Absinthe makes the heart grow fonder

Al Filreis

Below and at right: Albert Maignan's "Green Muse" (1895) shows a poet succumbing to the green fairy.

Edward Rothstein of course writes on art for the Times. Today's column is unusual — a seemingly real essayistic venture, and the topic is absinthe. Art that's been made under the influence of absinthe. And the green magic has long been associated with bohemianism and the avant-garde.

There are only two things that recommend this piece in particular.

First, a great line from Oscar Wilde quoted here: "After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see them as they are not. Finally you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world."

Before we get to the second reason for my interest, let me quote the opening of the piece so you have a sense of its approach:

"Dear reader! Should this column impress you as being more than usually lyrical, recalling perhaps the imagery and elegance of poetry by Baudelaire or Verlaine; should it seem a bit decadent, redolent of Oscar Wilde’s withering hauteur; should it have a touch of madness or perversity, combining, say, the tastes of Toulouse-Lautrec with the passions of van Gogh; should it simply sound direct and forceful and knowing like one of Ernest Hemingway’s characters; should it do any or all of that, let me credit something that each of these figures fervently paid tribute to: the green fairy, the green goddess, the green muse, the glaucous witch, the queen of poisons."

Okay, then, second: Rothstein's listy, flowy style itself. It's a bit of a dare, this piece — although just a bit (and that's my point). He admits that "[t]his column was conceived under the influence of a green-colored high-proof herbal liquor that was illegal in the United States for more than 95 years." Note: conceived; not written. Indeed, I wish the piece had actually been written under the influence, or in an unconducive-to-newspaper-sense mood engendered by other means; as it is, though, its waywardness and parallelisms ("the green fairy, the green goddess, the green muse, the glaucous witch, the queen of poisons") are fake drunken-loose writing. Recollection of flow after the fact. The list has green, green, green, glaucous (I like that substitution) and then queen. Green/queen rights the metrical rhyming ship of that otherwise teetering sentence. Too easy. Let it really get off the rails, and then Edward Rothstein would have been doing something new in the Times Arts page.

The piece set itself up for a fall with its indication of experimentalist standards: for the fact is its writing doesn't "recall [...] the imagery and elegance of poetry by Baudelaire or Verlaine." The opening paragraph is just an irony, even an (unintended) mock at writers who really go off.

Oh, why can't journalistic writing ever even once really do in its form what it does in content? Why must its excitement always be in the meaning of the sentences' sense and never in itself the means by which the piece is written? I'm asking a silly question, of course, for this is the paper of record ... but here (blog) is a space where like others I tilt at stylebook windmills, messing with media of which I truly

November 12, 2007

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DIGITAL PEDAGOGY: This was a magazine story published in 2001 about my use of e-media in teaching. “Postmodern poets focused on the process of their poetry, rather than on what the words in their poems actually said. The purpose was to make poetry and language new again. There's no better way to describe Filreis's teaching style. He uses technology to free class time for discussion, which to Filreis is more important than the course material itself. The point is to develop his students' ability to think critically, not to have memorized every last fact about Gertrude Stein. And yet, he said, through that active engagement with the material, students end up remembering more of the content.”

Click on the image.

ASHBERY PERFORMS STEVENS: In October of 1989, John Ashbery went to St. John's the Divine Cathedral in New York to be part of the induction of Wallace Stevens at the Poets' Corner. There was a vespers service and Ashbery read six sections of Stevens's "An Ordinary Evening in New Haven." Imagine that--that poem read at a vespers service! Anyway, I certainly don't know of another recording of Ashbery performing Stevens. Stevens was a fairly bad reader of his own poems. Ashbery is deemed by many to be an indifferent reader of his poems. (I don't agree, but understand the point.) But here, reading Stevens, Ashbery is marvelous. Here is a 7-minute recording of sections 3, 5, 12, 17, 18 and 30 of the Stevens poem that comes closest to real serial writing (seriality at the level of the section, anyway).

THE (ANTI)MODERN PRESIDENT. After looking at an abstract mural at the U.N. then President-elect Eisenhower said, “To be modern you don't have to be nuts.”

THE END OF THE LECTURE & PLANNING TO STAY. As often as I can, I call for the end of the lecture as we know it. I'm pretty serious about this - not often exaggerating on the point. Click here for one of many forays into the topic. Once you're there, click on the "end of the lecture" tag for still more. My thoughts on institutional politics and the arts were presented in a manifesto called "Planning to Stay" (published as a pamphlet by No Press); the text of that talk is available here.

KELLY WRITERS HOUSEPhiladelphia's PBS affiliate, WHYY-12, produces a TV show that in each episode features four centers for the arts and creativity in the Philadelphia region. For its winter 2010-11 program, the show devoted 15 minutes to the Kelly Writers House in a segment called “The Creative Campus.” To watch the video, click on the image above.

REPRESENTATIONS OF THE HOLOCAUSTI dislike Spielberg’s Schindler’s List intensely. It's a film, I think, that is very friendly toward sovereignty. For more on this minority view, click on the image above. I teach a course at Penn on representations of the Holocaust in literature and film every other fall semester.

In 2003 I founded and continue to direct the Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing at the University of Pennsylvania. CPCW brought together the university's writing programs and projects: Critical Writing, Creative Writing, the Kelly Writers House, PennSound, RealArts@PENN, Writers Without Borders, Creative Ventures, Jacket2, and more. For information and links to each of these projects, click on the logo above.