the idea to create records out of chocolate and, believe it or not, they can be played on a standard phonograph. He creates the records by pouring his time-tested recipe of melted chocolate into a silicon mold of his favorite vinyl. He places it in the refrigerator to set and voila. Each disc can be played up to 12 times before it’s too worn out, and that’s when you eat it.

 

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Robot with record player brain

 

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Buried in the midst of a load of LPs I recently bought was a clear virgin vinyl LP in a plain white jacket. The odd thing about it is there are grooves cut both sides with nothing on them. The dead wax on side one has inscribed NITTY GRITTY and BP 360 LP1 along with NW RTI 19724. Side two dead wax has 13875 and BP 000. Any ideas what this is and what it was for….we’d be interested to find out.

 

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These are not a direct substitute for pressed records. These are 100% hand-made, in real time. If the record is 10 minutes long, it took 10 minutes to cut plus setup time. This labor, coupled with the maintenance and knowledge required makes these lathe-cuts more expensive (per piece) than a larger pressing of vinyl.

 

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Jeroen Diepenmaat ‘Pour des dents d’un blanc éclatant et saines’ (2005), Record players, vinyl records, stuffed birds, sound. Dimensions variable.

 

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Music lovers can now be immortalised when they die by having their ashes baked into vinyl records to leave behind for loved ones. A UK company called And Vinyly is offering people the chance to press their ashes in a vinyl recording of their own voice, their favourite tunes or their last will and testament. Minimalist audiophiles might want to go for the simple option of having no tunes or voiceover, and simply pressing the ashes into the vinyl to result in pops and crackles.

 

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In 1967, the BBC created its own record label, designed to exploit the demand for commercially released TV tunes, comedy shows and, finding an unlikely niche in the market, sound effects, the best remembered being their three horror-related collections. Volume 1, Essential Death & Horror, appeared in 1977 and offers a dizzying collection of 91 different effects. Particular favourites of my own include an actually rather disturbing electronic workout, ‘Monsters Roaring’, and ‘neck twisted and broken’. Such was the success of Volume 1, a follow-up album arrived in 1978 – Volume 2: More Death and Horror. Rather more ragged than the first release, we are treated to even more inclement weather and death rattles – of particular note is ‘death by garrotting’. There was one final outing, the paltry twenty-five minutes of Volume 3: Even More Death and Horror. Easily the most startling record of the three, the methods of torture are truly imaginative; ‘self immolation’, ‘female falling from great height’ and ‘tongue pulled out’.

 

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Knowing how easy it is to scratch records or make them skip with the slightest bump, it might seem counter-intuitive to put a record player into a moving car. But the automobile record player, first introduced by Chrysler in 1956, contained a number of features that would keep the music going even when there were bumps in the road. Part of its downfall can be attributed to the fact that the Highway Hi-Fi required special records; you couldn’t simply pull a record off of the shelf and play it on your road trip. Rather, drivers had to purchase all of their music again in the new proprietary format. Since the machine was only available on new vehicles and not as an aftermarket accessory, there wasn’t a huge commercial demand for it. Moreover, the devices had the nasty habit of breaking often and Chrysler wasn’t thrilled with the cost of fixing all of those under-warranty units. By 1957, just one year after their initial introduction, Chrysler withdrew support for the ill-fated gadgets.

 

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Glass disc recordings, produced photographically in the 1880’s by Volta Laboratory Associates – Alexander Bell, his cousin Chichester Bell and Charles Sumner Tainter. Smithsonian officials unsealed them in the presence of Bell’s daughters and a grandson in 1937.

 

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Chris Supranowitz has made some images of a record’s grooves using an electron scanning microscope. For the vinyl record sample, he simply cut a small section of a record and attached it to a sample stub via carbon tape. He then sputter coated approximately 90 Angstroms of gold onto the grooves. Since the sample was relatively thick (2-3 mm) carbon tape was applied along the side to ensure good conductivity. It’s finally clear what the grooves actually look like!

 

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Jacques Tati with record player

 

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In 1973, the Kingdom of Bhutan issued several unusual postage stamps that are playable miniature phonograph records. These thin plastic single-sided adhesive-backed 331⁄3 RPM discs feature folk music and tourism information. Not very practical for actual postal use and rarely seen canceled, they were designed as revenue-generating novelties and were initially scorned as such by most stamp collectors. They are now fairly scarce and valuable and are sought after by both stamp and novelty record collectors. Their small diameters (approximately 7 and 10 cm or 2.75 and 4 inches) make them unplayable on turntables with automatic return tonearms.

 

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Nam June Paik ‘Listening to Music Through the Mouth’ (1962)

 

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NON’s Pagan Muzak (Gray Beat, 1978) is a one-sided 7-inch with 17 locked grooves and two center holes, meaning each locked groove can be played at two different trajectories as well as any number of speeds. The original release came with instructions for the listener to drill more holes in the record as they saw appropriate.

 

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The Hi-Fi murders were the killings of three people during an armed robbery at a home audio and record store called the Hi-Fi Shop in Ogden, Utah. On April 22, 1974, three enlisted United States Air Force airmen, named Dale Pierre Selby, William Andrews, and Keith Roberts drove in two vans to a Hi-Fi store on Washington Boulevard, Ogden, just before closing time. They entered the shop brandishing handguns. Two employees, Stanley Walker, age 20, and Michelle Ansley, age 18, were in the store at the time and were taken hostage. Pierre and Andrews took the two into the store’s basement and bound them. Later, a 16-year-old boy named Cortney Naisbitt arrived to thank Walker for allowing him to park his car in the store’s parking lot as he ran an errand next door; he was also taken hostage and tied up in the basement with Walker and Ansley. Later that evening, Orren Walker, Stanley’s 43-year-old father, became worried that his son had not returned home. Cortney Naisbitt’s mother, Carol Naisbitt, also arrived at the shop later that evening looking for her son, who was late getting home. Both Orren Walker and Carol Naisbitt were taken hostage and tied up in the basement. With five people now held hostage in the basement, Pierre told Andrews to get something from their van. Andrews returned with a bottle in a brown paper bag, from which Pierre poured a cup of blue liquid. Pierre ordered Orren to administer the liquid to the other hostages, but he refused, and was bound, gagged, and left face-down on the basement floor. Pierre and Andrews then propped each of the victims into sitting positions and forced them to drink the liquid, telling them it was vodka laced with sleeping pills. Rather, it was liquid Drano. The moment it touched the hostages’ lips, enormous blisters rose, and it began to burn their tongues and throats and peel away the flesh around their mouths. Ansley, still begging for her life, was forced to drink the drain cleaner too, although she was reported (by Orren Walker) to have coughed less than the other victims. Pierre and Andrews tried to duct-tape the hostages’ mouths shut to hold quantities of drain cleaner in and to silence their screams, but pus oozing from the blisters prevented the adhesive from sticking. Orren Walker was the last to be given the drain cleaner, but seeing what was happening to the other hostages, he allowed it to pour out of his mouth and then mimicked the convulsions and screams of his son and fellow hostages. Pierre became angry because the deaths were taking too long and were too loud and messy, so he shot both Carol and Cortney Naisbitt in the backs of their heads, proving fatal for Carol but leaving Cortney alive. Pierre then shot at Orren Walker but missed. He then fatally shot Stanley before again shooting at Orren, this time grazing the back of his head. Pierre then took Ansley to the far corner of the basement, forced her at gunpoint to remove her clothes, then repeatedly and brutally raped her after telling Andrews to clear out for 30 minutes. When he was done, he allowed her to use the bathroom while he watched, then dragged her, still naked, back to the other hostages, threw her on her face, and fatally shot her in the back of the head. Andrews and Pierre noted that Orren was still alive, so Pierre mounted him, wrapped a wire around his throat, and tried to strangle him. When this failed, Pierre and Andrews inserted a ballpoint pen into Orren’s ear, and Pierre stomped it until it punctured his eardrum, broke, and exited the side of his throat.

 

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Gregor Hildebrandt’s ‘Kassettenschallplatte (Cassette Record)’ (2008) is a sculptural work composed of hundreds of feet of wrapped cassette tape, a fetish object for which one medium has been rendered useless to embody the equally nonfunctioning image of another.

 

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Record player ring

 

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In the late 1920s and early 1930s the Vitaphone sound system used large 33 1/3 rpm records to provide the soundtrack for motion pictures. The record rotated in the usual clockwise direction but the groove was cut and played starting at the inside of the recorded area and proceeding outward. This inside start was dictated by the unusually long playing time of the records and the rapid wearing down of the single-use disposable metal needles which were standard for playing lateral-cut shellac records at that time. The signal degradation caused by a worn needle point was most audible when playing the innermost turns of the groove, where the undulations were most closely packed and tortuous, but fairly negligible when playing the outermost turns where they were much more widely spaced and easily traced. With an inside start the needle point was freshest where it mattered most. Almost all analog disc records were recorded at a constant angular speed, resulting in a decreasing linear speed toward the disc’s center. The result was a maximum level of signal distortion due to low groove velocity nearest the center of the disc, called “end-groove distortion”. Loud musical passages were most audibly affected. Since some music, especially classical music, tends to start quietly and mount to a loud climax, such distortion could be minimized if the disc was recorded to play beginning at the inner end of the groove. A few such records were issued, but the domination of automatic record changers, and the fact that symphony movements, for example, varied greatly in length and could be difficult to arrange appropriately on 20-minute disc sides, made them no more than curiosities.

 

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For their single “Blue Ice”, Swedish indie group Shout Out Louds came up with the idea of making a functional record on ice. 10 press kits consisting of silicon mold, a bottle of distilled water, and complete instructions were sent to select media and fans. Of course the record would only last in one play, and your needle is most likely to be ruined after, but the less-than-perfect crackling sounds have their own lo-fi DIY charms.

 

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Performance artist and experimental musician Laurie Anderson invented the Viophonograph in 1976. Its violin body turns a custom 7-inch vinyl record which is played by a needle mounted to a bow, all fed into an amplifier.

 

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Artist Pieterjan Grandry has broken a major barrier between the unreality of the Internet and the rest of the real world. Grandry has successfully taken animated GIFs and made them analog. His device, based on a pre-film form of entertainment called a phenakistoscope, uses frames from a GIF printed onto transparent material as individual frames and placed on a wheel. Once spun and illuminated, the images form a single moving picture — in this case, a head bobbing cat.

 

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A record album is stuck in record 3 of the 5 record changer in my Sharp Audio Disc A4 Player. How do I get it out? Record changer not responding. Disassembly may be required to get access to the stuck record and remove it.

 

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In the 1946-1961 era, some ingenious Russians began recording banned bootlegged jazz, boogie woogie and rock ‘n’ roll on exposed X-ray film. The thick radiographs would be cut into discs of 23 to 25 centimeters in diameter; sometimes the records weren’t circular. But the exact shape didn’t matter so much, as long as the thing played. “Usually it was the Western music they wanted to copy,” says Sergei Khrushchev, the son of Nikita Khrushchev. “Before the tape recorders they used the X-ray film of bones and recorded music on the bones, bone music.” As author Anya von Bremzen elaborates: “They would cut the X-ray into a crude circle with manicure scissors and use a cigarette to burn a hole. … You’d have Elvis on the lungs, Duke Ellington on Aunt Masha’s brain scan—forbidden Western music captured on the interiors of Soviet citizens.”

 

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Ottawa band, Hilotrons are releasing nuggets of their music on plastic records that only work for an all-but forgotten children’s toy. The Fisher Price record player is actually a simple wind-up music box, and each indestructible little plastic record is a spool that triggers different notes. What you get is the creepy, tinkling tones featured in the video below.

 

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Jasper Johns’ ‘Scott Fagan Record’ (1970) is a lithograph of Scott Fagan’s ‘South Atlantic Blues’ record, released in 1968. Fagan is the father of The Magnetic Fields singer and songwriter, Stephin Merritt. Although they had not met, John’s ‘Scott Fagan Record’ was instrumental in reuniting Merrit with his estranged father. Writer Mark Swartz had posted an image of John’s lithograph on his Tumblr, which Fagan found while searching for himself on Google. He contacted Swartz, and a relationship eventually created an opportunity for Merrit and Fagan to reunite, along with Merrit’s mother, Alix. Fagan and Swartz created a Kickstarter to fund a tribute album of a man interpreting his son’s (Merrit’s) songs, to which Jasper Johns contributed. The sentimental nature of the work is also present in the imagery, recalling Johns’ early “Target” paintings.

 

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Evan Holm: There will be a time when all tracings of human culture will dissolve back into the soil under the slow crush of the unfolding universe. The pool, black and depthless, represents loss, represents mystery and represents the collective subconscious of the human race. By placing these records underneath the dark and obscure surface of the pool, I am enacting a small moment of remorse towards this loss. In the end however this is an optimistic sculpture, for just after that moment of submergence; tone, melody and ultimately song is pulled back out of the pool, past the veil of the subconscious, out from under the crush of time, and back into a living and breathing realm. When I perform with this sculpture, I am honoring and celebrating all the musicians, all the artists that have helped to build our human culture.

 

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Imagine a turntable but instead of a needle, you have a pizza sauce spout, and instead of a record, you have pizza crust spinning so the red sauce can cover every inch. Imagine no more. That’s how pizzas get made at Costco. Workers put the dough on the turntable and the pizzas gets expertly covered in a controlled flow of sauce from the machines.

 

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WOW is a vinyl record containing a single ultra-low frequency which will alter slightly depending on the mechanical components of your record player. Use more than one system to play several records simultaneously and the air around you will start pulsating. Play 33 ⅓ Hz on 33 ⅓ rpm or 45 Hz on 45 rpm. Feel free to use the pitch wheel or even touch the record to control the sub-sonic wave field. Your choice of record players, the number of records and the character of your room create your individual listening experience.

 

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In over fifty new paintings depicting the circular labels of assorted vinyl albums and singles, Dave Muller draws upon his endless fascination and encyclopedic knowledge of music and its capacity to shape both individual and cultural identities. He culls resonant records from the ‘20s through the ‘90s, some familiar and others forgotten, tapping into shared poetic moments and a collective dialogue.

 

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A record player sits on the floor, shown from above. Slightly off-centre in the corner of a room, it lies surrounded by cables and a power strip. Through a transparent lid, the white label of a black vinyl disc catches the eye. This painting by German artist Gerhard Richter depicts the record player of Andreas Baader, member of the German terrorist group Red Army Faction (RAF), inside Baader’s cell at Stuttgart-Stammheim prison, and was painted after a police photograph.

 

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Many might say it is impossible for a tortoise to survive three decades living in a record player inside a filthy storage room. Those people would also be wrong. One fateful day 30 years ago, a pleasant Brazilian family lost their tortoise named Manuela. Manuela apparently got trapped in the storage room where the man of the house, Leonel Almedia, stored a variety of worthless junk, including electronic devices. Inside a record player is where Manuela the tortoise would call home for 30 years.

 

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22 picture discs

Anti-Flag ‘Bacon’

Skid Row ‘Youth Gone Wild’

Rev Jim Jones ‘Thee Last Supper’ WSNS 1984-PSYCHIC TV/TG

Metallica Interview LP

Fat Boys ‘Pizza Box Set’

Trick ‘r Treat Soundtrack Album

Urine Junkies ‘Abscess’

MF Doom ‘Rhymes Like Dimes’

J Dilla ‘Fuck the Police’

Sebadoh ‘Limelight’, ltd. ed. released to ‘honor’ Rush’s 40th anniversary

Revolting Cocks ‘Beers, Steers & Queers’

Uriah Heep ‘Backstage Girl’

Acid King ‘Busse Woods’

NZI 490004G605

David Bowie ‘Valentines Day’

Erika’s Hot Food to Go

Ozzy Osbourne ‘Miracle Man’

Guns n’ Roses ‘Nightrain’

Danny Brown ‘The OD’

Malcom McLaren ‘Madame Butterfly’

Queen ‘I’m Going Slightly Mad’

Lord Finesse ‘E-mu EP’

 

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One of Afro-Peruvian artist William Cordova’s recent sculptures, “Greatest Hits (para Micaela Bastidas, Tom Wilson y Anna Mae Aquash),” is a 13-foot tower of 3,000 stacked records accented with pieces of broken discs. Inspired by historical movements such as Dada and Arte Povera, Cordova created the tower to recognize those who have been overlooked in mainstream music. He wanted the piece to acknowledge past artists who added to the genre even if they had not produced a “greatest hit.”

 

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New five pound note plays vinyl records

 

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Rutherford Chang has a unique vinyl collection. He only collects the Beatles first pressing of The White Album. I interviewed him: Q: Did you grow up in a house of Beatles fans? When did you first hear about the Beatles? and about the white album? A: My parents are from Taiwan and didn’t listen to the Beatles, so I didn’t grow up with the music. I bought my first White Album at a garage sale in Palo Alto for $1 when I was 15 years old. Q: So how did you get familiar with the Beatles? A: They are the biggest band. Q: Are you a vinyl collector? A: Yes, I collect White Albums. Q: Do you collect anything other than that? A: I own some vinyl and occasionally buy other albums, but nothing in multiples like the White Album. Q: Why just White Album? why not Abbey road? or Rubber Soul? A: The White Album has the best cover. I have a few copies of Abbey Road and Rubber Soul, but I keep those in my “junk bin”. Q: Why do you find it so great? It’s a white, blank cover. Q: Are you a minimalist? A: I’m most interested in the albums as objects and observing how they have aged. So for me, a Beatles album with an all white cover is perfect. Q: Do you care about the album’s condition? A: I collect numbered copies of the White Album in any condition. In fact I often find the “poorer” condition albums more interesting.

 

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50 Locked Grooves by Audio-Visual artist Haroon Mirza made from cardboard, tape, glass amongst other things. Double pack contains 2 identical 12″s designed to be played together. Play any loop with any loop to unlock the music inside.

 

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Aphrodisiacal record

 

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In Dario Robleto’s ‘Sometimes Billie Is All That Holds Me Together’ (1998), several new buttons were crafted from melted Billie Holiday records to replace missing buttons on found, abandoned or thrift store clothing. After the discarded clothing was made whole again, it was re-donated to the thrift stores or placed back where it was originally found.

 

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C.C. Records (2013), an installation work by Duto Hardono is inspired by the city of Cairo & the most popular icon at the moment General Abdel Fattah Sisi himself, hence the title–if you’re an Egyptian, you might get it–the work stands as a satire comedy of the recent political life & situation of the country. The audiences create their own combination of the broken-into-half C-shaped Egyptian records & make their own mix of composition. Sometimes it creates a unique locked grooves that plays a loop over & over again. The audiences also choose their own speed whether it’s a 45 or 33 revolution per minute.

 

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For ‘Years, artist Bartholomaus Traubeck fashions a slice of tree trunk into the form of a vinyl record, with the tree-trunk’s rings resembling the spiral groove of the now-outdated audio format. Using a record player with a special sensor, computer software is used to translate the trunk rings into notes and then “play” them as melodies.

 

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Making a comment on Christian Marclay ‘Record Without a Cover’ João Paulo Feliciano, together with the Serralves Museum of Contemporary Art, is releasing ‘Cover without a Record’. The object, a gate-fold album cover, is produced on a standard record plant on edition of 1000 copies.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. I’m away from the blog today doing my IRL thing in the city of Rennes. Here’s a rerun post from the early days of this latest incarnation of my blog. Please enjoy or re-enjoy.

 

‘James Schuyler’s sublimely sad and funny novel, What’s for Dinner? looks back at Cranford and Madame Bovary and forward to present-day dysfunctional households like those of “Desperate Housewives.” It’s wonderful to have it back in print.’ — John Ashbery

‘A quietly scarifying, very funny, and wonderfully compassionate novel.’ — Stephen Spender

‘What’s for Dinner? is a comedy of manners all about alcoholism, insanity, adultery, drugs, moderate incest, and death. [It is] a great gift to the reader.’ — Alice Notley

 

Helene is restless:
leaving soon. And what then
will I do with myself? Some-
one is watching morning
TV. I’m not reduced to that
yet. I wish one could press
snowflakes in a book like flowers.”
James Schuyler, “The Morning of the Poem”

The novel “What’s For Dinner?” is a unique off-kilter quirky comedy of manners about us poor souls who live in suburbia. The novel was written by a poet, James Schuyler, and it has a captivating rhythm all its own.

For readers like me who are always on the lookout for something different and interesting, this novel is near perfect. Although “What’s for Dinner” can be considered a comedy, it is a comedy with a dark biting underside.

New Yorker James Schuyler was a manic depressive for most of his adult life and spent years in psychoanalysis and group therapy. In “What’s For Dinner?” he puts his group therapy experience to good use since much of the novel takes place during group therapy sessions. A lot of the novel is the dialogue between these group members. Group therapy talk has the potential for being very boring, but here the characters are so colorful and interesting that we care about what each character says. The talk in the group sessions covers such weighty matters as alcoholism, adultery, drugs, insanity, and death in an offhand conversational manner. Dialogue is surely one of Schuyler’s strong suits.

“Mrs. Judson,” Lottie said, “I wish you would tell me one thing that I’ve done to offend you. Or anyone else here, for that matter.”

“How could you offend me?” Mrs. Judson said. “I’m above that.”

“Yet you behave toward me as though I had. I’m not trying to provoke you – I think you will feel better if you get some of what’s bothering you off your chest.”

“I’ll thank you to leave my chest out of it.”

“Very well,” Lottie said. “I’ve tried.”

These are just ordinary people who might have stepped out of a TV sitcom. Being ordinary does not mean these same people can’t also be stubborn and capricious. Some make tremendous progress in the group, and some don’t. Also the family members of those in the group have their own things going on and their own sets of problems just like in real life. The entire story is told with a certain elan, a kind spirit, that keeps the reader smiling the entire way.

This novel has caused me to be interested in James Schuyler. I want to read more of his poetry and also his other novel which has been republished by NYRB, “Alfred and Guinevere”.

Once again New York Book Review (NYRB) has republished a book that puts the adjective ‘novel’ into the noun ‘novel’. I looked up the adjective ‘novel’ and found the following meaning: ‘different from anything seen or known before”. “What’s For Dinner?” certainly fits that definition.

“Your poems,”
a clunkhead said, “have grown
more open.” I don’t want to be open,
merely to say, to see and say, things
as they are.
James Schuyler, “Dec 28, 1974”

 

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Further

James Schuyler @ Wikipedia
James Schuyler @ PennSound
James Schuyler Papers
Slowly/Swiftly
Like a Lily Daché Hat
You Could Call It Singing
Waiting for the mailboat
James Schuyler’s somatic urbanism
Queering geographic information
‘Building a nest out of torn up letters’
Days and nights with James Schuyler
The Year of Living Deeply: Some James Schuyler resources
“Bluets”: James Schuyler, Carl Phillips, Joan Mitchell, Maggie Nelson, and Lydia Davis
Eileen Myles Reads James Schuyler (and Chats with Paul Muldoon)
Me, Me, Me
Helen Frankenthaler and James Schuyler: A Correspondence
Wayne Koestenbaum on James Schuyler
The Making of John Ashbery and James Schuyler’s A Nest of Ninnies
On editing James Schuyler
Buy ‘What’s For Dinner?’

 

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Extras

Reading at the Dia Art Foundation, New York, on November 15, 1988, introduced by John Ashbery
Watch it here

75 at 75: James Schuyler Reads “Salute” and other poems

James Schuyler 5 Poems

 

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Interview
by Raymond Foye

Foye and Schuyler, The Chelsea Hotel, c. 1989. Photo by Jeannette Montgomery-Barron

Q: I want to ask about your daily routine. What time do you get up in the morning?
A: Very, very early. Well before sunrise. It varies.

Q: And what do you do then?
A: Drink coffee and put on the weather channel. I’ve discovered some charming programs on cable TV: My Three Sons, Bewitched. One gets a little tired of them after a while. I’m sort of giving up on them now. And I go out and get the New York Times.

Q: We’re now up to about six-thirty.
A: Well, now that I no longer live alone, at that point I sometimes go back to sleep. My friend Artie likes to stay up very late, playing cards or shooting pool with his friends, so he sleeps in. But I also like to write very early in the day. It’s so quiet, the phone never rings. You don’t have any sounds at all.

Q: Do you write by longhand or use a typewriter?
A: Here I use a typewriter. I do write in longhand if I go out to the country. When I went to the friary at Little Portion recently, I kept a notebook.

Q: Do you write with a pencil or a pen?
A: I use a pen. I don’t know why but I’m quite averse to writing with a pencil. I can never get one that’s dark enough.

Q: What have you written most recently?
A: I wrote a three-page poem recently.

Q: Was it a skinny poem?
A: Not especially. It has some hips and bosoms here and there.

Q: I keep noticing in the small press and little magazines that come across my desk that there seems to be a whole school of young poets writing skinny poems ‡ la James Schuyler.
A: Oh, Raymond, I don’t see what’s so wrong with that.

Q: I always get the impression that it takes you about as much time to write the poems as it does to type them out. Almost as if they’re spoken into the typewriter, with not a great deal of laboring.
A: That’s both true and not true. I do an awful lot of fussing. That doesn’t mean rewriting. Well, it may mean rewriting just little bits. Or getting strung out where a line turns. I can’t keep at it indefinitely because after a point it all goes dead, so I just turn the page facedown. I used to leave it like that for a long time. Now I don’t. I come back to it in a matter of days.

Q: If you change something in one area does it mean you have to adjust it in another, or are they local revisions.
A: It’s usually more local. But I don’t do any “editing” as such. I used to show poems to Kenneth Koch and he would invariably say, “Jimmy, I like it very much, but have you thought about leaving off the last line?” It got to where this was the one thing he always said. So frequently I would chop off the last few lines to a poem and end it that way.

Q: Are you currently keeping a diary?
A: I just started again. I hadn’t in quite a while.

Q: What prompted you to do this?
A: The Yale Review is publishing excerpts from my 1988 diary. You know what my diaries are like—they’re mostly about looking out the window. A few descriptions of having dinner with you at Ninth Street.

Q: I just can’t seem to keep a diary with any consistency.
A: The important thing is not to become discouraged if you miss a few days, or a week, or even a few months. It’s only when you begin missing entire years that you should become concerned.

Q: So your mornings are reserved for writing?
A: I have written and do write in the afternoon, though.

Q: And at night, too?
A: Hardly ever

Q: Do you ever force yourself to sit down and write for the sake of writing—to see what comes out—or do you know exactly what you’re going to do when you sit down to write?
A: I don’t think I ever know exactly what I’m going to do about anything. If I have any idea about what I’m going to write it’s probably just the beginning of a line, or a word.

Q: At what point did you first think about becoming a writer?
A: As an adolescent the thing I most seriously wanted to be was an architect, although I had no particular gift in that direction. I was a fan of Frank Lloyd Wright. But reading is what I did most of, poetry and prose. In the back of our house was a gully, a slightly wild area, where I had a tent for the summer. And I was reading a book called Unforgotten Years, by Logan Pearcal Smith. He told how Whitman used to come to their house in Philadelphia from Camden, and what it was like—how Whitman used to sit in the outhouse singing “Old Jim Crow.” But then he says the idea suddenly entered his mind that maybe someday he too could be a writer. And I looked up from the book to the landscape outside and it all sort of shimmered.

Q: So has being a writer always kept that aura of fantasy or idealism about it for you?
A: What aura of fantasy? It all seems very real to me.

Q: I mean that it’s magical—you’re creating something that did not exist before.
A: Oh yes, very much so.

Q: So it’s been a satisfying decision for you.
A [soberly]: It’s been very difficult much of the time.

Q: If you hadn’t become a writer what might you have done?
A: I have no idea. I might have been some kind of noncreative writer, in advertising maybe.

Q: Would you have come to New York anyway
A: Oh yes. Where would you go? When I was in high school I used to buy the New Yorker. I would read the stories and essays, but even more avidly I would read the listings of all the nightclubs, El Morocco and the like.

Q: When did you first meet someone your own age who you considered a fellow writer?
A: My friend Bill Aalto, and through him I met Chester Kallman, who was my real close buddy. For Bill writing was very much tied up in politics. He was a Communist, and we had terrible fights about it. To me Stalin had become a terrible monster. I used to pick up the Daily Worker and turn to the literary column, which was written by a man named Dixie Putnam. And he would say things like, “With all her bourgeois values it’s natural that Virginia Woolf would go crazy and drown herself.” Argh! And of course through Chester I met W. H. Auden, who was a very intimidating person.

Q: Was he stern?
A: No, not at all. He was a sweetie. But it was impossible not to be in awe of someone so famous for his writing.

Q: What was he working on when you first met him?
A: He was writing “The Sea and the Mirror.” Also the Age of Anxiety, which he wanted to dedicate to me and to Bill, but he didn’t, because Chester had a furious fight with him, saying Auden was always trying to take things away from him and steal his friends. Later I realized I was just as glad that the Age of Anxiety wasn’t dedicated to me. I had enough problems by then.

Q: What sort of writer was Chester Kallman?
A: I’m afraid as a writer Chester was very constipated. He was most productive when he was collaborating with Auden on those libretti. Wystan was not taking any hocus-pocus about people not getting down to work. He got up every morning around eight, popped his amphetamine, and got right to it. Wystan was also very strict with Chester about his drinking. Wystan believed you had two martinis before dinner and then just wine after that. But I was close with Chester for only a very few years. One of his great interests was cooking. That was what he most cared about.

Q: He was an excellent cook?
A: Well, opinions varied on that. I would say sometimes. He was a somewhat terrifying cook because he was never very clean. You would look into the icebox and things would be growing. I remember once we were living together in Ischia where there wasn’t very much water to wash your hands. He was making old-fashioned southern biscuits, and they turned out charcoal gray.

Q: So Chester was an important, early figure for you?
A: Yes.

Q: At what point did you begin to feel there was a scene in New York among writers—the New York School.
A: It wasn’t until I met John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara that I had a kind of kinship in a writing way, which I never really had with Chester, who was more interested in art, or listening to and attending the opera. Then I met John and Frank, who were at Harvard, along with Kenneth Koch and Kenward Elmslie. And that was marvelous.

Q: Do you ever wonder what kind of a poet Frank O’Hara would have been had he lived, because I always wonder about that.
A: Oh, I don’t know. What I wondered about was what would happen with Frank’s drinking. His alcoholism was so far advanced, the last few times I saw him I couldn’t believe it. He was red-eyed and looked awful. Frank used to be very handsome. And his health was deteriorating, which also had to do with his having been shot.

Q: Frank O’Hara was shot?
A: Yes, he was shot in the hip on West Forty-ninth Street in a mugging by some young kids. The bullet couldn’t be taken out, and it moved around in him. It was a situation of great concern.

Q: Some people consider his accidental death a result of his drinking.
A: I don’t know, I wasn’t there. It was a terrific shock for many, many people. I didn’t see much of Frank from the time I began living in Southampton. Our paths rarely crossed, except at parties. Frank had this terrific social life—he went to hundreds of parties.

Q: Do find yourself thinking about Frank, or the past, very much, or do you seldom give it a thought?
A: I give it a thought but not a great deal. Whenever people are writing about Frank they interview me, and I’m aware that I remember much less than I did a few years ago. Ten or more years ago I made some tapes for Peter Schjeldahl and I know I had much more information then than I could dig up now.

Q: You never had the desire to write a memoir of that period?
A: I don’t think so. I’ve thought of it but . . . A certain kind of diary would have been more interesting, but it would never have been the sort of diary that I would have kept.

Q: How did the writing for Artnews come about?
A: Fairfield Porter was writing for Artnews. Elaine de Kooning and Robert Guest were working there for a while. At one point Fairfield knew they needed a new reviewer, and they suggested Frank. But Frank was working at the MoMA and there was a conflict of interest, so I applied for the job. I worked under Tom Hess, a wonderful man. He was brisk and snappy.

Q: Did they assign the exhibitions you were to review?
A: No, I got to select the shows I reviewed. On occasion I did write some bad reviews, and I regretted it afterwards. At a cocktail party John Button once referred to “Schuyler’s scorn.” The artists weren’t worth being so scornful about. I could have just dealt with it very briefly and not made as if they were doing something terrible by not being better painters than they were.

Q: How do you feel about the art world then as compared to now?
A: I knew the art world then very well, and I don’t know it at all now, except for a few people, so I can’t compare it.

Q: In those days who would you bounce ideas off of about art? Fairfield?
A: I think Frank, mostly. Fairfield too, and sometimes John. But Frank and I lived together for a number of years. Frank was always talking and one got caught up in it. If you didn’t believe that Helen Frankenthaler—or whoever it was he was touting that month—was the greatest thing since Titian, you were in for quite the verbal barrage.

Q: How did you feel about the Beats when they came along?
A: I didn’t think anything much.

Q: Did you read “Howl” at the time?
A: I wanted to, but I was having a nervous breakdown and Frank wouldn’t let me.

Q: Did you read On the Road?
A: Yes, I reviewed it at the time.

Q: What did you say?
A: I said it was like a boy’s book.

Q: Would you say John Ashbery is the writer whom you’ve felt closest to through the years?
A: Yes, much.

Q: Has John always been pretty much the same person he is now?
A: Oh, I think he’s ripened a bit . . .

Q: Was he always so charismatic? People are so deferring to John, even his closest friends.
A: No, I don’t think he had any charisma at all when I first knew him. He would usually eat dinner then head for the nearest sofa and fall asleep with his back to the room. Not a very charismatic way to behave. He was charismatic for the few of us who knew who John was, from the beginning—he was for me, actually, yes. Frank O’Hara had much more charisma. He had so much social flourish he could talk to anyone.

Q: How did your collaboration with John Ashbery on the novel A Nest of Ninnies come about?
A: We started that in the backseat of a car, driving in from Southampton one afternoon. We didn’t care for the people we were riding with. We didn’t want to be rude, so we wrote a novel.

Q: You began by swapping sentences?
A: Yes, then paragraphs, and finally chapters, I think.

Q: What year was that?
A: 1961, I think. John had come out to visit for a weekend. We were walking along the beach at sunset, heading for a cocktail party. The sun was casting those extraordinary technicolor effects on the sea and sky. John turned to me and said, “I always feel so embarrassed by these gaudy displays of nature.” I didn’t feel embarrassed at all.

Q: I notice you subscribe to Country Life. What do you look at in the magazine?
A: Every house ad. Pretty much everything except the advertising in small type in the back. I don’t read the text of all the articles. I love the columns by Frank Davis on the art auctions. That old devil fascinates me. He’s a hundred years old. He’s always putting in remarks about what a disagreeable painter Picasso is. And I read the gardening articles. I like Christopher Lloyd quite a lot. If you read him over a period of years he gets a bit repetitious. I get a little tired of hearing about how to root cuttings every year.

Q: Do you ever wish you still had a garden?
A: I’d love to, yes, to be outside of the city. Because I’ve written about plants and flowers so much people get the impression I was a gardener, but I wasn’t. I was a gardening slave when I was a kid, being forced to weed or hoe or mow. So I’m very ambivalent about the actual physical work of gardening. The hell, I’d rather read about it.

Q: What other magazines do you look at regularly?
A: The one I read most seriously is the Times Literary Supplement. I’m sent a subscription to the New Yorker every year but there’s not much in it I actually read. The movie reviews by Pauline Kael, and Whitney Baillant, their jazz critic, I like very much. Otherwise I don’t read much else in it.

Q: It’s so boring. I always find myself in the middle of some three-part article about yams.
A: Yes. Would they were on yams.

Q: Is reading your main activity in the afternoon?
A: Well, up till Hawaii Five-0 comes on at four.

Q: You were watching Santa Barbara for a while.
A: Oh, not for very long. Only a few months.

Q: You’re not currently watching any soap operas?
A: I don’t watch any, no. They can really make you go cross-eyed before a very short while.

Q: Do you eat out every night?
A: Not by any means. Every other night, maybe.

Q: What time do you usually go to bed at night?
A: It depends whether I go out or not. Nine-thirty if I’m staying home.

Q: Recently, when you were assembling your Selected Poems, did you see any progression in your work, thematically or otherwise, that you hadn’t seen before?
A: I really wasn’t looking at it in that way. It was an odd experience because I had never reread my own poems. I never gave poetry readings until maybe a year or two ago, so once the book was out I never went back and looked at them.

Q: Why?
A: Oh, I had a number of reasons—not wanting to be influenced by what I wrote. But one thing I learned to my horror is that there are certain words that I thought I’d used once, but I’ve used a number of times. And I thought I’d very much overdone the business of having a line end with the article “the.” That seemed kind of silly to me.

Q: Do you ever have an experience with a poem where you are left standing completely outside of it, having no connection or relation to it?
A: I think I know what you mean, and if the answer is yes, then it’s been rarely. I don’t think I ever completely lost touch with anything I wrote. But when Simon Pettet was collecting my art reviews and art writings I was very surprised at some of the things he would read to me from them that were totally unfamiliar, as if by someone else. I had no recollection of writing them at all.

 

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Book

James Schuyler What’s for Dinner?
NYRB Press

‘James Schuyler’s utterly original What’s for Dinner? features a cast of characters who appear to have escaped from a Norman Rockwell painting to run amok. In tones that are variously droll, deadpan, and lyrical, Schuyler tells a story that revolves around three small-town American households. The Delehanteys are an old-fashioned Catholic family whose twin teenage boys are getting completely out of hand, no matter that their father is hardly one to spare the rod. Childless Norris and Lottie Taylor have been happily married for years, even as Lottie has been slowly drinking herself to death. Mag, a recent widow, is on the prowl for love. Retreating to an institution to dry out, Lottie finds herself caught up in a curious comedy of group therapy manners. At the same time, however, she begins an ascent from the depths of despair—illuminated with the odd grace and humor that readers of Schuyler’s masterful poetry know so well—to a new understanding, that will turn her into an improbable redeemer within an unlikely world.

‘What’s for Dinner? is among the most delightful and unusual works of American literature. Charming and dark, off-kilter but pedestrian, mercurial yet matter-of-fact, Schuyler’s novel is an alluring invention that captures both the fragility and the tenacity of ordinary life.’ — NYRB

Excerpt

 

 

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p.s. Hey. Heads up that tomorrow morning I’m traveling to the French city of Rennes to work with Gisele Vienne on her new theater piece for two days. What that means for you is that tomorrow and Friday you will see rerun (as opposed to restored) posts from the earlier days of this latest incarnation of my blog and no p.s.es as I’ll be indisposed. I’ll be back on Saturday with a non-rerun post and a p.s. that will catch up with all the comments left here between now and then. Thanks. ** Ferdinand, Hi. I enjoyed your new piece muchly. Thank you about ‘Closer’. And I did like the photos you sent, yes. Sorry not to say so sooner; email is not a form I’m very good at. ** Misanthrope, It sounds really complicated and non-easy, that’s for sure. I can easily imagine myself in your boat, and I think I’d be as torn and sympathetic against all odds as you are. I trust you’ll make the best or at least only decision you can in good conscience. ** David Ehrenstein, Thank you for your fine thoughts on Syberberg. I’ll try to see that Chereau film at some point if I can. ** KK, Hey, hey. Yeah, Syberberg’s films are pretty much non-entities in the US at this point. Ripe for a retrospective/ reassessment there. Ah, Peter Watkins! Yes, excellent. In fact I don’t think I’ve done a post about his work yet, and I will. I’ve not read Kassel’s books, no. I should. I know him peripherally because he has collaborated with a number of my musician and choreographer friends here. Anyway, I’ll see if I can find a book by him here somewhere. Shouldn’t be too hard. I’m pretty good, thanks. You? Things on course? ** _Black_Acrylic, Hi, B. Yes, Syberberg is kind of overly ripe for a DVD box set, Criterion or otherwise. The films’ being so lengthy and, at the same, so anti-blockbuster, surely has a whole bunch to do with how rarely they’re screened. Already excited for the new episode! ** Max B, Hi, Max! I really like that OTTO track you linked us to. It was stuck in my head for a couple of days. And I really, really like your vocals. Do you compose the music, or you and your friend? I’m really looking forward to the full length. If you remember, alert me when it’s out and gettable. Anyway, big kudos! You like Susan Alcorn. Very cool. Things are solid here, and, kind of miraculously, not too hot so far. Have an excellent one! ** cal, Thanks, Cal. Nietzsche in the original German! That’s serious! Back in the 80s I visited the little house in Switzerland where he wrote that. Just a little house way up the Alps. Nothing too mystical about it that I could tell. Happy to turn you on the Feminazgul. I’m into it too, obvs. You sound good. I’m good. All is well enough. ** Right. James Schuyler is sublimely great poet, and he also wrote two novels, ‘What’s for Dinner?’ being my favorite. It’s sort of like New York School meets Barbara Pym or something, and it’s fantastic. Well worth your time. The blog will see you tomorrow (and Friday), and I will personally and directly see you again on Saturday.